“I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Dr. Steinberg with a confidence the android wished he felt as well. “After all, many of our stations have gardens. Why not this one?”
Majors wiped away some of the moisture that had gathered on his faceplate and brushed it on the shoulder of his containment garb. “Glad I’m wearing a suit,” he remarked offhandedly. “You could do the backstroke in this soup.”
The android tried to picture such an activity, but he couldn’t. Apparently, Majors’s remark wasn’t meant to be taken literally.
“No sign of the occupants,” Majors went on, taking the immediate vicinity in with a glance. “But according to our instruments, they’re here somewhere.”
“What’s that?” asked Sinna. A few steps ahead of the group, she pointed to something that the rest of them couldn’t see.
Approaching his friend, Data followed her gesture to a short, squat tree with feathery, yellow filaments growing out of it and saw part of a boot sticking out from behind its trunk.
“There’s somebody down this way,” barked the Yanna for the benefit of the others. She knelt as she got closer to her objective.
The android, who was right behind her, saw that the unconscious, humanoid form was representative of a race he had never seen before—one with pale yellow skin and large oval eyes. The alien’s eyes were closed now, his face in repose.
As the rest of the team gathered around Sinna’s find, Dr. Steinberg ran her medical tricorder over him. Her brow wrinkling, she considered the results.
“Radiation fever?” suggested Majors. “Or maybe an attack by one of the lizard creatures?”
The doctor grunted. “Certainly not an attack. There are no wounds, no broken bones, not even so much as a bruise. But it’s not radiation fever, either.”
Another possibility occurred to Data. “Is it possible that this is a natural response to dangerous environmental conditions?” He blurted it out before he had a chance to think twice.
Dr. Steinberg looked up at him. For a long, uncomfortable moment, the android was certain that she would dismiss his idea as ridiculous.
“Actually,” she said, “that’s just what I was thinking. Some species withdraw into an apparently comatose state as a way of protecting themselves. I’ve got a feeling that this is one of them.”
Sinna scanned the place. “There were supposed to be others here. And if they’re all in this condition … with those lizards running loose…”
“They are fortunate they were not set upon and killed,” Data noted, completing her statement.
It was only afterward that he realized he need not have done so. Sinna’s sentence fragment was sufficient to convey her meaning.
“Fan out,” instructed the doctor. “See if you can find the rest of them.”
Even before she finished, Data was on the move. His search had only gone on for a few seconds before he spied another of the now familiar boots. It was protruding from the fringe of a spiky, orange thicket.
“Dr. Steinberg,” he said, “I have located a second alien.” He pointed as he started toward it. “Over here.”
“Make that three,” responded Petros, who was moving in a different direction entirely. “No, wait … it looks like a couple of them.”
“I’ve got one, too,” called Majors, who was pursuing still a third course.
“Bring them all over here,” the doctor told them. “It’ll be easier to take care of them if one of the lizards somehow finds his way in.”
Before long, they had collected all the aliens into a single area of the garden—the same location where they’d discovered the first one. There were five of them in all, three males and two females, each as pale and insensible as the next.
Sinna shook her head. “They must have thought this was a good place to take refuge—from the lizard creatures, I mean, not the radiation.”
But Dr. Steinberg wasn’t listening to the Yanna, it seemed to the android. She was still sitting on her haunches and running her tricorder over the aliens, apparently intrigued by something she had yet to share with them.
Finally, she leaned back and grunted. “How about that?” she said.
“What is it?” asked Majors.
“I thought I saw some similarities in the basic skeleton,” the doctor replied, “but the DNA patterns confirm it. Our friends here and the lizard beings seem to represent two branches of the same family tree.”
“You mean they’re … related?” asked Petros, unable to conceal her surprise.
Dr. Steinberg nodded. “Looks that way. Not all that closely, mind you, there could be millions of years of evolution separating them.”
“In much the same way as the Terran ape and modern homo sapiens,” Data observed.
“Yes,” the doctor agreed. “An apt analogy.” She sighed. “So what does that tell us? That both these aliens and the lizard beings came from the same planet….”
“That these people must have known what they were transporting,” concluded Petros, “but felt secure with whatever safeguards they’d built in.”
“True,” Dr. Steinberg confirmed. “And that the collision with the asteroid, not to mention the ensuing radiation, put a wrench in their plans.”
“But we still don’t know why they were carrying this kind of cargo,” Majors reminded them. His jaw muscles worked. “And we’re no closer to securing the help of the natives than we were before.”
Petros eyed the doctor. “Is there any way to revive them? Maybe just enough to get some answers?”
Steinberg shook her head. “Dangerous and inadvisable. We don’t know enough about their physiology to try and bring them out of their comas—and that won’t change until I can get them to sickbay.”
“There are quite likely others like them on the station,” Data offered tentatively. “The ones who sent the distress call, for instance. Perhaps they can supply us with the information we seek.”
“Unless,” said Petros, indicating the beings at their feet, “it was these people who sent the distress call.”
Majors nodded once in terse agreement. “And even if it wasn’t, the corridors are still full of lizards.” Again his jaw muscles fluttered. “Talk about dangerous and inadvisable. We make one wrong move and we’re history.”
The android was considering Majors’s viewpoint when something happened—something quick and violent and too powerful to resist. The next thing Data knew, he was picking himself up off the floor and watching the others do the same. The android was unharmed, but his companions were nursing bruises and even a few minor abrasions.
They had fallen victim to another quake, he observed, just as Commander Sierra had predicted they might. And this one was worse than the one they had experienced earlier.
“Figures,” moaned Petros, holding her arm and wincing in pain. “The same darn elbow.”
“Sir,” said Majors, as he helped Dr. Steinberg to her feet. “If you recall, Commander Sierra told us we were to return to the shuttlebay if the quakes got much worse or if we encountered some other danger. At this point, I’d say that both those things have happened.”
The physician nodded as she brushed herself off. “Normally, Mr. Majors, I’d agree with you—except we’ve found what we’re looking for.” It seemed to Data that there was a harder line to Steinberg’s jaw now. “And that changes everything,” she finished.
CHAPTER
6
The doctor frowned. “The way I see it, it’s up to us to save these people, now that we know where at least some of them are. There are two possible ways to do that. We can try to evacuate the station gradually, taking a chance each time that we’ll be caught and destroyed by the lizard beings. Or we can take a shot at moving the station away from the radiation source—allowing the Republic to beam off our team, Commander Sierra’s team, and—if possible—both sets of aliens.”
She licked her lips. “My preference, of course, would be the latter option. Like any Starfleet officer, I hate the idea of allowing a
ny life-form, even a hostile one, to be destroyed. Unfortunately, to save both the occupants of the station and the lizard beings, we would have to have the expertise to operate the station and some assurance that the thing is still navigable, which it may not be. A long shot, at best.”
As the android absorbed this information, he continued to examine their surroundings for some sign of additional lizard beings. After a second or two, his search took him past the collection of unconscious station occupants lying side by side on the ground.
Even a human would have been hard-pressed not to notice that something had changed among the occupants. Something rather significant, in fact. “Dr. Steinberg,” he said.
The medical officer turned to him. “Yes, Data?”
“It seems,” he reported, “one of the aliens is missing.”
Dr. Steinberg’s reaction was one of incredulity. “That’s not possible,” she responded. “We would have noticed….”
Crossing the room under the cadets’ watchful gaze, she counted the unconscious forms herself. As the android had pointed out, there were four of them, not the five that had been there only a little while ago. The medical officer looked around, no doubt wondering how they might have misplaced an entire sentient being.
“Lord,” she said finally, yielding to the evidence of her own eyes. “You’re right, Data. One of them is missing.”
Suddenly, Sinna snapped her fingers, a habit she had picked up from her human peers in her short time at the Academy. “One of the aliens vanishes…” she said, leaving the comment hanging in the air.
The android followed her gaze as it shifted meaningfully to the other side of the room … where the lizard being was still prone in a bed of purple flowers. Abruptly, Data understood.
“An alien vanishes and a lizard creature appears,” he remarked, finishing Sinna’s thought for her.
“No,” muttered Cadet Majors, as he considered the possibility and summarily rejected it. “It’s got to be a coincidence.”
However, Petros seemed not to have heard Majors. Her brow wrinkling as she peered at Data, she asked, “Are you saying…?”
The android nodded, anticipating the remainder of her question. “Indeed,” he said, “I am. As bizarre as it sounds, it may be that the lizard being who just attacked us was an unconscious alien a scant few seconds earlier.”
Dr. Steinberg grunted softly. “I’ll tell you what. That would go a long way toward explaining the presence of the lizard creatures on the station. They could all be aliens who first went comatose and then somehow regressed into primitive, savage versions of themselves.”
“But why,” asked Petros, “would they pick this particular time to undergo their metamorphosis?”
“It could be an effect of the radiation,” Data suggested.
The doctor nodded. “Maybe that blocked-up gland I found in the lizard being is supposed to control the aliens’ metabolism. When working properly, it keeps the aliens in their evolved state—and when not working normally, it allows them to devolve into beasts.”
“That could be it,” agreed Sinna. “After all, no race would venture into space if it expected to change into a pack of primitive creatures halfway through its travels.”
Steinberg turned to Petros, who had become their unofficial timekeeper. “How long have we been here?” asked the medical officer.
The cadet’s reply was quick and accurate. “Two hours and forty-seven minutes, sir. A little more than three hours until planetary ignition.”
Steinberg looked dubiously at the four remaining aliens. “Under the circumstances,” she began, “I think we can rule out the possibility of evacuating these people. Otherwise, we might find that we’re carrying unconscious aliens one minute and savage lizard creatures the next.”
“So we head for the—”
Before the cadet could complete her statement, the station lurched again. It wasn’t as bad as the second time, but it was vicious enough to cut their legs out from under them again.
As the first one up, the android offered to help Dr. Steinberg to her feet, but she waved him away. “I’m getting rather tired of this,” she announced. Brushing a stray lock of hair out of her eyes, the medical officer turned to Petros. “You were saying?”
Petros shrugged. “It looks like we’ve got no choice but to look for the operations center,” she concluded.
Sinna nodded. “It’s the only real option open to us, isn’t it?”
Cadet Majors looked at her. “I don’t think so,” he said calmly.
CHAPTER
7
As the android looked on, Cadet Majors turned to Dr. Steinberg. “Sir,” he asked, “are you absolutely certain you want to venture out there? We’ll just be casting about, trying to figure out where the operations center is. In the meantime, we’ll be fair game for every creature on the station.”
The doctor eyed Majors for a moment, no doubt considering his point of view in light of his stellar reputation at the Academy. “Believe me,” she said at last, “I’ve thought about that. But if we’re to rescue these people, we’ve got to take some chances.”
Then, without any further discussion, Steinberg headed for the door. Data saw Majors’s frown deepen before—grudgingly, it seemed—he fell into line behind the medical officer.
The android wondered if Cadet Majors might not be right. After all, he’d had more training in tactical matters. The doctor had been thrust into the role of leader, even though it was clearly not her field of expertise.
As Data weighed this possibility in his mind, he saw something out of the corner of his eye. A streak of yellow-green, darting from one clump of foliage to another.
One of the lizard-creatures, he thought. Drawing his phaser, the android waited for it to show itself again.
“Data,” said Steinberg, stopping to look at him. There was a note of alarm in her voice. “What is it? Did you see another of them?”
“Yes,” the android replied, careful not to take his eye off the spot where he believed the creature had hidden itself. “Or perhaps it is the first one we found, recovered now from Sinna’s phaser beam.”
“Leave it here,” the doctor told him. “We’re going to be gone in a minute anyway.”
“With all due respect, sir,” Sinna responded, “it could follow us out into the corridor. Better to deal with it now and not have to worry about it later.”
“Besides,” added Petros, “it could hurt the aliens.”
Another officer might have taken offense at the cadets’ audacity. However, Dr. Steinberg seemed to be the kind of person who valued the opinions of others, no matter who they were.
“All right, then,” said the medical officer. “We’ll do as Cadet Sinna advises. But once we’ve stunned it, we’re out of here.” She licked her lips, her eyes flitting from one section of the botanical garden to another. “Whatever you do, stay together. I want everybody’s back covered.” A pause. “Lead on, Data.”
The android did as he was told. Advancing between two clumps of alien flora, he looked right and then left. Still no sign of the creature, no flash of scales to give it away.
Suddenly, Majors cried out, “I’ve got it!”
At the same time, a crimson beam sliced through the air, tearing apart a spidery shrub with black leaves and yellow flowers. As the ruined leaves fluttered to the ground, the cadets all converged on the spot.
But there was no lizard being there. Everyone looked at Majors, who looked back at them with something like anger in his voice.
“I thought I had it,” he barked. His face darkened until it was the same color as his phaser beam. “I don’t understand how I could’ve—”
Data was too distracted to fully grasp what happened next. However, the result of it was painfully obvious, especially to Dr. Steinberg—who found herself grappling desperately to keep a hissing lizard creature from ripping out her throat.
Majors aimed his phaser at the lizard being—but be- fore he could fire, Petros pushed
the weapon aside. “You’ll hit the doctor!” she cried.
Noting the wisdom in Petros’s warning, the android realized that there was only one other option open to him. Once again, undaunted by the possibility of having his neural net destroyed, Data flung himself at the creature and tore it free of its hold on Dr. Steinberg.
Then, reluctant to set it loose, the android slammed the lizard being to the ground. He didn’t dare use his full strength, for fear of killing it. But the impact was sufficient to daze it for a moment.
That was all the time the other cadets needed. Two phaser beams hit the creature, one right after the other, and the lizard being went limp in Data’s grasp.
Turning his attention to Dr. Steinberg, the android saw that she had been badly hurt. Though her containment suit was uncompromised, the skin around her right temple was already purple with large, painful-looking bruises. There was a good chance she had suffered internal injuries as well.
“Data…” she groaned, through clenched teeth. “My hypospray…”
Locating the device on the outside of the doctor’s suit, the android detached it and handed it to her. With trembling fingers, Steinberg input the necessary information and pressed the spray against her upper arm, where it injected her right through the fabric of the containment suit with the compound she had prescribed.
A second later, Data saw the medical officer relax. The muscles in her face seemed to lose their tension as well.
“A painkiller,” Steinberg breathed, providing an explanation. “Making me groggy … so groggy … but necessary.” Raising her hand, she gestured for the android to lower his face closer to hers. “Can’t see well,” she told him. “Or think well. But…” Her nostrils flared with the effort to stay focused. “I’ll need medical help soon … if I’m to survive.”
By then, the other cadets had clustered around them. Sinna and Petros winced at the sight of their fallen leader. Only Cadet Majors kept watch over the garden, so none of the other creatures could take them by surprise.
Star Trek: The Next Generation: Starfleet Academy #7: Secret of the Lizard People Page 5
