Double Helix 03_ Red Sector - Diane Carey [23]
Stiles paused and concentrated on breathing. He’d heard that Constrictor word before. Where?
Resting his left hand on his chest, he felt himself breathe. In, out, in, and a sigh. “This is… this is really… what’s the word-ironic?” “What is?” Zevon sounded closed-in, muffled. “I pulled rank to get this mission” “How did you?”
“The ensign who was up for duty that night, he was on my watch rotation. When I heard about somebody getting a chance to evac Ambassador Spock… what an opportunity! I rotated the other guy to an escort mission off the starbase. When the name for duty officer came up, it was mine.”
Glancing around his jagged stone prison, Stiles noted with clearing eyes the truly freakish surroundings which would now only in the most generous of mists have resembled a building. Twisted pipes and structural supports lay in tatters around him, the walls of former street-level chambers now fractured in dozens of places, so that plasterwork, concrete sections, brackets, lathe, joists, and support rods showed their gory broken edges. His jail cell had been on the street level. Now he was forty feet below the street, in what could be described as a wide well-shaft walled in on all sides by the remains of the floors above. “Still in the cell” he muttered.
Stone and metal collided somewhere in the dimness, behind a huge slab of concrete that must be the remains of the wall between his cell and Zevon’s. How much of the broken building had wedged itself between them?
“Is there anybody else in here?” Stiles raised his head. “Wish I could move… rm so… cold…” “Can you see your bunk?”
Bunk? Oh-Stiles blinked and forced himself to figure out his surroundings. There was the toilet, standing on its head with a piece of support rod piercing the bowl. What if he had landed over there? What would that rod have done to his body?
“Has your bunk fallen somewhere near you?” Zevon asked again, more forcefully despite the muffling of the wall material between them. Stiles turned his head to the left. “It’s right next to me.”
“Pull the blanket or the mattress on top of you. Cover yourself with it.” “Why?” “Because you’re going into shock:’
“Oh, I’m just… it’s just that my leg’s stuck and… I can’t….” “You’re getting cold. The temperature down here is still-” “Look, I don’t even know you! You could be some kind of a murderer or a criminal. Why should I listen to you? You’re coming over here to kill me, aren’t you?” “Pull the blanket over you. Cover your body.”
“You just don’t want me to see what you’re going to do to me:’
“Cover yourself, Stiles. Do it immediately. This is an order!”
His right arm shivered violently, transferring the shivering to his chest, his neck, and he suddenly tensed. The collapsed cell around him echoed with a grievous moan. He couldn’t disobey orders. Starfleet officers had an obligation. Set a good example. He was older than all the others.
His left hand cramped briefly, shifted-he forced it upward. The bunk lay on his left, tipped up on one of its points and leaning against whatever was behind it. Supported by something he couldn’t see… supported, as he had been by Travis, Beret, Andrea, the Bolt brothers, the whole team. The Evac Team. “Come on, Eric, lift your hand. You can do it.”
Travis Perraton stood up behind that bunk, holding the metal rim, edging the bunk toward his hand until Stiles’s fingers touched the blanket. “Pull it down.” Jeremy was there too.
The woolly fabric was cool, but warmed almost immediately as he clutched it. Looking down at him, Travis and Jeremy detached tile blanket from where it was tucked under the thin mattress, and the blanket fell onto his arm and shoulder with just a tug. “Thanks” he murmured. “I knew you’d get here.”
Travis nodded and looked at Andrea Hipp and Beret Folmer. They reached down through the rubble and pulled the blanket over Stiles’s chest.
Jeremy White’s hand floated forward and tucked the blanket around Stiles’s right ribs. “There