Chapter One

"Yesterday this was just a matter of delivering a survey team and some backup. When did it turn into an intelligence test?" Kirk demanded irritably of his first officer.

Spock looked non-committal. "The requirements of the Venayans are normal for Federation dealings with their colony worlds. What is surprising is that they accepted Doctor Hewell's request for access in the first place." This didn't appear to impress Kirk at all. "Of course, Star Fleet's wish to include the UFP Research Funding Assessor in the team does create problems..."

"Problems!" Kirk echoed, tapping at the search function on his keyboard. "There just isn't a combination of personnel that fulfils the criteria." He paused for a moment. "Not unless I include myself." He looked up mischievously at Spock.

"But you are required at Starbase Seventeen."

"Oh, come on, Spock. This planet is a paradise: unspoilt but with enough technology to make it safe, peaceful inhabitants, a nice straightforward piece of geophysical research. Wouldn't you want to be included in the team?"

"If the Venayans were prepared to tolerate Vulcans as visitors, I might..."

McCoy had just wandered into the briefing room. He pricked up his ears at this. "What? They won't allow Vulcans? Sounds very civilized to me."

"They claim they want to minimise cultural disruption by only allowing visitors who are indistinguishable from themselves. The Venayan parent culture is apparently very 'managed'." Kirk didn't sound as if this was a viewpoint of which he approved. "And they want to keep numbers to a minimum. Hence my problem covering all bases."

"Well, you'll need a doctor," McCoy volunteered cheerfully, "and as it sounds like my kind of planet..."

"I need a qualified paramedic who can fly a shuttle, cook, provide low level security, handle heavy equipment, carry out sophisticated research using unfamiliar equipment, be officially in command of the whole landing party as far as Starfleet is concerned, and won't mind mucking in with anything else that needs doing, including on the spot mathematical analysis to identify the optimum test locations," Kirk listed despairingly. "As far as the research goes, it appears to need doing in at least three places at once and I can only send two people. Even if I did include myself it still can't be done."

"The Venayans are saying you can only send two personnel?"

"The party size is limited to four," Spock elaborated patiently, "but that includes Doctor Hewell, whose research project this is, and Doctor Margaret Leverman, who is assessing the project for future UFP funding."

"Which leaves me with two places to fill," Kirk groaned. "If only this woman was a geophysicist rather than a bureaucrat, or at least would say she was willing to cook..."

"Well, Maggie Leverman is a medical doctor, Jim, so that solves one of your problems."

Kirk brightened. "If she can pilot a shuttle, I can assign Lieutenant Chu for the maths and..."

"I don't think so." ...Or anything else much. Why do you think she's a paper-pusher for the Federation? McCoy refrained from voicing his opinion of Doctor Leverman aloud. Jim looked as if he was losing his sense of humour already.

The captain looked up at the sour tone in McCoy's reply but didn't comment. McCoy had little time for people who took up scarce medical training resources and then made no use of them.

"Two shuttle pilots, one mathematician, and a high level of competence with scientific equipment are required, then, Captain. The other abilities are widely available."

"None of our mathematicians are qualified pilots."

"I thought Lieutenant Percival..." McCoy suggested tentatively.

"He's not qualified, Bones, not to fly around without any backup."

"Ensign Chekov is not a mathematical specialist but nevertheless, he is very competent," Spock suggested.

"Teacher's pet," McCoy said snidely. "What about Sulu? He's keen on rocks."

"But he is not a mathematician. And an investigation of the nature of a cold core has little to do with amateur petrology."

"And I can't afford to spare two of my bridge personnel while DeSalle and Regnault are on leave. Otherwise Chekov and Sulu would do just fine."

"So, Chekov and some other useful person who can fly a shuttle," Spock summarised rather vaguely. McCoy sensed that he had already arrived at a logical solution to the problem and was merely waiting for the captain to get there by his own efforts.

"Yes, we need someone to head up the landing party..."

"Why should Ensign Chekov not do that?"

Kirk and McCoy both looked at Spock.

"He's a little bit green, isn't he? If these Venayans are so touchy?" McCoy's choice of words was obviously deliberate but Spock ignored it.

"They are not touchy, Doctor. They merely set clearly defined limits for anyone who visits their colony worlds. That should, if anything, make the task easier."

"And it is a little sensitive, Spock," Kirk suggested. "While he would be nominally in command, as per Starfleet requirements, he's really there to back up the doctors and do what they want. That might be tricky."

"The problem is again clearly defined. Mister Chekov has spent three years training to solve such problems, plus one year of broad experience on this ship. The society is known to be stable and safe, the environment offers no particular hazards. I cannot see why you consider him incapable of commanding the landing party. Once that is decided there are several more junior officers with the necessary skills to complete the assignment."

"But he has no experience of commanding a landing party," Kirk objected.

"Then perhaps it is time he acquired that experience. There is unlikely to be a less dangerous opportunity in the near future."

***

Chekov watched the stacks of equipment disappearing into the shuttle hold and forced himself to take his time as he checked off the pre-launch tests one by one. Ensign Croft stuck her head into the cockpit. "Doctor Hewell wants to speak to you." He put the programme on hold, and climbed out after her.

A middle aged man in dull tan coveralls was standing by a pile of equipment that wasn't on any manifest Chekov had seen. He appeared slightly harassed. "Ensign Chekov?" He screwed his eyes up and peered at the ensign. "Oh well," he said for no reason and pointed at his stack of crates. "This is all fragile. It must be p...packed upright."

Chekov glanced at Mister Scott, who unaccountably appeared to be fighting down a smile. "How much does it weigh?"

"Oh, I don't know," the doctor replied.

Chekov decided not to waste time pointing out that if he'd brought it aboard the Enterprise he must have filled out a shipping docket some time. "Ensign Croft, please ascertain the mass of this equipment and prepare a list of non-essential items that we can leave behind. Don't take anything out without my approval."

"Yes, sir," she snapped smartly.

"I don't need much," Hewell offered helpfully. "So long as I don't have to eat those Star Fleet rations. Last time I had those I was ill for a week."

"Mister Scott, do we have anything other than Star Fleet rations?"

"I don't think so, Mister Chekov. It could be because we're a Star Fleet vessel."

The shared gibe was like a balm to Chekov's jangling nerves. Doctor Hewell looked at the two men, obviously aware that he was being mocked but not sure why. He swallowed nervously. "I was under the impression that you were, er, supposed to assist me, Ensign Chekov."

"Yes, sir."

"Well, perhaps I should, mm, let you get on with the packing. Just let me know when we're ready to leave."

"Packing?" Scott echoed in disbelief as Hewell exited the shuttle bay.

"Don't forget the beach ball, now," Croft supplied as she turned a tricorder on the doctor's equipment.

"Picnic hamper!"

"Sun lounger!"

Chekov stood in silence as the joke rippled around the shuttle bay. His mind was spinning with the weight of things to do before they could go. He suddenly had an acute feeling that he wanted out of this assignment. The initial thrill at being given command, bolstered by Sulu's unconcealed envy, had lasted approximately five minutes. The mission itself sounded fascinating, the planet delightful, the limitations on time and personnel merely a minor inconvenience. Then all the potential problems had suddenly snapped into sharp focus.

He looked despairingly at Scott and the engineer gave him a reassuring smile. "At least try and look as if you think it can be done, lad. The shuttle's fine. I double-checked her myself. The doctor's equipment is all solid stuff. Nothing you can't fix if it breaks, it's got no reason to go wrong in the first place and the gear is standard issue. The quarter-master doesn't make mistakes. It's not as if you won't be able to get back-up in an emergency and we're only going to be away four days. You really don't have to worry about any of this stuff." His arm circled to encompass the dwindling pile of stores, the shuttle and all Hewell's gadgets. Chekov did his best to return Scott's smile but it wasn't the equipment that he was worried about. His gaze wandered to Ensign Croft as she slid the access panel shut over a newly installed set of sensors. She caught his eye and strode swiftly over to him, looking bright and enthusiastic. Scott favoured her with a nod of approval and left the two young officers to their work. Croft's smile promptly evaporated.

"Okay, let's talk. This mission is a big opportunity for me and I don't want you to mess it up," she said brusquely.

Diana Croft's three distinguishing features were a complete lack of team spirit, murderous ambition and a vulnerable and appealing exterior. Chekov could only assume that the third attribute had swayed the judgement of some male on the Starfleet selection board. It had had the same effect on him for the first five minutes of their acquaintance. It had taken her that long to write him off as a waste of time and turn off the charm, while he had simultaneously decided that her beauty was strictly skin-deep. So far, after two months on board, she was still charming everybody else. Chekov fluctuated between congratulating himself on having seen through her and worrying that perhaps she had seen through him. Having her in the same room as himself was a nightmare. Four days of being responsible for her was worse than anything his subconscious had ever inflicted on him.

"Miss Croft, no one's going to mess anything up." He tried to believe it as he said it.

"Have you met this Doctor Leverman?"

"Not yet." He had spent five minutes in sick bay being lectured by Doctor McCoy on Margaret Leverman's vital importance to the funding of Starfleet Research activities, bad temper and dislike of al fresco living. McCoy hadn't made clear the source of his information on the latter two points but Chekov had been left with the strong impression that it was personal.

"I just thought I should warn you, Ensign," McCoy had finished up. "I know she's here to assess Hewell's grant application but she has a say in Star Fleet's finances too. I know we don't generally get involved in the politics of all this, but how this mission goes will affect her attitude." And then the intercom had summoned McCoy away.

"I gather she's a big wheel in funding Star Fleet."

Chekov marvelled, not for the first time, at Croft's ability to know everything. She didn't even seem to put any effort into it.

"I intend to impress her. So don't get in my way."

"Good. You allow me get on with the routine and you can shine for the benefit of the great doctor. Maybe she will be impressed by your ability to follow orders and cooperate with the team."

"Oh, get serious. I don't intend to get a pat on the head for being somebody's little helpmate, thanks. Look, we can do this really well and that means you come out looking good too. You handle the supplies, get the equipment where it's supposed to be and work out Hewell's sums. I'll do the piloting and help with the measurements. I gather we won't be interacting with the natives much but we can play that by ear."

She smiled at him, turning the charm back on again. He was torn two ways. Half of him knew that he ought to establish now that he was in charge but the offer of cooperation was seductive. If he told her that she should simply do what she was told, he had a chilling suspicion that she would do exactly and literally that and then turn around and blame the resulting disasters squarely on him. The thought of four days of undeclared warfare with Ensign Croft was too exhausting to contemplate. "If that's what you think you can handle best..." he conceded.

"You can be a sweetheart, you know. You won't regret it."

***

The remaining Enterprise personnel vanished, leaving Chekov to survey his new command at leisure. It would be a few more minutes before the shuttle arrived with Diana and Doctor Hewell, the dome was erected and stocked with all their gear, the large equipment was securely stowed within its own protective force field and Doctor Leverman had volunteered, to Chekov's surprise, to make some coffee. He walked around the perimeter of their camp, noticing that buildings were visible a few hundred metres away at most through the trees, and wondered how long it would be before someone came to see what they were doing. While the Venayan liaison officer had seemed to think no one would be very interested in them, Chekov found it hard to believe that in what he'd been told was a school or university of five thousand souls, no one would make a detour to see a group of off-worlders.

He was proved right almost immediately. Just as Leverman arrived with his coffee, two children appeared a stone's throw away, silent and watchful. Leverman viewed them with distaste. "I suppose they're skipping lessons to come and look at us." She turned away pointedly and walked back to the dome. Chekov turned on his translator and said, "Hello!" as casually as he could. The children brightened and ran up with no further display of caution. A girl and boy, in their early teens as far as one could tell, they poured out a breathless stream of questions and Chekov found himself giving them a guided tour of the camp and all its equipment. Leverman ignored the visitors, occupying herself with booting up the small computer in the dome. She only emerged when she heard the shuttle approach.

Chekov had instructed the youngsters to stand by the dome and once the shuttle had come to rest explained apologetically that he was going to be too busy for a while to spend any more time with them, but that they were welcome to return later in the day. They thanked him enthusiastically and departed, with many lingering backward glances. Chekov remembered himself at that age, and imagined that if they did return, he'd have to make sure they didn't get left unsupervised with anything hazardous - like the shuttlecraft.

"Thank God. I thought you were going to spend the whole four days playing tour guide." Leverman reached the shuttle as the door slid open and Doctor Hewell appeared.

He stepped out onto the grass with the air of a predator scenting something particularly juicy. "Right, let's g...get to work!"

It was fortunate that Chekov already had a good understanding of what Hewell required, as the doctor appeared to be quite incapable of translating his research objectives into a coherent plan of action. It seemed that anything he said tempted him off into a fascinating but irrelevant by-way. In the end, Chekov took pity on the stuttering scientist. "So, if I understand you, Doctor, we need to deliver the metering equipment to the locations which you've determined in advance and then be in position to monitor their observations when the seismic shocks are triggered. And the monitoring primarily consists of ensuring that any random noise is identified and excluded from the results."

Hewell managed to look both surprised and grateful at once. "Yes, yes, that about, uh, sums it up, um, Ensign. Of course apart from delivering the meters to the right locations, the shuttle will be required to take measurements itself while flying a carefully chosen course over the same territory. Then the data gathered on the first two days will be analysed, and any gaps and ambiguities hopefully resolved by further testing in the rest of the time available." It all sounded reassuringly straightforward and the entire party relaxed.

After an hour of dry runs on the equipment, to check that they could all operate it consistently, Chekov was beginning to have doubts again. When he and Hewell took readings and double checked each other there was no problem. Diana Croft appeared to be operating in another universe. Her difficulties did nothing for her temper, and the way Leverman hovered over everyone's shoulder, anxiously frowning and muttering to herself, made the rest self-conscious and clumsy. When they stopped for a brief break mid-morning, Croft followed Chekov away from the other two. "I'm going to murder that woman if you don't do something about her!"

"I will make sure she doesn't bother you."

"And how are you going to do that? I thought she had carte blanche to observe everything that happens."

"I'll think of something, OK?" She looked dubious and irritable. "Cheer up, Diana, I thought you wanted to shine?"

"Save your pep talks for someone else, Chekov. I don't need them."

Hewell was waiting to collar him the moment he returned to the dome. "I'm a little worried about Miss, er, Croft. She really doesn't seem to be able to get the hang of this equipment."

"She is probably just nervous. But she can pilot the shuttle craft and you and I can monitor the readings. It's not a problem."

"Mmm. I, er, appreciate, that is..." Chekov waited patiently for the Doctor to finish the sentence, but he appeared to have lost the train of thought and silently returned to nursing his beaker of cold coffee.

They spent the rest of the morning placing and testing four sets of equipment up to an hour's flight from the base camp. As a result lunch was late. Chekov called back from their final placing to ask Doctor Leverman if she could prepare something for them all to eat as soon as they arrived. She agreed in the tones of someone who is barely tolerating a grievous imposition. Chekov was surprised at the change in her attitude since the morning, but rapidly discovered the reason once they returned. The Venayan liaison had turned up, with a half-dozen students from the university. Leverman had obviously been reluctantly entertaining them for some time, and it was not easy to tell which side had found the experience more stressful. Leverman declined any lunch for herself, and went to lie down. Three of the students sought and received permission to observe the landing party at work during the afternoon. To Chekov's amazement, Hewell seemed quite enthusiastic about the idea, and conversed with them energetically over lunch. There were two young men and a girl, all of whom were clearly knowledgeable about their planet's deeper structure, and interested in the ideas that Hewell was investigating. Being quite newly settled, the planet had not been exhaustively surveyed, and the fact that its structure and composition was so unusual appeared to surprise and inspire them. It was obvious that Hewell found it easier to relate to the students than to Starfleet officers. His stammer seemed to have vanished altogether.

Before long it was necessary to return to work. Chekov called the group together, and was relieved to find Hewell was happy to let him continue to manage the details. "Ensign Chekov is translating the theory into practical terms," he overheard the doctor explaining to the natives enthusiastically. Croft caught his eye and grimaced. He ignored her.

"We'll be setting off percussive charges at this location," he jabbed a finger at the map, "at nineteen hundred hours - "

"Excuse me, Doctor," Chekov interrupted, a cold stab of doubt assailing his insides. "Surely you mean this - " He pointed at the place where the charges had been positioned an hour earlier.

Hewell shook his head furiously. "Oh, no. Mmm, since discussing the local understanding of the gross tectonic structure in this region, I've decided that we'll get less ambiguous results if we placed the charges on this more stable element in the geophysical melange." He smiled a self-congratulatory smile. This, Chekov realised, was Hewell the amusing and erudite lecturer, at least in his own eyes.

"But Doctor, you informed us that you required..."

"M...my requirements have altered. I can hardly be expected to arrive on a planet I have never visited and know to the m...micron the location of every test detonation I will carry out."

Chekov had met few prima donnas in his time, and none of them had worn the sheep's clothing of mild middle-aged geophysicists. He continued to try to be reasonable.

"Doctor, could I have a word with you privately?"

Hewell had his audience, and wasn't about to give in to the equivalent of an undergraduate student earning a little vacation cash by driving the research vehicle and humping the baggage.

"Aah, what about, Chekov?"

The ensign resisted the urge to look up and actually see that six pairs of eyes were fixed on him. Keeping his voice at the right level for a private conversation between two men standing three feet apart, he said calmly, "We do not have permission from the local authorities to set charges in the area you indicated. And if we are to achieve our research objectives in the short time available to us, we can't change the entire approach of our research too often."

"Our research?" Hewell was still pitching his delivery at a lecture theatre containing several hundred students. "I didn't know you were a geophysicist, Mister Chekov. I suppose you'll want your name on the paper when it's published? Maybe we could even name a new cold mantle structure after you? The Chekovian layer?" Hewell's twisted sneer, like his sarcasm, was laughable, but Chekov could feel his blood beginning to seethe. He forced himself to remain calm, answering politely but firmly.

"I'm sorry, Doctor. My only wish is to provide you with the technical back-up you need to carry out your research. I can do that better if you keep me up-to-date with your plans."

Hewell seemed to feel that this amounted to an unconditional surrender, and handsome apology on Chekov's part, and promptly readmitted the ensign to the magic circle of favourite students. From that vantage point it proved relatively easy to nudge him into agreeing that the original location would probably provide splendidly fruitful readings, and the afternoon's work continued peacefully enough, even if Ensign Croft did mutter, "Hmm, command by grovelling. They didn't teach that when I was in school," as she passed him with a load of equipment that wasn't needed in the shuttle this time out.

***

Chekov forced himself to ignore her. Commanding officers, he told himself, did not respond in kind to insults by their subordinates. They simply proved themselves by their handling of whatever problem had prompted the insult in the first place. And then, they had the subordinates shot at dawn... He decided to track down Doctor Leverman. She had, after all, spent nearly a week with Doctor Hewell on a small transport craft on the way here. She must know him pretty well. And she'd seemed quite friendly, when they were alone together earlier, whatever Doctor McCoy thought of her. The Medical Officer's opinion carried quite a heavy weight in Chekov's thinking, but he was aware that McCoy had a few blind spots. Indeed, Chekov sometimes seemed to inhabit one of them himself.

He trod lightly up the steps into the dome and was greeted by the crash of a slamming locker door. Maggie Leverman was on her feet, obscuring his view of whatever she'd been doing at her desk. "Don't you ever knock before you..."

"I'm sorry, Doctor. But these aren't your private quarters." Damn. This had got off to a bad start.

"Since I don't have any private quarters for the next few days, I don't think it's too much to ask for a little consideration from the younger members of the party."

Her self-righteous adult indignation almost had him apologising and backing out of the dome, before he remembered that he was in charge here. And he was in no doubt that she was hiding something.

"I'm sorry, Doctor. Of course, I appreciate your point of view..." As he spoke he continued his advance into the dome, and the Doctor abruptly opened the drawer of the desk and slammed something into it, thrusting it shut in the same movement.

He stopped, barely a pace away from her. It was probably some item of cosmetics, a spare prosthetic - he could clearly remember his grandmother's mortification when he'd found her temporary false tooth languishing forgotten in the bathroom one morning. And carried it in triumph down to the kitchen. Mind you, he had only been three or four at the time. He decided to give the doctor the benefit of the doubt, and moved past her towards the main computer console. As he did so, the unmistakable bouquet of French brandy stole warmly over his face.

He stopped again. "Have you been drinking alcohol, Doctor Leverman?" This was ridiculous. So what if she had? She was an adult, a civilian. Why hadn't he just ignored it? Did he have any right to object? Was she going to..."

She smiled coyly. "Pavel, I didn't have you marked down as such a killjoy." She batted her rather short, sparse eyelashes at him. "I know you won't join me, but maybe this evening? Everyone might enjoy a measure or two after we finish work for the day. Of course, I realise that you're on duty at the moment."

"Yes, well..." He shrugged, and smiled. Inanely, he knew. "I know I can rely on you to..."

"I know this mission is a big responsibility for such a young man. Of course you can rely on me, Pavel. And on Doctor Hewell. Although he doesn't find it easy to work as an equal with someone so inexperienced, who has no technical background in his field." She sat down at her desk again, and picked up her stylus and memo pad. He felt about twelve years old. And she'd made it very clear that she wasn't going to take his part in any disagreement with the geophysicist.

He shut his eyes for a brief moment, and reminded himself that Captain Kirk had considered him capable of commanding this landing party. And he respected the Captain's judgement. He opened his own locker and pulled out a tricorder, turning off the telltale bleeps as he aimed it at the desk drawer and set it to scan for ethyl alcohol. It registered approximately 600 grams of 20% solution. There was a further 600 grams in the doctor's locker. They were expecting to be here for four days. Someone who felt they needed that much brandy over that short a time had a problem.

He was tempted to wait until she went outside, and confiscate the liquor while her back was turned, but that would only have the effect of putting off the row he knew he was bound to have with her.

"Doctor Leverman, do you really feel you need more than a litre of spirits to see you through the next four days?"

She rose slowly to her feet, and when she turned to face him, he hardly recognised her. Her face was white and the skin taut. "Normally, no, but when I considered that I was entrusting my work and my personal safety to the sanctimonious oversight of a prying adolescent..."

"I'm afraid that I shall have to ask you to..."

"This is outrageous!"

"I'm sorry if you think that, but..."

"Quite outrageous. I have no intention of allowing you access to my personal locker, or to my work." She moved to stand in front of the desk drawer. He considered his options. He could physically throw her out of the dome, and use the tricorder to override the simple personal coding locks on the drawer and locker. He could try to reason with her. Or he could back down. None of those was particularly appealing, or likely to improve morale. He drew a deep breath, ready to ask her to leave so he could confiscate the brandy, and hope she didn't keep anything too personal in her desk.

"However," she said, with pompous emphasis, "since it worries you, and since you're obviously finding this assignment so stressful, and since it doesn't matter to me, except as a point of principal, whether I have the brandy or not, you may take it and put it somewhere safe." She stepped dramatically aside.

He blinked at her. She shook her head, as if he'd disappointed her yet again, and opened the drawer, taking the two bottles out and offering them to him. "Oh, wait a moment." She picked up a marker pen from the desktop and drew lines on the necks of the bottles. "I wouldn't want anyone to be tempted to help themselves."

Chekov bit off any reply. He accepted the liquor and carried it out of the dome to the shuttle where he stowed the contraband in the security equipment locker.

"What are you up to, Chekov?" Diana's whispered inquiry nearly made him drop the last bottle, just as he was pushing it to the back of the shelf. He shut the door guiltily, and had a sudden horrible vision of Diana thinking that it was for his own personal consumption. "Nothing. Double checking the equipment."

Underneath her arched brows, her eyes burnt into the back of his neck as he walked away.

Chapter Two

As the time for detonating the charges approached, Hewell became less and less of a performer. He began muttering to himself, absorbed in checking and re-checking the main seismic monitors which remained at a short distance from the base camp. Since he seemed to have lost interest in their visitors and hardly bothered to answer their questions, Chekov decided to get them out of his way.

"The charges are due to go off in an hour. We need to drop Ensign Croft off at the detonation site, so that she can monitor for safety. I'll take the shuttle on to the secondary monitoring location. Would you like to come with us?" He smiled at the students and the girl reciprocated with enthusiasm. She was as dark as Croft was blonde, about Chekov's height and possessed of a striking, expressive face. "Could I help you with the monitoring, please? And Siri here would like to assist with the detonation of the shock charges."

Chekov felt a tremor of disquiet at the way the party was splitting up. The social mores of this planet were supposed to be broadly similar to its home world, which was somewhere on the puritan side of humanoid norms. Was there going to be trouble if he let Croft out alone with the young alien? And looking at the problem even-handedly, was he happy to be alone with the woman? They both looked more interested in the science than anything else though, and after all, both he and Ensign Croft were trained to look after themselves. He turned to the third, quieter member of the trio, Harmo. "Would you like to assist Doctor Hewell with the monitoring here, or join one of the other parties?"

"I'll come with you, please," the boy responded enthusiastically and the trip was under way. Chekov double checked that everyone knew exactly what was required of them and that each member of his party was carrying their communicator. Everyone but the two doctors got ready to board the shuttle. Hewell was already in position with the main monitors, and Doctor Leverman was responsible for monitoring the receipt of data transmissions from each of the other stations at the dome. She seemed pleased with the prospect of a couple of hours alone, and Chekov wondered if perhaps she was a little shy. He paused at the door of the shuttle, the last to board. "Doctor Leverman, are you going to be all right here on your own?"

"Of course I am, young man," she snapped unforgivingly.

As the craft took off, Diana leaned over to Chekov, seated beside her, and said sotto voce, "Well, I can handle Groucho. How are you going to get along with Chico and Harpo?"

It took him a moment to place the reference. It annoyed him on behalf of their companions, but he couldn't resist a smile. The blond curly-haired Harmo had certainly been all but silent, and Siri had a habit of rolling his eyes that was strongly reminiscent of Groucho Marx. Diana glanced at him sidelong. "So you do have a sense of humour."

Until then, their three passengers had been sitting quietly in the back, staring in fascination out of the windows. Air transport was plainly not familiar to them, although looking down at the landscape it was difficult to see how else they moved about their planet. The continent was enormous, with few long rivers and no evidence of major roads. Perhaps at this stage in the colonisation they simply didn't travel much. Chekov turned round to talk to them.

"How long have you been here?"

The girl, Saera, looked up with a start. "Oh, I was born here. My parents emigrated twenty-five years ago. Siri is only a new-comer. He's been here eight years."

"How long has the colony been established?"

"Thirty nine years. We're having a big celebration this summer."

Diana looked away from her instruments momentarily. "How many fingers do you suppose they've got, thirteen?"

"Pardon?" Saera responded, plainly confused.

"We usually celebrate historical events after a number of years that is a multiple of ten. Because we count using a base of ten, having ten fingers." Chekov held up his hands to demonstrate.

She held up her fingers too, ten of them. "We count in base ten also. But we measure time in cycles of thirty nine years, for historical reasons. This year is the last of the four hundred and seventy-ninth cycle."

"Weird," Croft commented.

Saera touched the shoulder of Siri in the seat in front of her. "You're very quiet. Don't you like flying?"

As Siri turned from the window to look at her, Chekov caught sight of the young man's face. It was paper white and glistened with sweat. "No, I don't feel terribly well, Saera."

"What's our ETA?" Chekov snapped to the pilot.

She glanced at the panel. "Three minutes. I'm just initiating our descent."

"Is he going to be all right?" Chekov got out of his seat and sat down immediately in front of Siri. "It won't be long."

"Yes, yes, I'm fine, I would just like a little fresh air."

Chekov heard Diana increase the ventilation. He looked anxiously at Siri. There was no way the boy could have caught anything from them. The mission had been cleared for that sort of risk. It was probably just the unfamiliar motion of the shuttle and he would be as good as new once they landed. But it wouldn't be politic to upset the residents with any sort of medical emergency involving one of their own.

The shuttle's navigation system homed into the beacon they had left at the site earlier and the landing was accomplished smoothly. Siri scrambled out into the open, breathing in gulps. Chekov ignored him and concentrated on re-checking the equipment, while Saera stepped sedately out of the craft and looked around.

"I've never been out this way before. It's rather wild."

Chekov glanced up, and nodded agreement. The scrubby heath was dotted with sandy outcroppings of rock and yellow bushes that gave off a scent of aniseed in the intense afternoon sunlight. "Will you be all right here for a while?" He addressed the question to Siri, who was now sitting on the bottom step of the shuttle, looking dazed. "You would probably be more comfortable on the way back if you don't look out of the window. And if you haven't recently eaten."

The young man forced a smile. "Yes, I think I'll be all right. But I'll stay here for now."

Chekov stepped up past Siri and grabbed the bag that contained their rations for the afternoon. "Then you two are on your own for the next two hours. Check in with me half hourly. Understood?"

"Received and understood." Diana hesitated in the doorway.

"All ashore that's going ashore," he prompted, and she hopped down the steps out of the way of the door as it slid shut. Siri followed her over to the equipment. The fresh air seemed to be having the hoped for effect. His colour had returned. The shuttle lifted in a swirl of dust, and Siri peered at the display on the seismograph. "Four point six? What does that mean?"

"The machine interpreted the shuttle leaving as an earthquake. And it means no jumping around in the immediate vicinity or it will think you're an earthquake too. We need to take background readings before we set off the charges for exactly that reason. Want to help?"

***

Saera was hanging over Chekov's shoulder, following every move he made with her gorgeous dark eyes. He was relaxing a little at last, enjoying the uncomplaining cooperation of the monitoring equipment.

"I could calibrate the low frequency seismometer," she offered. "I watched Doctor Leverman do it at your base camp..."

"Good idea." And if you do it wrong, I should have time to check it and put it right, he added mentally. "How about you, Harmo? Do you think you could..."

"No. I'll just watch."

Chekov turned back to Saera. "Is he feeling all right? He is as pale as Siri was earlier."

"I expect so," she answered negligently, absorbed in her work. He leaned over to push a lead into place and his hip brushed against hers. Then she smiled, her eyes still fixed on her dials and readouts, and he pulled away rather abruptly. He didn't know if that sort of thing was allowed here, and he did know that he didn't have time for it if it was. Unreeling the lead to the secondary station a hundred meters away took a couple of minutes, and once the connections were made he powered it up. It emitted a couple of hiccoughing bleeps, and then pronounced itself ready for duty. He gave it a reassuring pat.

"Pavel!"

Saera was waving wildly at him and he began to trot back down the slight incline towards the shuttle and his two companions.

"What is it?"

"The equipment must be faulty." She ran a slender finger over the graph on the unit's little screen. A virtual forest of jagged spikes had sprouted from the previous dead flat line. He glanced disbelievingly at his chronometer. No, Croft wouldn't be setting off the charges for another half hour yet, even if she didn't check with him first as agreed. He keyed in a request for analysis, cursing his unfamiliarity with the basic subject matter. It could be an seismic tremor. It could be a signal superimposed on the power supply. It could, for all he knew, be somebody's stomach rumbling.

"Seismic disturbance." The display informed him briefly. He keyed for more. "Source, explosive activity on planet surface. Range, three thousand four hundred kilometres on bearing one nine seven (Probability 54%) Energy, 5E14 J..."

"Somebody is setting off explosive devices. Very powerful, equivalent to..." he cast about for a reference. "Do you have fusion reactors?"

"No, we use cold di-hydrogen cracking for power. But I know what a fusion reactor is."

"Of the magnitude of a year's output from a small one of those. And it is being repeated at apparently random intervals." He tried to remember the map of the planet, and what lay at the location given by the machine. Of course, a reading from just one location couldn't pinpoint something like that very accurately. "Do you know what it might be?"

She shook her head, not seeming much concerned. Perhaps she didn't appreciate the vast amount of energy being liberated. It could be meteor strikes, although there wasn't any space debris in the right place. "It resembles a cluster of medium sized earthquakes, but they are not coming from within the planet. The source is right on the surface."

"But as powerful as an earthquake?"

He nodded sharply, and she suddenly registered the worry that he felt. "What could do that?"

"Meteors, thermo-nuclear explosives, major industrial disasters - a large chemical plant going up..."

"Our main export is di-hydrogen compounds. They're stored for shipment at Polgor. That's about half way round the planet..." She span, looking for the direction of the sun. "... that way."

He checked. Pretty close to the bearing the machine had given. Close enough.

"Stored how?"

"Natural caverns in the rock, very close to the surface. They're sealed, then..."

He flicked open his communicator, no longer interested in her, nor in geophysics. "Doctor Hewell?"

There was a momentary pause, then the doctor responded. "Mister Chekov! Have you detected those signals?"

"Yes. Can we coordinate our readings to pinpoint the source?"

"Of course. Give me the location code from your meter. It'll be quicker than getting Margaret to..."

"Alpha nine four...two six five...one zero five...five seven seven."

He waited impatiently while Hewell did whatever calculations were necessary, then the doctor's voice resumed. "The location is the settlement at Polgor, to within a radius of twenty kilometres."

"Right, get Doctor Leverman to contact the Venayan liaison..."

"I certainly will. I was assured that no activity of this sort would be taking place during the time fixed for this research. You'd think they could test their bombs or whatever it is..."

"Doctor Hewell!" The snap in Chekov's voice surprised even himself.

"Yes?"

"I don't think this is a bomb test. I think it is a major disaster. We will contact the local authorities to offer assistance. Not to complain about the noise. Is that clear?"

"I don't..." The doctor sounded indignant, but Chekov cut in before he could register a protest.

"When she, or you, contact the liaison officer, say what we know, how we know it, and ask if we can offer aid. Our shuttle can be at the site in..." He calculated roughly. "...just less than an hour. We can carry up to twelve people if they need help evacuating personnel. Understood?"

"Yes."

"I'll contact you again in five minutes." He broke off and called up Ensign Croft. There was no reply.

He shut his eyes for a moment, trying to order his priorities. Whatever the nature of the disaster, if indeed it was one, it wasn't directly his responsibility. If, and when, the local authorities asked for help, he would respond, but he wouldn't attempt to second guess them. Hewell and Leverman were obviously safe at the moment. They were, like the shuttle, half a world away from whatever had happened. There was no reason to worry about them. Croft was really the only immediate problem. If she was simply ignoring her communicator, for reasons he probably wouldn't appreciate, he would deal with her - a few possible sanctions sprang to mind - but he had no choice but to go and see what had happened to her. He looked regretfully at the equipment. If they didn't get the readings they wanted today, they were very quickly going to run out of time. He decided to try calling her twice more in the next five minutes, then go to her assistance. He picked up his communicator to make the first call.

"Ensign Croft, come in please. Ensign Croft..."

"Yes?"

He felt his guts unclench. "Why didn't you answer just now?"

"I was busy. This idiot you left me with is being really ill. I think you're going to have to come back and get him..."

"Okay. We will get the readings now. I'll get in touch with Hewell and tell him we've changed the schedule. Set off the charges in... three minutes from my mark, understood?"

"Understood, sir!"

"Now!"

"Yes, sir!" Even when she was following orders she had to do it in tones of exaggerated sarcasm. Chekov flipped over the channel to contact Hewell. There was of course the danger that the doctor would have left the equipment untended while he tried to contact the locals, but that shouldn't matter, so long as everything performed properly, and Mister Scott had said there was no reason for any of it to malfunction. Chekov listened to the signal bleeping unanswered for a minute or so, and then switched it off. Didn't anyone on this damn mission bother to answer their communicators?

"Pavel?" It was Saera, her face pinched with worry. "Harmo's really ill. I thought he was just being shy, but he's in a lot of pain, I think. I hate to be a nuisance, but maybe we should..."

"Can he wait five minutes? Then we'll go and pick the others up and return to your home."

The young man was sitting with his head in his hands, leaning against the shuttle craft. Chekov walked round him and climbed aboard, telling himself that there was no need to panic. He just had to deal with the problems one at a time. With half an eye on his chronometer, he poured out a cup of water and took it out to Harmo. The boy looked up as he accepted it, but he didn't seem to recognise Chekov. Most of the water ran down his chin. Saera's shadow fell across the pair of them.

"Don't you know what it is?" Chekov asked her.

"No. I've never seen anything like this before. He's hot, and he's nauseous, and he seems to be less and less aware of us. I'm sorry, but I don't feel too well myself. Are you all right?"

"I think so." Chekov bent down to retrieve the empty cup, and Harmo grabbed him by the arm, and pulled him sharply, so that he fell to his knees. He felt Saera put her hands on his shoulders. "What..."

"No, I don't feel well at all. Mmm. Everything's spinning."

He pulled his arm back from Harmo, rose and turned to steady Saera, only to find himself pulled into a passionate embrace. "That's better. Oh, that feels much better."

"Saera!" He wrenched away from her and took a couple of steps backwards. "What is wrong with you two?"

"I told you. We don't feel very well. It's like - I've had too much to drink. Really. Oh, I'm sorry, Pavel. I didn't mean to..." She flushed scarlet with embarrassment.

"And how do you feel?" Chekov demanded of Harmo, as the man climbed uncertainly to his feet. If Saera was behaving in this unexpected fashion, and Diana was alone with Siri...

"I feel amorous," he confided, rather earnestly. Chekov snatched at his communicator and fumbled it in his haste. As it fell, Harmo kicked it. His coordination didn't appear to be affected by whatever he was suffering from. The communicator described a high slow curve. Chekov lost sight of it, forced to blink at the white glare of the sun.

Without wasting time on recriminations, he simply turned his back on them, and entered the shuttle. As he slid into the pilot's seat, his fingers hit the communications controls, but there was no answer from Diana, or the doctors. On an afterthought he switched into the frequencies used for local communications. Everything seemed to be jumbled into total chaos, music, jabbering voices, insistent demands for attention fading in and out of each other like audible spaghetti. He switched it off again and looked through the tinted windows of the cockpit. Outside Saera and Harmo twined in a passionate embrace.

"What is this? A mating ritual?" Leaving the radio making its calm, repetitive call into the void, he went and looked at the main compartment. He had to get them back to the base camp, and find out what had happened to Diana. He didn't fancy having them loose in the shuttle while he was piloting though. He thumbed open the security locker, to get out a couple of lockable seat harnesses. One of the bottles of brandy rolled out and hit the floor with a dull thud.

"What's this?" A hand snaked in from behind him, and he spun round. Saera was standing there, looking at another of the bottles.

"Give that back. That is the last thing you need!"

Saera giggled and passed it to Harmo behind her. Chekov couldn't retrieve it without pushing past her, and her eyes were inciting him to do just that. She, or Harmo, had unfastened the front of her dress. He swallowed. Then took her firmly by the shoulders and forced her down into one of the seats. As he turned his back on her to go after Harmo, and the brandy, he felt her arms lock into his, and twist, so that her knuckles interlocked at the back of his neck. Before he could react, she'd pulled him down into the seat in front of her. Harmo was easing the cap off the bottle. He sniffed it appreciatively, and poured a couple of inches of it down his own throat before leaning over Chekov.

"Don't you understand? We're in the middle of a disaster. I can't..." A hand clamped over his nose, and when he eased his lips apart to breath the bottle was forced between them. Most of the liquor spilt, but enough went down to set him spluttering.

"Harmo, please..." Another mouthful, and he couldn't cough all of it clear. His eyes were stinging as it splashed into them. Saera and Harmo were laughing. "Stop this!"

As he struggled, Harmo battered at his mouth with the bottle and something shattered. He spat reflexively, fearing broken glass, and a white fragment of tooth fell to the floor.

"Is there any more in there?"

Harmo nodded, took another swig himself, and held it for Saera while she swallowed a large measure.

"Ugh, what is it? It's not very pleasant."

"Then don't drink it," Chekov snapped at her between bruised lips. In response, Harmo returned to bottle feeding him. Once the bottle was empty, Saera released him. He still felt amazingly sober, until he tried to get back to his feet, and his legs turned to rubber.

"Oh, my God." The shuttle seemed to contract in pulses. He knew he needed to get to the medical kit. There would be something there to sober him up. He also knew that he shouldn't fly the shuttle, even after taking the detoxifiers, but Diana - anything could be happening to Diana.

He made it back into the cockpit, and realised he'd forgotten why he was there, but the patient beep of the radio reminded him of Diana. He'd been trying to reach her. He leaned over the console, and stabbed inaccurately at the keypad until he hit something.

"I want to fly this thing really high."

There was a determined edge to Saera's voice that shocked him almost back to sobriety. The medical kit, that was what he needed. But she was there in the hatch behind him, another bottle already open in her hand. "Just another little drink, Pavel, and then we'll go and get Siri and Diana. Yes?"

"I need the medical kit."

"This stuff's foul." Harmo spat out a mouthful of the brandy onto the deck. "We can't be far from Horros. Why don't we go there and get something better?"

"We can't go anywhere... I can't fly the shuttle... it's against regulations..."

"You could fly it just now," Saera said sensibly.

"I wasn't just now drunk, I mean..."

She slid into the seat beside him. As far as he could tell she didn't seem drunk, not in the sense of being as poorly coordinated as he felt. He sat for a moment, puzzling over the indicator lights, until he came to the worrying conclusion that someone had fired up the engines. Oddly, he couldn't work out who had done it.

Horros was displayed on the navcomp as a minor settlement just under ten minutes away. He couldn't remember why they had to go there, but it seemed such a minor diversion that he might as well get on with it. He initiated the launch sequence.

"Outer doors are open," the computer admonished.

He turned on the exterior flood lights, flushed the buoyancy tanks, double checked the fuel levels and eventually shut the doors. The computer stubbornly refused to initiate launch.

"Pilot reactions outside acceptable parameters," it announced primly.

"This is a medical emergency," he informed it.

"Coded override is required."

"You think I can't fly you, you self-important piece of... of..."

"Coded override is required."

He blasted the machine with slavic invective, but it was unmoved. Then he remembered what the code was.

"I'll show you who's master," he muttered under his breath. The shuttle jumped into the air, and a yelp of protest rang out from Harmo in the back. Saera laid a careful hand across her stomach.

"Oh, Pavel. Don't do that too often." She took her thumb off the top of the bottle and peered into it through one eye. "Do you want some more of this?"

"No!" He took it from her. To his surprise, she released it without protest.

"How fast can we go?" Saera was leaning forward in her seat, hands hovering over the co-pilot's console.

"This fast." He pushed the nose up and roared into an ascent that had every loose item in the shuttle flattened against the rear bulkheads. Then he remembered that Harmo wasn't strapped in, maybe wasn't even in a seat. He levelled, suddenly shaken by the crass irresponsibility of what he was doing. At least it was only an impulse shuttle, or they might have been a thin smear on the planet's surface by now.

"Check Harpo. Check he's all right."

"I'm fine. But warn me next time." The Venayan's gold curls were tumbled over his eyes, and he was flushed and laughing.

"Now how high are we?" Saera stood up and leaned forward, so that her nose was squashed against the clearsteel window. "Look, there's Horros!"

It was easy to pick out, despite its small size. It appeared to be on fire. A trail of ink-black smoke was blowing from it across the otherwise featureless scrubland. Along the vast circle of the horizon, other plumes of smoke curled like question marks.

"Sit down, Saera. And Harpo, strap yourself in. We're going to find Diana."

"I thought we were going to Horros?" Harmo sounded deeply disappointed, like a small child deprived of a treat.

"We are." Chekov felt something sharp dig into his ribs, and Saera's breath hot on the back of his neck. "Aren't we, Pavel?"

He tried to remember what the excellent reasons were for not going to Horros, but none of them quite outweighed his desire not to be stabbed.

"All right, then. But you'll have to sit down." He waited until both of them were secure, then began very cautiously to lose altitude. He felt perfectly in control, but he knew his instincts were as trustworthy as a Spican pawnbroker.

"Why are we going so slowly?" Saera had left her seat and come forward. "What does this do?" She began to hit buttons. The shuttle dropped like a stone.

"Merciful gods!" Saera covered her eyes and began to scream like a banshee. By the time Chekov halted their descent the proximity alarms were threatening to drown her out.

"Where in Horros did you want to go, exactly?"

She peered out between her fingers. "First, we have to go back and collect my insides."

"That was unbelievable. I want to do it again." Harmo sounded like a child at a funfair.

"No. Where did you want to go?"

"I don't remember. Where is this?"

They were hovering about twenty metres up, above a cluster of houses. The source of the thick black plume of smoke was now visible - a large building, or at least its skeletal remains.

"Rifflyn plant," Saera said. "It stinks when it burns."

Chekov set the shuttle down with surprising precision. Harmo was up from his seat instantly. "I'll get something decent to drink. Don't go without me." As the outer door slid open the stench of burning chemicals invaded the shuttle. The smell was acrid, stinging the eyes and the back of the throat. Chekov closed his eyes and started coughing.

"What is rifflyn?"

"Oh, just one of this planet's abundant natural resources. It's an organic compound. You can make almost anything out of it. You can even ferment it and drink it. That's what Harmo's gone to get. It doesn't taste as bad as it stinks. What did you do with that bottle?"

He bent down to retrieve it from where he'd wedged it between his feet. She took another swig. "I could get to like this."

"You shouldn't drink too much of it." He accepted the bottle in turn and absent mindedly took a couple of mouthfuls. It stung his bruised lips but cooled the burn of the rifflyn fumes. That felt so much better that he took another couple of pulls. "Saera, what is wrong with you and Harpo?"

"Nothing. Why?"

"You said you felt ill, and he was feverish. You said."

"No. We're fine. There's nothing wrong with us. Nothing at all."

"Then why is the riff-thing plant on fire?"

"I didn't set it on fire."

"No. No, you didn't. I'm sorry. You weren't even here." His eyes suddenly shut under their own weight. "What's happened to Harpo?"

"His name's Harmo, not Harpo. Pavel..."

"Umm?" He opened his eyes again. She took the brandy bottle back from him and stood it on a flat bit of the console. Her dress had slipped off her shoulders.

"Harmo's a really nice boy."

"Is he?"

"Yes. I mean really nice. I mean, he's very attractive. At least I think he's very attractive."

"Well, yes, I suppose he is. So what?"

"Do you like Diana?"

"No, I hate Diana."

"Oh. Well, if you did like Diana, if you thought she was really attractive, but she was a really nice girl..."

"She's not."

"No, I mean, if you liked her, and you thought maybe she liked you, but she didn't say anything because perhaps she was shy..."

Chekov suddenly grasped what this was all about. "Why don't you just tell Harpo you find him attractive. I'm sure he will know what to do next."

"I don't want him to think I'm forward, because I'm not."

"No, I can see you're not," he reassured her, although it was slightly disconcerting to be saying it to a virtually half naked stranger.

"Good." She toasted this bold conclusion with another swig from the bottle, and passed it to him. He held it to his lips, but paused as a worrying thought struck him.

"Diana. Oh, my God, Diana..."

"You hate Diana."

"No, well, yes, but..."

"But you love her, even though you hate her. I know. It's awful, isn't it?"

"No. That is not what I meant to say."

There was a sudden thunderous knocking on the outside of the shuttle, too loud to be just fists. Chekov reopened the doors and went to see who was there. Harmo had returned with a couple of metal flasks tucked under one arm, and a hefty axe, which he was brandishing. "Look what I found!"

The shuttle's pilot examined the line of dents the axe had made in the side of the shuttle. "Oh my God..." He couldn't imagine what Mister Scott was going to say about this vandalism. Visualising the engineer's apoplectic reaction, he cut off an undisciplined giggle. "Harpo, leave that thing outside."

But the Venayan had already clambered aboard, taking his new toy with him. He propped it up in one of the seats, and concentrated on taking the top off the first of the containers. They looked as if they held about a litre each, and once it was opened, a strong, peppery smell escaped. It made Chekov think of drinking ice cold vodka with pepper, but he had other things on his mind. "I have to contact Diana," he said firmly, and left the two of them to sample Harmo's supplies.

This time, Diana answered. "Chekov?" she said, a little breathlessly, and then, "Chekov!!" and the channel went dead. Attempts to make contact again were unsuccessful. He tried the doctors.

"Hewell here. I can't make any contact with the authorities. Croft seems to have set the charges off early..."

"Yes, Doctor. I told her to. We have problems here."

"Are you all right, Chekov? You sound a little - odd?"

"I'm fine. I want you to take precocious, to take... to be very careful. The Venayan students are behaving oddly, and we have just landed at a settlement where there appears to be some... some social disorder. You are to stay in the dome until I return. Do you understand?"

"Chekov, you sound drunk. What do you think you're doing?"

The ensign took a deep breath. "I'm trying to keep you alive, Doctor."

"Oh don't be ridiculous..."

"I'm not being ric... ridic... I'm being very serious. I think we are in danger..."

Harmo's axe plunged through the communications console, a whisker away from Chekov's hands.

He yelped and lunged to grab the handle of the weapon from Harmo, but the axe head was temporarily wedged, and in the end they both gave up fighting for it. "Have some of this," Harmo offered, by way of making peace, holding out the bottle.

"No, thank you. What in God's name do you think you're doing?" He stared disbelievingly at the lump of metal protruding from the helm. "What did you do that for?"

"Well, that man sounded deadly. He was going to tell you to come home and go to bed. Parents. I don't want you talking to them. He's not to talk to them, Saera. Watch him and make sure he doesn't."

"I'm not sure I can fix this." Chekov was prying up the cover on the front of the console to assess the damage. "And you threw my communicator away. We'll just have to go back. Can you strap yourselves in? We'll go and get Diana and your friend."

"Uh, huh. Not until you've tried this," Harmo said stubbornly. "I got this too." He pulled a small ballistic weapon out of his pocket.

"Don't fire that in here!"

"No. I'm not going to. I know that all the air will go Wheee! out of the bullet hole, and we won't be able to fly any more. But I will shoot you, if you don't have some of this." The young man waved the weapon about inaccurately.

"Okay, give me the bottle." Chekov was under the impression that he'd got his own inebriation under control. He could pretend to try the local hooch, just to keep Harmo happy. He began to tip the bottle up to his mouth, and Harmo knocked it sharply upwards. He swallowed a mouthful before its owner regained full control of the bottle and took it away.

"What d'you think of it?"

Chekov thought that it made vodka look like watered down -- water. The shuttle was suddenly dark, and mobile, and the backs of his eye sockets ached unbelievably. "I feel sick," he complained abruptly, but the feeling was only temporary. A moment later his stomach was numb and warm. He looked at Saera and Harmo. There were several of each of them, but they clearly didn't feel as bad as he did. They were passing the bottle back and forth, taking swigs and grinning at each other.

The next thing he knew was Saera shaking his shoulder. "Come on. I thought you wanted to go and get Diana."

"Oh, yes." But there was something else he had to do first. The medikit, that was it. Was someone hurt? No, no one was hurt. But he had a headache. He pulled the kit out from under the co-pilot's console and looked for a mild analgesic, sorting through the various capsules of detoxifiers and scattering them on the floor. Eventually he found what he wanted and injected himself with it. His headache settled down to a muzzy background discomfort with occasional stabs of blinding pain. That would have to do. He'd piloted under worse conditions.

"Strap yourselves in," he warned his passengers. Then he looked forward, out of the window, and realised that it was dark outside. Somewhere he'd lost at least three hours. Diana would be worried. He'd better hurry.

Chapter Three

Diana was sitting in the dark, with her back to a rock, and a lump of sandstone in her hand. She could hear Siri somewhere nearby, his breathing uneven and strained. Every so often she pulled out her communicator and made another fruitless attempt to contact the shuttle. Less often, she called the doctors, but they never had anything new to report. Around the base camp there was noise, a glow in the sky of fires, occasional glimpses of Venayans running through the trees, laughing, or sometimes screaming as if pursued. They hadn't dared to venture further afield.

"What the hell can have happened?" she said aloud.

"What?" Siri demanded.

"I wasn't talking to you, and if you come near me again, I'll stove your skull in."

"I'm sorry," he said hesitantly. "I don't know what came over me..."

She tensed. He was sounding a little more reasonable now. "Siri, how are you feeling?"

"Very strange. I'm... I'm frightened."

"You're frightened? Who stole my communicator and then attacked me? Who's alone on a planet covered in madmen, with only one damn ensign for company...where is he?" She stabbed at the code for his communicator again and was informed that it was receiving. But no one answered it. The shuttle didn't give back even that much response. It could be a simple technical fault she told herself for the hundredth time. If anything disastrous had happened, her communicator would be registering the distress beacon. "Answer, you moron, and I'll never tell anyone you're an under-sized gnome with personality problems that make Stalin look like a teddy bear again. Come on, Chekov, come on!"

"Diana?"

"Yes?" she snapped, clicking her communicator shut again.

"How far are we from anywhere?"

"We are so far from anywhere that your question is virtually meaningless. If you drew a circle round us, indicating the limit to which we could walk before we dropped from hunger, believe me, it wouldn't even reach to the rest of the known universe. Now shut up. This is all your fault..."

That was true, she told herself savagely. If he hadn't been ill, she wouldn't have been so preoccupied as to let him get hold of her communicator. If he hadn't spent most of the afternoon offering to give it back if she'd just kiss him, she could have got in touch with Chekov earlier. And then when he had, finally, returned it, he'd just used the opportunity to attack her. That was the last time she'd spoken to Chekov, four hours ago.

The recollection of her response to his attack gave her some comfort. He wouldn't repeat that experiment any time soon.

Her communicator bleeped. "Chekov?"

"No. You still haven't heard from him?"

"No, Doctor. Whatever he's doing, it's obviously far more important than thinking about our safety and your research. I don't know what impression you and Doctor Leverman must be getting of Star Fleet. Are you sure he sounded drunk? Maybe he's got whatever the locals have got..."

"I don't know."

"What could he have got drunk on, anyway? The shuttle doesn't carry a bloody bar."

"Maggie said there were three bottles of brandy in the shuttle."

"What? Chekov brought brandy down? He doesn't even drink brandy..."

"No. Actually I think he took it away from Maggie. She has a little bit of an alcohol dependency problem." Hewell had lowered his voice.

"Perhaps we're blaming the wrong person for this shambles," Diana commented acidly. "Mind you, he still had to drink it. Alcohol, sex and shooting Klingons, that's all he's interested in. He couldn't organise a two minute silence in a vacuum. He's an idiot, a clueless, irresponsible..."

"A bit inexperienced, perhaps..."

Something in the doctor's voice warned her that right now Hewell didn't want to be told that Chekov was totally incompetent.

"Yes, I expect someone thought this would be a good chance to let him practise."

"Well, I'm a little worried about you, out there on your own. Margaret thinks things seem to be calming down at this end. We were considering going to see if we could contact the local authorities."

She felt a twinge of unease. "But you said Chekov told you to stay put..."

"I know. But that was when we had no idea at all what was happening. I think we've identified a pattern now, we know what we're up against. Circumstances have changed. He can hardly have meant us to remain in the dome until the Enterprise returned."

"No, I suppose not. And I suppose his behaviour today has released you from any obligation to respect his orders anyway. Well, take care, Doctor. I'm rather depending on you to come to my rescue..."

"We'll do our best, my dear. Don't worry."

"'Don't worry'," she mimicked once the channel was closed. She made one last futile attempt to contact Chekov and when it didn't work she was mortified to find that she was crying. "I'm just tired, and hungry, and alone in the middle of nowhere with an amorous alien. I should be damn well crying," she told the night defiantly.

"You still can't contact the shuttle?" Siri asked.

"Oh, we are on the ball tonight, aren't we? No, I can't contact the shuttle. Any more questions?"

"Uh, maybe the receiving frequency at their end has been accidentally reset..."

She was so furious she hadn't thought of that, she flung the communicator at him.

"No," she said after a moment. "If he can receive us, then he'll be wondering why he hasn't received us, and that's the first thing even he would check. And it wouldn't explain why he doesn't answer his communicator. Try again, lover boy. I think he's just stoned out of his tiny mind."

"It's getting cold."

He'd moved in closer, but she didn't feel too worried. This wasn't the crazed, almost hysterical Venayan who had attacked her earlier. He was really just a frightened boy. She at least had the benefit of survival training. And he was right, it was cold, and the temperature would drop further throughout the night.

"Come and sit next to me," she said, since he was the nearest heat source. "And if you try anything, I'll..."

"Could that be the shuttle?" he interrupted. She stood up and peered into the spangle of stars that arched overhead. One of them was definitely moving. "It could be..." she began, only to have the words cut off by his hand over her mouth.

***

The moment the shuttle doors opened the sound of Diana's screams, and Siri's muttered curses, flooded the interior of the craft. Chekov lurched out of his seat and clung to the frame of the hatch until his head cleared again. "Oh, God, what is in that stuff?" He sat back down again, and turned the floodlights on. Diana, without pausing from raining blows on her attacker with her piece of rock, yelled "Help! Come out and help me you useless piece of..."

"I'll go," Saera said easily. "Siri's always a bit overexcitable." She stumbled out into the darkness. Chekov tried to swing the lights round to locate the combatants, anxious to help, but unwilling to go outside and leave Harmo alone in the shuttle.

"Chekov?" Ensign Croft climbed cautiously into the cockpit. She glanced behind her, checking that Saera had her companion under control. "Why the hell... what have you done to the shuttle?"

Once her eyes hit the axe handle protruding from the communications console they were stuck there.

"Harpo didn't want us to be able to contact base."

"Is it safe to fly it?"

"Of course it is. I flew it here safely, didn't I?"

She looked at him at last. "Yeah, Doctor Hewell said - you are smashed, aren't you? Chekov, you can't fly a shuttle in that state. I'll have to pilot it..."

"No!"

"Chekov, this isn't open to discussion. You aren't in any condition to pilot. If you touch that control panel, I'll make sure you lose your permit."

"If you don't want to come, you can stay here."

"Don't be absurd!"

He liked the note of panic in her voice. It seemed for the first time ever what he did was making some impact on Miss Croft. "Tell the doctors we're on our way, Ensign. I'm going outside."

She looked at the axe handle. "Tell them with what?"

Saera had refastened her dress when they opened the doors to the cold night air. Now she was sitting on the front row of seats, her arms round her knees, looking demure. "What happened here this afternoon?"

"We waited for you. It was exceedingly dull."

Saera nodded thoughtfully. "Pavel isn't overly fond of you."

Thank you for your loyal discretion, Mister Chekov, Diana thought. "You know what, Saera? I'm heart-broken." She stalked over to the open door, and looked out into the night. "Chekov, where are you? Can't we go?"

He emerged from the shadows and climbed aboard, careful not to come into contact with her.

"Look, I'll pilot. You must be tired..." She stopped. What was she doing? He was drunk, and he didn't deserve to be protected from knowing she knew it. "And legless, so I'll fly her, okay?"

He turned to answer her, and she noticed the bruises and broken skin around his lips. It struck her for the first time that he might not be voluntarily drunk. "No, Croft. I will pilot. You can navigate."

"There's a beacon..."

"Which operates through the communication set up."

"How did you get back to us then? Aren't communications working at all?"

"The comm is inoperative. The axe blade penetrated the main, back up and alpha circuit boards. I got here because I am a brilliant pilot."

"Sure, Chekov. One part luck and nine parts sheer bloody luck if you ask me." She turned away to the communications station. "It sounds as if you could rig something up by..."

"No!"

Saera had pushed forward into the cockpit, making it uncomfortably crowded. "You're not rigging anything up. You're not to talk to anyone. Understand?"

Saera's knife was in her hand, and Diana backed away. She didn't trust her combat skills in this restricted space, with Chekov an uncertain variable. There was nothing to be gained by talking to the doctors, at least not enough to risk injury. She went and sat down in the main compartment. "Okay, Mister Chekov. Take us back. And if you get her up there and change your mind about what a brilliant pilot you are, just let me know."

Diana regretted giving in the moment they took off. She regretted it even more when she realised that the use of full thrust had been deliberate. Only her acute sense of physical jeopardy kept her from unfastening her harness and pulling the pilot bodily out of his seat. "You moron, Chekov. You could rip the thrusters right off this shuttle doing that..."

"No I couldn't. I could if this was a standard model, but this one is one of Mister Scott's. I know what I'm doing, and I think we should get back as quickly as possible."

He sounded reassuringly sober for a moment, but the angry glow of half a dozen warning lights on the helm told a different story.

"Chekov, if we can get the comm functional, there's a subspace transmitter within a few kilometres of our base. From up here, we can beam a signal at it, even if it isn't switched on, and set the net resonating. If we put in enough power, it should pump out a signal strong enough to be picked up by the relay station at Hydrea Four. Chekov, are you listening to me?"

"Yes."

"Then you'll have to change course so we can do it. And slow down. It'll take me about ten minutes to patch this sufficiently."

"What are you talking about?" Saera demanded. She'd left her seat again and now she was standing between pilot and co-pilot, a hand on the back of each chair. "You're not going to mend your radio. You're not going to call for help. We don't need any help, thank you. We're okay."

There was a long pause while Chekov appeared to ignore them both. "We can do that later. I want to get back to base camp," he said eventually.

"Chekov, no, we can't do it later. It's orientated the right way for it to work at the moment. In half an hour or so it won't be. This is going to be a really weak signal. And in twenty five hours, when it's back facing the right way again, someone will probably have burnt it down."

"Diana," Saera interrupted in a stage whisper. "He's not going to do anything you say. He doesn't like you. And I'm not going to let you call for help, so you may as well shut up." She pulled her knife out and waved it provocatively.

"Why are you so sure it's facing the right way now?" Chekov asked.

"Because I just spent two hours with nothing to do but stare at the stars and think. I thought about ways to kill you, and I thought about the transmitter. And I know it's facing the right way."

"No, no, no. Don't even think of it. I'm not going to let you," Saera taunted. Diana turned to glare at her. Harmo and Siri seemed to have fallen asleep at the back of the shuttle, but Saera was very wide awake, with a gleam in her eye that suggested she'd appreciate an excuse to use her little knife.

Chekov chewed at his thumb nail. "I've got a better idea. Is there any of that brandy left?"

Saera retrieved it from her seat in the main compartment. She offered it to him, but he waved her over to Diana.

"Stop being so boring, and drink that."

She struck the bottle out of Saera's hands and it fell to the floor, letting the last inch or so of spirit pour out as it rolled off under the console. "Chekov we have to call for help. This may be our only chance."

"Well, if you prefer to be sober, I don't object." He flicked the controls to automatic pilot and turned an unsettling stare onto Diana. She had the feeling that he was not only undressing her with his eyes, but doing it with worse than indecent relish and expertise. She looked appealingly at Saera, and beyond her to the two men. They had slumped into the rearmost rows of seats. Saera grinned icily. "Now he's being more fun. I'm not going to let you spoil this. I'm certainly not going to let you call for help."

"No," Chekov echoed, shaking his head. "She's not going to let us call for help."

Diana glanced at the helm displays, registered that their ETA was a mere 17 minutes distant, and wondered what the hell Chekov was doing.

He had risen from his seat, his restraints seeming to fall aside at his touch. In contrast, her fingers fumbled as if chilled and numb with the clasp that held her. Then his hand covered hers and the belt snaked away into its housing, too late to let her run. He leaned over her and his face was close to hers. His eyes looked very calm and determined.

"Chekov." She tried to control her voice, to sound as if she were handling an episode of good-natured horseplay on board ship. "I really don't want to do this, not now, not with anyone. One fright is enough, OK? Joke's over."

Her voice rose to an undisciplined squeak as his lips touched hers. She wondered whether to bite him. His hands rested on her shoulders with a firmness that almost convinced her she was powerless. Then that very thought brought back her training. She could resist, she knew exactly how to use her lesser strength and weight, combined with his current preoccupation, to escape, at least temporarily, from this situation, at once terrifying and embarrassing.

He opened his mouth and planted a line of kisses along the line of her jaw, starting on her chin and ending up by her right ear. "Diana, if we only have seventeen minutes..."

She jerked her head sideways. "Chekov, please?"

She tensed herself, ready for another assault, gathered herself for a verbal appeal to his better nature, but before she could start, Saera had spoken.

"Pavel, what about me?" Both humans turned towards her. She was smiling enticingly. Diana felt a tremor from the body still pressed close to hers. She grabbed the backs of his arms awkwardly. His hands still rested on her shoulders.

"Chekov, don't!" She grabbed at his arms and missed as Chekov straightened and chucked her under the chin. "You can complain to the Captain if you like. Make the most of your spare time." He turned on his heel, took Saera's hand and led her to the rear of the shuttlecraft, where an open hatch led into the tiny cargo hold Diana shut her eyes and buried her face in her hands, attempting to cover her ears at the same time and not imagine what was happening.

When the warning bleep signalled one minute to ETA she rose stiffly from her seat and took the helm, without a backward glance. She accepted the transfer to manual control, pointed the floodlights down and took a bitter satisfaction in landing with pinpoint precision next to the dome. Let Chekov find fault with that!

"Open the doors!" Saera's voice rang out with casual authority from behind her. Diana complied, wishing the two of them would just disappear into the night and leave her to sink into the morass of her own confusion. But Chekov came forward and sat down next to her, and there was no sound of anyone leaving the craft.

Diana would not look at Chekov, but the movement of his hands on the communications console was visible out of the corner of her eye. The damage where Siri had axed the console was so extensive that she couldn't believe he hoped to do anything in the few seconds that Saera was taking to rouse her companions. Then the realisation hit her. He had given her seventeen minutes, and she had done nothing with it.

Involuntarily she looked up at him, and immediately turned away again at the load of disappointment in his eyes. All the time his hands were busy but he remained silent.

"What are you doing?" Saera had silently joined them. Her tone was icy.

"Some of the helm circuitry is linked through the communications systems to make use of navigational beacons," he bluffed smoothly. "We don't use it here, of course, but the damage is causing ghosting."

He kept his head down, sure that the technical excuses would go over her head, but afraid that his face would betray him. There was a long moment of silence, then her hands fell and swatted his hands off the remains of the console.

"Siri! Harmo! We don't need this shuttle any more. Make sure it's completely disabled." She nodded at Chekov. "And this one is trying to be too clever. He needs another drink. He was more fun drunk."

Chekov found himself being pulled roughly to his feet and frog marched out of the shuttle. They pushed him out of the hatch and he fell heavily nearly a metre to the ground. His legs seemed to have lost hold of the sobriety of the last twenty minutes. His head was pulled up and the rifflyn spirit was poured over his face. He struggled free with a gasp, but the flask came too and he both swallowed and inhaled the stuff. It burnt deeply into his sinuses and trachea, and almost instantaneous waves of intoxication combined with the lancing pain that seemed to drill directly into his brain. Then a booted foot made contact with his ribs, followed by another, and another.

Inside, Diana sat rigid with staring eyes, oblivious to Siri's frenzied axe attack on the helm. Splinters of metal and plastic showered her, until eventually he pushed her roughly out of the way. When the assault ceased she still didn't move. Saera eventually hauled her to her feet and pulled and shoved her out of the craft. Diana stumbled down the steps. It was quite dark outside. Chekov lay motionless on the ground and Saera appeared to have lost interest in him. She gestured towards the brightly lit dome. "You'd better get in there and stay out of trouble." Then she walked off, speeding up to a jogging run as if something important awaited her. Her two companions were drinking from the flask in turns, each holding it, their arms interlocked.

Once empty, the flask was discarded and they strode off. Diana shook herself, trying not to still the trembling that had set in at the sudden outburst of violence and the night chill. What could she do now to retrieve the situation? Nothing - no! It was that sort of thinking that had let her waste the precious minutes in the shuttle. Although it would have helped if that idiot Chekov had made it clear what he intended. How was she supposed to think straight while he was behaving in that disgusting manner? Now, she supposed, she was in charge of the landing party, until he saw fit to pull himself together. She knelt down beside Chekov and turned him so she could see his face. An agonised groan rewarded her efforts. At least he was still alive. He was lying on his back and she knew she should do something in case he vomited. Well, she wasn't going to sit and watch him all night. She pulled him over into the recovery position, ignoring his moans, then sat back on her heels to consider their position. Why had Leverman and Hewell not come out to greet the returning shuttle? Hadn't they come back yet from their attempt to find help? The door of the dome hadn't opened, and she had seen no movement at the windows. She strode over and hammered on the door.

"Doctor Leverman! Doctor Hewell!" No response. The door was locked. She snatched for her communicator, and realised in horror that it still lay in the dirt half a world away. Stupid! Not only would the communicator help her to locate the scientists, it would also trigger the electronic lock on the dome. Now she had no refuge, no access to the medical kit, no link to anyone but the unconscious Chekov.

For want of any better plan, she slid down to sit propped against the door of the dome, pulled her jacket around her and prepared to wait for daybreak or the return of the doctors. Sunrise, she somehow felt, would find the natives asleep and enable her to examine the wreckage of the shuttle for anything that might help them in their predicament. The doctors would provide her with someone to share the responsibility for her own and the others' safety. Despite discomfort and biting cold, the accumulated terrors of the day combined to topple her into sleep.

Chapter Four

"How do you think Doctor Leverman will react if things get difficult, Bones? I had the feeling you had reservations about her?"

"Reservations, Captain? Well..."

"McCoy? There isn't anything you're worried you didn't tell me sooner, is there?"

McCoy twisted his mouth thoughtfully. "I assumed someone at Starfleet had given her psych record at least a quick review before sending her on this mission. She used to be - awkward. She can be great fun, but she doesn't have much judgement. Or didn't have. I don't know, Jim. It's been nearly twenty years since I knew her. It didn't seem right to worry you about things she might have well under control nowadays."

"You let Chekov and Croft go off with a woman you suspected was trouble, in the vague hope that she might have her problems under control? What problems, exactly?"

"It wasn't my job to clear her for this. Someone else had already done that. If anything, I'd be more worried about Croft, if the chips are really down."

"Why, for heaven's sake? She's intelligent, bright, level headed..."

"Oh, all true. The only time I've ever seen her completely lose control of her temper was when she and Chekov got paired off for bridge a couple of days after she came aboard. You know, when Sulu had the whole mess playing duplicate..."

"Well, a duff bridge partner can be pretty annoying."

"Jim, with you teaching him to finesse, and Spock majoring on logic, there's no way that boy isn't a competent bridge player. They didn't communicate. They didn't cooperate. Chekov wasn't annoyed, he was livid. She wouldn't let him win, and she wouldn't let him lose gracefully. He's got the sense to do that if it's the only option, but she was out for blood. In the end he was bidding every hand so he wound up dummy."

"What happened? Why didn't I hear about it? Why didn't you tell me this before we left them there?"

"And then Hewell, he's okay until you cross him over something that involves his work. So long as Chekov puts the research work ahead of, say survival, eating and sleeping, he'll have no trouble from that quarter."

Kirk scowled at McCoy. "You're trying to wind me up, aren't you? Please say this is just your idea of a joke."

"Well, Spock was so darn sure he could do it. I thought, yes, give the boy a chance, what can go wrong? Only ever since, I've been regretting it. I just thought I'd let you in on that."

Kirk pushed his knife and fork together with his unfinished meal and rose to touch the controls on the nearby intercom. "Uhura, this is Captain Kirk. Can you patch a message through to the team on Venaya Seven, through the subspace net..."

"Captain, I've just had a general alert through from Starfleet. Venaya Seven has put out a call for assistance. I've been told to stand by for orders from Command."

McCoy shifted guiltily in his seat. "Don't look at me, Captain. Even if all my worst nightmares came true, there's no way two ensigns and a couple of scientists can wreck an entire planet."

***

Diana woke to anaemic early sunlight, and the realisation that someone had tucked a sleeping quilt warmly around her where she lay. She pulled herself back up to a sitting position and saw that Chekov was perched quietly in the open doorway of the dome. He smiled apologetically.

"I couldn't lift you. I think I've cracked a rib."

"How..." she coughed. Her throat was dry and rough. She started again. "How did you get into the dome?"

"I picked up your communicator."

She stared at him in disbelief. He was really beginning to needle her.

"Last night..." he began hesitantly.

"Yes?" Her tone was bright and somehow uninviting, like the polished steel of a trap. He put aside any idea of apologising.

"This may not be the ideal time, but we need to talk."

From his tone, he was about to say something she didn't want to hear.

"OK. I'm listening."

Aware of her hostility, even if he didn't understand it, Chekov tried to choose his words carefully.

"You're very good at the technical side of things, but you don't pay any attention to what I say, and that means I can't rely on you, so I have to waste time doing everything myself. And when you've been on your own you haven't shown much judgement or initiative. You've made mistakes and missed opportunities." He paused.

"Well, you haven't missed any opportunities, have you, Mister?" She managed to keep all trace of cheek out of her voice, and looked him straight in the eye.

"If you have any complaints about my behaviour, you should address them to Captain Kirk when we get back to the Enterprise. Which we won't be doing if you don't start to behave like an officer."

"And a gentleman?"

He swallowed his annoyance. "We have to do better than we have so far."

"How much better do you want to do?"

"We aren't discussing my behaviour!" he snapped, and got up painfully, clearly terminating the interview. She felt a pang of uncertainty, and cursed herself for her defensiveness. There was no question that their performance so far fell a long way short of guaranteeing their safety.

Chekov was also berating himself as he made his way over to the shuttlecraft. He'd handled that about as badly as possible. Despite less than a year between himself and Diana in age and experience, he felt it as a yawning chasm of responsibility on one hand and mistrust on the other. It was all very well for Diana to blame him for everything that went wrong, but he couldn't do anything to put it right without her cooperation.

He no longer worried that the returning Enterprise would find an embarrassing shambles, only that nothing would remain for them to find at all. The increasing irrationality and violence of the natives was clearly beyond his power to intervene. He could only hope to preserve his own people, and then only if they would let him. But he suspected that Kirk would not be impressed with the excuse that no one had done as they were told.

Suddenly his name rang out and he turned round as quickly as he could, his bruised torso complaining at the twisting movement. The two doctors were just emerging, apparently unscathed, from among the trees.

Doctor Leverman stopped by the dome, looking breathless and pale, but Hewell continued to lope in his usual relaxed manner over to Chekov. "We'd almost given up on you. I've been trying to raise you all night."

"Our communicators were out," Chekov replied shortly. He didn't feel like going into detail.

"I thought you said you had mine!" Diana objected. Chekov wondered whether, before they all got killed, he might take the opportunity to strangle her.

"I turned off the bleep so they wouldn't realise we had it. And somehow I forgot to turn it on again. Please forgive the oversight." He had pulled it off his belt and was reactivating its audio output as he spoke.

"Oh, you're really useless," Diana moaned. Any sarcasm other than her own appeared to float straight over her head.

He ignored her. "I thought I asked you to stay in the dome."

"Yes, I know." Hewell had the grace to look embarrassed.

Leverman showed no sign of remorse. "Things seemed to be quietening off for a while. We wanted to discover if any form of government was still operating. And I wanted to find out what all the noise was about. There was some sort of orgy going on over by the main university hall. Bonfire, loud music, and the most abandoned behaviour. I'd be interested to talk to the sociologist who classified this colony. We kept out of the way and rather lost our bearings. We thought it was safer to lay low until daylight than ask for directions."

Hewell's face was acid with disapproval. "Margaret appeared to find it all most - stimulating. I strongly suggest that we pack up and take the shuttlecraft to somewhere fairly remote until your ship returns."

Chekov bit off the apology that instinctively came to his lips. He'd had enough of taking the blame for everything that went wrong. "The shuttlecraft is not functional."

"Oh, that's an understatement!"

"Ensign Croft, get over here, now!"

She actually jumped, then made a point of getting to her feet rather languidly and strolling across to Chekov. She stood and looked at him defiantly.

"The main drive is undamaged, but there's no way to control it at present. I want you to disconnect all the life support boards at the back and see if it's possible to use them to give us some sort of control."

"You mean wire all the flight controls up to a completely different set of switches? What about the navigation computers?" Hewell sounded at once sceptical and intrigued by the prospect.

"We don't need a computer. In daylight we can fly by visual. Just to have a back door out of here. What are you waiting for, Croft? Get to it!"

Chekov turned abruptly and nearly doubled over with pain.

"Are you all right?" Hewell demanded. "Get Margaret to have a look at you. I'll assist Diana."

"Just a moment, please, Doctor. The force field generator from the equipment dump is missing..."

"I know. I switched it off, because it was interfering with the data transmission to the processor, and when I came back from trying to contact the authorities, as per your instructions, it was gone."

Chekov just looked at him, bereft of speech.

"Well, what was I supposed to do? If the charges had been set off while I was gone, I wanted to get the readings."

"It has a standby switch to protect it if you leave it. So that it can't be stolen."

"Well I didn't know that, did I? You should have told me if that was what you wanted done. I c... can't read minds."

Chekov's morale was tunnelling its way out of the soles of his boots. "I'm not blaming you. It was my fault. I should have made clear the correct procedure..."

Hewell looked at the young officer, with his pale, dirty face, pinched with fatigue, and then across at Croft's holier than thou expression. "If anyone's made a mistake, it's whoever sent you here with us. It's not your fault. You had no reason to suppose there would be a problem." He stood there, trying to think of something else to say to cheer Chekov up. "I don't suppose we're going to finish the research..."

"No, Doctor, realistically, it doesn't look as if we are."

"It's not going to look too good on your record, is it, Chekov? Your first command, and you've junked a shuttle, lost a few thousand credits worth of Starfleet generator, put the whole team in danger... and now as Doctor Hewell points out, we're not going to get our research done."

Both men glared at Croft, not sure who was the target of her attack. Hewell decided that it didn't really matter. "Of course, the research is unimportant. We just have to stick together and make sure we're still here when the Enterprise gets back. I'll try to be rather more helpful than I have been." He took the young woman's arm and hustled her over to the shuttle. "If I was your father, Ensign, I'd give you a damn good hiding!"

The words floated back to Chekov, but he was in too much pain to enjoy them. Instead he stumbled over to the dome, his head beginning to swim. Leverman sat him down on the steps. "You look as bad as I feel." She placed a rather clammy hand on his forehead. "Where exactly does it hurt?"

Chekov began to worry whether she was even as good a doctor as McCoy had grudgingly allowed. "There's a medical tricorder in the kit," he prompted hopefully.

She tsked at him. "I don't think I need that. Let's just take your shirt off and have a look. You'd better come inside where you can lie down."

"I think I've cracked a rib." The quicker they arrived at a diagnosis the better, as far as he was concerned, and if it was the wrong one, and he bled to death from internal injuries, that was OK too. Before Starfleet could court martial him for being the wrong person.

She tucked an arm round his chest and tugged him upright. He yelped with pain, and she nodded. "I think you could be right you know. Now sit there, and I'll just get this off. Ok, you lie down now. Perhaps you should undo your pants as well." He didn't. "I am a doctor, you know," she said archly.

He heard her digging in the medical kit for the tricorder and relaxed. This was a little more business-like. "They seem to be busy in the shuttlecraft." Her voice came from over by the door. His blood ran cold. Why did she need to check whether they were busy? Either she was planning to do something so painful that she needed help to hold him down, or - he didn't want to contemplate the alternative. The Doctor must be fifty if she was a day. Alien beauties in the line of duty were one thing, but this woman was old enough to be his mother, and furthermore her behaviour reminded him of some of his less sophisticated aunts after a couple of glasses of vodka on an empty stomach.

"I think I'm going to be sick," he protested, and struggled to sit up.

A hypo hissed as she restrained him with a firm hand. "I know just how you feel, young man. That was an anti-emetic. We'll get this rib strapped up and you'll be feeling fine in no time. Just stay there while I sort out what I need."

A warm relaxed sensation began to spread out from his middle, fighting back the rising panic that was emanating from every other part of him. He wondered whether she had lied about the hypo and given him a sedative. It was difficult to tell, in so far as the nausea had been entirely psychological. "OK, let's sit you up." She slipped an arm under his back and helped him smoothly into a sitting position. As she did so, her face was very close to his, and he was aware of the peppery scent of the local liquor on her breath. He shut his eyes and flinched away, but she ignored the movement. "OK, breathe in and raise your arms." He complied and grunted at the discomfort it caused. Eyes still shut, he concentrated on a mental recitation of stellar characteristics while she jacketed him in elastic webbing. It felt all wrong, too loose in places and too tight in others. He supposed, optimistically, that it would even out once he started to move around. The relaxation was winning hands down over the panic, but he hung on to a shred of revulsion at her touch on his skin.

"There." Her hands moved to cup either side of his face. "I expect that feels much better." Then she did kiss him, rather hesitantly, on the forehead.

He opened his eyes and fixed her with a glare. "Just what do you think you are doing, Doctor Leverman?"

He had tried to keep his tone light and ironical, to give her a chance to back off and retain her dignity. It plainly hadn't worked. She burst into tears and rushed out of the dome.

The urge to give in to the sedative was potent, but Chekov forced himself to resist it. It was all very well assuming that the natives would be sleeping off the effects of the night before, but in fact he wasn't experiencing anything like a hangover himself, as far as he could tell. They should be maintaining a lookout at the very least, someone should be doing something about breakfast, in case anyone wanted it, and they needed to review their progress and determine whether, if things returned to normal, it was still possible to retrieve any of the planned program for the remaining two days before the Enterprise returned. Putting those three objectives in order of priority, Chekov decided to go and sit on the steps of the dome and think about the other two.

Diana met him as he stepped through the doorway, her eyes blazing. "You brute!"

"What?"

"What did you do to Doctor Leverman?"

"What did she say I did?"

"I didn't ask her. She's crying on Doctor Hewell's shoulder. But I don't really need to use my imagination, do I?"

"If you must know..." Chekov stopped. He couldn't bring himself to embarrass the older woman by revealing her indiscretions to Diana Croft. And in the light of his own recent experience with the doctor, he suddenly regretted what he had done to Diana in the shuttle the previous night. True, he had needed to arouse Saera's interest without arousing her suspicions at the same time, but he could now appreciate how unpleasant the experience must have been.

"Diana, could you do something for me?"

For once she didn't come back with a snappy put-down. Maybe, he thought, she was just too pleased to hear the naked pleading in his voice.

"What?"

"I just want all four of us to be alive, when the ship gets back. I don't think that's too much to hope for, but it would be much easier if you would give me the benefit of the doubt sometimes."

"But you're such a creep, Chekov."

Any idea of appealing to her for support dissolved. "You're going to get us all killed, Croft. I'm not going to bother threatening you with when the Enterprise gets back, because you're not going to last that long. None of us is." He wrapped his arms round himself to control a sudden fit of shivering and walked miserably over to the shuttle. There was no sign of Leverman.

Hewell looked up from a mess of components in the rear. "Margaret asked me to apologise on her behalf," he said bluntly. "And don't get your hopes up as far as this wreck's c... concerned. A lot of the relays are burnt out. That stack over there are all serviceable, I think."

Chekov sat down on the floor and started taking the cover off the impulse unit. "Where is Doctor Leverman?" he asked.

"She went to get some more insulating gunge. We've finished what you had in here. I have a supply in the equipment dump."

"Good. Could you go outside and tell Ensign Croft to make us all something to eat and keep alert for any sign of the locals waking up. I want to be told the moment she hears any sign of activity. And you, Doctor. I would appreciate you keeping your eyes and ears open." He started looking for a supply of cable to run to the front of the craft.

"Yes. I'll do that," Hewell acknowledged quietly. "And I'll make sure Diana gets on it too."

As he left the shuttle, Chekov heard Leverman return, but didn't look up. She slipped past him and got on with making the stripped units safe, covering all the naked connections with electrical insulating foam. Chekov wondered what Scotty would make of the mess. Still, he had no intention of going anywhere that required life support. If they could take off and land safely, and keep in the air for half an hour in between he would be satisfied. Hewell came back and Chekov got him to run the cables up to the helm, securing them with tape, while he started connecting them in to the impulse drive and thruster units. A few minutes later, Diana appeared at the door and passed in cups of steaming coffee and warmed but leaden biscuits from the emergency ration packs. She seemed subdued. Chekov wondered what Hewell had said to her. After delivering breakfast she sat down on the steps to eat her own. Inside, they all continued working, breaking off for the occasional bite or sip.

"There's someone coming."

Chekov jumped to his feet, sending his coffee flying. He cursed and came to stand behind Diana, looking out over her head. A small group of natives were loitering uncertainly on the fringes of the trees. They didn't look hostile. "Stay in here, and shut the doors if they come close. Diana, come with me."

She got to her feet readily enough and followed him over to the dome. He shut the door of that as well and stood for a moment, trying to see whether any of the group looked familiar. He noticed that Diana had one of the all-purpose electrical tools from the shuttle in her hand, held so tight that her knuckles were white.

"Come on, let's see what they want."

Closer up, the party turned out to consist of six youngsters, aged from about ten to twelve or thirteen. They were filthy and woe-begone. Two of the boys had cuts and bruises on their faces and arms, and most of them had plainly been crying. Chekov recognised two of the children as his visitors from the previous morning.

"What can I do for you, Karra?"

"We're frightened, Pavel. We don't know what's happening, everyone seems to have gone mad. All the grown ups were getting drunk last night, and most of the students. They smashed up the school. It was really scarey. And this morning we can't find anyone around. There's just no one in any of the school buildings."

"No one alive," one of the boys said.

The two girls whom Chekov didn't know started to cry again. Karra looked up at him hopefully. "And then I thought of you..."

Chekov chewed his lip. He didn't want to take on responsibility for this lot as well, but he couldn't very well turn them away. "Have you got any weapons on you?" he demanded abruptly. The largest of the three boys jumped guiltily, pulled a savage looking knife out of his belt and offered it to Chekov. "Is that all?" They nodded hastily. Chekov took it and looked hard at its owner. "I don't know what is happening any more than you do, but I think we are in danger. You can stay with us and we will do our best to protect you, but you have to do as you are told, understood?" They nodded with pathetic eagerness. "Keep your knife. I don't want you to use it, but if we are attacked it might frighten them off. Just don't take any risks." The boy thrust it back into his belt and tried to smile reassuringly at his companions. "Come on, at least we can provide first aid."

They followed him to the dome and after he had opened it up again, Diana set to work with the medical kit. "Two of you, keep a look out at all times. Take it in turns. Can you do that?"

"Yes, sir," the knife-owner replied earnestly.

"What's your name?" Chekov asked.

"Dieter, sir."

"OK, Dieter, you're in charge of the look out. You tell me if anyone comes near us, or if you hear any activity at all out there."

He returned to the shuttle, feeling better, despite the added responsibility. Hewell met him at the door. "The cable's in place. But don't ask me to connect it to anything. You're out of my depth now. What did the kids have to say?"

"They don't know what's going on, so it's obviously not some regular event. They say almost everybody was affected last night, but they weren't. At least they didn't say they were. I suppose they would have realised if they'd been behaving oddly themselves. And there are fatalities."

"Yes, we knew that." Hewell's voice was expressionless. Chekov suddenly remembered that he hadn't debriefed the doctors on their unofficial expedition of the night before.

"Did you see anything that could explain what was going on?"

"No. It appeared - universal. All age groups. A lot of violence, but mostly as a result of drunkenness. Some people were just loud, or uninhibited. Most of the kids were just being objectionable, if you know what I mean. Sometimes it looked good-natured, other times it was like the sacking of Rome. We saw bodies. We saw one murder, but we didn't intervene. There were a gang of them. I didn't think we could do anything. Or maybe we just convinced ourselves that we couldn't." He obviously found that difficult to admit. "What happened to you?"

Chekov shook his head, unwilling to recount the events of the previous night. "I just thought they were ill. They were behaving a little as if they were drunk. Then they found Doctor Leverman's brandy..."

"She said you'd taken it away from her. So they really got drunk. But why did you..."

"They held me down and poured it down my throat."

"Oh. Well, I should have known better than to think you'd do it deliberately. I'm sorry."

"Doctor Hewell, I'm not stupid, or irresponsible. We will survive this if you'll trust me..."

"How old are you?"

"Old enough to be in charge."

Hewell smiled. "Fair enough. You'll have to make allowances. I'm not used to taking anyone's orders without bickering about it first."

"I'll make allowances, Doctor. But I can't guarantee that anyone else will."

Chapter Five

As the long day wore towards noon, there were sounds that indicated the locals were awakening from their slumbers. It soon became evident, however, that the violent abandon of the previous night had been succeeded mainly by hung-over irritability, and no return of self-restraint. There were shrieks, of anger or fear, and movements among the trees.

The makeshift repairs on the shuttle ran into one difficulty after another. It wasn't until after a belated and bad-tempered lunch break that Chekov finally pronounced it air worthy. His crew of make-shift engineers heaved sighs of relief only to find themselves detailed to tidy up the mess. Chekov sat watch on the steps, listening to their angry muttering, knowing he was being unreasonable but unable to bear the thought of Mister Scott seeing the shuttle in its present butchered condition.

The six children shadowed the Enterprise crew as if they didn't quite trust each other on their own. Karra sat like a cat on the step by Chekov's feet, her chin resting on her hands, which in turn rested on her knees. He felt that if she had a tail, it would have flicked nervously from side to side.

The sounds of conflict increased and Chekov doubled the watch. Eventually, by mid-afternoon, he decided to take no more risks and instructed everyone to gather outside the dome. He hadn't acted a moment too soon. Almost immediately a band of about five men burst out through the trees into the clearing around the shuttle, and pulled themselves together into a loose knot, assessing the scene before them. There was yelling and screaming in the background, as if they were being pursued, but Chekov was forced to ignore that for now. The men were armed.

"Doctor Leverman, get the children into the dome and lock it. Doctor Hewell, Ensign Croft, arm yourselves with something long and heavy from the shuttle. Get me something too." He looked down to check that Dieter had his knife as the boy passed him, exchanging a confident smile with the boy's trusting one. "What sort of weapons are they? Projectile or energy beam?"

"Projectile." The boy hesitated, last up the steps, by the open dome door. He screwed up his eyes against the bright sunlight and tried to make out the details. "They're hunting guns, sports weapons. Accurate, if they know how to use them, but single shot. And they're drunk, aren't they? They won't be able to reload quickly."

"You've used these guns?"

Dieter nodded enthusiastically, and Chekov reluctantly closed the door with the boy still outside. He pushed him back down the steps, and into the cover behind them. "Stay here. If I can get hold of one, and some ammunition, I'll throw it to you. Use it to protect the dome. Nothing else."

Dieter swallowed. "Yes, sir."

The five intruders were, fortunately, disorganized and inebriated. They were joking as they eyed up the camp, and Chekov really wished he knew what their intentions were, supposing they were sober enough to have formulated any. They might just be aimless hooligans, who would disappear at a hint of organised resistance, or they might be as mindlessly murderous as he feared. Next time he was in charge of a landing party, always assuming there ever was a next time, he'd make sure he had phasers, and damn the rules...

The screams erupted into the open, as two men dragged a hysterical woman with them to join their fellows. She was fighting tooth and nail and the largest of the men hit her savagely round the face, sending her crashing into a tree trunk. She slid limply to the ground. Chekov found that his mind was made up. He had to do something. Hewell pressed a half metre long wrench into his hand and stood just behind him. "I'm afraid I haven't a clue what to do in these kind of circumstances..."

"You have to utilise your imagination and the materials that come to hand. Croft?"

"Yes?"

"Take off in the shuttle. Fly at a height of two point five metres. Buzz them. Do it five times, then pull away and check to see what is happening. If we have the upper hand, then good. If not, repeat, but flush the coolant system at maximum to give a downdraft. That may frighten them sufficiently."

"I can't fly that close in to the trees..."

"Go."

"But Chekov..."

"Now!"

He didn't look to see if she was obeying him. "Doctor, we have to hope that they panic and simply attack them with the wrenches. I will attempt to get hold of their weapons. You cover me as much as you can. You can break arms with that, so aim low. It should be enough, but don't be squeamish about breaking heads if you must."

"U...understood."

The marauders seemed to have come to some sort of consensus, and began to advance across the grass. Chekov heard the roar of the shuttle behind him, and mentally amended the totally black report he'd been compiling on Croft. Even if she was right, and she couldn't cope with the low flying, at least she was willing to try. The men hesitated, their weapons still raised, and he flung himself forward, ignoring the tearing pain from his side beneath the ineffective bandages. It was no good just frightening them away. He had to have their weapons.

Surprise, and the distraction of the shuttle, worked as he'd hoped. He'd ploughed the two leading attackers to the ground, fist in one face, wrench swung left handed into the gut of his other victim, before the shuttle was in place overhead. He fought against the reflex to fling himself to the ground and cover his head, telling himself that he didn't really believe that Croft hated him enough to decapitate him with a shuttle stabilizer.

Hewell was in front of him, wielding a heavy-duty welding unit like a berserker sword. The sick crunch of splintering bone was only masked by the thunder of the shuttle.

He grabbed at the two rifles dropped by the men he'd downed ripping packs of cartridges from their belts. As he checked to see if either was loaded, Hewell was flung backwards, arms cycling wildly. The shuttle turned, seeming to graze his fingertips. Chekov swung the rifles up, closed his forefinger across two triggers simultaneously, and wheeled the sights round to freeze on the only native who was still upright and firing a weapon.

The man's gun, and half his shoulder, were blown away and the recoil nearly toppled the ensign. He staggered a couple of steps backwards, and turned full circle, slowly, making sure the assault was really over, for now. Then he lowered the guns, dropping to one knee to fumble with the ammunition, keeping his eyes on the natives. Five were down. The woman hadn't moved from where she'd originally fallen. The other two must have run away then. Doctor Hewell also lay motionless on his back, a thin trail of blood running down his temple into his black hair.

The note of the shuttle changed as it manoeuvred to land. In the sudden silence Chekov's ears were ringing. He gave up on reloading the guns, scooping up the cartridges instead and carrying them over to the dome. Dieter slowly stood up, his face white, eyes enormous. Chekov dropped the weapons at the boy's feet.

"Load them." He raised a fist to hammer on the door, but it opened inwards before he made contact. "See to Doctor Hewell, then the others."

Maggie Leverman brushed past him, medical kit in hand. Chekov was looking at the girls. The woman might need help, but he wasn't sure that she was any less dangerous than the men who had been attacking her. In the end he nodded abruptly at Karra. "You. There's an injured woman. The Doctor will need to know some general medical information about your people. Go and help her now, and be ready when she needs you. Don't assume that the woman won't make trouble."

She scrambled to her feet, eyes full of tears, and disappeared out through the door in turn. The remaining four pulled into a tighter huddle, giving him space for whatever he wanted to do. It struck him that they were frightened of him, but for the moment he didn't care. One of the storage lockers yielded thin rope, and he went out to make sure their prisoners didn't pose a threat.

***

The woman was moaning and sweating, feverish, according to Karra, who could only judge with an old-fashioned hand on the patient's brow. Maggie Leverman couldn't find any obvious injuries, apart from bruises and scratches. She rather suspected the woman had been molested, but wasn't sure what practical use that information, or any of the other details that Karra had given her, would be to Chekov, so she kept it to herself. The doctor was limited to making her patient comfortable on one of the bunks in the dome, and leaving Karra to watch her, with strict instructions to call for help if she showed any signs of waking up. She went back to Hewell, and checked him over yet again. A bullet from one of the guns had grazed his temple, leaving a white gleam of exposed bone, and copious blood. She wished he'd recover consciousness. While she could deal with a minor concussion, and there was no sign that this was anything worse, you could tell so little about head injuries until the patient was prepared to demonstrate that the brain was working.

"You ought to look at the rest of them," Chekov said unexpectedly from behind her.

"I don't think we should waste our limited medical supplies on them. We might very well need them all ourselves."

No, Chekov reflected, it wasn't surprising that McCoy had a low opinion of Doctor Leverman. "That was an order, Doctor."

She turned away from her patient to look the young ensign in the face, but her dissension died on her lips. He seemed, in some way, in even worse shape than Hewell. "Are you injured at all? I mean as well as what you already..."

"No."

He'd surprised her by the decisive way he'd dealt with the attack, and he was surprising her again now, by his reaction. He looked very edgy, as if he'd lose his temper at the least provocation, probably spectacularly. "Come on then, I'll have a look at them."

Dieter and Diana, each armed with one of their four newly acquired weapons and wearing a pouch full of cartridges over their shoulders, were keeping uneasy watch over the surrounding trees.

"We'd be better off somewhere more open," Chekov said, thinking aloud.

As they knelt down beside the first of the prisoners, he kept his head up, watching for any renewed attack. Maggie ran her tricorder over the man then surreptitiously swung it round to make a quick review of the ensign's condition. If he stayed this keyed up, he was going to be a wreck by evening.

"Broken arm." She peeled back an eyelid, and revealed that the patient was merely shamming sleep. He snapped his eyes shut again the moment she let him. The next was concussed, still out cold, the third and fourth had broken ribs from Hewell's battering. Like the first they seemed to have decided to play dead. Maggie noted that all four seemed overheated, like the woman, and their enlarged pupils reminded her of the effects of certain drugs. But the tricorder wasn't set to tell her if this was merely a normal reaction to injury and stress.

The fifth man had lost a considerable pool of blood and was pale and cold. She looked calmly at the blasted remains of his shoulder, and the thin seepage of blood from the mess of tubes and bones that protruded. "I'm afraid this one is dead. The lung is ruptured, obviously, and this must be one of the major arteries supplying the heart. I couldn't have done anything." Chekov abandoned his obsessive watch on the perimeter for a moment and looked down at the corpse.

"If these guns fire shells, how did Doctor Hewell..."

"Chekov, what does it matter? These people were attacking us, with these weapons. You only did what was necessary to defend us..."

"They're firing a mixture of shells and bullets. I have to check it out. Excuse me, Doctor." He sounded worryingly detached, as if he was participating in a drill he'd done hundreds of times..

She pulled a body bag from her kit and shook it out, laying it down beside the dead man. She didn't feel up to struggling with the body on her own, but everyone else was busy, unconscious or under age... or Chekov, but she didn't think it would be a good idea to ask him just now. She slipped the feet into the bunched up mouth of the bag and wrestled it up the near six foot length of the corpse. If anyone had asked her, she'd have assumed the ensign was well used to killing. And then, on the other hand, she'd assumed he was wet enough behind the ears to have no right to be in charge here. Perhaps she couldn't have it both ways. Whatever, she wanted a drink very badly.

***

As darkness fell, Chekov turned the shuttle so that its powerful forward floodlights drenched the dome in light. With Croft's help, he dragged the prisoners close to the dome, gritting his teeth against the pain the movement caused. Leverman checked them again, finding their condition unchanged. The woman had had to be restrained, as she became first agitated and then hysterical. In the end, Chekov had insisted that Karra leave her, worried about the effect the woman's raving would have on the girl. Instead, Karra stuck to Chekov's heels, until he lost his temper with her, and she retreated, woe-begone, to help Diana serve up an impromptu meal.

Hewell had regained consciousness quite early on, and the three adults had carried him into the safety of the shuttle craft, laying him across a row of seats. He protested that he was well enough to get up, but Chekov only snapped at him to be quiet. Leverman emerged from the shuttle, after a house call, and sat down on the step. Chekov was making his regular hourly attempt to raise the Enterprise, or some form of sane authority on the planet. As he folded his communicator shut, she spoke up.

"Ensign, can I have a word with you?"

"Yes, Doctor."

He turned to face her, but stayed put. She smiled ironically at his decision to keep his distance. "I won't misbehave. I wouldn't have before if I'd realised quite how dangerous you were."

He didn't smile.

"Seriously, I'm sorry. I'm a stupid middle-aged woman, fending off my mid-life crisis by chasing young men, and as a bureaucrat with zero practical skills, I have no right to be here making your life more difficult. And if it's any comfort to you, after you get me out of this in one piece, I'm never going to touch another drop of alcohol. Can we make peace, please? I think we have enough enemies here."

He relaxed. "Yes, very well."

He wasn't exactly killing the fatted calf, but if that was all she was going to get, she'd settle. "Now will you hear me out while I say something you won't like?"

She thought the answer was going to be no, as he turned away from her to scan the dark limits of their camp, his own silence showing that he was listening for any sounds of approaching danger. Then he focused on her again. "I'm sorry. What did you want to say?"

"How much sleep did you get last night?"

"I was unconscious for a while. I don't know how long..."

"No, that doesn't count. You can't go on. You're already wound up like a watch spring. You need to get some sleep. And I need to have another try at strapping up that rib. I can see it's hurting you, and it shouldn't be."

He made another slow sweep of the camp while he thought about that. "Yes, Doctor. In just a moment. And I don't think that anyone else slept that well either."

"They'll rest if you tell them to. I just want to be sure you don't forget yourself some time tonight."

"Understood. Thank you." He started to pull his shirt off, and she brushed his hands aside and did it for him, being careful not to look him in the face.

"Right. Now the next problem. I think Doctor Hewell is fine. He can get up tomorrow, if he feels up to it. The others, particularly the woman, I'd like to try to do something for them. I've been thinking about it..."

"We don't know..."

"What the problem is, no, but we do have a group of unaffected individuals. I've spoken to them, and they had one quite simple thing in common. They were all in their school sick bay yesterday afternoon, under observation for a minor illness. The illness, or the treatment, may be the reason it hasn't affected them." The strapping was off now, and she swiftly rolled it up, and began to rewind it round his chest. He was shivering in the chill evening air, but she seemed to know what she was doing this time. Perhaps she'd made use of the emergency first aid manual since this morning.

"So?"

"We could give one of the adults the treatment the children received. If that makes them lucid, we can maybe find out what's going on here. There, does that feel as if it's giving you some support?"

"Yes. I think it's better this time. But you want me to authorise you, and you're not even a practising doctor, to try experimental treatments on the citizens of another planet..."

"You have them tied up, Chekov, without due process. And if you untie them, they'll probably kill each other. The treatment was considered safe for children with a minor ailment. For Heaven's sake..." She stopped as he pushed back into his shirt, demonstrating by the confidence with which he did it that the strapping really was working.

"And we don't know that this - madness isn't voluntary in the first place."

"So we do it, and if they object we don't repeat the treatment and they can go mad again at their leisure. I think you're being unnecessarily diligent in respecting their rights."

Chekov considered the alternative scenario he'd been toying with, to withdraw to an uninhabited region, with the children if they wanted to come, and wait out the Enterprise's absence. But there was the woman. Her screams, the violence she'd suffered would haunt him, if he took that option. Not to mention the suffering of others like her.

"What if the children don't know what they were being treated with, even if we have it..."

"They can show it to me. There's plenty of it in the dispensary apparently. It's not far from here." Leverman spoke hesitantly, not wanting to push her luck.

Chekov nodded. "All right. I'll go with... " He had to leave Croft in charge here, strike one against the whole notion, and he had to take one of the kids to show him the way. Dieter would be ideal, but he'd rather there was someone else here who was at home with the weapons. That left Karra, since she was by far the most sensible of the others. "I'll go with Karra."

"I'll come too." She got to her feet, looking alert and ready for a little adventure. But Doctor Leverman was not that fit. She'd slow them up. And there was no advantage to taking her.

"I think you should stay and keep an eye on things here. You have patients."

"Yes, you're right."

Chekov went to find Croft and explain what he intended. She received the news with indifferent silence.

"You understand what I want you to do, Diana?" he prompted at the end.

"I think you're mad to risk it. We should just leave the lot of them here, the kids too, and take the shuttle to somewhere safe. Whatever's keeping the children out of it might wear off, for all you know..."

Chekov was suddenly very glad that he hadn't taken that option. "Whatever is causing it may start to affect us. Wouldn't you rather know that we have the cure, if there is one?"

"It's your decision, Chekov, may the Great Bird help us..."

"Right. We shouldn't be very long, but you're not to come after us..."

"Believe me, I wasn't intending to."

He went to look for Karra. Like the younger kids, she had accepted a sleeping bag from the stores and snuggled down under the raised floor of the dome. A pale, grimy face greeted him when he looked underneath and whispered her name.

"Can you help me do something, Karra?"

"Of course, Pavel, anything." She slipped out of the bag like a snake and shivered at the cold of the evening air. He went and fetched a uniform jacket from the dome, ignoring the ravings of the woman, and tossed it to the youngster.

"Thank you." She pulled the too-large garment tight and pushed her hands deep into the pockets. He picked up the two spare guns from the steps, and two handfuls of cartridges.

"Can you use one of these? Can you load it?"

"Yes, of course." She confirmed that by checking the gun he'd given her was loaded and safe He cursed himself for not asking her sooner and giving Croft and Dieter a rest from the guard detail.

"Can any of the younger children?"

"I think Mier can."

He wasn't sure which Mier was, but he could find out in the morning. "Good. I want to go to where you were yesterday and last night. The hospital."

"To get the medicine? Right."

"And I want us to do this very quietly and quickly, so no one notices us. You're to keep up with me, and do what I say immediately. Understood?"

"Yes, Pavel. Of course. I'm not a baby."

No, she was right. She was trying very hard to be grown up. And given that her world was falling horribly apart around her, she was doing a remarkably good job of it.

***

Someone had built a vast pyre on the expanse of empty space in front of the school buildings, and from the raw, throat searing smell, it was fuelled with chemicals as well as timber. The heat seemed excessive, even at a distance of fifty metres. Chekov stopped at the edge of the belt of trees, and put out a hand to signal Karra to halt. To his surprise, she grasped it in hers.

"Do we have to go past that to get into the building?"

"No. We can cut through the water garden, over there." She pointed with her free hand away to the right and he nodded agreement. There didn't seem to be many people about, but the light of the flames would show them up too clearly to anyone who was watching. The water garden was utterly black, particularly to eyes that had been gazing at the fire. "I'll lead the way," she volunteered. "There are a lot of deep pools." Still holding his hand firmly, she pulled him after her into the shadow, warning him to step over a low boundary cordon. "Pavel, when's your ship going to come back?"

"In two days. Maybe a little more."

"You can't contact them?"

"No. Our communicators don't have the range. But someone here may have used a subspace transmitter to call for help. Ships might arrive any time."

"I don't think so," she said shortly, and frustratingly disappeared into a narrow pathway between two hedges. He caught up with her.

"Why not?"

"What if it's happened to everyone, everywhere?" She'd stopped at the edge of a long drop, about four metres, down to a black pool of water.

He pulled up sharply, and followed her gaze down. "What is this?"

"It's a fountain. When it's working, it shoots into the air higher than the school building. But all the kids were dumping desks and things in here yesterday. I could see them from the sick bay window." Chekov raised his eyes towards the building, getting his bearings. "The top floor, the window at this end," she said. "When your ship gets here, you'll go, won't you?"

"They'll be able to help you."

"You don't mean that. Diana wanted to leave us now, and go off to somewhere safe."

"It isn't up to Diana." He knew that she wanted to be reassured, but he couldn't summon the energy to be convincing.

"But what if she's right, and me and Dieter and the others do start to..."

"That's why we've come to find the drugs you were taking. And if they don't work, we'll try something else." They were walking round the edge of the great basin now. Chekov put himself between her and the long drop, in case she should stumble, or miss her footing. The pool was about twenty metres in diameter, and he could only imagine the spectacle of a fountain on the same scale. It seemed a dangerous thing to put in the grounds of a school, but maybe there was normally some electronic barrier to stop children tumbling into it. Certainly there was no apparent way out of the water if one did fall in.

"Would you have to shoot me, like you shot Jeri?"

Chekov froze. "You knew that man?" He could still see the eyes of the maniac, pointing a gun straight at him, face taut with concentration. Being able to put a name to it made it a thousand times worse.

"Would you?" she persisted.

He took both her hands. "No, Karra. He had a gun, and he was using it to attack my people, and to hurt that woman..."

"Doctor Denn," Karra said quietly. "Her name is Denn."

"Right. He was going to hurt her, and..."

"No, that can't be true. The other men might have hurt her, but Jeri wouldn't."

"He shot Doctor Hewell. You saw him. I wouldn't have shot him if there was anything else I could do. I didn't expect to kill him. I didn't know the gun fired explosive shells." He couldn't keep his own anger and horror out of his voice.

"You blew his arm right off, and he bled to death..."

"I know!"

"He was my brother," she said, in a very small voice. He dropped her hands as if they'd burnt him. "And now you're so angry with us. It wasn't our fault, but you've been so angry ever since. We all thought perhaps we should just go away, then when your ship came, you wouldn't have to worry about us."

"We have to go and get the drugs." He had to get back to the others. He probably shouldn't have left them at all. What Karra needed, what she was trying to tell him, her anger, or whatever she needed to work through would simply have to wait. He took hold of her arm and dragged her into the deep shadow around the building. An open door let onto a broad corridor, awash with firelight from the windows opposite. "How do we get up to the top floor?"

"There are stairs," she offered, forgiving him his roughness. "This way."

A couple of minutes later, they were confronting the locked door of the dispensary. He knelt down to examine the lock and decided that it would be quickest and easiest to simply shoot it open. Of course, that would have the effect of leaving the medical supplies open to anyone who passed by, but he could only do so much worrying. He unslung the gun from around his shoulder and lifted the safety catch. "Stand back."

He expected her to shrink from the weapon, so soon after he'd killed her brother, but she seemed to face up to its use with an eager determination, barely flinching at the roar of the shell detonating in the narrow corridor. He tried the door, and when it still wouldn't budge he put his shoulder to it. It burst open and he almost fell over a couple of bodies.

His first thought was that he'd killed them himself when he fired at the lock, but a quick check revealed that they were cold. Karra stepped carefully over them, not looking down. Presumably she expected to recognise them, and didn't want to. The room was a mess, shelves swept clear, cupboards and drawers empty, bottles and boxes littering the floor. She sighed, picked something up, and tried to read it, with little success. "Do you have a torch?"

He retreated to the far end of the room, away from the bodies, and squatted down, so that the torchlight wouldn't shine through the window. He let its circle of illumination play over the scattered containers, until she dived with a cry of triumph on a bright orange box. "Lantil 5DE 69. That's it."

"Are you sure?"

She was checking that the box was full. "Yes, absolutely."

Having scooped up every carton of the drug, and a handful of loose capsules that looked in the yellow torch light as if they might be more of the same, Chekov was ready to go.

"Come now, Karra."

"No, I think I'll stay here. You don't have to worry about me."

"You're in danger here." He looked pointedly at the bodies. "If you don't come back Dieter and the others will only want to come and find you. You can't put them in danger."

She stared at the blank wall in front of her, and he felt a surge of irritation. He had enough to worry about without her adolescent tantrums.

"I am sorry about your brother, about Jeri. But there's nothing we can do about it now. You said he wouldn't have hurt the woman. Well, he wouldn't want you to be hurt either. You have to come with me."

"I hate you." She said it very quietly, but at the same time swung her gun back over her shoulder and stepped firmly over the corpses and out into the corridor. He followed her, wondering if he could secure the door against looters. They might be grateful for the supplies in here soon. But there was no obvious way to do it, and in the end, he just pulled the door to and walked away.

***

The night had become noisier while they were inside, and they were forced to skirt round in an even larger circle than before to avoid parties of shrieking drunks, many carrying knives or other weapons which caught the orange fireglow. Chekov wasn't sure if this was a sign of increased bloodlust, or merely a recognition on their part that all social order had broken down, leaving them to defend themselves as best they could.

He resented every metre they had to go out of their way, every second extra that it took to get back to their camp. Karra stayed just behind him, as if attached by a short rope, silent and accusing.

He stopped just short of the edge of the trees round the clearing, not wanting to startle Diana or Dieter into firing.

"Diana!" He paused. There was no reply, and no sign of movement in the pool of light cast by the shuttle. His heart almost stopped. Something had happened...

"Diana!"

"Okay. We hear you." He could almost have kissed the ensign. Instead, he handed her his gun and hurried into the light, digging the drugs out of his pockets to give to Doctor Leverman. "We had a bit of a problem while you were away."

"What?"

"No one got hurt. It's okay. But someone must have sneaked in in the dark and untied the prisoners. They've gone."

It was like a weight falling off his shoulders. Four less people he was responsible for. "You're sure everyone else is all right?"

"Of course I'm sure. And it's not my fault they got away. You can't defend this camp in the dark with just two sentries. And I had to deal with everything else that came up..."

"I know, Croft. I'm not blaming you. I didn't say it was your fault."

"Not that I care what you think anyway." She vanished back into the darkness, leaving him to face Maggie Leverman.

"Did you get it?"

"Karra thinks so." He emptied the boxes into her outstretched hands. She laid them down on the dome steps and took out a tricorder. "Hmm. I would guess this is used as a mild sedative. The kids said they had a viral infection, something they pick up from a plant. I've never heard of anything like it, but I guess it's like poison oak. It makes you itch like mad, apparently. Presumably this just helps them to sleep it off."

"Why didn't you tell me that the man I killed was Karra's brother?"

"Mm?" She looked up at him, her face bleached out by the glare of the lights behind him. She had her eyes screwed nearly shut. He moved to one side.

"I spoke to her about it. I explained that you had no choice. I thought she understood." He didn't seem satisfied with that. "I really didn't think it would help you to know. You seemed - rather cut up about it already."

"Doctor, I appreciate that you were trying to do what was best for me, but I don't have time to worry about my feelings now. I do need to know these things. If Karra had decided not to follow my orders, we would both have been in danger. Is there anything else you haven't told me?"

"Okay. The woman was Jeri's - well, fiancee, in our terms. I think she's been sexually assaulted. I did get some details out of Karra on the other prisoners, but I guess those aren't relevant any more. And as far as Karra is concerned, she has a crush on you that makes Romeo and Juliet look like a couple of Vulcans."

"What?"

"From the notes on the packet, this stuff is so safe, it's hard to believe it'll actually do any good, but it certainly can't hurt to try it. And don't look so surprised. You're the right age, the right sex, exotically alien and the situation gives you a veneer of dangerous sophistication. I preferred you when you were being cute, but I can still see the attraction."

"Thank you, Doctor. If you don't need my help, I'll go and take a turn on guard duty before the sentries fall asleep. Good night."

She let her face relax into a smile once his back was turned. She'd embarrassed him, and herself, and he had some excuse for his tight-assed disapproval, but she suspected he was beginning to thaw.

Chapter Six

There was a hazy grey cast to the sky the following morning that should have meant drizzle and cold, but it was only lingering smoke from the night's fires. A second shot rang out and Maggie Leverman realised with a jolt what had woken her and brought back the full horror of where she was. She sat up in her sleeping bag and looked out of the dome window, noticing with satisfaction that Chekov was still asleep. Karra and Diana had taken the last watch of the night, and were now doubling up guard duty with making breakfast. She folded up the bag and tucked it away, then turned to her patient. The woman, Denn, was peacefully asleep, as she had been ever since the drug had had a chance to take effect. The doctor decided to leave her for a few more minutes, and opened the dome door. Chekov sat up and stretched as she did so, his sleeping bag falling away to reveal nicely muscled shoulders. He caught her eyes on him and smiled. Good, the marginally better relations of the previous day had survived the night. But the smile was a little forced. You could almost see the weight of responsibility settling back on those shoulders...

By contrast, his reaction when Karra came over with a steaming cup of tea was to grab his shirt and pull it over his head. Then he took the tea from her, and said thank you rather briskly. She seemed unsurprised by this. Maggie considered wryly that the poor girl had obviously resigned herself to this being a hopeless passion, to be expressed only in practical acts of devotion to her beloved. She hoped Chekov's nerves were up to it.

"Where am I?"

She jumped, put her hand over her suddenly racing heart and turned slowly to answer her patient.

"Doctor Denn? How are you feeling?"

"Like the morning after a late night. Where am I?"

"I'm sorry. This must look strange. We're a Federation Geophysical Research team and..."

"What?"

The woman was sitting up now, beginning to look both frightened and angry.

"I'm sorry," Maggie said again quickly. "Give me a moment to explain. There isn't a best place to start. There have been disturbances, fights, riots, murder. We rescued you from a group of men who were attacking you. They appeared to be totally out of control..."

"But who are you?"

"My name is Doctor Maggie Leverman. I'm here as part of a U.F.P Geophysical Survey. You're in our camp."

The woman seemed to give this a chance to sink in. "Yes, I remember hearing about the survey. And I remember... I remember some strange things." Her eyes had grown large and anxious

"People behaving oddly?" Maggie prompted.

"Yes. Me behaving oddly. What's happening?"

Maggie just shook her head. "We hoped you could tell us that. When we came here we were given a pretty precise briefing on your society and how to fit into it, but no one mentioned a planet-wide baccanalia."

"Planet-wide? Is everyone affected?"

The doctor considered judiciously. "I don't know. Every adult we've come across locally, although we haven't been out looking for exceptions. There was a small group of six adolescents who seemed quite normal. You know one of them, Karra..."

"Yes. My partner's sister." Denn seemed to brighten at this good news amid the confusion. "Is she here?"

"Yes. I'll go and get her. She'll be pleased to be able to talk to you. I want you to stay here for now though. Are you hungry? Or thirsty?"

"Yes, I..." She fell silent, and Maggie followed her gaze to the doorway of the dome. Chekov was standing on the top step with a couple of mugs of coffee.

"How is she?"

"Awake, alert, reasonable. I don't think you're going to have to report me for medical malpractice."

"Does she know what's going on?"

"Doctor Denn, this is Ensign Chekov. Why don't you let our guest have my cup of coffee, Pavel? She'd probably appreciate it."

Forced to look at the woman, Chekov tried an unconvincing smile and put the mug down by the bunk. "I'm glad you're feeling better."

Denn regarded the ensign curiously. "Did I do something horribly embarrassing that I don't remember?"

"No," Maggie reassured her. "You were either unconscious or delirious or asleep until now. But..."

"Until when?" She suddenly looked ill at ease. "How long has this been going on?"

Chekov looked relieved to have something concrete to say. "We don't know exactly when it started, but we first observed symptoms, in some of the University students, about one and half days ago. Shortly after that we picked up seismic shock waves which we believe were caused by the detonation of the di-hydrogen compound tanks at Polgor..."

"Gracious Gods..."

"We don't know if that was connected. We never succeeded in making contact with the authorities after that. That night we... we were aware of violence against people and property. It continued sporadically during yesterday and in the afternoon a group of men attacked our camp. They appeared to have abducted you. We..." He looked at Doctor Leverman for help, and she shook her head slightly, but Denn didn't wait for him to finish.

"What about power, water, community services?"

"Power and water are off in the school, and there is no evidence of lighting in any of the nearby buildings. I don't know..."

"Be merciful! I have to get to work..." She was tumbling out of the bunk, untroubled that the medical smock Maggie had found her barely covered her. "I'm responsible for the city power plant, the di-hydrogen splitter. If it's been unattended for a day and a half, maybe longer..." She looked round wildly. "I need some clothes!"

Chekov was grateful for an excuse to get out. He dived for the door and called out to Diana, then disappeared down the steps. Maggie could see him through the window, taking one of the weapons from Ensign Croft and continuing her role of doling out rations to the younger children while maintaining an uneasy vigilance over the camp. Diana arrived to dig a spare uniform out of her locker and offer it to the woman.

"What's the rush?" she asked easily. "There's nowhere for you to go."

"Only up," Denn responded cryptically. She pulled the uniform top down over black pants, and picked up the coffee. "What is this? Will it help me to think straight?"

"Marginally," Maggie said, trying to keep calm. "You think there may be problems?"

"You know how a di-hydrogen splitter works?"

Both women shook their heads. "It's not everyday technology," Diana explained defensively.

"I know." Denn was taking swigs of the coffee, but obviously found the taste unpleasant. "If the core of this planet wasn't twenty-five percent di-hydrogen, it wouldn't make sense, but as it is, it's virtually free power, apart from the extraction costs. And we're working on a way to make that minimal. But that isn't the problem. At the moment, we extract it under pressure, and we have to split it immediately. We can't store it, it's too volatile, once the pressure is reduced, and of course, we can't just vent it. The carbon fall out would make life rather - well, dirty. There's a chain reaction that spontaneously cracks it into clean first table residues, releasing energy as a side product, but if a critical mass builds up you get a fission-type reaction, and if no one's been monitoring it..."

She stood up, suddenly transformed into a slightly dishevelled Starfleet ensign, but for her extra years. "I have to go. Thanks for your help."

"I don't think that would be a good idea," Croft objected. "There are an awful lot of violent people out there. And what can you do if it is getting out of control? You'll have no one to help you."

"So what am I supposed to do? Sit here and pray for a miracle?"

"Well, I think you should... you should..."

"Spit it out, Diana," Maggie said pleasantly. "I don't think you'll find it hurts."

"You'd better talk to Ensign Chekov before you do anything."

Denn smiled. "Why? He's not hoping to be a power plant engineer when he grows up, is he?"

Croft's face creased up with the effort of not laughing outright. "Can I quote you on that?" she asked eventually.

Maggie narrowed her eyes at the woman. "Mister Chekov is in charge here. You owe your life to him. Don't forget it."

"I'm sorry. He seemed a little... bashful."

"He is. He's also intelligent and resourceful. And if you can't control your power plant single handed, he probably can." She wondered if she was overdoing the eulogy, but Chekov kept surprising her with what he could do. Maybe power plant management was on his resume.

"Right." Denn looked from Leverman to Croft consideringly. "I'll talk to Mister Chekov, then. Uh, if I'm all right now, isn't it possible that everyone else is?"

"We dosed you with Lantil, a mild sedative. I think that's why you've recovered."

"And everyone else isn't okay," Diana added. "We've already had to fire on a couple of bands of idiots this morning to keep them away. They seem to be getting more out of control, more reckless, if anything."

Denn found her boots under the bunk and pulled them on. Maggie left her to it and came out into the slightly cool morning air. Doctor Hewell was sitting on one of the shuttle stabilisers having his breakfast, and the two of them hugged like long lost friends. "You shouldn't have got up before I had a chance to look at you. How's your head?"

"Fine. A bit muzzy, maybe, but I think the shuttle got a little stuffy last night. How's Pavel? That's more important."

"He doesn't seem to be in any pain this morning. I think he's finding the people side of all this a little challenging."

Hewell smiled. "Well, we're an unpromising bunch, aren't we? I can't imagine what his captain was thinking of, expecting him to be able to cope with all of this."

"He'd have coped with everything that was supposed to happen. And you'd better hope he can deal with everything that wasn't supposed to. We now have a power plant that's about to go up, or down, or whatever they do when no one's watching and they boil over."

"Oh, my God..."

"What?" Somehow, Denn's concern hadn't hit Leverman too hard. It had seemed a domestic matter, not relevant to the Starfleet personnel, who were after all, mere observers.

"Di-hydrogen cracking is a wonderful, cheap, clean source of power, so long as you have a supply. Almost no one does. And so long as you crack it as soon as you get it. It even does that itself, as fast as you can clear the side products out of the way. But if you let the side products build up, the reaction slows down, a critical mass accumulates and it transforms itself into a huge dirty fission reaction. Which will go on exploding, because it's being fed continuously from the di-hydrogen well under the plant. And the reservoir is the entire core of the planet."

Leverman reacted as if someone had electrocuted her. "We have to get away from here. Start ditching everything non-essential from the shuttle so we can get everyone in and as much food as possible..."

"I think you should make that suggestion to our leader, don't you?" He smiled tiredly at Leverman.

"Yes..."

She turned round to locate the ensign, but he was already on his way over, trailing the Venayan woman behind him. "I'm going with Denn to have a look at the power plant. It should take an hour at most to assess the situation..."

"Shouldn't we just get out of here?" Maggie demanded impatiently. "You don't know when it will go up."

Chekov turned back to Denn. "What did you say the population of the city is? Within the immediate blast radius?"

"About one hundred twenty thousand." Denn looked apologetic. "I realise that I'm asking you to take a risk here, but it's very unlikely that the plant will blow during the next eight hours. After that, though, the probability really takes off."

"How far away do we need to be to be safe?" was Maggie's next question. She was furiously keyed up, itching to react to the threat, and Chekov was being so maddeningly calm.

"We'll worry about that when it becomes necessary," he said levelly. "How's your head, Doctor?"

"Fine. Is there anything I can do while you're gone?"

"Stay here, stay out of trouble. Doctor Leverman, I'd like you to see if you can use the Lantil capsules to prepare an injectable form of the drug. It isn't practical to expect people to swallow pills."

"We'll only have enough to treat about thirty adults, unless we can get away with a smaller dose, but I don't suppose you want me running field trials?" Her tone suggested that she'd appreciate the chance to do that, to do anything, but Chekov shook his head. "No. But I think we may have a clue as to the cause of the problem. Doctor Denn?"

"Historically, our species has been subject to cyclical upheavals. And when I say historically, I mean fifty generations ago, at least. Before our industrial revolution. The cycles occurred every thirty nine years, and the records that we have agree in some respects with what you've seen here. This is the right year."

"How do you normally control it?" Maggie asked.

"We don't. It just doesn't happen any more. It died out as our culture became more settled and sophisticated. I'm sorry. I haven't really helped you at all, have I?"

"Just the opposite," Chekov said gloomily. "If it's a natural phenomenon that you don't treat, we don't have any implied authority to intervene."

"That's insane," Hewell said, as if Chekov had just claimed that two plus two makes five.

"Well, I'm glad you treated me!"

Chekov shrugged. "Malfunctioning power plants are within accepted parameters however. Can you handle one of these sports rifles, Doctor?"

She nodded. "I hunt."

A few minutes later, the two of them set out, armed with a tricorder and two of the weapons. Diana watched them until they were out of sight, then began to organise the youngsters to deal with the domestic details of camp life, while Maggie turned the dome into a pharmaceutical lab, and Dieter and Hewell stood watch. It was only after five minutes or so that Diana realised Karra was missing.

***

A breeze started to rise as Chekov paced Denn through the trees, keeping a careful eye all around them. As always there seemed to be plenty of activity just out of sight, including heart-stopping eruptions of rifle fire, but no one came close.

"Does everyone have these rifles?" He'd stopped momentarily, to inspect a heap of spent cartridge cases on the path. Glancing around, he spotted an explanation. Someone had stood here and fired off shell after shell at an abandoned vehicle. It was barely recognisable, with its interior blackened, and its body panels twisting grotesquely away from the frame.

"There's a craze for hunting. Marmaks and grass-eaters. They've got to plague levels, or they were before the protection order came off."

"You use shells for hunting animals?"

"Marmaks are big. And dangerous."

Of course they were. It stood to reason they would be. A whole herd of them were probably grazing round the shuttle at this very moment.

"But they don't come close to the city."

They'd started walking again, keeping up a brisk pace. The breeze carried ash that irritated their eyes and throats. They'd got into the city proper now, although there was no harsh transition. It was spacious, new, and wrecked. Almost every building they passed was a burnt out shell, some with groups of people camping in the formerly neat gardens. No one paid any attention to Denn and Chekov.

"How long does... did the madness last?"

"Eleven days, according to tradition. At least that's how long we celebrate Harmush now. The feast of remembrance. But it's in mid-winter..."

"So this isn't the same time, not exactly?"

"Harmush is mid-winter on Su-Venaya, but our seasons are different here, so we moved Harmush to fit. The customs are mid-winter, cold weather things. Lighting fires, snow-fights, although it never snows here. Too temperate. I really don't know if there's any connection between this and Harmush. Ask me when eleven days is up."

"And you don't have any idea what caused it?"

"It's a little difficult to investigate something that happened so long ago. If it was sociological, who can you talk to about it? If it was medical, who can you examine?"

"Surely you have archeologists..."

She looked blank.

"People who study ancient civilizations by digging up the remains of settlements."

"What would a load of broken pots tell us?"

"But remains of bodies, skeletons, tissue fragments..."

She halted so abruptly that he had to take a step back to remain with her. "You disturb the dead?"

He started to defend the practice, then thought better of it. "Different people have different customs over things like that. We would, yes, to benefit the living, and where the people concerned were long dead."

She shivered revulsion, and when they started walking again, the distance between them had widened. "But then we don't encourage small children to blast wild animals with explosive shells. It's just a matter of taste."

She laughed, without any humour. "The Terran civilization, held out as a beacon to all of the less advanced cultures in the galaxy, and they value dumb beasts above their own dead. I wonder you ever climbed out of your own gravity well. Here we are."

The announcement took him by surprise. The building in front of him looked no different from the domestic architecture that had lined the broad avenue they'd been following for nearly a kilometre. Its windows, too, were smashed, and the door flapped idly in the breeze, slamming open every third or fourth flap, as a gust swept through the building. Somewhere close behind it a geyser of black smoke was pouring up from something, but the wind was mercifully carrying most of it away from them. He swung his rifle off his shoulder. "I'll go and make sure it's safe in there."

"I'm sorry."

"Why?"

"Well, here you are, risking your life for us, and I'm sneering at your ethics. I'm sorry."

He looked down at the ground, and she smiled. Doctor Leverman was at least correct about his bashfulness. She was yet to be convinced of his other sterling qualities. "Come on, we're wasting time." She pointed at the door, and let him go first, approaching the building along a blank wall, and peering quickly inside, then beckoning her after him. He shut the door as soon as both of them were inside.

The interior was a single chamber, unexpectedly huge by virtue of descending twenty metres or so into the ground. Galleries ran round the sides and the centre of the low-pitched roof was clear, letting in the grey daylight. Not much reached to the floor of the room, where the main control centre of the power station appeared to be. It was dead and still.

She gave a little sigh. "I'll go and see if the emergency generator is working. I can't find out what's happening inside without some of this stuff."

"Is it damaged? Why isn't it working now?"

Chekov was making his way down into the pit, glancing at the consoles and controls that he passed, making little sense of black screens and labels in Venayan script. Reassuringly, everything appeared to be in tact, and before he reached the bottom, the equipment began to hum into life. Only a second behind the first surge of activity half a dozen alarms went off.

He looked up at Denn, who had returned to the upper gallery after fixing the generator. "It's about as bad as I thought," she called down calmly. "I can't get accurate readings because conditions in the station are outside any parameters the sensors are designed to measure." Rather than using the ramps and steps around the edges, she vaulted over the safety rail and slid down a ladder. "That console, in the far corner. Call off the readings to me."

Glad to let someone else take charge temporarily, he found the information she wanted.

"Mm. Thought so. Come here."

She was bending over a horizontal screen set into a work bench in the centre of the pit. "This is a simulation of what's happening, and what's going to happen."

The depiction of the plant was stylised, and it took him a moment to identify the main reaction chamber, and the well that supplied it with di-hydrogen. There was a small high pressure storage facility to regulate the flow of fuel, and the chamber itself was divided into a complex three dimensional maze, from which the waste products of the cracking process could be withdrawn. Energy was extracted simply and cleanly by virtue of the electric potential across the chamber.

"You understand it?" she asked.

"Yes. When the residues aren't removed, the splitting slows down, and the chamber is large enough for a critical mass to build up...Why don't you use a smaller chamber?"

"It's impossible to engineer the electrical fields on a smaller scale, or at least we thought it was. We're just beginning to investigate using transporter technology to manipulate the residues. Once we can do that..." She stopped. "I really don't have time to go into that now."

"No. Can we block the well?"

"The pressure's too great."

"Flare off the di-hydrogen?"

"That's what I was hoping to do..." She was staring at the diagram, tracing control systems with her finger.

"But you can't?"

"When the sensors failed, the main chamber was at a temperature of four thousand degrees. None of the safety mechanisms are going to work, and we can't exactly go in there and do it by hand."

"Don't you have any automatic pressure valves, in case something like this happens?"

"No. Normally, the last thing you'd want is a partial decompression. It could lead to exactly the problems we've got now."

"Where is the plant?" he asked abruptly.

She pointed directly downwards. "All that smoke was coming out of the cooling system. The only solution is to blow it wide open. What weapons have you got?"

"How far down?"

"Ten metres of subsoil, two of rock, one of steel."

"No. We don't carry weapons. We only have the rifles we confiscated from your people. You need starship phasers." He was watching the floor beneath his feet carefully, as if it might start to bubble, or heave. Only her complete calm prevented him from running for the door. "Is there anything to be gained by standing here thinking about it?"

"If we could get explosives, the sort that were used to extend the caverns at Polgor, how much would we need to do it?" She wasn't really asking him, just thinking aloud.

"I've no idea. Can you get them?"

"We've got to do something."

"How much time do we have?"

She punched figures into whatever program was generating the simulation. "We have a five percent probability of fission commencing within nine hours. In thirteen hours it's risen to fifty percent. In seventeen it's virtually one hundred."

They both stared at each other while they considered, calculated. "We could barely evacuate in time if everyone was behaving normally," she concluded. "How long are you willing to stay in the area? If we treat as many people as we can, shuttling them to a safe distance, how many return trips, how many people each..."

"What happens when you flare off the di-hydrogen?"

"Nothing. At least it splits harmlessly. And a bit messily. Everything gets coated in molecular carbon. It's seeping out of the core all the time. But we can't..."

"I think we can. Can you show me a schematic of the chamber, and exactly what's between it and this?" He stamped on the floor.

She touched the keyboard, and the simulation gave way to an engineering drawing. For a couple of minutes, he examined it in silence, broken only when he asked her to translate something for him.

"We have two options to consider." He fixed his eyes on her face, but she had the feeling that he wasn't really seeing her. "We can evacuate a maximum of one hundred and fifty people to a safe distance. Probably fewer. The only argument in favour of doing that is that we know it will work." Then he considered the state of the shuttlecraft. "Probably. Or we can rig the shuttle craft engines to act as an explosive charge. Turn it into a torpedo, effectively. It should be powerful enough to shatter the top of the chamber. The immediate blast radius will be small, because of the way the foundations are designed - was that intentional?"

"Yes. It's standard practice for any industrial installation. Any explosive energy is funnelled straight up."

"It didn't work at Polgor," he objected, remembering the seismic wave that had hammered out from there.

"No. Those were basically natural caverns, and used for storage only." She was watching him intently, almost unable to believe that there was anything they could do.

"Ideally we should evacuate in a five hundred metre radius..."

"Ideally. How sure are you this will work?"

He focused on her. "I'm not. I just don't see what else we can do."

Chapter Seven

By the time they'd walked back to the camp Chekov had convinced himself that he'd made the only decision he could live with. Bailing out, even if they managed to save the maximum one hundred and fifty lives, including their own - and it wouldn't probably include all their own: capturing the crazed natives would be dangerous, timing when to cease the operation...

"Chekov!" He stared at Diana Croft. She actually looked pleased to see him. Mier and Dieter were running up too, carrying their guns like a couple of veterans.

"Your communicator!"

He handed it to her without a word, and she flicked it open and began calling the Enterprise.

"What's wrong with the other communicators?" he asked Hewell as the doctor joined the crowd.

"Margaret and I weren't carrying ours. We'd left them with our gear. They're missing."

"As is Karra." Croft flicked the communicator shut, her calls unanswered. "I couldn't make the hourly contact attempt you ordered. Of course, if you'd given me one of the communicators, instead of treating me like a six-year old who's dropped her ice-cream money, I'd have known enough to carry it with me..."

"When did Karra disappear?"

"What does it matter, Chekov? We can hardly send out search parties for her."

"She'll have the communicators."

"What the hell makes you think that? She probably just got tired of making eyes at you."

"Croft, go start clearing everything you can out of the shuttle. Anything that isn't welded into place and that we don't need to fly it. Seats, lockers, everything." She stared at him for a full ten seconds of uncomfortable silence then scowled and walked off towards the shuttle.

"We're evacuating?" Hewell looked relieved. "I'll go tell Margaret, and get the kids together."

"No. We're not evacuating." The moment he outlined the plan to the rest of the team, it became obvious that it wasn't an overwhelmingly popular choice.

Maggie looked embarrassed. "If we were certain that it would work..."

"Help might arrive in eight hours," Hewell pointed out. "Why don't we wait? We can decide nearer the time. After all, we've only got one shuttle. If it doesn't work..."

"It isn't very likely that anyone is going to turn up in the next eight hours," Chekov pointed out. "I'm sorry, it's my decision, and it's not open to discussion."

"You could be signing our death warrants." Maggie's tone was shamefaced but determined. "I know you don't think much of us, but..."

He stood his ground. "We don't deserve to die, and neither do the thousands of other people in this city."

"How's it going to work?" Hewell demanded. "The shuttle isn't exactly one hundred percent. I imagine you'll need to rig a b...beacon to get it to crash in exactly the right place, and it'll take some fancy engineering to get the maximum blast..."

"That's why I don't have time to take you to somewhere safe first. To be certain, we'd need an eighty minute round trip. And I honestly don't know how long the shuttle is going to keep operating. Doctor Leverman..."

"Yes?" She looked resigned to accepting his decision, but still less than enthusiastic.

"If you really wanted to scout for a ground vehicle, try and find something in working order, and take the children as far as you can - Dieter can provide some protection, and Mier can use a gun too..."

"I'll... yes, I'll do that."

Denn looked doubtful. "We didn't see a single undamaged vehicle the whole time we were out, Chekov."

"It won't hurt to try. Come with me." He led Denn and Hewell over to the shuttle, and the heap of discarded equipment outside it. "We have to disconnect the automatic distress beacon to use as a homing device. I'll need to pinpoint the crash site precisely, and visibility wasn't too good. Is there any chance that the smoke will clear? How much combustible material is there down there, Doctor?"

"The subsoil is lignite, with a high oil content. That's what'll be burning. The smoke's just coming up through the ground."

"Oh, that's good. They position the power plant in the middle of the city, and as if that isn't enough they put it under a tinder pile. When did Karra go?"

Hewell followed him into the shuttle, and watched him poke around at the remnants of the communication console. Siri had reduced it to so much swarf.

"What is it about Karra?" Croft demanded again, leaning into the cockpit.

"She overheard you say we should go off and leave them. And she worked out that without the communicators we wouldn't be able to contact our ship and leave the planet."

"So she took the communicators? Little bitch. She must mean to come back then, or there's no point to it."

"Unless something's happened to her."

"Chekov, there are over a hundred thousand people out there that something might happen to. Or there are four here that you're actually responsible for. When are you going to start worrying about us?"

"Is that why you're in Star Fleet, so that you can worry about yourself all the time?"

"Be realistic. You can't do anything to help them. Now you've decided to evacuate let's get on with it. If Karra decides to come back in time..." She faltered to a halt. He was shaking his head slowly.

"We're not evacuating, Diana. And I need Karra, because I need one communicator to guide this shuttle in and nose dive it on the power plant and one communicator so you can get in touch with the Enterprise when they do get back."

Croft pushed into the cockpit, past Hewell, and took the screwdriver that Chekov was using to extract the black box which would respond automatically to a call sign from the Enterprise, as well as recording crucial technical data in case of an accident. "She went about the same time as you. If you think you can find her, you'd better go."

"I need this taken out, and I need it rigged up with a power pack."

"I know that, stupid."

He beckoned Hewell to come with him, and noticed Denn at the same moment. She'd become withdrawn in the face of the opposition to Chekov's plan and the disastrous condition of the shuttle, but now she came forward to stop him. "How are you planning to control the shuttle?"

"When I know how many communicators I've got, I'll tell you."

"Chekov, I'm not sure this looks like such a good idea any more."

"No, it is beginning to look increasingly stupid, isn't it? How well do you know Karra? Where would she go if she wanted to be on her own?"

"I'm sorry. We weren't that close."

"Well, you and I can go and look, while Diana..." He suddenly breathed a sigh of relief. Through the open shuttle door, Karra was visible, returning to camp with Dieter on one side of her, apparently lecturing her with all the authority of a not-much-older brother, while Maggie Leverman marched on the other.

Chekov ran across to meet them and planted himself in front of Karra. She looked determinedly anywhere but at him. "Where are the communicators, Karra?"

"I threw them away. So you won't be able to go off and leave us."

"We need them. You're wasting time we can't afford."

Maggie shut her eyes and tried not to scream at him. If he'd only said he was pleased to see Karra, she'd probably have told him straight off. Now he'd turned it into a confrontation.

"We've got plenty of time. You can't go anywhere now."

"Karra, the power plant is in danger of going critical. You remember, I told you what that meant when your class came round for a visit last year?"

The girl lifted her tear-streaked face to look at Denn. "That means we're all going to die, doesn't it?"

"No. Mister Chekov can help me to stop it. But he needs the communicators."

"He killed Jeri."

Denn stopped, and then continued as if the interruption had never happened. "That isn't important now, Karra. We can talk about that later. You must take him and show him where you put the communicators."

The girl was clearly undecided. She looked at each of the adults in turn, Denn taut with worry, Maggie sympathetic, motherly, and Chekov looking like her father when she'd taken her baby sister hunting and forgotten where she'd left her. "All right then."

"Good. And we do need to hurry. Diana, and Doctor Hewell, get one of the guns and come with us. Doctor Denn..." Chekov ground to a halt. Denn was crying, quite silently. She hadn't even known that her partner was dead a moment ago. "We'll get back as soon as we can. Doctor Leverman, make sure the children keep watch. And dig out a power pack from the equipment dump. Take it off anything, and make sure it's fully charged. Now, Karra, where are they?"

***

Chekov looked hard down into the crystal clear water of the fountain basin, and the tangle of debris at the bottom. "How deep is it?" he demanded angrily.

"I don't know," Karra said, with a sort of sulky defiance.

He grabbed her shoulders and shook her. "How deep? Are there steps down anywhere? Come on!"

Her teeth were rattling with the violence of the assault. He stopped abruptly, ashamed of himself but no less angry. "Karra, we need those communicators. For your safety as well as ours. We aren't going to use them to go off and leave you!" A sudden flash of understanding hit him. "You want me to get them back, otherwise you'd have hidden them where I couldn't damn well get them, wouldn't you!"

"It's about three times your height. I think. I'm not sure."

Chekov looked again. Allowing for the distortion of the water, that seemed about right. Could he get down that far, allowing for the initial drop of about twelve feet into the water? And how long would he have to search once he got down? Was it even worth the attempt? He decided it had to be tried. "Doctor, find us some rope. There's a cordon - you remember, just back there. Here, you'll need this to cut it." He tossed his pocket knife to the doctor. When he turned back to the water, he found that Croft was matter of factly stripping to her underwear. "You're no swimmer," she said shortly. He remembered that she more or less lived in the pool when she was off-duty. Which of course was why she didn't think of him as a water lover. If she was in the pool, he would choose to be elsewhere. Still, it made more sense to risk her than himself, he thought, uncomfortable with the fact that for the first time he was no longer the dispensible one of the party. "Very well, but..."

She scowled at him and dived over the edge. With the momentum of the dive she made it to the bottom easily and began hunting around.

"I've got the rope."

"Right."

It seemed an impossibly long time had gone by, and was she feeling around on the bottom to get hold of the communicator, or was she struggling with something? Her presence had kicked up the fine layer of silt at the bottom, turning the clear water into a fog.

"Give me the knife!"

"Why?"

"I think she's in trouble." He was kicking off his boots and managing to pull one arm out of his shirt at the same time.

"Be ready to throw the rope." He dived in, less cleanly than Diana had, but still splitting the water neatly enough. He had to fight for the last few strokes to the bottom, grabbed Diana's arm and pulled. She struggled to loose his grip, but she wasn't coming up. Then she turned, revealing a face twisted with panic.

He climbed down her, hand over hand, like a length of rope, his pulse pounding in his head, until he reached the twisted metal that clung like a noose to her ankle. She lunged away from him, pulling it tighter. One hand around her calf, he grabbed at something, anything, that would give him a hand hold to pull her down and loosen the tension. He would have to give up. He couldn't stay here any longer. She suddenly, convulsively, gave up the fight, and he found a hold, yanked her downwards with his last strength and pulled the debris clear of her ankle, then took a gasping lung-full of water and let go. He expected to rocket to the surface. Instead it was a slow, dreamy drift, despite the coughing, spluttering reflexes that seemed to be happening to someone else. Then he blacked out.

When he opened his eyes again, a hand, very near his face, was trying one of the communicators. Hewell let his head roll back onto the concrete pavement. "Thank God," the doctor said simply, "but the communicator's useless. The cover wasn't closed properly." Diana was sitting up, curled into a tight ball, rocking back and forth, muttering something. She looked at him, her expression unfathomable. Then she got to her feet and shook her bob of blonde hair like a dog. "Can't you ever let anyone do anything for themselves? Jeez, some people." She nonchalantly rolled off her wet underclothes and donned her shirt and pants. "You'd better not sit around in wet clothes, Mister Chekov. Your mother wouldn't like it."

Karra burst into tears. Chekov started to get up, then realised that he was shivering too much to stand and his legs had no intention of supporting him anyway. "G...g...give me my shirt, please, Doctor." Hewell responded by stripping off his own sweater and kneeling down to towel the ensign dry.

***

The shuttle was stripped to an empty shell, and an untidy nest of wiring connected the only functioning communicator into a screen salvaged from one of Hewell's monitors. The beacon was sitting outside on the grass, silently pouring its alarm call into the ether. Karra had allowed herself to be cajoled into carrying it around for ten minutes or so while Chekov made sure his home made tracking device could follow it.

"Good. We're ready," he said eventually. He checked the time. It was virtually midday. Maggie Leverman pushed a sandwich into one hand, and a beaker of fruit juice into the other.

"Did you find a vehicle?" he asked, his mouth full, and his mind on a hundred and one other things.

"No. There aren't any. You're planning to pilot this thing yourself, aren't you? You let us believe you were going to remote control it."

He shook his head. "I don't have the equipment or the time to set it up for remote flight. And with the heat being emitted by the plant itself, and the surrounding combustion, I would have to compensate for updrafts and heavens knows what else. It just won't work."

"There must be something..."

"If there is, I can't think of it. The Enterprise should be here by late tomorrow. All you have to do is keep together here. They know this is where they left you, so they're bound to look here."

"What if what you're trying doesn't work?"

"I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't think it had a good chance. Really I wouldn't." He gave the empty glass back to her and went to find Croft. She was sorting out stores into packs that one person, or child, could carry.

She stopped when he approached and took up a pugnacious, defiant stance, her arms folded in front of her. "It might not work. If it doesn't I intend to get as far away from here as possible. It might be enough."

"No. The blast radius is too great. And if the Enterprise should happen to get here in time, they'll find you here. If you go running off, they won't. It doesn't make sense..."

"None of this makes sense. We should have gone while we could..."

"And left everyone else?"

She looked as if she'd like to hit him. "Any last orders, Mister Chekov?"

"There are floodlights, in the equipment dump."

"I know. I can cope. Everything that can go wrong already has. We have plenty of ammunition, plenty of food. The dome can be defended..."

She didn't seem her normal abrasive self. Rather she appeared to be embarrassed to be talking to him, to want to get it over with as soon as possible.

Hewell unexpectedly took his hand and shook it furiously. "I'll enjoy watching Diana try to keep us all in order. I'll be p... putty in her hands, I promise. Good luck."

Chekov called Dieter away from his guard duty. "While I'm away..."

"You don't think you're coming back, do you?"

"Well, unless I think of something very clever in the next half hour, no."

"Are you frightened?"

"Yes."

Dieter nodded. "Our gods will go with you, I expect."

"Thank you. You have to do exactly what Diana tells you. If she can depend on you to give the others a lead, it will make her job much easier."

And Karra, last of all, was waiting on the steps of the shuttle, but she was crying too much to say anything. He kissed the top of her head and told her to stand clear.

"Are you ready?"

Denn had already strapped herself into the co-pilot's seat. "Yes."

He lifted the shuttle off, relieved to find that it still responded evenly despite the butchery of its systems.

"I don't know how you can do this so calmly," she said suddenly.

"I don't feel at all calm."

"Good." In response to his look of surprise, she added, "I was beginning to think you weren't quite real. I wish you'd told me about Jeri."

"I'm sorry."

"Only so I could tell you I didn't blame you. I wish this wasn't happening. Why doesn't this shuttle have an emergency personnel transporter, or something?"

"Because they take too much power, and the number of times you need one in practice aren't sufficient to justify it."

"Why did you strip all the equipment out of here?"

"To increase manoeuvrability. Just on the off-chance that I can get away."

"But I thought you had to crash the shuttle..."

"No. I can jettison the engine core, and then try to fly it on thrusters. They are designed only for low gravity manoeuvring, so I won't get far. And I have to be not more than a hundred metres up when I do it, to be sure the core will land on target. And the blast is going to be moving so fast, I'll be incredibly lucky not to get caught up in it, from a standing start."

"How good a pilot are you?"

"Probably not good enough."

"Why didn't you tell the others?"

"It really isn't a very big chance. I don't want them to worry about looking for me."

He set the shuttle down in the street a hundred metres or so from the station. She picked up the beacon. "Why do I get the feeling you don't want it to be a very big chance?"

"I don't know. Because this is all such a mess. Go and drop that onto the control room floor. And hurry. If all that lignite is burning off, there could be a cave in at any moment."

"I know. Do you think I want to survive either?"

He stood in the hatchway, and watched her walk smartly down the road. As she opened the door of the station, he saw her fling out a hand to catch her balance. It was as if an earth tremor had rocked her.

"No!" He was down the steps and running towards her before he knew what he was doing. She turned and shook her head at him before he was even in shouting distance. Then she was gone inside. He hesitated, took another half dozen uncertain steps towards the station, and froze as the building suddenly disintegrated and vanished into the ground.

Bozhe moi, they had transporter technology. She'd said as much. There hadn't been any need for her to go in there. Had she known that?

He realised that several minutes had passed in which he'd simply stood looking at the place the station used to be. He cut off everything but the task in hand from his conscious mind, and went back to the helm of the doomed shuttle.

Chapter Eight

"How will we know whether it's worked or not?"

They'd all drawn together as the shuttle took off and Dieter voiced the question on everyone's mind. Hewell shrugged. "I presume a shuttle exploding makes a big bang, and a power plant being blown up makes a bigger bang. Unfortunately I don't have any absolute scale of bangs to measure them against. I don't even suppose the di-hydrogen flare will make a visible difference in all this mess. Have you ever heard a shuttle crash, Diana?"

"Oh, shut up." She grabbed one of the guns from Dieter and stomped off to circle the camp.

"Arthur, you are the most insensitive man alive." Maggie smiled, and he looked at her curiously.

"Well, I may be t... tactless, but at least I'm not happy about the situation."

"Neither am I. Pavel was really rather splendid, wasn't he?"

The geophysicist scowled at her. "Yes, but I'd rather that wasn't his epitaph."

"Doctor Hewell?"

"Yes?" They both turned to look at Karra. She was pale but dry eyed now.

"If it works, the explosion will be much deeper, won't it?"

Hewell struck his forehead with both fists. "Of course. My dear girl, I won't insult you by referring to babes and sucklings. Come and help me, quick."

He caught her hand and the two of them sprinted across the grass towards the neglected survey equipment. Maggie looked at Dieter. "Did you understand that?"

He nodded. "The seismic shock from the explosion will register on Doctor Hewell's monitors. We should be able to tell how deep the origin of the shock waves is. That will tell us whether the reaction chamber was breached or not."

"I see. Well, since life is continuing, at least for the moment, perhaps we should clear up after lunch, or are you still on duty?"

Dieter glanced around, to see that Mier and Diana were on opposite sides of the camp, peering anxiously into the thickening smoke. "No, ma'am. I'll help."

***

The explosion happened about fifteen minutes later. They all froze in place, whatever they were doing. Hewell and Karra locked eyes for a long moment then turned to look at the screens. One showed columns of apparently random figures, another a graph with a sudden outbreak of spikes.

"Let's see..." The doctor keyed in a few adjustments to the standard analysis program. "That seems fairly conclusive."

He turned to address Maggie only to find that she was occupied, her arms round their surviving ensign. He looked worriedly at Karra, wondering if she was going to react in the same way. She pointed at a new spike on the graph. "Could that be an unpowered shuttle crashing?"

"I don't know. It worked, but I don't know whether he got away. That doesn't pinpoint a direction, or even a distance, so we can't go and look. It's most probably an after-shock, another p... part of the plant collapsing, something like that."

He realised that Diana had come over to join them and he pointed to the screen again. "The main shocks originated from a depth of thirteen metres, indicating that the operation was successful..."

"Good. Let's try to maintain the lucky streak, shall we? This smoke is getting unbearable, and it makes it impossible to keep watch. We have to find somewhere..."

"Mister Chekov told us..."

"Mister Chekov is no longer in command."

"Diana, I'm sure you're only being practical, but could we have five minutes to get used to the idea?"

She gestured impatiently out into the darkening billows of smoke. "It'll be twilight in less than an hour, if the wind doesn't get up and blow this away. We have to move to a defensible position. We have one less adult who can use a gun, and we can't retreat to the shuttle if things get difficult. We have to sort out the supplies and equipment we need and can move. We don't have to go far, and we'll leave a note in the dome so that the Enterprise can find us. One thing that Mister Chekov told me, quite early on, was that he wanted us all to be alive when they got back. It's too late for that, but I intend to achieve as much of that objective as is still feasible." Her voice was brittle, verging on tears.

"Of course. And, I don't think you should get your hopes up, but that," he pointed to the lone, belated spike, "might or might not be a shuttle crash landing without its engine core."

She traced it with her finger. "You know where?"

"No, I'm sorry."

"Then it's not important right now."

***

"Emergency Relief teams beaming down to the agreed locations now, Captain," Uhura reported. "Still no success in making contact with our people. The sensors are really screwed up by all the atmospheric molecular carbon residue. I've never come across anything like it before. But, sir... this looks like the footprint of a high energy plasma detonation..." Like an impulse engine exploding while functioning, she didn't say.

Kirk got up out of his seat and came over to her station, although he knew he could do nothing that she couldn't. The soup of distorted readings told him nothing beyond what she'd said. "Let's not jump to conclusions, Lieutenant." It rankled with him that he had to give priority to strangers over his own crew, even if the arithmetic of lives made sense. He glanced up at the screen. "Can you pinpoint where we left them?"

She keyed in commands to the sensors and the image zoomed in. The screen appeared to go dead, until Kirk realised he was looking at billowing smoke from above. "What scale is that?" he asked, horrified.

Spock straightened up and turned to look at the screen himself. "Equivalent to five hundred metres. There are life forms present in the area, but the atmospheric pollution from combustion and di-hydrogen residues makes it impossible to distinguish human characteristics."

"But they could be alive down there?"

"The fires are out. Meteorological conditions are preventing the smoke and ash from dissipating. It should be possible to survive without breathing apparatus, but to locate particular individuals..."

"I'm going down. Spock, you stay up here to assist in coordinating the aid teams. Uhura, keep trying to contact them. That burst from the emergency beacon must have meant something. Sulu, come with me. And get McCoy to assign me a paramedic. He must have one left on board."

The one left on board was McCoy so he assigned himself accordingly. He nearly had second thoughts when he arrived in the transporter room and overheard Sulu and Scott conferring over the problems caused to the transporters and the tricorders by the clouds of smoke and carbon. They seemed to think that there was little likelihood of a successful transport and less of finding anyone down there anyway, but the moment Kirk arrived they shut up and reported ready to go. Kirk didn't even bother to remark on the fact that McCoy was there, simply taking his place on the pad, donning the breathing filter that Sulu handed him and saying impatiently, "Shall we go, gentlemen?"

The transporter, as always in McCoy's opinion, took longer than it should have, but they arrived nonetheless, in a choking soup of smoke and dust. Immediately Sulu pointed into the gloom, and said, "Before we lose our bearings, the beam down site is ten metres that way, and from what I remember, they had the dome set up another ten metres beyond. We should keep together."

"Yes," Kirk agreed, "but first, let's see if there's something stopping our communicators operating." He opened his as he spoke, and found himself talking to Uhura with no trouble at all. Pocketing it again, he nodded to Sulu. "Lead the way."

Sulu's memory of the layout of the camp proved accurate, and in a little over twenty paces they had found the dome. Kirk signalled the door to open, and immediately realised he needn't have bothered. The front of the dome was like a stage set, opening into a litter of equipment and collapsed wall panels. The whole thing stank of hydrocarbon fuel, even through the filters.

"Get away!" Kirk yelled at them. He backed off himself and the others joined him. "Someone tried to torch it, but they wrecked it first, and that can't have been easy." A sudden breath of wind cleared the smoke for a few metres around, and McCoy pointed to a mechanical digger, parked a little way away. "I don't think it was designed to stand up to one of those." He walked back cautiously to the wreck and lifted some of the panels. Kirk let him get on with it, knowing what he was looking for. After less than a minute, McCoy returned, looking grim, but not displeased. "No bodies, and no first aid kits, ration packs, communicators or insulation blankets. Looks like they took shelter somewhere else."

"But where?" Kirk demanded. "He should have taken the shuttle to somewhere safe..."

"But he didn't or we would have found it," McCoy responded.

"I don't understand that, Captain." Sulu said. "I know our sensors aren't coping with this mess too well, but the flight recorder automatic beacon..."

"He turned the beacon into a homing device, Captain." Hewell suddenly emerged from the fog, accompanied by a filthy teenage boy carrying what appeared to be a rifle. The boy eyed the newcomers warily and kept a step behind the doctor, looking ready to raise his weapon at the first suspicious move they made. "And you can't find the shuttle because it's p... probably buried under several metres of rubble."

"Probably?" Kirk queried. The idea was bizarre enough, without the element of uncertainty.

"The city had a power plant based on di-hydrogen cracking. It malfunctioned and Chekov reckoned the only way to stop a fission reaction was to wreck the cracking complex before the residue build up was too great."

From Kirk's expression, this might as well have been rendered in High Aldebaran. "You mean he used the shuttle as an automatic missile?" Chekov's ideas tended to be, well, bold, but this had to be the record so far.

"Not automatic, Captain, because the helm and navigation were such a mess, it still had to be flown manually. I'm sorry. He hinted that he might be able to jettison the engines over the station and then crash land the shuttle far enough away to survive. I think it was only a very slim chance."

Kirk made silent calculations: how many seconds of flight powered only by thrusters designed for nudging the shuttle around in low gravity, how large a blast radius, how long an interval between dumping the core and detonation, how many other unknowns.

He pushed aside as irrelevant the desire to know how the party had managed to wreck the guidance systems on the shuttle in the first place. "And Croft, and Doctor Leverman?" he demanded, concentrating on the living for now.

"We are all quite safe, Captain, along with a small group of the local people who turned to us for assistance." He nodded at his bodyguard. "I think of them as Mister Chekov's irregulars, although to be fair, they gave him less trouble than we did most of the time."

***

The rest of the party were sheltering in a one storey, stone built pavilion, a few hundred metres from the dome. Croft emerged, pushing lank and dirty hair out of her face, another of the rifles slung over her shoulder.

"Captain, thank God..."

"Are any of you hurt?" McCoy pushed forward with his medical tricorder and Maggie Leverman laughed.

"Leonard, there's nothing wrong that can't wait until we're aboard. I can do first aid, just. We've even managed to work out how to cure the madness..."

"H-receptor sedatives..." McCoy told her, repeating the solution the Venayan home world had worked out and passed on.

She nodded. "I think we were hoping to have everyone straightened out by the time you got back, but maybe that was a little overambitious."

Kirk looked at the three of them. Despite their dishevelled state, and their obvious exhaustion, they seemed curiously cheerful about the whole experience. Perhaps it was just the adrenalin, or the satisfaction of having survived. Or someone had been working miracles in the morale department. Then Doctor Leverman caught his eye. "I'm sorry, Captain. Mister Chekov was... Oh, God." She let Hewell take her into his arms.

Kirk was silent for a moment but he couldn't let them stand around all night. "Okay, you'd better all beam up. There's nothing more we can do here until visibility improves one way or another. Mister Sulu, I want you to stay by the dome, in case. Check your phaser and communicator. I don't want you to do a disappearing act as well." Kirk watched the doctors vanish with the first four of Chekov's irregulars. The children looked too tired to argue, but he had the impression that a little rapid dealing had been done between the four who left and the two oldest who remained. Once they were alone he was proved right. The rifle toting youth planted himself in front of Kirk, determination written large on his grimy face. "We aren't going until you find Mister Chekov. We'll stay with..." he gestured at the lieutenant, "him."

Sulu nodded silently to Kirk without the boy seeing. He wouldn't cross Kirk in this, but he understood how the boy felt, and appreciated the loyalty on behalf of his friend.

"Very well, but you stay here and do exactly what the lieutenant tells you. If you go chasing off, he's got no authority to run after you and keep you safe. Understood?"

"Yes, sir," he snapped. The girl echoed him. They reminded Kirk of a couple of Star Fleet cadets on their best behaviour.

Kirk turned to Ensign Croft. "I think you'd better come with me. You've had your share of this mess."

She looked at the children and back at Kirk. "He'll be all right, I know he will. Any minute now he'll come walking in here, covered in blood and apologising as if this whole fiasco was his fault. I know he will. I really know he will..." Kirk folded his arms around her and nodded at Sulu. "Tell Scotty, two to beam up."

Sulu handed out spare filters to his two companions and set up all the lamps he could retrieve from the dome, like a beacon. He reckoned they would burn until morning, at least. Then he relieved Dieter of his rifle and told the kids to sit down by the lamps, setting a lead by making himself comfortable against a tree stump. "Aren't we going to look for Pavel?" the girl asked.

"You heard what the Captain said. And we don't know where to look. Unless you know something?"

She shook her head. "We'll look in the morning."

Sulu seriously doubted whether Kirk would permit that, given what they were likely to find, but he decided not to argue. "Okay, you'll want to be fresh, then, won't you? Why don't you get some sleep now?"

To his surprise, she accepted this, flopped down to sit leaning up against his shoulder, and almost instantly fell asleep. A moment later, Dieter followed suit. As their heads lolled, Sulu put an arm round each of them, and settled down to a long, cold, uncomfortable night. He tried not to think ahead to the search that awaited in the morning, letting himself be warmed instead by the absolute trust that the two children seemed to put in him. If Chekov was lost, it was a telling tribute to him that another man in the same uniform inspired such confidence.

It was still night when a twig cracked and brought him awake. Enough awareness had remained to stop him bolting upright and disturbing the children. He tried to peer beyond the circle of brightness, keenly aware that his beacon also made them an easy target. His phaser had never left his hand since he sat down, and he raised it cautiously. "Who's there?" He tried to make the whisper quiet and penetrating and ended up just coughing.

"Sulu! What are you doing here?" Chekov limped across the clearing and knelt down beside the threesome. "What is this, Hansel and Gretel?"

"They wouldn't go up to the ship until we found you." Sulu turned and let Dieter down gently to the ground, then did the same for Karra. "All the others went up, our people and four kids. Hewell said you'd crashed the shuttle. He thought you were on board."

"I didn't think I had much chance of getting out. I thought they'd be safer if they weren't worrying about whether I was all right. The blast knocked the gyros out on the shuttle, and I crashed it. It was pitch dark by the time I felt like moving, and I didn't know where I was. That was the difficult part, finding my way back here, and wondering what I'd find if I did get back." He rubbed tiredly at his eyes, and Sulu reached for his communicator, but Chekov laid a hand on his arm to stop him. "Wait a moment, please. When did you get here?"

"About five hours ago."

"You know what's been happening?"

"Yes. There were similar troubles simultaneously on other Venayan colony planets. All of them. It seems the parent world's atmospheric pollution has been masking some chemical stimuli that used to drive the entire population wild with clockwork regularity..."

"Yes. We worked out it was something like that."

"We came back as soon as we realised you might be in difficulties, but we had to pick up help for the planet first."

Chekov shook his head dismissively. "I've had enough, Sulu. I can't do this."

"Look, you had a rough time. I'm not sure that the Captain expected to find any of you alive..."

"I don't care what the Captain thinks. It's what I think. I don't want to be responsible for people like this. They could have been killed ten times over. I did kill two people, because I didn't think of something in time, or check on something properly. It was just luck that the rest survived, that's all. I made every mistake I could."

"Pavel, this is not the time for important decisions..."

"That's just the point. I don't want to make any more decisions at all."

Karra grunted softly, reached for the sheltering arm that had lulled her to sleep, and then jack-knifed into a sitting position, terror written all over her face. The moment her eyes opened she realised that her protector had returned. She flung herself at him, almost knocking him over.

Chekov wrapped her in a hug, his eyes fixed on the ground. After a long moment he looked up. "What did Diana Croft have to say?"

Sulu wondered at his tone of voice. He knew that the two of them didn't get on, although he thought Ensign Croft was pleasant enough. Conceivably the experience had brought them closer, but something in Chekov's words made him doubt it. "I think she was in a state of shock. She kept saying she knew you'd be all right. The captain had to take her away bodily in the end."

The ensign closed his eyes. "I don't believe it. She should be an actress, not an officer."

"Pavel, there are people who aren't going to get any sleep until they know you're safe. And these kids should be in bed."

"Then let's go." Chekov's voice was still subdued. He bent down and roused Dieter, then helped the boy to his feet. Dieter seemed to be too overwhelmed to say anything. He was just grinning as hard as he could.

Sulu got up stiffly and opened his communicator. "Enterprise?"

"Sulu?" Uhura made no pretence at a business-like manner.

"Four to beam up," Sulu said, knowing that was all she wanted to hear.

Diana Croft was waiting in the transporter room. Chekov looked at her in surprise. Spending all night there so that she could act out a charade of being relieved to see him seemed ridiculous, even by her standards, especially since there was no one to see her but himself and Lieutenant Sulu. The transporter operator looked as though he was functioning in his sleep and wouldn't have noticed if she'd thrown a parade.

"Do you think there will be anyone in sick bay or are they all helping out on the planet?" he asked Sulu, pointedly ignoring the woman.

"Doctor McCoy was on board the last I knew. Are you hurt?"

"It's nothing serious." What he wanted more than anything was sleep, but he suspected he wasn't going to be allowed to sneak off to his cabin and lock the door.

Croft stepped forward. "Do you want me to get these two settled?" She put a hand on each sleepy youngster's shoulder.

"Shining again already, Diana?" Sulu was shocked by the bitterness in his voice. "I'm sure Mister Sulu's impressed..."

"Pavel..." Sulu interrupted reprovingly, and Diana ushered the two children out into the corridor, and then planted herself squarely between Chekov and the door.

"I just wanted to say..." she began, her voice nervous and too loud.

Chekov looked over her shoulder at Captain Kirk framed in the doorway. What the hell, he thought, she's going to tell everybody what a mess I made of it sooner or later. We might as well get it over with.

"What?" He wondered if she could see her audience reflected in his eyes.

As she regarded his tired, defeated face all the apologetic, thankful things she wanted to say seemed to coagulate in her throat. "You're such a bloody hero, aren't you?"

"Diana..." he began, not sure what came next, but she threw her arms round his neck and kissed him, then pulled back abruptly.

He blinked at her, too surprised to answer, and Kirk stepped into the silence, coming round Diana to put a hand on the small of his navigator's back and propel him towards sick bay. "I've had two doctors speechless with admiration. Mister Scott is even prepared to forgive you for using his shuttle craft as a missile. And the signals from the two sets of explosions you picked up were so powerful, and just in the right places, that apparently you even managed to get most of the data that Doctor Hewell needed..."

As the captain's voice faded into the distance Sulu looked at Diana Croft. "Are you going to find these two a couple of nice warm bunks?"

She nodded.

"And then are you going to tell me what went on down there?"

"You'd better ask Mister Chekov."

"Come on, he's not going to tell me. Not all of it."

"And neither am I."

The End