They built the trap out of garbage.
Bell's dead communicator provided the signal.
The broken phaser provided power.
The still's thermal element provided heat.
Utility cord became a release line.
Two ration containers became reflectors.
A blanket became movement.
Sato looked at the collection spread across the stone.
“This is ridiculous.”
Ox nodded.
“Yep.”
“Good.”
She started wiring.
The plan was not to kill anything.
They did not know what the enemy was. They did not know whether it could be killed. They did not know whether killing one would bring ten more.
They knew three things.
It responded to transmissions.
It reacted violently to movement.
It had avoided open flame.
That was enough to try something.
Maybe.
The word had become part of the unit.
* * *
They moved Kane before sunrise.
The basin narrowed at its western edge into a cut between two ridges. Beyond it, according to four minutes of tricorder mapping, the ground descended toward the original shuttle approach corridor.
If Starbase searched, that corridor was where rescue would begin.
If the enemy understood that too, it was where they would be waiting.
Ox did not mention that second part.
He did not need to.
Bell said it for him.
“They'll expect us to head toward the shuttle route.”
Mbeki adjusted his grip on Kane's litter.
“So we don't?”
Kessler looked around the barren basin.
“What else do we have?”
Sato answered before Ox could.
“A transmitter, heat source, moving target and two ridges.”
She looked at Ox.
“That's what we have.”
Ox grinned.
“Yep.”
They left the trap in the eastern basin.
Duran rigged the blanket between two lengths of cord so the wind would jerk it upright when Bell released the line.
Sato connected the communicator to pulse at maximum output.
Mbeki arranged the ration reflectors around the thermal element to throw a larger heat signature.
It looked terrible.
Ox liked it.
They moved west.
* * *
The first enemy pulse came twenty-three minutes later.
Far behind them.
Then another.
Bell released the cord.
The blanket snapped upright in the wind.
Three pale flashes struck the eastern ridge.
Sato activated the transmitter remotely.
Static burst from Bell's communicator.
The forest behind them erupted with answering fire.
Ox listened.
“One.”
Another flash.
“Two.”
Then two nearly together from different angles.
“Three. Maybe four.”
Mbeki looked at him.
“You're counting weapons.”
“Counting something.”
The thermal element overloaded.
A bright orange flare climbed above the basin.
The firing shifted toward it.
“Now,” Ox said.
They moved.
Kane bounced on the litter and made one low sound through his teeth.
Lena stayed beside him.
“Sorry.”
“Don't be.”
His eyes opened.
“Keep up.”
Even half-dead, he sounded annoyed that anyone might slow down on his account.
They reached the western cut.
A shape stepped onto the ridge above them.
Mbeki saw it first.
“Contact!”
The pale weapon turned.
Kessler fired.
His shot struck stone below the shape.
The enemy moved sideways.
Ox had been waiting for that.
“Bell!”
Bell fired not at the enemy but at the rock shelf above it.
The focusing crystal from the broken phaser had been installed in his weapon. The beam held.
Stone cracked.
Mbeki fired into the same fracture.
The shelf collapsed.
Dust filled the cut.
“Go!”
They ran through it.
Nobody waited to see whether they had hit anything.
* * *
The last kilometer was the worst.
Kane stopped responding.
Duran's burn began bleeding.
Kessler stumbled twice.
Their water was gone.
The surviving tricorder dropped below six percent power.
Sato looked at the display.
“There's a rise ahead. If we get to the top, we may have line of sight to the approach corridor.”
Bell said, “Tricorder won't last.”
Sato shut it off.
“Then we don't use it.”
Nobody looked at Ox.
They climbed.
Halfway up, Lena's legs began shaking.
Ox took her side of Kane's litter without comment.
“I can carry him.”
“Yep.”
“Ox.”
“Walk.”
She walked.
At the top they found bare stone and open sky.
Nothing else.
Bell laughed once.
It was not a happy sound.
“Great.”
Mbeki looked behind them.
Movement in the trees.
“Company.”
They had one charged phaser pack between two weapons.
Sato took both phasers.
She removed one pack and split the remaining charge.
“Lower settings.”
Bell nodded.
“Make them think we have more.”
Ox looked at them.
Nobody had asked him.
Good.
Kessler collected fist-sized stones and stacked them along the ridge.
Duran pulled the reflective lining from the last ration container.
“What are you doing?” Lena asked.
“Signal mirror.”
“There isn't any sun.”
Duran looked at the bright gray sky.
“Still reflects.”
Lena helped him flatten it.
The enemy reached the tree line.
Three shapes.
Maybe four.
Still impossible to see clearly.
Bell fired left.
Sato fired right.
The shapes separated.
Kessler threw a stone downslope.
One weapon snapped toward it.
Duran flashed the reflector toward the opposite ridge.
Another shape turned.
They were not winning.
They were buying seconds.
Seconds were something.
Ox heard the shuttle before anyone else.
A low vibration through the rock.
He looked up.
Nothing.
Then the sound grew.
Starfleet engines.
Lena heard it.
Her face changed.
Duran stood and waved the reflector.
A pale pulse struck the ridge near him.
Ox tackled him flat.
The shuttle came over the rise behind them.
Its forward phasers fired once into empty ground between the survivors and the tree line.
A warning.
The shapes vanished.
Just vanished.
Nobody pursued them.
Nobody tried to discover what they were.
The shuttle landed.
Starfleet personnel poured out with medical gear.
For the first time in three days, Ox stopped counting.
* * *
Starbase 11 smelled too clean.
Lena found Ox outside the medical section after Kane had been taken into surgery.
Ox sat on a bench holding a cup of something hot.
“You're leaving?” she asked.
“Enterprise wants me back.”
“You nearly died.”
“Didn't.”
She sat beside him.
For a while neither spoke.
Then she said, “You saved me.”
Ox looked into his cup.
“Everybody saved everybody.”
“You know what I mean.”
He looked at her.
She had known those eyes when they were younger. She had known the way they followed her into rooms, the way he always happened to be available when she needed help, the way hope could disguise itself as friendship when a boy wanted something he was too afraid to ask for plainly.
That boy was gone.
Not dead.
Not bitter.
Just gone.
She said, “I didn't know you could do that.”
“Do what?”
“All of it.”
Ox frowned as though she had asked why he knew how to tie his boots.
“We were in trouble.”
“I know.”
“So we got out.”
She laughed softly.
“You make it sound simple.”
“Wasn't simple.”
“No.”
He took another drink.
She looked at his hands.
Scraped knuckles. Dirt still beneath the nails despite the Starbase wash station.
Her stomach did that strange falling thing again.
She hated that it had taken three terrible days to discover it could.
Ox stood.
“Gotta go.”
“Ox.”
He stopped.
She wanted to say something.
She did not know what.
He smiled.
“We're family. What was I supposed to do?”
Then he put one hand on top of her head and rubbed her hair the way an older brother might torment a little sister.
“Take care of yourself, Lena.”
He walked away.
She sat absolutely still.
Her hair was a mess.
Her heart was worse.
Ox never looked back.
* * *
Kane survived surgery.
Two days later he stood at a viewport in the security section because the doctor had told him not to stand anywhere, which had apparently made standing a matter of principle.
Commander Harlan Pike—not the captain, no relation, and tired of explaining that fact—stood beside him reading the preliminary Academy incident report.
“Venn was a good man,” Pike said.
“Yeah.”
“Cadets speak highly of your Enterprise man.”
Kane said nothing.
Pike lowered the report.
“You had a lot of guts trusting that kid.”
Kane turned his head.
“What?”
“You were half dead. Venn was gone. Six cadets. Unknown hostile force. You put their lives in the hands of an enlisted man who looks like he wandered in from somebody's barn.”
Kane stared at him long enough that Pike began to regret the sentence.
“That kid grew up on a farm dirt fucking poor,” Kane said. “Never had a goddamn thing. If something broke, he fixed what was left. If there wasn't enough, he stretched it. If he didn't have the right tool, he used the wrong one until it became the right one.”
Pike looked through the viewport toward Enterprise.
Kane continued.
“He didn't have to learn how to work without equipment. He learned equipment later.”
Pike glanced at him.
“So you knew he'd take command.”
“No.”
“But you trusted him.”
Kane looked out at the ship.
“I knew he'd make do.”