The dry taste of ash filled Sulu’s mouth as she raced in the direction of the fire. The air grew warmer as she ran, the autumnal cool of the morning bleeding away, as though the calendar were somehow slipping ahead to the high heat of a summer afternoon. The crowd thinned as she continued forward, and she hoped that she would not arrive too late to help bring others to safety.

The ambient light wavered, shadows fluttering across the scene. She peered up past the buildings lining the street to see inky trails of smoke intermittently obscuring the Koltaari sun. Flakes of soot floated down from the sky like blackened snow. Even without being able to see the fire itself, Sulu was beset by a sense of disaster.

How could they do this?she asked herself in frustration. The Koltaari had not done anything—lacked the capability of doing anything—to warrant these attacks. Their society had matured to the point of uniting beneath a single government, but they had taken only the smallest steps out into their solar system, and they knew nothing of life beyond their own world. Their planet, though long valued by the various powers of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants for its abundant and untapped natural resources, had benefited from its position beyond established political boundaries. Its strategic location had actually protected the Koltaari, for any incursion onto their world by one power could easily be interpreted by the others as an act of aggression. For decades, that threat of interstellar conflict had kept the Koltaari safe.

Until now,Sulu thought bitterly.

She pressed on, the flood of Koltaari running past her now reduced to a trickle. She reached an intersection and turned onto the road leading directly to the power plant, expecting to see the structure in flames just a few hundred meters away. Instead, the fire only peeked out here and there from beyond a veil of dense gray smoke. But even hidden, the blaze roared, its gusty voice punctuated by hissing and cracking and the sporadic clamor of ruin: what sounded like a ceiling timber crashing down, a wall toppling, the metal of machinery moaning as the fierce heat robbed it of its strength.

A Koltaari man suddenly lurched out of the chaos, teetering as he limped forward. He coughed violently, and Sulu saw that his green flesh had discolored around his nose and mouth, the black smudges there obviously noxious trails the smoke had left. His eyes were tightly shut, his arms held out before him like those of a blind man navigating an unfamiliar environment.

Sulu sprinted forward, ducked down, and threw a shoulder beneath the man’s arm. “I’ll help you out of here,” she said, and only after the words had left her mouth did she realize that she had yelled them. Along with the noise of the fire, the sirens had grown louder now, and she could visualize the Koltaari firefighters heading for the blaze, the chain of bright blue, ovoid hovercraft impeded by the people clogging the streets.

For a moment, Sulu feared that the man had not heard her above the tumult, but then he leaned heavily on her, allowing her to guide him. She walked him quickly away, back the way she had come. Once around the corner, she settled the man against the brick wall of a building. He slumped, his eyes still closed. She reached up and took his face between her hands, experiencing an odd instant of disconnection at the sight of her own skin colored green.

The man’s eyes opened, but he didn’t seem to see her. His pupils had contracted into narrow slits, and Sulu wondered if shock would prevent him from being able to get himself away from here. “You have to keep moving,” she shouted. The man blinked twice, and then his gaze found her. He nodded his head in apparent understanding. “I have to go back,” she told him, dropping her hands from his face. “You need to keep moving.” The man nodded again, then pushed off of the wall and started away. She watched him for only a few seconds before turning and heading back toward the inferno.

Around the corner, the smoke had surged forward, the length of the street left visible shorter now. “Hello!” Sulu called, cupping her hands around her mouth. She strained to listen for any voices, then called out twice more. When she heard nothing, she started forward, reaching an arm out to the side of the nearest building, intending to use it as a guide once she entered the dark clouds. With her other hand, she stripped off the belt that cinched her traditional Koltaari tunic at the waist, then pulled the hem of the yellow garment up to cover her nose and mouth. Drafts of heated air pushed past her exposed midriff.

She plunged into the maelstrom of smoke and ash, and at once visibility dropped to almost nothing, as though a light had been extinguished in a windowless room. She moved along the building quickly but cautiously, alert for any Koltaari she might encounter. “Hello!” she called out again, briefly taking the makeshift filter from her mouth. “Can anyone hear me?” The only reply was the ravenous cry of the fire’s fury.

She kept moving, slowing her pace, but continuing to call out. Despite holding the bottom of her tunic over her face, she breathed in traces of smoke, and finally she began to cough. Soon, her throat burned as though she had inhaled a mouthful of smoldering gravel. A series of deeper coughs racked her body, and she quickly dropped to her hands and knees, bending her head low in search of breathable air. Her eyes stung and watered, and she closed them against the relentless smoke. As she brought her face within centimeters of the street, though, she found a shallow band free of the foul clouds. She gulped at the clear air, and fought to bring her hacking under control. She knew that she could go no farther.

Then an image rose unexpectedly in her mind: a woman lying on an infirmary biobed, her delicate features glistening with perspiration, her long, straight black hair in knots, her body convulsing from yet another coughing jag. Sulu thought of her mother frequently enough, but not usually from those final days on Marris III and Starbase 189. She most often remembered her mother in one of her sleek, ultramodern outfits—a woman vibrant and confident, her impossibly green eyes threatening mischief—or in one of the traditional gowns she had occasionally worn—still vital, still strong, but her eyes instead promising mystery. Right now, though, those cherished recollections could not chase away the specter of her mother in that infirmary, in that biobed, her body ravaged by Sakuro’s disease, set afire from within.

Sulu opened her eyes, an attempted defense against the unpleasant picture in her mind. She saw the pavement stretching away from her beneath the roiling sea of smoke, the brick of the wall she had followed visible just a meter or so away. She inhaled deeply, then stood and retraced her steps along the building. Even as she pulled the hem of the tunic up over her nose and mouth once more, another bout of coughing rasped her throat, but she concentrated on keeping her legs in motion, and on reaching air that had not yet been poisoned by the fire.

Five steps. Ten. And still the smoke engulfed her. She began to feel lightheaded, and she feared that she might not make it out into the open air. She tried to maintain her focus on following the wall, on the rough-hewn texture of the brick as her fingers passed over it, on the—

She tripped.

She went down hard, her hands scraping along the street, her knees striking the unyielding pavement. Pain shot through her limbs, sharpening her attention. Instead of rising, though, she reached behind her, to whatever she had fallen over. Cloth and something beneath it gave way to her touch: a person.

Sulu climbed back to her feet, then stooped down and walked her hands along the body until she located its arms. She hauled the victim to their feet—they seemed slight, perhaps no taller than a meter and a half, more than a dozen centimeters shorter than Sulu—and then up onto her shoulders in a classic rescue carry. After wrapping an arm around a leg and arm, Sulu reached for the wall with her other hand. She couldn’t find it, but decided to trust her bearings and started once more through the smoke.