“Szarka!”

Szarka cringed at the sound of Bohkat’s voice, wondering what she’d done to set him off this time, but as she approached the outline of his form on the far side of the chamber, he kept his gaze firmly on the wall.

Something about his posture was off. Was he… nervous?

A nervous Bohkat was somehow much worse than an irritated Bohkat.

She stopped just next to him, and when he turned to face her, his face was very briefly slack and his eyes unfocused before he retrained his features into their usual scowl.

“What do you make of this?” he asked.

She looked again at the wall, and what she’d first taken to be a few scratches turned out to be long swaths of claw marks. As she and Bohkat and Ang shifted and shuffled in their EV suits, the long gouges rippled under their lights.

Without a word, she reached out and touched one of the marks with her gloved fingertips, walking a few meters along the wall to take them all in. Was there a pattern? Or was her human brain just creating its own signal in the static?

“It can be a thin line between a message and a meltdown,” she said, trying to fill in the silence while her brain kept poking at the puzzle.

“Meaning what?”

Ah, Irritated Bohkat was back.

Szarka snapped out of her contemplation and lifted her tricorder, tapping away at one of the panels as she spoke. “Well, if this is a pattern, it doesn’t match anything we have in our Borg linguistic database.”

“How old is it?” came Anand’s voice through the comms, and without looking over her shoulder Szarka could tell the approaching footsteps were his.

Now it was Ang’s turn to snap back to reality and take out his tricorder. “Based on erosion and microbe colonization, probably only 25 years old.”

“Could very well be related to the ruins on the surface, then,” said Anand. “Send the data to the team on the ship and let’s keep going.”

“Which way, sir?” asked McNeill, chomping at the bit and ready to explore.

“Down the pipe.” 

Anand pointed his wrist lamp at a hole in the ground not much wider than McNeill.

Szarka groaned. “Are you sure I’m essential personnel for this mission?”

“Is my chief communications officer essential in locating a distress beacon?” Anand asked, and though he was huffing with exertion as he lowered himself into the hole, she could detect a hint of laughter in his voice. “Don’t worry, this part is probably easier than half the drills you had to run in basic training.”

By the grunting noises he made as he braced his arms against the rock and disappeared deeper into the ground, Szarka guessed that Anand was feeling those intervening decades between this mission and basic training.

“Fine,” she said, watching McNeill disappear in after him. “But I’m going last, so that if I fall I land on all of your heads.”

She watched as Ang lowered himself into the pipe and disappeared below. Bohkat hovered, glancing at Zamora. Only after her nod of approval did he follow after Ang. 

Sounds of exertion, huffing and grunts, and the occasional curse rang clearly over the comms. Szarka chuckled, grateful for the distraction because as the chamber emptied, she began to regret her decision to go last. The lights disappeared, the darkness encroached, and all the while the scratches on the wall felt like a malevolent entity waiting to reach out as soon as she turned her back on it.

Zamora must have noticed her unease because she asked, “You sure you don’t want to go next?”

Szarka opened her mouth to speak, but she had no answer. She looked from Zamora to the hole in the ground and back to Zamora and shrugged.

Zamora, thank goodness, understood. “Just watch me and do what I do.”

She looked Szarka up and down before adding, “Try to do what I do,” and reached out to grab Szarka’s arm, gripping it hard even through the EV suit. “I always said you were too skinny.”

Szarka jerked her arm away and sputtered. “Not to my face, you didn’t! It’s a little late to start bulking up now.”

Zamora ignored her indignation and gave her a pat on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, if you follow right behind me I can catch you if you slip. Even in that suit, it would take a lot more weight to knock me loose.”

Szarka rolled her eyes and scoffed, but hoped that her “thanks” sounded as genuine as she’d intended.

After a quick inspection with her wrist lamp, Zamora nodded, sat herself on the edge of the pipe, and slid right in.

Szarka peered over the edge and saw Zamora bracing her back against the rock, heels and elbows jutting out to dig into the earth. To Szarka, it looked like she was holding the edges of the tunnel up instead of the other way around.

She let out an appreciative whistle. “Nice. Hey, you and your husband went spelunking on your first shore leave together, right? What is that, like Tellarite second base?”

She heard a couple of muffled laughs over the comms in response.

“Shut up while I’m climbing,” said Zamora, in a deep and breathless voice that brooked no argument.

“Yes ma’am,” said Szarka, in that rare tone reserved for when she actually meant what she said.

Still and silent, she watched as Zamora and her lights descended inch by careful inch, and was mesmerized by her steady breathing over the comms. Maybe she could do this after all.

“Okay, come on.”

Zamora’s voice broke the spell, and Szarka was suddenly aware of the chamber around her once more. Heart thrumming in her chest, she sat down on the edge of the pipe so that she was facing the claw marks on the distant wall, and with one last defiant glare in their direction, she lowered herself in.

She braced herself against the rock so quickly and violently that she nearly knocked the wind out of her lungs, but after a few calming breaths, she realized that the pipe was at a very slight angle and not a total vertical drop.

She shifted and tested her weight. Her grip held. She felt secure.

She could do this.

Slowly, carefully, she began inching downward. Foot, foot, elbow, elbow, almost like a crab walk. She was breathing hard, but she could still hear Zamora’s steady breathing over the comms and it soothed her.

“You’re halfway there, Szarka,” Anand announced, and she gave a strained whoop of victory.

Leg, leg, arm, arm, leg, leg, arm–

Her right elbow slipped.

There was a flash of adrenaline, a second that felt like an eternity before she realized that she was still holding steady. Her heart hammered in her chest.

“You good?” asked Zamora.

A great question. She shifted her weight by the barest millimeter and felt a loose rock under her right arm.

“I’m okay, but something is coming loose here. I don’t want it to hit you in the head.”

As soon as she’d said that, there was a light tap on her helmet.

Then a heavier tap, followed by a thunk. A pattering sound as sand and pebbles hit her shoulders and her back, echoing through her suit.

She held her breath waiting for the debris to stop.

It didn’t stop. 

It grew louder, denser. She felt numb as panic set in.

Then she felt a firm grip on her boot. “Go limp.”

“Wha–”

“DO IT.”

Zamora’s barking command hit her like a reset and she let go.

She felt the tug of unrestrained gravity on her stomach, she felt the rocks sliding past her on every side, she felt her suit heating up with the friction, she didn’t have time to think.

She landed on Zamora.

The comms were abuzz with shouting that drowned out even the sound of rocks tumbling down over their heads. She felt herself being dragged, lifted, pulled away.

The rock slide became loud enough to feel through her suit. She could feel it spilling out of the pipe into the open chamber they’d landed in, a sudden intrusion that pushed air and dust and bodies outward in an arc. Szarka and the body that had grabbed her hit the ground, and everything went dark. Was she being buried alive? She was still alive.

“Zamora?” she shouted into her helmet. The rocks had quieted. There was no need to shout, but she did anyway. “Zamora?”

Zamora didn’t answer.