Twilight

As Vaughn reached the back of the smashed shuttle, he looked back along the line of Chaffee’s descent, expecting to see long gouges where it had skidded along the ground, perhaps even a small impact crater where it had first hit. Instead, he saw only a level, unbroken plain. Vaughn squatted and set the beacons down, then pulled a tricorder from an outside coat pocket. He opened the device and sca

At least for now.

Vaughn closed up the tricorder and placed it back in a coat pocket, then bent and collected up the beacons. He wiped at the corner of his mouth with a knuckle, his saliva no longer streaked with red. What he had thought might be a symptom of an internal injury had turned out to be nothing more than the result of a chunk of flesh he had bitten from the inside of his cheek. He had mended the wound and stemmed the bleeding, although his cheek still ached.

Vaughn went back around the wreckage and headed toward the fire that was still consuming the shuttle’s cockpit. As he walked, he noticed again the remote hum that he had first heard when he had regained consciousness after the accident. So far as he could tell, it had never stopped; it felt like Defianttraveling at warp, that constant background drone and throb of the engines that permeated the ship. It’s the voice of the clouds,he thought, the audible effect of all the energy surrounding the planet.

Vaughn passed the flickering orange flames burning the forward section of the shuttle. Beyond, the small encampment came into view—although calling it an encampmentseemed an overstatement to Vaughn. The area he and Pry

As Vaughn approached, he saw Pry

“How is he?” he asked Pry

“He’s the same,” she said, answering him across ch’Thane’s body. A gust of wind blew past, and she pulled the collar of her jacket up higher.

Vaughn peered down at the young man, whose usually bright blue skin had grown dull. “He’s lucky to be alive,” he said. “We’re all lucky to—” Vaughn stopped as he looked up at Pry

“I’m sorry,” she said. She raised her arm, and Vaughn assumed she was wiping away her tears. He heard her breathe in slowly and deeply, then she dropped her arm and turned back around. “It’s just that…we were friends,” she said. “Becoming friends, anyway.”

Vaughn thought that there was probably even more to it than that; just before he had arrived at Deep Space 9, the station had been attacked, and Pry

“We werelucky,” Pry

Vaughn nodded. He told her what he had seen—what he had failedto see—in the downed shuttle’s wake. “How did you do it?” he asked, genuinely curious, but also wanting her to focus on her involvement in their survival.

“It’s an old shuttle pilot’s trick,” she said, and for the first time since the crash, she seemed to perk up. “There are certain maneuvers you can make with a crippled shuttle…at the end, the antigravs saved us.”

“Antigravs don’t work at speed,” Vaughn noted.

“We decelerated as we broke apart, and I used the emergency thrusters to brake us even more at the right moment,” she explained. “Then I overcharged the antigravs. It’s a split-second timing thing. They call it the ‘Sulu Shuttle Stunt.’” Vaughn nodded, impressed. He recognized what Pry

“Thank you,” she said, accepting the compliment graciously. Vaughn opted not to ask her for whom the “old shuttle pilot’s trick” had been named, Hikaru or Demora. He had known them both, and neither answer would have surprised him. Instead, he handed her one of the beacons.

“Here,” he said. “I thought these might be useful.” Pry

Vaughn walked around Ensign ch’Thane. He set the other two beacons down, then grabbed a bedroll and lowered himself into a sitting position on it. “We need to discuss what we’re going to do,” he told Pry

“I’ve actually had some thoughts about that,” she said, pulling the tricorder back out of her jacket. She opened the device and worked its controls. “I sca

As a commander, Vaughn listened to Pry