STAR TREK - TOS - 91 - New Earth - Rough Trails

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s

imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or

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THE SHUTTLE BROKE

CLEAR . . .

. . . of the dust and hurtled into shockingly transparent air. Chekov’s instincts had been right—they were

only seconds away from contact with the surface.

Dust-swarmed inertial dampers struggled against the violent shifts in mass, but couldn’t entirely save

them from the impact. It came with a weird sluggishness, as if the ground had somehow oozed around

their shields instead of crashing into them. Then silvery curtains of water geysered up over the windshield,

and all view of this world was drowned. . . .

L . A . G R A F

NEW EARTH CONCEPT BY DIANE CAREY AND JOHN ORDOVER

POCKET BOOKS

New York London Toronto Sydney Singapore Belle Terre

The Shuttle Broke Clear . . .

Rough Trails

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

STAR TREK STARFLEET: YEAR ONE

Look for STAR TREK fiction from Pocket Books

ROUGH TRAILS

Chapter One

“SHE’S AWAY!”

Without benefit of an antigrav, the crate tipped gracelessly over the lip of the shuttle’s hatch and fell free.

Chekov leaned to the extent of his safety cable and watched the container tumble toward the ocean of

airborne dust below, wondering how much chance they had of it landing anywhere near the drop target.

The high-pitched shriek of its sonic beacon was swallowed up so quickly by the howl of Llano Verde’s

winds that he suspected if it went too far astray, it would never be found again.

Behind him, Plottel’s voice, muffled by a filtration mask already several wearings too old, intoned

blandly, “. . . and three and two and one . . .”

The crate’s parachute ripped into existence with awhhuf! Chekov could imagine but couldn’t actually

hear over the roar of the dust storm outside. Fluorescent orange billowed into violent bloom, snapping

the crate out of reach of the maelstrom only briefly before relaxing back into its descent. Almost

immediately, wind tipped the parachute sideways and began dragging the crate sharply lateral of its

original drop path. Storm-blown dust and sand swarmed the crate, the lines, the ’chute like famished

ants. Once the air sealed behind the drop, Chekov couldn’t even tell where the supplies had torn their

way through. Swallowed by this wounded and angry planet, just like the sonic beacon. Just like

everything else.

“Heads up, C.C.”

Kevin Baldwin didn’t have to give a jerk on Chekov’s safety line to get his attention, but he did it

anyway. The sudden assault on Chekov’s balance while hovering ten klicks above Belle Terre’s surface

launched his heart up into his throat. He grabbed at the sides of the hatch with both hands, but clenched

his teeth before gasping aloud. That instinct let him preserve at least a modicum of dignity. Backing calmly

away from the opening, he tried hard to ignore Baldwin’s laughter as he disconnected the lifeline and

shouldered out of its harness.

The hatch rolled shut with a grinding squeal that made Chekov’s teeth hurt. Dust in the mechanism,

sliding between the parts. Dust in everything—the air, the floor, his hair, his clothes. When Reddy, the

shuttle’s pilot, had promised they’d be above the ceiling of the dust storms, Chekov had assumed that

meant they’d be flying in clear air. Instead, it meant Reddy kept the shuttle just high enough to avoid

clogging the intakes on the atmospheric engines; Chekov, Baldwin, and Plottel could stand in the open

hatch under the protection of goggles and filtration masks, but didn’t have to wear the kevlar bodysuits

required by stormgoers on the surface. Not much of a trade-off, considering he’d still have to buy a new

set of clothes the minute he set foot in Eau Claire. Or, at least, he would if he wanted Uhura to be seen

with him in public.

Swiping uselessly at the front of his trousers, Chekov finally settled for patting himself down to dislodge

the uppermost layers of grime. “I never thought I’d hear myself say this.” He stepped sideways out of his

own dust cloud. “But there’s too much olivium on this planet.”

Plottel and Baldwin shucked their breath masks before the light above the hatch had even cycled from

red to green. “Maybe.” Plottel didn’t smile as he crossed the cargo shuttle’s deck to dig a battered

canteen out of a locker. “But if it weren’t for all that olivium, Starfleet wouldn’t have stuck around, and

we’d be deprived of the pleasure of your company on this little flight.”

Chekov watched him fill his mouth with water, rinse and spit into a disposal pan, then pass the canteen

on to Baldwin. “And if Starfleet weren’t here, there’d be no one in-system with rations to spare for your

emergency supply drops.”

“If Starfleet weren’t here—” Baldwin discharged a mouthful of water at Chekov’s feet, creating an

anemic slurry of mud, dust, and olivium. “—we wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with.”

Chekov nodded once, lips pursed, then went back to beating the planet out of his clothes.

This was an exchange they’d had, in various permutations, at least twenty times since the cargo shuttle

kicked off from the orbital platform above Belle Terre. Chekov had given up pointing out that, while

Starfleet’s actions might have directly led to the gamma-ray burst that most everyone called the Burn, it

was only because of Starfleet that the planet still existed at all. Allowing the Burn had actually been the

best in a very short list of options. While it all but defoliated most of a hemisphere, the colonists had been

ferried out of harm’s way. When house-sized segments of Belle Terre’s largest satellite slammed into the

face of her smallest continent, there was no one there to kill, no homesteads to lay waste. The combined

Starfleet and colony ships, led by theEnterprise, had salvaged half a planet and an entire colony from

otherwise certain destruction.

And the colonists had yet to forgive them.

From the moment they left Earth’s gravity well, the Belle Terre colonists had bristled with fierce

independence. They made their own rules, picked their own battles, all but spat upon Starfleet’s offers of

help and personnel—even when that help saved them from the numerous disasters that had plagued the

expedition practically from the word go. Even now, when extended dust storms threatened the small

continent of Llano Verde with starvation, theEnterprise ’s sacrifice of its own rations to assemble relief

supply drops was accepted with palpable resentment. The fledgling colony had nothing to spare for its

own members, but theEnterprise ’s continued humanitarian support was interpreted as an implied

criticism of Belle Terre’s ability to take care of itself.

This flight to the surface was no different. The volume of olivium dust laced through Llano Verde’s soil

after the Quake Moon impacts made transporter travel there impossible, and Captain Kirk had issued a

moratorium on Starfleet personnel hitching free rides on civilian-operated shuttles. Which put Chekov in a

bit of a bind. He’d been left on the orbital platform three weeks ago when theEnterprise set out to patrol

for pirate traffic, keep an eye out for the Kauld—aliens who had attacked the expedition—and search

for the missing vesselRattlesnake. Chekov was officially cut loose, on leave, grounded. Sometime in the

next two or three months, the light courierCity of Pittsburgh was due at Belle Terre to pick up Chekov,

John Kyle, and two otherEnterprise crewmen for reassignment to the newly commissioned science

vesselReliant. UntilCityof Pittsburgh arrived, Chekov, Kyle, and the others were expected to rest,

relax, and comport themselves in a manner that wouldn’t aggravate the Belle Terrans any more than was

inevitable. In general, this translated into long stretches of profound boredom as far away from the

colonists as possible. Chekov spent the time trying to get used to seeing himself with executive officer’s

bars on his shoulder and answering to the title “lieutenant commander.” He hadn’t felt so small and ill

suited to a uniform since being namedEnterprise ’s chief of security two years before.

Which was why he was once again violating Kirk’s prohibition to join Sulu and Uhura for dinner in Eau

Claire, the continental capital of Llano Verde. The two had been stationed there with Montgomery Scott

and Janice Rand for several weeks, cut off from chatty communiqués by Gamma Night and

olivium-contaminated dust, not to mention swamped with work and colonial frustrations. Long months

away from shipping out to his new assignment, Chekov was lonely, insecure, and painfully bored. Part of

him feared he’d never make the kind of lifelong friends on theReliant that he had on theEnterprise;

another part half-hoped their reunions would somehow prove him too indispensable to let go. He would

be allowed to serve under Kirk on board theEnterprise forever.

In reality, he knew all he would get out of the trip was a good dinner and a few precious hours of

socializing before he returned to his restless and unrelaxed days on the orbital platform.

Chekov had made an end run around Kirk’s moratorium by refusing to be shuttled surfaceward like so

much cargo. He knew about the weekly runs to airdrop emergency supplies across Llano Verde.

Showing up in the bay just before Orbital Shuttle Six kicked off, he offered to help the civilian laborers

pitch the crates toward their assigned drop points in exchange for a shuttle ride down to Eau Claire. It

wasn’t just a chance to “pay” for passage, it was also a chance to be useful, sweat off some of his

frustrations, and leave a positive impression on the colonials. Or so he’d thought. Vijay Reddy, the pilot,

suggested that Chekov leave the heavy lifting to the laborers and ride up front with him. Not about to be

coddled out of honestly paying his way, Chekov insisted on remaining in back to work alongside Baldwin

and Plottel. Since neither of the laborers objected, Chekov assumed they were perfectly happy to have

an extra set of hands.

By an hour into the flight, he’d figured out where he really stood. When he wasn’t dragging a

crate—without help—forward from the cargo hold, he was supposed to either lend his back to shoving

the crates through the airlock, or sit out of the way on one of the armless benches welded into the

bulkhead. His comments weren’t welcome, and neither was his presence. They spoke to him only when

forced to, and made no effort to censor their bitterness toward Starfleet when they talked between

themselves. For his own part, Chekov swallowed most of the angry comments that sprang to mind.

Another hour or so and they’d be on the surface. He would part ways with them in Eau Claire, and

contemplate Kirk’s wisdom in recognizing from the outset that the colonists needed as much physical and

emotional space as Starfleet could give them.

A little communications panel high on the bulkhead chirruped with incongruous cheer. Unlike

communicators or even crystal-based radios, intercom systems based on hardwire connections still

functioned perfectly despite all the olivium radiation Belle Terre could throw out. The wall speaker,

however, buzzed from the weight of the dust coating its tympanum. “Dave, how many crates have we got

left back there?”

Plottel touched the container on which he sat as though silently acknowledging it in his count, then craned

his neck to check the deck behind him. “Three up front, another twelve in the hold.”

“And who’s scheduled to get most of them?”

Baldwin set down the canteen and reached out to steady the cargo manifest dangling near the hatch

door, squinting at its dust-fuzzed display panel. “Four go to Desert Station. Everyone else gets two or

three.”

“Okay.” Reddy paused, caught up in some piloting duty, and Chekov felt the subliminal shift in mass that

meant they’d changed heading without slowing down. “Hold out one from the Desert Station drop.

They’ll have to make do with three.”

“Sedlak isn’t gonna like us changing the manifest like that,” Baldwin warned.

Invoking the continental governor’s name injected a startling level of annoyance into Reddy’s voice.

“Sedlak isn’t here. We’ve got an extra drop on the list for the northeast side of Bull’s Eye—a group of

herders who got stranded by the storm.”

“What the hell were they doing out on a day like this?” But Plottel was already scrubbing at his goggles

to clear them, getting set for another round of labor.

“They went out three days ago, before the dust got so bad. The ranch they’re attached to didn’t get

word down to Eau Claire until yesterday, and the spaceport wasn’t able to punch through the dust to the

orbital platform until just now. Otherwise, we could’ve just put additional shipments aboard.” The

speaker snapped, nearly drowning out Reddy’s grumbling sigh. “Now we’re going to have to

shortchange somebody. It might as well be Desert Station.”

Ironically, if a Starfleet officer had made the same suggestion, there would have followed ten minutes of

defensive resistance before any action could occur. As it was, Baldwin and Plottel started untangling their

safety harnesses while Chekov was still stealing a single swallow of water from Baldwin’s abandoned

canteen.

“Is there any way to contact Eau Claire?” Chekov asked as he scooped his own harness up off the filthy

deck. He’d given Uhura the original arrival time, and didn’t want to leave her pacing the spaceport,

wondering what had become of him.

“Don’t worry about Eau Claire—they’re used to this.” Plottel was either trying to reassure him, or head

off any fretting before it began. “The spaceport won’t even consider us late until we’re three hours past

our scheduled ETA.”

Chekov repressed a sigh. “It wasn’t the spaceport I was worried about,” he said, but without much

expectation of being listened to. “Is there any way to contact anyone on the planet?”

“ ’Fraid not,” Baldwin said, wrenching the hatch open on the sea of roiling dust outside. “Nothing gets

through that dust out there, not unless it’s falling through.” His grin was wide enough to see around the

edge of his dust mask as he gestured toward the open door. “Feel free to take the message down

yourself, C.C., if you want to. We won’t try to stop you.”

And they might even help me on my way,Chekov thought, remembering Baldwin’s previous push. He

reached for the nearest lifeline and clipped it on a little more quickly than dignity allowed. Even the howl

of Belle Terre’s dust storm wasn’t loud enough to drown out the resulting shout of mocking laughter.

“Uhura to Sulu. Come in, Sulu.”

Uhura had said the phrase so often over the past five weeks that by now the words slid out of her mouth

without the slightest effort—or attention—on her part. She pressed the correct transmission key on her

experimental communications panel, paused for the appropriate time afterward to allow a reply to come

through, but no longer really listened for an answer to her call because no answer had ever come.

“Auditory feedback fatigue” had been the official term for it back at Starfleet Academy. Out here, on the

nebulous fringes of known space, people just called it communications burnout. It was a condition most

often seen in the crew of disabled ships who spent so long listening for an answer to their distress calls

that they missed hearing it when it actually came.

“Uhura to Sulu. Come in, Sulu.”

Uhura had recognized the syndrome in herself about two weeks ago and been horrified. Her entire

career in Starfleet was based on her ability to listen. She knew she had a keener ear than many other

communications officers, and she prided herself on her ability to thread out a signal buried in

electromagnetic noise, or hear the barest scratch of a message through the resounding silence of

subspace. Finding herself adrift in a numb haze of not listening, not even sure how many hours she had

spent repeating the same six words without paying attention to them, had shaken her professional

confidence right down to the bone. Could something as simple as futility really overcome all those years

of training and experience?

“Uhura to Sulu.” She fiddled with the gain on the transmitter to keep herself alert, watching the

transmission histogram on her monitor spike into alarmed red then fade back to green as the computer

compensated for the adjustment she’d made. The reception histogram, which was supposed to display

the frequencies of Sulu’s response to her hail, remained a dull, flatlined gray, just as it had since the first

day she started hailing him.

A burst of irritation momentarily clawed a hole through Uhura’s boredom. There was absolutely no

reason this experimental communications system shouldn’t be working. The pall of olivium-contaminated

dust that hung over the island subcontinent of Llano Verde during its long, dry winter was known to

attenuate every known kind of subspace and electromagnetic transmission. But the dust had created a

dense surface layer in the planet’s stratified troposphere, permanently trapped beneath cleaner and

colder air above it. The knife-sharp boundary between those air masses should have been able to amplify

and reflect back any signal that managed to reach it—every computer model and Starfleet expert Uhura

had consulted agreed on that. So while Janice Rand worked on augmenting the city’s short-range

communications using olivium’s natural crystal resonance, Uhura had designed a long-distance

communications system that relied simply on punching a strong signal up to the top of the dust layer and

letting nature take care of the rest. All she had to do—in theory—was calibrate the system by noting

which electromagnetic frequencies created the best reflections at different points on the subcontinent.

With computers varying her output signal nanosecond by nanosecond as she spoke, and a special

receiver carried in the experimental shuttle Scotty had designed and Sulu was test-flying around Llano

Verde, the whole project should have taken about two days to complete.

In theory.

“Uhura to Sulu. Come in, Sulu.”

“Commander Sulu’s flight plan said he was going all the way to Mudlump today, down on the south

coast,” a familiar voice said from right behind her. “Could he really answer you from there even if he

heard you?”

Uhura sighed and turned to face the stoop-shouldered man behind her. His green-hazel eyes were puffy,

his thinning reddish hair badly needed a trim, and his colony uniform was rumpled and coffee-stained. He

looked exactly like what he was: not a rugged settler, but one of Belle Terre’s too few and too

overworked technical experts, hired on long-term contracts to help the colony through its initial growing

pains. Despite her own tribulations, Uhura managed to summon up a sympathetic smile. No one could

fault the colony’s initial strategic plan for not taking a planetary catastrophe like the Burn into account, but

it didn’t make life easier for continental government employees like Chief Technical Officer Neil Bartels.

“The transmitter I sent with him is automatically programed to reply on whatever frequency it just

received.” She accepted the steaming mug he held out for her, grateful for the bracing combination of

Belle Terre spices and artificial caffeine concentrate. After several weeks of conferring over technical

specifications and borrowing circuit-testing equipment, they’d fallen into the habit of sharing a cup of

afternoon tea before the last and dullest stretch of the day. Uhura privately suspected that Bartels would

have been even happier to spend his break discussing his numerous technical problems with Montgomery

Scott, but the chief engineer had spent the last few weeks out at the spaceport as Sulu ran his shuttle

through its paces. “Any reply from it should get bounced and amplified by the atmospheric boundary

layer exactly the same way mine did on the way to him. That means it will arrive right back here.”

Bartels lifted an eyebrow at her over his steaming mug of tea. “Even if his Bean is jumping really fast at

the time?”

It was a measure of Uhura’s stress level that the nickname the irreverent Llano Verde colonists had

given Sulu and Scotty’s antigravity vertical flight vessel could no longer spark even a flicker of

amusement. “That’s why I’m using a range of simulcast frequencies,” she said, rubbing at the frown lines

that seemed to have engraved themselves permanently into her forehead. “I tried to stuff in as much

bandwidth as the system could handle without getting any negative interference on the carrier wave. I’m

not sure it’s really enough to compensate for Sulu’s movement over an extended broadcast, but if he lets

me reply every so often—”

“Assuming he ever hears you.”

Uhura winced. The disadvantage of chatting with fellow technical specialists was their clear-eyed grasp

of the crux of a problem. She knew exactly how to extrapolate reflectance angles to all parts of the

subcontinent once she had a minimum set of established values, and she’d even figured out how to

correct the system for daily meteorological variation of the boundary layer. But she still had no answer for

the fundamental question of why Sulu had never, not even once, heard any of her experimental hails.

“Have you talked to the weather people lately?” she asked. It wasn’t an attempt to change the subject,

although Bartels’s puzzled look told her he hadn’t followed her train of thought. Llano Verde had gotten

its name from its previously lush semitropical climate. At some point, those Burn-disrupted rains were

going to return, washing the olivium dust out of the atmosphere for a while and making the need for

Uhura and Rand’s new communications systems much less urgent. “When are they predicting the dust

season will end?”

The technical officer sighed and drained the rest of his tea. “Depends on who you ask,” he said. “The

computer modelers think we’ll get spring monsoons in the next month or two, but the hydrologists keep

saying they don’t have the field data to support it.” He ran a hand along the top of her console, brushing

off dust and shaking his head ruefully. “I’m not sure how rumors spread so fast through the Outland

without any real communications system, but I’ve already got half the continent begging me for

flood-control dams while the other half is yelling for irrigation channels.”

Uhura’s tea suddenly tasted acrid on her tongue, as if her taste buds had just noticed how foreign those

native spices were. She swallowed the last of it with difficulty. “I’m sorry. I know I should have had this

system up and running for you weeks ago—”

“Hey.” Bartels reached out to pat her arm in a half-gentle, half-awkward way that struck Uhura as oddly

familiar. It took her a moment to realize that it was the same inept manner in which Chief Engineer Scott

dealt with the human aspects of his job. “I wasn’t blamingyou, Commander. We weren’t the ones who

called up Starfleet and demanded an overnight fix for Llano Verde’s transportation and communications

systems. Governor Sedlak tried to tell Pardonnet that even Starfleet technology couldn’t solve the mess

the Quake Moon made of this continent, but he just wouldn’t listen. And no one else has made any more

progress than you—”

Uhura shook her head in disagreement. “Mr. Scott and Commander Sulu have the latest version of the

Bean running almost full-time. All they have to do now is work out a navigation system that doesn’t

depend on making constant contact with the orbital platform—”

“Just like all you have to do is find the right frequency to bounce off that dust layer. It’s like they say in

the Outland—you’ve got to swallow a whole lot of dust before there’s room in your throat for any

water.”

Uhura smiled at the colony technical officer, appreciative of both his support and the unique way he had

phrased it. “I’ve never heard that saying before.”

Bartels snorted. “That’s because you don’t have Outlanders tracking radioactive dirt into your office two

or three times a day to tell you exactly how they think you should be doing your job.” He swept up the

empty mugs with a clatter, as if the mere thought of his constituents had flogged him back to work.

“Come to think of it, don’t bother to get that system of yours working any time soon,” he advised her as

he left. “I hate to think how many more irate citizens I’d hear from if they could just pick up a comm and

call their complaints in.”

When he first felt the deck jolt beneath him, Chekov was struggling to back his way out of the cargo

hold while towing five hundred kilos of malfunctioning grav-sled. It strained to keep its belly even ten

centimeters above the decking, and every irregularity reached up to trip it, knocking it off course and

killing its momentum. He’d cursed and kicked his way through moving a dozen other crates in exactly the

same way. While his patience decreased with every repetition of the battle, he wasn’t about to complain.

So when the deck thumped against the soles of his feet and made him stumble, Chekov wrote it off to the

grav-sled bottoming out yet again, or Plottel and Baldwin indelicately rolling one of the crates in the

forward compartment.

Then his sense of balance attenuated in a moment of free fall, and the liberated grav-sled slewed

sideways like a drunken bear. Whatever official safety procedures he’d once learned for handling

grav-sleds flashed out of existence as he danced aside to avoid being crushed against the remaining

crates in the hold. When full weight returned an instant later, Chekov was already halfway up one of the

access ladders with his feet pulled up out of the way. The sled slammed back down to the deck, and the

wall of crates it had bumbled against teetered but refused to fall.

Plottel and Baldwin were nowhere to be seen in the forward hold. The hatch to the outside whistled

dolefully, adding more dust to the mosaic already filling the shuttle floor. A flash of what he at first took to

be ochre landscape rolled into view through the opening, followed by an equally dismal patch of khaki

sky. Chekov hadn’t thought they were close enough to the surface to see beneath the pervasive clouds.

Then he realized it wasn’t ground he saw but the eerily sharp demarcation between the “clear” airspace

of safe shuttle passage and the roil of Llano Verde’s dust storm. There was something odd about the

orientation of that boundary, something that clashed with Chekov’s own internal sense of balance. Either

the edge of the dust storm had become vertical rather than horizontal, he thought, or Reddy was turning

the shuttle in a banking turn so tight that centrifugal force had overcome the usual pull of gravity.

Keying the airlock closed on the jarring view, Chekov went forward to look for the rest of the crew in

the cockpit.

“I tell you, there was nobody.” Plottel’s filtration mask hung from one hand while he combed the fingers

of the other through his dust-caked hair. “We should have been right on top of them, and I couldn’t see a

soul.”

STAR TREK - TOS - 91 - New Earth - Rough Trails

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