Chapter Text
Abemeda II
The humanoids were tall, over two meters on average, and had dusky skin tone that varied in hue from burnt orange to a dark caramel. Even here in the planet’s northern climes, the weather was semi-tropical, a byproduct of the world’s proximity to the star system’s twin suns.
Their hamlet was a kind of collective, with large family groups living in their own mini-communities, connected to the larger village by roads and footpaths along which commerce traveled. The larger village contained a sizeable market area and stockyard, as well as an outdoor amphitheater and structures suggestive of houses of worship.
The buildings here were between one and three stories high, mostly of kiln-hardened mud-brick construction over wooden frames. The dominant shape was round, tapering to a conical dome above the final story.
The smell of wood-smoke wafted through the air, accompanying the scent of newly cut grasses that were being bound and transported by animal-drawn carts to the community’s market area.
Trujillo and her away team studied this scene via binoculars, the image enhanced with tricorder information linked to the binos’ internal display. The team lay along the crest of a ridge overlooking the community, trying to remain unseen while observing the goings-on below.
“Well,” Trujillo commented as she scanned the pastoral scene with her binoculars, “these people don’t appear to be worried about an alien invasion.”
“Agreed, sir,” Garrett said from where she lay beside her, studying her tricorder intently. “Odd, though, you usually don’t see mud-brick construction techniques used in semi-tropical climates. It suggests a wide variance in this region’s seasonal temperatures. Probably something to do with the accelerated rotation of the binary pair…”
Trujillo cast a glance at the younger woman, who remained completely engrossed in her readouts. The captain looked over Garrett’s head to share a knowing grin with Kura-Ka, whose responding smile could be deduced from the flexing of his cheeks at the edge of his breather-mask.
“Commander,” she asked him, “any indications of transtator technology or electronics of any kind?”
“None, sir,” he replied in his mask’s slightly digitized tone. “Wheel, axel, and lever-based technology, roughly analogous to pre-Columbian Mesoamerica on Earth. The most developed mechanization we’ve seen has been windmills and water-wheels utilized for grain milling, but that’s the extent of it. Their clothing is all fashioned from natural animal and plant fibers, no synthetics.”
“Captain, something of note,” Jarrod offered, moving to lay next to Trujillo as Garrett scooted over to accommodate him. Jarrod painted one of the villagers in his binos with a target indicator, then transmitted that information to Trujillo’s optics. An orange field highlighted one of the aliens in Trujillo’s field of vision, and she saw the man carrying a wooden object shaped vaguely like a cricket bat.
“It’s one of the swords Ensign Garrett hypothesized about, wooden core with what looks to be sharpened rock on the cutting edges,” Jarrod pointed out.
“Indeed it is,” Trujillo breathed, enhancing the image to magnify the weapon clutched in the man’s hand. “We’ve also seen spears and arrows similar to those found aboard Esau.”
“But how do people with this level of technology stage an attack on a starship?” Jarrod asked.
“I’ve got Glal working on that upstairs,” Trujillo responded. “If everything goes according to plan, that will be our next stop on our tour of scenic Abemeda II.”
“Comaoura,” Garrett corrected her by reflex, still engrossed in her data.
“Beg pardon, Ensign?” Trujillo couldn’t contain a mischievous smile that Garrett was unable see with Jarrod in the way.
Garrett blanched. “I—I’m sorry, Captain. I didn’t—”
Between them, Jarrod dropped his head to his arms, his shoulders shaking with silent laughter.
“Please explain, Mister Garrett,” Trujillo asked with cloying sweetness.
“Sir, the name for this world in the local dialect is ‘Comaoura.’” Garrett gestured vaguely behind them. “I found it etched into that shrine near where we beamed down.”
“Comaoura,” Trujillo repeated, sounding out the word. “I like it.” She gestured to Garrett’s tricorder. “Make sure you note that in our reports and let astrometrics know to add it to our star-chart updates for the sector.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Glal to Captain Trujillo,” the XO’s voice issued from her combadge, sounding tinny and distorted due to local electromagnetic interference from the system’s binary pair.
Trujillo rolled onto her side and rifled through a pocket of her away mission jacket, producing a flip-grid communicator. She flicked it open, finding the old-fashioned activation chirp comforting somehow. “Trujillo here, go ahead.”
Glal’s signal was much clearer over the handset. “We’ve recovered the reconnaissance drones we beamed into those caverns, sir. It’s a massive network, extending out for dozens of kilometers. Some of the chambers are big enough to park Reykjavík in.”
“What did you find?”
“Lots of technology, or more accurately, it’s remains. DeSilva’s been looking at the telemetry and she believes that those energy blooms they attacked us with were actually some kind of two-way transit portal. It’s her best guess that our phasers may have exited the other end of the portal within the cavern system and started a destructive chain reaction.”
“Any life signs down there?” Trujillo inquired.
“Indeterminate, sir. That cascade of explosions released a good amount of radiation and hazardous chemical residue, which made reading life-signs in all that mess problematic.”
Trujillo stifled a sigh. “May I presume we’ll need to beam back to suit up in EVA gear?”
“That’s correct, Captain. And may I convey my everlasting gratitude for your taking my place on this landing party.”
This time Trujillo did sigh. “Don’t mention it, Commander.”
* * *
Garrett’s first thought was that she and the others had beamed into her distant ancestors’ concept of Hell.
They had materialized onto an outcropping of rock halfway up the wall of a gigantic subterranean chamber, its ceiling towering another hundred meters overhead. This enormous cavern was lit from below by burning, twisted metal that cast eerie, writhing shadows dozens of meters high along the cavern walls.
“Well, this is… cozy,” Jarrod quipped from within his EVA suit’s helmet.
“Perimeter scans,” Trujillo ordered, looking to her own tricorder. “If anything looks like it may be building to another explosion, call out. This isn’t the time to be bashful.”
Jarrod nodded to Garrett with an appreciative expression, making a sweeping gesture with his rifle to encompass the apocalyptic scene below them. “When you break something, you don’t mess around.”
Garrett merely goggled at the havoc her calculations had wrought.
Kura-Ka pointed down to a passageway leading to another chamber, barely visible against the smoky haze from the smoldering equipment below. “The recon drones showed the next chamber over suffering significantly less damage than this one. However, that chamber is also partially shielded by heavy elements in the rock strata. We nearly lost the drone we sent in there when we beamed it back. It’s safer to walk there from here.”
There was a roughly hewn rock staircase leading down from their perch to the next chamber’s entrance, some eighty meters below.
Trujillo looked to the two security personnel accompanying Jarrod, all three of which had transport pattern enhancers strapped to the backs of their EVA packs. “Be careful with those,” she said. “If we get stuck in there for some reason, those may be our only way out.”
The away team descended carefully, panning their suit-mounted lights around to illuminate the steps which became intermittently shrouded in the smoke-laden air.
“Radiation levels are rising, but are well within our suits’ safety tolerances,” Garrett noted as she swept her wedge-shaped hazardous-environment tricorder back and forth. “No life-sign readings,” she added.
They passed through the tunnel into the next chamber, where true to Glal’s word the damage appeared considerably less severe. This cavern was less than half the size of the one they’d just left, and here they found row upon row of ovoid-shaped pods, each about four meters in diameter.
On a raised platform at one end of the cavern was located an enormous crystalline prism, surrounded by numerous articulated arms, each one ending in a different sized circular aperture. These in turn were flanked by a row of conical structures that bore a striking resemblance to stacked warp coils from an engine nacelle.
Hlavic, one of the security detachment, frowned at the grouping of pods. “Please tell me those aren’t eggs,” she joked over the shared comm-net.
Trujillo silenced her with a stern look before turning her attention back to the bizarre looking structure.
“Advanced metallurgical techniques,” Garrett marveled at her tricorder’s readings. “Equivalent to or even exceeding present Federation abilities in that area, sir.”
“Beyond the capabilities of the native population, certainly,” Trujillo assessed.
Jethridge, another security specialist, called Jarrod’s attention to a long, angled rack set between two rows of pods. The rack contained hundreds of spears, arrow-quivers, and swords similar to those observed in possession of the villagers, and those found aboard Esau.
Garrett had completed cursory scans of the pods and had moved towards the assemblage of robotic arms surrounding the large milky crystal. The entire structure was some forty meters in height, and closer inspection of the arms revealed intricate scroll-work patterns set into the metal.
Kura-Ka joined her and he and Garrett switched over to an private comms frequency and began theorizing about what they were seeing.
Jarrod checked to ensure his security people were situated properly in places from where the landing party was in clear view before kneeling to better examine the weapons housed in the storage racks.
Trujillo turned in a slow circle, scanning with a standard tricorder that while less sturdy than the HazEn versions was more discriminating. She paused, detecting a weak life-sign distinct from those of the away team. Trujillo moved in that direction, realizing that she was walking towards the rows of pods. The life-sign began to grow stronger as she approached. “Mister Jarrod, I have something here,” she called, drawing her phaser from its holster on the EVA suit’s abdominal plate.
“Hang tight, sir,” Jarrod’s voice echoed in her helmet, “I’m on my way.”
There was a cracking sound from somewhere nearby, but as exterior sounds were translated through her helmet’s comms system, it was difficult to attribute a direction to it. Trujillo stepped back a pace, raising her phaser.
Her tricorder began to trill as one life-sign became two, and two became four…
“Set up the pattern enhancers, now!” she commanded.
Sudden movement in her peripheral vision caught her attention, and Trujillo turned to see one of the pods split open along a previously invisible seam. A flood of pinkish fluid spurt forth from where the seam had separated. A large, pale, three fingered hand reached out from inside the pod and grasped the edge, levering it upwards.
More cracking sounds and the splash of more fluid spattering on to the roughly hewn rock floor convinced Trujillo that this phase of their investigation was quickly drawing to a close.
“Trujillo to Reykjavík, we’re setting up pattern enhancers now. This will be an emergency beam-out. Do you copy?”
There was no response and it suddenly occurred to Trujillo that she had failed to confirm an active comm-link with the ship when the team had entered the second cavern. Rookie mistake, she thought dully. That’s what happens when you haven’t led an away mission in over five years…
“Fall back!” she yelled to the others. “Back to the other—”
An enormous hand, identical to the one she had been fixated on, collided with Trujillo’s helmet and sent her sprawling.
She landed faceplate down, her head reeling from the impact. The whine of multiple phasers reverberated through her helmet as heated voices called out over the team’s comm-net.
“More of them!” Hlavic warned.
“Behind you!” Jethridge shouted. “Look out!”
“Captain’s down!” someone yelled.
“Stun isn’t working!” Jarrod advised. “Max your phaser settings!”
Trujillo gasped, coming suddenly to full consciousness. She pushed herself up into a kneeling position, her hands casting about for her fumbled phaser as she cursed the occluding spider-web of cracks marring her faceplate.
Streams of blue light sizzled past, seemingly at random, and a weirdly detached part of Trujillo’s mind appreciated the play of light and shadow in the otherwise darkened chamber. Focus, she raged at herself. Focus or you and your people are going to die here!
She found her phaser and clutched it awkwardly in her heavily gloved hand, trying to increase its setting despite her blurred vision and cracked faceplate.
A shadow loomed over her and she looked up to see a monstrosity revealed in flickering phaser light. It stood nearly two-and-a-half meters tall, bipedal with short trunk-like legs and a broad torso that looked like an inverted triangle supporting two massive arms. There was no head, only two dark, watery eyes set at the top of the torso where a neck should have been.
As she watched the creature brought a massive wooden club encrusted in razor-sharp rock chips over its head. Without warning, the monster and it’s weapon vanished like a wraith in a swirling corona of energy, courtesy of a phaser beam set to disintegrate. Trujillo glanced down and realized the beam had come from her own weapon.
Someone grabbed her EVA by the carry-handle at the top of her atmos-exchanger pack, pulling her to her feet. “Come on, sir,” Hlavic panted. “We have to get out of here.”
The security specialist threaded an arm under hers and helped guide her through the obstacle course of pods, racks, and power trunks towards the exit. Hlavic would pause occasionally to let loose a phaser beam at an unseen opponent, and during one of these moments Trujillo caught a fleeting glimpse of another of her people.
This figure was shooting, ducking and moving among the pods, clearly trying to draw the golem-like creatures away from the others. This person vaporized multiple of the towering horrors before another of them rose up directly behind the individual. The beast brought an obsidian-edged wooden sword slashing down at the figure, only to have it parried by the individual wielding their phaser-rifle like a polearm.
Then Hlavic and Trujillo were through the narrow entrance and into the cavernous chamber beyond.
DeSilva’s voice suddenly crackled in Trujillo’s helmet, “—tus report? Away team, can you read us? This is Reykjavík on emergency channel Theta-Four.”
Hlavic moved to hand Trujillo over to Kura-Ka who stood nearby, applying a pressure-seal to a vicious-looking tear in one arm of Garrett’s EVA suit. Trujillo was still having difficulty with her vision, and her awareness continued to ebb and flow, laser-sharp one moment, fleeting the next.
She saw a line of other EVA suited personnel, all armed with rifles, charging down the steps she and her team had descended less than fifteen minutes prior.
Trujillo thought she heard Glal’s voice order, “Get back to the ship, we’ll cover your egress.”
Hlavic clutched her phaser pistol and fell into line behind the others as they rushed past, vanishing back into the passageway from whence they’d escaped.
A phaser-toting Garrett moved to follow, only to have Kura-Ka restrain her. “No, Ensign, we’re going home,” he said in an astoundingly patient voice, given the circumstances. “You too, Captain.”
Trujillo turned to put the chief engineer in his place, only to have her eyes roll back into her head as her legs gave out.
She fell then, into the blackness, further and deeper than even the subterranean chambers they had come to explore.
* * *
The gentle, steady beeping of a bio-monitor usually provided a soothing background sound for those confined to Sickbay. Not so for Nandi Trujillo and her troubled dreams. Her mind was awash in images of monstrously deformed creatures assailing her in a poorly lit cavern.
She only vaguely heard and felt the touch of a hypospray at her neck, the dispensed medications prompting her eyes to flutter open. Trujillo started, reaching her hands out in a defensive gesture towards the face hovering over her.
Dr. Bennett grabbed her hands gently. “It’s okay, Captain. You’re okay. You’re back aboard Reykjavík.”
Trujillo exhaled loudly, blinking. “Doctor?” She tried to sit up, but Bennett maintained steady pressure on her shoulder to keep her supine.
“Let’s just take it slow, shall we, Captain? You suffered substantial neural trauma from that attack. If you hadn’t been wearing an EVA helmet, I dare say that blow would have crushed your skull.”
“How long have I been out?” Trujillo asked, still blinking dazedly.
“The landing party and rescue team returned to the ship about eight hours ago, sir.”
“How… how many did we lose?” Trujillo didn’t want to know, but she had to know how many lives her carelessness had cost.
“No fatalities, sir,” Bennett answered evenly. “However, a number of our people suffered significant injuries, yourself included. Lieutenant Jarrod just came out of surgery, as did Specialist Jethridge. They both had multiple fractures and serious internal injuries from blunt-force trauma. Five others from the rescue team also incurred less serious injuries.”
“Rescue team?”
Bennett turned to look at someone else in the exam room, and a moment later Glal’s visage replaced the doctor. “How are you feeling, sir?”
“A little… light-headed. Kind of fuzzy. That… thing really rung my bell, didn’t it?”
“Apparently so, Captain,” Glal confirmed. “Doc says he spent hours realigning your neural pathways. I asked him to make you nicer, but he told me he’s a Doctor, not a miracle worker.”
Trujillo emitted a laughing snort, and immediately covered her mouth, looking mortified. “I don’t do that!” she squeaked from behind her hands.
Glal’s tusks quivered from barely contained mirth as Bennett stepped back into view. “Don’t worry, Captain,” the doctor said. “The sedative is still wearing off. Your reactions may be a bit exaggerated for the next few minutes.”
She blinked, trying to steady her thoughts, and turned her head to look at Glal. “Someone mentioned a rescue team?”
“Yes, sir. As soon as we lost comms with your landing party after you entered the second chamber. I led a rescue team down and arrived just as you were exiting. You don’t remember?”
“Vaguely…” she trailed off, a faraway cast to her eyes as she struggled to recall those last, confusing moments.
“We were able to extract Jarrod and Jethridge and get everyone back to the ship.” Glal informed her.
She nodded faintly, still trying to piece the events together into some kind of cogent narrative. “Good work, Commander.” Glal noticed Trujillo’s customary spark seemed to reappear in her eyes, or he at least imagined that it had.
“What happened to the… laboratory, or launch site… whatever we’re calling it? Were we able to recover any technology or did those things chase us off?”
Glal’s expression became grim. “No, sir. After we recovered our personnel, I was concerned about the possibility of a follow on attack. The recon probes we sent down there apparently mistook inert equipment for damaged. The technology in the second chamber was largely operational when you arrived. Ensign Garrett believes the device at the front of the chamber with all the arms was a kind of focal refractor for the long-range transporter they attacked us with. Despite our firefight in the cavern, most of their equipment remained intact. But, in all the confusion, they must have overlooked the pattern enhancers we’d left behind. So, I used them to beam three photon torpedoes into the chamber on a five-second delay.”
Trujillo’s eyes widened. “That must have made for an impressive explosion.”
“Brought down an estimated fifty-million metric tons of rock, collapsing four-fifths of the cavern system.”
Trujillo nodded distractedly, craning her head around to locate Bennett. “Doctor, I’d like to see the men who just came out of surgery.”
“Of course, Captain,” the doctor replied. He stepped forward, and he and Glal helped Trujillo up into a sitting position on the bio-bed. “Mister Jethridge is still sleeping, but Lt. Jarrod is awake.”
Glal leaned in to whisper, “I’m putting both of them and Hlavic in for citations for valor, Captain.”
Trujillo walked toward the recovery rooms, assisted by the two men until she was steady on her feet, then under her own power.
She spent a few moments with the sleeping Jethridge. Half of the young man’s head was encased in an osteo-therapy cradle, fusing the multiple fractures in his skull. Long hours of exhaustive neural realignment and reconstruction awaited him, similar to what Trujillo had just undergone. She whispered her thanks for his efforts and then proceeded slowly into the next room.
There Jarrod lay with his left arm and both legs encased in osteo-therapy sleeves. He sipped at a cup of water with a straw, held in his one working hand. As Trujillo entered the compartment, Jarrod tried to sit up straighter, wincing with the effort.
“At ease, Lieutenant,” Trujillo said gently.
“Hello, Captain,” he said simply. He set the cup down. “I… regret you were injured down there, sir. I shouldn’t have—’
She held up a hand to silence him, sitting down on the edge of his bed. “I remember someone down there running around vaporizing those things and drawing them away from us. That was you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You and your security team saved us, Mister Jarrod.”
With a pained expression, Jarrod shook his head fractionally. “No, sir. Those things got the drop on us. That shouldn’t have happened.”
“There were very few seconds between when the creatures began waking up and when they attacked. I never saw the one that got me, and I thought I was being hyper-vigilant.” Trujillo took his hand in hers. “I led the team, and I neglected to keep an open channel with the ship, compromising our safety.”
“Sir, I—”
“Thank you for my life, Gael,” Trujillo murmured, squeezing his hand.
Jarrod’s eyes widened, focusing on Glal and Dr. Bennett, both of whom stood transfixed in the doorway.
“Nandi,” he whispered hoarsely, “we have company.”
“I know,” she replied. “I don’t care. I don’t care anymore if the crew knows. I’ve been treating you… us… like some dirty little secret for far too long. You’re an amazing person, and you deserve much better than that.”
She glanced back at the doorway where Bennett was trying to pull a goggling Glal out into the corridor to give the two of them some privacy.
Trujillo smiled at her XO. “Commander, be advised that Gael and I have been romantically involved for the past four months.”
A slow smile spread across Glal’s features. “No shit?” he wondered aloud.
* * *