Shran grinned and resumed his continuous search for new targets, trying to cover Jhamel’s efforts. Maybe I’ll drive them all off before they can do any more–

Something abruptly slammed into Shran then, spinning him as though he were a small moon that had been dealt a glancing blow by a passing asteroid. His feet slipped out from under him, in spite of the heavy, studded treads built into his cold‑weather boots. The entire left side of his body was suddenly numb and paralyzed, which prevented him from stopping himself as he slid down a slope on the icy cavern floor.

Must have been hit,he thought, feeling woozy as his slide continued unchecked. More energy discharges stitched the ice all around him, filling the air with superheated steam and the tortured creaks of breaking ice and grinding stone. He was keenly aware that hewas now a target, no doubt of the highest priority.

The maw of a large, dark crevasse–perhaps opened up only moments earlier by the firefight’s relentless volleys, maybe even by one of Shran’s own blasts–yawned hungrily before him. He flailed with his good right arm to arrest his tumbling, sliding descent, but succeeded only in entangling himself awkwardly in the strap of the Orion rifle he’d been holding when he’d fallen.

The accelerating sensation of sliding abruptly ceased, replaced by the gut‑churningly familiar vertigo that accompanied orbital freefall in ships not equipped with artificial gravity. His nervous system charged with survival‑instinct panic, Shran realized that he was falling feet‑first into the crevasse, tumbling toward the fathomless, unilluminated spaces below.

His right arm lashed upward as he dropped, and the sensation of weight returned with a suddenness that slammed his jaw shut and probably loosened a few of his teeth. He looked up and saw in the gloom surrounding him that his rifle strap had snagged on a stony, ice‑covered outcropping. Awkwardly restricted to the use of his right arm and leg, he gripped the strap hard and struggled to pull himself back up over the crumbling lip of the crevasse.

Inching upward, his head cleared the ice‑crusted verge, giving him a reverse view back up the path of his unplanned and haphazard descent. He caught sight of Jhamel, still calmly assisting what Shran hoped were the last few Aenar stragglers in escaping the predations of the Orions. Near her was Theras, who seemed every bit as paralyzed by fear as Jhamel was composed and self‑possessed.

Until she crumpled to the ice in a strobe‑flash of light, struck in the back by an Orion energy‑weapon discharge. Theras hurried out of sight–fleeing!–even as a pair of the slavers converged on Jhamel’s motionless form and tagged it with a communications beacon that enabled them to have her beamed away.

“No!” Shran cried, pulling himself, one‑handed and one‑legged, up onto the creaking, groaning ledge. Fueled by rage and adrenaline, he dragged himself slowly toward the two slavers, one of whom very calmly raised his weapon, changed its setting, and took careful aim in Shran’s direction.

He didn’t bother looking away as he braced himself for the brutal heat of the beam he expected to take him down to final oblivion.

Then the surface directly beneath Shran cracked sharply and gave way, spilling him back into the crevasse while sparing him from the Orion’s weapon. An energy beam lashed out over his head, missing him by a wide margin, not that it mattered now. Time dilated as he plunged into the frigid darkness below.

A rough, sharp shock followed, and oblivion came.

The tingling and pain that commingled along the left side of his body, coupled with the biting cold of the surface on which he suddenly found himself sprawled prone, convinced Shran that he wasn’t quite dead–at least not yet. He wasn’t certain how long he had been unconscious, but the return of sensation to the part of his body that had been clipped by the Orion weapon told him that enough time had passed for his nervous system to begin returning to normal after the fierce stunning it had received during the firefight.

Jhamel!

He beat back his fear. Think, Shran, think.The Orions had her now, along with Uzaveh‑only‑knew how many others. They could already have been under way at high warp for hours now, and might be anywhere in the sector, or maybe even farther away than that.

And thatzhavey ‑ less coward Therasran instead of standing up to defend her.

His rage rekindled, Shran struggled into a sitting position and tried to haul himself to his feet. Nothing seemed broken, but he was frustrated by his inability to get his studded boots underneath him as his knees and elbows ineffectually sought purchase on the glassy ice on which he lay. He sighed in frustration, his breath curling upward like coolant leaking from an overheating warp core.

I have to get back to surface. Back to the ship. Find their trail before it grows as cold as this cavern.

After making another failed attempt to stand, he noticed that the darkness was beginning to give way to a diffuse, amber light. His antennae twitched, responding to what felt like someone’s physical presence, which he’d somehow not noticed before now. The ice shifted behind him, and Shran craned his neck toward the sudden cracking sound.

Something grasped him firmly by the shoulders, and a disembodied voice inside his head shouted, “Move!”

A flurry of hot hailstones came down around him, scorching his jacket and trousers wherever they touched him. One of the thumb‑sized, glowing objects landed momentarily on the back of his right hand, and he flipped it away onto the ice with a strangled cry of agony.

Ice borers,Shran thought, watching the slow rain of the tiny creatures, which was illuminated very faintly by the energy of their own heat‑generating bodies. He recalled how he’d once been badly burned by the very same type of subterranean grubs during his youth. Ice borers provided the people of Andoria with a great deal of usable heat, but they also posed a serious hazard to anyone unfortunate enough to be directly beneath them when they chose to make a vertical downward passage through a mass of ice.

The patter of the small, incendiary bodies quickly slowed and stopped, leaving only a shotgun scattering of faintly glowing holes in the floor and ceiling of the cavern as the light levels quickly receded to stygian darkness.

That darkness concealed the identity of whoever had just dragged Shran to safety. “Are you injured, Commander Shran?”

“It’s just plain Shran now. And I’ve been in far worse shape than this.” Shran cradled his burned hand before him as his rescuer attempted to help him get up on his feet.

“Thank Uzaveh I managed to find you.”

Well, at least I know he’s not one of the Orions,Shran thought. He leaned against his benefactor as he experimented with putting his full weight on both of his feet simultaneously.

“Who are you?” Shran wanted to know.

“It’s me,”said the voice inside his head. “Theras.”

Shran found it difficult to rein in the contempt that surged through his soul at that moment. His instinct was to push the coward as far away from him as possible, but he restrained himself, not eager to risk taking another awkward tumble into the icy darkness.

“Theras. I thought you had run away.”

“ I ran to findyou.”

“Stop speaking inside my mind, Theras,” Shran said, his words as sharp as flйchettes. Only Jhamel had his leave to take such intimate liberties.

“I apologize for the intrusion,” Theras said, his voice sounding hoarse as though from long periods of disuse.

“I’m not the one you owe an apology to, Theras. Jhamel was captured because you decided to run instead of staying to help her.”

Theras’s voice took on a pleading tone that Shran found quite hard to distinguish from whining. “Shenar and Vishri were taken as well. I didn’t know what to do. I only knew that I had to make sure that youescaped and survived.”