Disclaimer: I own Gwen; everything else belongs to someone other than myself.
Two Months
chapter two
Jonathan Archer awoke to a throbbing pain at the back of his head, and his body was stiff from lying on a hard surface, but he could not remember why that would be so. Although his arms and legs wouldn't respond when he tried to shift them, the fog about his brain did not permit him to get too worried, and so – not knowing any reason why he should do otherwise – he peacefully surrendered himself to unconsciousness once again.
He woke some time later – he did not know exactly how much time had passed – to be assaulted by oppressing heat, searing pain along much of his left side and the smell of his own burnt flesh. With a muffled shout, he jerked away from the fire and lurched painfully to his feet, grimacing all the while.
We must have crashed, Archer thought, memories of the turbulent moments just before he blacked out for the first time coming back to him.
"Novakovich!" he yelled hoarsely, peering through the haze of smoke that separated captain from crewman. Archer could make out a limp form slumped over the console, but it showed no sign of stirring at his voice.
"Crewman Novakovich!" he tried again. "Ethan!"
The smoke began to sting his eyes as the fire crept closer to where he stood, and still Ethan showed no sign of having heard his captain. Casting about him, Jonathan Archer searched for something that would help him; a bright red canister caught his eye. It was packed full of flame-repressing foam, which had been specially developed by Starfleet for the NX-01. Fire was especially dangerous in space.(1)
Holding the canister at arm's length before him, Archer cleared a path to the main console of the shuttlepod and stepped carefully between the fires blazing on either side of him but saw that the fire had gotten there ahead of him.
Probably it started there, some detached part of his mind noted as he gazed with horror at the scene before him. The charred flesh he had immediately smelt upon awakening had not been just his own; the body of Crewman Ethan Novakovich was going up in flames right before his very eyes, and he couldn't seem to tear his horrified gaze away. The greedy flames devoured what had once been a living man, and Archer watched, wanting to look away but somehow unable to.
It was the flames that began to lick again about his own boots that finally brought him back to himself. Swiftly, he killed those about his feet, then those consuming Novakovich, before turning his attention to the rest of the shuttlepod. After all the flames inside the pod had been quenched, he stumbled outside and put down a few small fires that he would have supposed – had he the time to stop and think about it – had started up on impact.
Finally, the adrenaline that had kept him going wore off, and his body reacted to the happenings of the last half-hour. Jonathan staggered a few steps, and his stomach heaved, bringing up what little food he had in him, images of his burning crewman filling his mind. Then he was assailed by a wave of pain and fell mercifully unconscious for the third time in as many hours.
Gwen strode quickly through the tangled growth of the forest, never misstepping among the mass of roots beneath her feet, though it was still dark. The woods had welcomed her even when the people of her village had not and so she had spent much of her youth in the cool shade beneath the boughs of the derw, teaching herself to hunt and to heal and to gain some semblance of control over those powers within her that so scared the villagers. She knew the hidden trails of the forest just as well as she knew the much-trodden path from her mattress to her hearth to the entrance flaps of her hut. The forest was a second home to her; its trees had seen her grow from a girl-child into the young woman she was now. They had watched silently as she made her first kill – a small gwiwer and hardly worth eating but a testament to her aim and skill with a bow nevertheless – and as she learned hand-to-hand combat and gathered the perlysiau that aided her recovery after a difficult day of combat lessons.
She had seen the general direction the…whatever it was…had been heading in when it crashed into the forest and trusted her gut to lead her more directly to it. And so she walked steadily onwards, sometimes having to double back when she felt she had missed the way but never pausing, even though the sun began to peek above the horizon before she caught the lingering scent of smoke on the air.
(1) I have no idea if this is true for the Enterprise. I read about the foam in an Andromeda fanfic; I don't even know for sure if they really had it on the Andromeda. But I liked the idea so I used it anyway.
A/N: I apologize greatly to all my faithful readers who have been waiting patiently for this next installment; I can only plead that I got distracted by two of my other works. Thanks also to all of you who have taken the time to review so far! And sorry to firebirdgirl and anyone else who developed a liking for Novakovich... Anyway, there was going to be more to this chapter, but I figured that y'all would want to read what I had now. So - please review and let me know what you think of this chapter, and also if you would prefer longer chapters or quicker updates!!