Kirk repeated his chief engineer's confident remark to Spock twenty minutes later and watched the Vulcan's eyebrow elevate.
"I fear, sir, that is not probable."
Behind Spock, the other members of the landing party were huddled in the rear of the shelter, piled together for warmth. The shelter's internal heater was working overtime. Kirk automatically counted heads and saw that they were all there: Yeoman Shimona, sleeping curled like a kitten with her head resting on Lieutenant Larssen's leg; Larssen herself, sitting quietly, her eyes on Spock and the screen of the shelter's com unit; Yeoman Brand tinkering with what looked like the shuttlecraft's 'black box'; Ensign Grenwood working on a badly damaged tricorder and Ensign Bai'tin napping in an untidy sprawl of fur covered limbs.
"I have very little to report, Captain. As yet, no data has been obtained from the shuttlecraft flight recorder or the tricorder retrieved from the wreckage. As to the interference, I have been working on the problem since I established the cause, and I have yet to determine a solution."
"You keep working, Spock, and hang in there. Between us, we should be able to come up with an answer."
The eyebrow, only recently returned to level, went up again. "I suspect that the answer will be to wait until the weather calms and the atmosphere clears. The storm shows no sign of subsiding as yet.
As for 'hanging in there', we have nowhere else to go, but we have also nowhere to 'hang'."
Kirk grinned. The landing party was in good shape if Spock could rise to the bait. "The storm seems to be spreading, although not intensifying. With a bit of luck it'll dissipate it's energy more rapidly over a larger area. I'll get in touch when we have something positive to report."
"Indeed, Captain. I would also suggest you make contact again shortly before the window of opportunity closes, in case we have retrieved any useful data from the equipment we recovered."
Spock could tell his captain didn't like the inference they would not have a solution by the deadline, but Kirk nodded. "If it's necessary.
Any information you need while I have the channel open?"
"The Enterprise sensor logs on the climate and weather would be useful." Kirk nodded. "Sending now. We'll have you back before you have time to analyse them."
"Of course, captain. Data received. Spock out." He closed the channel, leaving Kirk with the realization that Spock had just told a social lie.
Larssen eased Shimona's head from her leg and stood. He muscles had cramped with the cold, which had been severe until the shelter's heaters and the combined body heat of six people had taken the chill off the air, She stretched her leg, watching Spock as he bent back over his portable terminal, hesitating a moment before crossing to his side.
"Sir?" She pitched her voice low, for Vulcan hearing only. "Did the Enterprise find a way to defeat the interference?"
Spock turned and gave her a look which seemed, ineffable, to contain a trace of disapproval. "If that were so, Lieutenant, I would have told you."
"Yes, sir." She stepped firmly on the impulse to say Humans question certainty out of fear, sir. Because they don't want to believe the worst. She stepped on the impulse to say We're calm now but people are going to worry soon, and you're the officer. "That was an unnecessary question." She stepped on the impulse to ask Any news?
He was Vulcan: he would tell them if there was any news, and he would not realize that a human would expect to hear if there was no news at all. She went back to her warmish spot between Shimona and Brand, and those still awake looked expectantly at her.
Larssen shook her head slightly. "They're still working on it." she breathed, "Might take a little while."
Grenwood's eyes were wide. This was one of his first away missions and the first in which anything had not gone exactly according to plan. "What will happen to us?"
"Worst case scenario," Larssen said calmly, "is we sit here getting increasingly bored and running all the experiments we can from inside a tent until the storm blows itself out. Best case scenario, we get beamed out in the next ten seconds and I make rehearsal on time." She played in the Enterprise's string concerto, a competent and reliable cellist. Grenwood gave her a little grin, and went back to his task.
Larssen, with no task for the moment, settled herself back down and closed her eyes. She had long ago some to the conclusion that sleeping was something you did every chance you got in Starfleet.
Klingons and Romulans did not change their plans of ambush simply because one Corrina Larssen had been planning a lie in that morning.
She had once gone quietly to sleep while on stand down in the middle of a particularly protracted running fight her last ship had been in with two birds of prey, a fact that had put the rest of science section in awe for almost two weeks, until someone else had done something remarkable. She concentrated now on remembering what that succeeding remarkable feat had been and had narrowed it down to something to do with Ensign Jased and a beverage synthesizer when she drifted off to sleep with a smile on her lips.
She slept through Kirk's call to Spock when the deadline of the end of the communications window came up. She slept through Brand and Grenwood separately completing their salvage work and turning the devices over to Spock for him to recover what he could. She slept through quite a lot of muttered conversations between landing party members, and when she woke suddenly some hours later she was not entirely sure what had woken her but she knew that whatever it was, it had scared her.
Her heart pounding, she scanned the tent. Everyone except Spock was sleeping now. Spock was seated cross-legged at the other end of the shelter, eyes fixed on the portable computer in his lap. Larssen scanned the corners of the tent, the entrance, looking for the threat that had awakened her. Her gaze came back to Spock. He had not moved,
not did her now, he simply sat gazing at the terminal without a flicker of expression on his face, and yet now she knew what had awakened her: Commander Spock's stillness radiated a palpable sense of threat.
Awkwardly, trying not to wake anyone, she got to her feet and tiptoed across the floor to kneel at his side. 'Commander? Has something happened to the ship?"
"I have no way of knowing." He said it almost absently, still concentrating on the screen he held, and then looked up and gave her his full attention. "Why do you ask?"
"Because..." she hesitated. "Because something's wrong." She hesitated again. "What have you found out, sir?"
He looked down at the screen again, and then up at her. "Wake the others." was all he said.
"Professor," Kirk said formally from the door of Science Lab Seven.
"I'm sorry to interrupt, but I have some news."
"Yes?" Ridely said, not looking up from the bioscanner she was using.
"You've found them? Where were they hiding themselves?"
"They're dead." Kirk said simply.
Ridely didn't turn to face him, but Kirk noted that her slim shoulders stiffened, and her fingers were still on the controls for a moment.
"Oh," she said at last, carefully pressing the 'save scan' button and swinging round in her seat. "How?"
"They took a shuttle from the base and crashed in a blizzard. There were no survivors."
"Oh. Did they - did they die in the crash?"
"No. It appears they froze to death afterwards."
"Ah." She blinked hard, biting her lip. "Well, I - I understand that that's not such a bad way - that it doesn't-" Kirk saw she was loosing the battle with tears, and tactfully looked away. "I mean, if you have to - dammit though! Joseph was so close to a breakthrough on Mansinni's Syndrome, he only needed-"
"I didn't realise you knew Commander Riboud." Kirk said, looking up.
Her bad manners over the past few days were now revealed as anxiety,
and a desire to bury that anxiety in work: Kirk wished he'd been less terse with her. Without the expression of impatience she'd worn every other time he'd seen her, Ann Ridley looked younger than he thought her to be, her green eyes swimming with tears. She was close to his own age, he realsised.
"He was an old friend." Ridley said softly. "We were research assistants together, years ago."
"Not that many years, surely?" Kirk asked, smiling.
"Oh," she said wearily, a catch in her voice, "it feels like the other side of forever, now." She turned her back to him and leaned her forehead against the side of the scanner. "I'd like some time alone,
Captain."
"Certainly," Kirk said. "Call me if you need anything, Professor Ridley. I'll give my people instructions that you are to be able to reach me whenever you need."
She nodded once, and he left her be. As she heard the captain's footsteps fading away down the corridor, Ann pulled herself together and stood up. The news he'd brought her had settled inside her, chill as Ser Etta Six itself, and she shivered as she began to reset the bioscanner. Oh, Joseph, she thought, you always said I was afraid,
and you were right. I was a coward, because cowards live longer. And you were brave, and now bravery has got you dead, and it's got me stuck on this brave ship with its brave crew and its brave captain,
and they'll get me dead, as likely as not.
Ann would only get out of here when Kirk himself decided it was time for the Enterprise to leave. She knew enough about the Enterprise and about Captain James T Kirk to know he would never willingly leave crew behind. They would stay in orbit around this hostile planet, too close to the Romulans for any kind of comfort, until Commander Spock and the others were safely back on board or proved to be dead.
Therefore, the sooner they found some answers to the planet's mysteries, the sooner she would be safe in her own bed. She bent to the bioscanner with a will, her hands made steady by fear.