A HIGH-PITCHED, swooshing scrape whistled from the synthetic rope as La Forge’s carabiner streaked across it. The metal ring rubbed taut against the line with each descending jump he made down the belaying line.

The mountain trembled from a percussive boom, which was muffled but still audible through several hundred meters of rock. Several dozen meters above, a sharp blast resounded and hurled debris into the overcast sky.

His shallow arc pulled him back toward the cliff face. Extending his feet, he bounced into the impact, and pushed off again without losing momentum. His drops were longer and wider than he was accustomed to; Tezwa’s lighter gravity made the rapid descent easier to manage. T’Eama and Braddock were slightly ahead of him one moment, a few meters behind the next, but generally keeping pace on either side of him.

A humid gale blew in on the leading edge of a storm, then another sonorous blast hammered Mount Ranakar from within. Suddenly, and with a deafening thunder-crack of splitting stone, a fissure opened in the cliff face between La Forge and T’Eama.

Heavy chunks and jagged shards of jingle rock rained down around the trio as they quickened their pace, risking longer jumps and free falls to escape the disintegrating cliff face.

La Forge looked down at the swiftly nearing ground, which was now peppered with freshly shattered, razor-sharp broken rock. Bouncing into his last jump, he glanced upward. Several enormous slabs of the cliff face sheared away from the mountain, directly above the strike team.

No time to play it safe. La Forge released the breakaway clasp of his climbing harness and dropped the final six meters. He rolled into the impact, gritting his teeth as he tumbled across the jagged stone debris. T’Eama landed on her feet, with feline agility, and bounded away from the wall in a single graceful leap. Braddock tried to emulate La Forge’s technique, but he landed on a mound of loose stone that sent him sprawling hard onto his side. La Forge heard the bones in Braddock’s left arm break on impact.

Grabbing the stunned security officer by the collar, La Forge tossed him clear and narrowly dodged the massive blocks of shale that smashed down behind him, stinging his neck and the back of his head with tiny pieces of rocky shrapnel.

With T’Eama’s help, Braddock got back on his feet and tenderly cradled his shattered arm. “Let’s go,” La Forge said. “We have to get back to Wathiongo.”

Trudging back through the wiry scrub brush, La Forge palmed the blood from the back of his close-cropped head. Looking over his camouflage jumpsuit, he saw it was badly torn and marred with bloodstains, sweat, and dirt. Braddock was in even worse condition, while T’Eama merely had to brush the dust from her fatigues to look good as new.

As they neared the camouflaged shelter they’d hastily erected for Wathiongo, Data’s voice scratched through the static on La Forge’s headset com. “Bravo Leader to all teams: Bravo Team is clear. All team leaders report in.”

La Forge walked and listened while Peart and Vale checked in. As Taurik confirmed that Echo Team had “achieved its objectives and reached minimum safe distance,” the team reached Wathiongo’s shelter. T’Eama stepped inside and checked on the injured engineer with her tricorder. La Forge didn’t need to wait for her report—the perfunctory manner in which she turned off and holstered her tricorder told him what he needed to know. “This is Piper Leader. Mission complete. We have one KIA.”

“Acknowledged,” Data said.

Braddock, who had been listening in, looked puzzled. “Wasn’t Commander Riker supposed to do the check-in?”

“Yeah,” La Forge said, his voice chilled with a cold, prescient dread. “He was.”