Rough Trails by L.A. Graf

Author:L.A. Graf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Books/Star Trek
Published: 2000-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

“COMMANDER? Can you get up now? There’s someone here we think you should see.”

Startled out of uneasy sleep, Sulu tried to sit up to see who was talking to him. The muscles of his back and shoulders, knotted from long hours of piloting, then bruised by almost as many hours on the lurching back of a camel, cramped in protest. He groaned and dropped back into his tangle of dusty blankets, narrowing his eyes against the glare of light. Something snuffled at his shoulder, then whined. A moment later, he felt a wet warmth slop across his cheek.

“All right, I’m awake!” He used his elbows to lever himself up this time, but it still didn’t put him out of range of that enthusiastic licking. “You can call your dog off now.”

“Kinney, down.” The backlit figure in the doorway sounded a little breathless, but his voice still carried enough snap to drop the big, husky dog to the floor. A much smaller dog ran a circle around it, plumed tail frisking eagerly, but the big one never took its dark eyes from Sulu. “Sorry. She’s usually not that friendly with strangers.”

“I probably smell like dog food. The shuttle’s full of it.” Sulu scrubbed at his eyes, feeling the familiar day-after muzziness of having slept too little after too long a period of wakefulness. He glanced around the bare plas-steel walls of the prefabricated bedroom, trying to find a window so he could tell if it was day or night. All he saw were sacks that looked as if they had once held food or seed grain, tacked up in the places where windows should have been. Outside, a muffled wind hooted and moaned. “Is the storm over?”

“It’s never over.” The red-haired man put a foot out to sweep Kinney out of the way as Sulu got unsteadily to his feet. When his face caught the light, Sulu could see that it had once been handsome, but the blistered scars of too much radiation exposure had turned it into an expressionless mask around his pale eyes. “We’d better get you to the emergency med unit.”

“No, it’s all right. I’m just a little sore.” Sulu’s response was unthinking, born more of the assumption that his radiation shots were still protecting him than an actual assessment of his health. Now that he thought about it, he could feel an uncomfortable tightness across his own cheeks, as if he’d gotten sunburned during the long night journey to this homestead. There was a hollow not-quite-nausea in his stomach that he hoped was merely hunger. Between the long camel ride and the sleep he’d tumbled into as soon as they’d arrived, Sulu had no idea how many meals he’d missed since last night’s makeshift dinner in the Bean.

He still regretted having left the experimental shuttle behind in Desperation, but there hadn’t been any other alternative. Peals of thunder had chased him from the cockpit back to the cargo hold, and when he’d opened the loading-ramp door,

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