The Naked Truth
Jerry M. Wolfe
Reg Barclay stood in the corridor outside Counselor Deanna Troi’s conference room, trying to build up the nerve to signal for admittance. The thin-faced diagnostic engineer shifted the weight of his slender frame from one foot to the other and used one hand to comb back a few unruly strands of black hair. How could he tell her about the foolish dream? Lots of people dreamed about being naked in public. He’d checked in the computer, knew the statistics. She’d probably just cluck about how normal it was, and how he had nothing to worry about. But terror was terror.
Three days ago Captain Picard had picked him to lead an away team that would install a new generator core for a science station in the binary Tarvo system. His first command! A warp-drive failure on the regular supply ship and trouble with a backup generator had brought the Enterprise into the picture, but it was just a routine job.
All he had to do was take the Hawking and two crew members down to the surface, install the generator core, and return. What could be simpler? Even the heavy sunspot [97] activity had worked in his favor since there would be no transporter to contend with. Damn it, there was nothing for even a congenital worrier to fuss over.
But each night since the captain spoke to him, the identical nightmare of public nudity had tortured Barclay’s rest. In about twelve hours he would take command of the Hawking, and he was afraid to sleep. Stupid!
Reg stepped toward Deanna’s door, but quickly pulled away and pretended to examine a wall-panel diagram of the ship when two crew members passed by. God, maybe he was going insane. Maybe the shock of turning into that spider thing two months before, when the entire Enterprise crew had suddenly begun to de-evolve, had finally caught up with him. The fact that a bona fide disease now bore the family crest would give scant comfort if he went crazy in the bargain. It would be just like a Barclay to go stark raving mad on the eve of his first real command.
Reg screwed up his courage and returned to Deanna’s door, determined to speak with her. His finger had not yet touched the sense pad, however, when the door whooshed open, and she nearly bowled him over. Reg stumbled backwards, caught a heel, and fell.
“Reg, you startled me. Are you all right?”
“I-I-I’m fine,” he said, scrambling to his feet. “S-s-orry ...”
Deanna smiled and be caught a whiff of perfume, very subtle, like a flower.
“Did you want to see me?”
“Me, oh-uh no, I mean yes, well if you have the time, but I see you’re on your way out, so—”
The chirp of his combadge came to his rescue.
“Barclay here.”
[98] “Lieutenant Barclay, report to the bridge immediately. The captain wishes to speak with you.”
He’d never been so glad to hear Data’s precise tones.
“I’m on my way.”
Reg felt heat rush up his neck as he faced Deanna.
“It was nothing, really. Just a silly dream. I’ve got to go.”
Before the counselor could respond, he turned and walked away briskly, heading for the nearest turbolift. It was only when the lift was halfway to the bridge that he realized how rude he had been. Now there would be an apology to work out, another fine opportunity to make a fool of himself in front of Deanna Troi. Reg sighed. At least he realized he had been rude. Once, he would have been too wrapped up in his own embarrassment to even notice.
The bridge door opened, and he was directed to the ready room. Captain Picard, Commander Riker, and Geordi were already seated at the table. For a jolting instant, panic grabbed at Reg’s gut. The dream had been just like this at the beginning. He tugged at the edge of his uniform just to make sure he still had one.
“You asked to see me, sir?”
“Yes, sit down, Lieutenant. There has been a change of plan,” Picard said.
Reg took a chair and fought the sinking feeling that he would be removed from command. Picard got right to the point.
“We have just received a distress call from the colony on Syng H. A massive volcanic eruption has endangered the entire settlement. They have several dead and too many injuries for their medical team to handle. We will take you to a point about twelve hours from the science station by [99] shuttle. Then the away team will fly the Hawking to the planet, complete the mission, and wait for the Enterprise to return from Syng.”
Reg nodded, but he still felt unnerved by how similar this was to his dream. Same people, same room, maybe even the same situation. He remembered nothing beyond the onset of terror when he realized he was completely naked. Reg shook himself and spoke.
“How long, sir? I mean how long will we have to wait?”
Picard glanced toward Riker, who answered.
“The reports from Syng are confused, but counting trip time you should expect to wait at least seventy-two hours.”
Then Geordi added, “Supplies are being loaded into the Hawking, and it’s been prepped. I notified your team of the change. You’re ready to go.”
My team. Anticipation surged inside him, and he pushed thoughts of the dream aside. Reg stood up.
“Request permission to report to the shuttle, sir.”
“Permission granted,” Picard said. “We should arrive at the debarkation point within the hour.”
Then Geordi added, “Sunspot ionization is still disrupting communication with the science station, but you should have no problem locating their neutrino beacon.”
Ensign Ro Laren sat in her old spot on the bridge waiting for Captain Picard to emerge from his ready room. Commander Data sat on her left at the other control station, busy with a last-minute diagnostic scan of the ship’s systems. It was good to be back on the Enterprise, if only for this short break from her Starfleet training program. Riker, Worf, and the rest of the bridge crew stood ready at their [100] stations behind her. Ro stared into the viewer screen at the twin suns of the Tarvo system. Suddenly they reminded her of eyes watching the Enterprise. Watching her.
Eyes.
She had felt uneasy ever since they had arrived here at the edge of the system, but up to that very moment it had made no sense to her. Not that it made much sense now. Why should the thought of eyes have anything to do with anything? She shook her head in disgust and wondered how such corz dung had crept into her brain. Captain Picard entered the bridge, and she gladly brought her focus back to the helm controls.
“Has the shuttle left yet, Ensign?” he asked as he took his seat.
“Launch in about twenty seconds, sir,” she said.
“When they are safely away, take us out of here, Ensign. Set course for the Syng system, warp 5.”
“Aye, sir.” Ro’s hands flew over the panel in front of her with practiced efficiency.
“The shuttle is away,” Data said. Ro swung the ship around and it began to accelerate. Feeling the Enterprise move under her control sent a chill up Ro’s spine every time, a reaction she hoped she would never lose.
“Course set, sir.”
“Engage.”
The Enterprise leaped into warp, and an undeniable wave of relief washed over her as the twin stars vanished from view.
“Hold shields at one-quarter,” Reg said to Yeoman Samuel Carter, who sat in the pilot seat of the Hawking next [101] to Ensign Mara Ying from biological sciences. The planet’s surface lay some ten kilometers below, hidden by thick clouds.
“Shields steady at twenty-five percent,” Carter said.
It did feel exhilarating to be in command and on your own. Reg hadn’t stuttered in twelve hours. He watched the readouts on a side panel as the shuttlecraft shivered and bucked occasionally in the heavy clouds in spite of its stabilizers. It had taken two hours of scanning from a low-level orbit, just skimming the upper atmosphere, to locate the neutrino beacon, but now they were on their way down. Nothing but gray showed in the viewing ports, but it was still better than beaming down. While transporters no longer terrified him, he’d take the shuttle given a choice.
&nb
sp; “We’re below the ionization layer, sir,” Ensign Ying said. The tone of her voice clearly indicated that she thought it was time to lower shields.
“Hold shields for now,” he said. “We’ve got two suns to contend with. No need to take chances. Yeoman, do we still have the neutrino beacon on sensors?”
“Yes, sir. The sunspot activity is affecting sensors, but I’ve got a lock on the beacon. We should drop below the clouds any—”
A sudden burst of light cut Carter off. The shuttle lurched wildly as if swatted by a giant fist. The accompanying explosion left Reg’s ears ringing in spite of dampening by the shields.
“Shields at maximum!” Reg shouted.
But before Carter could respond, another explosion jolted the shuttle. This time a ribbon of blue energy arced across the panel in front of Carter and Ying and then plunged into [102] them. Both slumped forward in their chairs, unconscious. Smoke billowed from the control panel, and Reg coughed and held his hand over his mouth as he released his straps and came to their aid. Emergency air pumps battled the acrid smoke and ozone as he pulled the unconscious crew members away from the chairs and strapped them into the ones behind. Then he lurched into Carter’s place.
He heard the distant, muted hissing of air rushing along the shuttle’s outer skin, but it was the sudden quiet inside the Hawking that shocked Barclay and set off a twinge in his gut. It was all up to him.
Reg still saw only gray out the front window, but on the computer screen the glowing, orange representation of the Hawking descended at a steep angle, tumbling as it fell. If it weren’t for gravity control, he’d have been plastered to the wall. He fought to regain control of the plummeting craft. The fires had been extinguished, but main power was gone and the stabilizers had sustained damage. Thank luck he still had auxiliary power.
After several frantic seconds, he managed to slow their descent and stop the craft’s spinning. But they were still headed down. His heart pounded even harder in his chest as he realized they were going to crash. Desperate, he tried sub-space radio.
“Enterprise, come in. Enterprise, do you hear me?”
Nothing. They were long out of range, of course. Think, man! Then he tried to reach the science station but got only the crackle of sunspot interference. The Barclay curse had struck again. He was going to crash on his first command. The finality of that sunk in. Ying and Carter shouldn’t die like this.
[103] The instruments said the Hawking was still a kilometer up. The clouds had given way to a flat, tree-clogged landscape wreathed in wispy bands of fog. It was mostly jungle according to the reports he had read. He checked the sensors again. The neutrino beacon sat atop one of several low, bare hills about ten kilometers away. With inertial dampers below fifty percent, the best chance lay in using the hillside’s sloping edge to minimize impact. First he had to get there.
Quickly, he routed every remaining bit of power to the engines and struggled to keep their descent from turning into a free fall. He was too busy to worry, too busy to wonder what had hit them. At the last second, he used a burst of power to pull up the nose and allow the shuttlecraft to hit tail-first on the bare slope just beyond the crest of the beacon hill. He cut all power except to the vertical steering thrusters under the nose just as the shuttle made contact with the ground. Oddly, his only clear thought was that he had forgotten to apologize to Deanna.
The screeching of tortured metal and the ferocious bumping came to an end with a final jolt so strong that Reg hit the restraining straps with enough force to stun him. When he came to, he was staring through the front port at a tall boulder. A thick cushion of damp soil gouged from the hillside had actually softened the final blow. Just as miraculously, the ship had managed not to flip over.
Reg took a deep breath and checked himself. He had bruising from the straps but nothing worse. Carter and Ying both slumped in their chairs, unconscious but alive. The yeoman’s breathing had an ominous rasp to it, however. Reg unstrapped himself and retrieved a tricorder. It confirmed his fear. Carter had internal bleeding. Ying’s [104] readings looked stronger, but she showed no signs of coming to. Both had burns and nerve damage beyond Reg’s skills or equipment.
Reg gave them injections to block pain, slow down any bleeding, and keep them out of shock. That was all he could do beyond laying them upon the two couches. Then he sagged back into a chair, nauseated and trembling, a delayed reaction to the crash, he guessed. But it wouldn’t do. The shuttle’s communication system was gone, and he couldn’t wait for help to find them. The biologists at the station should have a field med-station. Reg hated to leave Carter and Ying behind, but there was no choice.
He left a message on Ying’s tricorder in case she came to while he was gone. Then he checked his phaser and tricorder before snapping a hand-light to his side. He squeezed past the cargo containers and out through the aft door which was wedged partway open.
The jungle air wrapped around him like a damp blanket, still and thick, carrying a sweet, fetid odor. An eerie quiet lay over the area. The crash must have temporarily silenced anything nearby. That had to be it, but his scalp tingled all the same. About thirty meters further down, beyond the boulder, a forest of tall trees with fernlike leaves and gnarled trunks like twisted rope encircled the hill’s base. A thick, blue-green carpet of moss, or something very like it, covered the open ground.
He surveyed the deep trough gouged out by the shuttle as it skidded down the hill face. If the boulder had been only a few meters further up, he’d just be another piece of wreckage right now. It was hard to believe how short a trip it had been from foolish elation to disaster. Then he saw the [105] blackened splotch etched on the right side of the ship’s nose. He checked the tricorder reading and went cold.
It indicated that a chemical explosive followed by a pulsed proton beam had done the damage. The Hawking had been shot down, and not by any type of weapon known to the tricorder’s memory bank. Primitive technology, perhaps, but effective. Good thing he hadn’t dropped shields. Yet, why hadn’t this unseen enemy hit them again? Good question. Maybe they had tried and missed. He might not have noticed with most of the sensors out.
Reg set the tricorder for long scan and swung it in a circle, searching for any signs of the station or its crew. He read multiple life-forms but nothing humanoid within a kilometer of the crash site. The station was supposed to be about a kilometer from the beacon on another hilltop, but he had seen no sign of it during their descent. He decided to climb to the top of the hill to get a clearer reading.
But first he slipped back inside the Hawking and rigged a force field across the aft door, one that he activated from the outside. It had just enough jolt to discourage any local denizens who might be out for a quick meal. With energy reserves so low, the field would fail in a few hours, but he planned to be back with help long before then. If there was any help to be found, that is. Whoever had shot down the shuttle could have captured the station as well.
But that didn’t change what he had to do. It just made his stomach churn that much more. Reg switched his phaser to maximum and headed up the hillside. It couldn’t have been more than two hundred meters high, but when he reached the top, he was sweating and miserable in the humidity.
Something buzzed near his face, and he automatically [106] swatted it away. The flier beat its wings and scraped its legs against his palm. Reg jerked back his hand and anxiously examined his palm. Had it stung him? He imagined some deadly venom or virus creeping into his bloodstream and finally had to scan with the tricorder.
Nothing.
With a sigh of relief, he set the tricorder on wide scan and swung it in a circle. A smear of metal was all that remained of the beacon. The shuttle must have come down nearly on top of it. He found no human lifesigns. The tricorder picked up a weak energy source on top of an adjacent bill, one whose crest lay clothed in fog. That must be the station. Holding the tricorder in one hand and his phaser in the other, Reg started down the hill.
Ro sat
bolt upright in bed, a stab of fear twisting inside. She had dreamed of the camps for the first time in nearly a year. But not about Cardassians, or beatings, or seeing her father tortured. She had dreamed of Glym, the camp spinner, and a tale she had told the children. A tale from the ancient times when the Bajorans had dominated the quadrant.
Ro had been too young to remember much of it, and until tonight had pretty much forgotten she’d ever heard it at all. But one refrain, spoken in Glym’s raspy voice, had crept into the dream.
Death hunts beneath the eyes of Dolmak.
Ro cursed softly. She now remembered being terrified for days, living in mortal fear that she might meet this Dolmak. Was that what this whole stupid thing was about? But why did a pair of suns evoke the memory while the eyes she saw every day had no effect? Maybe there was more of Glym’s [107] tale stuck in the deep recesses of her mind than she knew. More corz dung. She shook her head.
She’d soon have her hands full with hurt people and repairs. This was no time to lose sleep over nonsense from her past. She lay back down and closed her eyes, but sleep was as elusive as the remainder of Glym’s tale.
Reg stood panting from the climb up the hill and scanned the ghostly gray science station rising out of the fog. He read lifesigns, but something like insects might give off. Nothing humanoid was alive in there. Cautiously, he traversed the edge of the building, looking for the entrance. A few throaty calls penetrated through the fog coming from the nearby jungle. He pictured nice safe birds making the noise, but it could just as well be poisonous swamp slugs massing for an attack. Or even the enemy who had shot them down. For at least the fifth time he made sure his phaser was set on maximum.
The station was square, only about twenty meters on a side, so it took little time to find what had been the doorway. It was now nothing more than a black, gaping mouth ripped from the side of the structure. A few meters up the side of the station’s wall, he saw a jagged, blackened crack, the sort of thing a phaser might do if it had been fired from inside. He had a horrible feeling about what lay in there, but he had a duty to look. If only his hands would stop shaking. He took a deep breath.
STAR TREK: Strange New Worlds I Page 9
