Caretaker - L. A. Graf [54]
"If you will scan the southern continent," he said as he stepped clear of the tub, "you'll find a range of extinct volcanoes.
Follow the foothills north until you discover a dry riverbed."
He made a sling with the towel to polish his ample backside.
"You'll find an encampment there."
Tuvok committed the simple instructions to memory. "Do you believe our people might be at this location?"
"It's not impossible." Neelix shrugged and tossed the towel aside.
"Maybe. Perhaps not." He smiled up at Tuvok as he pushed through the doorway in front of the Vulcan on his way to the main living chamber.
"But we'll find them. We'll need several containers of water to bring for barter." He picked up a mostly fleshed bone at random as he wandered over to the control bank on the opposite wall. "Do these replicators make clothing, as well?"
Hoping to encourage that line of thought, Tuvok said only, "Yes."
"Will it make me a uniform like yours?"
The thought alone nearly broke through Tuvok's Vulcan control.
"No," he made himself say, very clearly. "It most certainly will not."
Neelix gave a little grunt and turned back to the replicator with the half-gnawed bone sticking out of his mouth. Tuvok directed his attention toward the empty bathroom, studying the fractal patterns made by the puddles until Neelix indicated that it was safe to turn around.
* Janeway took in as many details of the place as she could in the instant between first return of vision and the transporter effect's release. It didn't take long to absorb what little the landscape had to offer.
Sand. Sand, and more sand. Water had been gone so long from this land that the very skin of the ground had cracked and shrunken, leaving a scaly surface that looked like widely spaced stepping-stones with black fingers of nothing between them.
Kilometers away to left and right, where the banks of this onetime river rose up to make ancient floodplains, broken structures with the height and regularity of artificial constructs sketched out a depressing hint of cities long gone.
Of lives swallowed up by the dryness until only dust remained to chew away at the foundations and drag civilization's litter back down into the dirt from which it came.
In its place, a rude tent camp had sprung up in the middle of the hard-baked waterway. Spare, sun-darkened people froze and looked up at the transporter's whine. Their clothes were sandblasted to the same dark tatter, their skin and eyes so burned by heat that it was hard to imagine any expressions but anger and hatred on their lean, wasted faces. Janeway took in the row of out-of-atmosphere ships lined up several hundred meters beyond the last building in the camp, and matched that strange incongruity to the obvious weapons slung across the backs of half the skinny desert people, and she made a note to herself not to underestimate these pitiful creatures. They hadn't managed to survive in such harsh conditions without knowing how to fight.
"Why would anyone want to live in a place like this?" Paris remarked with an inappropriate amount of disgust as soon as the transporter released them. He kicked up a cloud of powder-fine sand while Janeway watched the dirty aliens at the fringe of the camp boil into activity like a nest of disturbed ants. She wondered if it was their arrival or the deep thrumming she could feel through her feet that had the natives so excited.
Neelix moved up alongside her, following her gaze as he answered Paris.
"The rich cormaline deposits are very much in demand."
"The Ocampa use it for barter?" Chakotay asked.
"Not the Ocampa." Neelix seemed vaguely irritated at the stupidity of the suggestion. "The Kazon-Ogla."
"Kazon-Ogla?" Janeway