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The Falls

USS Nautilus: Shuttle One Crew, Senior Science Officer Carlin Agran's Log, Stardate 81630.1:

I've finally met up with Antori, but by the time I found him, he'd been injured. He's recovering now, sedated for the moment. While he rests, I'm drying off, and taking some time to be alone with my thoughts. They taught us at Starfleet medical to "do no harm." I'm a science officer now, but its always been in the back of my mind...But now I have done harm, I've taken lives, even ones I was trying to save! What would Antori say to all of this?

I don't know. I try not to think about it, try not to let it distract me. We have to find Sam-Doctor Mor, too-, and find a way off of this planet for all of us.

Dawn came, bringing light to the old ruins. Storm clouds still hung low overhead while rain poured down, but for a little while the sun of this world hung on the horizon, shining below the clouds and illuminating everything. Carlin saw it from the hole in the rock wall that disguised Antori's secret camp. She blinked in the light and peered out. The ruins were beautiful: glistening wooden forms in strange, exotic shapes. The mountains that surrounded this village were lush and green, and Carlin spied a large golden statue of a woman in robes atop one of the peaks. Perhaps it was another shrine to this Himiko. There was a waterfall not far to the east of that, cascading down through multiple levels and through the village itself. It was all beautiful, but Carlin saw the ugliness that had overtaken it. The remains of a civilian transport were visible at the bottom of the waterfall, its hulk rusting, lodged in several buildings it had plowed through on its way down. Further down the mountain the air was still tinged with smoke. There were also the bodies of half a dozen wolves lying in the mud nearby.

Carlin could see the rest of the ugliness every time she closed her eyes. She could see the remains of the Vorta in the ground vehicle, the bodies in the swamp, the charred remains of Chief Petty Officer Heidi Cook. She could see the flames devouring the ruin where six men had tried to ambush her, and only one escaped. She could feel the Klingon's fingers closing on her throat, see him gasp his final breath as she stood over him, his disruptor in her hand. She shuddered and her hands involuntarily went to her auburn ponytail, fingers combing debris from it mechanically.

"Good morning," Antori whispered, coming up behind her, half-crouching because of the low clearance between the ground and the first floor of the building above them. "You look cold. I brought your jacket…and your pants, too."

"Thank you, I took them off to dry." Carlin accepted the missing pieces of her uniform. While she pulled on her pants, he laid her jacket around her bare shoulders. "Thank you," she whispered again.

"I'm the one who should be thanking you," said Antori. He settled into place across from her, stretching out his left leg. Except for the gaping holes in his uniform, there was no sign of the injury. "You do good work."

"A wolf's got nothing on that broken bottle Crewman Hanes managed to land on a couple months back," said Carlin. Fortunately, she'd been in the messhall at the time and she'd been able to stanch the blood loss from the femoral artery long enough for a medical team to arrive. The memory was not exactly a pleasant one, but it was at least more pleasant than this. At least then I was saving lives. She turned and looked out again at the landscape. Her fingers toyed with her hair.

"A penny for your thoughts?"

Carlin turned to him. He'd used the old Earth adage before, and she knew what it meant. "What makes you think they're worth so much?"

"When you do that with your hair, you're always thinking of something," he pointed out.

"All right," she said, lowering her hands and hugging her knees. "But I warn you, you might be overpaying."

"Let me be the judge of that," he said. "What's troubling you? Can I assume it has something to do with our current situation?"

Carlin nodded, then shook her head. "It's about last night…I-I killed people, Antori, people I didn't have to."

"What do you mean?"

She looked down at her boots. "Well, first there was this Klingon who tried to strangle me, and then these two Romulans who tried to kill me…I didn't have any choice there," she said. "But then some men ambushed me in a wooden ruin and used smoke to drive me out. I thought I could incapacitate a few of them and sneak by. I sedated two of them: a Vulcan named Sovar and a Romulan named Pratak…but then I got into a fight with the others and wound up burning the whole building down on them!"

"And now you intend to hold their names against yourself forever?" Antori asked her.

She hugged her legs tighter. "I don't know."

Antori sat back. "Well, Carlin," he said. "Let's get one thing straight here: who started that fire?"

"One of the men did," she said. "I don't know his name, or even his species. He was throwing fuel and flaming bottles around. One of the others said he was going to burn the whole place down, and left." She paused. "But I'm the one who shot him. It was my fault the whole ruin went up as quickly as it did."

"And if you hadn't shot him?" he asked. "Where would you be then?"

"Well, dead probably," she admitted. "And he probably would have burned down the place anyway just to get me. He had half of it on fire already by the time I killed him."

"Which would have left the two you'd sedated just as dead, only you'd have joined them, followed quickly by me," said Antori. "I may be tough, but I have no illusions about what would have happened to me after I passed out last night if you hadn't been there with your medkit."

Carlin nodded. It was true. "If only I hadn't sedated them, though. Maybe they'd have stood a chance."

"Maybe," said Antori. "And maybe they'd have killed you instead. Maybe they'd have died anyway. We can analyze and agonize over every possible outcome of the situation for years, but it doesn't do them or anyone else any good. We can't change it, and even if we could…well, you did do the right thing by at least trying to show mercy. It's not what I would have done, but it's a noble sentiment nonetheless. You shouldn't feel any guilt over that. What happened after that, and even what led up to that, was beyond your control. All we really have control over is our own actions and motivations. Yours were pure, and that's something to be commended for."

Carlin looked up and smiled at him. "Thank you, sir."

"You're welcome, and let's get back to a first name basis, shall we?" he said, lightening the tone. He leaned forward and glanced out at the dawn. "You find anything interesting while I was unconscious?"

Carlin nodded, picking up her tricorder and leaning out—but only a little, so as to stay out of the rain. "I've been getting intermittent subspace signals from that mountaintop over there, too brief and too garbled to make out, but definite communications signals."

"A subspace communications base, and one with significant power," Antori said. "I can see the transmitter tower from here. That could handle a pretty strong signal, maybe up to a terawatt. It should be plenty to punch through the polaric interference."

"Yes, but it's running at significantly lower power now," said Carlin. "They probably have it optimized for routing communications on the planet. It must be how they're able to coordinate their actions."

Antori nodded. "Which means it's our next target."

Carlin turned to him. "You're joking, right?"

He shook his head. "If we take away the communications base, we'll leave them with no way to coordinate with each other. There's also bound to be some communications logs, probably enough to tell us where they're holding Sam and what they plan to do with her. Then, there's the last reason: the most important one."

"Which is?"

"We need to find a way off of this planet," he said. "Captain Sokar will be looking for us by now, but he won't be able to find us without a distress signal. We've got to get up there and send a signal. Everything depends on it."

Carlin nodded. "We should wait for the rain to clear," she said. "It looks like we'll have to climb the falls to get up there, and the rain's falling in sheets!"

Antori shook his head. "The rocks at the falls will be just as wet after the storm-and after it we'll be vulnerable. The weather's bound to keep the men out there off balance. If we move now, we have the advantage."

"When your opponent is off-balance, try to keep him that way," she quoted.

"Exactly," he said, smiling. He produced their packs and a pair of climbing axes and a rope. "I found these on the scouts," he said. He tossed one of them to her. "I also traded your disruptor for this," he said, handing her the Type-1 Phaser. "It's a little less powerful, but it should be more familiar. Also, it has a stun setting."

Carlin smiled. "Thank you," she said. She'd never thought a weapon—and an underpowered one at that—could qualify as the perfect gift, but under the circumstances, Antori had managed to pull it off. She accepted the phaser and kissed him on the cheek. He kissed her on the lips, but the contact was all too brief.

"We need to get moving," he whispered. "I want to plot our route up the falls while it's still light, before the sun goes behind those storm clouds." She nodded and reluctantly pulled away.

A moment later, he was helping her into her uniform jacket while she tied one end of the frayed rope he'd taken from the unfortunate scouts around his waist and torso to form a crude harness. When she was done, he did the same for her, tying her into the opposite end of the rope. "We climb together: one harness to share, one climbing axe each," he said, tying off the knot and handing her a climbing axe. It was crude: little more than a notched titanium blade fused at a right angle with a piece of duranium for a handle. Still, it would get the job done.

"When we get out there, I'll lead, you follow," he said. "Watch what I do, and look out for falling debris." He laid a hand across her shoulder in a reassuring caress. "Remember the Crag on the North Face of the Tenaran Ice Cliffs?"

"How could I forget?" she said, trying to smile.

"You'll be fine," he assured her gently. "You can do this."

Carlin nodded. She had to do this. She had no other choice. They needed to make it to the subspace transmitter.

Antori saw her determination and gave her a final pat on the back before ducking out of the hole and into the shimmering rain. "Let's go!" he shouted. "Before this light fades!"

Carlin ducked through the entrance and joined him in the rain. Water pounded down on her, cold, but not unpleasantly so—at least not yet. She gripped her climbing axe in one hand and her phaser in the other, just in case. Then, she followed Antori's lead through the ruins.

They headed straight for the base of the falls. Antori paused there for a moment, examining the way ahead. The sunlight was already starting to fade as clouds obscured the rising sun. Antori pointed to a pair of wooden bridges on the uppermost and lowest cascades of the falls. "We'll plan our route around those two," he said. "The roads beyond the lower bridge seem to have been destroyed by landslides, and the road beyond the upper one, to the east, seems to be our best shot at reaching the communications base. Using both of them, we can take advantage of that boulder field on the lower west portion of the falls, the terraces in the middle on the east side, and the wooden crossbeams supporting the west end of that top bridge. It'll still be technical in places, but it looks like the easiest route."

"That's three crossings," Carlin pointed out. "Four, since it looks like we're on the east side of the river now. There are only two bridges!"

"The wreck of that Klingon transport gives us a way across the river down here," he said. "Further up, there are some ruins among the terraces. We might be able to find a way across there." He shrugged. "Of course, I'm open to suggestions."

She examined the falls, but the landscape was growing dim now, and the route Antori had chosen really did seem like their easiest option—with the only alternatives being seventy-plus meter climbs up sheer cliff that Carlin didn't want to risk in this storm, or trying to navigate around the falls through kilometers of unfamiliar terrain (which might end in finding out, hours later, that there was no way around the falls from here). "We'll take your route," Carlin said.

They started by making their way across debris-strewn ground to the transport. While its main hull sat almost directly beneath the lowest cascade of the waterfall, one of its dark nacelles had buried itself in the remains of a hut on this side. The thick pylon that joined it to the rest of the hull was still intact, and the transport's impulse engines hung over the west bank. Antori and Carlin scrambled over what was left of the hut and the nacelle and climbed onto the pylon. He pulled out a tricorder and ran a quick scan, then said something, but his words were lost in the roar of the nearby waterfalls and the drumming of the rain.

"What?!" Carlin shouted.

"I said it looks stable!" Antori shouted back. "The polyduranium's bent, but it's recrystalized. It shouldn't bend again unless we crash it into another planet!"

Carlin nodded. "Let's do this, then!"

They walked out onto the pylon. It was wide enough that Carlin could only see the river below if she leaned out to one side. She didn't. While she generally enjoyed climbing, she knew when not to tempt herself toward acrophobia. Instead, she followed Antori quickly across and climbed onto the main hull. The metal was slick with water, but layers of corrosion had also given the hull rough patches, where it was easier to maintain footing. Carlin tried to stick to those as they made their way to the aft end of the ship. Once there, Antori stepped into the gap left by a dislodged hull plate. He drove his climbing axe between two struts. "I'll anchor from here," he said, coiling up the rope between them. "You go ahead and climb down! It's only about ten meters, but be careful!"

"I will be!" she assured him. She double-checked the knots on her harness, then pulled out a little slack from Antori. She stepped over the edge, landing on the cowling of one of the aft impulse engines, about half a meter down. She could hear the metal pop over the sound of the nearby falls, but it didn't collapse. Carlin made a mental note not to do that again. She made her way across the top of the cowling till she found an access ladder—or what was left of one, running along the back of the ship. She pulled out a little more slack and gently made her way down the ladder, using the rope and her climbing axe to maintain her place on the slick rungs. When she reached the bottom, she stepped off onto the lower cowling and looked down. There was nothing between her and the rocky ground below, but she was still at least three meters up. The ship must be resting at an angle, she thought. She looked around, searching for another way down.

Suddenly, there was a blinding flash of light and a deafening explosion of thunder. A tree a dozen meters away was sheered in half and Carlin slipped, losing her footing. She screamed, bracing her hands in front of her face.

But the impact didn't come. Carlin could feel her harness digging into her and opened her eyes to find herself suspended, swinging, two meters off the ground. The tree she'd seen shatter was a stump now, rapidly being extinguished by the rain, but she understood now what had hit it, and she was not afraid.

"Are you alright down there!" Antori shouted from atop the transport.

"Yes!" she shouted back. "The lightning just startled me and I lost my footing! I'm only a couple of meters from the ground. Go ahead and lower me!"

Antori obliged and the rope gently lowered her to the ground. Once there, she pulled out her tricorder and scanned under the transport. "The transport's tilted, which will make getting you down difficult, but I think I found what it's resting on!" she shouted. "There's a duranium hull fragment about two meters square lodged under the hull in the middle of the river. I can see it from here! It's barely hanging on. If I can cut it lose with my phaser, you'll be able to climb down easily!"

"Go ahead!" he shouted back. "I'm well secured up here!"

Carlin set her little phaser for maximum power and aimed at the place where the loose hull plate joined the rest of the ship. She fired. The hull plate groaned, then snapped off and fell into the water. As it did so, the whole transport shifted, falling to the ground in front of her. Carlin shielded her eyes as the impact kicked up rocks, but then it was over. Once the transport was down, Antori began his own decent of the aft side. He stood beside Carlin in a few minutes.

They continued on. The boulder field on the west side of the falls did not prove to be much of a challenge, though the presence of the lightning-struck tree so close by made Carlin nervous. There were no further lighting strikes, though, nor even any thunder, just steady rain and a chilling wind. They made their way across the first bridge at the top of the lowest cascade, and Antori pointed out a rough rock face just to the east of the next cascade that would provide them access to the terraces above. He took the lead, climbing ahead of her and chipping hand and foot holds into the rock as he went. She followed him carefully. The next cascade was just to her right, the water falling like a curtain, almost close enough to touch, From here, she could see a ledge carved into the rock under the falls, hollowed out by the constantly-plummeting water. She was about to mention it to Antori when he shouted down to her.

"Rock!"

Carlin instinctively flattened herself against the rock face. Small stones and debris tumbled down past her shoulder, missing her by centimeters. She tentatively glanced up. Antori was backing down toward an earlier set of handholds. He wedged himself into those and then looked down to her. "You alright?"

"Fine!"

"Sorry about the rocks," he said. "The stone changes up there. It's too soft! We need to find a different route."

"There's a ledge in the hollow under the falls!" Carlin said, pointing to her right. "We could climb across on that to the outcropping in the middle of this cascade!"

He nodded. "Are you okay with taking the lead!"

"With you stuck up there till I move, I'll have to," said Carlin. He nodded and she turned her attention to the new route. There was enough clearance between the rock and the sheet of white water that she was able to duck under the falls, feeling for hand and foot holds as she moved sideways along the rock ledge. There she paused, digging out her palm beacon. It was almost pitch black under the falls, with the storm clouds overhead blocking out most of the sunlight and the sheet of water behind her blocking out the rest. She switched on her palm beacon and shone it across the ledge. It didn't look to difficult to cross, but she didn't want to take any chances. She knew she'd been about five meters up while she was over the east bank, before she went under the waterfall, and she was betting the water had carved a pretty deep plunge pool beneath it (which probably added at least two meters)—and there was a sheet of water less than half a meter behind her which would be all too happy to knock her off balance and carry her all the way to the bottom. She wanted to be able to use every available limb to keep that from happening. So, she held the palm beacon in her mouth and turned her head to illuminate her way while she made the crossing.

As soon as she was on the other side and able to find some secure hand and foot holds by natural light, she removed the palm beacon and spat. That tasted vile, she thought, wiping her mouth on her uniform sleeve. When was the last time that thing was washed?

She held the beacon in one hand, lighting the way for Antori to cross under the falls. Once he was across as well, he resumed the lead taking them up the harder rock of the outcropping to its vine-capped crown, at the top of this cascade. But just short of the top, he suddenly stopped, his whole body tensing. Carlin was about to call out to him, ask him what was wrong, when he gestured to her. He laid a finger across his lips for silence, then cupped one hand over his ear. Listen? Carlin wondered. Listen to what?

Then she heard them, voices, coming from the terraces at the top of this cascade. They were men's voices. Hunters! She thought, remembering the men who'd chased her and Doctor Mor in the ruins. Matan's men!

"Hey, did you find anything?" one of them shouted a voice from the left, on the east side of the falls.

"No, nothing!" was the reply from the west side.

"What?!"

"I said nothing!" the second voice repeated.

"But I'm sure I heard something," said the first man. "There were voices, and that transport didn't drop all by itself!"

"You're crazy!" the second man retorted. "The hull of that transport's been scavenged a dozen times and it's been falling apart for years. I'm surprised it's still in one piece! There's no one up here but us! They never make it up this far!"

"Fine!" said the first man. "Should we head back up to the bunker?!"

"Nah, let's wait out the storm!"

"Got it!" the first man replied. "Stay alert!" Then, he dropped his voice, though he was still talking loudly enough for Carlin to hear him. "Let's move inside!"

Antori looked down at her and motioned upward with one hand. Quietly and carefully, they made their way up the last few meters to the top of the outcropping. They found themselves on a tiny island in the middle of the river, perched right on the edge of the waterfall. They crouched behind a pile of rocks on the center of the island, Carlin trying to make herself as small as possible while Antori cautiously surveyed the situation.

"We've got some time. We might as well relax," Carlin could hear a new voice say, also from the left.

"Yeah, you're right," said the first voice. "They'll probably put us on wreck duty later."

"Nah, this one went down over deep water," said the third man. "We'll never see a scrap of it."

There was a pause and Antori crouched down beside Carlin. "There are two in the ruins of a building to the left, another in a hut to the right, out of sight," he whispered into her ear. "They've all got cover, they're flanking us, and we can presume they're all armed."

"We need a distraction," she whispered back.

"My thoughts exactly." He peeked back over the rocks, to the left, searching for a suitable diversion. Carlin moved closer to cover, and closer to him.

After a moment, Carlin heard the third man ask, "So, what do you think they use it for?"

"What, the long-range transmitter?" asked the first man.

"Yeah, it still works, right?"

"Probably," said the first. "We've got people up there guarding it day and night. Father Matan doesn't want anyone going near it."

"Do you think he has a line to the outside, Brother?"

There was a chuckle from the first man. "Why do you think no survivors never make it up this far? Why none of them ever evade the hunting parties for long?"

"Well, the sensor stations on the other islands always pick up the ships," said the third man.

"Yeah, after they go down," said the first. "Why do you think so many of them crash here anyway, out of all the possible places on this planet?" A pause. "Father Matan knows exactly when they're coming in, and he generally tells us when a new ship is gonna crash on the island hours before it happens. We have plenty of time to prepare. Heck, I've even heard some of 'em babble about getting distress calls before they went down. You should be able to put it together from that!"

"So, he's fishing…," said the third man, making the realization at the same time Carlin did. "Using long-range communications signals to lure in ships."

"Exactly."

"But why? More recruits?"

"Maybe," said the first voice. "But I think he's trying to find Her…the Key."

"The Key? Do you really believe in any of that?"

"I…I don't know," said the first voice, suddenly uncertain. "Look, we shouldn't be talking about any of this. Let's just try to get some rest."

As the men quieted down, Antori crouched back down. "There's no way past them without being seen," he whispered. "Did you hear what they were talking about?"

Carlin nodded, her jaw set. "Using distress signals to lure more ships to their doom here…it's despicable."

"Then you'll understand if I say they don't deserve mercy," he said.

She shook her head, gently taking a handful of his soaked red uniform jacket. "As long as we wear these, we have to be better than them," she whispered. "These men aren't the culprits: Matan is. At least one of them didn't even know what he was doing until tonight. We should leave them alive if we can."

"You may have a point with this bunch, but we're fighting for our survival and that of our shipmates down here," said Antori. "We don't have the luxury of giving everybody who gets in our way and tries to kill us all a fair trial." Carlin just glared at him, and he sighed. "Fine, you be the conscience, I'll be the tactics. I think we can lure one of them out of the ruins on the left, separate them, and take them out in the confusion. Limiting ourselves to non-lethal options is going to make it a little more difficult, but not impossible." He put his arm around her shoulder and raised her just above the top of the rocks, then pointed. "Do you see those clay pots over there?"

She nodded.

"Think you can break one with a rock or something? That should give us the distraction we need," he said.

"I can do it," Carlin said. "What will you be doing?"

"Setting up an ambush," said Antori. He leaned over and put his hand in the water. "The current's swift, but it's not very deep—the deepest it goes is only a meter on this side of the outcropping. I should be fine as long as I keep my back to the rock and stay away from the edge." He slipped silently into the water, crouching low so that only his head was above the surface. "Throw the rock and then keep out of sight. When I give the signal, take out the man on the left, followed by the one on the right."

Carlin nodded, grabbing a small rock. "What's the signal?" she asked.

"You'll know it when you see it," he said, then submerged himself completely.

Carlin resisted the urge to tug her hair. That wasn't going to help now. Antori had a plan, and she needed to make sure she did her part, and quickly. She peeked above the rocks and took aim at the large clay vases, throwing her stone at them as hard as she could. Then she ducked and immediately pulled out her phaser, setting it for stun.

The vase shattered. "What was that?!" the third man demanded.

"I don't know," said the first man. "I'll go check it out!"

Carlin heard splashes as someone wading through the water, followed by squelching footsteps of soggy boots on stone just behind her. She pressed herself back into her hiding place, phaser ready. Where's the signal? She wondered. The man was almost on top of her now. She fought down the urge to panic.

Then, a large shape exploded from the water, seized the man around the legs and began to drag him down. The man had just enough time to scream before he was pulled from his feet, hit his head, and lost consciousness. Carlin would have screamed herself, but at that instant, she realized that the attacking shape was actually Antori. Some signal! She thought, rising.

The man's companion on the left had seen him go down and raised a bow, pointing it at Antori. "We need some help over here!" he shouted to the man on the other side.

He didn't seem to have seen Carlin yet, though, and she didn't give him a chance to. She took aim and fired, catching him full in the chest. While he fell, she turned to the opposite bank. The last man was coming out there, his bow already half drawn. He saw the two Starfleet officers and hesitated, unsure which to target first. Carlin had no such indecision. An angry red beam shot out from her phaser, and he dropped to the ground, unconscious.

With the last man down, Carlin turned her attention to the first man, whom Antori had attacked. He was Ktarian. She checked his vitals with a quick tricorder scan. "He's bleeding from a small laceration at the back of his head, and he'll have a wicked headache when he comes to, but he should be alright. All I can say is it's a good thing Ktarians have thick skulls." She turned to Antori. "What were you thinking? You could have killed him!"

"And he would have killed me," said Antori. "Like I said, it's actions and motivations that matter. I was as gentle with him as I could be, under the circumstances. I only would have killed him if I had to."

"Well, try to be more careful next time, please," she said.

"I'll do my best."

They waded across to the east bank. The water was a lot colder than Carlin expected. She felt herself shivering as she stepped out and knew she would have to find a place to warm up and dry off soon. They were only about halfway up the falls, though. Antori again assumed the lead, taking them up a series of short stone walls that formed the edge of the terrace here. At the top level, they found the remnants of some sort of wooden dam—reduced now to little more than a wooden beam spanning the rushing water. It was enough for them to cross back to the West side, though, and reach the base of the upper bridge.

From here, Carlin could see that the east side of the bridge was partially collapsed. The waterfall had altered course at some point, washing most of the wooden beams that supported the east end of the bridge away while leaving the west side intact. It looked steady enough from here, though, and Carlin was unwilling even to think about heading back at this point. The wind had picked up and the rain, though thinner, was now sharply cold, stinging her wherever it touched bare skin.

They climbed to the top of the bridge, using the crossbeams as rungs in a giant ladder. When they reached the top, Antori paused, staring at the bridge. Carlin followed his gaze and noticed that the bridge was swaying visibly in the shrieking wind. "I suppose it's too late to find a way around!" she shouted over the wind.

"I don't think there is a way around!" said Antori. "We'll just have to hurry across and hope for the best!"

She nodded. "I should go first! I'm lightest!"

Antori put a hand on her back, as if to say, I'll be right behind you. Carlin squared her shoulders and started out onto the bridge. She could feel it swaying beneath her feet, moving and groaning like a living thing. But at each step, it held, and she pressed on, one step further-until suddenly a support beam below splintered with a crack like thunder and the world went mad!

The entire bridge began to fall apart. She could feel it starting to fall out from under her. She pulled out her climbing axe and broke into a run. If I can anchor myself to the edge on the other side before the whole thing falls… But before she could even finish the thought, the east section of the bridge vanished: caught by the current and torn away. Carlin found herself in midair, arms and legs pinwheeling. She was not going to make to the opposite side. She could see the cliff face that made up the eastern side of the chasm rising to meet her. In desperation, she swung her climbing axe to meet it. Sparks flew and there was a reverberating shock through every bone of her body as the axe smashed home, but it held fast. Carlin was thrown against the cliff, but managed, somehow, to hold on to her climbing axe, finding a foothold somewhere in the process. Then, she remembered Antori, bound to her with a rope and falling as well. She gripped her climbing axe tighter. A moment later, her harness dug into her as the rope tried to pull her down. She heard a thud from down below, then the sound of loose stones falling and the tension on the rope suddenly lessened.

She looked down. Antori was still there, now digging into the rock himself with his climbing axe. "Are you alright!?" she asked. He nodded and waved for her to lead the way to the top of the cliff. She sighed with relief and started the climb, chipping handholds as she went. They had only fallen a couple of meters from the edge, so it was not long before both she and Antori were on level ground again.

Once there, they paused for a moment to catch their breath. "We made it," Antori said, looking down the way they'd come.

Carlin was too weak to do much more than nod. She tried to undo the knots on her harness, but her fingers were too numb from the cold. "We need to find shelter and a fire before we do anything else," she said.

He nodded and helped her up. The path led eastward into the wind and toward the transmitter tower. Not far beyond the falls, the road dipped into a gully. Carlin and Antori walked together and she leaned into him, grateful for his closeness and warmth.

Suddenly, he jerked and cried out in pain, holding his left leg. Carlin looked down to see he'd caught it in a hole in the broken flagstones of the roadway, twisting his ankle sharply. He went down, dropping his disruptor in the process. Carlin dropped down beside him, fumbling to open her medkit.

That was when she heard them: more men, more hunters. "Hey, wake up! We've got an intruder!" one of them shouted. Three men boiled out from behind a barricade halfway down the ravine.

"There's two of them," said the second man, a Lethian with a bow. "How'd they get up here?"

"Who cares? Just kill them!" growled a Ferasin, lighting a torch.

"With pleasure!" said the final man, a Nausicaan. He drew a makeshift machete—almost a meter long—and stalked toward them.

Carlin reached for her weapon, but realized she'd dropped it in her haste to tend to Antori. The disruptor lay within easy reach, just below her hand. But if I use that… She hesitated. "Please, you don't have to do this!" she pleaded.

The Nausicaan only laughed, stopping before her and raising his weapon. In that moment, she knew that he didn't kill out of need, but out of desire to do so—and that if she and Antori wanted to live, they would have to kill him. Her hand went for the disruptor as he brought the machete down at her head.

He never landed the blow. Antori's arm was suddenly there, seizing the Nausicaan's right arm by the wrist, directing the blow away from her even as he punched the alien in the abdomen hard. The Nausicaan's blade struck the cobblestones and it staggered backward, wincing. A moment later, he was back up again, charging at them…but a moment was all Carlin had needed. She raised the disruptor and fired.

The Nausicaan went down with a smoking hole in his head. The Lethian swore and loosed an arrow. Carlin dodged to one side, Antori to the other—though his ankle hampered his movements. The Lethian put another arrow on the string, but before he could draw, Carlin's second shot caught him in the throat.

Just then, a bottle smashed down between Carlin and Antori. She smelled alcohol, and looked to see flames erupting between them. She turned to see the Ferasin with the torch preparing another bottle. She did not give him a chance to throw it, firing again. The shot caught him in the torso and he fell backward, the bottle breaking where he fell and spreading flames around his body. He did not scream, though. He was already dead.

Carlin lowered the disruptor. She turned her attention back to Antori, stamping out the fire between them before going back to tend to his ankle. She removed his foot carefully from the hole and examined it with her tricorder. "Sprained," she pronounced. "I'll have to use the muscular regenerator on the tendons, and it could take a few hours. Until then, you'll have to use a splint and take it easy."

"No can do," said Antori, trying to rise. "We've got to keep moving. If these guards are any indication, that base is nearby, and we—AHH!" He cut off in a cry of pain as he tried to put weight on the leg. Carlin took her place on his left side, supporting him. "On second thought, perhaps I could use a splint."

"I thought you'd say that," said Carlin. She managed to find her phaser and retrieve it, handing the disruptor back to Antori. They both kept their weapons drawn as they made their way cautiously forward. "One of the men was telling the others to wake up, that probably means they have a camp nearby…"

Sure enough, just past the barricade, they came to the mouth of a tunnel of sorts-part natural earth, part toranium alloy. There was a campfire down by this end, hidden from the rest of the tunnel by a crashed ground-vehicle. The camp was abandoned. Antori sat down by the fire while she made a splint for him and started the treatment. "You were right," he said. "This will feel a lot better. We should try drying ourselves out, too, while we're at it."

Carlin nodded. "You were right, too," she said binding the splint with a segment of the rope they'd used for a harness.

"About what?" he asked.

"About what matters, about what we can control," she said. "Our actions and motivations." She glanced back toward the tunnel entrance, where the bodies of the camp's original owners lay. "I killed those three men, but I didn't want to. My only choice was to kill them or let them kill both of us, but they…they wanted to kill." She turned back to Antori and tugged at his red uniform jacket. "I guess I just realized that makes us different…better than them, whether we're wearing these uniforms or not."

Author's Note: In case you haven't already figured it out (or read it in the description), I'm trying to do regular updates, once a week on Mondays, for this story. While this is a little slower than my usual method of posting chapters immediately after I complete them, it does allow for more regular updates. It also lets me keep this story going without burning out on it or losing the ability to do other things on the side. I have a backlog now, so regular updates should continue even if I hit a major case of writers block (or another set of technical issues). This also allows me to go back to previous chapters and make major changes to preserve continuity before they're published. I will be going back and doing some edits on previous chapters (mostly cleaning up typos-my apologies) but I'll wait until the end for that.

And now, for the chapter itself! There are divergences from the game here, but mostly for reasons already mentioned in chapter 13's notes. Obviously I already skipped over the wolf-den quest, but I tried to work in some of the details of the associated climb. I also set the whole thing later, in the morning. The biggest difference, of course, is that I had Antori and Carlin go up together, whereas in the game Lara goes alone while a still-injured Roth stays behind. With the wonders of Starfleet medicine, there's on compelling reason for Antori to stay behind, and he would definitely want to go.

There were some other more minor and thematic changes. Once again my characters reminded me that the best way to stave off hypothermia from wet clothes is to dry said wet clothes off, but having Carlin out of uniform in the opening scene also served to make the scene a little more intimate and her a little more vulnerable, which I thought was important, given the subject matter.

About the subject matter, one of the themes of the game is Lara's journey and process of becoming a warrior. Her first kill, Vladimir, is obviously very traumatic for her and its clear she doesn't like killing. Early on, she tries to avoid confrontation with the Solarii even pleading with them, as Carlin does in the final fight scene of this chapter. But as the game goes on, she toughens up and seems to realize that the Solarii aren't going to give her any choice...and that they richly deserve everything that's coming to them (with the end result being her taunting them during fights instead of pleading with them not to kill her). I wanted to show Carlin on something of a similar journey, and hopefully I succeeded.

A terawatt was the amount of power used by the Allasomorphs to communicate through the distortion of Daled IV's atmosphere (TNG: "The Dauphin"), so I figure it could punch through similar interference on Yamatai. Polyduranium is a material that made up parts of the Defiant, specifically a bulkhead on the bridge (DS9: "The Search, part 1")...and I pretty much made up its properties. Acrophobia is the fear of heights. Pretty much any other character would have said "fear of heights," but I think Carlin would be more technical. Toranium was a very strong substance used in Cardassian construction (DS9: "The Forsaken" and "Second Skin").