Star Trek: Cayuga
09 - ‘Four People from Khymer’
By Jack Elmlinger
It was too early in the morning.
Naala pulled at the sheets of her parents’ bed again. Her father groaned with fatigue and reached down to pick her up. “Daddy,” she said with the seriousness of a three-year old.
Her father rubbed the ridges around his eyes. “Yes, Naala?”
“There’s a monster in the backyard.”
“There’s no such thing as monsters,” her father told her. Her gaze didn’t waver and he sighed. “Come on and show me. Don’t wake up your mother.”
Naala led him into the kitchen and pointed out the window. “There.”
Wiping the sleep from his eyes, her father leaned on the windowsill and gazed outward. Then he slowly stepped back. The creature was as tall as a Cardassian. Hard plates were embedded into its brown-and-green skin. Each of its fingers were easily as long as a humanoid forearm. None of this was as disturbing as the six blood-red eyes staring out from its face.
“Is it a Gem’adar?,” Naala asked him.
“Never say that name,” her father snapped at her before he shook his head. “No, it’s not a Jem’hadar.”
His daughter frowned at him. “What is it, then?”
“I don’t know.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
“‘Cause I’m as free as a bird -- oh, damn it.”
Jeanne Pozach resettled the guitar on her hip and strummed through the riff again. Still not satisfied with the sound, she tightened the strings. The door suddenly chimed and she glanced up from her music.
“Enter,” she said.
The door slid open and Commander zh’Tali strode in and came to attention before her.
“Captain, I apologize for interrupting you during your off-duty hours.”
“At ease, Commander. What brings you here?”
“Lieutenant Maguire is missing.”
Pozach placed the guitar across her lap. “What?”
“During the twelve hundred rounds of Starbase Three-Five-Nine’s hospital, it was discovered that her bed was unoccupied. Station security ran a sweep and they were unable to locate her. I was informed myself, twenty minutes ago.”
Pozach stood up, laying her guitar down on her couch. “Did she come here?”
“No. her codes weren’t used to access the ship.” zh’Tali held out a PADD towards her. “Upon further investigation, I found out that she had booked passage on a Rigelian relief freighter bound for Cardassia Prime. They launched from the starbase, an hour ago.”
“Have we received any orders yet to resume our cargo runs?”
zh’Tali shrugged at her question. “No. A number of ships from the Seventh Fleet have been reassigned to deliver relief aid to the Cardassians. Our return to duty has been delayed.”
“All right, recall all of our personnel from the Starbase. Have a course plotted for the freighter. Rigelian ships are fast but we’re quite a bit out from Cardassia. We should be able to intercept them.”
zh’Tali took her orders as a dismissal and departed from the Captain’s cabin. Jeanne sat back down on her couch and strummed a few cords. “Aimee,” she asked the room plaintively,” what have you done now?”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
The monster wasn’t alone.
While her father left his family to go fetch the authorities, Naala watched three more creatures appear in flashes of light. New plants also appeared out of nowhere and spread, strangling the life out of the trees. By the time that her father returned with a few members of the local militia, the air was thick and tinged with green particles. The soldiers took aim with their disruptor rifles and they gagged on the strange oxygen, falling back, overwhelmed.
Naala’s mother took her and they fled the house that afternoon. Before she left, the small Cardassian girl saw small, hopping lizards flit through the living room.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
“This is so like her!,” Sean Pasko exclaimed with disgust. “Something bad happens to her and she runs away. I know she did.”
Across the table from the pilot, Thomas Riker looked up in surprise. “I’m sorry?,” he asked him.
“It’s the same thing that she did with Captain Pozach. It’s like all she knows how to do is run.”
Riker frowned at his admission. He had only been aboard the Cayuga for little more than a day and already there was excitement. Although if half of what he heard about her was as true as what he read in the ship’s logs, then this Maguire was the type of person who enjoyed making a scene.
“Captain Pozach sent a message to a Lieutenant Dixon aboard the Gihlan,” he told Pasko. “Are he and Maguire related somehow?”
“She’s just like my sister!,” Pasko cried, obliviously. “I’m always having to chase after her.”
“All senior staff, report to the Situation.” Riker glanced up at the ceiling and he pushed himself up to his feet.
Pasko shook his head and glanced over, noticing Riker for the first time. “Do you know where the Situation Room is?,” he asked the new guy. “It would be embarrassing for our new Operations Officer to get lost. Come on.” He gathered his plates up onto a tray, adding,” I suppose we’ve caught up with that Rigelian freigher. I’m going to kill her.”
They stepped into the corridor and Riker could feel the subtle vibration of high warp through the deckplates. To Pasko, it felt like the ship was changing direction, but only slightly.
The doors to the Bridge parted open and Pasko led Riker into the Situation Room. Lieutenant Hobbes, Lieutenant Ntannu, Assistant Chief Engineer Zehna, and Commander zh’Tali were already seated around the conference table. Captain Pozach was standing behind her chair and she beckoned them to their seats, impatiently.
“How long until we intercept the freighter?,” Pasko asked her.
“We’ve received new orders from Admiral sh’Diaar,” was the Captain’s answer. “A distress signal has been received from Iannar III. They’re reporting that they’ve been invaded by unknown forces. The USS Patsayev is on-scene and we’ve been tapped to assist them.” She turned her chair around and sat down. “Mister Hobbes has the details.”
Brandon Hobbes stood up, with uncertainty from his chair and activated the wall monitor panel. A planetary globe appeared and it was covered in small red circles that were largely concentrated in the southernmost continent. “This is Iannar III as it was illustrated by the Patsayev’s sensor scans. As of fifty minutes ago, there were over two hundred and thirty… portals for the lack of a better word.”
“How do they work?,” asked Zehna Nako, Lieutenant Maguire’s assistant chief engineer.
Hobbes’ mouth opened and he shrugged at the question. “Unknown,” he said. “They’re almost like … puckers in the fabric of reality.”
“Like wormholes?,” zh’Tali asked him.
“No,” the science officer said, shaking his head. “The scan returns are nothing like those from the Bajoran or Barzan wormholes. Or even what we know about the Iconian gateways for that matter.”
He pressed an indicator on the side of the screen and the globe was replaced by a Cardassian video feed.
“The portals are short in duration, just for a few seconds and they usually deposit one or two lifeforms.” The feed showed a wide grassy plain. There was a burst of light and a massive beast appeared. It had legs as thick as tree stumps. “The portals have deposited a variety of flora as well as some of these plants emitted toxic fumes.” He glanced down at the PADD in his hand. “With the alien fauna killing off the native fauna and the gases polluting the atmosphere, Iannar III will soon be rendered inhospitable. It will be the end of the world as they know it.”
“That’s great,” Pasko snapped,” and I feel for these folk, I really do, but what about Aimee?”
zh’Tali glanced at him from across the table. “Lieutenant Maguire has chosen her own course of action, Mister Pasko. We have a mission and we cannot divert from it for the sake of one wayward woman..”
With his face turning red, Pasko began to rise up from his seat. “You unfeeling -- “
“Sean, sit down,” Pozach said icily and she silenced zh’Tali with a glare. “She’s right, Sean. The invasion of Iannar take priority.” She typed a command into the command panel on the table and the screen turned into a map of Cardassian space with the Federation to the right of it. The Cayuga’s position was indicated by a Starfleet delta symbol just over the border. The solar system Iannar appeared to be near it.
“Sean, how long will it take for us to get to Iannar at maximum warp?”
Pasko stared at the screen and he spoke softly. “We can maintain Warp Nine-point-Three for the next twelve hours. After that, we’ll have to cruise at Warp Eight.” He shot a look at the temporary chief engineer. “Assuming that Zehna can keep the engines together, we should be there in about fifty-four hours.”
“Good,” the Captain said, ignoring the venom in the helmsman’s voice. “When we get there, our orders are to evacuate all of the civilians from the affected areas. After that, we need to put an end to this invasion by shutting down the portals.”
“Evacuation will be difficult with the proximity of the larger cluster of portals, Captain. Their reality-warping effect makes using the transporter impossible,” Hobbes explained to her,” but the Patseyev reports that they’re already in the process of completing the most critical of the evacuations.”
Pozach nodded at all of them. “All right then, we’ve all got our jobs. Let’s go do them.”
All of the senior officers but Hobbes and Riker filed out of the room. They stared at each other and once the doors swooshed shut again, Riker spoke.
“Hello, Brandon.”
“Hello, Thomas.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Sickbay was empty and Zimthar Moru liked it that way. A full sickbay meant sick people but an empty one meant that he could sit back in his office, relax with his feet propped up on the edge of his desk, and read a paper on the evolutionary consistency among non-dual gendered species like the Andorians, the J’Naii, the Hermats, and the Jarada. He had just gotten to the chapter on gendered social interactions when Captain Pozach walked through the door.
She didn’t look good at all. Despite the late hour, she was still wearing her duty uniform, although the jacket was hanging open. She crossed the tiled floor to sit down heavily on a biobed. “I can’t sleep, Doc,” she moaned.
Moru walked from his office and glanced at the readouts on the display over the bed “How long has this been going on?,” the Bolian physician asked her.
“About a day.”
“Since we got our orders,” he said, sitting on the edge of the biobed beside her.
“And we had to abandon Aimee,” Pozach finished, grimacing. “I’m worried about her.”
Moru thought for a moment. “It occurs to me, Captain, that I haven’t taken any leave since before the Dominion War.”
“That’s wonderful for you, Doc,” she said with a tone of defeat creeping into her voice. “Wait a minute, didn’t you just have leave on Earth?”
The Bolian shrugged at her question and he raised his voice a little to better illustrate his point. “Were I to take leave, I was thinking that I might want to spend it on Cardassia Prime. See the sights of something. There might even be a friend that I might want to look up.”
The captain looked back at him. “You’d better take the Garibaldi. Talk to Mister Pasko about when you can launch.”
“Certainly,” he said, helping her to her feet. “I’d best go get ready.”
Jeanne placed her hand on his shoulder, making him pause. “Thank you.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
09 - ‘Four People from Khymer’
By Jack Elmlinger
It was too early in the morning.
Naala pulled at the sheets of her parents’ bed again. Her father groaned with fatigue and reached down to pick her up. “Daddy,” she said with the seriousness of a three-year old.
Her father rubbed the ridges around his eyes. “Yes, Naala?”
“There’s a monster in the backyard.”
“There’s no such thing as monsters,” her father told her. Her gaze didn’t waver and he sighed. “Come on and show me. Don’t wake up your mother.”
Naala led him into the kitchen and pointed out the window. “There.”
Wiping the sleep from his eyes, her father leaned on the windowsill and gazed outward. Then he slowly stepped back. The creature was as tall as a Cardassian. Hard plates were embedded into its brown-and-green skin. Each of its fingers were easily as long as a humanoid forearm. None of this was as disturbing as the six blood-red eyes staring out from its face.
“Is it a Gem’adar?,” Naala asked him.
“Never say that name,” her father snapped at her before he shook his head. “No, it’s not a Jem’hadar.”
His daughter frowned at him. “What is it, then?”
“I don’t know.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
“‘Cause I’m as free as a bird -- oh, damn it.”
Jeanne Pozach resettled the guitar on her hip and strummed through the riff again. Still not satisfied with the sound, she tightened the strings. The door suddenly chimed and she glanced up from her music.
“Enter,” she said.
The door slid open and Commander zh’Tali strode in and came to attention before her.
“Captain, I apologize for interrupting you during your off-duty hours.”
“At ease, Commander. What brings you here?”
“Lieutenant Maguire is missing.”
Pozach placed the guitar across her lap. “What?”
“During the twelve hundred rounds of Starbase Three-Five-Nine’s hospital, it was discovered that her bed was unoccupied. Station security ran a sweep and they were unable to locate her. I was informed myself, twenty minutes ago.”
Pozach stood up, laying her guitar down on her couch. “Did she come here?”
“No. her codes weren’t used to access the ship.” zh’Tali held out a PADD towards her. “Upon further investigation, I found out that she had booked passage on a Rigelian relief freighter bound for Cardassia Prime. They launched from the starbase, an hour ago.”
“Have we received any orders yet to resume our cargo runs?”
zh’Tali shrugged at her question. “No. A number of ships from the Seventh Fleet have been reassigned to deliver relief aid to the Cardassians. Our return to duty has been delayed.”
“All right, recall all of our personnel from the Starbase. Have a course plotted for the freighter. Rigelian ships are fast but we’re quite a bit out from Cardassia. We should be able to intercept them.”
zh’Tali took her orders as a dismissal and departed from the Captain’s cabin. Jeanne sat back down on her couch and strummed a few cords. “Aimee,” she asked the room plaintively,” what have you done now?”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
The monster wasn’t alone.
While her father left his family to go fetch the authorities, Naala watched three more creatures appear in flashes of light. New plants also appeared out of nowhere and spread, strangling the life out of the trees. By the time that her father returned with a few members of the local militia, the air was thick and tinged with green particles. The soldiers took aim with their disruptor rifles and they gagged on the strange oxygen, falling back, overwhelmed.
Naala’s mother took her and they fled the house that afternoon. Before she left, the small Cardassian girl saw small, hopping lizards flit through the living room.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
“This is so like her!,” Sean Pasko exclaimed with disgust. “Something bad happens to her and she runs away. I know she did.”
Across the table from the pilot, Thomas Riker looked up in surprise. “I’m sorry?,” he asked him.
“It’s the same thing that she did with Captain Pozach. It’s like all she knows how to do is run.”
Riker frowned at his admission. He had only been aboard the Cayuga for little more than a day and already there was excitement. Although if half of what he heard about her was as true as what he read in the ship’s logs, then this Maguire was the type of person who enjoyed making a scene.
“Captain Pozach sent a message to a Lieutenant Dixon aboard the Gihlan,” he told Pasko. “Are he and Maguire related somehow?”
“She’s just like my sister!,” Pasko cried, obliviously. “I’m always having to chase after her.”
“All senior staff, report to the Situation.” Riker glanced up at the ceiling and he pushed himself up to his feet.
Pasko shook his head and glanced over, noticing Riker for the first time. “Do you know where the Situation Room is?,” he asked the new guy. “It would be embarrassing for our new Operations Officer to get lost. Come on.” He gathered his plates up onto a tray, adding,” I suppose we’ve caught up with that Rigelian freigher. I’m going to kill her.”
They stepped into the corridor and Riker could feel the subtle vibration of high warp through the deckplates. To Pasko, it felt like the ship was changing direction, but only slightly.
The doors to the Bridge parted open and Pasko led Riker into the Situation Room. Lieutenant Hobbes, Lieutenant Ntannu, Assistant Chief Engineer Zehna, and Commander zh’Tali were already seated around the conference table. Captain Pozach was standing behind her chair and she beckoned them to their seats, impatiently.
“How long until we intercept the freighter?,” Pasko asked her.
“We’ve received new orders from Admiral sh’Diaar,” was the Captain’s answer. “A distress signal has been received from Iannar III. They’re reporting that they’ve been invaded by unknown forces. The USS Patsayev is on-scene and we’ve been tapped to assist them.” She turned her chair around and sat down. “Mister Hobbes has the details.”
Brandon Hobbes stood up, with uncertainty from his chair and activated the wall monitor panel. A planetary globe appeared and it was covered in small red circles that were largely concentrated in the southernmost continent. “This is Iannar III as it was illustrated by the Patsayev’s sensor scans. As of fifty minutes ago, there were over two hundred and thirty… portals for the lack of a better word.”
“How do they work?,” asked Zehna Nako, Lieutenant Maguire’s assistant chief engineer.
Hobbes’ mouth opened and he shrugged at the question. “Unknown,” he said. “They’re almost like … puckers in the fabric of reality.”
“Like wormholes?,” zh’Tali asked him.
“No,” the science officer said, shaking his head. “The scan returns are nothing like those from the Bajoran or Barzan wormholes. Or even what we know about the Iconian gateways for that matter.”
He pressed an indicator on the side of the screen and the globe was replaced by a Cardassian video feed.
“The portals are short in duration, just for a few seconds and they usually deposit one or two lifeforms.” The feed showed a wide grassy plain. There was a burst of light and a massive beast appeared. It had legs as thick as tree stumps. “The portals have deposited a variety of flora as well as some of these plants emitted toxic fumes.” He glanced down at the PADD in his hand. “With the alien fauna killing off the native fauna and the gases polluting the atmosphere, Iannar III will soon be rendered inhospitable. It will be the end of the world as they know it.”
“That’s great,” Pasko snapped,” and I feel for these folk, I really do, but what about Aimee?”
zh’Tali glanced at him from across the table. “Lieutenant Maguire has chosen her own course of action, Mister Pasko. We have a mission and we cannot divert from it for the sake of one wayward woman..”
With his face turning red, Pasko began to rise up from his seat. “You unfeeling -- “
“Sean, sit down,” Pozach said icily and she silenced zh’Tali with a glare. “She’s right, Sean. The invasion of Iannar take priority.” She typed a command into the command panel on the table and the screen turned into a map of Cardassian space with the Federation to the right of it. The Cayuga’s position was indicated by a Starfleet delta symbol just over the border. The solar system Iannar appeared to be near it.
“Sean, how long will it take for us to get to Iannar at maximum warp?”
Pasko stared at the screen and he spoke softly. “We can maintain Warp Nine-point-Three for the next twelve hours. After that, we’ll have to cruise at Warp Eight.” He shot a look at the temporary chief engineer. “Assuming that Zehna can keep the engines together, we should be there in about fifty-four hours.”
“Good,” the Captain said, ignoring the venom in the helmsman’s voice. “When we get there, our orders are to evacuate all of the civilians from the affected areas. After that, we need to put an end to this invasion by shutting down the portals.”
“Evacuation will be difficult with the proximity of the larger cluster of portals, Captain. Their reality-warping effect makes using the transporter impossible,” Hobbes explained to her,” but the Patseyev reports that they’re already in the process of completing the most critical of the evacuations.”
Pozach nodded at all of them. “All right then, we’ve all got our jobs. Let’s go do them.”
All of the senior officers but Hobbes and Riker filed out of the room. They stared at each other and once the doors swooshed shut again, Riker spoke.
“Hello, Brandon.”
“Hello, Thomas.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Sickbay was empty and Zimthar Moru liked it that way. A full sickbay meant sick people but an empty one meant that he could sit back in his office, relax with his feet propped up on the edge of his desk, and read a paper on the evolutionary consistency among non-dual gendered species like the Andorians, the J’Naii, the Hermats, and the Jarada. He had just gotten to the chapter on gendered social interactions when Captain Pozach walked through the door.
She didn’t look good at all. Despite the late hour, she was still wearing her duty uniform, although the jacket was hanging open. She crossed the tiled floor to sit down heavily on a biobed. “I can’t sleep, Doc,” she moaned.
Moru walked from his office and glanced at the readouts on the display over the bed “How long has this been going on?,” the Bolian physician asked her.
“About a day.”
“Since we got our orders,” he said, sitting on the edge of the biobed beside her.
“And we had to abandon Aimee,” Pozach finished, grimacing. “I’m worried about her.”
Moru thought for a moment. “It occurs to me, Captain, that I haven’t taken any leave since before the Dominion War.”
“That’s wonderful for you, Doc,” she said with a tone of defeat creeping into her voice. “Wait a minute, didn’t you just have leave on Earth?”
The Bolian shrugged at her question and he raised his voice a little to better illustrate his point. “Were I to take leave, I was thinking that I might want to spend it on Cardassia Prime. See the sights of something. There might even be a friend that I might want to look up.”
The captain looked back at him. “You’d better take the Garibaldi. Talk to Mister Pasko about when you can launch.”
“Certainly,” he said, helping her to her feet. “I’d best go get ready.”
Jeanne placed her hand on his shoulder, making him pause. “Thank you.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
I loved the mystery of the invasion, an invasion that turned out to be a desperate evacuation. Lots of wonderful little character moments and humor sprinkled throughout. Did I miss the 'episode' where Thomas Riker came aboard, or did that happen 'off screen' in between stories?
