Gomez’s running footsteps slammed against the cracked pavement and sent painful tremors through her shins. She had almost become accustomed to Teneb’s gravity, but now, as she tried to sprint, she really felt it pulling her into the ground.

Hawkins was in front of her and Stevens was right beside her. The truck carrying the crashed Starfleet probe rounded the corner and began climbing a gradual incline. Hawkins veered away from the chase, toward the building the away team had been staking out. “Hawkins!” Gomez said. “Where are you—”

“Playing a hunch!” Hawkins shouted over his shoulder. “Stay on the truck, I’ll catch up!”

Gomez pushed ahead after the truck. In regular gravity, an unburdened run up such an incline would be no problem for her. But she watched the truck gain speed up the slope even as she felt the muscles in her legs begin to burn and ache. Several dozen meters ahead, the truck neared an intersection.

Stevens kept pace beside her. She sensed that he was holding back. “Don’t worry about me,” she said, gasping for breath. “Go.” He hesitated for a moment, then steadily gained speed—not enough to overtake the truck, but enough to leave Gomez behind.

Stevens was running on fumes. He hadn’t eaten in a day and a half, and he’d been pushing himself much harder than normal.

His throat burned with every ragged gulp of biting-cold morning air. Gusts of breath exploded from his mouth in clouds of mist that quickly evaporated.

Push through the pain, he told himself. Pain is my friend. He tried to force himself into a “runner’s high,” but he knew it was still far away, on the other side of a mountain of agony he wasn’t prepared to scale.

The truck turned right at the intersection and disappeared around the corner.

He forced his legs to pump faster, fight harder against Teneb’s merciless gravity. His grunts of pain became growls, then gasping cries. His body desperately wanted to stop. His leg muscles felt like knotted cable. Sharp knifing pains stabbed between his ribs with every frantic pull of frigid air.

He refused to slow down. He flailed through the right turn in a stumbling run. The truck was far ahead, fortuitously slowed by another maze of exploded car husks in the road.

A few more steps, he begged himself. Just a few more steps.

“Fabian!” Gomez shouted from behind him. “Take my hand!”

He looked back and saw a large cargo van hurtling up the road toward him. Hawkins was in the driver’s seat, securely strapped in. Gomez stood in the open passenger-side door, her hand extended toward the exhausted Stevens.

He forced himself to keep running, alongside the van. He held up his hand and left it there until Gomez seized it and pulled him up, through the open door into the vehicle. He crouched between the two seats. Gomez got in behind him and slammed the door. “Thanks for the lift,” he said between gasps.

“Jump in back and tell me what’s there,” Hawkins said.

Stevens turned and opened a narrow door that led into the van’s cargo area. He squeezed through into the windowless space, which was dark except for the narrow shaft of daylight slashing in through the open door behind him.

He reached toward an overhead light fixture in the middle of the cargo area. The van swerved suddenly, and he tripped over a heavy object on the floor. He righted himself as Gomez joined him. He reached up and turned on the light.

The back of the van held an arsenal. Its sides were lined with assault rifles and submachine guns. Boxes of grenades and ammunition covered the floor. “Vance?” he said. “If you want weapons, today is Christmas.”

“I figured that much,” Hawkins said. “What’ve we got?”

Stevens looked around, more than a little spooked by the primitive, savage weaponry. “Projectile weapons galore, a ton of ammo, and a lot of grenades.”

“Are the grenades smooth on the outside, or bumpy?”

“Like Cardassian neck ridges,” Gomez said.

“Okay, those are high-explosives. Careful with those. Anything else?”

Stevens opened a long, narrow box. An odd weapon was nestled inside, packed securely in custom-cut blocks of foam. “I have an empty metal tube with a targeting sight,” he said. He opened the large square box next to it. “And a box of…I have a rocket launcher.”

“Good to know,” Hawkins said. A staccato rattle of gunfire was followed by the sound of cracking glass. The van swerved wildly, tossing Stevens and Gomez back and forth against the walls of guns. “Load me up a small semi-auto,” Hawkins said, “and grab two for yourselves. Bring extra rounds.”

“I don’t know how to load one of these things,” Stevens protested.

“Neither do I,” Gomez added.

“Didn’t you guys read my mission briefing?” Hawkins said.

“Did you read mine?” Stevens retorted.

Another buzz of gunfire was followed by ricochets off the van’s front hood. “No,” Hawkins said grudgingly.

“Tell me what to do,” Stevens said.

“See the open slot in front of the grip?”

Stevens picked up a submachine gun. It was much heavier than the phasers he was used to. “Yeah,” he said, looking at the bottom of the weapon. The van lurched side to side again, but he was starting to get used to the chaotic rocking motion, and he swayed with it.

“Look for a clip full of bullets that fits into it and slap it in.” Stevens and Gomez rooted through the boxes at their feet. Gomez found the matching magazines, jammed one into her weapon, and handed one to Stevens. He loaded his weapon while Gomez armed another for Hawkins. Stevens picked up the box of loaded magazines and moved back toward the van’s cab.

“Stay down,” Hawkins said. “We’re taking fire.”

Stevens crouched and shuffled back into the cab, pushing the box of ammo ahead of him. Gomez inched in behind him and handed a weapon to Hawkins, who ducked low behind the steering wheel and peeked occasionally to see where he was going.

The windshield was spiderwebbed with cracks radiating from a constellation of bullet holes. The engine roared as Hawkins stomped on the accelerator.

The passenger-side windshield exploded over Stevens’s head. A storm of glass shards rained down on him and Gomez as bullets dented into the rear wall of the cab.

“Shoot back!” Hawkins said.

Gomez and Stevens lifted their weapons over the dashboard and aimed them out the shattered windshield in a vaguely forward direction. They opened fire. The weapons were incredibly loud. Stevens found his gun impossible to control—it jerked and jumped in his hand like it had a mind of its own.

By the time he and Gomez released the triggers, they were sprawled atop each other on the floor. Smoking bullet holes cut a path across the van’s roof. The van’s cab smelled of sulfur.

Hawkins was pressed down against his door and glowering at them. “Whose side are you on?” he shouted. “Use both hands. Short, controlled bursts. And watch your ammo.”

Another sweep of enemy gunfire turned the rest of the van’s windshield opaque with damage. Hawkins punched the windshield with the flat of his palm and knocked it out of its frame. It slid across the bullet-scarred hood and fell into the street. Icy winds whipped dust into the cab and stung their faces.

Stevens and Gomez sat up and steadied their weapons on the van’s dashboard as Hawkins swerved around more burning wreckage in the street. Stevens felt the flames licking at his face as they sped through a curtain of fire with a whoosh.

He opened his eyes and saw the escaping truck thirty meters ahead. The back of the truck was open. Two Tenebian men crouched inside, both brandishing large assault rifles.

The muzzles of the Tenebians’ weapons flashed. Bullets zinged past Stevens’s head. He held his breath and steadied his aim as he stared into the cold wind, then pulled the trigger.

Beside him, Gomez opened fire, her face a mask of grim determination, the frigid gusts watering her eyes with tears.

The weapons chattered in their hands.

They filled the back of the truck with a spray of bullets. The two Tenebians hit the deck as ricochets rebounded and tore out through the canvas-covered, wooden-plank sides of the truck, which Stevens guessed probably had been “borrowed” from a livestock or poultry purveyor.

His and Gomez’s weapons clicked empty. He tried to pull the empty magazine out of the weapon, but it refused to come free.

“Press the release on the right side of the rear grip,” Hawkins said as he aimed his own weapon one-handed out the front windshield. He spun the steering wheel through a tight right turn and peppered the truck ahead with more harassing fire.

Stevens fumbled with his weapon’s release catch, then felt the magazine slide easily and fall from the weapon to the floor. He picked up a fresh magazine and slapped it in.

Beside him, Gomez locked and loaded. She nodded to him.

They sprung back into position, facing into the wind, weapons planted on the dash.

Looking back at them from the truck, now only twenty meters ahead and racing toward a Y-shaped merge with another road, were the two Tenebians—both of them aiming rocket launchers.

Stevens saw the look on Hawkins’s face, and he knew:

We’re so screwed.

A moment before the Tenebians fired their rockets, their truck barreled into the Y-merge—at the same moment that a speeding passenger car raced into the merge from the other fork of the Y and accidentally broadsided them. The car caromed off the truck and spun into a dusty collision with a brick wall.

The Tenebians’ shoulder-fired rockets careened off-target. One screamed into a deserted building to the left of the van. The other plowed into the street directly ahead of it.

Hawkins slammed on the brakes. The van skidded to a halt just shy of the explosion in the road, which kicked up a smoky storm of glowing-hot broken asphalt that pattered down onto the van. Past the smoldering crater, the rocketed building collapsed into a broken-stone mountain that blocked the street.

“Can we go over it?” Gomez said.

“Not in this thing,” Hawkins said.

The security guard poked his head out his window, looked around quickly, then spun the van through a reverse whip-turn. He shifted gears and stepped on the accelerator. The van sped forward. He hooked a quick left turn, then made another left down an alley so narrow that a shower of sparks fountained from either side of the van as he accelerated.

“Chief,” Gomez said, “where are you going?”

“I don’t know,” Hawkins said. “I’m making this up as I go.”

Commander Zila monitored his army’s drive into Lersset from a bank of monitors installed in his personal jumpjet. Sitting opposite him, facing his own bank of monitors, was Legioner Goff, whose attention had become much more narrowly focused during the past few seconds.

“What is it?” Zila said.

Goff held up a hand to signal that he needed a few more moments to concentrate. He looked up at Zila. “Reports of a van chasing a truck in southern Lersset, near the riverside. A recon unit says the two vehicles have exchanged gunfire.”

“On my monitor,” Zila said. Goff transferred the command-and-control screen to Zila’s computer. The time-stamped reports scrolled quickly up the side of the screen while blurred, grainy images snapped by an aerial reconnaissance drone showed moment-by-moment details of the chase.

“That’s it, that’s our target,” Zila said. “Order all forces to intercept and capture. No heavy munitions—I want those vehicles and their cargo intact.”

“And the passengers?”

“Expendable.”

Hawkins kept the accelerator pinned to the floor and barreled up streets, down alleys, and through the occasional vulnerable-looking fence. Stevens rode shotgun, his safety harness now securely fastened.

Hawkins glimpsed the morning sun as intermittent, yellow-orange flashes in the narrow seams between the decaying buildings he raced past.

Leaning forward, he glanced upward, then swung the van wide through a right-hand turn, followed by a quick left turn. Stevens held on to the dash with white-knuckle intensity.

“What’re you following?” Stevens said. “Their scent?”

“No,” Hawkins said, pointing skyward. “The planes.” Several blocks away on either side of the van, flying low over the rooftops, were two Venekan jumpjets. They were approaching from different directions, but seemed to be converging on a point several blocks ahead of the van.

“Nice work,” Stevens said.

“Well, Starfleet didn’t hire me for my looks.”

“Obviously,” Stevens quipped.

“Don’t make me come up there,” Gomez said.

The buildings melted past in a blur as Hawkins pushed the van to its top speed. As the van rounded a long gradual bend in the road that ran along the river, behind the docks on the west side of town, the truck came into view.

Two jumpjets converged several dozen meters behind the truck. One aircraft assumed an attack position; the other dropped back over the river, to cover the leader’s wing.

A ground-to-air rocket soared up from the back of the truck and sliced like a blazing scalpel through the leader’s right wing. As the aircraft pitched nose-first in a death-spiral toward the ground, a fiery chunk of debris expelled from its wing was sucked into the follower’s left turbine intake. The second jet’s left-wing engine exploded, taking half the aircraft with it in a massive, aviation-fuel conflagration.

Wreckage from the lead jumpjet struck the road and rolled like a Catherine wheel juggernaut over a row of decrepit dock warehouses. The second jet disintegrated in midair, scattering its debris in ephemeral, coal-black coils of drifting smoke as it splashed down in the river on the other side of the road.

Hawkins kept his eyes on the truck and his foot on the gas.

He pondered the tactical dilemma that was only seconds away from requiring an answer: How the hell are we supposed to stop them when they have rockets?

The question became moot as a sustained spray of large-caliber machine-gun fire, from an unseen source on the truck’s left, shredded the wood-beam-and-canvas covering of its cargo area—and mowed down the two gunmen in the back of the truck.

From a gap in the several-kilometers-long row of dock warehouses, a flatbed truck swerved toward the smaller truck. Mounted on a pivot secured to the flatbed was the heavy machine gun whose handiwork Hawkins had just witnessed.

The flatbed’s machine-gunner and another Tenebian man leapt into the now-open back of the truck that carried the probe. Both men drew small pistols from under their coats and fired several shots through the truck’s rear window.

The attackers swiftly opened the truck’s doors, pulled out the two men inside, climbed inside, and commandeered the moving vehicle with hardly any loss of forward momentum.

Hawkins veered slightly to avoid running over the two dead Tenebians who’d just been thrown into the street.

“That flatbed doesn’t have Venekan markings, either,” he said, stating the baldly obvious.

Stevens shook his head in shock and disbelief. “How many countries on this planet are trying to steal this thing?”

“All of them,” Gomez said without irony.

Maleska sat next to Yellik on top of the AAV as it rolled toward the turn for West River Road. From adjacent streets he heard the low rumble of two more columns of AAVs converging toward the south end of Lersset.

“What’s going on?” Yellik said, shouting to be heard over the noise.

Maleska shook his head. “No idea,” he said, his voice hoarse from yelling over the thick screech of low-flying jumpjets, which seemed to be leading the way. He had never seen this level of frenzy in either of his previous tours of duty in X’Mar.

Yellik leaned closer to him. He thought the man looked worried. “You don’t think it’s nuclear, do you?” Yellik said.

“I don’t know,” Maleska lied. “You know how it is. We’re just the boots on the ground. Nobody tells us anything.”

He looked back down the road and saw the column of AAVs growing longer with each block it traveled. He counted his men and was satisfied to see them all still accounted for. He sighed. At least we don’t have to hump into the zone on foot.

Gomez leaned forward from the van’s cargo area and assessed the situation. Hawkins was keeping the van a safe distance behind the truck and the flatbed, whose passenger now staffed its gun, leaving just the driver in the flatbed’s cab.

The two large vehicles veered away from the river and sped into a vast industrial plaza that contained several mountains of construction-grade gravel. The flatbed was still on the truck’s left, and the two were nearly parallel.

“I don’t think they see us,” Hawkins said. “I’d say it’s now or never.”

“Okay, what’s your plan?” Gomez said.

“I was hoping you had one.”

Gomez eyed the twisting, obstacle-littered terrain ahead. Then she saw six Venekan jumpjets, still several kilometers away but closing steadily. And she knew that the enormous, advancing cloud of dust rising from the city beneath the jets had to be the product of an army on the move.

“Can you get in front of them without getting us shot?” she said, nodding at the trucks.

Hawkins cocked his head to the side. “Maybe.”

Hawkins swerved left onto a path that ran parallel to the road that the truck and flatbed were traveling on. The path and the road were separated by mound after mound of gravel.

Pushing the van to its limits, Hawkins quickly caught up to the two trucks. The wind cut like a meat ax at Gomez’s face.

As the van raced past a wide gap between two conical gravel mountains, the driver of the flatbed turned his head and saw them. Behind him, his machine-gunner opened fire.

Large-caliber bullets chopped a wide swath across a slope of gravel in front of the van. Bits of rock bounced in through the vehicle’s empty windshield frame.

The flatbed accelerated ahead of the truck as another dark gray gravel mountain filled Gomez’s field of vision.

She pointed to the next gap linking the path and the road. “Cut across up there, and don’t slow down!”

She moved back into the cargo area. Grabbing the bolted-down weapons rack along the wall to her left for leverage, she kicked open the van’s rear double doors.

Reaching down, she opened a box of grenades. She took one grenade out of the box and armed it. The van lurched into a sharp right turn. As Stevens fired out his window at the flatbed, Gomez jammed the live grenade back in the box.

The van cut a hard turn across the industrial yard’s main road. Gomez heaved the box out the van’s rear door. Then she hit the deck and grabbed the first thing that didn’t budge.

Behind the van, the flatbed raced into the intersection. A chattering burst of machine-gun fire tore through the van, unleashing a storm of metal fragments. Hawkins and Stevens yowled in pain. Gomez felt a sharp impact in the back of her left thigh, followed by an agonizing burning sensation.

A shrapnel-filled fireball erupted beneath the flatbed’s second axle, directly below the machine gun. The blast lifted the truck off the ground and dropped it in a burning, broken-backed heap. Gomez enjoyed a very brief moment of gloating until she heard the screech of brakes from behind the flatbed.

The truck carrying the probe was unable to slow down in time to avoid the crippled flatbed in front of it. Making a desperate left swerve up a gravel slope, the truck lost its traction and slid out of control. It clipped the back edge of the flatbed and rolled several times until it came to rest on its side, several meters from the flaming husk of the larger vehicle.

Hawkins stopped the van and shifted it into reverse. He backed up the van to the truck, which lay on its left side, helpless as an overturned turtle.

Gomez got up and stepped out the van’s rear doors, her submachine gun still clutched in her hand. Every step with her left leg caused sharp jabs of pain to radiate from her wound.

She looked back as Stevens and Hawkins got out of the van. Stevens’s door looked like it had been chewed up and spat out. Hawkins pressed down on a bloody wound along his lower right abdomen. Stevens limped beside him and clutched fiercely at the left side of his neck. “How bad are you guys hit?” she said.

“Flesh wound,” Hawkins said.

“Grazed, but it stings like a sonofabitch,” Stevens said. As Gomez got closer, she realized both men’s faces and hands were covered in tiny nicks, scratches, and cuts that were only now beginning to bleed. She also saw that the right leg of Stevens’s pants was shredded below the knee. He noticed her watching him limp. “Shrapnel,” he said simply. “From the door.”

They gathered in back of the overturned truck. The probe was still securely fastened to the floor of the truck’s rear section. Hawkins and Stevens loosened its restraints and lowered it quickly but carefully to the ground.

The low mechanical roar of approaching tanks, troops, and aircraft grew steadily louder, from both in front of and behind the trio. Except for the van, the two wrecked vehicles, and the gravel mounds, there was no significant cover in the industrial yard and no means of escape.

Hawkins stared into the distance, also tracking the Venekans’ approach. “Make this quick, Fabian,” Gomez said. “The Venekans’ll be here any second.”

Stevens ran his hand along the probe’s casing until he found the probe’s hidden access panel. “Stevens to Abramowitz,” he said. “Carol, we need the tricorder to transmit the security code that opens the probe’s maintenance panel.” There was no reply. “Carol, do you read me?”

“I can’t,” Abramowitz whispered over the open channel. Even over the transceiver, Gomez could tell Abramowitz was speaking through a clenched jaw. “They’ll kill me.”

“Carol, if we don’t get the panel open now, we’re dead,” Hawkins said. “Just get clear long enough to send the signal, and we’ll beam outta here in two minutes.”

“You don’t understand,” Abramowitz said, her voice rising with desperation. “There’s nowhere I can—”

“Abramowitz,” Gomez said. “Activate the tricorder and send the signal. That’s an order.”

For several seconds there was no response. Then Gomez heard Abramowitz’s muffled and dismayed answer: “Yes, sir.”

The dust cloud followed the Venekan troops as they entered the industrial yard and fanned out around its perimeter.

Gomez heard the engines of large, heavy ground vehicles and the frantic clatter of boots growing closer.

A pair of Venekan aircraft cruised low overhead, stopped in midair over the river, hovered, then began doubling back.

Soft chirping noises accompanied the opening of the probe’s maintenance panel. Stevens reached inside and deftly handled several delicate-looking gadgets. He reached deeper inside the probe and pulled out a tiny kit of Starfleet repair tools—which decades ago some genius engineer had, in a moment of rare foresight, thought to design into the probe itself for exactly this kind of emergency field repair.

“Good work, Carol,” Gomez said. “Hang tight, we’ll be outta here in a few minutes.” Gomez watched Stevens work for a few seconds, then realized Abramowitz had not acknowledged the good news. “Carol, do you read me? Gomez to Abramowitz, do you copy?”

Silence reigned over the transceiver channel.

Abramowitz stared up into the crazed, maniacally gleaming eyes of teenaged Lica, elderly Mother Aleké, and the formerly gentle and caring Nedia. They and a dozen other women surrounded her.

Nedia had been the first to see the tricorder and alert the others. Now they all stared angrily at the high-tech device in Abramowitz’s hand, as if it were the very embodiment of evil.

“What is this thing?” Mother Aleké said, her voice grave.

“It’s hard to explain,” Abramowitz said.

“It’s a Venekan tracking beacon,” one of the women said. “She’s helping them follow us to the sanctuary.”

“No,” Abramowitz said, “I’m not, I swear. Please, I—”

“I can’t believe I let you deceive me,” Nedia said. “You said your friends were ‘captured’ by the Venekans?” Abramowitz nodded. “Was that before or after your friends built you that shelter? And collected the wood for your fire? Certainly, with your injuries, there’s no way you did that work yourself.”

“Yes,” Abramowitz said, “my friends built my shelter. They were captured later.”

“How could you know that?” Nedia said. “Unless they were captured close enough for you to have seen or heard it. But if the Venekans were that close to you, how could they have not seen the smoke from your fire? Smoke that we saw from more than two tiliks away?”

An even larger crowd was now gathered behind the circle of women surrounding Abramowitz. Nedia snatched the tricorder from Abramowitz’s hand. “Or did they contact you with this?” In the moment between Nedia’s grabbing the tricorder and her holding it up to the crowd, the device vanished—poof.

Nedia stared at the dissipating tendrils of vapor in her hand, then looked down at Abramowitz, her rancor now tinged with fear. The entire crowd had seen the tricorder vanish in Nedia’s hand, spawning a wave of horror that rippled out into the troubled sea of refugees massed on the cold mountain road.

Mother Aleké pointed a gnarled, bony finger at Abramowitz.

“She is a spy,” Mother Aleké proclaimed.

Mother Aleké drifted back into the crowd as dozens of X’Mari women kneeled down, picked up fist-sized rocks from the road, and carried them toward Abramowitz—who had done enough research on the xenophobic X’Mari culture to know there was nothing left she could say that would stop them from executing her.