4731J-3 Ch. 01

"Sensors..." Wesley began, trailing off as his eyes closed in frustration. Opening them again, he looked at his mother to report, "I think there's a problem with the sensor arrays."

"What problem?" Crusher asked, trying not to lose her cool. What else could go wrong?

"I don't know," he replied. "According to the computer, there is no problem. I ran a manual diagnostic of all the shuttle's systems, and no problem with the sensors came up."

"How long ago did you run the diagnostic?"

"Shortly after we dropped out of warp; I was checking for damage."

"Perform another diagnostic," Dr. Crusher ordered.

He began this procedure, his mother standing over his shoulder as he reviewed systems she didn't understand.

"There," he said. "The diagnostics program still says there's no problem with the sen-"

"(Bee-bee-beep!)"

"What's that?" Crusher asked, looking at a red light that was flashing with the audio tone on Wesley's console. The same red light was flashing on Ensign T'vor's console, and it was she who answered.

"Low power alert..."

"But that can't be," Wesley refuted. "I'm looking at the diagnostics report and it says we have twenty-two percent."

"(Bee-bee-beep!)"

"That is not what the emergency monitor says," T'vor needlessly pointed out as her fingers raced over the console.

Then the lights went out and the consoles went dark, their flashing red lights and auditory tone ceasing.

"What's going on?" Crusher demanded.

"Sir, the emergency monitor activates when power levels reach ten percent. I've shut down everything, including life support systems, in order to have enough power to land, and we'll have no choice where that will be."

"Ensign, protocol demands that you inform me of these situations as they arise so that I can make those decisions," Crusher told her, trying to be firm without allowing irritation to seep into her tone.

"I apologise, Sir," T'vor replied. "However, by the time you'd decided to do what I already knew we had to do, our power levels would have been down to eight percent, and our chances at landing safely would have been fifty-fifty."

Beverly was momentarily at a loss for words. While the Ensign was right, her delivery had bordered on insubordinate. When Troi interrupted, the doctor decided to let it go, at least for the time being.

"Don't we need life support?" the worried Betazoid asked.

"We can comfortably survive," T'vor said, "on the existing air and heat for approximately thirty minutes before things start to become... uncomfortable. Landing procedures will begin in forty-three minutes, thirty-seven seconds, at which time we can restore necessary shuttle systems, including life support."

With this, T'vor swivelled in her seat to face forward. Closing her eyes, she finished with, "I recommend we all sit and practice slow, shallow breathing in order to conserve as much oxygen as possible."

Crusher watched the ensign in growing irritation as her own breathing became heavier. With an effort, she calmed down and went aft to find a place to sit, a place away from Troi where she could privately fume over how T'vor had just overridden her again.

Wesley, like everyone else, had sat back and tried to relax. Under the circumstances, relaxing was difficult, and he longed for something he could do to help the situation, but he knew there was nothing. So, once again, he entertained his eyes with Ensign T'vor's body while she sat with her eyes closed.

Forty-two minutes went by with nobody checking the time and nobody speaking until T'vor's eyes suddenly opened, her limbs going into action at the same instant, mind completely awake and alert as she began calling out start-up protocol. They could well taste the bad air and feel the cold that had been creeping in through the hull.

Wesley had been the most surprised. By the time forty-two minutes had gone by, he'd managed, in his imagination, to put T'vor and Councillor Troi in some very compromising situations with each other. His full erection would be awkward should he have to leave his console for any reason.

T'vor had finished with start-up procedures, the craft's damaged inner workings again awhirl with life and freshening air. The cabin lights remained down and T'vor was preparing to take the shuttle into the upper atmosphere as she addressed Beverly.

"Sir, I advise you, Councillor Troi and Nurse Ogawa to strap yourselves in."

"How bad is this going to be?" Crusher asked.

"That depends on the terrain, Sir."

"After that is anybody's guess," Wesley mumbled. His erection had half softened as he ran final systems checks, once again rattled over the computer's confusion and worried about what other information it might be wrong about.

The unaccustomed experience of sunlight began flooding the interior of the shuttle as they breached the planet's upper atmosphere. As they went deeper, the oddly comforting, orange coloured sky brought a deceptive sense of assurance with it, a sort of 'welcome to atmosphere' before dealing with sudden gravity and superheated oxygen molecules. By the time the shuttle was violently shaking, streaking far above the reddish clouds as a fiery omen, nobody was paying attention to the queer colour of the sky.

Beneath the clouds, the terrain seemed to be an overall foggy, reddish brown with darker green blotches. By the time they were close enough to make out more detail, T'vor was activating thrusters to slow their descent while Wesley called out velocity and vector. The ground got closer and closer, seemingly racing faster and faster beneath them until the thrusters were screaming.

And then they landed, so to speak, with a jarring impact and a great "WUUUUUMMP!" from outside.

The following crypt like stillness in the suddenly dark confines of the shuttle seemed impossible after their atmospheric experience. For moments that felt like minutes, Beverly's mind adjusted until she called out.

"Is anybody hurt?"

The only lights were coming from the still exposed panels and a few lit console controls. From the way she was hanging in her safety harness, it seemed as though the shuttle had come to a rest with her nose down at an approximate fifty degree angle.

"I'm alright, Doctor," Ogawa said from beside her.

The interior lights came up then, illuminating Troi where she'd strapped herself in across from the doctor. Her breasts were thrusting almost obscenely from between the upper body straps of the restraint and her eyes were wide, but she seemed okay. A quick check to the left told her Wesley and T'vor were also uninjured and were in the process of carefully extricating themselves from their seat restraints. Ahead of them, the windows were coated in some greenish brown substance that blocked all light from the sun. She was looking at this when the shuttle shifted with a groan.

T'vor and Wesley glanced at one another before Wesley abandoned the attempt at his harness in favour of an operation at his console.

"Doctor, do you require assistance?" T'vor asked, out of her safety restraint and advancing up the inclined deck.

"No, I'm fine," Beverly replied, releasing her harness and bracing her ankles against the same incline a moment before Ogawa managed the same.

"I need assistance!" Troi plead with an expression of helplessness.

The harness release was wedged up tight under her breasts and she seemed to be having trouble with it. It took T'vor two seconds to ascertain the problem.

"Your dress is caught in the secure point and jamming the release."

"What will we do?" Deanna worried.

"(Rii-iip!)"

"Ensign, my dress!"

A moment later, Troi was free of her restraint, only held from falling on her face by the strong arms of Ensign T'vor. And then she was gone, leaving Deanna to survey the damage to the front of her dress. There was a rather large tear across the bodice, just under her breasts, and now the bottom of her blue, supportive cammie could be seen along with her bare upper abdomen. She was about to complain about this when the shuttle shifted again with a metal flexing groan.

"Why is it doing that?" Beverly asked.

"Because we're sinking," Wesley supplied.

"Sinking?"

"As I said," T'vor reminded as she opened the emergency supply panel, "with only ten percent power, we had no choice in where we landed. We landed in what appears to be a swamp."

"So, we can't stay here?" Troi asked, looking around for an answer.

"No, here is sinking," T'vor patiently re-explained while Wesley's eyes bugged out at Troi's uniform malfunction.

"What will we do?" the councillor asked.

"We're evacuating," Beverly told her.

"But, what about the conference?"

Wesley breathed a sigh of relief when the rear loading ramp activated, letting in the sickly, orangey glow of daylight along with a thick, rolling mist that poured down and into the shuttle almost like a volcanic ash cloud. Since the collision that may or may not have been, none of the shuttle's systems were trustworthy and a part of him was quite happy to be getting off of it. He vaguely wondered if he'd still feel that way in three hours when the shuttle was gone for good.

With their backpack of emergency supplies, T'vor climbed the deck to the ramp. While the shuttle's nose pitched so sharply downward, the edge couldn't touch the ground, instead making of itself an elevated platform that was almost level. She walked to the edge of it to survey their surroundings, followed by Beverly, then Ogawa. With Wesley's help, he and Deanna were the last two shuttle occupants to emerge, taking in the local scenery.

It wasn't much.

The muddy water the shuttle was slowly sinking in was a reddish brown, somewhat like the clay mud that covered the doomed craft. Knots of what looked like floating vegetation offered some greenery, but it was a dark green, often mottled with a dark purplish brown. Here and there, small islands supported young trees that looked a cross between birch and palm with broad, oval shaped, orangey yellow leaves and pea green trunks. The mist, orange like the air, clung to the water, making long distance visibility an impossibility. It was approximately five meters high and had by then completely filled the shuttle's comparative, but deceptively welcome interior. Adding to what already looked like an uncomfortable thirty day visit, the temperature was a humid thirty-six degrees Celsius according to T'vor's tricorder.

"Sir, we have a problem," T'vor said, still peering at her tricorder.

"Now what?" Beverly peevishly asked as she stepped to the young woman's side.

"The mist. It holds an unusual type of plasmic energy. Our emergency beacon will not function anywhere near it. It has to be set at least ten meters above the mist."

"Can we get it up in one of these trees?" Beverly asked, gesturing to one of the closer little mud islands.

"The beacon has to be stationary and pointed straight up," Wesley said. "The trees here aren't high enough and the beacon would be waving around too much. We need higher ground."

"That way," T'vor clarified, pointing with her tricorder as Beverly removed hers from her utility belt.

Above the mist, one could make out in the distance an area where the trees grew thicker and the land appeared to rise to a higher elevation.

"How far is that?" Ogawa asked doubtfully.

"Six point four kilometers to the trees," T'vor told them. "Another four point eight kilometers to where the terrain begins to elevate. Eleven point two kilometers altogether."

"What about predators?" Ogawa asked.

"My scans did not reveal any wildlife within tricorder range," T'vor said.

"None at all?" Crusher asked.

"Not even insects," T'vor replied with a raised brow as she eyed the murky water's surface three feet below the shuttle's loading ramp. "Curious."

"And we have another problem," Crusher's grim features informed, peering at her own instrument as she spoke. She turned it off, pausing to look at each of them in turn as she replaced it to her belt before divulging, "There's nothing on this planet that we can eat."

Plasmic energy

The news of the poisonous bacteria Dr. Crusher's tricorder discovered in every living organism it could find, including the water and the mud, came as a blow. Food was one of the reasons they'd committed themselves to 4731J-3. All this left them was breathable air and maybe a week before they died of dehydration. The situation was dire and the only option was to go forward in the hopes that something, some hope or asset, would present itself.

From the shuttle's weapon locker, T'vor took one of the two type II phasers, handing the other to Wesley before passing her own type I to Dr. Crusher. Wesley's backpack was loaded with the emergency med kit and beacon, and he was the first to hop from the ramp, landing in water almost up to his crotch. He made a face as he pulled one leg out of the thick muck at the bottom with some difficulty, then the other as Ogawa splashed down behind him.

Finally, the only two left were Deanna and T'vor, the former looking down with some trepidation.

"It will be fine, Councillor," T'vor assured.

"I could twist an ankle!"

"It's too mucky to hurt yourself, Deanna," Beverly called with some impatience.

With great dread and hesitation, Troi managed to daintily splash down, a shocked look of surprise and disgust on her face as her dress billowed around her on the water's surface while she found her footing. She raised her arms, trying to shield herself as T'vor splashed down beside her.

"Everybody, try not to stand in one place for too long," Crusher advised. "You'll start to sink down, and it takes more energy to free yourself. Try to keep moving along at a steady pace."

"But, how will we rest?" Deanna almost whined.

"We'll try those islands," Crusher said, adding, "Obviously, the conference is off. From here on, we'll be following standard away team protocol."

They stood for a moment, looking around themselves. A large air bubble broke the surface beside the shuttle's hull, followed by a lot of small ones as the structure groaned again, listing further.

"Let's get moving," Crusher finally ordered.

Squaring their shoulders, the crash survivors prepared to turn their backs on their craft, pulling their feet free of the muck to begin a laborious trek through the swamp to the highlands.

"Heeelp!"

It was Troi.

Beverly turned, hearing Ogawa's muted curse as they beheld the Councillor. She had a helplessly pleading expression on her face, searching one, then another of her fellow landing survivors until she came to Wesley.

"I lost my shoes!"

Everybody's shoulder's dropped.

"I need them! What will I do when we get to high ground?!"

It seemed she had a point.

She continued to look at Wesley and, since nobody else wanted to do what was required to remedy the situation, the rest of his shipmates did too.

"Where were you standing?" he asked with a sigh, passing his pack to Ogawa.

"Right there... somewhere. Maybe there."

He wasn't sure, but for the second time that day, Wesley could have sworn he saw a smile on T'vor's face before she quickly turned her back.

Just over ten minutes later, they were finally on their way through the water and the mist that clung to its surface, Deanna's flat soled shoes safely stowed in drenched Wesley's pack.

Two hours after that, they were all drenched in their own sweat, hair matted and tangled, and already hungry. They decided to rest, but found the muddy islands were really a mass of partially floating roots that held a clot of the red mud around them. Climbing this tangled, slippery mess proved impossible.

"We could cut one of the trees down with a phaser and use it as a ladder," Ogawa offered.

" ... Do it," Crusher told Wesley, though disliking the expenditure of the phaser energy for this, not to mention the energy her people would have to expend in climbing a tree to reach a place where they could rest and consume some small amount of the limited emergency rations they had.

The idea worked handily and, after a brief rest, they were on their way again after dunking themselves to the neck to wash off the reddish muck from the island. They continued walking through the vast, alien swamp in single file, constantly wiping perspiration from their brows, but Crusher decided to rest them a little less often from there on. While the going wasn't easy, it wasn't all that difficult as long as one didn't leave her feet in one place for very long. She'd learned a certain stride that minimized effort and, therefore, the need for cutting trees and struggling to climb them.

Of course, Beverly knew as well as the rest of the team that the real question wasn't about how long it would take the Enterprise to rescue them. It was about how long it would take to find some sort of nutrition source, no matter what it was. In the meantime, their energy had to be used as wisely as the shuttle's energy reserves had been used in order to get to the depressing mud ball that somebody had designated 4731J-3.

After their rest stop, Wesley took lead. Like his mother, he'd found that there was a certain stride that made the walk easier, though his leg muscles were beginning to get sore from the resistance of the brackish water. Meanwhile, he was having a hard time keeping his mind off of what he could now see through the tear in Councillor Troi's dress and T'vor's wonderful body, and this was part of the reason he'd volunteered for lead. This way, he'd have to turn around to see them, and that would be way too obvious. The other part of why he'd taken the lead was so that none of the others would see if the half erection he'd had in his pants for the last hour became a hopelessly obvious full erection.

At this point, they were all soaked, either from the swamp water or their own profuse perspiration, and every woman in the group, each shining, body hugging, one piece uniform was a constant tease to his persistent young libido. He had no idea what was going on, but he wasn't about to broach the subject with his mother, doctor or no.

Even worse than that, however, was the discomfort caused by his gray pullover. It was too heavy for this climate to begin with and, since he'd gotten it soaked in the search for Troi's shoes, it had become intolerable. He'd been desperately wanting to take it off, but modesty made him refrain.

Nurse Ogawa, plodding along behind him, was in a world of her own, thinking of different ways she could tweak her personal holodeck programs to make them more interesting as a way to keep her mind off of her stomach. While debating the possible dangers of finding herself a play toy for three sex starved Klingons with the safety override turned off, she almost ran into Wesley.

"Oh, I'm sorry, Wesley," she mumbled, blushing as though he could read her mind.

"It's okay," he said, holding his pack out to her. "Can you hold this for a minute?"

"Of course," she agreed.

She watched him strip out of his pullover, surprised to see that he was in half decent shape, though in desperate need of some sun. She'd have thought he'd be skinny and unremarkable but, while he was far from musclebound, it was easy to see that he'd later develop a very attractive build.

After tossing his pullover to the water, Wesley caught the young nurse's eye, taking his turn to blush as he explained, "It's just so hot..."

"I understand," Ogawa said after seemingly snapping herself out of something. "If I could, I'd take my uniform off."

As Wesley suddenly found himself picturing Ogawa without her uniform, an awkward silence arose between them until Beverly, next in line, caught up with them. She looked at her son's bare chest, an odd expression flashing across her features before her face returned to the business of survival. Without comment for Wesley's half clothed condition, she cleared her throat before speaking.