Consciousness was wet.
Hayes pulled his face out of the water with a gasp, crowing for air.
He was still alive.
That fact surprised him.
His breathing apparatus was gone too, which both surprised and dismayed him. He was breathing that contaminated atmosphere.
It didn't smell weird or anything. Actually it was kind of nice, fresh and woody, refreshing after so long cooped up in the ship's recycled atmosphere. But knowing what he knew about it, he would still have very much preferred not to smell it at all.
His hand groping at the newly tender area on the back of his head found a lump there like half a hen's egg. That did not surprise him at all; the pain of hitting it on something as he was knocked over backwards by the weight of a leaping wolf was the last thing he remembered. Actually it was the last thing he would have expected to remember at all, this side the Pearly Gates, but it appeared that Saint Peter and the heavenly chorus weren't ready for him yet.
He was somewhat reluctant to raise his eyes from the sparkling depths of the stream in front of him. The stream into which he had presumably been dunked by ... somebody. At a guess, to bring him back to the land of the living.
The situation wasn't going to get any prettier for not being looked at.
He raised his head.
A couple dozen pairs of blue eyes looked back at him impassively. Their owners were standing or sitting in or around the stream in which he was partially lying. Just here it was very shallow, so presumably they hadn't been trying to drown him.
His arms and ankles were slightly sore, though the skin appeared to be unbroken. This was more than he could say for his uniform, which was stretched and torn in a score of places. It appeared that it had been a communal effort to carry him from the meadow, but it had been done carefully, inflicting as little damage on his person as possible. His uniform, at a guess, didn't count. Certainly his breathing apparatus didn't – perhaps they'd removed that in order to dunk him. Although his air tank was still in position on his back, his air hose and face mask were nowhere to be seen.
He would have been other than human if he hadn't felt the clutch of fear as he stared around at all those unblinking eyes. His rifle was gone, presumably the shuttle was gone too (at least, he hoped the others had gotten away safely), and he was here alone, the prisoner of a pack of huge hairy wolfhounds who did not appear to want to eat him.
At least, not yet.
They were splendid animals. Their coats were long and sleek, their slender heads tapering and beautifully proportioned. Their large ears stood upright, with long tufts of fur springing from the base to lie on the mane that covered powerful shoulders. The only thing that was slightly un-doglike about them was the tail, which was much longer than that of an average dog, though also plumed. Perhaps it served to steady them in a sharp turn, the way a cheetah's did.
"Hi, guys," Hayes said quietly. There had to be some reason why he was still alive. Could these animals possibly be tame?
The first thing he had to do was contact the ship and let them know he was okay. Moving very slowly, so as not to startle them, he slid his hand towards his communicator.
That was a serious mistake. They clearly understood about communicators.
As his hand fell back, the chorus of snarls subsided.
Well. This was definitely different.
Maybe the rest of the landing party were all dead. He tried to shut out that thought.
But if they weren't, what was happening? Why hadn't he been beamed up to the ship? Was it because he was too close to these damned wolves and they couldn't separate his bio-sign yet?
Had the survivors just assumed he was a goner? Fairness compelled him to admit that it would have been a reasonable assumption. He would have made it, if he'd seen a comrade being dragged off by predators.
So if they'd managed to get to the shuttlepod, presumably they'd left in it. They might have taken casualties, and that would account for their haste to get back to the ship; but surely once there they'd run checks for his bio-signs? That would tell them he was still alive. Even if they couldn't use the transporter for some reason, Lieutenant Worf wasn't a quitter – he'd put together some way to mount a rescue attempt, even if he had to bring down reinforcements. A second shuttlepod, with a few of the guys well-armed and well prepared for what they'd be facing when they got down here; if he wasn't too far from the clearing it might not be impossible to get back there. These were only animals. Intelligent animals – he was already aware of that – but animals nonetheless. If they'd wanted him dead he'd never have woken up, so presumably they wanted him alive. And not communicating with the ship.
As he rose slowly and cautiously to his feet, the wolves watched him steadily.
He looked around, trying to guess in what direction the crash site might be. If he could find his way back to that he could find his way to the meadow, which had only been a short distance away and within clear eyeshot. The shuttlepod might still be there or it might not, but it represented his best chance of escape right now.
He was deep in woodland. He'd examined the preliminary scans of the place as they headed down, and he thought he remembered enough of the topography to be able to make a guess at where he was in relation to the crash site; there weren't that many streams in this area, and the direction of flow suggested he needed to be heading uphill from it. But no sooner had he taken a step that way than the wolf nearest to him snapped at him, and the others growled.
The snapper was close enough to have made it a bite. The teeth clipped together close enough to his groin to bring a cold sweat to his forehead at the thought of what kind of damage a bite with those jaws could have inflicted, but there was no doubt that it was a warning. The mobile ears had flattened, and the blue eyes stared up at him threateningly.
"Not that way. Right. I get you."
Did they want him to move in any direction?
If they didn't, an attempt to might not go down too well. But he couldn't stay here indefinitely. Presumably even they couldn't. And there was a definite space in the crowd in one direction.
Maybe it was simply coincidence. But he was starting to wonder if these animals did anything that amounted to coincidental.
"You want me to go that way?" he asked, pointing.
Hell, maybe the atmosphere was getting to him already. He was actually acting like he expected these damn wolves to answer him.
One of them, at the far side of that open space, gave a soft, encouraging 'Wuff'.
"If that's a 'yes', you just make sure this guy here understands that, will you? 'Cause I sure don't want to lose the family jewels over a communications breakdown."
With what he felt to be entirely justifiable caution, he extended a foot in that direction.
No reaction from his 'guard'. Warily, he took an actual step. Still nothing.
It was probably anthropomorphism at its most extreme to imagine that the beast who had seemed to call him on wore a look of complacency as – emboldened by his success – Hayes walked slowly down what was effectively a lane.
He was perhaps a couple of meters away from the end of it when the wolf rose and walked away from him. It was a big, beautiful animal, with a black coat slashed with silvery-white streaks; like patches of snow on a freezing black mountainside, or bright moonlight spilling into a dark forest, he thought irrelevantly. He'd call it 'Moonlight'.
The other wolves followed, making no attempt to touch him. There was no escaping the realization that he was being quite deliberately led – and led away from any hope of rescue. Trying to make a U-turn, however, was almost certainly doomed to failure. Persisting in any such attempt could be extremely dangerous. They might want him alive, but they also wanted him to understand his situation: he was a prisoner, pure and simple. His wellbeing, if not his survival, depended on his obedience.
Well. 'While there's life, there's hope' was an appropriate enough maxim for his predicament. As long as he stayed alive, there was still a chance that Enterprise could rescue him somehow. There was no saying but that sooner or later events might offer him half a chance to break loose and call the ship, and until then it seemed the wiser part of valor to play along. The more cowed they thought him, perhaps the less vigilant they would be.
They traveled for perhaps a quarter of an hour, roughly following the course of the stream, which was joined and enlarged by another a little further down. Eventually they dropped with it into a small gully, where presumably the force of thaw-fed spring floods at some point had helped to carve away the face of a low cliff at one side. Boulders that littered the ground supported this theory; the lichen on them certainly indicated they'd been here a long while, and certainly it would have required a colossal weight of water to move them, but maybe there had been some change in the landscape that had reduced the stream to its present modest size. Michael was a weapons specialist, not a geologist.
The front of the cliff-face was seamed and weathered. At the base of it a jagged split opened on darkness. Moonlight padded towards it without a pause. At the entrance the wolf glanced around, gave another short, sharp bark and disappeared inside.
A cave. Michael hesitated. Much depended on how far it went into the earth, and of what rock the surrounding strata were composed. Too far in, and even if he could somehow contrive to get hold of his communicator unobserved, the signal would not penetrate.
Still, the chances of his getting to use his communicator as things stood were pretty poor anyway. Just maybe, in the dark inside, they might improve. And if his captors wanted him to go in, they would undoubtedly make life very, very uncomfortable for him if he resisted.
"Hope this isn't you guys' larder," he joked a little feebly as he ducked his head to enter.
The entrance was low, and partly blocked by what looked like an old fall of rock. The light gave out almost immediately, and Hayes held out his hands carefully, guiding himself by his fingertips against the wall. The ceiling was hardly a couple of meters high at best, and he grazed the top of his scalp once or twice as he groped his way forward.
They passed through a cave of some sort. The right-hand wall disappeared suddenly from his touch, and the change in the echoes of his footfalls told him that there was much more space around him, but he went on shuffling forward, feeling for each footstep and trying to ignore the thought that there might be some kind of sinkhole down here towards which he was being blindly led. The floor remained relatively level, however, and in a minute or two the other wall returned. Another section of the tunnel, and a soft sound from what sounded like about a meter in front of him said he was still being summoned onwards.
After he'd stumbled along for what seemed like a very long time, a faint smear of radiance appeared around what seemed to be a jink in the tunnel. There must be some kind of crevice in the ceiling, he thought, allowing light from above to seep down and illuminate part of it. At least that would allow him to see a little better for a few steps.
The light let him see that Moonlight was only a couple of paces ahead of him. As the wolf turned its head to glance at him, the blue eyes flashed oddly in the reflected glow.
He turned the corner, and everything changed. He skidded to a halt, his boots stuttering on the damp stone.
"Hell's teeth, what–?"