[A.N. Inspired by Karracaz's photomanipulation, 'Untouchable', on deviantArt]
It had been thirty-nine days since they had last seen Spock – one day for every year of his life, Christine thought with a moment of grim humour. Thirty-nine long days… She had felt every one of them. She had become sick of seeing the same planet revolving beneath the ship for all that time. Usually she found such sights tirelessly beautiful, but this time…
This time, Spock was down there somewhere. Azure seas, ghosts of clouds and moss-mottled landmasses aside, the thought of his body somewhere there, a pinpoint amidst dust and boulders, made her gut clench with anxiety and longing. Not a wife or partner – hardly a friend really – she was not allowed to mourn openly – but she kept her fear and grief tight inside, praying every spare moment that he was alive, and safe.
They had pinned down his possible location to five square miles of post-blast terrain somewhere near the epicentre of the planet's last, cataclysmic war. The lingering radiation interfered so badly with the sensors that there was no hope of locating him with any more precision. It was no so much that they had found him, but that he was not anywhere else. Therefore, he was here, or dead.
Christine's face was pinched with worry as she walked through the ruins of Talasin's greatest city.
Let him not be dead… Let him not be dead…
The heat crept around her and enclosed her like the inside of a warp reactor. She ignored it. Her head was protected from the blistering sun with a regulation sunhat, and the tissues of her body were protected from the remnants of radiation with an array of shots. She had an insulated flask of chilled water and a full ration pack at her hip, and she could continue for a good few hours without a break. She would continue. There was no question of that. She would scan what she could with the faltering tricorder, and the rest, her eyes and hands could do.
There were dozens of them searching for the Vulcan. She had volunteered for the first party. They had split up to cover more ground, and she was more than happy to be searching alone, with no one to view her worry but herself.
'Dammit, where is he?' she murmured.
Her voice sounded strange in the hot silence, and she pressed her lips shut again, becoming aware of the tingling in the thin skin as she did. She reached into her pack and applied more radiation-screen to her lips and face.
There was to be no easy rescue. This far into the radiation zone the communicator barely functioned, and using the transporter was out of the question. Whatever it was the Talasees had loaded into their bombs and weapons, Federation technology hated it. Christine speculated over various forms of radiation, perhaps a fine dust of abindum powder mixed into the explosives. It was almost impossible to analyse it because it repelled all attempts. Machines broke down within a few minutes of exposure. The human body, miraculous as always, persisted – but even the tenacity of living things was an open question. There certainly weren't as many insects or animals this far in as there had been on the fringes of the zone.
She moved onward, curving around the ruined walls of what may have once been a home. The grey bricks were crumbling, and she wondered if it was the nature of their makeup, or whether the radiation had made them so friable that they could no longer hold their shape.
She scanned again, looking for any fluctuations in the tricorder readings that might indicate a Vulcan heartbeat, or any biological activity on the level of a higher mammal. Nothing so far. Nothing… Nothing… Noth- Wait!
She stared at the readings. Something. Something perhaps… A tiny blip that indicated some rhythmic activity, somewhere nearby…
She turned around, her eyes unwavering on the tricorder's screen, watching for any increase or decrease. Suddenly she remembered playing hot and cold as a child, searching for sundry trinkets with her friends. The memory caught her and held her for a moment, and the tricorder screen blurred. But this was Spock's life…
Her gaze sharpened again, the present flooding back. The heat of the sun prickled at the back of her neck, and the readings on the tricorder were growing in intensity as she moved slowly forwards. Somewhere… Somewhere…
Warmer… Warmer… The readings held, and then grew again – and then, as she stepped forward, faded a little. She pursed her lips. Colder. It was as if she had walked straight over the top of him.
She stopped, confused. She let her eyes travel over her surroundings. She was in the ruin of a house – she had to be. Yes, there was the doorway, between two crumbled uprights. The sill was nothing more sophisticated than a slab of stone, and it was worn with footfalls that had long since died away. She could trace the lines of walls amongst the rubble, like tracing the median on a graph sprinkled with dots. She pushed a greying heap of rubbish aside and saw what might have been a bowl, smashed and useless, the brightness of the glaze only suggested through years of accrued grime.
There had to be signs of more recent life…
And then she saw it – a shaded space under an indecipherable jumble of remains, where the thick dust and dirt had been pushed aside as if by the side of a foot. And there was some kind of split there, a flat surface and marks in the dust as of fingers prising at the edge.
Christine knelt, swinging the tricorder out of the way, and moved her own fingers along the split in the ground, and felt wood – wood so ingrained with dust that it looked like stone. It was a hatch – and she dug her fingernails in and heaved it up and revealed a black space beneath. Dust trickled into the darkness. The brightness of the sun caught the motes as they fell, but illuminated little else.
She proffered her tricorder towards the hole, and caught the spike in the readings. Still faltering due to the persistence of the radiation around her, but stronger than they had been. It was a heartbeat, definitely, and the pattern was Vulcan.
She held in her joy, allowing herself no more than a flashing smile. Until she set eyes on him it was too soon to celebrate.
She opened her communicator. It was pitch dark down there, and she had not come equipped for darkness. She tried hailing the ship, but all she received was static. She shut the device again, and sighed. She would have to rely on the resources she had.
She turned the tricorder screen to its fullest brightness, and angled it into the hole. It lit up little beyond a yard away, but it did show her a ladder stretching down into impenetrable shadow. Without allowing herself to acknowledge the lingering doubts and fears, she turned around and lowered herself into the darkness.
The silence spread around her, the crackling, oppressive heat suddenly cut off as she slipped into full shade. It was hardly any distance to the bottom. Her feet touched strewn dirt almost as soon as her head was below the level of the trapdoor.
It was cool down here – almost cold compared to the dry heat of the ground above. The pale light from the tricorder showed almost nothing but a floor littered with crumbled, indefinable detritus – evidently the walls were too far away for the light to reflect from them. But with this pallid light that might only be a matter of yards, Christine reasoned.
She turned the tricorder screen towards the ceiling above. There was little more than six inches clearance above her head, and the ceiling looked to be composed of something akin to concrete. She hoped it still had some structural integrity after this many years of lying abandoned, but it had seemed solid when she had walked on the ground above.
She studied the faltering readings on the tricorder again, starting up the same game of hot and cold that she had played on the surface. The readings were stronger down here, and the radiation showed a marked decrease. Perhaps she was exploring some long-abandoned bomb shelter? There was definitely a Vulcan heartbeat now, and signs of expelled carbon-dioxide and other waste gases.
She moved forward slowly, leaving the square of light that marked the trapdoor and pressing into the darkness, using only the faint glow of the screen on the floor to guide her. Fallen rubble cracked and crumbled under her feet, and dust rose and resettled, powdering her sweat-sheened skin with grit. She felt the change in temperature acutely now. It was probably not so cold in actuality, but the contrast to the world above to her damp and overheated body made her shiver.
She continued to walk, playing blind man's buff now, always expecting a low beam or unseen object to cause a trip or fall. Now she was continually checking the readings on the tricorder her eyes were semi-dazzled by the screen and the darkness was darker still when she looked back into it. And then she came to a wall, rough-surfaced and covered in cobweb-like accretions, and she felt sideways, pushing more rubble aside with her feet.
And then she fell in earnest.
Her uncontrolled shriek of alarm echoed from unseen walls, and she scrabbled with her hands as she fell through empty space and then hit hard and slid. She caught at what felt like the hard angles and hard drops of stairs beneath her body. Pain was blossoming in her shins and her ribs where she had hit the ground, and she bit back the urge to cry.
She sat still for a moment, taking inventory, feeling for her flask, her ration pack, her medical bag and tricorder, and then making an internal assessment, rationalising that there was nothing broken and she was no more than shocked and bruised. She caught her breath, brushing hair out of her eyes with a dusty hand, restraining herself from rubbing the tears from her eyes. Dirt in her eyes was the last thing she needed. Her throat and lungs were already dry with dust.
She opened up the tricorder again and studied the screen with shaking fingers, focussing on her mission to deflect her mind from the sharpness of her bruises. The readings were definitely stronger now. She was getting closer. She must be. She stood up, bracing a hand on the wall she felt to her left, taking in a breath of air that was still good, if not entirely fresh, and then began with shaking steps to descend the staircase.
It was a spiral. She noticed that as she began to move, her hand trailing over the curve of the wall. And then she thought of something, and stopped. She recalled the sudden panicked plunge as she had started to fall, apparently through empty space. She looked up, angling the tricorder screen in the same direction. It lit nothing useful, so she turned and made her way up the stairs, her forehead furrowed.
It was as she had thought. The stairs continued up for thirteen steps, and then the treads became crumbled and disjointed and finally nonexistent, nothing but the damaged remains of the central pillar and the smooth outer walls above her head. She had fallen down a hole out of which she had no hope of climbing. Even the pillar seemed to crumble into nothingness a little further up, and she had never been good at shinning up trees and poles as a child, anyway.
She bit her lip into her mouth, her stamina wavering. Deliberately she brought the thought of Spock, and of the strengthening readings on the tricorder, to the front of her mind. She had come here to find him. She would find him, and together they would find a way out.
She began to pick her way downward again, feeling each step with great care, fearful that the concrete-like treads would be broken into a void again at any point. But the further down she stepped the more stable and whole they became. Perhaps the effects of the radiation again, she thought. Perhaps she had found the limits of its reach and it had no power to degrade compounds into base molecules down here. There was certainly less and less radioactivity spiking on the tricorder, and the Vulcan heartbeats were becoming a firm and regular thing, a slow and steady rhythm urging her on to where life obviously persisted.