Latik Kerjna, Drema IV

Pithead, Dilithium Mine Alpha

Day 1

The first thing David Gold saw when he arrived at the battered, broken structures that surrounded the pithead was the burnt-out shape of something that looked as though it could have been a wagon in its recently ended life. One other Dreman remained, trying desperately to put out the fire that had begun in the ramshackle, old shed that covered the top of the mine, the hiss of the water mixing in a disturbing harmony with the flickering of the flames. The dark gray smoke was getting thicker and more acrid by the second.

Beside the wagon was the burnt, crumpled figure of a man in what looked to have once been orange coveralls. He was flat on his back on a white drop cloth. His right arm was to his side, but there was no sign of a left arm to be found. Whoever this poor schlemiel was, that was one hell of a way to die.

That was when he saw the right arm move. He’d seen the last twitches of death in muscles far too often before, the last gasp before letting go. The sight of conscious motion in that arm was all he needed.

Pulling the neckline of his uniform tunic up over his mouth to act as a filter against the smoke, Gold ran toward the motion. Liankataka was on his heels. The burned man’s skin ranged from a sickly burgundy-black to patches of a more normal terracotta red, and the smell of the charred flesh brought back more than a few memories of the Cardassian War. He’d seen people die from far less injury back then. How was this man still alive?

Quickly slapping the combadge on his chest, Gold hoped the modified long-range circuits would get his voice where it needed to go. “Gold to Progress.”

There was no answer.

“Gold to Progress. Come in. Gold to Drema Station.”

Again, there was no answer. He looked to Liankataka and shook his head. “Damn it! I can’t reach my people. The explosion must be interfering somehow.”

The Dreman leader already had a small communications unit in his own hand. “Emergency services are on the way. I’ve asked them to use the tie-line to the station to get through to your ship, Captain.”

Gold wiped a hand across his brow. His eyes felt as though a thousand tiny grains of sand had found his corneas at once. “Tell them to get Pulaski down here. She’s got the best knowledge of how to help your people of anyone we’ve got. If there are any more people down there, you’ll need her.”

Liankataka nodded, dialing his communications unit once again. Giving the requested instruction, he finished the call just in time for the first battery of gawkers to arrive. “By Traiaka, what happened?” came from several voices in the crowd.

A rasp sounded from the man at Gold’s feet. Kneeling down, he got as close as he comfortably could. All he could hear from the man was something that sounded like, “Shurtah.”

“Rest,” Gold said. “Help is coming.”

“What did he say?” Liankataka asked in a voice filled with disbelief.

Raising his eyes to the guardian, Gold said, “It sounded like ‘shurtah.’ ”

The Dreman’s skin flushed to near-pink. “No.” Liankataka turned and walked away from the scene. He ran one long-fingered hand over his face. “We thought we had found every xurta left behind.”

Gold began to put the pieces together. “I take it that’s a bomb?”

Liankataka nodded. “The Exiles used to bury them around any installation they considered important. They can be wired to be pressure-sensitive or even heat-sensitive.”

“And they obviously must have considered the mine important.”

“Yes,” the guardian said. “I am sorry, Captain, but this may change our ability to fulfill our bargain with your government. It may take us years to get the bombs out of the mine. There may not even be a mine left.”

“With all due respect, Guardian, we need to prove there are more in there first. Have your people developed a way to scan for them?”

A strand of garnet hair slipped out of place as he shook his head. “Not without setting them off.”

A short, robustly built Dreman in a white tunic and pants ran over to where they stood, a long, brown box that looked to Gold almost like a toolkit in his hands. “What happened?” he asked.

“Xurta,” Liankataka simply replied. Judging by the shock on the younger Dreman’s features, it was enough.

Fighting the urge to cough that the thickening smoke from the fire triggered in his throat, Gold backed away and allowed the young doctor to kneel by his patient.

Pulling a black and silver stethoscope out of his bag, the doctor quickly stuck the ends in his ears and pressed the plate to one of the less-burned places on the poor man’s chest. “His breathing is shallow, but steady. I don’t see any active bleeders. It looks like the heat from the explosion cauterized the arteries. Eliatriel, can you hear me?”

Gold took a good look at the man’s bloodied and burned features and quickly wished that he hadn’t. The Dreman was lucky to be alive. The idea that the young doctor could have recognized who had once been behind the burned skin, missing nose, and forcibly closed eyes was, to Gold, a mystery. Then again, when he considered the average population of the city, not to mention the recent battles, the overall friendliness of the people he’d encountered thus far, and the general close-knit feeling of community that he’d gotten from the moment he’d beamed to the surface, perhaps it wasn’t that much of a mystery after all.

Another rasp sounded from Eliatriel’s mouth. This one was completely unintelligible from where Gold stood.

“Good. I know it hurts,” the doctor said, still checking over the man’s injuries and unwrapping what looked like clean white cheesecloth to cover the more severe burns. He checked over the hole that had once been Eliatriel’s nose and then draped another cloth bandage over it as well, making sure not to cover the man’s mouth or eyes. “I don’t think cold water’s going to help you here, my friend. We’re going to get you to the hospital very soon, okay? I’ll let the burn healers know you’re coming. They’ll take good care of you, I promise.”

The roar of fire bellowed from the mineshaft opening. The two Dremans who’d been working on putting out the fire backed away, allowing the flames to lick at the remainder of the shed like a child with an ice cream cone. The fire wasn’t going to die until it had consumed it all. Gold jerked his head toward the sight. “Come on,” he said to Liankataka, “they need help.”

The Dreman female stood with her eyes as wide as saucers as she watched the fire blaze. Admittedly, Gold didn’t understand precisely how the dilithium worked, but he knew one thing: dilithium focused energy. Fires gave off energy. If the dilithium did its job, there was no telling what would happen, but he had the distinct feeling it wouldn’t be good. Visions of free-flowing lava picked that moment to take up residence in his mind. They needed to get that fire out sooner rather than later.

His boots began to make a disturbing squelching sound in the mud as he approached. Far more water was staying where they stood than making it to the fire. Gold grabbed the empty bucket from the woman’s hand, trying to usher her attentions to the nearby feeding hose. “Fill this up and then give me the hose,” he said. “Let me help.”

He could see the panic in her eyes as she turned from the fire to him and back several times before it finally registered that he was there to help. She finally grabbed the hose and filled the bucket, handing the hose to him when she was done. It wasn’t an optimal fire hose, but Gold tried his best to make do with it. In between filling the water buckets, he trained the spray on the closest support beam.

The fire was burning white-hot, and Gold thought he felt his eyebrows singe on a couple of occasions, but he kept at it. The spray from the hose was barely powerful enough to reach the fire from where he stood, but he didn’t dare inch forward.

“Is there another bucket?”

“What?” Liankataka was on the left side of the support beam infrastructure, bucket in hand, and the fire roaring between them was loud enough to drown out any creature who wasn’t screaming.

“Another bucket!” Gold yelled. He managed to suppress a cough as the smoke tried to fill his lungs. “This hose isn’t going to last much longer. We need something with more force!”

Almost on cue, a siren sounded in the distance.

“What’s that?” Gold asked, once again raising his voice over the sound of the flames.

“Something with more force!” A panicky, but also somehow prideful smile filled Liankataka’s face.

The ground shifted slightly under Gold’s feet. Forcing the momentary urge to back away from the conflagration into a corner of his mind, he managed to overcome the strong need to be somewhere else and continued trying to fight the fire.

The fire truck—or what passed for it, for when Gold spared a glance at it, he realized he’d seen more advanced firefighting transports in the museums back on Earth—pulled into the small clearing near the pithead and somehow worked around the Dreman doctor who, from what Gold could see, was still trying to stabilize his patient.

Three men disembarked from the transport, all wearing heavier coveralls. Two wore a bright, easily recognizable orange, while the third wore red. The writing across the backs of each man’s uniform suggested their names, but Gold hadn’t had the chance to study the written Dreman language, so he couldn’t be certain. However, he assumed the writing was there for reasons similar to human firefighters back on Earth—identification in the event of catastrophe.

It only took a few seconds for the three men to get the truck set and unroll the water hoses. The man in the red coveralls appeared to be the one in charge. Gold briefly took his eyes off the fire to see where they were, but it was long enough to see him instructing the other two. “Kleera! Take left. Laraka, take right. We need to approach this from both sides, or it’s going to take the mine down.”

Take the mine down? I don’t like the sound of that. Still, he kept to the improvised bucket brigade in an attempt to help the firemen put the fire out. Within seconds, two of the firemen had the hoses pumping water at full-bore against the mine opening. It was helping, but the supports were still being stubborn.

The ground rumbled beneath his feet.

Gold tried desperately to ignore it, but the fire insisted upon keeping him close to the mine entrance. Every now and again, he got a face full of hot spray bouncing back from the streams that the fire hoses were projecting.

Suddenly, the rumbling that he’d been trying to ignore turned into a roar. Gold tried to back away, keeping his hose trained on the fire, but he could only go so far and still be any help.

In the middle of it all, he heard a woman scream and another woman yelling something about a collapse.

Then the ground beneath his feet ceased to exist, and everything turned very, very black.