Survival Tactics

Planetfall

The dream was always the same: The Sarcophagus Ship, the Klingon ship of the dead--the fetid, musky smell, the dim lighting, the arabesque design to the massive bridge.

Georgiou.

Burnham watches her captain's melee with T'kuvma, tamping down the sinking feeling that there is no way this will end well. This isn't the way the mission was supposed to go. The captain is outmatched physically by an opponent whose physiology designed him to be superior to her, and who is drunk on youth and fury. She watches from behind what seems to be a pane of glass or a viewscreen—something that allows for visibility, but not contact. She tries to will Georgiou some of the strength she developed living with Vulcan's higher gravity, some of the will she feels to rewrite the past, some of her own fury at how everything turned out.

But it all happens anyway.

And when Georgiou's eyes widen with sudden horrid realization that she's dead, Burnham wakes up.

Fingers snapping.

"Come back me. Specialist Burnham. Come back to me."

More snapping.

Burnham was aware of laying on the ground. She could feel a chilly wind blowing. She moved her arms and legs, testing joints, looking for sharp pains, but feeling none.

"Burnham..."

She opened her eyes, saw Detmer crouched over her. "Keyla..." she managed, and slowly began sitting up. The world shifted vertiginously.

"You had a nasty landing. I think you suffered an MBTI,"—Burnham struggled for the acronym, then found it: mild traumatic brain injury—"but I gave you a shot of compselene, which should help with the brain-tissue bruising. I don't think you have any broken bones, so that's a good thing."

"Yeah, I don't feel anything broken," Burnham said groggily as she slowly settled into a sitting position. She blinked a few times until her double-vision coalesced into a single image and surveyed their surroundings. They sat in a small clearing that was surrounded by bare and skeletal trees, which, from the look of them, must have once been something akin to Terran fir trees. These, however, were bleached whitish-grey. Detmer looked around at the trees with her.

"Most of them seem to be petrified. Probably not naturally. Must be a by-product of the strip-mining."

"Cycleron radiation," Burnham nodded, feeling a jab of pain shoot through her frontal lobes. "It calcifies organic tissue."

"Super," Detmer said grimly. "We get to turn to statues."

"We'll die of the toxins in the atmosphere first," Burnham said. "The mining machinery uses focused beams of tereon radiation to burrow into the ground, but the extraction and refinement process causes toxic levels of pollutants."

The blood went out of Detmer's face as she laid out the contents of her med kit. "There's nothing in here for that. This is all basic field-injury stuff—wounds, broken bones, some anti-toxins for venomous plants or animals..."

"No, we'd need a sickbay for proper treatment. Is there any chance of salvaging anything from the shuttlecraft?"

Detmer shook her head. "I watched it come down, must have been twenty klicks from here. Whatever's left is in pieces."

Burnham squeezed her eyes closed, and fought off a rising ache behind them, then opened them and refocused. "All right, then. What do we have?

Detmer gestured to where their packs sat, leaned up against a wide, calcified tree truck. "We have a standard expedition kit: shelter, heat sticks, some rations, water, one Type-Two phaser, two Type-One phasers, two standard tricorders, and two communicators. Fine, if we were going camping or taking some cadets on an overnight survival primer. In our current circumstances...we're screwed." She let out a shuddering breath.

Burnham picked up a communicator and flipped it open. "Burnham to Discovery...Discovery, do you copy?" She was answered by an unnerving silence.

"I tried that," Detmer said sharply. "For an hour while you were recovering, I tried that. Know what I got? Nothing? Not even static."

Burnham closed the communicator. "The radiation in the atmosphere is probably bouncing the signal back. We need something more powerful." She clipped the communicator to her belt, then picked up a tricorder. She opened the interface, activating the device, and called up the last data synch with the shuttle's computer, then she flipped over to cartographic mode and waiting a moment for the whirring instrument to calculate their location. "Okay...it looks like we're about forty kilometers east of the mining camp where Conn'klyn is located."

"Wait, you still want to try and extract this guy? How? Are we gonna walk him off this planet? I'm sorry, Specialist Burnham, but this mission is over! It's done!"

"Our only way off this planet is at that camp," Burnham replied forcefully. "Conn'klyn communicated regularly with Sorensen. That means he's got comms off this planet. We can probably use whatever he has to contact Discovery and have them put together an exfil."

"Discovery?" Detmer's laughed was just a little too shrill, and Burnham began to realize what she was dealing with. "Discovery is gone. She probably jack-rabbitted out of the system, and that's assuming she survived the Klingon attack. With fucking D'Epiro at the helm, they probably didn't last twenty seconds--!"

"Keyla!" Burnham snapped. "Keyla, you need to focus. You need to concentrate."

"Don't tell me what to do, Specialist! You're not my ranking officer anymore!"

Burnham put up her hands in what she hoped was a placating gesture. "It's physiological. The adrenaline and endorphins that flooded your system during the evacuation are wearing off. It's making you feel hopeless and overly-emotional."

Detmer threw her look of pure hatred. "I am not overly-emotional. You're just out of your mind."

"Okay," Burnham said, barely holding back the urge to scream at her, to nerve-pinch her into unconsciousness, or just plain break her jaw. "Okay, but we need a plan. We only have three days—four at the most—before we're non-operational from the toxicity of the atmosphere. Now, the sun is going to set in a few hours and the temperature is going to drop. I recommend we start moving now. Otherwise we'll lose time, and we don't have time to spare. But you're right: you're the ranking officer. It's your call to make."

Detmer breathed through her nose, her gaze sliding wildly over their gear. After a few moments, Burnham though she saw something shift in Detmer's features—some greater instinct override, if not overcome, her emotions.

"All right," she said heavily. "Let's move."