The shuttle sinks rapidly. Jamisson goes with it, face fried by an exploding console as they plummeted into what had looked like a clearing, but had turned out to be sucking mire. Poor sod. Three weeks from retirement, a pregnant wife at home. "Tell her I love her." He'd rattled as Chapel shot him full of sedatives. "Tell her I tried." There'd been no time for anything but escape, after that. No mayday beacon, no backup supplies. A med kit and a phaser, and the rations in the emergency satchel. That's what they have to survive here, for who knows how long.
La'an turns her face to the sky, finds nothing but greenery, a faint, shrouded sun. She's up to her knees in muck still, uniform caked from their scramble to safer ground. There are no trees to speak of, nothing you could climb. No horizon to give her a bearing.
"This place stinks." Chapel mutters, wiping uselessly at the screen of her tricorder. There isn't a scrap of clean clothing between them, nothing with which to clear the gunk. La'an plucks a leaf, drops it quickly when it stings. Resists the impulse to suck her fingers, because yuk. "That's powerful stuff." Chapel injects antihistamines as hives start to appear, first on her hand, then creeping upwards. "We need to be careful, just about everything's toxic."
Great. And never mind whether the place has natives, whether they'll run out of water and food, there's nowhere to sleep, to lie down without the risk of drowning. How the hell are they going to survive?
"They'll come looking." Chapel squeezes her arm. "The nuns need those supplies, they're going to holler when we don't show up. No one ignores starving orphans."
Right. Sweat prickles along La'an's forehead. She feels… strange. "We need to get higher." The tricorder's readings are fuzzy, but they pick a direction, set off through the squelching mess. There's a path, once they reach firmer ground, like an elephant track through the jungle. Something lives here. It isn't particularly comforting. La'an's head swirls. She tries another step, sways suddenly to her knees. Something slithers beneath them, twisting and sinuous.
Up ahead, Chapel shrieks.
"Run!" La'an manages as tendrils twist around her ankles, begin dragging her downwards, but Chapel's coming back, slipping on the undulating pathway, trying to reach her. La'an fires at the vines as they erupt between them, dripping and coiling. "Run!"
"I'm not leaving you!"
Of course she isn't. And it's academic anyway, the phaser's useless, the vines are too tough, too many, too wet, a clinging, stinging net of jellyfish tentacles that ensnare them in seconds, tightening inexorably, making her senses blur. La'an fights her way forward, manages to catch Chapel's fingers for one final second, I love you, before they're dragged under, and the world goes black.
It's an ignominious ending; in a putrid swamp on an unsurveyed rock along a disused flight path. Starfleet will never find them.
But at least they've gone together.