The Red King - Michael A. Martin [23]
“You cannot support both my weight and your own,” Akaar said, protesting. “We will both fall to our deaths.”
Tuvok took a sterner tone than he normally did with anyone other than recalcitrant children. “Leonard, Vulcans possess much greater strength than do most other humanoids—even Capellans. I will be able to get us back to the surface. But time spent arguing is a waste of my admittedly depleted energies.”
Akaar nodded, either persuaded by Tuvok’s logic or unable to argue further because of his pain. Gingerly, he reached out and wrapped his thick arms around Tuvok’s midsection. Tuvok felt him jockeying with his hands, probably to have his good hand hold the wrist of the injured one.
“Are you prepared?” Tuvok asked, trying to keep his croaking voice steady.
“As prepared as I can ever be,” Akaar said.
Tuvok began to climb, immediately feeling the larger man’s weight as it trebled his own. He concentrated on breathing deeply, attempting to channel every erg of energy in his body into his arms and legs. He moved one arm up, then the other, then a leg. A fourth movement, and he felt the entire weight of Akaar on him; his captain was free of the ledge.
As he began the excruciating climb back to the surface, Tuvok attempted to clear his mind of everything save his goal. The more overheated his body became, the closer he knew he was to the top.
As he climbed, his mind wandered. He felt as though his body was becoming heavier, as though whatever internal gravimetric aberrations allowed this improbably small worldlet to maintain a Class-M atmosphere—a super-dense core? he wondered—had chosen him and Akaar for special torment. It was as if the planetoid itself wanted to draw them both downward to their deaths.
Foolish. Illogical.
He began to imagine instead that he was back at the outskirts of Vulcan’s Forge, intent on completing the time-honored tal’oth survival ritual.
His mind raced, despite all of his mental disciplines. By the seventh time he had replayed the entire tal’oth rite in his mind, he saw the bright light above, and knew that they had almost reached the top.
And the desolation that lay above. In which they would both surely die.
DAY 12—STARDATE 26815.4 (25 OCTOBER 2349)
As closely as Akaar could estimate, they had been on the planetoid for nearly twelve standard days. Twelve standard days of nightless, sunbaked hell , the Capellan thought.
Their rations were exhausted save for a final liter or so of water, and there had been no sign of rescue. When he was lucid and not feverish from the injury to his hand, Akaar admired the calm that Tuvok exuded. The Vulcan still seemed to disbelieve that they would ever be found, but at least he had stopped arguing the point with his superior officer.
Mostly, they sat as immobile as possible in their shelters, emerging only every now and then to speak to each other briefly, lest the heat and fatigue overtake them. By now, Akaar knew every detail about Tuvok’s life that the Vulcan was willing to share. And Akaar had shared his own long backlog of personal memories of his lifelong off-world exile with his mother, the Regent Eleen.
As they watched each other gradually withering and dying, they came to know one another better than most friends ever could or ever would. But that knowledge had prompted Akaar to make a difficult decision.
Tuvok was refusing to drink much of the water, deferring to Akaar, whose injury, the ensign felt, gave him priority for the precious liquid. And yet, of the two of them, Akaar felt Tuvok had more to offer the universe should he survive than did he. The Vulcan had a wife, and children, and a longer lifespan to share with them. Akaar had only his mother, the woman who, acting through friendly Capellan intermediaries, was endlessly building his tomb on their homeworld; it was not a sign that she wanted him to die, but rather a monument to remind everyone concerned that, deposed or not, he was the rightful high teer of the Ten Tribes of Capella.
As Tuvok slept,