“You’ve got quite a few cuts yourself,” she said, pointing up at his face.

“And I can feel every one of them,” he said with a halfhearted smile.

Prynn turned and peered back at the smashed aft section of the shuttle. “We need to find a medkit,” she said.

“We need to find Ensign ch’Thane.”

“Oh no,” Prynn said, distress filling her voice. “Shar.”

Vaughn glanced down and saw that, somehow, his combadge still hung on his uniform. He reached up and pressed it, and it warbled to life. “Vaughn to Ensign ch’Thane,” he said. He waited a few seconds, then repeated the call a second time, and then a third.

There was no response.

Prynn turned and surveyed the area, and Vaughn did the same. They began searching the nearby ground around the wreckage of the aft section. As they looked, Vaughn’s gaze alit on the distant pyre of the shuttle’s bow.

“The front of the shuttle,” he said, and he rushed by Prynn and back into the mass of debris from which they had just come. He heard her say something as he moved as quickly as he could through the twisted doorway and into the aft compartment. Everything lay in a shambles—he stepped on a phaser as he entered—but by simple fortuity, he saw what he needed immediately, lying in a corner and propped up against a dented metal locker. Vaughn took two long strides, bent, and picked up the fire-suppression canister.

He made his way back out of the wreckage. Prynn, he saw, had already started toward the fiery bow section. He ran to catch up with her. A million small aches nagged at him, but he counted himself fortunate that he could even stand up at this point.

Prynn stopped several meters from the burning cockpit, her arms thrown up in front of her face. As Vaughn reached her, he felt the heat of the fire coming at him in waves. The flames roared, the sound sending him back six weeks to the explosion on Defiant’s bridge, to when he thought he had lost his daughter. But he had no time for that now. “Stay here,” he yelled to Prynn. He walked forward a few steps, wanting to get close enough to be able to use the canister effectively, but the heat grew unbearable. He stumbled to the right, starting around the wreckage in search of a break in the fire that would allow him to move closer.

As Vaughn circled, he saw something through the blistering air, glimpsed as though through rippling water. He backed away from the fire to get a better view, and saw only a pile of metal and circuitry lying another twenty meters away. He continued around, though, looking not at the fire, but out at the surrounding land. Another heap came into view, and Vaughn recognized the gray of a Starfleet uniform and a trace of blue that could only be Andorian skin.

“Prynn,” Vaughn called. “Shar.” He dropped the canister and ran. As he drew closer to the fallen ensign, he saw that his body had landed in an awkward position, like a rag doll tossed carelessly aside. Ch’Thane lay facedown, his left arm bent back in a way that seemed impossible for a human or an Andorian; at best, the shoulder had been dislocated, and at worst, it had been torn apart.

Vaughn dropped to one knee beside ch’Thane’s head and felt for a pulse at the side of his neck. Vaughn knew little about Andorian physiology, but he knew enough to ascertain that the young man was still alive. He got up and began working his way around ch’Thane’s body, searching for any visible injuries. He heard Prynn’s footsteps race up and stop.

“How is he?” she wanted to know.

“He’s alive,” Vaughn said, not looking up. He moved down along ch’Thane’s body. As he reached the knee, he noticed a dark patch below ch’Thane’s shin. Vaughn examined that area of the leg and found a tear in the uniform pants. He reached two fingers from each hand inside the hole and pulled in opposite directions, the sound of tearing cloth strangely out of place in this alien environment. Vaughn examined ch’Thane’s leg, and what he saw made him want to turn away.

“What is it?” Prynn asked, her concern obvious. “Is he all right?” Vaughn heard her take a step closer, and he looked over at her and locked his eyes on her face.

“Stop,” he commanded, and she did, looking up and meeting his gaze. The dried blood from the gash, coupled with the injury to her eye, made her appear as though she was wearing a mask on one side of her face. “Stay right there and listen to me. Ensign ch’Thane is all right, but I’m going to need your help to keep him that way.” She nodded mutely, and Vaughn thought that shock might be setting in. “I want you to go back to the aft section and find a tricorder and a medkit.” Prynn turned immediately and started back the way they had come. “Wait,” he called, and she stopped and turned back toward him. “I think I saw the emergency survival cache in the aft compartment,” he said. “See if you can open it. If you can’t, or if you can’t find it, then you’ll have to search through the wreckage for loose equipment. I also need something I can use as a splint.”

“A splint,” Prynn echoed.

“Yes,” he told her. “Now go.” She headed away at a run.

Vaughn looked back down at ch’Thane’s leg. Halfway between the ankle and the knee, the jagged end of a bone protruded through the young man’s skin. The white of the bone sharply contrasted with the blue of Andorian flesh. Indigo blood spilled from the wound and darkened the dirt beneath.

Vaughn stood up and hastily pulled off his uniform tunic. He kneeled back down again and lifted ch’Thane’s leg just enough to allow him to slide one sleeve under the thigh. Vaughn pulled the sleeve out the other side, then tied it together with the other one as tightly as he could. The blood flowing out of the leg wound ebbed at once.

“We’re getting you help, Shar,” Vaughn said quietly. He reached up and again felt for a pulse at ch’Thane’s neck. “Don’t die on me now,” he said. “Don’t die on me.”

The day had moved on.

Vaughn pulled his coat closed against a breath of cold wind, grateful that the outerwear had survived the crash. He moved out of the wrecked aft section of the shuttle, carrying three handheld beacons, the last items that he thought they would need. As he and Prynn had ministered to Ensign ch’Thane’s injuries—and to their own—and then as they had raided the emergency survival cache and set up a camp around the fallen officer, Vaughn had begun to decide how they would proceed. Now, as he made one last inspection of the downed shuttle, he settled on a plan. Not necessarily a good plan,he thought, but of the few options available to them right now, it had been a simple matter to identify the best course of action.

As Vaughn stepped from Chaffee’s splintered decking onto the hardpan, he peered around. The two smaller fires burning closest to here had sputtered out, leaving behind smoldering mounds of seared machinery. The larger fire enveloping the shuttle cockpit still blazed, though it had abated. Overhead, the incessant cloud cover continued to hold the planet’s daytime hours in a continuous dusk. The gray conditions gave Vaughn the sense of an impending rainstorm.

Or of an impending attack,he thought.

He eyed the never-still sea of shadows above, remembering vividly the murky form that had penetrated the roof of the shuttle, and which had looked very much like an extension of the cloud cover. Vaughn had considered the idea that the clouds might actually be life-forms, but nothing the crew had learned so far, either aboard Chaffeeor back on Defiant,supported such a possibility. The “attack” on the shuttle had likely been akin to a lightning strike, he thought, with the clouds discharging energy, and the shuttle acting as a ground and conducting it; back aboard Defiant,when the ship had been similarly struck by an energy surge, Ensign ch’Thane had offered the same analogy.

Before returning to the makeshift camp he and Prynn had set up, Vaughn decided to loop around the wreckage of the aft section, just to make certain that nothing else they might be able to use had been thrown clear. They had already been fortunate that the emergency survival cache had come through the crash dented, but intact. Starfleet should make their shuttles out of the same material as their survival lockers,Vaughn thought, a flippant notion that had occurred to him on several other occasions; this was not the first shuttle accident he had lived through.