Fur and Fathers

Chapter Twenty-Two

The vast white wilderness stretched unbroken as far as the horizon in three directions.

Shran was facing the fourth, due south.  He’d put the shuttle down on a spur of solid ground that jutted out of the broken clutter of old ice chunks, and now stood at the edge of the sea, watching the waves roll in.  Each gray roller bore a crust of ice shards.  Further out, in the bay, the pieces were starting to knit together.  Very soon this whole area would be a solid sheet.

He breathed happily of the freezing air, his antennae dancing and twitching to its exhilarating bite.  He felt at home here, almost as though he were back on Andoria.  Although he hadn’t intended to make this detour when he’d come down here, he was glad the thought had occurred to him.  The Skaira were certainly amazing people and he was glad he’d met them, but the prospect of just hanging around doing nothing had been unpleasant. The prospect of exploring the northern continent had appealed to him.

He hoped sincerely that the journey would prove worthwhile.  Although he would never have admitted it openly, over the course of their encounters he’d developed an enormous respect and affection for Jonathan Archer, and seeing him collapse in the way he had had been horrifying.  He’d been secretly delighted to have the chance of aiding in his recovery, even if by nothing more than providing the transport; perhaps if it had only been Commander Tucker he’d been dealing with he could have acknowledged his readiness to do so more openly, but his people’s ingrained distrust of Vulcans in general had made him reluctant to do so in front of T'Pol, lest she perceive him as ‘soft’.

His relief at the discovery that Shiránnor was not only still alive, but was confident that she could help Archer’s recovery, had been genuine and heartfelt.  It had been obvious that the ‘lion-lady’, as the humans referred to her, held a deep affection for Jonathan, and that the feeling was intense and mutual.  He wondered how this had come about, but suspected he was unlikely to find out.  He had no objection to keeping the Hath in orbit for a while – the crew could use some time to relax after their exertions in the recent conflict, and they would all enjoy time planetside, even if it was to do no more than walk in the pleasant cold air and fill their lungs with the freshness of it.  He might try a little spear-fishing.  The ingenious and meddlesome pinkskin engineer had even modified the hand-scanner on the shuttle, but the modifications had been limited to mineralogical data.  A scan when he’d arrived here had told him that the water beyond the ice was teeming with life.

Feeling the snow crunch beneath his boots, he strolled contentedly along by the water’s edge for perhaps half an hour.  The sun was low in the sky, hazed behind a thin layer of semi-transparent cloud.  He was the only living thing in sight. 

But not quite, for presently a huff of exhaled air drew his eyes out to where a tall fin had surfaced among the white shards.  He gazed out towards it, shading his eyes against the almost horizontal rays.  A sea-creature, and going by the height of the fin it must be a big one.  The cloud of vapor hung in the still air for a moment, shot with rainbows by the sunlight before it dissipated.  The fin sank and disappeared without a sound, and the great dark body beneath the surface vanished into the depths. If it hadn’t been for that brief apparition he would probably never have noticed the strange discolored rock formation on the jagged spit of land behind it.  As it was, his gaze in that direction picked it out, and after a startled moment or two he realized he was looking at wreckage.  The wreckage, in fact, of some kind of spacecraft.

He cast a newly cautious glance around him, but the landscape was silent and still.

It had been no more than sensible to bring his pistol when he’d come exploring – there was no saying what kind of creatures called this place home.  He unclipped it from his belt and walked quickly but quietly towards the crash site.  A short distance from it he slipped behind a rocky outcrop and took a cautious survey of the scene.

It was not recent.  Layers of snow had fallen and partially entombed it over successive winters; enough had melted in the brief summer to reveal its nature, but soon it would be hidden again.  It had been a big ship, larger than Hath.  It looked as though it had still had some power when it hit, because it had landed relatively level rather than plowing in nose-first, but it had evidently sustained heavy damage during some kind of a fire fight that had taken out its propulsion systems.  Five huge stripes like claw marks were visible on the flank that was nearest to him, the ship’s electronics bared beneath them like organs behind fatal wounds.  There would be no-one living here now.  Even if they had enough food supplies to sustain them, the cold would have taken them.  Even he couldn’t have survived a whole winter with such minimal protection.  Part of the ship had split open in the impact, ending its ability to protect the crew from conditions only a little less hostile than those of deep space.

He moved out of cover, a little less wary after this survey.  And perhaps half way to the ship he discovered who the crew had been.  His boot touched the remains of a body sprawled among the icy stones.  Scavengers had been at it, so it was hard to tell at a glance how he had died, but some of the skeleton was still intact.

Nausicaan.

Pirates.  He cast a disgusted glance at the ship.  Still, he might as well check it out.  You never knew, perhaps it would be worth a look.  Near the ship he found another body.  This too had been partially eaten, but one of the exposed ribs bore the marks of a huge, savage claw-slash.  Shran shuddered a little and looked around him, his fingers tightening on the pistol-grip, but nothing moved across the white and gray landscape except the unceasing wind.

There were no other bodies.  He made his way to the side of the craft.  The door seals had burst during the crash, and the door was easy enough to force open.  Nausicaans often took slaves as cargo, and though doubtless there was nothing living left inside, it was worth checking to see if any Andorians might have been aboard.  If there had been, enough might have remained to allow for identification later.  If nothing else, learning of their ultimate fate might afford grieving relatives closure.

There had been no slaves.  Either that, or they had escaped and eventually perished of cold and hunger.  The crumpled and misshapen cargo rooms were bare of remains, though in one several boxes of what must have been almost priceless fabrics had been clawed open by wild animals and were now little more than swathes of half-rotted cloth strewn anyhow around the deck plating.  The side of this area too had been raked, though it must have been the action of frost and wind that had scored away any traces of burn marks.  The low, cold sunshine shone harshly through the slashes in the hull, showing glimpses of the vast bare vista outside.  The wind moaned through the ship, both a warning and a lament.  As he glanced briefly into a small room, hardly larger than a cupboard, whose door had been ripped off its hinges and now lay partly across the corridor, a stray gleam of sunshine lit on something that twinkled.

He would have passed it by without a second look if the sun hadn’t been at that precise angle.  As it was, he caught the glitter out of the corner of his eye, and stopped.  It came from inside a large box that must have been on one of the shelves before the impact threw it to the floor and broke it open.  With a last cautious glance around, he stepped into the room and crouched down to examine the find. 

Cut stones.  He put a hand into the mess, pulled, and a necklace came out, with two or three other pieces tangled up in it like the most irredeemable junk.  Gems of every color and size, clotted together anyhow in his astonished gaze.  Another necklace, this one of unbelievable intricacy, bearing what looked like frozen flowers winking and trembling with light; a collar of what must be solid gold by the weight, studded with diamonds of incredible size and clarity; earrings, dripping with fiery amber stones that seemed to burn in his hands, all only a small part of a whole mass of treasure that the average pirate crew could have lived off like kings for the rest of their days.

This would pay for a ship the Andorian government would dream of having in the fleet.  Or if, as he suspected from the quality of it, it was a haul whose loss somebody somewhere would have widely advertised, the government would very much enjoy the kudos to be gained from being the agent of its restoration.  There was every chance that that kind of enjoyment might be worth giving him back his command, and they needn’t think they could be niggardly over the kind of ship they gave him either.  This was his future!

He retreated to the room he’d seen earlier, pulled out swathes of the fabric, and found some that had been relatively undisturbed.  They were consequently in rather better condition than the rest.  Nevertheless, they were so fine that they’d never been particularly strong.  They certainly didn’t resist his concentrated efforts to tear them up.  In a very short time he was able to tip the whole sparkling, shimmering jumble into a makeshift sack and carry it out of the wreck.  Although the sun was dipping towards the horizon by this time, the short polar day almost over, there was still ample light left to show his way back to the shuttle.  Out across the bay a tall dark fin lifted into view briefly and was gone.

Reaching his refuge, he immediately started the engines and took off.  On the admittedly extremely remote chance that somebody was searching for the wreck and just happened to arrive at this particular place at this particular time, he didn’t plan on staying anywhere near it for a moment longer than necessary.  As the shuttle lifted, his newly aware gaze took in other anomalous shapes here and there on the landscape.  The Nausicaans’ wreck hadn’t been an isolated incident.  This place was a ship graveyard.  He suddenly remembered the fear that the pinkskins had felt for the fifth planet – did this one harbor dangers potentially as great?  And if so, why had Enterprise and Hath been permitted to escape unscathed?  Because they came with good intentions that someone – or something – had detected?  Was it just his imagination running riot, or did those slashes across so many of the hulls resemble gigantic claw marks?

He shuddered, and opened the throttle.  Even if he found some way to retain the coordinates, he got the distinct feeling that a second visit might not end up as harmlessly as this one seemed likely to.  Seeing all these wrecks made him singularly disinclined to push his luck, particularly after it had favored him so spectacularly in the matter of that abandoned hoard.  He was ahead, and that was the point at which it was wise to quit.

Time to get out of here.