Quark pulled back and stared at her for a few moments, his eyes squinting into slits. He appeared to consider Treir’s request. Then he said, “I’m a romantic, but I also know the 229th Rule of Acquisition: ‘Latinum lasts longer than lust.’” He pulled his arm from her grasp, but before he could take another step, she grabbed him again. This time, she pulled him in close to her.
“Then at least let me do it,” she said. “I hired him; let me fire him.”
Quark jerked his arm free. “Fine,” he said. “I just came in to get a bottle of groszfor Admiral Akaar.” He looked over at Hetik, and then back at Treir. “Make sure he’s gone when I come back in tonight,” he told her.
“Fine,” she said.
Quark started to head for the bar, presumably to retrieve the grosz,but then he stopped, came back, and leaned in to her. “Just be happy I’m not firing you too,” he said. Then he made his way to the bar. She watched as he pulled out a stubby, dark green bottle and carried it out.
Once Quark had gone, Treir finally turned to Hetik. She saw that he was now looking at her. She started toward him, wondering what she would say.
36
The smell of smoke reached him first.
Vaughn regained consciousness as though a switch had been thrown. One moment, his mind did not exist, and the next, awareness deluged him. With his eyes closed, his other senses painted the canvas of his circumstances. As he breathed in the acrid smoke, it irritated the dry membranes of his nose. A bitter taste coated his mouth, and his throat burned as though he had swallowed broken glass. His body ached within and without, his muscles strained, his flesh battered, and the air felt unpleasantly cool about him. The crackle of live flames reached him from several directions, but not so close that he could feel their heat. And beneath it all, something else made itself known…a noise that held more substance as a feeling than as a sound…like a far-off wind whispering at the very limits of hearing, moving air with a force diminished by distance.
Vaughn opened his eyes. He lay on his back, propped up against a section of bulkhead in what had been the rear of Chaffee’s forward compartment. The front of the shuttle was gone. No, not gone. It sat on the open ground thirty or forty meters away, engulfed by fire. A pillar of thick black smoke rose up from it, reaching for the gray clouds above as though for a kindred spirit.
Between the two sections of the destroyed shuttle, wreckage littered the ground. Two smaller fires burned off to the right, and hills sat far off in the distance to the left, but otherwise, the landscape extended away desolate and unvariegated, a flat, brown plain. Vaughn glanced over his shoulder and saw the bulkhead separating the fore and aft compartments. Through the misshapen doorway, the aft portion of the shuttle appeared relatively intact, although the roof had been almost completely ripped away.
Something moved directly to Vaughn’s right, just a meter or two away. The broken remnants of a chair tumbled from atop a heap of debris, and he saw a hand reach upward. “Prynn,” he said, his voice rasping, the word barely understandable. He gulped, trying to clear his throat, then coughed forcefully. Mucus filled his mouth, and he spat to his left, not surprised to see streaks of red mixed in with the yellowish fluid. “Prynn,” he called again, pronouncing her name clearly this time.
“I’m here,” she said, and she waved her hand. “I’m stuck.” She sounded remarkably calm in light of what they had just endured.
“Hold on,” Vaughn said. He set one hand against what remained of the bulkhead to his left, and the other down on the decking beneath him. He pushed himself forward and upward, and managed to get to his feet. His body ached everywhere—in his joints, in his muscles, on his flesh, and he felt a throbbing pain on the inside of his cheek—but he seemed to have escaped any significant external injuries. “I’m coming,” he told Prynn. He stepped carefully over and around masses of ruined machinery, leaning toward the aft compartment in order to compensate for the forward tilt of the decking.
When he got to the chair Prynn had pushed from atop herself, he reached down and lifted it out of his way. He swung the bent object back in the direction he had come, setting it down with a thud. Then he stepped forward and pulled away a snarl of mangled circuitry, revealing Prynn. She looked shaken and bruised. Her face and neck showed multiple cuts, and a long gash arced from her temple all the way down to her chin. A blood vessel must have ruptured in one of her eyes, because the sclera had turned a dark red. “Can you see out of both eyes?” he asked her.
Prynn glanced around, then back up at him. “Yes,” she said. “But my arm.” She pointed up toward her right shoulder, beyond which her arm disappeared beneath a fractured section of hull plating. She tried to push the plate away with her free hand, but it did not move at all beneath her efforts.
Vaughn studied the situation for a moment, then glanced around in the unlikely hope that he might spy a tricorder lurking somewhere nearby. Ideally, he would scan behind the metal slab before attempting to extricate Prynn. If some portion of her arm had been severed, the plating might actually be preventing her from bleeding to death; on the other hand, she might be losing blood right now.
Seeing no tricorder, Vaughn moved to his left and wrapped his fingers around the top of the hull plate. He had expected to find the metal warm to the touch, perhaps even hot, but it was actually cold. He pulled gingerly on the heavy slab, testing its weight; he did not want to manhandle it away from Prynn only to have it crash back down on her an instant later. Satisfied that he could move it, Vaughn repositioned himself so that he could brace his legs against an unbroken section of the starboard bulkhead. Setting his hands beneath the top of the slab, he pushed, using the combined strength of his arms and legs. The plate shifted forward a few centimeters and stopped, the loud screech of metal scraping against metal erupting from its lower edge.
From somewhere below him came the sound of movement. Vaughn felt sweat forming on his forehead as he struggled to prevent the plate from falling backward. He grunted as he tensed his arms and legs, pushing with as much force as he could manage, and still the plate began to slip back.
“I’m free,” Prynn yelped suddenly. Vaughn looked over to see his daughter moving away from the metal slab. As quickly as he could, he jumped back out of the way, onto the dirt beyond the fallen shuttle. The broken section of the hull slammed back down. Vaughn turned and spat again, and again he saw blood. He wondered just how bad his internal injuries were.
Prynn tottered to her feet, and relief flooded over Vaughn when he saw her raise her right arm and flex her shoulder, elbow, and fingers. Her uniform had been torn open in a dozen places, he saw, and her combadge no longer hung on her tunic. Considering what they had just been through, though, she appeared more or less unscathed. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m okay,” she told him as she found her way out of the wreckage and onto open ground. She faced him across a few meters and raised a hand to the side of her face, feeling cautiously at the wound there. She pulled her hand away and examined her fingertips, which were now red with blood.
He walked up to her. “You’ve got a deep cut here,” he said, drawing a finger through the air along the side of her face. He looked closely at the gash, then said, “It looks like the blood’s clotted, so you should be all right.”