The sound of violent splashing drowned out her screams and for a fraction of a second, his rational mind disconnected and the primal, instinctive areas of his brain engaged. A flash of rage coursed through him as his body turned in the direction of the sound, but his logic quickly prevailed.
He pivoted on his left foot, stooping down to grab the long hyperspanner on the ground and raced in her direction. Her screams turned into angry yelling, and after two long strides, he saw the source of her panic.
A long, serpentine creature had emerged from the water and chased her onto the remains of a decomposing tree. Nyota was typically an agile creature, but her enormous belly skewed her balance, and the oversized boots made the climb up the muddy slope awkward. She struggled mightily, grasping at rotting branches that gave way in her hands.
The animal's long jaws snapped at her legs, catching several teeth in the fabric of her trousers. It pulled her halfway into the water and she pummeled its thick, scaly head with the foot of her free leg while twisting her body to claw at the roots of the stump. The animal's death grip on her leg dragged her further into the pond.
Spock was upon it seconds later, leaping into the water and clubbing its broad head with a backswing from the long, tritanium hyperspanner. Its mouth sprung open, recoiling from the pain of the blind assault. It turned on Spock and after several more sharp, merciless blows from the hyperspanner, and the animal floated dead in the water.
"Are you alright?" he asked, slogging through the water in her direction.
She released her hold on the tree and slid down the mucky embankment into the knee-deep water beside him, gasping through her curses. He held his hand out to steady her and then leapt up onto solid ground and extended his arms to help her up.
"Nyota?"
"I'm fine," she muttered, leaning forward to rest her hands on her knees and catch her breath.
She observed the shreds of fabric hanging below her right calf. She had several superficial cuts to her shin, but had been fortunate that the animal had only managed to grab the clothing.
"Sorry about your pants," she mumbled with a weak laugh, glancing at her dead attacker.
It was a big creature, approximately three meters long from nose to tail, though the tail accounted for most of the body length. It was crudely analogous to a Terran crocodile with a slimmer body, a flatter head, and fearsome, interlocking, five-centimeter long teeth that protruded along the sides of its jaws. It was almost certainly an exclusively aquatic animal due to the rough, gray scales and limbs that more closely resembled flippers than feet.
Its death was regrettable. As a Vulcan, he respected all life and abhorred killing, yet even Vulcans acknowledged limits to pacifist principles and made exceptions for self-defense. The animal was only fighting for its next meal, but Nyota had been fighting for her life.
It was the true, brutal arrangement of nature. He had learned firsthand during the kahs-wan ritual of his adolescence that despite civilization and technology, no one was ever truly exempt from the natural world.
"Let's get back to the pod," he said, eyeing the thick streaks of mud running down the front of her wet clothes.
More splashing erupted from the water to their right. Two more of the animals had arrived and began making short work of the carcass. Nyota made a face.
"How did you fall in?" he asked, noting the meter drop from the embankment to the water.
"I was trying to use the tree for balance but lost my footing," she explained.
"Perhaps next time you need to relieve yourself, you should avoid an area near the water."
"My boyfriend, the genius," she mocked, her voice flat and low. "You know, I wasn't expecting my choice of location to literally try to bite me in the ass."
She glared at him and then clamped her eyes shut, mumbling, "I'm sorry… and thanks."
They marched back to the pod in silence. Nyota stripped off the muddy trousers and sweater and allowed Spock to treat the cuts on her right leg with the dermal regenerator. She put on the last set of clean clothes from his bag and hung the muddy ones to dry, then set to work examining the communication equipment.
He left her to it, logically opting to perform the more physically arduous tasks of inventorying their supplies and establishing a camp. The pod was designed to be converted into a shelter in the event of an emergency landing, and he began stripping away the seat and storage compartments to hollow out the interior.
The end result yielded a shelter 2 meters long by 1.25 meters wide and deep – not quite a coffin, but not far from it for a pregnant human female and a Vulcan who measured 1.95 meters in height. It would be snug, but it would be dry and secure.
He opened the first removable compartment and discovered miscellaneous survival gear. He laid the contents next to the engineering equipment, accounting for a multipurpose hand tool, a small sewing kit, a 5 liter metal can, a low energy hand phaser, a reusable chemiluminescent lamp, a set of ratchet straps, a hatchet, a spool of parachute cord, a package of resealable waterproof bags, surveyor's tape, and a fire striker.
He sealed the pod's computer and tricorder into one of the waterproof bags and set it atop the survival gear.
The second locker was lighter and contained fire resistant blankets, a poncho, a heavy tarp, nylon overshoes, thermal heat packs, a hat, water resistant gloves, radiation goggles, and a snowsuit. These supplies would be useful, given then computer's earlier atmospheric calculations estimated nightly temperatures would fall to approximately negative fifteen degrees Celsius.
The third compartment contained the medical kit and engineering equipment, which meant the fourth and final locker contained the rations. When he cracked the lid, he found an osmotic water purification system with five liters of potable water. Underneath the purifier were the rations, and he was concerned to discover only two days worth of food for a single individual. Per Federation regulations, standard Starfleet escape pods had to provide provisions for seven days per person. The Whipsaw had clearly not been in compliance, but there was no safety officer to take his complaint.
He began to analyze the situation. Once she restored the communication equipment and they could broadcast a distress signal, their chances of being rescued within twenty-four hours were close to one hundred percent. In that case, one day of rations would be sufficient.
Estimating their time to rescue was far more difficult if the communications equipment was beyond repair. The moon occupied a well-traveled region of space, but nothing in the database indicated it possessed anything of economic or scientific importance that would draw many visitors.
He moved to the back of the pod to check the status of her progress.
"Nyota-"
"What?"
She had the transceiver module completely disassembled and was staring disinterestedly at the components.
"Sorry… sorry," she sighed, holding up a sublight signal processor for closer inspection. "I don't know what's wrong. There's some damage to the casing but the internal components are good to go. I can power it on, but I can't send a signal."
"What about the Doppler compensator?"
"It working just fine – the Heisenberg compensator too – but even without it, I should be able to send a short range message. I can't get anything out."
"Have you checked the an-"
"Antenna array?" she snapped, reaching for the transceiver components to begin reassembling them. "I'm not a first year cadet."
"I am merely trying to help troubleshoot the issue."
She gritted her teeth and sighed. "That was the first thing I checked, since it's embedded in the hull and the hull was shredded in the blast. I tested it and it's fine, believe it or not. Every component is working, tested, connected, and ready to go."
"Can you think of any-"
"No."
"Are the power sources stable?"
"Yes."
"Are there alternative power sources you could try?"
"Alternative power sources? Like what? This thing doesn't run on happy thoughts," she sneered.
Heightened sarcasm – another symptom of pregnancy.
"If you are certain the equipment is functioning properly, perhaps there is an external complication you have not considered," he replied, returning to the stack of supplies to collect the tricorder.
"We're in the middle of a swamp," she shrugged. "Doesn't seem like the kind of place to have a high concentration of elements that would interfere with subspace EM radiation, but maybe."
She finished putting the transceiver back together and stood clumsily to look over his shoulder. The results were puzzling.
The tricorder showed the moon's crust had a composition similar to Earth's – primarily oxygen and silicon with trace amounts of iron and aluminum. Like Nyota had hypothesized, there was no natural explanation for the transceiver's inability to broadcast.
"The transceiver is unable to transmit, but can it receive a signal?" he asked.
"I don't know," she admitted. "Do you have a communicator or a PADD?"
He extracted his personal PADD from his duffel bag, and when he attempted to send a signal, the mystery deepened. His PADD had functioned perfectly aboard the Whipsaw, and there was no obvious reason why it was unable to transmit a simple signal to a transceiver that was only three meters away.
"So we can't transmit on subspace and we can't even transmit on the regular EM spectrum," she groaned, covering her face with her hands. "If I didn't know better, I'd say there was a dampening field. But that makes no sense: we're on an uninhabited moon."
"The sensors on the pod were damaged," he reminded her. "We are not certain this moon is uninhabited."
"The database said it was," she argued. "How old was that information?"
"The Federation's last survey of this moon was conducted in 2190, before the Kantare adopted a policy of isolationism."
They looked at each other, and Spock tried to interpret her thoughts in her facial expressions. She was trying to appear calm, but she was worried.
"I suggest we continue to work on the communication equipment," he urged, returning the tricorder and his PADD to the waterproof bag.
Her eyes flicked in his direction. The subtle purse of her lips and squint of her eyes indicated she thought it would be pointless, but much to his surprise, she agreed.
They spent the next five hours brainstorming and theorizing, stopping every so often to analyze some component of the communications equipment. After finding no resolution, they began considering alternative communication strategies in the form optical methods, but Nyota quickly dismissed each. They simply lacked the necessary equipment.
The moon had a short 16.9-hour day, and very soon the sun began to set, casting a steel gray haze over their work. The misty vapor returned, nearly obscuring the ground, and the temperature began to plummet.
"What's there to eat?" she asked, rubbing her stomach.
He had been so focused on solving the immediate problem of communicating a distress signal that he'd overlooked her physical condition. She needed food, water, and rest, particularly after the day's harrowing events, yet he was working her like a newly pinned ensign.
She looked worn, anxious, and exhausted, so he decided against revealing their dire food shortage for the time being.
"Go lie down in the pod," he urged. "I'll secure the equipment."
He expected an argument about being babied, but she offered a weak nod and slumped through the pod's hatch without a word. He packed the radio equipment into two waterproof bags and sealed it in the locker with the engineering and medical supplies.
He reassessed their food stores and began totaling the caloric content of the meager rations. Nyota had increased nutritional demands, but his Vulcan physiology would allow him to function normally without food for three days before he experienced mild physical problems such as dizziness and slower cognitive processing.
Yet it was logical to conclude there was a diminishing return to forgoing sustenance. Nyota needed food, but due to her condition, she also needed help, whether or not she wanted to admit it. She was not weak, but she was vulnerable. It had been logical to sacrifice himself to put her in an escape pod when she had a high probability of rescue, but now that they were stranded here for the foreseeable future, she would need him. Her best chance for survival – and the survival of their child – required him to stay healthy as well.
Tomorrow he would need to begin foraging for food. From his preliminary survey of their surroundings, there did not appear to be much in the way of edible plant life, but the scaly carnivore that attacked Nyota had demonstrated that there were animal life forms. Spock had never eaten animal flesh. He found the idea unsettling, but Surak's teachings made exceptions for killing in order to preserve one's own life.
He extracted a single serving of the nutrient dense emergency rations and a liter of water and sealed the locker. He collected the lamp, blankets, hand phaser, poncho, and snowsuit and met Nyota in the pod.
She was already asleep, so he took the opportunity to stack the supply lockers and secure them with the ratchet straps to deter any curious animals.
She was sitting up and rubbing her eyes when he returned. A deep rumble escaped her belly, causing her to wince.
"Here," he said, offering her the paltry provisions.
Nutrition scientists had spent centuries perfecting emergency rations, always seeking the perfect balance between shelf life and nutrient density, and palatability was often the first variable sacrificed. Nyota had in her possession two small bars, one gray and rich in protein and the other green and packed with carbohydrates.
She took a very cautious, very loud bite and frowned, asking, "Were these designed to break teeth or was that just a happy accident?"
He offered her the water bottle and she managed to choke one down, working her jaw to exhaustion through crunching.
"Aren't you going to eat?" she asked, taking a bite of the second bar.
He did not prefer to lie, but he also did not prefer to have another confrontation with her.
"I ate while I packed the supplies," he said, crouching to begin smoothing the snowsuit over the bare floor of the pod.
The seat had folded out into a stiff bed, but it was barely wide enough for Nyota. Sleeping on interior of the pod's duranium hull would cause rapid loss of body heat through conduction, and he needed a way to insulate himself from the metallic floor. The snowsuit turned out to be a moderately comfortable mattress, so he surrendered it to her and took the hard, retrofitted seat for himself.
He sealed the pod and engaged the atmospheric recycler while she spread out the blankets, and soon they lay down to sleep. She curled her back against his chest and he wrapped his arm around her, taking in the scent of her hair and absorbing the rise and fall of her chest.
He felt a hard push underneath his hand – their child was moving again. A loud exhalation escaped her lips, releasing tension, frustration, and despair. A snicker quickly followed, and she mumbled, "We should be arriving on Risa right about now."
"We were not scheduled to arrive for another hour," he replied.
"Yet here we are," she sighed.
Several seconds passed before she said, "Spock?"
"Yes, Nyota?"
"I'm so thankful for you."
Her voice cracked and she uttered a painful sigh.
"I am grateful for you also," he admitted.
"I'm so sorry I've been so horrible," she sniffed.
"You have apologized many times, and each time I have told you that you have nothing for which to apologize. I realize this had been very difficult for you."
He felt her shudder and he melded his mind to hers again. As his hand traveled across her cheek, it encountered a wet stream of tears. Her mind was in a state of complete disarray. She wasn't just afraid: she was terrified. Eventually she fell into a fitful sleep in his arms but he lie awake, struggling to center his focus.
By Dr. McCoy's estimation, she was not due for another three weeks.
She shifted in her sleep and he felt the child stirring within her belly once again and he paused at the thought that an estimation was just that – an estimate.