<USS Cervantes> "Pursuit Pt II"

"Pursuit Pt I"
 
            They were a hundred paces into the desert. Their footfalls
were scooping tiny pitfalls of sand, each successively deeper. Their
progress was slow.
            Behind them, a dune rose almost high enough to cover the
looming ruins. In front of them, they were too far from camp to discern
the spiky Ss'thla architecture.
            "Oh, no," Ashne'e sighed aloud.
            "What?"
            "Lar's scan showed four Ss'thla with Ssarish, four at the
temple and one at the camp. Orschh must have been at the library with
Ssarish."
            "Do you think he's dead?"
            "I think it's more likely than he's a murderer."
            Kennedy pulled out her tricorder and started a scan. "This
is going to take a minute. Something about this atmosphere is resistant
to scanning. I can see the four at the temple, and I can see four more
heading toward the temple. and, yeah, I guess that blip probably means
one at the camp. but I'm not reading anything else."
            "You can't read the corpses?" Ashne'e asked gravely.
            "No. wait. Oh, hell."
            "What is it?"
            "How good are your rock impersonations? We're being
followed."
            "How fast is he gaining on us?" Ashne'e queried in sotto
voice.
            "Fast enough."
            It was impossible to run with the sand a mire of
inconsistency, at one moment seeming solid where buffeted by the ground
beneath, and then giving way beneath their weight so they had to work
their way out. The air was still and quiet. Ephemeral morning breezes
were napping in the afternoon heat so nothing relieved the tension
festering in the air. Into that emptiness, the mind inferred snatches of
sound like mirages. Was that a footfall? A rustle? The snap of straining
scales?
            "This is impossible," Kennedy announced. Tossing up her
hands, she halted in front of a rise of sand. Slender, with her arms
upraised like branches, she looked like a desert tree. "We should stop,
use our phasers. It'll give us the element of surprise. Frag him."
            "You may be right, Lieutenant."
            Ashne'e stood beside Kennedy, surveying the pocked surface
of the planet. She shouldn't have been thirsty, but the sight of all
that dry sand made her palette ache for the relief of water.
            "Why can't we see him?" Ashne'e asked. "Where could he hide?
A nine foot tall reptile slinking through the sands. where is he?"
            "Maybe his rock impersonations are better than ours."
Kennedy shrugged, but her eyes were darting across the sand, searching.
            Ashne'e spun slowly, surveying, until the rise loomed in
front of her, a mountain of sand. "The camp is on the other side of that
rise," she said, pointing. "I recognize it. The divot in the middle like
a dimple. How long would it take us to climb it? A few minutes? But if
we can get to the top."
            A grin spread across Kennedy's face from ear to ear. "We can
slalom down! On our cloaks! I remember once when I was with the USS
Croft, and we were in Egypt --"
            "Later," suggested Ashne'e, feeling the pressure beat
against her back like the heat.
            Kennedy mounted the rising sand first, her greater height
better suited to taking the slope in immense, yawning strides. Ashne'e,
taking her hand, climbed backward, her hand never far from her phaser.
It was awkward, but it meant Orschh couldn't sneak up on them, whatever
his vantage point. 
            It was a long, slow climb. Once or twice, Ashne'e stumbled.
There was no sign of Orschh.
            It would have been hard not to feel silly as they spread out
their cloaks on the top of the sand ridge, flopped onto their bellies
and prepared to dive down the sides - it would have been hard if it
hadn't been for the prodigious girlish grin splitting Kennedy's face.
            A brief thought flashed through Ashne'e's head on the way
down: what kind of publicity photo would this make? Join Starfleet -
slalom down exotic hills. She couldn't help but laugh a little. When she
got back to the ship, she'd have to suggest to someone that they make
cloak-slaloming a vital part of an academy holo-training program.
            They skittered to the bottom. Ashne'e picked her way free of
the cloak, and tried to shake loose the sand that had embedded itself in
the pores of her skin.
            "Is there any sign of him?" Ashne'e asked.
            Kennedy shook her head.
            "We'd better find Ss'lih then. Keep your tricorder out."
            "The Ss'thla lifesign is on the other end of camp, near the
trading post."
            Ashne'e nodded and started off through the dense mass of
identical black structures. She started forward, paused, questioning her
sense of direction, and placed her foot along another of the myriad
possible paths, trying to distinguish some unique feature of any
building that would help her move forward.
            The beams of colored light the Ss'thla had fashioned to help
the Starfleet officers find their way through the camp had been switched
off. "I hope your sense of direction is better than mine," Ashne'e said
to Kennedy.
            Kennedy pointed upward. "I think that slanted roof is the
main building. So we should go that way." She started down a narrow
alleyway that forced the two women to walk single-file. "At least if we
get lost, we can follow the tricorder." A large, pointed object like a
gate barred their path. "Sort of." She turned to the left, and carefully
picked her way around the obstacle, Ashne'e following her doggedly.
            By all rights, their footsteps should have echoed between
the spaces, mockingly resounding as they dove upward toward the black
roofs. The silence was more eerie.
            Black on black on pale beige. The eye strained to
manufacture color out of the stark landscape. And then there was green.
            "There!" Kennedy hollered. Ashne'e was already a few steps
in its direction.
            They'd both seen the blurred green form streaking past the
slight gap between the dark buildings, hardly more than a flash of color
and movement.
            "It's on its way to the trading post!" Kennedy frantically
hit buttons on her tricorder as if trying to force it to yield different
information. 
            "To kill Ss'lih." The words passed through them with a
chill.
            Ashne'e sighed, her luminescent eyes shading. "We'll never
make it before he does."

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