Scent of Smoke - 1. Act I: Lost Property (part I)

STARDATE 62084

31 January, 2385 CE

Just another planet, or so it appeared from up here. Cursory glances out of the window or across public access data terminals afforded him little useful information about the dusty red world above which they circled. And there had been so many, so many planets since this voyage had begun that Kira, Crewman First Class, Rior to his friends, was beginning to wonder whether his first posting would ever yield anything more interesting.

He shifted in the seat of the shuttle cockpit, looking over his shoulder to inspect the palletised crates in the aft compartment.

A milk run, he thought glumly. Great.

A female voice over the com caught his attention, and he straightened unconsciously, running a quick hand over his close-cropped, mouse-brown hair.

“Clear the bay, all present, clear the bay.”

Rior focussed his attention forward again, catching a couple of deckhands in their tan-coloured utility jumpsuits exiting the shuttle hangar through an airtight door to starboard at the Flight Director’s announcement. Next noticing the bay doors rolling up and open, he cleared his throat and readied his hands on the shuttle’s controls, ready to acknowledge her checklist.

“Shuttle Two/Beltane, clear forward, board is green, you have control.”

“Beltane/Shuttle Two, board is green, speed zero-one-five, I have control.”

Giving a nod and a thumbs-up to his right at the raised booth on the port side of the bay, he saw the Flight Director return his signal, and eased his craft into motion. The type-6 shuttles were neither the fastest, nor the best-looking, nor the most heavily-armed, but they handled well enough, Rior thought, executing an elegant sweep under the starship’s warp nacelles before firing the main impulse engines for the descent burn.

It was with some difficulty that he refrained from indulging in a more ostentatious manoeuvre. The eyes of the Flight Director, not to mention half the bridge crew, would be upon him for this first solo flight, and he had no wish to give them any excuse to revoke his flight status. It was with a resigned and slightly grim smile, therefore, that he turned control over to the autopilot and watched the red-orange orb grow larger in his field of view.

He’d never liked the autopilot. He felt there was something vaguely ominous about putting one’s fate in the ‘hands’ of a machine – one tiny miscalculation and he could burn up on entry, fly into a mountainside or bounce off the atmosphere and hurtle off into space. Some small, rational part of his brain suggested that the odds of such a thing happening were far greater if he himself were in control, but that was easily dismissed. He’d much rather take the blame for such an incident himself than try and pin it on an equipment malfunction.

Nevertheless, he had to admit it was nice to take the load off once in a while. There would be plenty of time for more extravagant flight once the FD had eased up on him somewhat, once he’d logged a few more hours in the cockpit. So rather than dwell on this, he chose to take the time to get a good look at the planet below, the mountains and ravines flicking by revealed in a much greater detail than could ever be conveyed by an orbital scan. So engrossed was he in his unofficial reconnaissance, he barely noticed the perturbations in the air rushing past the shuttle as it dipped below the stratosphere, a fast-moving black smudge across the cloudless, white-orange sky.

Thrust against this sky, directly ahead, were a dozen or so columns, each easily a hundred metres high or more. Built of red stone a darker colour than the surrounding earth, the towers had a decayed, skeletal look to them, as though they were the bones of some giant creature being picked clean by vultures. Nonetheless, each tower had a forbidding majesty about it, their broken facades at once inviting a closer look, and prohibiting it.

Rior found himself repressing an excited shudder as the craft skirted around the ruins of this deserted, ancient city. He’d wished for something more interesting than milk runs – well, it seemed all the excitement was down here today.

*

Lieutenant Will Gates acknowledged the shuttlecraft soaring barely two dozen metres overhead with a wide wave of his arm. His body, lean and muscled from years of Starfleet physical training, turned to follow his gaze as he looked after it, a silver flash reflecting the powerful sun, heading for the base camp a few kilometres to the east. He slung the strap of his phaser rifle more comfortably over his broad shoulder and continued in his report to the starship above.

“Plenty of dust, rocks, tumbleweeds, all that. We’ve had indications of animal habitation around this general area but no sign of intelligent life. It's just like we thought.”

“Alright, Lieutenant,” he heard a male voice in his left ear, the signal routed to the earpiece through the silver-and-gold com badge on his chest. “You’ve got about… three hours of daylight left. Make sure he doesn’t waste them.”

Will grimaced, the expression momentarily disrupting the permanent half-smile etched into his rugged face. “Wish I could promise that sir, Gates out.” He turned again, briefly pausing in his scan of the horizon to look again at the ruined towers, reaching defiantly into the sky like so many admonitory fingers. His gaze at last settled upon a three-foot-deep trench cut into the ground a few paces away, and the male figure crouched within.

The archaeologist, having neglected to give the officer his name, had not exactly endeared himself to Will upon their meeting hours earlier. Indeed, he had spared him little more than a contemptuous glance and the phasers across his shoulder and at his belt a downright withering glare, before moving off and setting about doing… well, whatever it was they did, rooting around in the dirt for hours on end.

Will had little time for the civilian members of the expedition, and the feeling seemed to be mutual, even more so from this guy. The typical ‘poor, undervalued scientist’ mentality they all wore like a crown was ever-present: at meal times in the mess, when they passed in the corridors, and especially during digs. Drawing the short straw on this mission was a certain ticket to hours upon hours of sidelong glances, sullen muttering if he stepped too close, near-death from either heat or drowning (depending on which planet they were investigating) and, above all, boredom. The few times he had bothered to attempt conversation with an archaeologist under his protection, it had either fizzled out into awkward nothingness, or he had been bitten back so hard that the phaser on his belt had seemed awfully tempting.

It was with a slightly morbid fascination, therefore, that he bounced over to the figure in the trench and crouched at the edge, his shadow not entirely accidentally falling across his work area.

“Are we there yet?”

His voice was cheerful, his north-London accent adding a light-heartedness from which he felt extremely far removed to his words.

“No.”

The archaeologist’s response was curt and irritated; it seemed to Will he was more annoyed at having to answer the question than having been asked it. The lieutenant bounced on his haunches for a few moments, then decided to push his luck.

“How about now?”

He saw the man tense, as if holding in a deep breath, but otherwise got no reply. Will hesitated; perhaps he was going too far. His impression of the man was definitely someone who wasn’t comfortable around other people. All the other archaeologists worked in pairs, and chatted about their own things. This one worked alone. While a bit of baiting might be fun now, he thought, it would lead nowhere good in the long run.

He stood and stepped back, and saw the man relax a little. He was about to turn around when he heard a mutter from the trench.

“Maybe…” The other man reached behind and to his right, fumbling absently in a tool box on the edge of the trench, beside which Will had just been kneeling. Will did not ask for a clarification, but instead took a few steps to his right, so he could see the archaeologist–and his work–in profile.

Though he knelt in the dirt of the trench, the man was clearly tall, probably at least as tall as Will himself was at a hundred and ninety centimetres. Of clear northern Caucasian lineage, he had a thick head of dark red hair, though dust from his hands had coated much of it in wide, light brown streaks. His face, furrowed in concentration, was classically handsome with its straight nose, wide but not heavy jaw and slightly hollow cheeks, currently dusted with stubble a lighter red than his hair. Though he could not see them at this angle, Will knew from a few brief corridor encounters and ever-so-slightly lingering shared glances in the mess that the man’s eyes were a deep, Mediterranean blue. He was dressed casually in a close-fitting white shirt and loose tan trousers. Will’s eyes lingered for a moment on the shirt sleeve he could see, how the hem wrapped snugly around the muscle of the man’s upper arm.

Aware of his attention wandering, Will cast his gaze down into the trench once again and focussed on the spot directly before the archaeologist instead. Buried in the dirt, only a couple of millimetres visible above the surface, a large, flat, rectangular something was buried. Before he could wonder for more than a second or two what it was, the other man’s arm cut across his vision, moving a brush across the surface of the object. Will could just make out a serious of cursive inscriptions against the reflective glare of the sun, and moved forward again.

“Please tell me you’ve found something,” he said, without thinking, a mild note of desperation in his voice.

“Maybe,” his charge said, a little more strongly than before. Will saw his right hand move to his chest, and heard the chirp of a com badge, a blue-and-gold Federation sigil on the left breast of his shirt. “Carson to base camp.”

Will was mildly surprised to hear that the other man also hailed from his home island - a lowland Scot, if he read the accent right. He had never before heard him say more than a couple of words at a time. His voice was a shade lighter than Will’s own; if he had been a singer, he’d make the perfect tenor.

Another disembodied voice, this time a woman’s, responded within seconds. “What is it, Nathan?”

“I think I may have something here, hold on a second…” The archaeologist, Nathan, stood and withdrew a palm-sized device from his trouser pocket. He aimed it at the tablet in the ground and Will heard the distinctive blip of an image capture and upload.

“Okay, I got it… not bad.” Will could hear the smile in the woman’s reply. “I’m afraid you’ll have to wait on the translation, we’ve got something of our own here.”

Will caught something of a smile in return on Nathan’s lips as he closed the channel, but his face quickly darkened upon noticing Will’s gaze. Shaking his head visibly and muttering something that Will could not hear, Nathan turned his back on him and returned to his kneeling position above the tablet, leaving no chance for him to use the discovery as an ice-breaker.

The lieutenant shrugged, quickly putting aside his minor disappointment, and trudged off around the dig site, embarking on another patrol of the area that seemed less necessary with each passing minute of inaction.

Some two hours later, during which he had circled the dig site a round dozen times and seen nothing more interesting than a pair of native insects engaged in courtship, Will made his way back to the centre trench where Nathan still sat, brush still in hand, the tablet protruding a couple of inches above the soil. The shadows were long now, the sky dimming from orange to a medium brown, the white sun turned blood-red barely above the horizon.

Hearing the officer’s approach, Nathan glanced up, took note of the sun and jumped to his feet. Will heard a few muttered oaths as the other man began grabbing his tools and dropping them back into the case. He stepped up to the edge of the trench and looked down at the man three feet below, now brushing his hands on his thoroughly dust-covered trousers.

“You need a hand, mate?”

Nathan glanced up irritably. “I’m fine, thanks.” He placed both hands upon the edge of the trench, swung his right foot up to join them and achieved a rather ungainly standing position on the surface, finding himself almost nose-to-nose with Will, who had not stepped back quickly enough. He did so now.

“Sorry,” he grinned. He had meant the apology sincerely, but Nathan merely huffed and moved past him, withdrawing from his pocket the device he had used earlier, aiming it once again at the ground in a wide, sweeping motion.

A little nettled, Will stepped up beside him, trying to get a look at the screen in Nathan’s hand.

“What are you doing?”

Another huff. “Performing a geophysical analysis of the area.”

Will nodded, catching the inside of his left cheek between his teeth and holding it for a moment. “Why?”

“So I have a better idea what’s under here for tomorrow.”

There was danger in the man’s voice now, a quietly seething anger boiling beneath the surface that Will could feel directed at him, like radiation behind woefully insufficient shielding. Feeling both perturbed and a little annoyed himself, Will decided to keep going, keeping his voice polite, casual.

“Why not just use the ship’s sensors when we get back up there?”

His sentence was barely complete when the angry retort came; Nathan was addressing him head-on at last, dislike etched into every feature of his face. “Don’t you ever shut up?”

Will laughed. He had to, for his only other instinct would have been to smack him in the mouth. “Excuse me?”

“Ever since we landed, it’s ‘why this’, ‘why that’, ‘why not do it this way’, ‘I know best cause I'm Starfleet.’” Nathan ran an exasperated, dusty hand through his hair. “I… I don’t even know why your lot are down here, or why you’ve got that thing with you.” He gestured with distaste at the phaser rifle still slung over Will’s shoulder.

Will refrained from hoisting the rifle into an even more obvious position with some difficulty. “Neither do I, because oh, incomprehensibly powerful aliens in uncharted territory would make for a really fun civilian expedition.”

“Extinct aliens,” Nathan retorted, with the air of someone explaining that one plus one equals two. “Aliens who vanished from this planet five thousand years ago, just like they did on all the other planets we’ve been to.”

“Look,” Will held up his hands. “All I’m saying is that Starfleet must sanction any mission in unclaimed space with potential military reward. That means you need an armed escort, I drew the short straw, so here I am, here’s my gun, we’re not going anywhere.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Nathan growled. “Armed escort, what the hell for? Do I need to say it again? We haven’t picked up a trace of intelligent life nor found any other evidence of habitation, past or present. So –”

Will seized his chance as Nathan paused for breath. “Okay, just shut up and listen, alright?” His voice was rather louder than it had been until now, and Nathan looked a little taken aback. His head dipped slightly, apparently unconsciously. “You don’t want me here? Fine. I don’t want to be here. Given the choice my team and I wouldn’t put up with one second of your bitching, but the sad fact is your mission is endorsed and funded by ‘my lot’, so like it or not –”

He stopped talking immediately at the double blip in his ear, and held up a hand to silence Nathan, who looked as though he was recovering his composure. He angled his head to the left and pressed a finger to his earpiece, pinpointing the source of the disturbance. Something had tripped one of the security sensors he had positioned hours ago around the perimeter of the dig site.

“What? What is it?” The bite in Nathan’s voice remained, but it was now tinged with concern rather than anger. Looking past his shoulder, Will felt the familiar cocky grin return to his face in spite of himself.

“You might just need me for this.” And he nodded at a point some hundred metres behind Nathan’s back.

They were being stalked. If the creature had ever had a name, it had been forgotten along with the planet’s previous inhabitants. If he had to call it something, Will would have said lion; but no Earth lion had ever stood as tall as this beast, nor could it have been so perfectly camouflaged against the orange dust of this barren world. Were it not for his sensors, Will had no doubt they wouldn’t have noticed the lion until it was too late.

Nathan’s head whipped around, and upon seeing the lion slinking towards them took several panicked steps backwards, his shoulder blades quickly meeting Will’s chest.

“Easy there, tiger,” Will smirked, unslinging his phaser rifle in one smooth, casual motion. A second double blip, different in tone to the first, rang in his ear, confirming the suspicion that had come to him the moment he’d seen the lion. Without so much as a double-take, he turned on his heel, raised the weapon to his shoulder and discharged it at the second creature that had been attempting to catch them unawares. With a shriek of rapidly-heated air, lightning-bright flashes leapt from the barrel of the rifle, striking the animal between the forelegs. The lion slumped to the ground instantly, unconscious.

Nathan also turned at the sound of weapons fire behind him. Will heard several more muttered oaths, and upon turning back, saw that the archaeologist’s face had blanched at the sight of the second creature. Now who’s unnecessary, he thought, now who’s out of their league? Something of this thought might have shown in his face, for Nathan now gestured to the rifle.

“Give me that.”

“Oh-ho, no!” Will half-laughed as he draw the hand phaser from his belt instead, and pressed it into Nathan’s outstretched palm. “I’ll let you know when you’re ready for the big boys.”

Sparing the officer one last withering look, Nathan took the weapon without comment and turned again to face the first lion. The animal, seeing the fall of its companion, had halted its approach, aware the ambush had failed, and wondering whether the attack was worth the risk. Apparently it decided that it was, for a moment later it reared onto its hind legs, abandoning subtlety and letting out a roar that echoed across the whole plain, before breaking into a swift charge.

Knowing they had less than a minute, Will stepped up behind Nathan again, but the man had already raised his arm, aiming the pistol-sized weapon with a trembling hand. The beam lanced out from the tip as it had the rifle, but missed; Will noted the blast and resultant column of debris had only been a foot or so off target, but nevertheless he grabbed Nathan’s raised wrist with his right hand and held his bicep with his left, his chest pressed close against the other man’s back. The skin was hot beneath his fingers, the muscle twitching with the rush of blood and adrenaline.

“Breathe,” he said in a low voice across Nathan’s right ear. “Breathe…”

The animal had crossed half the distance between them before Will felt his body relax slightly. Looking along Nathan’s arm, he held the man’s aim steady, his brain quickly determining and counting down the seconds until it was upon them.

Twelve… eleven…

“Fire!”

Nathan depressed the trigger with his thumb again, and this time his aim was true. The brilliant orange phaser beam struck the lion in the chest... and did nothing. Cursing his idiocy, Will knew his mistake at once – stun setting, for humanoids, not giant alien lions. There was now no time to grab the device, reset it and shoot it himself, so he went with his only other option.

“Again, fire!”

Six… five…

With a crackle of energy, the weapon discharged for the third time. The animal was mere metres away when it succumbed to the disruptive forces shooting across synapses and overloading neurones. One foreleg caught the other; it tripped over itself and came tumbling towards them. Will grabbed Nathan and shoved him to the side, falling atop him in a classic protective stance as the lion came to a halt exactly where they had just been stood.

It was a moment before the two men, breathing hard, realised it was over. Nathan’s face, staring up at him, was covered in sweat and dust, and Will knew he must look little better. He saw a slightly puzzled expression flit across the archaeologist’s face for a second, before it was replaced by an uncomfortable grimace.

“You can get off now.”

Will’s half-smile twitched. “Yeah, of course.” He rolled off Nathan’s chest and jumped to his feet, offering a hand down, which this time was accepted. Will pulled the other man up into a stand, and did not complain when he allowed their contact to continue.

“So, where were we?” Will’s voice was light again, but there was no desire to gloat about the justification of his presence.

“I think I was about to offer thanks for services rendered, and an apology for services unappreciated.” Nathan was wearing a small smile of his own; the first time Will had seen such an expression directed at him.

“Accepted, on both counts.” He squeezed Nathan’s hand, and shook it, grinning back when he felt the gesture returned. “You know, I never got your name.”

“Nathan Carson, PhD. Nathan, if you like.”

“William Gates, Lieutenant, Starfleet Tactical and Security.”

The handshake continued. “So I should call you…?”

“‘Will’ is fine. Or ‘sir’. Whichever you like.”

“Piss off.” Nathan pulled his hand away, looking disgruntled, but Will could detect that same smile behind his words. He moved off, back towards the trench again, and gathered the remaining tools still scattered around his work area. “Shall we head back, then?”

“Sure, after you.”

Sparing one last glance for the pair of unconscious animals, Nathan trudged eastward, where several pinpricks of light could be seen a few kilometres away. The sun behind them had now dipped beneath the horizon, the sky darkening from brown to deep purple. He’d gone maybe a dozen paces, and Will had just set off after him, when he stopped, holding something towards him. “You’ll probably want this back.”

Will shrugged, smiling at the hand phaser. “Hold on to it. You did okay. For a beginner…”