Chapter Text
The turbolift doors parted to admit Trujillo onto the bridge, prompting the computer to issue a specific alert chime.
Glal half turned in the command chair at the sound to confirm Trujillo’s presence before announcing, “Captain on the bridge.” He stood to surrender the seat.
Trujillo offered a perfunctory, “As you were,” to dissuade the bridge crew from coming to attention. She stepped over to Glal. “Report.”
The XO handed a data-slate to her. She perused the information displayed there as Glal updated her. “We are five minutes from system penetration, Captain. The probe we sent ahead confirmed Esau is still intact but detected no active life-signs aboard the ship. She’s adrift mid-system at approximately three-hundred kph and is not presently near any of the system’s planets. We’ve been unable to detect any structural damage to the ship’s exterior. Esau’s warp reactor appears to be in standby mode and she’s running on auxiliary power. The ship continues to broadcast an automated distress beacon.”
“No signs of threat vessels in the vicinity?” she asked.
“None, sir. Also, no signs of wreckage indicative of a battle having been fought.”
“Understood. You are relieved; I have the conn.”
Glal accepted the slate back from her. “I stand relieved.”
Trujillo seated herself and completed a slow rotation in her chair to survey the bridge. Her officers were working diligently at their posts, with some of them conferring in hushed tones on matters of import as they approached the system boundary.
She gave herself a moment to mourn what she presumed to be the loss of Esau’s crew. Starships were designed to prevent complete ship-wide atmospheric loss or bacterial/virologic contamination, so the fact that Esau was intact but bereft of life-signs could only mean that her crew had been either abducted or killed. A major shipboard disaster that hadn’t consumed the ship itself would have left some survivors, she thought.
Trujillo had called up Esau’s commanding officer’s service record, and found that despite being relatively young, Lt. Commander Ngư had a reputation for being thorough and cautious. He was not someone to walk blindly into a trap, nor one to ignore signs of potential danger.
She forced herself to relax, making herself ready for whatever they were to encounter in the Abemeda system.
“Dropping out of warp in three… two… one…” Ensign Naifeh counted down through the deceleration curve as the streaks of light on the main viewscreen retracted into singular points of luminescence.
“Ahead one-quarter impulse,“ Trujillo ordered.
“One-quarter impulse, aye,” Naifeh confirmed. “Now crossing the heliopause threshold and entering the Abemeda system.”
Trujillo turned slightly in her chair to glance towards the science station, where star system diagrams and data began to pop up on Ensign Garrett’s displays. Garrett caught a glimpse of the captain’s patient stare and announced, “Beginning sensor sweep.”
From Ops, DeSilva called out, “Confirmed sensor contact with Esau, Captain. Her situation appears unchanged from the information we received from our probe.”
“Weaps?” Trujillo called over her shoulder to the Tactical station.
From long experience, Lieutenant Jarrod replied without the questions even having to be asked. “No anomalous sensor contacts, Captain. No signs of any other craft in or near the system to within two light-years.”
DeSilva confirmed, “Esau is structurally intact, but registers no life-readings. Life-support systems appear to be functioning normally.”
“Captain…” Garrett had begun speaking, but her voice trailed off as a new stream of data scrolled across the monitor she appeared fixated on.
Trujillo turned fully in her chair to face the ensign. Her raised eyebrow demanded elaboration.
“…I’m reading a detectable increase in bacteria-generated trace gasses onboard,” Garrett finally continued. She turned to look at the captain, her complexion suddenly ashen. “It’s the kind of increase you’d expect from early necrotic processes, sir.”
“Corpses, you mean,” Trujillo probed.
Garrett swallowed hard. “Yes, sir.”
Trujillo gestured to Glal, seated at an auxiliary station. “Commander, pull up Esau’s command prefix codes. I want to access their internal visual recorders.”
“Aye, sir,” Glal affirmed as he set to work.
Turning back to Garrett, Trujillo asked, “Ensign, any sign of viral or bacterial pathogens aboard?”
“I’m unable to make that determination at this distance, Captain. In fact, depending on the pathogen, it may not be detectable even at close range without atmospheric sampling from the ship itself.”
Trujillo scowled. That would not be her first choice. She turned back to Glal.
Red icons flashed across his display and he shook his head in frustration. “Sorry, sir. Their main computer and all secondary processors are offline. I can’t access any of Esau’s command and control functions.”
“What’s maintaining their life-support systems then?” she asked.
From the Engineering station, Kura-Ka spoke through his concealing mask. “The remaining ship’s systems are running on tertiary backups, Captain. From what little I can tell from here, it appears the damage to their primary and secondary computer cores was deliberate. It’s far too comprehensive to be a cascade failure or accidental damage.”
Trujillo leaned back in her chair, pondering their dilemma. “Mister Glal, prep a boarding party in full EVA gear. I want all necessary precautions taken to safeguard against chemical and biological weapons. Take Commander Kura-Ka, Dr. Bennett, Ensign Garrett and a full security team.”
“Aye, sir,” Glal responded, turning back to his console to make the necessary arrangements.
“Mister Naifeh, set an intercept course with Esau and execute at half-impulse.”
As the crew carried out her orders Trujillo sat and feigned an air of detached calm as her mind spun with possible scenarios, none of them good. Something or someone had killed the starship Esau, and now she was potentially taking her crew into the sights of that very same danger. The dark cynic at her core reminded Trujillo that she had, in fact, wished for an assignment more out of the ordinary only weeks earlier.
And that, dear Captain, was your first mistake, she mused.
* * *
USS Esau
Reykjavík’s away team materialized in a corridor intersection, all of them facing out with phasers drawn. They were clad in bulky EVA suits, the kind worn for work in hostile planetary environments or the vacuum of space.
There was a sudden intake of breath that carried across their mutual comms frequency and it took Garrett a moment to realize that the sound had come from her. They had beamed into utter bedlam, a scene that each of them knew instantly would haunt them for their remaining days.
Blood and gore were splashed across the ceiling, floor, and bulkheads in great swaths, making it look as if the carnage was intended as an artistic statement as much as a slaughter. Bodies littered the corridors, many of them mangled almost beyond recognition and contorted into impossible positions either through the efforts of their attackers or the ferocity of their own death throes.
Garrett’s head spun as she fought the overwhelming urge to expel the contents of her stomach. She was reaching reflexively for the faceplate of her helmet when Glal’s hand clamped firmly around her wrist like a vise. “Don’t even think about it, Ensign,” he told her in a serious tone tinged with sympathy.
“Breathe,” he told her. “Just close your eyes and breathe. It’ll pass in a moment.”
She did as he instructed, and a minute later the panic and nausea diminished. “S—sorry, sir…” she murmured between shuddering breaths.
“No, no apologies. Not for this. Never for this.”
Glal gestured to the security team. “Take up blocking positions in those corridors and cover our advance towards the computer core.” He turned to face Kura-Ka, whose broad, placid features struck Glal as particularly alien in the EVA suit helmet. He so rarely ever saw the Zaranite’s true face that he realized he’d begun to confuse the mask with the man behind it. “Be ready to run a bypass on the core access hatch if the doors are in security lockdown,” he told the engineer.
Glal regarded Dr. Bennett who was studying the readouts of his trilling tricorder.
“No indications of pathogens, either viral or bacterial,” the doctor reported.
He checked back with Garrett, who gave Glal a thumbs up despite looking pale and stunned.
“Commander,” Bennett called in surprise. “Is that…? It can’t be.”
Glal turned to see Bennett kneeling next to the body of an enlisted crewman, one whose remains were more or less intact, relative to the others. The doctor was pointing to what appeared to be the shaft of a wooden arrow protruding from the back of the man’s torso. There were colorful feathers for fletching at the end of the shaft, an incongruous detail in such a horrific scene.
The XO looked on as Bennett swept the detachable cylindrical hand-sensor from his medical tricorder over the body. “Sharp force injuries from the arrow and what looks to be some kind of bladed weapon,” Bennett observed clinically. “Additional to blunt force trauma and crushing injuries from… I don’t know what.”
Bennett paused to open his medical kit and retrieve a pair of forceps. He reached into a gaping wound along the man’s side to gently pluck something small and dark from out of the exposed tissues. He held it up to the light, turning it to examine his find.
Glal squatted next to him, squinting at what appeared to be a shard of dark, hardened material. “What is it?” he asked.
Bennett opened a small sampling port at the base of his tricorder and dropped the shard inside before closing it. “It’ll take a moment to analyze, sir.”
The comm interface in Glal’s helmet chirped and he winced, realizing that it had been a full two minutes since they’d beamed in and he’d neglected to update the ship. He stood and opened the channel.
“Glal here, sir. Apologies for the oversight. Things are… rather gruesome over here. I’m switching on my camera now. Be prepared, this isn’t pleasant.” He toggled a control on his suit’s forearm interface, activating a helmet mounted camera which broadcast an image from his perspective back to the ship.
There was a prolonged silence on the comm channel before he heard Captain Trujillo say, “Understood, Commander. Please proceed,” in an understandably tight voice.
The doctor held up his tricorder toward Glal to indicate that he had results. “It’s a shard of obsidian, sir. Very sharp. Likely a piece of whatever produced the wound in his side.”
Garrett stepped over to the two, her eyes wide, but this time with intense focus rather than horror. “Doctor, are there any traces of wood particles on that obsidian, by chance?”
Bennett studied the tricorder’s display for a moment, fiddling with the settings to adjust its analysis parameters. He gave the young woman a puzzled look through his helmet’s faceplate. “Yes, actually. How did you know?”
Garrett’s own expression was guarded. “Lucky guess,” she said cryptically. She looked to Glal. “I have a hunch, sir, but I’ll need more evidence before I’m ready to offer up a theory.”
Glal nodded. “Fine.” He gestured down the corridor with his drawn phaser pistol. “Let’s keep going.”
The signs of massacre continued in much the same fashion as they moved through the ship. Some corridors had fewer bodies than others, some had none. There was a wide variety of damage to the victims. Some of the crew had been felled by arrows or wooden spears, while others had been dismembered by catastrophic physical trauma of unknown origin. Still others had suffered grievous wounds from what must have been bladed weapons of some kind.
Many of the bulkheads bore scoring from phaser impacts clearly set to lethal levels.
“This has to be Klingons,” one of the security officers muttered over their shared channel.
“No,” Glal countered in a heavy voice. “I’ve seen my share of bat’leth wounds, and these aren’t from those.” He paused to run a gloved hand across a phaser blast mark seared into a tritanium bulkhead support beam. “The Klingons also use Type-III disruptors. The only energy weapons impacts we’ve seen so far have been from Starfleet phasers.”
The team approached an intersection that had been sealed off by a massive pressure door. The tritanium alloy of the two-centimeter thick barrier had been rent open as though something had simply peeled apart a cardboard sheet placed in its path.
A security man turned to fix a dumbfounded look on Glal. “What could do that?”
Glal merely shook his head and increased his phaser setting to maximum.
* * *
USS Reykjavík
The reaction on the bridge to the macabre telemetry from Glal’s helmet-camera on the main viewscreen was visceral.
Trujillo’s eyes were riveted to the screen as her mind struggled to absorb the full horror on display. Someone stationed at a console behind her gasped, and another person off to her left gagged as they fled the bridge for the turbolift. Trujillo refused to look back, determined to allow her people to recover their dignity in private.
A pang of regret welled in her chest with the thought that she’d sent Ensign Garrett into that particular vision of Hell. Trujillo and most of the other senior officers had experienced many tragedies in the course of their careers. These were the smaller, repeated traumas that hardened one’s heart and mind against the onslaught of the truly ghastly. Garrett had no such defenses.
In the span of two days, Trujillo had failed the young woman twice, and in disgraceful fashion.
With a few quick keystrokes at her console interface Trujillo initiated a program to effectively pixilate the remains of Esau’s crew, sparing at least those on the bridge the full brunt of the nightmare discovered aboard their fellow starship.
* * *
USS Esau
Something had forced its way through multiple pressure doors and into the ship’s computer core where it had wreaked havoc on the delicate contents within. Shattered isolinear optical chips littered the floor, along with larger pieces of data-ware substrate and crystalline memory wafers. The destruction was thorough, to be sure, but something here also spoke of untempered rage.
Glal pursed his lips in irritation, certain that the smaller secondary memory core would be similarly destroyed.
Bennett stepped up to him to make his report. “Still no indications of any pathogens, though there are some viral strains that are too small to be readily detected by tricorder. I’d still recommend we take samples back to the secure analysis station I’ve set up in our shuttle bay.”
Glal started to object, but Bennett pressed, “It’s surrounded by vacuum, Commander. There’s no chance of anything being transferred to the rest of the ship.”
“You can’t beam your analysis gear over and run the tests here?” Glal asked.
Bennett glanced around, “This… environment would make accurate testing more problematic.”
“It’ll be the captain’s call to make,” Glal told him, secretly relieved the decision wouldn’t be his.
“It’s also notable that I haven’t detected any non-Federation cellular residue. There’s nothing on the weapons used by whoever or whatever perpetrated this attack. Nor is there any residue on the doors that were forced open or torn through. Any creature strong enough to exercise that level of violence would doubtless leave at least microscopic tissue traces behind.”
Glal pointed to the scorch mark left over from a phaser impact on the door frame. “Their phasers were set to kill. You’re saying that none of them hit anything?”
Bennett shrugged inside his environment suit. “At the very least they hit nothing that bleeds, Commander.”
It was then that Glal noticed Garrett with a pair of her own forceps, prying another shard of obsidian out of what remained of a bank of smashed processor towers.
“How’s that working hypothesis of yours?” he asked.
“Firming up, sir,” she replied, placing the shard into a small sealed container which then went into a carryall slung over her shoulder.
“Care to share with the class?” Glal asked dryly.
“Yes, sir. I believe that one of the weapons used here was an analogue of an ancient-Terran macuahuitl.”
He folded his arms across his chest impatiently. “Explain,” he instructed.
“The Terran version of this weapon was utilized by the Aztec civilization of Mesoamerica in roughly the 13th to 16th centuries, AD. It’s essentially a wooden club or paddle, the outer edge of which is inset with sharpened pieces of stone, usually flint or obsidian. It’s a slashing weapon, excellent for close-quarters combat. That jibes with the arrows and spears we’ve seen employed in this attack, as they also utilize arrowheads and tips of shaped obsidian.”
Hlavic, one of the security team, moved to join the conversation. “Who attacks and overwhelms a starship with paleolithic weapons?” she asked incredulously.
Glal gestured to the heavy door leading out of the compartment which had been peeled back with evident ease. “What force armed with such weapons could tear open a tritanium hatch? And why are there no enemy bodies?”
“I hate to cut short your meeting of the minds,” Trujillo’s voice broke in, “but I’m recalling the away team. Secure your samples, and we’ll beam you back to the isolation lab in the shuttle-bay. Your team will be quarantined in the dormitory there until we can be absolutely certain no pathogens were involved here.”
Glal cut over to a secure channel, limited to himself and the captain. “Sir, has something happened?”
“No, Commander. Given the circumstances and what you’ve discovered so far, I’m going to bring you home, raise the shields, and alert Starfleet to what we’ve found. If we fall prey to the same force that attacked Esau, I don’t want yet another starship blundering in here and having to start over from square-one.”
That decision made sense both scientifically and tactically, Glal thought. Not for the first time he mused that Nandi Trujillo might just have made captain for good cause.
“Copy that, sir. Give us five to collect our gear and samples and we’ll be ready.”
* * *