Blue on Blue

Chapter Seventeen

“You need,” she said, after a moment for two, three, four long, shaky breaths.  “To remove your outer gear.”

He didn’t speak, only nodded his understanding, then lay gasping.  She pulled one loop then the other over his stiff, blue-tinged hands, dropped the spent line on the ground and undid the sleeves of the jacket still knotted across his chest.  Water poured from the garment as she lifted it away from his back. 

“And the shirt,” She continued.  Not waiting for his response, she began unfastening  the front of the uniform, watching the usually blue material glisten sodden black as water ran from it in sheets.  Again, he nodded, swallowed hard and fought to keep himself from curling forward while she pulled it free.

Swinging away from him, she twisted the fabric three, four, five times between her hands.  The most important thing now was to bring up his core temperature.  More sheets of cold tidal water pattered onto the stone floor.  The chill of it made her hands ache with sudden tiredness.  She had no time to wonder what degree of exhaustion Jonathan must be experiencing.  Instead, she drew a silver tinted blanket from her pack, like the one she had wrapped around Trip’s shoulders.  Folding it into a long roll, she lay it on the ground, reached into the pack again and pulled out a tall metal cylinder. 

“T’Pol?” Jonathan managed a vague note of surprise between breaths as she unscrewed the top then doused the blanket with half the warm coffee. Its bitter aroma filled the air as she wrung out the fabric with the same quick movements.  For an instant, the warmth stung, before the pleasure of the heat began to spread through her fingers.

“Here, lift your arms,” she said, wrapping the blanket lengthwise, once, twice around his chest.  Fumbling only slightly, she tucked the free end in at the top and then picked up his shirt.  “I want you to put this back on.” 

Not waiting for a response, she lifted the uniform top and began working his icy blue hands into the sleeves without attempting to warm them.  Extremities, she remembered, were not the priority with generalized hypothermia.  Warm them too quickly and run the risk of shock.  Certainly that was a bad enough situation on its own, without attempting to treat it in these surroundings. 

“The coffee will cool,” she went on, bending to pull off one boot, then the other and tipping them to let rivulets of water pour out.  “But it will stimulate heat production through your core areas.  I am sorry there is nothing I can do about the rest of your clothing or footwear.”

He would already know this from his own survival classes, she was certain.  Still, the flow of her words as she helped get the boots back on, would give him something to keep his attention on until she could get him moving.  It would be easier and safer than letting him drift off even briefly and then attempting to rouse him again. 

Ideally, according to that long ago instructor, the best thing would have been to get him someplace warm, dry and quiet.  Since that was not possible, she had created what dryness and warmth she could for him.  Now she must get him walking, slow and steady without bringing up his temperature too fast.  She would get him back to the relative safety of the tunnel where she could leave him and Trip while she went to find the rest of the search team, and rescue.

It seemed like a tremendous undertaking.

Jonathan watched her as, still talking, she removed her heavy outer jacket.  She draped it, cape-like over his shoulders.  “The heat from the liquid will be captured between the fabrics of your shirts and held beneath the jacket.  It should stimulate your circulation to warm your core more than the blanket alone would have.  Will you be able to walk?”

“My feet are pretty numb,” he said, instinctively burrowing into the shelter of her jacket where some of her own warmth still lingered.  “But I know I should keep moving.  What about you?  Will you be all right without this?”

She nodded.  “Yes.  For now your need is greater than mine.  Let’s go.”

It was slow, stiff work getting him to his feet.  She put on her pack, then moving close beside him, put one arm around his back. She rested her other hand across his chest in front of his heart.  Normally, Vulcans did not engage in casual contact, but then, they usually didn’t engage in mental melding, either.  Still, aside from the relief she experienced at the solid, living feel of Jonathan beneath her hands, the logic of the action was clear.  This way, we can share our warmth.

“All right, I’m ready.” Jonathan managed through teeth that were beginning to chatter.  Tremors began to ripple across his back, to spread beneath her fingers.

It was a good sign, T’Pol noted.  He would have been in far worse condition if he had been beyond the point of being able to shiver.

“Come then,” she told him.  “We have some distance to cover before we have any guarantee of encountering the rest of the search party.”

His breathing was becoming more regular as, with deliberate care, they made their way up the winding path at the edge of the cave.  She allowed him a brief pause for rest, though not to sit down, when they reached the ore canister.  Standing with his tired weight resting against her side, T’Pol stared at it with some regret, then wordless, they turned and moved on.  That ore was the fuel the landing party had come for.  Now, they would be grateful to leave it behind if they could escape this place with their lives. 

“Trip’s sample case…” Jonathan broke the silence a short while later.  “It’s smaller than the canister.  We should bring it.”

T’Pol nodded, bent and picked up the case.  She juggled it to her left arm and circled Jonathan’s waist with her right.  She allowed his arm to drape itself across her shoulder and listened to the rocks soft rattle beneath the metal as they walked. They were nearing the entrance to the cave, passing the beautiful blue on blue crystal.

She had not heard Trip call since their meld broke, not for the captain, nor for her.  Was his need to tell someone of Jonathan’s danger the catalyst for it?  Had knowing a rescue was underway ended the need to continue?

Trip?  She explored the space where silent conversation had flowed back and forth between them.  But there was nothing, not even a sense of consciousness or the lack of it.

A more experienced melder might have known…  Perhaps even one with a little more training.  With any training at all…

Beside her, Jonathan straightened.  She could feel a slight lessening of his weight across her shoulders.  The constant shivering had given way to bursts of deep, hard shuddering.  He gazed for a moment up at the magnificent pink flecked stalactite hanging high above them.  The rate of his breathing was growing closer to human normal now.  Most important, for the first time she sensed that he was fully alert to his surroundings. 

“How many people?” he asked.  “Are in the search detail?”

“Lieutenant Reed, Ensign Mayweather and myself.”

“Did you make contact with Commander Tucker?”

“Yes.  In one of the tunnels,” she began.

“Did he tell you how to locate me, or did you find me on your own?”

“Commander Tucker,” she hesitated, washed over by an automatic wave of shame at the manner of the telling, no matter how practical and necessary the meld had been.  “Told me.”

“He didn’t come with you?”

“No, he was injured retrieving the rappelling equipment.  He sent me to find you.”

Jonathan nodded.  “It’s strange.  I could call it an error in judgment, that I took that pack back with me instead of leaving each of us with a full compliment of gear.”  She could hear the exhausted strain in his voice as he tried to speak without breaking the rhythm of their pace.  “When I think back on it, that decision went against half my training.  But then it seemed like something I needed to do.  Something important.”

“Commander Tucker didn’t see an error in judgment,” said T’Pol.  “My impression is that he believed taking the pack was an entirely practical suggestion.”  But it wasn’t responsibility for what had happened that was on Jonathan’s mind.

They covered several steps before he continued. “You know, it was pure luck that Trip spotted something wrong back there.  Nothing about the ground’s instability showed up on our scanners.”

“Yes,”  T’Pol agreed.  “It was fortunate.  The stone was undercut, apparently by erosion.  It was hidden by energy signatures emanating from mineral compounds in the area.  Trip-”  She couldn’t bring herself to use the word “said” with all it implied about spoken conversation.  After a moment’s hesitation she continued.  “…Commander Tucker believed if he had been walking a foot further to the right, he never would have observed the danger.”

Jonathan nodded.  “He and I were putting together a standard rappelling operation to bring me back across the plateau.  I don’t think it was my being there that brought it down.  Just timing.  But if we’d been even a few seconds further into the procedure, that is…  If I had been the one holding up my hands to catch his line…”

T’Pol turned to look at him as the implication of his words became clear.  He wouldn’t have been grasping the stalagmite and could have been caught in the landslide.  Trip, even if he had the equipment needed to begin a rescue, would have had no time to effect it.  The flood had cascaded into the cave only moments after he’d turned to get the pack.  Its thunder had been the nameless white noise filling his head as he ran.

Had it been precognition that caused the captain to take that pack back into the tunnel?  Or what humans called “intuition”? 

It was another one of those concepts that, like time-travel, the High Council had declared impossible.  But was it?  That was a question worth later consideration.  For now, beneath her hand, the captain was still having uncontrollable bouts of shivering and Trip’s well-being, like Jonathan’s before it, had become the unknown quantity.

There was little more conversation as they moved up the tunnel, possibly speech, while maneuvering the steep incline, was proving too much for Jonathan.  Or perhaps he was caught up in the wonder of circumstances that had allowed his escape from the flooded cavern.  All that T’Pol was certain of as they skirted the narrow areas where dirt and rocks had fallen, was that much of her adrenaline was long since spent and her footsteps were becoming almost as uneven as the captain’s.

She had no recollection the tunnel was this long.  It seemed steeper than Trip recalled.  At least now she was seeing an occasional lantern hook embedded in the wall to encourage them onward.  Jonathan’s breathing seemed to have steadied.  At least it sounded no more labored than her own.  The fierce bouts of shivering appeared to be coming less often. She paused for a deep breath.  Concentrate.  Wasn’t this where that long-tailed rodent had streaked across her boot?  Could this be the spot where Trip first heard the drip of water?  She hadn’t heard a drip, but a patter.  Now, it was a drip again and…

Jonathan’s hand came out from beneath the cape of her jacket, caught hers within jittering fingers.  When she glanced over at him his eyes, though shadowed deep with exhaustion as well as by the helmet, were warm with encouragement.  “I remember this,” he said.  “T’Pol, I think it’s not far to the main tunnel.”

They were such tired, kind words.

“Thank you, Captain,” she said, as he burrowed back deeper under the draped cloth.

It was no more than twenty paces before she recognized something he would not, the last tight squeeze where the cascading rocks had blocked most of this part of the tunnel and almost buried Trip. 

Ten paces now and they would come out into the place where she had left him with her scanner shining its golden light in his hand.  She could see its glow bouncing off the tunnel wall even before she and Jonathan staggered through the gap in the rocks.