Star Trek-TOS-013-The Wounded Sky by The Wounded Sky

Author:The Wounded Sky [Sky, The Wounded]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-08-06T16:24:32.109000+00:00

Nine

"Is our course confirmed, Mr. Spock?"

"It is, sir."

"Uhura, is the message away to Starfleet?"

"Set into the inversion apparatus, Captain. It will go when we do."

"Is the crew ready?"

"Yes, sir."

"Mr. Sulu, give us—-«o, never mind the countdown. Uhura, notify the crew we're going.—All set? Very well. Engineering, implement!"

They jumped.

—the evening wind blew and she lifted her head to it, catching strange scents with the familiar ones. Pine was there, but so was raiwasku; she smelled sage and cypress, but also bluestar and talastima. From far away, toward the rose and opal sunset, a sound came floating —a low, coughing grumble that made the hair stand up on the back of her neck. There was no mistaking that.

Lion. She lifted her eyes to the darkening sky and saw two white moons, one unmarred, one stained and scarred with maria, drifting toward the burning horizon. A third, tiny and hasty and rose-red, leapt up from under the opposite horizon as she watched, and chased after the other two.

This was Serengeti, then—the fifth planet of Procyon A, where the once-endangered creatures of the Terrene plains roamed free and untroubled by hunters. She had never had the tune to come here, though the place had been her idea of Heaven when she was a little girl. Serengeti was just being founded when she was five or six; and some story her mother told her about it got mixed hi with all the other stories, about animals that were able to talk to each other and sometimes even to people. She decided then and there that she would be a Serengeti ranger when she grew up, and go talk to the animals.

What she found out as she got older was that it wasn't so much the animals that fascinated her, as the talking —communicating with another kind of life, finding out what it was thinking, sharing her thoughts in turn. And Starfleet was the place where they taught you to do that. She plunged into Academy, graduated, and forgot all about Serengeti, beckoned outward by the wonders and strangeness of Vulcan and Tel and the Cetians, Orion and Aus Qao and the Aldebaran worlds. Now she stood in the crimson grass of the Serengeti equatorial high veldt, looking up at Mount Meritaja in his snowcapped majesty, and laughed softly, a small, glad sound in the huge windy silence. This was where what she now was had begun. It was high time she acknowledged it.

She glanced down at herself and found herself suitably attired—jumpsuit, bugbelt, slogging boots; and at her side, not the familiar, minimally-powered Federation phaser, but a blaster worthy of the name, that could vaporize half a hill. Out here it might come in handy. Not for the animals, of course—but there were rumors of poachers.

Heaven help them if they run into me/ she thought, starting to walk (for lack of a better goal) toward the sunset. The ecology of Serengeti was one of the most delicately balanced in the Federation, the more so because it was contrived.

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