At each corner, a wide tower, only slightly higher than the wall on either side but made of the same materials, looked out over the desolate plains. The towers were pentagonal, giving overlapping fields of view—or fields of fire, Scotty thought darkly—along the walls to either side. Simple stairs bolted together out of tubing led up the interior walls to wide platforms on the towers. The walls themselves had no walkways at the top.
A handful of buildings clustered inside the walls. They were made of the same materials as the exterior walls, with simple flat panels as roofs. A thin layer of dust was visible on each roof. Scotty picked a building at random, and opened the door. The interior was dusty and cool, but surprisingly comfortable-looking. The tables and chairs were clearly from the crew quarters of the Hera.
Another building was a dormitory, with beds from both crew quarters and sickbay. The biobeds weren’t connected to anything, and were clearly being used simply as beds. Scotty grimaced, knowing he wouldn’t be receiving any treatment here.
“Mister Scott!” Nog called out. “Look at this!”
It was a separate walled enclosure, but this one had no defensive towers, and no buildings inside.
The residents of this enclosure, however, hadn’t left. They remained, permanently, under markers fashioned from duranium plates. There were somewhere between twenty and thirty graves.
Voktra knelt to examine the names scorched into the duranium marker plates. “Serval, Ensign, a Vulcan. Baker, Michael, Lieutenant. T’Pren, Commander, another Vulcan.”
“Wait, look at this one.” Reg knelt, and brushed away the dust. The sight stirred a mixture of feelings in him. “La Forge, Silva, Captain.”
“Captain La Forge,” Nog echoed.
“Aye, lad,” Scotty said sadly, putting a hand on Nog’s shoulder.
Barclay couldn’t take his eyes off the plate. It would sadden Geordi, of course, but it would be a good thing for him to have closure on the mystery of his mother’s fate. Barclay just wished there was some way to let Geordi know what they had found, or to bring him here to pay his last respects.
When he looked up, he saw that Scotty had sat down on a stone, looking flushed. The others were more widely scattered, so Barclay took the opportunity that he’d been waiting for for a few hours now. “Scotty, can I talk to you?”
“Ye are talking to me.”
“I meant about, um, I’m not sure how to put this, but you don’t seem . . . well.”
“Ah, that.” Scotty smiled faintly.
“Aye, that. I mean, yes, that.” Barclay hesitated. “I’m no medical expert, but as a recovering hypochondriac I’ve read up on a few things over my life and . . . You look as if your heart—”
Scotty managed a wan smile. “I have neuro-electrical damage from spending ninety years in a transporter buffer, and organ damage from when the Split Infinite went nova. I’ve been on a program of treatments every forty-eight hours in sickbay, but . . .”
“With the power down . . .”
“I’ve missed a few.”
Barclay’s heart sank. “I thought as much. Is there anything we can do with the field kit from the shuttle?”
“I’ll be fine once we get back to Challenger.” Reg didn’t dare offer his opinion on how likely he thought that was.
“Sir, you really shouldn’t have come on this mission, should you?”
“No,” Scotty admitted quietly. “But if I didn’t, Geordi would have come instead, and that would be so much the worse because Challenger needs her captain if the crew are to have a chance of ever makin’ it home.”
“Don’t you think you would have given the ship—”
Scotty looked Reg in the eye and shook his head slowly. “A ship needs a captain who’s not dyin’, lad.” He waved a hand around at the duranium grave markers. “I guess all I need is here, if it comes to it, and we canna get back to the Challenger.”
Barclay shook his head, more to shake away the upset he felt than to indicate a negative. “You can’t be dying, Scotty.”
“It’s all right, Reg. I’ve had over a hundred and fifty years. I’m well up on the average.”
“But—” Barclay’s protestation was cut off by a deep rumble. “What’s that?”
Nog, Voktra, and the Romulans were running back toward them from the edge of what looked like a forest, but was actually a thick layer of moss, with furry extrusions the size of fence-posts crammed together for kilometers.
The ground was shaking, and it was hard to tell whether it was causing the low rumble, or vibrating in sympathy with the sound. “Groundquake!”
As the away team fought to stay upright, one of the graves near Nog swelled up like a blister in the earth. The thin layer of topsoil split and began to run away, disgorging a thrashing mass of wet green and brown tendrils. To Reg’s horror, the thing immediately rose upright on two legs, and turned toward him.
It was roughly humanoid in shape, and was composed mostly of slick roots and damp moss, with shining skeins of crystalline rock threaded through it. Pieces of the moss sloughed off it as it moved, revealing bone underneath.
One of the Romulans snapped into a classic shooting stance, one hand under the other, and fired his phaser at the creature. The blazing beam slashed past Barclay and seared away the moss and roots on the left side of its head. There was a—now charred—human skull underneath. A wisp of smoke from the burned moss drifted out through the exposed eye socket, and it turned from Barclay and lunged for the Romulan. He blasted it again, and this time the moss and roots that were threaded around its spine and packed into its ribs burst into flame.
With preternatural silence, apart from the crackle of the flames, it grabbed hold of the Romulan and began to try to twist his head off. He screamed as the flames dug into his uniform.
More swollen graves began to weep moss and twisting roots, and suddenly there was another creature, and another, and another. In a minute, there were a dozen of them.
Nog exchanged a glance with the other Romulan. Their eyes met, and a moment of understanding passed between them, as two warriors in the same unpleasant situation, who both have similar training about what to do.
“Fall back by twos,” Nog shouted, leveling his phaser at the approaching creatures.
“I’ll give covering fire,” the Romulan called back.
They shuffled backward, taking potshots at the moss-powered zombies. Nog had remembered from horror-themed holonovels that aiming for the head and destroying the brain was the best way to deal with a zombie, but that was fiction, not in exobiology. When the Romulan had attacked the first creature, it seemed clear that setting fire to the densest clumps of moss was the best option. Even then, it took some very long moments for the fire to burn away the roots that bound the skeletons together, and for the zombie to finally collapse into blazing wreckage.
The phaser shots flickered through the darkness, igniting the spongy green hearts and turning the oncoming figures into walking flambeaux.
“Aim for the thickest clumps of moss!”
The screech and whine of their weapons accompanied harsh burning beams slicing into the rushing creatures. Lurching bodies fell, engulfed in flames. More of the zombies kept coming, claws of bone and quartz swiping at the away team.
Nog shot a creature in the face, hoping the bones of La Forge’s mother weren’t somewhere inside, and then ignited it with a wider beam. He scuttled backward, desperate to avoid the wildly waving torches that now passed for its arms.
Voktra swung left, right, and center, firing the shortest flashes of phaser fire that she could. She had worried for a time that joining the engineering corps of the fleet would lead to her martial skills deserting her, and that she wouldn’t be able to pull her weight when lives were in the balance. She needn’t have worried. As she cut down her first moss zombie, she was still terrified, but by the third one she was relieved. She was a scientist and engineer first, and a soldier second, but at least she was still a soldier, and still a worthwhile membe
r of the Romulan military.
Blazing figures ran blindly, though it didn’t look to Scotty like they were caught in either terror or panic. They simply no longer functioned as hunters, and had only an instinct to flee their own destruction.
He saw one of them go blindly back into the press of the other zombies, igniting many of them. Others stumbled on as they were consumed in flames, until they shriveled and the bones inside cracked.
Whenever one fell, another took its place. As the away team reached the edge of the moss forest, the thick green depths of it began to writhe and try to entangle the visitors’ feet, holding them tight as the zombielike creatures closed in remorselessly.
42
Suddenly the moss-zombie creatures slowed, spinning around and waving their limbs as if they had been plunged into darkness. Nog hesitated, looking around for whatever might have affected them. Somehow, he didn’t think that being scary to these things was necessarily a sign of being benevolent to the away team.
A figure had emerged from a narrow cutting near the creatures who looked most affected. It didn’t seem to be doing anything, and its arms were hanging loosely at its sides. It seemed to be humanoid, and wore a rough, homespun robe with a cowl.
A second humanoid followed the first one out of the cutting, and the creatures grew more sluggish. One of them simply faded away into the moss forest as if it was merging with it, and another dematerialized into a cloud of specks, which in turn vanished, as completely as a hologram that had been deactivated.
Nog suddenly felt a presence at his elbow, and turned sharply, the breath catching in his throat as a stern face loomed above him. He was halfway toward raising his phaser when he realized it was a Vulcan, wearing a blue-green tunic with black shoulders.
“Do not be afraid,” the Vulcan said. “Fear only provokes further attacks.”
“They’re slowing,” Nog gasped.
“Our ability to control our emotions seems to repel them.”
“Do they feed on fear?”
“I don’t believe so, but they are able to use it to track their prey. Come with me. As long as we are with your party, we will cloak your emotions with our discipline.”
As Nog followed the Vulcan, he saw that the other figures that had emerged from the cutting in the moss forest were also all Vulcans.
The Vulcans were wearing a type of uniform that had been discontinued some years ago. It was a mostly black jumpsuit with shoulders in their department’s colors. A couple of them even wore the two-piece uniforms older than that, which had black shoulders and a torso in the department colors.
The Vulcans led the group back to the fort-like settlement. “I apologize for our absence when you arrived,” the leading Vulcan said. “We left in the belief that you were a threat to us. Clearly that is not the case.” He raised an eyebrow in that way that, Scotty sometimes thought, they must train their children to do from their first day in school. He’d never met a Vulcan who didn’t use it as their main means of nonverbal communication. “Your uniforms are unusual, and yet . . . Starfleet?”
“Aye. Yes,” Scotty hastily corrected himself. “I’m former Captain Scott, this is Lieutenant Commander Barclay. We’re from the Starship Challenger.”
“Challenger? Galaxy-class?”
“Aye. She’s not the latest model, but she’s got it where it counts. At least, she did have, before one of those leviathan ships carried us here.”
“The damage is, no doubt, considerable.”
“Considerable, but we’re getting her fixed.”
The Vulcan stood at attention. “I am Commander Savar, first officer of the Hera.”
“The same thing happened to the Hera, didn’t it?”
“Yes, Captain Scott. We were caught in what we later discovered was some form of trans-slipstream wake. We lost all power, and crashed into a gravitational anomaly—”
“A toroidal continuum fold, I think ye’ll find.”
Savar nodded an acknowledgment. “And before we could take any further evasive action, we found ourselves on this . . . quite unique planet, thirteen standard years ago.”
“It’s unique, all right,” Scotty agreed. “It’s too hot for nighttime.”
“This planet has no sun,” Savar said. “It is a rogue world.”
“Tell me, would ye know where this planet is? In our own galaxy?”
“No. The analysis we were able to make with astronomical equipment salvaged from the interior of the Hera suggests we are in the galaxy NGC 4414, approximately sixty two million light-years from our own galaxy.”
Scotty had expected this kind of news, but it was still a shock to hear it. “How many of you are there?”
“Forty-seven of us remain. Thirty-nine Vulcans, six humans, one Bolian, and one Caitian.”
“Forty-seven? Out of seven hundred and fifty?”
“Out of seven hundred and sixty-three in total, yes.”
Nog stepped forward. “How did you manage to find food out here? We’re reading life signs, but not seeing much life, apart from the moss forests. I’m not sure if those zombie things count.”
“There is limited life on the surface,” Savar said. “The atmosphere contains both water moisture and sufficient chemicals to support bacteria. There are edible mosses and so on. However, we were most fortunate that several replicators remained online and could be kept running with the surviving portable generators.”
“Handy.”
“That being the case, the microbiological life has been most useful to us as raw material for the replicators. Water has been less of a problem. It condenses readily with temperature change, as on most planets, and there are occasional rains.”
Another Vulcan brought a medical kit, and began to prepare a hypo for Scotty. “You seem affected by the atmosphere,” he said. “A tri-ox compound should be of use.”
As he applied the hypo to Scotty, the non-Vulcan survivors began to appear. Scotty thanked the Vulcan medic, and Barclay turned to Savar. “What are those things that attacked us? Some kind of zombie apocalypse?”
Savar gave him a pitying look. “They are not the undead. This planet is psycho-reactive and it responds to uncontrolled emotions by generating hostile bioforms out of locally available materials.”
“There are bones in them!” Voktra exclaimed.
“Then what are they? Animating our dead in the hope we won’t fight back against them? Or just desecrating them for fun?” Barclay asked.
“Neither,” Nog said. “I should have realized it before. It’s a good engineering idea.”
“Engineering?” Voktra echoed.
“Moss and roots, or whatever that stuff is, isn’t going to be able to run or fight. But wrap it around an articulated armature . . .”
“The skeletons?”
“A handy articulated frame,” Nog agreed, “for a puppet.”
“Controlled by that moss?” Voktra’s tone dripped with skepticism.
“I don’t know. Controlled by something. Savar, could that moss be intelligent? Or perhaps the crystalline material that was in it.”
The Vulcan seemed to consider. “The moss is high-protein and very elastic, optimized for incredibly rapid growth and contraction. Almost like muscle tissue, and that is the purpose it plays.”
Scotty thought over all that he’d been listening to as the tri-ox compound took effect, and his breathing eased. “A skeleton as an armature, moss for muscles, rock crystal for mass, and roots to hold together . . . But what’s the driving force? Where’s the intelligence?”
“And why attack us?” Barclay asked.
“Perhaps because you are new,” Savar suggested. “The attacks on our settlement have reduced over the years, as we have adjusted our minds to the situation.”
“Maybe . . . But it would surely take some kind of intelligence to generate such reactions. Processing power at least,” said Scotty.
“There is no technology here,” Savar pointed out. “No computers other than the ones we brought.
And we run them rarely.”
“After some rest, I’d like to show you something,” Scotty said, unable to keep his eyes open any longer.
“As you wish, Captain,” Savar agreed.
A few hours later, the surviving Challenger visitors, plus several Vulcans and one Caitian, had returned to the city formerly known as the Hera. Scotty led them like a tourist guide, pointing a hand around the raised plateau that surrounded the city-like interior of the Hera, pausing as his finger angled toward the various rock outcroppings that were growing up around the structural spars, and encrusted the bases of the ground-level walls.
“The interior seems to have arrived partially inside the surface.”
Savar looked where Scotty was pointing. “That is how it appears, but it was not the case when we arrived.”
“It wasn’t? But this is rock, it couldn’t have just grown in twelve years.”
“And yet it has.”
“I wonder how that happened . . .”
“Is it important?” Voktra asked. “I don’t see how it impacts on our situation, and we do have a limited time.”
Barclay took a deep breath, evidently trying to play it cool. “When you’re explorers, everything new that you find is important. And when you’re trying to survive, anything that’s out of the ordinary, or might have a tactical implication, is important.”
Voktra nodded curtly. “You are correct. I apologize.” She hesitated, then offered a slightly wavering smile. “And I have to admit, it’s curious from a structural engineering viewpoint.”
“Yes, yes it is. I knew you’d see it my way,” Barclay said.
“Your way?” Voktra asked.
Scotty took Savar to the base of the structure. “The ground itself is growing around the Hera’s structure.”
Barclay felt vindicated. “Like I said when we arrived, the geology on this planet makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. The heat without either sunlight or volcanic activity, the hill growing up around and through the Hera . . .”
Star Trek: TNG Indstinguishable From Magic Page 37
