As Vaughn reached the back of the smashed shuttle, he looked back along the line of Chaffee’s descent, expecting to see long gouges where it had skidded along the ground, perhaps even a small impact crater where it had first hit. Instead, he saw only a level, unbroken plain. Vaughn squatted and set the beacons down, then pulled a tricorder from an outside coat pocket. He opened the device and scanned the area; although interference from the energy in the clouds and at the source of the pulse hindered long-range scans, it remained possible to gather short-range readings. In this case, Vaughn’s scans only confirmed what his eyes had already told him: Chaffeehad come down hard, but at neither the vertical nor the horizontal speed he would have expected. However that had happened, it had probably saved their lives.
At least for now.
Vaughn closed up the tricorder and placed it back in a coat pocket, then bent and collected up the beacons. He wiped at the corner of his mouth with a knuckle, his saliva no longer streaked with red. What he had thought might be a symptom of an internal injury had turned out to be nothing more than the result of a chunk of flesh he had bitten from the inside of his cheek. He had mended the wound and stemmed the bleeding, although his cheek still ached.
Vaughn went back around the wreckage and headed toward the fire that was still consuming the shuttle’s cockpit. As he walked, he noticed again the remote hum that he had first heard when he had regained consciousness after the accident. So far as he could tell, it had never stopped; it felt like Defianttraveling at warp, that constant background drone and throb of the engines that permeated the ship. It’s the voice of the clouds,he thought, the audible effect of all the energy surrounding the planet.
Vaughn passed the flickering orange flames burning the forward section of the shuttle. Beyond, the small encampment came into view—although calling it an encampmentseemed an overstatement to Vaughn. The area he and Prynn had staked out around Ensign ch’Thane consisted of little more than bedrolls, blankets, and the locker that had contained the survival cache. A second locker, which had held a small, portable shelter—a thin but insulative and weatherproof material and a collapsible framework over which it fit—had broken open during the crash, its contents ripped apart.
As Vaughn approached, he saw Prynn standing over ch’Thane, a tricorder in her hand, no doubt checking his condition. The ensign lay on his back now atop one of the bedrolls, wrapped in a thin metallic blanket that confined his body heat and kept him warm. Vaughn had treated ch’Thane’s fractured leg—as well as his dislocated shoulder, three bruised ribs, and numerous cuts and contusions—as best he could, but damage to one of the young Andorian’s less identifiable organs demanded more medical knowledge and ability than either he or Prynn had. They had stabilized the ensign enough to move him onto the bedding, though, and his vital signs had improved somewhat. He had even shown indications of reviving, but Vaughn had decided to administer an anesthetic, to keep him both unconscious and out of pain. Ch’Thane appeared to be out of immediate danger, but Vaughn knew that he would require a doctor’s attention soon.
“How is he?” he asked Prynn. She looked much better now, after Vaughn had tended to her bumps and bruises, and after she had cleaned herself up. He had been able to heal almost all of her thankfully superficial injuries, with the exception of the one to her eye. The deep red surrounding her dark iris and black pupil made the eye appear opaque and therefore blind, but her vision actually remained unaffected.
“He’s the same,” she said, answering him across ch’Thane’s body. A gust of wind blew past, and she pulled the collar of her jacket up higher.
Vaughn peered down at the young man, whose usually bright blue skin had grown dull. “He’s lucky to be alive,” he said. “We’re all lucky to—” Vaughn stopped as he looked up at Prynn and saw tears in her eyes. She turned away from him and moved a few paces away.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She raised her arm, and Vaughn assumed she was wiping away her tears. He heard her breathe in slowly and deeply, then she dropped her arm and turned back around. “It’s just that…we were friends,” she said. “Becoming friends, anyway.”
Vaughn thought that there was probably even more to it than that; just before he had arrived at Deep Space 9, the station had been attacked, and Prynn had lost coworkers and friends, one of whom she had been very close to. Now he wanted to go to his daughter and wrap his arms around her, hold her and tell her that everything would be all right. But apart from all that had come between them over the years, he understood that she needed something other than that right now. “Ensign Tenmei,” he said gently, “we weren’t…lucky…were we?” He emphasized the word by isolating it.
“We werelucky,” Prynn said, pushing the tricorder closed and slipping it into a jacket pocket. “But not justlucky.”
Vaughn nodded. He told her what he had seen—what he had failedto see—in the downed shuttle’s wake. “How did you do it?” he asked, genuinely curious, but also wanting her to focus on her involvement in their survival.
“It’s an old shuttle pilot’s trick,” she said, and for the first time since the crash, she seemed to perk up. “There are certain maneuvers you can make with a crippled shuttle…at the end, the antigravs saved us.”
“Antigravs don’t work at speed,” Vaughn noted.
“We decelerated as we broke apart, and I used the emergency thrusters to brake us even more at the right moment,” she explained. “Then I overcharged the antigravs. It’s a split-second timing thing. They call it the ‘Sulu Shuttle Stunt.’” Vaughn nodded, impressed. He recognized what Prynn had described so matter-offactly as a maneuver that even the best shuttle pilots would fail to perform successfully nine times out of ten. She really is exceptional,he thought, and he told her so, making sure to speak as her commanding officer, and not as a proud father.
“Thank you,” she said, accepting the compliment graciously. Vaughn opted not to ask her for whom the “old shuttle pilot’s trick” had been named, Hikaru or Demora. He had known them both, and neither answer would have surprised him. Instead, he handed her one of the beacons.
“Here,” he said. “I thought these might be useful.” Prynn took the beacon, found its activation switch, and turned it on. A powerful beam of white light emerged. She shined it at the ground around her feet, and then off into the distance; even in the dim daylight, it had a considerable range.
Vaughn walked around Ensign ch’Thane. He set the other two beacons down, then grabbed a bedroll and lowered himself into a sitting position on it. “We need to discuss what we’re going to do,” he told Prynn. She switched the beacon off and set it down with the others.
“I’ve actually had some thoughts about that,” she said, pulling the tricorder back out of her jacket. She opened the device and worked its controls. “I scanned the rear section of the shuttle, and it just might be possible to scrounge enough salvageable components from different systems to repair the transporter.” Transporter technology, Vaughn knew from Prynn’s record, had been a secondary area of concentration for her during her Starfleet service. “We obviously wouldn’t be able to beam back to the ship through the clouds, and with the levels of the energy at the source of the pulse, I’m not sure how close we could get to there, but we might be able to get clos er.”
As a commander, Vaughn listened to Prynn’s proposal with satisfaction, pleased simply in terms of her professionalism. Here was an officer actively seeking a solution to their dilemma, and though her thoughts had turned to preservation of the away team, they had also included an attempt to find a means of completing their mission. “How long would that take, and how likely is it to work?” he asked.