Chapter 57: ...and now, the conclusion.
The first thing I noticed when I woke up was that I hurt. A lot. The crash had bruised just about every part of my body, but I was still alive, and still in the shuttle—though you could argue that a lot of things counted as 'in the shuttle' at the moment, since one wall and most of the roof had been sheared off in the crash. You could also argue that nothing counted as 'in the shuttle' at the moment, given that it would never shuttle anything ever again.
The old Class 2 had come to a rest on its side, which meant that the crash chairs were above me, parallel to the ground. My right shoulder had been dislocated, which made crawling difficult, but I was slowly able to make my way towards the gaping hole in the roof of the shuttle. It was still raining outside, but closer to the drizzle we'd seen the first time we'd left the shuttle. Some strange, modern instinct compelled me to leave a wrecked vehicle.
Shiss stirred while I was shuffling past his seat. He groaned and held a hand to his head as he blinked rapidly. "That was rough," he muttered, looking 'up' at the hole ahead of me, then 'right' to me when a bump to my shoulder made me hiss in pain. "Cassandra? Hold on—" he put a hand on the harness clasp, then stopped when he realized he was about to drop himself onto my back.
"Give me a minute," I said as I went back to crawling.
"You dislocated your shoulder."
"Glad to know… we have… a medical officer…" I muttered as I continued to pull myself out of the ship. It felt like hours before I managed to get clear enough that Shiss could drop himself to the floor and drag me the rest of the way out.
"I need to fix this," he said as he examined my shoulder. "This is going to hurt—"
"Then hurry up and do it."
He did, and my vision flashed white. When that faded, my arm was working again. "Thanks," I said as I massaged my shoulder with my other hand.
"It's going to take a bit to heal properly, so you should avoid exerting yourself–"
"I don't think that's really an option, Doc," I interrupted, "but thanks for the thought."
A thump announced Ebav disengaging his own harness and landing on his feet. "Hello?" he yelled.
"We're out here!" Shiss yelled.
"Where's the Captain?"
"Here!" Captain Merrill yelled back. She was walking back towards us, carrying two boxes under one arm and cradling the other like it was broken.
"What's wrong with your arm?" Shiss asked.
"Sprained wrist. I hope." Merrill held it out for his examination.
After a moment with his tricorder, he shook his head. "It's broken. Where are the medical supplies?"
"Probably somewhere on the other side of the island." She nodded her head behind her rather than point with her broken wrist, and for the first time I noticed the trail of destruction we'd left. The shuttle had carved a path across the island; rather than a furrow of dirt, it had left a massive
scratch across the rock, and more than a few jagged stumps where we'd torn through trees in the path of our flight.
"What have you got there?" Ebav asked as he limped over to join us.
"Food," she said. "Are you hurt?"
"Nasty bruise. I think something hit me during the crash."
"That might have been one of us," I said. "Crash harnesses also prevent you from becoming pinballs."
Shiss raised his hand like we were in class. "What's a pinball?"
"Imagine a large ball bearing in a tumbler and you'll have the right idea," Merrill explained. "Moving on: is the rain clean?"
He took out his tricorder and began to scan the water that was still falling around us. "Fah," he grumbled. "This isn't working."
"Scan the water," I said with a tinge of exasperation, "not the
rain." Shiss must have been rattled from the landing worse than I thought, and he was probably the best one to try and diagnose a concussion.
"Sorry, sir." He did, and the results were promising. We wouldn't die of dehydration.
Hunger and exposure were still on the menu, though. A quick check of
Tools dashed my hopes that they'd scale to the setting; I could summon flint and steel, but not a hockey-puck-sized Federation-standard emergency space heater. Finding enough dry wood to build a fire was unlikely.
I took out my own tricorder and turned it towards the shuttle. The news was grim. "The shuttle's totally dead," I reported. "Failsafes hard-scrammed the warp core, and the auxiliary batteries shorted. The computer's fried, there's nothing to power the subspace antenna even if it's still functional, and I'm not sure the standard issue equipment would make it through the storm anyway."
"That's going to be a problem," Ebav said. "We're on the wrong island. How long is it going to take them to find us?"
Captain Merrill hesitated, running some mental math. "We're about fifty klicks out of the mission area," she said. "It might take more than a week for them to find us. We'll have to go to starvation rations until we manage to find more food."
"Half rations and no shelter is going to be rough," I said. "How many crates were we carrying?"
"Two, which means eight boxes. We ate through most of a crate on the mission itself, but there should be plenty more out there, and we have a nice, thick trail to follow."
"How far, though?" Ebav asked. "We slid over most of the island, by the look of things. The trail could be ten kilometers long."
"They wouldn't make it that bad," Shiss replied confidently. All three of us looked at him like he was crazy. "I mean, this is a test, right?" he said calmly. "Part of the exercise? We're not
stranded here. This is just an extra step. A surprise survival course. We're not going to starve to death or anything."
"Even if it is, that kind of thinking would be marked down," I said.
"Always assume a real emergency," Merrill said, then glared at me for having the gall to agree with her.
"Well, obviously," Shiss said, slightly defensive. "I'm saying that we don't need to
panic."
"We shouldn't panic in a real emergency," Merrill argued. "In fact, if this
is a real emergency, it's even
more important we not panic."
I looked over at the remains of the shuttle. The crash hadn't felt controlled at all, but I had to admit that things had been arranged perfectly for a survival test, and the Academy
loved its fake emergencies. Limited supplies in a harsh environment, minor injuries… this
might have been intentional. I wasn't willing to bet on it.
"We should get moving," Ebav said. "The shuttle's not good shelter. It'll attract lightning strikes."
The four of us shared a knowing glance; we all knew how
Star Trek ship components reacted to stray lightning bolts.
"We'll head back along the trail," Captain Merrill said. "Anything that survived the crash should be there."
———X==X==X———
I had to give Ebav credit: despite flying a crippled shuttle through hurricane-force winds, he'd managed to hit the island more or less dead on. If he'd glanced it, or overshot, we'd have skipped off the rocks and ended up in the ocean anyway. As it was, we'd plowed straight through the majority of the island along its longest axis, and that had saved our lives. We'd also managed to miss the mountain range on the southeast portion of the island, which would have been an even quicker end.
There wasn't much else to celebrate. We were bruised, battered, and dirty. I'd either injured my back carrying the weather station, or in the crash, and my uniform had a gash across the stomach where I'd dragged myself across a sharp bit of hull. We didn't have enough food, the local plant life wasn't edible, and we had no way to signal that we were now on the completely wrong island.
Unlike the relatively flat island we'd
intentionally landed on, the single, massive mountain on this one acted as a sort of wind break. The result was a few inches of actual topsoil colonized by larger trees, strange elastic vines, and stubborn, prickly bushes that snagged our uniforms at every step. To top it off, our hike thus far had been fruitless; the only things we'd found were bits of hull.
We couldn't even reliably follow the shuttle's trail: at several points, we'd skipped off the ground like a stone on a lake, flying over the rocks and trees for a time before slamming back down and continuing to tumble. The first few times—which would be the last few times to anything that had witnessed our crash—the flight was short, and we could pick up the trail without issue. Within a few kilometers, however, the skips had grown long enough that we simply had to trace the right direction and start walking. This time, we didn't pick up the trail again.
With another storm picking up, Captain Merrill made the command decision to seek shelter. The wind was blowing heavily in one direction, so we clustered up against a large, slightly concave boulder and hoped for the best. It didn't do much to keep the rain off, but we were sheltered from the debris the wind swept up.
Once we'd settled down in our temporary shelter as best we were able, Shiss eased the tension with some stories from his childhood on Andoria. I was missing a bit of cultural context, but it passed the time well enough.
Compared to the time I'd spent sharing a tent with Alicia, spending the rest of the day in the lee of a large rock with
Captain Merrill was strangely bearable. Something about the crisis had brought out a stoicism that was far easier to deal with than her previous behavior, even if her actual treatment of me had barely changed. It seemed she found it easier to simply ignore who I was, at least as long as I didn't do anything to draw attention to myself—which I ended up doing anyway.
"Rations," the Captain said as the sun began to set behind the unyielding cloud cover. She took two foil-wrapped packages out of the box she'd been carrying. "A standard crate has eight boxes of twenty-four ration cubes. We have one unopened box and slightly less than half of another. Each ration cube is a little over eight hundred calories. Standard rations during periods of physical exertion are one cube per meal. We're going to be making due with half a cube, twice a day."
"How much is 'slightly less than half'?" Shiss asked.
"Ten."
Given the distance we'd traveled from our original mission area and standard Starfleet search patterns on an O-class planet with this level of atmospheric sensor interference, a search team would encounter the wreckage of our shuttle three to four days after they started searching under the best-case scenario. The
worst-case scenario was that they mis-modeled our flight path, in which case it might take as long as two weeks before they stumbled across the wreck. Worse, said search would only commence twenty-four hours after the end of our mission window, which wasn't for another five days. As such, we had between eight and eighteen days before we were found.
Thirty-four 800-calorie cubes—chalky species-agnostic nutrient blocks that were closer to protein-bars in shape than their name would imply—meant 27,200 calories. Under normal circumstances, we'd each eat 2400 calories over three meals for a total of 9600 calories per day, exhausting our supplies in under three days. With the reduced rations, we'd each be eating only 800 calories each, for a total of 3200 calories per day. That would stretch our supplies to around eight days, assuming we weren't able to find more rations—enough for the best case and not much more. Simple math.
Except that I'd tucked my watch into my work belt before we boarded the
Tehran, which reduced my need for food by ninety percent. If I ate 2000 calories, my body would act like I ate 2000 calories, but if I only ate 200 calories, my body would still act like I ate 2000. That meant that rather than eating 800 calories a day, I could get by on 80—round it to 100 for convenience—with roughly the same effect as everyone else. Thus, instead of 3200 calories, we'd only need 2500 calories per day, increasing our supply to more than eleven days. We still didn't have enough, but it gave us longer to try to find more before we'd become too weak to keep searching.
"I don't need that much," I said. "I can survive on two hundred calories a day for a couple weeks without ill effects. Starvation rations would be one half cube every four days."
I'd expected her to be relieved. I'd considered the possibility that she'd use this as an excuse to deny me food at all. Instead, she glared daggers at me, the knuckles on her good hand going white on the ration box. "Fine," she ground out.
Shiss broke the cubes in half and handed them out. I took a single bite from mine and wrapped the remainder in the foil it had come in for 'breakfast' the next day; it tasted like someone had spent three hours describing cinnamon to a bag of white flour, but I already wanted another bite.
Alicia dumped the remaining ration cubes into a pile and set the open box out to collect rainwater so we could refill our canteens in the morning. Then we hunkered down in a damp and miserable little huddle and tried to ignore the cold and hunger.
None of us slept well that night.
———X==X==X———
The storm didn't let up until nearly midday, and our continued search was off to a bad start.
"Are we sure we're even going in the right direction?" Ebav asked after an hour of walking. "We strayed off the path for shelter last night, and I'm not sure we're back on track."
"Do you have a way to check?" Captain Merrill asked unhappily.
"I could climb a tree," Shiss suggested.
"You don't know that's safe," I said.
"Relax," he said. "We'll be fine." He climbed onto a rock bearing one of the largest trees I'd seen—a different type than on the other island, closer to a fir tree than the weird flat-canopy savanna-esque trees from our initial landing spot—and began hauling himself up the trunk, using the heavy knotholes as hand and footholds. Shiss impressed me; in under a minute, he'd climbed a tree more than twelve meters tall. "I see it! There's another scrape about two hundred meters that way!" He pointed nearly perpendicular to our previous heading and grinned down at us. "Does that answer your question, Captain?"
"Good work," Captain Merrill said. "Now get down here, carefully."
"Sure thing!" Shiss snapped a salute and stepped down onto the massive, gnarled branch below him—which promptly broke like it was made of styrofoam, sending him plummeting to the ground with a horrible crash. Ebav was the first to reach him, and the cry he let out was awful to hear; by the time I caught up with him, he was cursing in Andorian as he checked over his roommate, quietly repeating the same word the way I might stand around muttering
shit shit shit shit.
Shiss himself was silent, teeth clenched in pain as he clutched his leg, where two different bones had been thrust through the skin far enough that his right leg was more than a dozen centimeters shorter than his left. Just looking at the injury made me feel queasy.
"Why do we not have a medical officer?" I asked, not really expecting an answer.
"Because he's the medic," Alicia said numbly. I glanced over at her in surprise, but she was still staring at Shiss' injury.
"He's hurt, bad," Ebav said. "Not just the break—he's got wood chips all over his back. The normal first aid kit was in the back with the tents, and the emergency kit was on the missing wall. We don't have anything." His voice was shaking.
I stopped and tried to remember my lessons on Andorians. Differential xenophysiology: higher metabolic rate, increased caloric consumption, increased rate of exhaustion, increased rate of recovery from fatigue, increased rate of soft tissue healing, decreased sensitivity to exposure including temperature and dehydration, increased vulnerability to infection through wounds and broken skin, increased vulnerability to shock from severe injury.
This was
really fucking bad.
"Sorry," Shiss hissed. "Should have… tested my footing. I messed up."
"Apologize later," Merrill said. "We need a new plan."
"Don't bother," Shiss groaned. "I failed the test. We can't keep going now; I need urgent medical attention."
I glanced at Ebav. "We need to keep going," Ebav said. "We can't just stop."
"We have to," Shiss said. "Cancel the test. I need antiseptics and dermal regeneration before infection sets in."
The four of us waited in the vain hope that a Starfleet officer would appear from behind a rock and flunk the lot of us before whisking us off-planet. Half a minute later, we were still there, standing in the rain, stranded.
"We need to move," Captain Merrill said. "That mountain isn't a volcanic formation. It's likely the geological upthrust is mostly limestone, which means caves we can shelter in until rescue."
"He may not have enough time to wait," Ebav warned her.
"I
know," she replied, "but he can't walk."
"I'll be fine," Shiss ground out through gritted teeth. "Captain's right. We need to move."
"What about the leg?" I asked. "Do we try to straighten it, or leave it?"
I looked to Ebav for an answer, and he looked to Shiss. The wounded Andorian shivered slightly.
"Straighten it," Shiss said, with the air of a man sentencing himself to death.
———X==X==X———
We didn't make it far before another storm hit. Ebav and I were trading off on carrying Shiss, since Alicia only had one usable hand; I'd have done it alone, but my back and shoulder were still injured. The rising storm and fading light reduced visibility to nearly zero, even with our lamps, forcing us to take what little shelter we could and settle in for the night.
After 'dinner', Ebav and I did our best to tend to the wounds on Shiss' back. We were able to get most of the splinters out, but we didn't have disinfectant to treat the wounds, or even bandages to cover them, and that was a serious problem. Andoria was an ice planet, which meant few microorganisms survived on the surface; pre-spaceflight, injured Andorians could simply pack their wounds with snow. Their immune system was robust enough to fight off most communicable diseases—arguably more so than humans, given the way we got sick from exposure to weather they'd consider 'mild'—but they relied on their skin for defense against infection, and Shiss had a
lot of broken skin.
Under his direction, I shorted the power cell from his tricorder and used it to cauterize the scrapes and punctures. It was the best we could do.
———X==X==X———
The storm quieted down a bit overnight, but it was raging again by dawn—such as it was, given the continuing cloud cover. Down six ration cubes, we peered out from under our rock into the dim half-light and tried to decide what to do.
"We're going too slowly," Ebav said. He'd taken to pacing at the edge of the shelter, a hollow too shallow to call a cave in the side of a hill, and his nervous energy wasn't helping.
"I know," Merrill agreed. "We may not be able to salvage anything after all. But the math is sound: we'll be found in about seven days."
Seven days was optimistic, but I didn't correct her estimate.
"We don't
have seven days!"
"Our food–"
"I'm not talking about
food, you
f'thoss!" he snapped. "He'll be long dead by the time rescue gets here!"
"What's the alternative?" Merrill asked.
"We get moving, obviously."
"Don't be ridiculous! We can't see anything out there!" She lit her lamp and pointed it into the storm to make her point; the wall of rainwater reflected the light like a curtain, blinding us to anything beyond.
"What's the alternative?" Ebav echoed. "Going caving at the mountain? I'm not going to hide under a rock while we wait for him to die! We need to find the transmitter and signal for help!"
"If we go out there, we'll
all be dead long before we find anything worth salvaging," Merrill explained patiently. "Even if we don't slip and break another leg, the wind and rain will kill us soon enough."
"Then
I'll go! I've survived worse weather than this!"
"That's extremely risky," I said, stepping into the argument for the first time. "The interference from the storm means our combadges barely work. We'd be totally out of contact."
"We're not splitting up," Captain Merrill insisted, "even if the combadges worked. Staying together is paramount."
"No,
survival is paramount," Ebav said. "If we're not going to survive together, what's the point of staying together at all?"
"Do you really think you can find anything in that?" she demanded, waving at the raging storm outside.
"It's better than hiding in a cave and waiting to die!" Ebav held Alicia's glare for a moment, then turned to me. "Cassandra—"
"This isn't a democracy!" Merrill said. "We are not going out there!"
"You idiot!" Ebav yelled. "You're killing him! He doesn't have time to wait for a rescue party to stumble over us!"
"We! Cannot! Survive! The! Storm! You know what's going to happen? You're going to walk out there and
disappear, and then we'll only have
two people to share the load–"
"The
load?" he roared, stepping into her face. "You know what
I think would happen? I'd walk out there, and you'd
leave him behind when you followed me, because you've already given up!"
"You take that back!" she screamed. "I am not going to leave anyone behind!
You want to gamble all our lives on a desperate one-in-a-million
prayer that you manage to stumble across a working radio in complete blindness! I won't put everyone's lives at risk just to lessen the risk to one person!"
"Cap… tain's… right…" Shiss mumbled. "I can… last… a week…"
"Be quiet!" Ebav snapped. "You're not going to last a
day at this rate!"
"Ebav!" I said, shocked.
"I'm right!" he shouted as he spun to face me, pointing his finger right at my face. "You
know I'm right!"
Merrill was unmoved. "You have your orders, Cadet!"
"Then this is a mutiny!" Ebav shouted. He reached up and tried to tear the hollow Cadet pip out of his collar, only to be stymied by the tough, tear-resistance fabric.
I grabbed his arm before he could finish. "We don't even know if any of the equipment is still usable, or how far away it is," I reminded him.
"I'd rather risk it all on a long shot than give up!"
"As I thought." Alicia turned her back on him and stalked off as far as our little rock shelter allowed.
Ebav watched her go with tears in his eyes. "You know I'm right," he said. "We need to find the transmitter. It doesn't matter how damaged it is, as long as we can get a signal out."
I shook my head. "You could walk right past the transmitter and never know it."
"We have to try! Sitting here, walking for an hour or two in between storms—it's not going to work! We'll be here for the full week, and you
know he won't last that long."
"Splitting up would be bad enough if we could stay in contact. If you go out there, you're on your own. What happens if you get injured too?"
"Then at least I'll have died
trying!" he yelled. "Why are you agreeing with her? She doesn't see you as anything but a machine!"
"It doesn't matter what she thinks of me," I lied. "We need to stick together—"
"Then stick together! Go on! Enjoy being treated like a slave!" Ebav gave me a hard shove away from Shiss, then carefully put his friend on his shoulders. "I don't trust you two to take care of him," he said when I looked like I might argue.
"I wouldn't abandon him!"
"You already have." He squared his shoulders and turned away.
"Wait!" I yelled. "Ebav, wait!"
He twisted around to glare at me. "Why?"
I pointed at the containers of ration cubes.
———X==X==X———
The moment the storm died down—around an hour before noon—Alicia stormed out of the cave. I grabbed the half-box of Ration Cubes Ebav had left us and headed out as well, only to immediately lose track of her. It wasn't until I'd backtracked back to our shelter that I realized that she'd turned
east, abandoning the shuttle trail completely.
It took me a few minutes to catch up to her, since the rain was still coming down steadily enough to make walking on the slick rocks difficult. "Where's Shiss?" she asked.
"With Ebav," I said simply. "Where are you going?"
She didn't reply.
It didn't take long until we reached the base of the mountain. Captain Merrill scanned the land around us with her tricorder in silence for a few moments before heading off without a word, leading me straight to a crack in the side of a cliff that quickly widened into a large cavern. It was large enough to fit a half-dozen shuttles if we didn't mind scraping them against the walls on the way in, so we were nicely sheltered from the storm that was already picking up again. We ate our allotted ration cubes, and then Captain Merrill assigned me first watch while she slept.
I spent the next two hours staring out at the storm, wondering if I'd ever see the two Andorians again.
My vigil was interrupted by a noise from the back of the cave. I turned around slowly, to see Alicia sitting up, staring at the wall. Curious, I stood up and headed over to see what she was doing. She had her back to me, but from the way she was breathing, I could tell she was crying quietly into her hands.
She must have sensed me hovering nearby. "Here to gloat?" she asked. "Tell me this is all my fault?"
"No…?" I said curiously. "How is this your fault?"
"I didn't listen to you when you said the shuttle was damaged. You were right, I was wrong. That's what you want to hear, right?"
"No, it's not," I said. "I didn't think the problem was significant, either."
"But you would have fixed it," she said. "I
ordered you not to adjust it."
"Yeah, you did, but I could have argued. I
agreed with you. It was a four percent fluctuation—nowhere near enough to crash the shuttle."
Alicia wiped her nose on her sleeve. "Why did it crash, then?"
"It's the storm," I said. "Something in the atmosphere interacts with subspace in a way I've never heard of. Driving an old shuttle like a Class 2 through a disturbance like that is like pouring gravel into an air intake. We went right through a disturbance, and it chewed up the impulse thrusters."
"My fault," Alicia muttered. "Shiss tried to explain the weather thing to me, but I wasn't listening. I didn't listen to him. I didn't listen to you. I drove Ebav away." She had to pause and wipe her nose again. "Why are you even here, Twelve?" she asked. "You could have followed them."
"Someone needed to stay with you," I said, biting back my annoyance at her
still calling me 'Twelve'. "You forgot your rations."
"Rations?" she snapped, twisting around to face me. "Rations? You came with me to make sure I had
food?" She was seething now, glaring at me through her tears. "Why do you care?"
"Because it's what crewmates should do for one another," I said, "no matter how we feel about each other." I hesitated, then said, "I looked you up, the first day we met."
"And?" she demanded.
"And I found your parents' documents, as well." I didn't have the
get better perk, but I could almost remember what it felt like, to have the right words to say, and I tried to channel that feeling as much as I could. "I can't understand what you went through. I've never had to face that kind of loss. I could say that I'm sorry, call it terrible and unfair and all those things, but I'm sure you've heard it all from people you like a lot more than you like me.
"I guess all I can really do is say that I understand why you wouldn't talk to me. I don't like it—in fact, it was awful—but I don't hate you for it." I could hardly hold it against her when I should have just
not imported as a former cog in a genocidal war machine.
The olive branch didn't work; she gave me the cold shoulder and turned back to the wall. The perk had been more than just words; it imparted a bias towards recovery and mental wellness. Without it, I was just running my mouth.
To my surprise, however, Alicia wasn't done talking. "The Borg took everything from me," she whispered, more to herself than me. "My parents. My home. Everything except my life… and they should have taken that, too."
The shift to self-loathing was jarring. "What?"
"I'm a failure. I'm supposed to be in charge, but I ruined everything. Now someone's going to die because of my mistakes."
"The situation isn't that bad, Captain," I said, subtly emphasizing the title. "You made the decisions you thought were best—"
"Best?
Best? I wasn't thinking about what was
best, I just wanted this mission to be over. I wanted to get back to the academy and away from you. Because you're one of
them, Twelve. You'll
always be Borg, no matter how much you lie to everyone else."
"You've made your opinion of me very clear," I said sharply. "You made it clear the first day we met—and you're wrong. I am not a drone!
"You blame yourself for ignoring my warning, but I could have disagreed. I could have argued, told Ebav not to take off until I'd inspected the engine. A drone might do what it's told, but I have free will, damn it! I thought. I chose. I came to the same conclusion you did: a four percent fluctuation was a minor issue that did not warrant immediate action. Besides, it's not clear that fixing the engine would have prevented the crash, anyway! They were damaged on the way
up, not the way
down."
"I still ignored the problem," she said. "If I'd remembered Shiss describing the subspace disruptions in the cloud layer, I would have realized that we needed to avoid the intense storms."
"I had the same information," I said. "I should have realized how badly the storms were affecting the engines. If I hadn't blown up an engine, we could have crash landed, rather than just crashing."
"After we crashed, I allowed Shiss to injure himself and drove Ebav away," she countered. "Now we're separated, he's going to die, and it's
my fault."
"He's not going to die," I said. "We're only fifty klicks out of the mission area. They'll find us—"
"In a week? We don't have a week!" she snapped. "We took the same differential xenophysiology class! He's not going to last that long."
"You don't know that.
Tehran might start looking for us early if someone wonders why we aren't transmitting. The wrecked shuttle might be visible on orbital sensors. Maybe enough telemetry got through the storm to point them in the right direction." It was a long shot, but sometimes hope was all you had to go on. "I
know things are bad, but if you give up, our chances go from slim to none."
"What chances?" Alicia snapped. "I had a plan. We find our emergency supplies, food, medicine, the transmitter,
anything we can use to survive. Then Shiss fell, and I panicked. With the storms, on half rations, sick from exposure and carrying a wounded man… it was too much. Too many things stacked against us.
"I thought… it doesn't matter what I thought. What we
got was somewhere to die in peace."
"We're not going to die–"
"Well maybe I
should! This is all my fault. At least if I was the one to die, they wouldn't be able to court-martial me afterward!" She covered her face with her hands and whined, "Leave me alone."
She'd left the food behind because she'd been
looking for 'somewhere to die in peace'.
Damn it! I'd trained for a lot of things, but trying to help someone out of a mental breakdown wasn't one of them.
"Get some sleep, Captain," I said weakly. "You'll need your strength."
"Go away, Twelve."
I went.
Back outside the storm was growing worse, the rain getting heavier and sideways-er. After another hour by my internal clock, Captain Merrill gave up on sleep and relieved me from my watch. She didn't move from the back of the cave, and it wasn't really any less comfortable where I was now, so I simply lay down at the entrance and went to sleep.
———X==X==X———
I woke up a couple hours later to a particularly loud thunderclap, and sat up slowly, looking around the cave. Alicia was snoring softly in the corner behind me, so I sat in the dark and listened as the wind finally began to lessen in strength. Another two hours passed before the snoring stopped, and I heard her stir.
"Good morning," I said, not really meaning it in any sense. She didn't reply. "Are you well, Captain?"
"Don't call me Captain," she said. "I'm not a Captain. I'm just a cadet who couldn't keep her head on her shoulders when things got bad."
"You were the first to recover," I argued. "You found us food. You kept us on track, gave us orders. That woman I saw after the crash, that wasn't Alicia, the moody cadet who never talks to me. That was Captain Merrill, the officer who was going to get us home alive."
"And a fat lot of good she did, right?" Alicia countered. "So much for the Psych Test."
"Hm?"
"Don't tell me they didn't give you the stupid Psych Test," she said.
"They did–"
"I bet you passed with flying colors."
"I barely passed at all." I couldn't see much, since neither of us had our flashlights out, but I could hear her stirring at the back of the cave, and the shadows moved in a way that made me think she'd turned to face me. From her point of view, I'd have been a spot of blackness silhouetted against the slightly lighter blackness outside the cave.
"It was the Borg," she said. "Everyone around me was worried about what they were going to face. It's supposed to be your greatest fear, and sometimes it's hard to know what that is, but I knew. It wasn't even a question. It was going to be the Borg."
I bit back a reply. Talking about the Psych Test was… taboo was probably a good word for it. A shared experience everyone had and never mentioned.
"You said you looked up my records," she continued. "Did you know I was on board?"
"On board…?" I asked.
"I can barely remember my mother," she said, "but I remember… they had the children leave. We all had to beam down to ESD. My mother promised that it would only be for a few days. That she'd come back." She paused, her voice thick with emotion. "She didn't. None of them did.
"I grew up with my father on board the
Sacramento. I listened as people discussed the Borg, the…
things that had killed my mother. Then, one day… I was ten, I think. The ship went to red alert. We had to go back to our quarters, like in the drills. Not fast enough. The ship started rocking and jerking and I knew we were fighting. Then I saw them. They were
there, on the ship with me, and I… I ran. I found the nearest hiding place and locked the door behind me, for all the good that would have done. Everything kept shaking for a while, and then the lights and gravity turned off, and I floated there in the dark for twenty minutes before a rescue vessel beamed me out.
"I already knew my father was dead. If he was still alive, the ship would have still been fighting.
"The Borg killed my parents, chased me through the halls of my home, and then they destroyed that, too."
I was speechless. Alicia hadn't just lost her parents to the Borg, she'd had two different ships—
homes—shot out from under her. I had no words to offer for the sheer level of horrible that was, so my brain jumped ship and drew a connection to the man who'd survived both atomic bombs at the end of World War II.
"For the test, the proctors put me in a holodeck simulation of the boarding action that took the
Madrid. They didn't even need to fake a real crisis, the way I heard they do for some people. Just putting me in a holodeck and having me run the program was enough."
"You succeeded," I pointed out.
"Barely. I could keep it together fine while I was organizing survivors, tending to the wounded, planning our route to engineering to scuttle the warp core… I managed all of that. But when I actually had a drone in front of me…" Her shiver wasn't just from the cold. "Was it the same for you?" she asked. "Is that what you're scared of? Being taken back into the Collective?"
"No," I said. "Maybe it's because I don't remember any of it. I know I was in the Collective, but only because of these." I tapped the implant over my eye. "So I know I was Borg, and I'm scared of losing the life I have, but it's not my greatest fear."
"What is, then?" she asked bitterly. "What's your big fear? What'd they show you, Twelve?"
I turned my head to look out at the rain, not that I could see much of anything anyway. "A man asked me to follow him, then shoved me into a room at gunpoint," I said hollowly. "They showed me a video of a Borg drone killing eight people."
"And?" Alicia demanded.
"It was me." I turned my head back towards the Alicia-shaped patch of shadow I could barely distinguish from the rest of the cave. "That's my greatest fear, Alicia. I'm scared of the Collective taking me back, but not because of what happens to me. I'm scared that I'll be the one to kill someone else."
"That was the test?" she asked. "They just showed you a video?"
"No, there was more. One of the…
actors," I said bitterly, "told me that I'd killed his brother. That he wanted me to pay for what I'd done. He had a phaser in his hand, and he wanted to kill me."
There was a long pause before Alicia finally asked, "What did you do?"
"I told him that it wouldn't bring his brother back, and it wouldn't fill the hole his brother left behind…" I paused dramatically, then added, "…and that if he still wanted to do it, I wouldn't stop him."
"And that
worked?"
"I passed. Barely." I gave a bitter laugh. "I thought about it a lot, trying to figure out how I could have handled it better—what they
wanted me to do, what they were grading me against—and I think I finally figured it out. They weren't testing my ability to keep my cool and not lash out. They were testing me to see if I
could lash out, or if I was too much of a pacifist to act when I needed to."
Alicia thought about that. "That's a really weird test," she said. "Is that why you slapped the PADD out of my hand?"
"Yeah."
"Huh."
When she didn't say anything else, I ventured, "I know it probably sounds hollow, and I'm sure you've heard it before, but I'm sorry about… well, all of it, really. I wish I had more to offer than just sympathy…"
"Yeah, I've heard it before," she grumbled. "How it's so awful, unfortunate, unfair… you know what's unfair? Having to deal with
you. Going to the practice lab and seeing
you. Coming back to my room and seeing
you. It's not bad enough that I lost my parents, now I'm stuck with a constant reminder of how they died. How am I supposed to get along with the people who killed them?"
I was tempted to say something like, 'they got me too!' My history would make me as much a victim as anyone. Whoever Cassandra Rhodes had been before being assimilated was just as dead as any of the Collective's other victims… but Cassandra Rhodes hadn't
been anyone.
But Cassandra Rhodes was someone
now, and that someone was sick of being abused.
Whatever culpability I may have for this mess, the fact is she would treat any other ex-Borg cadet just as poorly. Forget Cassandra Rhodes; Alicia's attitude was unacceptable on general principle.
"You want to talk about being
unfair, Alicia?" I asked. "How fair is it that you never once tried to see me as a person? How fair is it that you've managed to treat me badly enough in the last week that I miss the times you acted like I didn't exist? How fair is it that every time you see me,
you remind
me that I'm different—" I tripped over my tongue as the phrase 'in ways I never asked for' almost made a liar of me.
After a deep, calming breath, I tried something more conciliatory. "I'm sorry you lost your parents. I'm sorry I remind you of how and why. But it's not my fault. It's not any of our faults! We were all
lost at some point—colonists, or Starfleet officers, or just in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Surprisingly, she responded. "Which were you?"
No one. "I have no idea. No memories."
"So whoever you were is dead, too," she muttered.
"I… prefer not to think of it that way."
"But that was your point, wasn't it? That the Borg hurt you, too?" Alicia huffed. "Of course, the difference is… no, I guess your family didn't really 'get you back', did they?"
"By the time I was disconnected, I didn't have any family left."
"Another orphan, then," she said miserably. "Is it better or worse to not remember them, do you think?"
"Better," I answered without hesitation.
"Why?"
"Because you're my other data point."
"You…!" Alicia bit back whatever she was going to say, then admitted, "That's… that's fair." There was a moment's pause, then she asked, "Can I ask you a question?"
"Sure."
"What do you see when you look in the mirror? Be honest. What do you think when you see your… face thing?"
Honest, eh? "I just see myself," I said. "I know a lot of former Borg hate their implants—or hate the way people react to their implants—but I don't hate mine."
"Probably because you don't remember anything else," she grumbled. "Indifference? That's it?"
"Not… quite," I admitted. "If I'm honest, before I had to deal with how they marked me, I liked them."
Alicia made a noise that probably signaled either doubt or disgust.
"Can I ask
you a question?" I asked.
"Knock yourself out."
"What do
you see when you look at me? Do you see a Borg, or just a freak, or what?"
She took long enough to respond that I'd started to think I wasn't going to get an answer. "I saw the monster I used to have nightmares about," she said. "I saw… a zombie, pretending to be alive. Lifeless, shambling, unfeeling. Freakish. Dangerous."
'Saw', she said. "And now?"
"Annoying," she said immediately.
I rolled my eyes—not that we could see each other—and turned my attention back to the rain outside.
"You know," Alicia added, "when you slapped the PADD out of my hand… that was the first time I'd seen you actually do something
human."
I had no idea how to respond to that, so I didn't.
"You were always so… robotic," she continued. "You were never happy, or angry, or anything."
"I prefer 'professional'," I said, "and how would you know if I was happy or angry about anything? You never engaged me. I tried, I
really tried, but you weren't willing to take the first step towards any sort of counseling. If I seemed 'robotic', it was because stiff politeness was the least offensive way to behave around you."
It must have been Alicia's turn to be lost for words, since her only response was a long-delayed, "Oh."
For a couple minutes, only the sound of the storm filled the cave.
Eventually, I broke the silence. "If the pattern holds, the next lull in the storm should be a long one."
"You want to find the others." It wasn't a question.
"You said yourself we shouldn't split up."
"I know," she grumbled. "I guess we've got our work cut out for us."
———X==X==X———
It was better than merely drizzling; just like the day after the storm we'd been here to survey, we got a few hours of clear skies and calm air shortly after dawn. We made the most of it, hurrying back to where we'd parted ways with the others, and then it was more hiking through underbrush that was already beginning to recover from Ebav's passage. The flora here seemed to treat their branches as ablative, creating fragile, hollow structures they could replace in hours.
If I'd made that observation a few days earlier, Shiss might have avoided his fall.
I told my theory on the plant life to Alicia, along with anything else I could think of to say, trying to keep her mind off the situation itself.
"This whole planet reminds me of an old fantasy novel I read," I said as we ambled down the center of another 'scrape'. "It took place on a planet where there were these hurricanes every few days, always going from east to west. The only place in the entire world with an earth-like biosphere was the westernmost part of the continent, where the storms were weakest; everywhere else looked more like this."
She didn't bother to comment on my rambling.
The rain started up again soon enough, reducing visibility and slowing us down, but we were gaining. We could see by the trampled foliage where Ebav had left the trail, only to return a dozen paces further down. In contrast, we were going in a straight line along the scar the shuttle had left in the jungle, making up distance that way. I only hoped we were gaining fast enough to find them before we had to look for shelter again.
It wasn't that easy, unfortunately. The storm picked up in earnest shortly before noon, so we camped out under a fallen tree and popped open our box of rations. "We're going to find the others, and then the transmitter," I said confidently. "Eat up." She didn't contradict me, and we enjoyed an entire ration cube each before resuming our journey despite the continuing downpour. At some point, our journey had become exactly the Hail Mary effort Ebav had wanted: we weren't worried about running out of food or falling sick from the damp when we were already staking everything on an attempt to get Shiss back alive.
Alicia wasn't speaking to me, but she was still alert; she was the one who spotted Ebav's signal above the treeline to our left. "Look there," she said, pointing to a scrap of fabric that had caught on a tree branch.
"Debris?" I asked.
"It's tied to the branch," she said. "Standard shipman's knot." I looked again and realized she was right.
It was a flag.
"Ebav!" I yelled. "Ebav! Are you here?" There was no answer; we were too far away for my voice to carry through the ongoing storm. "Ebav? Shiss?" I kept yelling as we crashed through the underbrush, heading towards the flag like our lives depended on it. They very well might.
We were still a hundred meters from the flag when we finally got an answer. "Rhodes?" Ebav yelled. "Over here! We found the transmitter!"
"You found the transmitter?" Alicia called back. "Is it intact? Does it work?"
"Captain?" he asked, clearly surprised.
"Is it intact?" Alicia repeated.
"It's all in one piece, but it's damaged. I can't fix it."
"Let me see it!"
We followed the sound of his voice to his 'camp', where Shiss lay in the nook of a tree. The poor guy looked like death, and Ebav wasn't looking so hot either after spending two days in the storm, but I had eyes only for the transmitter.
Claiming it was in once piece was generous. It had suffered badly from the crash, and the casing was so bent that the hinges no longer worked. I had to pry the panel off with sheer brute strength before we could get to work, and no sooner had I done so than Alicia pushed me out of the way to see for herself.
She reached into the case with her working hand and picked bits out one by one, listing them as she went. "Control unit's broken. Signal attenuation compensator's toast. Waveform modulator's shot. Subspace encoder's busted. Even the energy inverter's gone." The internals were gutted, the broken fragments cluttering up the inside of the case. The deeper she dug, the smaller the pieces were; soon, she was pulling out shattered components by the handful. By the time she was done, the casing was basically hollow. "It's totally wrecked," she said, despair creeping into her voice. "There's no fixing this."
"'Fix' may not be the right term for this project," I said, "but I think I can build a
new transmitter with the parts." It was going to be a shoddy, jury-rigged piece of kludge, but I wasn't being graded on good engineering practices.
Alicia looked like she wanted to argue, but she just sighed and moved over to let me at the pile of scrap.
As it turned out, I couldn't build the new transmitter with just the intact parts from the transceiver, but I didn't need to. Ebav had stumbled across a piece of debris that Alicia recognized from his description as being the Type-11's computer core, and that provided the last few bits I needed. The lights went on. "I've got it!" I yelled. "We're transmitting!"
"Transmitting what?" Alicia asked.
"Uh… 'One'," I said, enthusiasm dimming slightly. "The internal systems were wrecked; I more or less wired the power supply straight to the antenna. But they should be able to see our signal. We're basically shining a light straight into space."
"Can you give me control?"
"All I've got is this switch, here," I said, pointing to the heavy 'MAIN POWER' toggle switch on the case. I moved aside to let her at it, and she began to toggle the switch back and forth. Flick–Flick–Flick. Flick. Flick. Flick. Flick–Flick–Flick.
It was Morse code—SOS—a solution I should have thought of myself. Maybe I would have if I hadn't been focusing on the engineering side of the problem. It didn't matter.
She repeated the message three times before she stopped transmitting and broke out in laughter. "What is it?" Ebav asked. "What's so funny?" Alicia just pointed to the signal light on the device, continuing to laugh.
The signal light was blinking back, flickering between Green and Yellow in the same pattern. The
Tehran was modulating their signal pings. They heard us.
"We did it!" she yelled. "They're coming for us!" Alicia forgot herself completely, grabbing Ebav in a fierce hug and then doing the same to me. "We're going to be okay, Cassandra! We did it!"
———X==X==X———
Shiss survived and made a full recovery, though it was a close thing. The shuttle was eventually recovered and towed back into orbit to preserve the local ecosystem. Most of the debris was recovered as well, for the same reason, and what remained was deemed too small to matter.
I took responsibility. I'd failed my duty as the engineer; if I had stopped and
thought about why a perfectly functioning shuttle had managed to pick up an engine stutter effectively overnight, we'd have been back on the
Tehran without issues. I'd then doubled down on fucking up when my attempt to correct for my mistake had made the situation significantly worse. Regardless of what had happened after the crash, it was my fault we had crashed in the first place, and I expected Alicia to say the same.
I didn't think I'd be ejected from the Academy for it, or even censured for it, but I wasn't expecting this course to go down in my record as anything but an abject failure.
We each received a passing grade, and none of us were punished for wrecking a shuttle and almost getting ourselves killed. It was almost enough to make me suspect that Shiss had been right about it being part of the test… but on the other hand, if they'd been observing us directly after the crash—or, hell, if they'd seen us
before the crash—we'd have all failed. Our conduct in the days between the crash and rescue had been dismal; if not for the fact that we'd managed an eleventh hour bonding experience, that disaster could have ended with one or more dead cadets.
The reality was that the interference, and the complete destruction of the shuttle's computer bank—courtesy of many,
many lightning strikes—meant there were no logs of our mistakes, and we were all too busy accepting blame to point fingers at each other. Without knowing the details of our misadventure, the situation looked like this: a freak accident stranded four cadets on an island, and within a few days they rallied together and built a radio from scrap to call for help for their injured crewmate. From that angle, without knowing about any of the intervening drama, we almost looked competent.
While it was hardly the only 'incident' during my time at the Academy, nothing else ever came close to the clusterfuck that was my first Practical Exercise, for which I was extremely grateful.
———X==X==X———
