Star Trek Hunter
Episode 14:
When Death Comes
Scene 8:
The Dead
Lt. Tauk cleared the klaxon and set the beacons to steady red with a few commands into the tactical console.
“Gaia,” said Lt. Cmdr. Kenneth Dolphin, “something has happened to Hunter. I think someone has tampered with his code. I need you to go find the problem and fix it. Bring Hunter back. We need to go to warp as soon as possible. I have deactivated all hand phasers, but the trills might have isolated theirs. You're going to have to rely on your krav maga. Drop any trill you see. Watch out for everyone else too. If anyone acts strangely or aggressively, drop them.”
“Understood, I think,” came 2nd Lt. Gaia Gamor’s voice over the comm system.
“Lock off the docking bays and deck 8 on your way down,” Dolphin ordered.
“So what do we do now?” asked Tauk.
“I’m fairly certain this is local,” Dolphin replied. “We need to go to warp, but I can’t do it from this console. We’re locked out of engineering and I can’t reconfigure the controls from here. I haven’t been able to raise Gibbon down there. Either one of the trills got to him - or whatever got to them found a way to get to him.”
“So what’s the plan?” Tauk asked.
Dolphin leaned back in the pilot’s chair, turned around to look at Tauk. “We wait.”
“You don’t seem to have been doing a lot of that…”
“At this point there’s not much else we can do,” Dolphin responded. “We need to keep both of these stations manned and the bridge locked. We need Hunter back.”
“What if Gamor can’t get him back?” asked Tauk.
“She has a Ph.D. in Astrophysics. You don’t get one of those without being able to prime a warp core. If nothing else, I will send her down to Engineering to restart the engines so we can go to warp.”
“And face the trills, by herself?” Tauk said.
“Assuming your people don’t take care of them first. I heard about Tolon’s new squad. Pretty glad we’ve got the old ones at the moment and not them,” Dolphin said.
Tauk coughed - hard - then said, “Assume my team doesn’t get the job done, you’re just going to send Gaia in there without backup?”
Dolphin grinned - grimly - “Sometimes it sucks to be number 2. But Gamor is also proficient at krav maga. She made it into the semi-finals at the academy her senior year.”
The comm system suddenly came to life, bringing the youngest engineer’s voice into the room: “Bridge, this is Kerry Gibbon in Engineering…”
“Dolphin here, go ahead Mr. Gibbon.”
“Sir, Dr. Trei was trying to initiate a recursive static warp shell.”
Dolphin shook his head, tried not to sound exasperated. “What does that mean, Engineer?”
“You know all those horrible things Dr. Carrera said would happen if we have a misbalance in the warp core while using recursive warp? Initiating a recursive static warp shell is the most surefire way of making all those horrible things happen.”
Dolphin hit the side of the pilot’s console in frustration. “Can we go to warp in standard configuration, Mr. Gibbon?”
“Give me a few minutes to clear all these commands and make sure there aren’t any other traps in the system. A lot of people have been entering weird commands into these consoles down here,” Gibbon responded.
Tauk started coughing, hard. Dolphin spun around to look, then stood up, eyes wide – all amazed – he could not believe his eyes…
Tauk was coughing his lung out, pointing, an expression of sheer terror on his face. He fell back against the wall, one hand to his chest, the other pointing. He slid down to the floor, still pointing.
Dolphin had no idea why. His mind was filled with wonder. He took a few steps toward the back of the bridge… “T’Lok???”
- * - * - * - - * - * - * -
Tactical Specialist Belo Cantys turned when she heard her name called. She couldn’t believe what she saw. She raced out of navigation/deflector control in pursuit. One lift door was closing, so she took the other. She had an instinct where to go. She took the lift to deck 4 and saw the door to the ground operations lounge closing. She raced into the lounge and into his arms.
“This is the only place we can be safe, kid,” came a familiar, gravelly voice. He lifted her easily and backed into his sleeping/escape pod. The one that had remained empty since that horrible day in orbit of Cun Ling.
“How??” she asked, only to be shushed.
Investigator Lynhart Shran whispered. “We have to be quiet or he’ll hear us… You don’t want him to find us. I can keep you safe here, but I can’t handle him if he finds us. He’s too strong…”
“Who??” asked Cantys.
“Shhhh… We have better things to do, kid… I’ve missed you…”
- * - * - * - - * - * - * -
Tactical Specialist Jarrong heard a muted, mewling whimper. She wandered off in search of it. It was coming from deck one, which consisted of a small platform with a few workstations located about the middle of the warp drive units and Dr. Carrera’s office, which was located at the back of the deck, flanked by the lifts. She made her way up the ladder near the back of the Main Engineering deck and swung onto deck one.
The pathetic, whimpering, mewling sound was coming from Dr. Carrera’s office. She entered the office, but couldn’t find where the sound was coming from. Then she remembered that Dr. Carrera used to sleep on a cot in an alcove behind his office. Jarrong found the door that led into this alcove - actually a storage area that Carrera had reconfigured so that he could take naps in it.
Jarrong started crying immediately and knelt next to the cot. It was awash with blood and entrails. Joey Chin could no longer speak. He was trying to hold his intestines inside, but there wasn’t enough structure left to his midsection and his intestines were spilling from his hands.
“Oh no, no, no, no, no, no…” Jarrong used one hand to help hold Joey’s entrails in place as gently as she could. She laced the fingers of her other hand into his unbelievably soft hair and kissed his face, rocking and crying as she held him, feeling his life slowly slipping out of their hands. “No, no, no, baby, no, no, no, no, no, no…” she repeated over and over - his blood and entrails all over her hand and her uniform as she cradled his head, alternately kissing his face and laying her cheek against him, bitter tears pouring from her eyes.
His horrible death was interminable. Every time she thought he had died, only a few moments later he would take a rasping, gurgling breath and begin crying in terror and pain again.
- * - * - * - - * - * - * -
“Jarrong?” Belo Garr looked around, wondering where his cousin was. Behind him, Flight Engineer Kerry Gibbon was working furiously to undo whatever Chrissiana Trei had done to the warp drive system. Fortunately, Chrissiana Trei was a medical doctor, not a warp field engineer.
Garr turned the other direction and suddenly found a large, ancient hand on his face. His face went pale as terror drove the blood from his skin to hide deeper in his body, his mouth partly open, lips stretched in terror as he looked into a pair of bright hypnotic blue eyes. An ancient face, horrible with the intensity of its corrupt, evil intent. Garr fought, trying to punch his way out, but his hands - his arms - his legs betrayed him - remaining still at the command of the ancient vulcan’s mind.
As commanded, Garr turned around, seized the back of Kerry Gibbon’s head in his hand and smashed the engineer’s face against the engineering console, then drove his knee into Gibbon’s ribs - hard. To Garr’s surprise, as soon as Gibbon hit the deck, the engineer’s body dematerialized in a haze of lights.
- * - * - * - - * - * - * -
Ensign Tolon Reeves ducked into one of the Jeffries Tubes on deck 4 to escape an andorian patrol. He worked his way down to deck 3 and ducked into another Jeffries Tube to find his way down to Deck 2. But a pale blue teenage andorian girl was blocking his way. She looked disturbingly familiar.
The andorian girl pointed a trembling pale blue finger at Reeves - her voice an unnatural scream with the power of a torrent of voices - high and piercing - low and thunderous:
“YOU DID THIS TO MEEEE!!!!”
Tolon tried to scramble out of the tube, crawling backward. The teenage andorian girl reached up, sized a handful of her own hair and lifted her own head off her shoulders. She threw her head at him - her decapitated corpse collapsed in the tube - her now disembodied head approaching in slow motion - there was nothing Tolon could do - there was nowhere to escape this gruesome, dripping, pale blue missile. Her bright blue eyes accusing him, burning into him - her scream of rage deafening him.
Reeves was too terrified to scream - he could barely whimper in terror and guilt…
Then her horrible face collided with his. His head slapped back against the airlock wheel on the Jeffries Tube hatch behind him, dealing him a blow of blinding pain - Reeves gradually lost consciousness with the young andorian girl’s horrible, bloody, enraged, accusing teenage face pressed to his - her blood oozing onto his uniform - her antennae slapping down onto his forehead.
- * - * - * - - * - * - * -
Tactical Specialist Belo Garr hurried up the ladder to deck 2 and barreled into the open doorway of navigation/deflector control room - only to be met with a sustained phaser blast in the chest. He managed to stand up for two seconds, then crashed, unconscious, to the deck.
2nd Lt. Gaia Gamor shoved Garr’s unconscious body out of the room, then brought her phaser up again as Garr’s half-sister, Belo Rys, came onto deck 2 from the ladder - her face also distorted with fear. Another two seconds with a solid phaser beam on heavy stun and Rys fell to the deck as well.
Gamor closed and locked the door, then changed her phaser setting and fried the door controls from the inside, effectively sealing herself inside navigation/deflector control.
“Hunter, I’m trying to bring you back. The moment I start doing anything that hampers your functioning, I want you to fill this room with anesthetize gas and keep me unconscious. That is an order, Hunter,” Gamor said, then turned her attention back to the console.
Author's Note: Ensign Tolon Reeves' encounter is a callback to Episode 12.12. During a rescue operation in the Ice Castle at Bespatel on Andoria, Ensign Tolon witnessed Shressa getting her spine severed at the neck by her younger cousin's Ushaan Tor.
