Star Trek Into Darkness Page 0,3
more. He imagined himself a spider on a silken thread, hunting for the one stable perch above a vat of boiling oil.
Picked out by the shuttle’s hasty surface scan, the landing site was right where it was supposed to be. Its spear of metamorphic stability thrust comfortingly above the lava that geysered around it. Though recognition of it was gratifying, securing the visual did not make touching down on it any easier. All around him, huge jets of molten rock the color of the sun fountained upward, threatening to collapse atop his precarious perch and drown him. Air currents rippling with heat made it difficult to maintain position, and despite the best efforts of Sulu and the shuttle’s optimizing stability system, perfect immobility was impossible to achieve in the hissing throat of the volcano. The overwhelmed helmsman finally had to admit as much. His voice filled the increasingly warm interior of the exosuit’s helmet.
“I can’t hold us here! Activity is becoming more violent, and the stabilizers’ algorithms aren’t designed to cope with this combination of heat and atmospheric distortion. Spock, we have to pull you back up!”
The Vulcan proffered a reply that was as characteristic as it was in startling contrast to his present surroundings. “Negative, Mr. Sulu. This will be our only chance to save this entire species. If this volcano erupts, this planet dies. I would be remiss in my duties as a science officer were I to terminate this mission now.”
Then the cable, stressed by heat and circumstances with which it had never been designed to cope, snapped.
It was not a long fall, but the landing was hard enough. Spock winced as contact was made with the unyielding rocky surface. Jolted from his grasp, the case and its precious contents tumbled toward the molten rock that surrounded the solid stone on which he had landed. As he rolled and struggled to stabilize his position, he fumbled for the Rankine nullifier. Ignoring the pain in his back and ribs, he scrambled to recover it before it was lost to the seething lava. High overhead, the lower length of the broken cable had vanished into the roiling, toxic haze.
To a stunned Uhura, the unprogrammed rapidity of the cable’s ascent could mean only one thing. “The line . . . there’s no weight on it.” Though equally distressed, Sulu had no time to comfort her. As individual components shut down or went offline, the shuttle’s performance was being swiftly degraded. Frantically bypassing damaged elements and engaging emergency backups, he was fully occupied in striving to keep them from following the science officer into the volcano’s blistering, molten depths.
Rocked by a tremendous blast of superheated air, the shuttle was blown upward several dozen meters before Sulu could regain control. Despite the danger of being knocked to the deck or thrown against the roof, Uhura began to unfasten her seat’s safety harness.
“We have to get him back. There’s another specialty exosuit in the cargo bay. I can suit up, go down, and pick him up.”
With no time to spare for discussion, a grim-faced Sulu kept his attention focused on the controls. Too many readouts had turned a monotonously lethal red, too many more were shifting threateningly from green to yellow. In his left ear, a nearly invisible transmitter relayed a streaming updated info dump, none of it reassuring. Their situation was bad and growing worse.
“Given the ongoing degradation of the shuttle’s functions, at this point I’ll be lucky if I can get us back to the ship.”
Her voice cracked; her eyes pleaded. “We can’t just leave him!”
Sulu outranked her. At that moment, he wished he didn’t. Wishing, however, had no place in the chain of command. “We don’t have a choice! We barely have maneuverability, we’ve been in here too long, and if we stay a moment longer, I can’t guarantee that we’ll go anywhere but down.”
No time, no time. Uncertain even if he could still hear her, Uhura addressed the console pickup. “Spock, we’re going to try and get back to the Enterprise.”
Their discussion was rendered moot as, at that moment, a sizeable chunk of solidifying, red-hot basalt slammed into the underside of the shuttle, sending it spinning wildly upward. Alarms screamed. Fighting to retain control, Sulu entered a navigation sequence, hoping that the shuttle retained enough aerodynamic functionality to comply. If he spent any more time at the manual controls, he wouldn’t be ready when the time came to abandon the sturdy but beleaguered craft. Unsealing his flight suit revealed