When the Winter Comes

By

Pat Foley

Chapter 7

The battle and bombardment went on for days.

But then, finally, it did stop.

It was hard to believe at first. Hour after hour, day after day we had sat, straining our senses, listening for sounds, smelling smoke when fires got close, feeling the vibrations of explosions as things impacted with the earth, and as the ships fired on each other in the sky, while the battle went on. And on. And on.

Sarek sat in the same position, barely moving. Meditating, at least part of the time. I was sunk in a silence of my own. But after a while I recognized a quality to his mood. That it was worse than mine.

"It's not your fault," I said, in a lull between bombings.

He raised his head from his steepled fingers and looked at me, as if I'd spoken in a foreign tongue.

Of course, I often forget. English is a foreign tongue to him.

"It's not your doing," I said in Vulcanur.

"My doing," He brought his hands down from his meditative position as if eager to discuss it. "Certainly blame must be affixed to whoever started the hostilities," he said. "But I was responsible for finding a solution."

"You did find a solution," I insisted. "You brought them to the table. You weren't responsible for terrorists hijacking the peace agreement."

Sarek tilted his head, a sign he didn't agree. "I am reviewing the negotiation discussions and trying to determine if I could have worked harder with those members--"

"Their government recalled them!"

"Before they were recalled. Or even after. There is no statute of limitations on seeking a resolution with all parties."

I shook my head in frustration. "You certainly can't be expected to work with delegates after they're recalled by their own government for intractability. You worked with those people for twenty hours a day, for three months. You gave them every chance for a reasonable resolution. They didn't need to do this." I sighed. "Certainly, if you think reviewing the discussions might help in some similar situation in the future, go ahead. But don't blame yourself."

"In the future," Sarek said, a new tone in his voice. As if I'd said something ridiculous. Incredulous.

I looked at him. My husband knew humans had scant appreciation for being constantly quoted odds, so he didn't, with me. But I knew him well enough to understand the tones of his voice, however subtle. "Are you saying we don't have a future?"

He looked at me, and didn't answer.

I wasn't ready to accept that. "We have a future," I insisted. "I don't care if it's no more than the next minute. There's always a future, until there isn't."

He looked at me and then looked away. I supposed that was one disadvantage of having a brain that could track odds like a supercomputer. When the odds turned against you, it was more discouraging. Where humans always could be blinded by hope as opposed to facing odds or logic.

"You can tell me its human nonsense. You can quote me the odds if you want. Twenty percent. Ten percent. I know we're in trouble. I understand. But we're not done for yet."

"You didn't want to come," Sarek said, sidestepping that subject to one that had no doubt been tearing at him, in spite of his Vulcan controls.

"Oh, Sarek," I put out a hand to him. "I always say that, at first. Don't you remember?"

"But you were right," he insisted. "You predicted something of this sort."

"So did you. You knew this would be a difficult assignment. That the chances of success were limited. You said at the start it would be dangerous."

"If we hadn't come, perhaps there wouldn't have been this war. And we would not be in this situation. It might have been better for all."

"It isn't your fault. We had to come. Sarek, it was your job. Your duty." That hit the right note, and silenced him momentarily. His shoulders dropped a bit, relaxing from their tensed state.

"It was a duty," he admitted.

"You couldn't have lived with yourself if you hadn't done it. You wouldn't be you if you hadn't come." That much was true. I sat back myself. "And I'm not sorry I came, either. I would rather be here, with you, in this mud hole," I smiled, just a little, to take the sting out of my words, "than anywhere else without you. I couldn't live with myself if you were in this mess alone, and I was safe on Vulcan."

"Illogical," Sarek said. But his expression had softened, just a bit.

"And you love me for it," I countered. "Or at least love me, anyway. You know you do."

He didn't admit it. But he took my hand. The cave shook from another explosion, and then the noise was too loud to talk above it.

So we went back to waiting. And waiting. And waiting for the war to stop. Or for it to be over. One way or another.

And then finally there was silence. Real silence. That lasted.

We couldn't quite believe it. Or trust it. At first I wondered if our hearing had simply failed. But we were two difference species, with two very different acoustical sensory systems. They couldn't both fail at the same time. I looked at Sarek. He looked at me. We didn't say anything. For me, not to jinx it. For Sarek, because I think he'd been edging past hope.

Six hours of silence passed. Eight. Ten. Twelve. There was rain, torrential rain. The rain ran down into our cave and we edged further back. We finally smelled damp ashes rather than active burning. I slept a few hours. I woke. It had been sixteen hours since the last explosion. We still didn't trust that it was over. We drank more muddy water. Twenty four hours. We slept again, both of us. We woke again. Strained to listen. There was nothing. Even the air smelled clearer.

"Let's go out," I said finally. We were both weak from lack of food and suffering from hypothermia. We really had no choice.

Sarek was more cautious than me, but even he hadn't heard or sensed anything. And he was freezing and starving more than me.

We went out.

Outside the world looked like it had snowed in summer. Ashes everywhere, green underneath. The birds were still with us, but subdued. Due to the rain, everything was damp gray over the greenery, and the ground was slushy with gray ash.

I moved to get a real drink from a stream but Sarek stopped me. "We don't know if that water is safe," he said. "It runs too far over ground, exposed."

"Then lets go home," I urged. "I want to go home." I meant it in more ways than one, but he took the more pertinent meaning.

After a moment he nodded.

It took us about two hours to get back to our camp. There was more ash there, but it wasn't burned. The forest fire hadn't reached us, except for the wind blown ash. We went into our cave, sweeping ash away from the entrance. Deeper inside, our beds were still there, untouched. Our wood and tinder still sat against the wall. The cache of food I had gathered for the next day's breakfast still where I'd left it. The mealy fruit was fine. The berries in their net were mushy, but not quite rotten yet. Sarek built a fire. I washed the fruit in our rill. We sat there, still a bit shell shocked and ate and drank in silence.

Then we slept, more deeply now that we were home, basking in the warmth of the fire.

And ate again. And slept and ate.

The explosions didn't come back. We felt better after we had some food down us, and the chill leached from our bones, but we needed to go further afield to find more food.

But Sarek stopped me. "I think we have to see what that fire was before you go off on your own. How close it was. There was no settlement supposed to be there."

"It could have been just a bomb gone astray."

"I think we need to see. It was too close."

I could think of reasons for it, and reasons against it, but I was too ambivilent to marshal an argument either way. It was just easier to go along.

We walked for a couple of hours, gathering and eating some of the mealy fruits as we went. There was more ash as we moved along. Clearly whatever had exploded had also triggered a forest fire, and the wind had blown the ashes this way. But then, still hours of walking from the actual bomb site, we smelled a smell that we couldn't ignore. Nothing living smelled like that. It was the carrion scent of death. Sarek stopped and I stopped. We looked uneasily at each other. And then, hesitantly, we moved on. Until we came across the first of them.

People. What had been people. Perhaps fifty, sixty. They'd been running, away from the bombing and the fires. Many of them had fallen coming toward us, dropping in their tracks as they fled. But others had clearly died in combat with each other. Some looked as if they had torn each other to pieces with their bare hands. The expressions on their faces, the ones we could see, were insane.

It had rained since they'd fallen. But I could see remnants on their clothes of a substance with a lavender tint.

The neurotoxins. It had destroyed their minds. They'd gone mad with it, turning on each other, even as they were fleeing. Till it killed them.

I jumped back as if burned.

"Sarek!"

"I see," he said grimly.

"I thought you said there was no nearby settlement?"

"It must have been a small one. An offshoot. Not on the records. They must have fled for miles," he added. He was looking at their shoes and pant legs, covered with mud and ash up to the knee. "Before the toxins --."

I shivered violently. "I want to go."

"Yes. We must. We can't stay here."

I turned. But then I stopped. We had nothing but the clothes we stood up in. And behind us was a treasure trove. Clothes and shoes and – who knew what they might be carrying in pockets or on their persons. It was a horrible thought, but I couldn't help thinking it. I looked at Sarek, the question in my eyes.

He shook his head. "We can't touch them."

"We could wash the things," I ventured. "The clothes. You're wearing nothing but rags. And you're cold."

"It wouldn't be safe. That toxin is probably not water soluble. Washing would not likely rid it from fabric. And it penetrates the skin. It's not safe."

I nodded, sadly, and took a few steps. And then looked back again. "We can't just leave them. Shouldn't we – I don't know. Bury them or cover them with rocks or burn them or--" Even as I said it, I knew it was impractical. There were so many. But so was just leaving the bodies, fallen across the grass where they'd died. It wasn't human, to do that.

"We can't touch them." He took my arm. "We cannot stay here. And to burn them might leach the toxin on their persons into an aerosol form too close to our camp. It's not safe. So far we have been fortunate, that it is designed not to be wind carried. But if we burn them, we risk releasing it again into the atmosphere close to us. No. We must leave them as they are.

So we left them, staring up in the sky of the world they thought to claim their own. Well they had claimed it. At least the six feet where they lay fallen they had claimed.

We went back to our camp. Shoveled out more ash. Built up our fire. Scrubbed ourselves down in the chance that we had picked up any of the toxin, for whatever good it might have done. Gathered more fruit and washed it. Had another meal. But the whole feeling we'd had, over the few days immediately before that bombardment, that of odd safety and almost ordinariness as we built our little camp in the wilderness, and filled it with fire and food, had fled. We were subdued and silent, and that night I had nightmares, thinking of the bodies in the woods.

It rained for the next couple of days. The ash disappeared in our area, but we were cold and uncomfortable and we stayed pretty much in the shelter and slept when we didn't have to forage for food or fuel or to eat. We both could use some catching up in that regard. It took a couple of days for us to realize that there hadn't been an explosion on the ground or in the air since that last huge firefight. More days passed, and there was nothing.

"Is the war over?" I asked Sarek.

He shook his head, human style. Not in negation, but because he didn't know.

And there were still no bombings.

We'd gleaned all the berries around and all the mealy fruit, and I had to go farther afield to find food, but there was still plenty and hopefully more to come. The paper nut bushes began to be ripe, and there was a grass that looked like it might be a grain, when it changed from green to gold. Sarek tasted a few raw kernels of it, and pronounced it edible. But the rain and the fire had spoiled most of it, and there were only a few patches that I kept an eye on, to gather when it became ripe.

I had been watching some bee-like insects that visited various flowers, and I had followed them to see that they had some sort of nest in papery lanterns they constructed on top of earth mounds. Hunger made me bold enough to surround one with a series of smoking branches and drive the insects away. I came back with a piece of what looked and tasted to me like honest-to-god honeycomb. I was hungry enough to try it without waiting for Sarek's analysis. When I brought the dripping comb to him, he tasted it and concurred. Honey.

"How did you think to do that," he asked, when I explained about the smoking branch. "Had you gathered honey before?"

"I read it in a book," I answered.

"Keeping bees?" he asked.

"A book of fiction."

He flicked a brow dismissively.

"It was useful this time, for us."

So we had another food source. I was feeling hopeful about that. Grain and nuts, soon to be ripe. Honey. There were less and less brambles and the mealy fruits were getting scarce but still we still had plenty of fruit, and I wasn't too worried about that. But I had begun dreaming of food, real substantial food, and was thinking seriously of birds' eggs. So far I hadn't gotten quite desperate enough to try that on Sarek. If he didn't want to eat them, I might just eat them myself. But the honey put that decision off for a few days. I mixed fruit with honey, for a change from fruit without honey. I mixed a few handfuls of grain with honey, and Sarek and I both wolfed it down like hungry bears. I wished we had more grain and went further afield looking for ripe unspoiled patches. I got bolder about raiding honey nests, and would go in now with just a single smoking branch. But it was all still just sugar. It wasn't enough, and we were always hungry now, no matter how much fruit we ate. Clearly something had to change.

Meanwhile, we had gone days without a single explosion and were beginning to get used to the silence, and even feel as if there had never been a war, or other people. Just us, and the continual search for food, which took us further afield and further away from each other. So we were totally shocked when a fireball roared across the sky and landed just to the south of us.

The explosion was loud enough that it rocked the earth. I was staring stupidly up at the track in the sky where the projectile had passed. Sarek came running out of nowhere, grabbed me, knocked me to the ground and covered me, as if he alone could save me. Even Vulcans succumb to instinct. Though being flattened by a Vulcan nearly three times my weight – Vulcans have denser bones and muscles though they can look surprisingly lean and fragile, and Sarek was stockier than most Vulcans to begin with. – didn't exactly qualify as saving me. "Sarek, you're hurting me." I complained, even as we both shuddered from the noise and shockwaves of the explosion.

He didn't answer or move. For a moment, I nearly panicked, and then I realized that his attention was riveted to the not far distant fireball, his eyes darting to the leaves swaying with the wind. I realized with a chill the crash was to windward of us, and he was dreading that a purple cloud might appear and that would be the end of us. But minutes passed and nothing came.

"I believe that was a ship that came down," Sarek said, as if in astonishment. He got to his feet and helped me up. And he moved toward the fireball.

I ran after him. If it was, these were still our enemies, or at least enemies of someone. They weren't going to be exactly cordial to us, no matter what side they'd been on, and weren't these the people we were trying to evade? I wanted to say all this, but Sarek was moving forward too fast, and so I just struggled to keep up with him.

It took us a couple of hours to reach the crash site. We saw bits of wreckage long before we came to the main debris field. It covered a wide area, though the ship hadn't been large. Sarek pronounced it one of the small corvette warships, perhaps only a half dozen men. There were, of course, no survivors.

"I thought the battle was over," I said, surveying the smoking wreckage.

"This ship must have been knocked out of orbit, no doubt in the battle. Gravity has finally pulled it down into the atmosphere, where it broke up. There would be no survivors. But there might be something we could use."

That spurred me on, though it was a grisly treasure hunt. Not that there were bodies – the heat of reentry had been tremendous – but there were enough things that were recognizable enough even though most were far too damaged to be of any use. But the sight of even traces of once erstwhile civilization were both oddly painful and stirred an avaricial greed, at least in me, for something, anything that would make our lives easier.

Sarek began searching for usable electronics. Now that our enemies appeared to have left the field, he hoped to cobble something together for a transmitter. Though what we could find that would have power to punch into subspace and reach the Federation and not be detectable by anyone local was moot. It was something he could do, and so I left him to it.

I wandered around with more prosaic goals. Weeks of nothing but fruit to eat had made me ravenous for protein. Metal cable for fishing lines, or bird snares. Fish hooks. I didn't care. There were enough metal sheets that we might build a reasonable shelter, if we had fasteners and if our cave wasn't feeling so homey now. I flipped one over half heartedly, setting it aside with the others that were reasonably intact. Underneath it was more rubble, smaller sheets from what had perhaps been lockers. And came across a jumble of flat metal boxes, which must have been in the lockers and had survived relatively intact. I crouched down and my eyes widened. "Sarek! Sarek!"

He came as I was scrabbling through the debris, stacking the battered boxes up. "One, two, three, four!"

They were some sort of supply kits, emergency supplies for a shuttle or lifepod. Sarek eyed the labeling on the boxes critically, and then shrugged, unimpressed. Clearly they were not what he was looking for. "We'll review the contents later." He picked them up and tossed them on the pile of things we were salvaging and went back to his electronics hunt.

The afternoon ended too soon. It was getting dark; we had to find shelter. It was too far to walk back "home" and come back the next day. Sarek still seemed engrossed in his search, and so I set up as best I could a sort of shelter upwind from the rank smell of burning electronics and metal. I used some panels that had survived being melted, propping and wedging them against an overhanging rock face. It wouldn't have survived a rainstorm, or even much wind, but it was a calm night. I pulled out all the rocks and brush, covered the earth with handfuls of leaves and grass and settled the piles into some reasonably padded beds. Then with the basic work done for the evening, and with a flutter of anticipation that I hadn't felt since a child on holidays, I opened the boxes.

No Christmas day could have equaled my delight. So many of the things I'd been wishing for – little things that you'd pay pittance for, if you even had to buy them. A set of collapsible dishes, that unfolded, could carry water, or even take heat. You never know how much you miss containers until you have none. Just a bowl to carry water is a treasure. And a bowl that you could put over a fire is worth a king's ransom. I could have kissed the simple thing. I did. And couldn't wait to use it. I found a running stream and bought back a bowl of water and carrying it back I felt like a genius, or an acolyte holding the Holy Grail. I could have danced for joy. Foot aside.

And there were dozens of similar treasures. A pair of scissors. A laser cutter and a knife. A short ax. A couple of sheets of some presumably waterproof and thermal, heat reflective material that could be fashioned into a tent, or used as a blanket. Matches, and a powered firelighter that I knew with one click, could bring a flame. I didn't bother to click it; fuel was too precious to waste.

One metal box held medical supplies. Bandages, ointments, some few drugs. I set those aside for now.

One box had the insets for weapons and ammunition. But only the insets. The box itself was empty. The emptiness was a disappointment. I hadn't been hoping for guns, and Sarek would have disapproved and perhaps refused to take them, but still it was disappointing to find nothing in the box.

I opened the last metal box and my jaw dropped. If the last one had been empty, this one more than made up for it.

Food. Rows of packets, that when the seal was broken, would heat up and be ready in seconds. Containers of water and others of some liquid that had that had pictures of fruit on the front, so must be some fruit drink. Bags and bags of some flat bred or fiber wafers, or crackers of some sort. I couldn't read the script, but the given our enemies were humanoid stock, it all had to be edible. We'd gotten no adverse warnings before taking the mission not to eat the local food. I passed my hand lovingly over them and tried to decipher the pictures in the growing dark. And then I realized we didn't have to sit in the dark. We had the means for light.

I gathered up all the brush and branches I could find, cleared an area in front of my shelter, banked it with stones and added my brush. And then, I used my firelighter.

The brush wasn't quite as dry as I'd hoped but in five minutes, I had a fire. Sarek's head went up, at the smell of wood smoke – so different than the smell of the burning ship -- and the sight and sound of the fire. It was almost dark, not too dark for Vulcan eyes, bred to moonless nights, but he came over anyway. I opened a bag of the wafers, two hot food packets at random, and two containers of the fruit drink and scrounged in the mess kit for a couple of eating implements that resembled spoons with little fork tines on the ends. I was unaccountably delighted, not just with the food, but that we didn't have to eat it with our fingers. "Soup's on."

"How did you?" He asked, amazed, and then his eyes went to the boxes. "Yes, of course. I didn't think."

"You had something bigger on your mind. We humans have always been prone to more prosaic, immediate gratifications. Come on, I'm hungry."

He sat down beside me and reached for a spoon.

It may have been reconstituted, over preserved, mass produced cardboard that once upon a time, when we lived another kind of life, we might have politely choked down, but, honestly, now I felt no meal had ever tasted so good. Sarek's eyes met mine at the first spoonful, his pupils widened even more in the dark and then we both just tucked in. My spoon soon scraped the bottom of the metal-like paper of the package and I unreservedly licked the packaging clean.

Sarek was taken aback by this – I, who used to remark pointedly on table manners when I was bringing up our son, but after a moment he did the same to his paper, one emerald tongue cleaning up every drop. Then his eyes fell on the metal box, ruthlessly cataloging the contents and his eyes strayed over the other food packages, still unopened. "I don't suppose we could…"

"Oh, why not?" I said recklessly. "Let's splurge."

So we opened another and ate that one more slowly, while I showed Sarek all the presents I'd found in the kit. My stomach was too shrunken to actually eat all of the second meal, so I gave the rest to Sarek, who wolfed it down with as much hunger as the first and then proceeded to eat every single cracker in the bag I'd opened, as if the food would melt away if he didn't finish it all. Though he gave the food locker another speculative glance, he didn't suggest more. He joined me under the metal overhang, and we stared blissfully at the flames of our fire, warm and comfortable and well fed for once without hours of tedious labor to build a fire, or find food.

"Isn't it wonderful?" I asked him absently, thinking about that contentedly. "Just like home."

He didn't misunderstand me, but he turned and looked down at me, one brow raised as if he didn't quite believe me.

"You know what I mean," I said. "Civilization."

He gave that minute held tilt that was a Vulcan shrug and settled back against me and stared at the flames, for once content.

"How did you do in your search?" I asked.

"I found a quantity of components that I believe may have survived re-entry," he said. "I will begin reviewing them at first light."

I wondered if I dared ask if that meant we might get rescued, but I decided against it. If there was a certain chance of it, Sarek would not only tell me, but give me the odds. That he was silent told me all I needed to know. I pushed back my thoughts on that, and settled on more prosaic concerns.

"You know what else was in that kit?" I asked conversationally. "Soap. And even a comb. Tomorrow, I'm going to have a real bath."

His brow raised and he looked at me speculatively. "And I was just becoming used to your hair accessories of dried leaves and brambles."

"Watch it, buster," I warned him. "That kit also had scissors. And I can't think of a better time for me to bob my hair." I made as if to reach for them, and Sarek's hand flashed out, quicker than any human could learn to expect. He could still startle me in that.

"Indeed you will not," Sarek said, my hand in his. "You are my wife."

"Prove it," I dared, turning my hand to match his, palm to palm in Vulcan style and raising my lips to his, for an equally human kiss.

He brought his hand to mine and his head down to mine, and then his body moved over mine in a way he hadn't since all this began. And he did prove it, quite expertly. Twice, which for our present starved and exhausted selves was quite a complement.

Then we slept the sleep of the dead in each other's arms, for once not aching with hunger, or dreaming of rescue. In the downed wreckage of the ship, at least a little rescue had come. For the moment.

And with a warm fire before us, we didn't notice that this night was a little chillier than before.

To be continued…

Review, review, review