by Cory Rushton
Regardless, the tricorder’s problems were the main reason why the discovery of Lauoc’s prone body was such a surprise. Corsi didn’t need her faulty equipment to tell her that the Bajoran wasn’t moving, and with her allergic reactions still suppressed by Carol’s last cocktail, her nose was enough to inform her that the area was covered in blood.
She knelt and quickly took Lauoc’s pulse. It was faint, but steady. She rapidly took stock of his injuries: lacerations on the face and chest, a broken right leg where he’d fallen, and a bite mark on his arm. She frowned and shone a light on the last injury. Tooth marks, humanoid tooth marks, and it wasn’t a simple bite taken in the heat of battle.
Someone had eaten a chunk of Lauoc’s arm.
“That’s disgusting,” she muttered, even as she realized her quarry might still be close.
She pulled an emergency hypospray. “Sorry, Lauoc, this is going to sting.” She pressed the device against his neck, and a groan informed her that Lauoc was waking up. A second groan told her he was feeling the bloody wound on his arm.
Corsi touched her combadge, cursing the little bleep that accompanied its activation. “Vinx, I’m heading back with Lauoc. He’s injured. Whatever this thing is, it’s not averse to eating us.”
“We’re almost at the base, Commander. ”
Corsi cut the contact without another word; as much silence as possible was best under the circumstances. “Let’s get you up and back to the others.” Letting the creature that did this go, even for the moment, gnawed at Corsi’s conscience. But there was no alternative, not if it meant letting Lauoc fend for himself with his injuries. She draped his right arm around her shoulders and forced them both to their feet, and began moving back the way she came.
The small group was silent, each nursing their own thoughts. The news of Lauoc’s injury confirmed their worst fears: There was something sentient out there, attacking both natives and Starfleet indiscriminately. Madness is disturbing in every culture, thought Carol.
“What if it’s one of us?” asked Vinx quietly, Jarolleka well behind them. “What’s if it’s that Starfleeter who was left behind?”
Carol shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. Whoever it is, they’re not well, and we have to help them.”
Vinx shuddered. “But…cannibalism, doll? Even Iotia at its worst, we never ate nobody.” His gangland accent was as thick as Carol had ever heard it, the stress of the moment causing him to revert to his most basic speech patterns.
Carol placed a hand on his shoulder. “It’s the madness, not the person. We’ll do what we can to stop it, and then we’ll do what we can to make certain it doesn’t happen again.”
The Iotian shook his head in horror. Carol was reminded, as she had been again and again in this mission, that Sigma Iotia had only been a member of the Federation for a decade, and had only known about the Federation for a century or so. They hadn’t had the benefits of living with modern psychological practice. Madness was madness to them, a thing to be avoided, to be feared. Just as any kind of illness was a frightening mystery to the native Coroticans. The idea that this savage wandering the woods might be a representative of the Federation, possibly even a human, was bound to disturb a man from a society heavily influenced by old Earth.
Vinx was saved from having to respond to Carol’s assurances by a sudden glimpse of a clearing through the trees. “That’s the base ahead,” he said, his voice rough. “I’ll go down first, make sure the coast is clear.” He moved silently into the brush, his Starfleet training taking over.
“Where’s Iotia?” asked Jarolleka quietly, standing in the shadows behind Carol.
Corsi was barely making any progress at all, and with the team obeying an unspoken command to radio silence except in dire circumstances, she couldn’t be certain Vinx had managed to get the team safely to the Jem’Hadar base. Worse, she wasn’t certain what they’d find there if they had arrived safely.
“Looked…abandoned,” spat Lauoc through gritted teeth. Had they served together long enough for him to anticipate her thoughts that way, or was he just a damn fine soldier?
“I’m sure it was,” she replied. “No Jem’Hadar could live without the white for this long.”
Lauoc chuckled, a grim sound more pained than amused. “We both know that’s not necessarily true.”
One step after another, she thought. Aloud, she asked if he knew what had hit him.
“Tricorder said it was human, possibly an Alpha Centaurian.”
“You didn’t see it?”
“Just a shape lurching up from the ground in front of me. The thing’s fast. Taking us down earlier wasn’t a fluke.” He paused, drew in a shuddering breath. “There was an odor, but I couldn’t place it.”
Corsi nodded, aware that Lauoc wouldn’t see it in the dark. “Would you recognize it if you smelled it again?”
He sucked in his breath as Corsi stumbled slightly over a root in the dark. “Not…sure. It was like…” His voice trailed off.
Corsi stopped and took him by the shoulders. His eyes were closed. “Stay with me, Lauoc.”
The Bajoran’s eyes fluttered open. “I am with you. And so is it. I’m smelling it again.”
She let him drop, knowing the fall would do less damage than an unprotected assault from the creature. She aimed her phaser steadily and rhythmically, first behind her and then to the left, and then forward.
Something shifted in the trees above her and she glanced up, the phaser following her line of sight perfectly. She could see nothing but darkness until something shone briefly.
Eyes. Bright blue eyes, blinking.
She fired into the branches, and something black against black moved quickly away. She knew instantly that she hadn’t hit it, and that it had moved in exactly the direction it had wanted to move, toward the Jem’Hadar base and her team.
Chapter
9
“Iotia?” Carol wracked her brain, trying to summon a visual image of the Corotican continent. “It’s on the eastern coast. It’s very small. Lady Domenica’s family is from Iotia.”
Jarolleka stared at her for a moment, calmly. “That might be so.”
Carol glanced toward the Jem’Hadar base, willing Vinx to summon them down. Reluctantly she turned back to the Corotican. “You sound like you’re not very sure about that.”
The man shrugged with a sigh, glancing up at the stars. “My whole life,” he said, not looking at her, “I believed that the gods didn’t care. They weren’t evil. They just weren’t concerned with us. They weren’t our creators, weren’t our masters. They were simply another order of beings, living their lives as we lived ours.”
Carol felt a wave of sadness. “And then one of them showed up.”
Jarolleka nodded, eyes shining with unshed tears. “And then one of them showed up. The One who Blesses and Condemns.”
Carol moved closer to him, debating whether to touch his shoulder sympathetically or not. “And he condemned Ajjem-kuyr.”
“The Academy had survived zealots before. The city hadn’t always appreciated our efforts. We’d been accused of corrupting the youth, or angering the gods, or whatever. In the old days, any famine or storm could be an excuse to torch the library and kill the scholars. But gradually, over time, they learned to accept us. Ajjem-kuyr became a city of enlightenment. We kept our temples and ceremonies, but we did it for ourselves, because of who we were.”
He laughed bitterly. “And then it turned out the zealots were right. We had angered the gods, and they did care. They cared very much. So much death because of our arrogance.”
Carol fought back the lump in her throat. Her own society prized knowledge and valued human achievement beyond all else. Humans respected the beliefs of their allies, the Klingons and Bajorans who still held fast to religious belief; some humans, even her own commanding officer, participated in traditional Terran spirituality. Her ship was named after a man who had achieved excellence in almost every field of endeavor available to him.
But above all else, Federation life was a journey of discovery and tolerance and liberty. Before her very eyes, this world’s own Leonardo da Vinci seemed to be withdrawing into a shell of ignorance and fear. If she let him, the Federation’s problem would be solved: This world’s traditions would be preserved, but at the expense of its diversity.
A Nikolai Rozhenko would be thrilled; another primitive culture saved so that the Federation could babysit it, learn from it, admire its own past made visible in the present.
She still hadn’t decided what to say when Vinx called from the base, his voice strained as he ordered them to hurry down.
Vinx walked to the messed-up building slow-like, an itchy trigger finger on his heater. The building wasn’t nothing to write home about, maybe thirty feet tall, no windows, and a big pair of double doors with what looked like a steel strip across the middle.
People told tales back home, from back before the Book, about people that ate other people. Moms and Dads told their kids about cannibals to make them sit down and shut up, but the stories hit real close to home with every Iotian. Rat-a-tat-tat, and things that went bump after the music stopped and streetlights went off. Maybe it was the same for everybody in this crazy galaxy, but it also meant that Makk Vinx was as jittery as a stool pigeon at a family reunion.
He sprinted as quiet as he could to the wall of the plastisteel structure, which looked as out of place in the forest clearing as a Vulcan lyre in a jazz band. There were empty wooden poles around the perimeter, which Vinx couldn’t make heads or tails out of. He knew that some folks back home, people who hadn’t been touched by the Book, made wooden idols like this—least until the Feds came and brought the whole damn planet together. It wasn’t like those Dominion mokes to build in wood, or to use nothing but metal and force fields for their protection. Nah, the Dominion were hard as rocks, and wanted everyone on their block to know it.
He paused and waited for something, anything, to make a peep. After a few seconds, he breathed again and started sneaking along the wall to the big doors.
The doors definitely weren’t Fed gadgets—or Dominion ones, neither—since they didn’t open up automatically. His heater in his left hand, Vinx reached out to the big bar in the middle of the door. As he ran his fingers across it, he realized it was welded to the doors. It was a bar to make it so that everything inside the building stayed inside the building.
Vinx swallowed hard, but he knew he didn’t have no choice. He had to know what was what inside this dump before he called down Doc Abramowitz and the local mug. He leveled his heater and fired along the soldering point, watching as the metal turned all red and bubbly. The job had been done in a hurry, and not by professionals like the guys and gals on the da Vinci would do.
Another moment, and the left door was mostly unlocked. The bar’s bottom was still welded on, though. Vinx didn’t want it dropping to the ground in case anyone inside could hear it go clang, and he sure as shooting wasn’t catching the scalding-hot metal. Nah, their first warning would be when he kicked the door in like Kall Porakan bursting in on the Yakkle Gang.
He switched on his wrist light and breathed in deeply. Using a move he learned in his Starfleet security training, he spun himself around and kicked out at the door. Lot more sophisticated than the coppers back on Iotia, I’ll tell you that.
The door went flying open, making a big racket, and the bar hit the dirt with a sizzle. Flames burst out as it hit the dry grass, which suited Vinx fine—it’d give him cover.
Without hesitating, Vinx went in.
Stevens rubbed the back of his neck, trying to ease out the kinks that had built up over the week. Part of his aches and pains was the work itself, all the intricate wires and sensitive equipment necessary to a proper observation post, which all seemed to require awkward positioning. Fabian would’ve thought that spending hours under a low console would be second nature to him by now, but the treetop location of the duck blind meant that much of the work had to be done while suspended from various branches and trestles.
But Fabian was bothered by more than the work. Corsi and her team had barely been in contact since they’d decided to pursue the creature killing the locals. He knew that minimal contact was necessary, not only because of the danger but because they were accompanied by a Corotican native. Not knowing how Corsi was doing still bothered him, even though he knew she was more than capable of taking care of herself.
He’d known plenty of people who’d been capable of taking care of themselves. Past tense intended.
Stevens glanced toward Ensign Hj’olla. The Tiburonian was installing a perimeter sensor into one of the native jopka trees, facing toward Baldakor. The engineer had to admit that the woman had a knack for the camouflage, and she’d managed to fool him once or twice when he’d tried to tell the real bark from the fake that covered each sensor. She barely left a hair fracture between the two.
As if she realized she was being watched, Hj’olla glanced up toward him. She smiled tentatively and waved slightly. Stevens pulled his hand away from his aching neck just long enough to wave back quickly, and she looked away.
Their friendship had started out flirtatiously, and Fabian had to admit he’d enjoyed the slightly guilty little secret. But as Corsi remained in the Corotican wilderness for day after long day, Stevens had found that flirting had come less and less easily.
He hadn’t wanted to offend or trouble the Tiburonian officer, but Fabian only had mental space for two things: his work on the duck blind, and the safe return of Domenica Corsi.
The Jem’Hadar base was darker than a tar pit, and quieter than Rosie’s Bar after closing, but even without the wrist light Vinx would’ve known that it was a space as big as a hangar. He smelled something like rotten meat, and some twisted shapes were looming in front of him. Vinx shone his light through the smoke of the grass fire at the floor in front of him, and jumped as it fell on the eyes of a Jem’Hadar, its mouth snarling.
Shouting, Vinx dropped, aimed his heater, and fired, holding the trigger until the Jem’Hadar started to smoke.
Panic settling into his bones, Vinx shined the light from left to right. Everywhere he looked, some Jem’Hadar mug stared back at him, eyes all blank. It was only when he doped out that they were piled on top of each other that Vinx was frosty enough to look away and try to find the light switch in this dump.
He found a panel, but tapping it didn’t do nothing. Vinx looked around with the wrist light until he found a Jem’Hadar hand. Bracing for the jamoke’s weight, Vinx stumbled when he yanked on the arm and realized it wasn’t attached to nothing.
Holding the severed limb, all red and crusty at the end where the shoulder shoulda been, Vinx muttered the most expressive of all Iotian curses: “Mamma mia.” He pressed the cold dead hand against the access panel.
When the lights came on, row by row to the hangar’s back wall, Vinx realized that this wasn’t no tea party. Hundreds of these Dominion mooks were all over the place, most of them in pieces. A bunch were piled in a semicircle around the doors. Vinx saw that the inside of the doors had scratch marks and burns that were probably from Dominion heaters.
The twisty stumps at the end of some Jem’Hadar hands showed Vinx how that happened.
Worse, as Vinx stepped gingerly over the mangled corpses, he saw that lots of these guys had weird scars on their arms and faces. There were green scales on the floor, like someone ripped them off, and lots of the Jem’Hadar had blood around their mouths.
But Jem’Hadar don’t eat flesh, ’cause they just like to chow down on that white stuff, thought Vinx, trying to keep from vomiting all over the bodies. Unless they ran outta white, and someone gets the bright idea of getting it straight from another mug’s veins…
Corsi’s voice on his squawk box caused Vinx to nearly drop his heater, and he truly hoped his boss lady hadn’t heard him squeaking like a little girl.
He cleared his throat. “Vinx here.”
“The creature’s nearly killed Lauoc an
d it’s heading back to base. I’m pursuing as fast as I can, but it’s likely going to be up to you.”
“Me?” stuttered Vinx. He felt queasy. It was all too much. What the hell was a dumb kid from the slums of Grak Street doing in Starfleet, anyhow? “It’s a massacre here, sir. All the Jem’Hadar, they were trapped in the building. They killed each other.” He paused again, the pieces falling into place. “I think their Vorta did it.”
There was a silent pause. “Vinx, can I depend on you?”
Vinx worked his throat, but he couldn’t make the words come.
“Vinx,” came Corsi’s voice, with more steel in it than Vinx had ever heard. “I need you to stop this jamoke, Vorta or not. Capisce ?”
The Iotian took a deep breath and tried to calm his nerves, his own dialect from an unexpected source working like a salve. “I got it, doll.” He checked his heater, and knocked up to a higher setting than stun. “I got it.”
Outside, Carol and Jarolleka skittered down the slope toward the Jem’Hadar clearing in a hail of small stones and twigs. Vinx’s warning had been perfectly clear: The creature was coming, it was likely a Vorta, and it wouldn’t hesitate to kill. Carol resisted the urge to glance over her shoulder, afraid of what she might see screaming out of the alien forest.
The doors to the base were open, and Vinx had told her that he was inside and that she be prepared for the worst. She called on the almost-forgotten sprinting she’d done at the Academy, willing her legs to move faster.
Behind her, Jarolleka fell with a startled scream.
Carol whirled, aiming her phaser, unsure of what she’d be able to do face-to-face with an insane killing machine but unwilling to leave the Corotican philosopher to his fate.
Jarolleka’s face and elbow were bleeding as he forced himself up from where he’d fallen. He kicked his right leg free from the root that had tripped him up, and Carol’s anxious glance quickly told her that no murderous creature had pushed him. “Come on,” she said, relief washing over her. “Let’s get inside!”
