A/N: Yes, I am working on my original story. :-P But, I have been having fun writing ST, and so I decided to go on with my next idea here too. Hopefully, you will have fun reading it.

I would like to think that this will be an episode-type story. :-) We'll see ...

He was trapped.

The hollow beneath the floorboards of the old, broken-down shed was barely large enough to fit him, even half-starved as he was, but it had seemed his only option. The soldiers had been chasing him for hours, through all of his usual haunts, and there had been no time to find a better hiding place. Caves, trees, abandoned mines—he'd been forced to pass all of them for fear that they'd catch up even in the scant time it would take him to duck in or climb up. He'd run, and they'd followed, and for the last twenty minutes or so he'd been in serious danger of being overtaken. On most days the soldiers would have had no chance—he was young and quick, and they were slow with age and drink—but it had been two days since he'd eaten and his head was spinning, his legs weak.

Then … a miracle. Or what passed for one, here. He tripped over an exposed tree root and tumbled into a hidden gully, crashing painfully against rock and wood until he slammed to an abrupt halt on the dry, tumbled rock. His fingers cracked, his mouth bled, and his ribs screamed with every breath … but they didn't notice. They'd been coming out of the trees, and they didn't see him fall. For a few precious minutes they followed his previous path, and it gave him his chance. He crawled painfully, fervently, and when he finally thought it safe to risk a glance over the edge, he saw the ramshackle stable at the bottom of the rise.

They were returning by then, aware that they had lost him, that they must have passed him somewhere along the way. He scrambled out of the ravine and threw himself down the hill, crashing and rolling, making enough noise to alert half the planet of his whereabouts—if the flight of mock-sparrows startled by his passage didn't do it for him. The soldiers didn't catch up, though. They didn't see him before he dove through the half-rotten door, didn't reach the bottom of the hill until he had slipped painfully beneath a couple of broken floorboards into a washed-out hollow beneath, against the cracked, crumbling foundation. He could just as easily have passed the stable and escaped into the woods.

It was his only hope. His only chance. If they found him now, he had nowhere to go.

The rotten door crumbled beneath a rough blow, the top swinging back to hit the wall and the bottom disintegrating onto the worn wooden planks. The floor crackled beneath the heavy boots, the muffled jumble of swearing and spitting drifted to his ears. His hollow was barely deep enough—the rough boards above him dug into his chest and cheek, splinters gouging through his thin shirt. He could feel the give of the boards as the soldiers searched, rustling with their phaser rifles through piles of damp, rotten hay and shoving the remains of a battered wagon away from the wall. The footsteps moved closer, the voices grew louder. They were still indistinct—his fear blurred the words as much as the wet ground against his head on one side and the wood pressed tight against the other—but he could hear their anger.

They had expected to catch him by now. They wanted to be home, out of the sullen mist and sharp chill and eating their fill.

It was what they worked for, wasn't it? Food and shelter? A rare commodity here—worth, they thought, trading their common decency and sense of justice …

A footstep close by, and the boards bowed against his face. His heart raced.

He was trapped …

"Jim!"

A hand shook him roughly, and a jolt of adrenaline followed a cool hiss against his neck. Jim Kirk startled up from the ground, and the hand around his bicep tightened.

"Whoa there. Slow down, go slow."

Kirk squinted against the headache and his pounding heart into McCoy's worried blue eyes. He sat up slowly, pushing against the hard, dusty ground beneath him, and rubbed at his eyes. "What happened?"

McCoy shook his head and sat back on his heels. "Must have been one of those power surges. We were all knocked clean out."

Kirk looked around them sharply. The other three members of their party, Lieutenants Lincoln and Jersa from Security and Ensign Catrell from Geology, were sprawled nearby, muttering and rubbing at their foreheads and shoulders. Jersa looked to have damaged his wrist in the fall—at least, he held it close against his chest as he knelt by Lincoln, speaking softly—but otherwise everyone seemed fine.

Except, of course, that they had all been rendered unconscious by the planet's as-yet-unstudied energy fluctuations.

"Well." He focused again on McCoy. "I guess now we know they're not completely harmless." The lines around Bones' eyes were pronounced—he was suffering from a headache too, at the very least. The doctor scowled and stood, offering Kirk a hand up.

"Not the way I'd have preferred to gather my research."

"No. Effective, though." Kirk gathered his balance and released McCoy, eyeing the sheer brown cliff that rose above them. There was no way up—they had walked for an hour to find a way around, and they would have to take the same path back. His head throbbed. "How long were we out?"

"Bout thirty minutes, best as I can tell."

Kirk nodded slowly. "All right. We should probably head back to camp, let Spock know what happened. We'll need to implement some sort of safety protocols while we're here."

"Right." McCoy shook his head. "Although how we go about guarding against surges we still can't see coming, I have no idea." He grimaced. "Teach us to go wandering off without any idea what we're getting into."

"Bones." Kirk quirked a grin, wincing as pain lanced through his head. "When has that ever stopped us before?"

"Hmph."

Kirk chuckled and gripped McCoy's arm, then turned toward Ensign Catrell to help her up. "Well, maybe Spock and his people will know something new when we get back." He nodded to Lincoln and Jersa, and hauled Catrell gently to her feet.

The nightmare—if that was what it had been—faded from his mind.