Title: Trapped (#3, The Drabble Bin)
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek TOS
Characters: Riley, others
Summary: This is a drabble/snapshot of the dangers of a Starfleet officer’s mission.
Previous Drabbles: The Old Four | Those Neighborhood Hoodlums

High above, the last ember of sunlight gutters into darkness, and silence descends. A small group of people breathe in hushed, nervous tones, their backs to the cavern’s wall as they listen for sounds of movements beyond the small niche of rock sheltering them. They hear nothing.

At last one of them stirs, his fingers seeking out a device to tentatively lift its cover. It emits a beep and a fizzling wave of static.

“Captain,” the man holding the communicator whispers. “Riley to Capt’n Kirk. Hello?“

For a moment there is no response; then the static crackles and half-formed words filter in and out, sharp barks of a familiar but muted voice. “—ca—ear—ley! Can you—port! —“

The young officer tightens his grip on the device. He tries his level best not to sound as panicked as he feels. “Captain, we’re—” trapped “—in a network of tunnels, no more than five meters beneath the surface.” But it still had been a significant distance to fall when his grip slipped from the lattice-work of roots on the climb down.

He fumbles for information of their locale, wishing their only tricorder hadn’t broken under him when he landed. “Last coordinates—”

The pale-faced geologist murmurs a number.

“—45:26:40N. There was—is something out there, sir,” he emphasizes with a shudder in his voice. It snatched a man off his feet, he doesn’t say —a junior lieutenant and one of his friends, whom Riley cannot bear to think about because if he allows himself, he can hear echoes of his friend’s screaming reverberating through the silence of this godforsaken hole in the ground, a mistake they made when they had recklessly decided to hide.

He keeps talking, forcing out words like campsite ambushed and no supplies and two injured officers. “We need help—send help, I repeat, send help!”

Belatedly Riley realizes the connection to the outside world has long since faded away; he has been begging for rescue from a dead communicator. The device slips from his bruised fingers into his lap, and he doesn’t bother to pick it up again. Head bowed, he faintly hopes the unruly flop of his hair hides his fear from the others.

A warm hand presses against his thigh. “Kevin, are you okay?”

He briefly covers the small hand with his own, grateful to have the comfort of physical contact with another person, and huffs out a tiny laugh for the anxious woman crouched beside him. “Yeah, yeah I am, Lizza. It’s all right,” he adds with almost too much bravado. “The Captain will find us.”

“I know he will,” she replies in soft tones. The smile trembling at the corners of her mouth is painful to look upon, so Riley closes his eyes.

Her grip moves from his thigh to his shoulder, hard now. “But don’t fall asleep, please. I think you’re concussed.”

Riley has senior rank among the four of them. He couldn’t fall asleep if he wanted to, concussion or no concussion. He’s responsible now, even for young Lt. Harris, who is propped between Riley and the geologist and slowly bleeding from an abdominal wound made by voracious claws. Harris will die first, Riley thinks hollowly, and even that is his responsibility.

He gropes blindly for the communicator in his lap then opens his eyes as he twists the dial, though it does nothing to clear the channel. Then Riley begins again, “Lt. Riley to Capt—to anyone—this is Kevin Riley, I repeat, Kevin Riley of the USS Enterprise—”

A Cage of His Own

Related Posts:

• A Cage of His Own (#4, The Drabble Bin) – from February 29, 2012
• Those Neighborhood Hoodlums (#2, The Drabble Bin) – from February 4, 2012