THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST Read online

  Chapter Four

  Second Year, 2369-70

  “THIS LOOKS LIKE SHUNT,” Nev Reoh said, blinking at the low, brown hills that ran to the horizon under a blinding white sun.

  “What’s that?” Bobbie Ray asked.

  “Shunt is the Bajoran resettlement camp where I grew up!”

  As a last-year cadet, Nev Reoh had waited as long as he could before taking the required survival test. His two teammates, Bobbie Ray and Starsa, were second-year cadets, and had chosen to take the test as soon as they could. He knew the only reason they had agreed to have him on their team was because there was a certain sense of obligation that came from being in their first Quad together.

  There were lots of other cadets who would have liked to team with Starsa and Bobbie Ray. They were both athletes—Bobbie Ray because of his admirable physique and Starsa in spite of hers. It had taken Starsa nearly a year to acclimate, but now she seemed to be making up for lost time.

  Reoh had watched her the entire summer, and she hadn’t seemed to mind being stuck on Earth for her vacation break. From his workstation assisting at the Academy Database, he could see a bunch of cadets who grav-boarded on the concourse. Of all the crazy cadets who were left on the campus, it was Starsa who made him swallow in fear. The way she hung off the front edge, riding that fine line between the fastest speed the human body could achieve and out-of-control tumbling, made him dig his fingers into his own thighs until blue bruises rose to the surface.

  Reoh hadn’t dared to ask Bobbie Ray and Starsa if he could join their team. It had been their decision to include him. When he had first found out, he gave thanks to the Prophets, in spite of his crises of faith. At least he had a chance to survive, let alone pass the test.

  Reoh had prepared for the test by taking extra survival courses every semester. Now, they were standing on a ridge overlooking a barren, rocky desert of sharp cliffs and flat-topped plateaus very much like the only place he really did know. “Shunt!” he repeated, shaking his head.

  “You say that like it’s bad,” Bobbie Ray pointed out. He was looking very uncomfortable in his rubber suit. “Where’s all the water? Down in the cracks?”

  “If this is like Shunt, we’ll have trouble finding enough water to stay alive.”

  Bobbie Ray undid the neck buckle of his waterproof suit. “Everyone said there would be water. The last eight times the survival missions took place in a marsh, a bog, two swamps, and four rain jungles.”

  Reoh shrugged, just as boggled as Bobbie Ray was over this unusual twist.

  Bobbie Ray let out a frustrated growl as he peeled the rubber suit off his fur. He had been so smugly satisfied as the cadet ship had beamed them down to the surface, so certain that he wouldn’t have to suffer four days of wet fur, that his disgruntlement at finding themselves high and dry was ironic, to say the least.

  “Where’s Starsa?” Reoh asked, glancing around.

  Bobbie Ray tossed the rubber aside. “I didn’t see anything until you came over that ridge.”

  “I was put down a few meters inside that ravine,” Reoh said.

  Bobbie Ray judged the angles and decided, “I bet she’s over there. If not, we’ll be on higher ground and able to see better.”

  “What if we don’t find her?” Reoh asked.

  “We’ll find her.” Bobbie Ray started toward the rise about a hundred meters away from them. “You’ve got room for that, don’t you?”

  “Uh, sure.” Nev Reoh paused long enough to gather up the rubber suit and stuff it in his bag before hurrying after the Rex.

  From their vantage point on top of the slight rise, Reoh could see that, like Shunt, this plateau desert was a step-by-step series of fairly flat-topped units separated from each other by cliffs and broken, steep-sided slopes. One glance revealed it to be a vast and lonely land, with no signs of life other than a few brown, scraggly plants on the edges of the plateaus or down in the narrow canyons.

  Bobbie Ray planted his feet firmly, looking around for Starsa and bellowing her name—“Starsa!!” They could hear his voice echo against the flat-sided canyons for what seemed like miles. In an aside to Reoh, he added, “This is the ugliest place I’ve ever seen.”

  Reoh swallowed. “I sort of like the colors.” The layers of rock exposed by the canyons were brilliantly varied in hues of purple, red-orange, yellow, gray, and creamy beige. Maybe that explained his innate desire to study geology—rocks, he knew. “It could be a color chart lesson in planet-building.”

  Bobbie Ray gave him a look. “It’s useless land. All chopped up.”

  Reoh gave up trying to explain exogeology to the Rex. “Where’s Starsa?”

  “How should I know?” Bobbie Ray retorted, looking annoyed.

  “What will we do if we can’t find her?”

  “We’ll find her.”

  “How?” Reoh asked.

  “Stop asking me so many questions!” Bobbie Ray kept gazing around, as if hoping Starsa would pop up from one of the canyons.

  Nev Reoh obediently kept his mouth shut. The only thing that made him feel better was knowing that his vital signs and location were being closely monitored by the cadet ship. The four dozen cadets participating in the survival test had placed the temporary orbital satellites in the stratosphere of the planet themselves. If anything serious went wrong with a cadet, a transporter would pluck them from the surface before serious injury could occur. There were a number of stories at the Academy, like the one of a cadet losing her grip at the top of a Cipres tree and falling thirty meters before dematerializing in front of the shocked eyes of her survival team. Of course, that cadet had failed the test, but all Reoh cared about was that she had lived to tell about it.

  Reoh opened his mouth but remembered in time that Bobbie Ray didn’t like questions. He quietly followed the orange Rex as they tried to triangulate their arrival positions. Ideally, a survival team rejoined shortly after transporting to their test site, and then rejoined with as many other cadet teams as possible while managing to stay alive.

  By nightfall, Nev Reoh and Bobbie Ray hadn’t found a single cadet—including Starsa.

  Reoh ventured to ask, “We’ll fail if we don’t find her, won’t we?”

  “Yes,” Bobbie Ray said shortly, as irritable as if Reoh had personally caused Starsa’s disappearance.

  They settled in for the night under an overhang of sandstone, where the shale at the base of the cliff had been cut away by the wind. There was a nice pile of sand that had been deposited by the last rush of water that had run through the canyon—but from the lack of growth, Reoh estimated that had been seasons ago.

  “I hope Starsa is all right,” Reoh worried as they smoothed the sand into a place to sleep.

  “She’s fine. She’s just down in one of these pits, like us,” Bobbie Ray grumbled. They hadn’t been able to build a fire because of the lack of suitable vegetation. But the absence of any sort of print or trail in the sand had led them to believe it would be safe to sleep on the ground. Actually, they had no choice. It was either here or up on one of the plateaus, exposed to the rising wind. At least in the canyon they had a semblance of shelter.

  Bobbie Ray yawned, obviously feeling better now that they weren’t tramping uselessly all over the place. “Besides, as long as we find another team, then we can still get a qualified-pass.”

  “But Starsa’s part of our team,” Reoh protested. “We have to find her.”

  Bobbie Ray shrugged, no longer assuring Reoh that they would find her. Reoh didn’t say anything, but he didn’t like it that Bobbie Ray was giving up on her. He worried about Starsa almost as much as he envied her innocence of sexual tensions and her lack of fear or self-doubt. She lived completely in the moment, unrestrained, yet unaware of her own freedom. But that made her vulnerable in ways the other cadets couldn’t imagine.

  Reoh slept uneasily that night, and at one point he felt Bobbie Ray get up and squirm into his rubber suit for warmth and protection against the wind. Without an
y cloud cover, the heat was released from the atmosphere and the rock walls lost their warmth almost as soon as the sun went down.

  Soon after, Bobbie Ray passed out so solidly that even when Reoh moved in closer, trying to get out of the wind behind the bulk of the Rex’s body, Bobbie Ray didn’t stir. He kept thinking about Starsa, out there all alone.

  The next day they spent circling the area where they had beamed down. They stayed on top of the plateaus except when they had to descend into the canyons to cross to another section. In the morning, Bobbie Ray once again seemed confident they would soon find Starsa. But as it turned out, the plateaus were deceptively hilly, hiding variations and crevices in the land until they were nearly upon them.

  Nev Reoh felt completely at home in the arid place. Most of the scant vegetation grew in the eroded crevices leading off the plateaus—a few pygmy trees similar to Austrid conifers. The central portions of the high lands were barren hills formed from ancient layers of volcanic ash that had turned to clay. It was likely that plants couldn’t get a hold in the clay because it swelled in the brief wet periods and shrank when dry.

  Half the morning was gone when they came upon cadets Puller, Reeves, and Ijen. Nev Reoh’s worst fear was finally confirmed when he saw Puller’s contorted, misery-filled face. Reoh had suspected something was wrong because of Starsa’s disappearance, but Bobbie Ray hadn’t listened to him.

  Now, none of the cadets could ignore Puller’s anguished breathing and sweaty skin. The other team was halfway down a cliff, in an inpromtu camp on a narrow ledge. Nev Reoh couldn’t stop staring at the shreds of Puller’s uniform hanging down one side, echoing the torn flesh underneath. He wheezed from ribs broken in the fall, through his chest was now bound with a support bandage from the medkit.

  Reeves and Ijen looked almost as bad as Puller, having tended their pain-racked teammate all night on their exposed perch.

  “Why hasn’t the cadet ship picked him up?” Bobbie Ray demanded, his voice rising in fear. They were all looking up into the shimmering pearl grey sky.

  “Didn’t you call?” Nev Reoh asked, nearly panicked at Puller’s streaky white pallor. He was already digging into his pocket to grab his own alarm-summons. Bobbie Ray tried to stop him, but Reoh activated it anyway, not caring if they failed their own test. He wanted Puller off these rocks and in sick bay now.

  They waited, expecting a medical team to appear or to hear a summons on their comm badges, keyed to the cadet ship overhead. But nothing happened, and there was no sound but the wind whistling around the rocks.

  Ijen sat with her head in her hands, obviously too weary to get her hopes up that a different alarm-summons would work. “Something’s happened to the cadet ship,” she said dully.

  “What could happen to the cadet ship?” Reoh blurted out.

  Reeves obligingly began to supply possibilities. “It was attacked, it crashed, the crew died of food poisoning, the life-support system failed . . .”

  “What are you saying?” Bobbie Ray demanded. “That we’re on our own down here?”

  Ijen slowly raised her head. “Yes.”

  Bobbie Ray didn’t believe it. Starfleet wouldn’t desert a bunch of their own cadets. There would be so many people protesting in the Federation Assembly that the Academy would never recover from the scandal. Even with the evidence right in front of his eyes, he couldn’t believe they would all slowly die on this waste-planet.

  “Maybe there’s something magnetic going on,” Bobbie Ray told them. “Something in the ionosphere. You hear about it all the time.”

  Nev Reoh was nodding in support, still anxiously looking to the sky as if to expect the cadet ship to suddenly appear overhead.

  But Reeves shook his head. “You helped deploy the satellites. This planet has a very weak magnetic field because it’s no longer tectonically active.”

  “Well, it’s got to be something,” Bobbie Ray insisted. “Excited electrons in the stratosphere, or solar flares. We just have to wait for it to subside and they’ll come get us.”

  Now both Reeves and Ijen were looking at him, their expressions dull from lack of sleep. “If we don’t get more water soon,” Reeves said, “we’ll be dead before that happens. We’ve explored as far as we dare to go alone, and we can’t leave Puller—”

  “We’ll find water,” Bobbie Ray told them, glad to have a firm objective in mind.

  Reoh hesitated. “Uh, that might not be so easy.”

  “We’ll find water,” Bobbie Ray repeated, looking straight at the former Vedek, willing him to shut up.

  “Uh, sure,” the other cadet agreed, cowed into submission.

  It was difficult climbing down the rest of the way into the canyon, even for Bobbie Ray. He couldn’t understand why the other cadets had tried to descend at that point—it was obviously unstable. Perhaps the cadet ship was waiting to see how the other two handled the situation they’d gotten themselves into. But Bobbie Ray somehow doubted that. Puller was in real pain; no one in Starfleet could be that callous.

  Bobbie Ray led Reoh down into the canyon, heading in the direction that Ijen and Reeves said appeared to lead toward a larger canyon. He and Reoh would be needing water soon, too. They had been looking for water all morning, in fact, and Bobbie Ray was becoming adept at recognizing the types of terrain that seemed like they should contain water, but in fact, didn’t.

  “Sometimes you find seeps back in these overhangs,” Reoh said for perhaps the dozenth time.

  Bobbie Ray folded his arms, waiting while Reoh crawled forward on his stomach under the sandstone ledge, feeling around cautiously with one hand. The only life-forms they had discovered were long, ovoid insects with too many short legs that burrowed into the sand. He shuddered, thinking of where they had slept the night before, but at least he’d had the protection of the waterproof—he knew it would come in handy!

  There was also a round-bellied rock-dweller that had extra-long legs and lived in the dark places in the cracks. The Bajoran soon emerged, shaking his hand as if he’d encountered something scurrying inside. Bobbie Ray couldn’t help twitching his own hands, as if invisible insects were crawling across his fur.

  “No water,” Reoh reported glumly.

  Bobbie Ray started to say, “I could have told you—” when the sound of rocks falling further up the canyon made him stop.

  “Starsa!” Reoh exclaimed to Bobbie Ray. He called out, “Star-sa! We’re over here! Starrr-sa!”

  Bobbie Ray led the way down the canyon, heading further away from the sick-camp, as he was beginning to think of it. They went much further than it had sounded, calling out all the way, but they didn’t see or hear anything else. Not for the first time, Bobbie Ray regretted that their comm badges were only linked to the cadet ship rather than the other cadets.

  “Look at this,” Reoh suddenly said.

  Bobbie Ray joined him at the base of a loose pile of sedimentary rock. A few had rolled beyond the pile, and nearby there was some sort of mark on the hard-packed, rocky soil. Four parallel grooves dug deeply into the ground.

  “What is it?” Reoh asked.

  Bobbie Ray glanced around, unsheathing his knife. “I don’t know.”

  “It doesn’t seem natural,” Reoh said hesitantly.

  Bobbie Ray stuck the point of his knife into the groove and it sank nearly three inches. “Looks dangerous, whatever it is.”

  “Try scratching the surface,” Reoh suggested.

  Bobbie Ray jabbed at the dirt; he had to dig a few passes to make his ragged groove as deep. When he stood up, he kept his knife out—the only weapon the cadets had been allowed to bring on this test.

  “It looks dangerous,” he repeated. “I figured this was too easy.”

  “Easy? You call this easy? Puller’s chest is shattered, we can’t find Starsa, and all of us are going to die if we don’t find water soon.” Nev Reoh stared at him. “Easy?”

  Bobbie Ray let him blather on, mainly keeping an eye on the surrounding cliffs. He led them
out of the narrow chasm as soon as he could, certain that their best tactical situation would be to climb up on the plateaus.

  Luckily, when they reached the top, they were on a long and winding plateau that was interconnected with several other large islands in the midst of the canyonlands. Nev Reoh pointed excitedly to a fluff of green vegetation at the bottom of one of the deepest canyons. “There has to be water down there.”

  The sun was at its height, and the day grew hotter as they slowly made their way down into the canyon. But they were rewarded at the bottom, where there was a small seep in the wall. It trickled through a thick, green mat of algae before disappearing into the damp sand at the base of the cliff.

  Bobbie Ray shoved his way through tall grass and tiny-leafed bushes that grew protectively around the seep. Filling all five canteens took some time, as Reoh patiently held each nozzle up to the trickle. Bobbie Ray scouted the area, never going much further than a few hundred meters before Reoh’s worried call drew him back.

  Bobbie Ray was certain he heard footsteps, and twice he turned to see the movement of a shadow. But on this planet they’d seen nothing capable of moving or casting a shadow—not a cloud, not a plant, not any animal.

  As Reoh was capping the last canteen, Bobbie Ray stood over him, keeping an eye out for his stalker. He was certain he was being stalked. If Titus had come on the survival test, he could have assumed it was him, because that would be typical of the cadet. But Titus and Jayme had passed Academy-approved survival tests the summer before their first year.

  “I’m finished,” Nev Reoh announced, moving stiffly from having crouched so long next to the seep.

  Bobbie Ray ignored Reoh’s request to rest, and he rushed the older cadet back to the spot where they had descended into the canyon.