The snow was so deep outside that it almost reached as high as the window panes, whatever strange material those panes were constructed from. Spock had scanned them and was yet to deduce exactly what they were made of, apart from the fact that they had a high mineral component. He was not sure if they had been quarried and polished to transparency, or perhaps harvested from some plant or animal. When he touched them with a finger almost none of the cold from outside came through the pane, which was an impressive feat considering their thinness. They did not present a perfectly undistorted view of the outside world, but it was at least as good as the glass that had been made on Earth and Vulcan before factory methods.
These secure and easily heated quarters had one benefit paramount above the others. Within the safety of these walls Spock had agreed to stay for long enough for his leg to heal more, and he thought that if he were assured that the place could be heated steadily for some hours, he was willing to attempt a healing trance. The ensigns seemed pleased to be settled for a short time, and Christine Chapel was satisfied that finally her patient was willing to look after himself. The only doubt in his mind was how hard it would be to persuade the humans to leave this place willingly once they were settled. The advantages of four secure walls and a warm fire were hard ones to leave behind, especially if only for a hope of something better further south based on little more than assumptions. Spock could offer them no certainties.
Truth be told, he himself was wavering in his resolve. This place was safe. It was secure. However, he had no way of knowing what season they were currently experiencing, if this planet even had seasons. They could be in store for an idyllic spring and summer in this picturesque and spreading valley. On the other hand, they could be facing weather that would only grow more severe, and when they discovered that it may be too late. A careful survey of day length and mean temperatures could help to build up a picture, but to make it a meaningful one they would have to stay longer than Spock cared to. Besides, there must be some reason why the original inhabitants left...
Standing at the window, leaning on the shallow sill, Spock saw some kind of winged beings rising up above the trees, standing out as dark silhouettes against the pallid sky. He could hear their calls, thin in the wind, like Arctic fowl of earth. It crossed his mind that it was a lonely sound, but he quickly dismissed the thought. It was very human to infer emotional states into mere noises. He could not risk sentimentality.
He stood still and watched attentively, alert for danger. The humans were outside, searching for food and fuel in the snow, and as so were at risk from any predators out there. He could not tell how big the creatures were with nothing to gauge them against, and the tricorder was on the other side of the room, an easy trip for most but a painful walk for Spock. He was not even supposed to be standing up, according to the nurse's orders. He had been left with a place to rest close to the fire and his only permitted activity, on strict medical orders, was to feed that fire and keep warm. But lying inactive on the floor was almost unbearable to Spock, and so he was here, at the window, looking out.
Where had these birds – if birds they were – come from? Spock had seen almost no avian life in this place. Were they cousins to the 'dragon' which had preyed upon the other members of the group? Perhaps they were a herald of warmer weather. Perhaps they were a herald of – something else...
He made the decision to get the tricorder. He swung himself painfully across the room on his crutches and picked it up from the bed, then hobbled back again. His cast was currently tied to his leg with strips of bark, since Nurse Chapel insisted the swelling had not yet diminished enough to warrant a new cast. She also wanted to keep an eye on the healing infection, and, Spock suspected, keep him from moving about too much.
Once back at the window he leant on the sill and flipped the top open on the tricorder. The 'birds' were still there, circling high in the sky. The tricorder registered them as warm blooded, and possibly more akin to mammals than birds in the conventional sense. But they were small creatures relatively low down, not large ones at high altitude.
He watched them as they circled again then dipped down suddenly, dropping as one and disappearing behind an outcrop of rock. Their shrieks rose, wavered in the wind, died away, rose again, and then he saw them flying up in a cluster, fighting viciously over something that they grasped at with what looked like prehensile limbs. It seemed to be a small creature, dead and being torn apart. So, these creatures, too, were carnivores, like their larger cousin.
He opened up his communicator and called, 'Spock to Nurse Chapel.'
Almost instantly her voice filtered through the speaker. 'Here, Mr Spock. Are you all right?'
'Yes,' Spock replied. 'Are you? Do you see the birds?'
'I see them, but they're not near us, and we're all together, about point five of a mile out from the house. Curious critters, aren't they? More like mammals. But how can you see them, Mr Spock, if you're lying down by the fire?' she asked suspiciously.
'I was alerted by their cries,' Spock said somewhat evasively. No need to say he had already been at the window. 'Proceed with caution, Lieutenant. Spock out.'
It crossed his mind after he cut the connection that he should have asked about their progress. He made to open the communicator again but he was distracted by the sudden banging of the door. Cold billowed into the room, and Ensign Grant came across the floor to him, unaccountably sobbing. Her face was covered over with her hood and balaclava, her arms were out, and she staggered towards him emitting a kind of wail that spoke of acute distress. When she reached him she flung her arms about him, holding onto him as if he were a life ring in a stormy sea.
'Ensign!' Spock said loudly and clearly, trying not to stumble backwards. She had caught him off balance and his leg seared with pain. 'Ensign, control yourself! Ensign Grant, report!'
He could not understand. Only a moment ago he had spoken to Nurse Chapel. She had said they were all together. The implicit message had been that they were all safe. What could have happened in so short a time? How could the ensign have returned here so swiftly from half a mile away?
The woman's hysteria showed no signs of abating. She was sobbing into his shoulder, clinging to him, her cries coming out viscerally, like vomit.
'Ensign Grant! Report!' he snapped again.
It gradually came to him. This was not Ensign Grant.
'Ensign Malton?' he asked in wonder. Her sobs did not break.
He leant hard against the window, took hold of her shoulders with both hands, pushed her gently back from him and touched the balaclava obscuring her face. He lifted it up and pushed away her hood to reveal matted, shoulder-length dark red-brown hair, wide brown eyes, a freckled face disfigured with a long bruise.
'Ensign Malton!' he repeated, joy leaping inside him. He clenched at the emotion and pushed it down before it could reach his face. Dr McCoy would no doubt call this a miracle. Spock was sure that there was scientific logic behind it, but all the same, he was as amazed as anyone seeing the blind healed or the lame made to walk.
'Ensign, let – me – ' he tried to say as she attempted to attached herself to him again. 'Let me sit down,' he said more firmly. His crutches had toppled to the floor and he found himself having to fight against something that seemed more octopus than human to get hold of them and then get himself across the room to the low shelf that served either as sofa or bed. When he sat she sat with him, immediately putting her arms around him again and pressing her head against his chest, sobbing words against him that he could not understand.
He fought against the clinging human to extract his communicator and snap out a brief message to the nurse, telling her and the rest of the party to return immediately. He ignored Miss Chapel's bewildered questions about the noises she could hear in the background, since he could hardly hear what she was saying.
'Ensign Malton,' he said, putting his hands on her shoulders again and trying to peel her away from him. 'Please, try to calm yourself.'
Her emotions battered into him in waves. Relief. Fear. Pain. Relief. The relief was so great that it seemed to be filling the whole room. It was that which was causing her to cry so long and so hard.
There was nothing else he could do. She was working herself into hysterics. He touched his hand gently to her face, not so much initiating a meld as just a very light connection, some way to impart his own calm and control carefully into her mind. Slowly her sobs became breathy gasps, and then eventually she quieted.
'Ensign, do you feel able to tell me what happened?' he asked, dropping his hand from her face.
She was thin and she looked exhausted, but the bruise on her face, which was mainly in greens and yellows, bore all the signs of being old, as old as that fateful night when her peers had been killed. She stared at him as if she were dazed, her face tracked with tears that had run through dirt and dried blood.
'I – I – ' she began.
Spock regarded her for a moment. Perhaps it would be better to wait until the nurse returned and assessed her condition. He got up painfully on the crutches and moved over to the fire, where there was a pot of warm water with a rather pleasant tasting bark steeped in it, and some of the rations. He poured her a cup of the drink and brought it back across the room, along with a strip of the 'dragon' jerky.
'I assume you are cold and hungry,' he said, holding out the cup. She took it in shaking hands. When she lifted the metal receptacle to her mouth it clashed against her teeth, but she drank half of it before lowering it again.
'This is meat,' Spock said, handing her the jerky. 'Try to eat a little.'
He sat down again, watching her as she put the jerky to her mouth and chewed off a portion. She did seem hungry, but so emotionally overwrought that she was finding it hard to swallow.
'It is all right now, Ensign,' Spock murmured in what he hoped was a comforting voice. 'You are quite safe here.'
'The – the others?' she asked, her eyes wide.
Spock looked briefly toward the window. No matter how much logic there was in the truth, it was an unpleasant truth. He decided to couch it in positive terms. 'Ensign Grant, Ensign Del Sarto, and Nurse Chapel all survived that night,' he said quietly. 'The others did not.'
She stared at him, mute for a moment, then asked, 'You – you – know they – ?'
'We found the bodies,' Spock said gravely. 'You were the only one that we could not find.'
She began to cry again, and Spock took the cup of bark juice from her limp hand and set it down on the ledge beside him. She seemed magnetised to him, for she turned and threw herself against him again, pressing her head against his chest and weeping quietly. Resigned to the fact that he could not prise her away, and indeed that prising her away would probably be quite harmful to her mental state, Spock resigned himself to having to act the comforter until the other humans arrived. He put his hand gently on her back and began to stroke.
He judged it to be twelve point three minutes between calling the nurse and the small party arriving at the door, panting, stamping snow from their boots. Their amazement was evident from the moment they stepped into the room
'Leslie!' Ensign Grant cried.
Del Sarto just stared, while Chapel immediately snapped into professional mode and picked up her bag, coming across the room and holding out her medical scanner to the young woman.
'It's all right, Ensign,' she said. 'It's all right.'
She tried to prise her away from Spock, something which Spock was anxious to achieve, but it seemed impossible. The woman's gloved hands were clawed into his top.
'It's all right,' Chapel said again. 'Try to breathe slowly and deeply.' She caught Spock's eye and asked quietly, 'Can you bear with it for now, sir?'
Spock looked down at the head of red-brown hair pressed against his chest, and sighed. He was suffering a considerable battering of emotional projection against his mental shields, but what were Vulcan disciplines for if not to help one tolerate such assaults?
'I would suggest a thorough medical assessment before moving her,' he said, then added, 'Yes, I can bear with it, Miss Chapel.'
He let the woman lie against him, still tentatively stroking at her back. Chapel watched the movement for a moment then looked up and caught Spock's eye, a kind of tenderness in her gaze. Spock's instinct was to stop stroking and revert to proper Vulcan conduct, but this young human's needs came first.
'She's suffered concussion in the last week,' Chapel murmured, holding her scanner up near the woman's head and consulting the results filtered through to the tricorder. 'Extensive bruising down the right side of her body. No broken bones, thank god. She's lost weight but she's not dehydrated. Somehow avoided frostbite... But considerable mental trauma, I'd say.'
'That much is quite obvious,' Spock commented.
The nurse brought out a hypo and carefully pressed it to the Ensign's neck. The survival suit, made for high altitude descents, was too thick to allow the hypo to work through it.
'Painkiller and a sedative,' she murmured to Spock. 'It's not going to knock her out but it should calm her down a bit.'
'That would be very useful,' Spock replied.
He sat and waited for the medication to take effect. He glanced across the room at the other ensigns, who were standing near the fire stripping off their outer clothing and knocking the snow off their boots. They looked as astonished at this miracle as Spock had been, and he was inwardly glad that they had returned to such a gift. It would have an extremely positive effect on their morale, he was sure.
After a while he looked up at Christine, who was still standing near the ensign, monitoring her vital sounds. Silently she nodded, and he nodded in return.
'Ensign, do you feel able to tell us what happened now?' Spock asked carefully.
Her breathing had slowed down and her sobs had stopped. Slowly she nodded, and then sat up a little more, apparently suddenly aware of her position against the Vulcan's chest.
'I – I'm sorry, sir,' she said quickly. She wiped her eyes with her hand and winced as she rubbed over her bruised orbit. 'I – I don't really know...' she said slowly. 'That night, the wind was so strong, and then we heard – we heard that thing outside. I had the tricorder out, saw it was some kind of animal, and it sounded – it was growling or something. The tricorder – suggested it was a predator. I got my phaser and I opened the tent and the wind got in and it just – it went. It went up like a kite – '
She shuddered, trying to hold down a sob, and Chapel put her hand on her shoulder and said, 'It's all right. Take your time.'
'Well – it just – picked me up,' she said. 'I don't know what happened. The wind picked me up, I was caught up in the tent, and I couldn't see, it was dark, and I – I suppose I was carried along. The tent was wrapped all round me. It was caught round my arm, and it pulled me. The wind screaming, up in the air, in the dark. And then – I dropped.'
She stopped speaking. Spock waited a while and then prompted her, 'You dropped?'
'I – I suppose I hit my head,' she said, touching her hand tentatively to the bruise on her face. 'I don't remember hitting even. Just falling. And then I woke up, so cold. I still had the tricorder because it was round my neck but the phaser was gone. I thought – at first I thought everything was broken. My head hurt so much. I looked at the tricorder and I'd been – I'd been out for about seventeen hours. I didn't know where I was. I couldn't recognise anything, I couldn't see the tent, I could find any life signs on the tricorder. I – thought at first maybe you were all dead, then I looked around and I realised things looked – different. I don't know how far the wind had blown me. I didn't have our original position in the tricorder. I – didn't know what to do...'
By now Del Sarto and Grant were both near her too. Ensign Grant had sat down on the end of the sofa plinth while Del Sarto was crouching down in front of Ensign Malton, his hand on her knee. She looked at them as if she were bewildered to see their living faces, then carried on;
'I – just walked. I knew you'd said we should move south, Mr Spock, so I thought the only thing I could do was do the same, try to get to somewhere warmer, somewhere easier to live. But I didn't have a tent, the tent was ruined. No sleeping bag. Just the survival suit and the tricorder.'
'You did well to survive in such temperatures,' Spock murmured.
She smiled a strange twisted smile, as if her face were still remembering grief.
'I just had the tricorder. I used it to scan for flint. So – I found flint and I found bits of stuff to use for tinder, so I managed to light fires. I'd – I'd walk as long as I could then gather anything I could find to make a fire, and light a fire to keep me warm through the night. I had to wake up every few hours to keep it going. And I used the tricorder to find edible plants. I just kept heading south, and I got through the hills, and then it snowed so heavily I didn't know what I was going to do. I couldn't make a fire, so I had to make kind of – well, kind of snow caves, and huddle up inside. It was hard to find food, and I could only drink snow, and I got so cold. And then I got into this valley here, and I saw the smoke. I saw the smoke...'
'The smoke from this dwelling,' Spock said quietly.
'You must have been so relieved,' Chapel said, shaking her head.
'In fact, hysterically so,' Spock murmured.
Ensign Malton flushed deeply, as if she had only just recalled her conduct.
'I'm – sorry, sir,' she murmured.
'It is quite all right, Ensign,' Spock assured her.
'First of all I was relieved,' she said. 'Then I was frightened. What if it was aliens? What they were hostile. And I came up to the house, crept up to the house, and I saw human bootprints all around it. I mean, Starfleet bootprints,' she corrected herself quickly. 'And then I knew – '
'Ensign, you have proved yourself to be extraordinarily resourceful in an extremely hazardous situation,' Spock said.
The ensign seemed to glow.
'Well, Mr Spock, my first prescription for Ensign Malton is a good meal and a hot drink,' Chapel said in a brisk voice, breaking the momentary silence.
'I have already given the ensign a hot drink,' Spock supplied, 'although I am sure that more, and hot food, would be welcome.'
Christine nodded, and looked up at the other ensigns. 'We dropped most of the fuel we found when we got your call, but we brought the food back,' she said. 'Ensign Del Sarto and I can go back and get the fuel. Ensign Grant, can you fix up some food for Leslie? Mr Spock, I want you to monitor her and call me if you have the slightest concern.'
'Of course,' Spock nodded, and Ensign Grant said smartly, 'Yes, sir.'
Spock moved sideways a little, increasing the gap between himself and Ensign Malton as Chapel and Del Sarto went out through the door. She seemed far calmer now and it was a relief to be able to distance himself from her emotions. He sat and watched as Ensign Grant busied herself at the fire, and Ensign Malton leant back against the wall, looking extremely tired.
'Once you have eaten, Ensign, I would advise that you go upstairs and sleep for a while,' he told her.
'Yes, sir,' she said, looking at him and blushing suddenly. Spock was suddenly reminded of how long the ensign had spent regarding his ears when they were on board the shuttle, and he wondered how well-advised it had been to allow her to cling to him for so long. But she was young and she was vulnerable, and surely it was well within his ability to deal with her odd preoccupation now she was back with the group.