Invasion! First Strike

by Diane Carey

  There was something beneath his feet, not carpet or deck, but a litter of crunchy and mushy matter, all different sizes, different textures, as if he were treading over a dumping ground. Fungus gave under his weight and puffballs popped as he stepped on them. Other things cracked. The air was thick and musky with smells both plant and animal.

  When he thought he couldn't stand another meter of the cloying dimness and moss that grasped at his hair and arms, Zennor led him out into a broader cavern, though still coated with growing plant life—and a sense, if not a visible presence, of other life, of eyes watching him. To all outward senses, he and Zennor were alone here.

  But Kirk had spent his life being looked at. He knew when it was happening. There were beasts in the walls.

  No, the walls didn't have eyes, but they did have punctures, dark recesses from which more of those skulls peered out, many skulls, but not humanlike skulls. There were many kinds, some belonging to creatures he hadn't seen yet but now assumed were here. Unless they were dragging along the skulls of aliens they met on their voyages, Zennor's amalgamated crew was even more amalgamated than Kirk had first guessed. These were most likely the skulls of fallen comrades.

  So they kept the skulls of some, and the "souls" of others. And who could tell what else? Foreign cultures could be very complicated.

  Suddenly he wanted the chance to get to know them better, and felt that chance slipping away as he dodged behind Zennor up their icy slope.

  He forced himself to ignore the skull niches as he hurried behind Zennor, also forcing himself not to bellow an order to move even faster.

  All at once they burst out into a blinding brightness, creased with the noise of hundreds of voices making disorganized, wild cheers and chants. Kirk shaded his eyes and paused until they adjusted, then tried to look.

  The chamber was enormous, as big as a stadium and half again taller, lit with green and yellow artificial light, and twisting with a white haze created by vents clearly spewing the stuff near the ceiling. From the configuration of the Rath, he guessed they were near the aft end. So the propulsion units weren't back here, but somehow arranged elsewhere. He'd have to remember that—

  But thoughts of hardware and strategy fled his mind as he looked up, and farther up.

  In the center of the huge foggy chamber stood—yes, stood—a giant mannequin in humanoid form, with a head, two arms, two legs, like a vast version of one of those poppets, except that this mannequin was a good six stories tall and made entirely of slats of wood and raw tree branches, and veined with braided straw or some kind of thatch. Its arms stood straight out like a rag doll's, bound at the wrists with some kind of twine; its legs ended at the ankles, with only stumps of chopped matter for hands and feet.

  Bisecting the hollow arms, legs, and torso of the wickerwork giant were narrow platforms—scarcely more than slats themselves, but enough to stand upon—and there, in the middle of the straw giant's see-through right thigh, Leonard McCoy hovered twenty-five feet above the deck.

  The doctor clung pitifully to the twisted veins of thatch, looking down upon a gaggle of cavorting beings, all types of misshapen vagabond demons, from the snake-headed beings to the horned ones to those more squidlike than anything else, and the others who looked as if they had wings.

  Evidently this was Zennor's crew, dancing around the straw legs of the monster, laying more straw and twigs in heaps around the giant's ankles, and chanting while they did this.

  The Furies. Even if it wasn't them, it described them now.

  Kirk stared, measuring the critical elements, consumed for a moment with astonishment and a bad chill. He knew a preparation for a bonfire when he saw one.

  Stepping forward from the entranceway, he felt the green-tinted light reflect off the topaz fabric of his uniform shirt and sensed how bizarre his facial features must look with that light cast from below, like something boys would see playing with flashlights in a pup tent.

  "Jim!" McCoy knelt on the slats and called down, pushing his face between the veins of thatch.

  Kirk turned to Zennor. "What is this?"

  Zennor gazed at him with ferrous eyes that held no apology. "Punishment."

  The crew of the Rath, at least the off-duty crew presumably, jumped and rushed, chanting all the way, around the giant straw mannequin in a gangly kind of organization, each going his own way at his own pace, but all going in the same direction. They deposited bundles of straw, branches, and even whole trees at the ankles of the giant. Their metal wristbands, chains, medallions, bracelets, and belts bounced and rang, creating a fiendish jangling in the huge hall. On their metal belts, many of them had those linen poppets, each in the rough image of the wearer, doing another kind of dance.

  As Zennor stood before him in his dominating and statuesque manner, Kirk was careful to stand still, not attract any more attention than necessary until he could size things up.

  A sundry train of beings broke off from the dancing circle and hurried toward him and Zennor. It took all of Kirk's inner resolve to stand still and let Zennor handle his own crew.

  The horrendous gaggle descended upon them in a rush until the last four feet, when they skidded to a stop and made Kirk glad he was still wearing his portable translator, because they were all speaking at once.

  "We're home!" a winged thing said to Zennor.

  "The Dana told us the news!" crowed an elongated creature that seemed to have no bodily mass other than bones thinly veiled with rubbery brown skin. It would've looked like a Halloween skeleton, appropriately enough, except that it had four arms.

  A tentacle-head repeated, "The Dana told us the good news!"

  "This is our place!" someone else trilled in a high voice, clearly meant to congratulate their leader.

  "The Dana had no authority, Morien," Zennor said. His voice had a tenor of bottled rage. "You should be at your posts."

  "But we have a criminal, Vergozen," the tentacled person said, and looked at Kirk. "Is this another one?"

  The "it" gestured at Kirk.

  "He is here for the final visitation," Zennor snarled, and Kirk couldn't tell whether it was sarcasm or not. Then Zennor motioned for Kirk to move past them. "Fetch me the Dana."

  Morien quickly said "Yes, Vergozen!" and skittered off into the crowd.

  Kirk took his cue and moved toward the wicker colossus. Other creatures seemed uninterested in him, though many glanced up in mild curiosity. They were involved in their work and looking forward to what they were about to do. They didn't seem to care about visitors who walked in with their captain.

  He came to the bottom of one straw leg, as big around as a warp engine, close enough to speak to McCoy in a normalish voice, without attracting attention.

  "Bones," he began tentatively, "you all right up there?"

  "So far." The doctor gripped the reedy filaments of the colossus. "Did they hurt Spock?"

  "They knocked him off his bunk. Chapel's taking care of him. I've never seen her so happy."

  "Are the Klingons here yet?"

  "Just popped onto our long-range. We were about to make a border run when you turned up missing. Now I'll settle for anything I can get away with."

  Frustrated, McCoy glanced around, then reached down with a toe and found a lower slat, and climbed down through the wooden webbing until he could stand inside the giant's right leg, just above the knee. He could only make it about another seven feet down before the straw webbing stopped him.

  "Jim … they're going to set fire to this."

  Caught with empathy, Kirk nodded and tried to be clinical. "Yes, I know. I'm working on it."

  "I broke their laws with that damn doll. You might not be able to do anything about it."

  "Don't make any bets."

  "I don't want to," the doctor said. "Jim, listen—when they put me in here, they shoved in a lot of other things. They put my medical tricorder in with me, and all this other stuff." He maneuvered with difficulty, having to stand on slats of bowing straw twisted to
provide a foothold that was obviously temporary, and scoop up bits of material from around him. "There are thigh and hand bones here … and hanks of hair, skin scrapings … and this bony plate is the back part of a cranium."

  "The place is full of skulls."

  "Yes, I know. But this skull is Andorian!"

  "That's not possible," Kirk said, but it came out with a terrible resignation that surprised even him.

  McCoy raised a long gray bone, scored with cracks. "And this thighbone … it's human. From Earth. It's a perfect DNA match." He leaned on the slat with one knee and held up his medical tricorder with his other hand.

  "Could they have acquired it here in the past twenty-four hours?"

  "They could've. Except that they'd have had to raid an archeology lab for this. It's old as a bristlecone pine!"

  "How old is that?"

  "As nearly as I can estimate, it's over four thousand years old. A human bone!"

  "Bones, are you sure about this?'

  "I've had nothing else to do in here"

  "They put those in there with you just now?"

  "Just a half hour ago. I think they're raiding their own coffers and placing things in here that look physiologically like me. At least to their minds. Some kind of symbolic connection—who knows?"

  "Can you explain the DNA link?"

  The doctor scowled. "I'm not saying that humans or Klingons went out into space and met these people, but I'm wondering if somehow these people ended up on our planets a long time ago and affected our beliefs. If a shipload of Vulcans showed up on Earth in the fourteen-hundreds, they'd sure be taken for devils."

  "And life has been around the galaxy for millions of years. Is it really any surprise if Earth, Vulcan, the Klingon homeworld, and a lot of other planets might've had visitations?"

  "Given the numbers, I'd be surprised if they hadn't." McCoy squirmed for a better grip.

  Kirk gripped the straw spokes too, as if to make a connection. "The dangerous bottom line is that it's beginning to look like this was their space."

  "Then we'd all better get used to carrying pitchforks," McCoy said, "because I think that's the conclusion." He held up the human thighbone and shook it. "Unless they killed a human in the past twelve hours and somehow made this bone appear to my readouts as if it were four to six thousand years old. I think we got that mythological stuff from our Greeks and Egyptians and druids, but I think the Greeks and Egyptians and druids got it from them."

  He swept the medical tricorder to indicate the circle of aliens, then reached out between the wood and straw and tossed the tricorder to Kirk.

  "If I don't make it, you've got to take that to Spock," he said urgently. "I don't mind being right, but this time I was even more right than I had the sense to know. It's not just a coincidence that these people look like our legends and myths of evil. They are our legends and myths of evil!"

  A sight within a sight.

  Furies and fire.

  In the center of the great hall, twisted with manufactured fog and looming nearly to the ceiling, the straw giant had no face and no hands, only the bound strands of thatch to make up the most base form of intelligent life. On the walls, carved forms of animal heads and double-headed statues flared down in carnal images of the beings dancing below.

  "Have you got your phaser with you?"

  McCoy's question was subdued.

  "Yes," Kirk said. "They didn't take it away. I don't know if that's courtesy or they're just not afraid of it. It's not because they're stupid, I'll bet."

  Around them a drumbeat began, low and not very steady, timpani made of skin stretched over some kind of iron cauldron. Horned beings like Zennor were pounding them with thighbones the same as the one McCoy had shown him.

  "Jim," the doctor began.

  Kirk turned. "What?"

  "If you can't get me out of here and they light this up," McCoy said with great struggle, "use the phaser on me."

  Anguish pushed at the backs of Kirk's eyes as he looked up and saw McCoy for the fullness of his character at that instant. McCoy hadn't asked him to open up on these creatures in order to get him out of here, to incinerate them in order to spare him incineration, never mind that a single phaser could easily do that. Hundreds could be killed in a single sweep, much more painlessly than the death they were offering the doctor now.

  McCoy didn't want that. He'd take the death, but he wanted to make sure that his life was the only sacrifice and that, if there was still a chance for peace, he should die to smooth that path of possibility.

  "Understood," Kirk accepted. Sympathy tightened his throat. "I promise."

  Each knew a heavy price was being asked here, and a terrible guilt to be risked. The space between them was a cursed thing.

  He stepped back, through the chanting circle of aliens, to where Zennor stood waiting, colossal in his own way, perhaps vile in the same way.

  "You know I won't let them do this to him," Kirk said.

  "Nor would I, were he mine," Zennor said. "There are customs."

  Abruptly petulant, Kirk squared off in front of him. "Where I come from we have laws instead of customs to rule us. We have trials before we have punishment. What about that?"

  "He mutilated Manann's soul. He admitted it. He wished to atone. This is atonement."

  "This is villainy. One crime doesn't absolve another. Are you going to stand there and let this occur?"

  Zennor did not answer. In fact, he was no longer looking at Kirk.

  "There are other crimes," Kirk pushed, not caring anymore if he was being rude. He all but shouted across the chasm of distrust that had cracked between them. "Theft, for one. Garamanus stole several computer records from my ship. That's Starfleet property. I want them back, untouched."

  "What is upon them?"

  "Give them back. Then we'll discuss it." In mortal panic of pressing the situation too far, too fast for McCoy's good, too fast to get back the records and the volatile information upon them, Kirk reined in his tone. He held out a supplicant hand. "There has to be some line of trust between us, or we have nothing and our cultures have nothing on which to build. I know you don't want that."

  The entreaty burned in his throat, for it was a lie. He knew the tangled truth and dared not tell yet. If possible, he would introduce these people to the weird truth slowly to explain it, gradually enough to make them digest the distance in time from the common element, whatever that element turned out to be, and that whatever happened five thousand years ago, there was no one here to answer for it anymore. Slowly, he hoped, enough to explain that whoever the conquerors were, they couldn't have been Terrans, Vulcans, Romulans, Orions, or even Klingons. The years just weren't right.

  That message had to be delivered with finesse, of which at the moment Kirk possessed not a drop.

  Zennor looked past him, gazing instead at a new presence moving out of the greenish haze toward them.

  Spinning quickly, out of instinct, Kirk found himself staring up at the imposing half-moon eyes of Garamanus.

  Zennor stepped out and met him. "Why have you done this?"

  "You know why," the Dana said. "This is our home space. The Danai are correct."

  The galloping crew slowed down and few by few began to stop and watch the power struggle play out. None seemed surprised, though all were tense, and Kirk drew the sensation that this was an old struggle between the quest of the Danai and the hard science of machines and pilots, a struggle thousands of years old, today coming to a head.

  "You have no proof," Zennor said when his crew dropped to a sizzling quiet and listened. He stepped closer to Garamanus. "You have told them a lie."

  The reaction of the crew was bizarre—but somehow familiar to Kirk, who had seen many kinds of humanoids and aliens and had learned to read for clues. Color changes, changes in the shapes of eyes, altered posture. He saw all those now. Had anyone ever called a Dana a liar before?

  Kirk entertained a particular shiver and kept his mouth shut.


  "I know their secrets," the Dana told him. "I have seen their memories. They are the conquerors."

  The priest indicated Kirk somehow without moving very much at all.

  Relatively clear. Somehow he had managed to read the files even with mechanics from all the way across the galaxy.

  While they were gone, power had shifted. How could they get it back?

  "We are not conquerors," Kirk said. "I refuse to concede the point. The past you're talking about is all finished and all you have left is a festered memory. I'm urging you not to act on it."

  "It is not festered," Garamanus said. "It is the Veil of Evermore and as real as you are. When we light the effigy and burn the one who cuts souls, it will be the beginning of our onslaught. We know who you are." He clasped the medallion hanging at his chest and turned it upward for the mirror side to show. Kirk saw the flickering reflection of his own face. "And we know who we are."

  "What's that supposed to mean?" Kirk demanded.

  Garamanus clasped his own medallion, but did not hold it up. "We each wear a mirror, to be sure we will never forget what the damned look like. Until now, we held them only to ourselves. But that is all changed. Now we are not the cast-out, the despised, the unclean anymore … you are."

  The Dana kept the small mirror up, and in it Kirk continued to see his own flushed face.

  He reached out and pushed the mirror down.

  "We did what you asked," he went on persistently, unable to keep the desperation out of his voice. His words sped up. "We investigated your data and it turned out to be nothing. There's no scientific proof—"

  "You have not disproven us," the Dana said.

  "But not proven either," Zennor claimed.

  In the full flower of his newly acquired mantle, Garamanus raised his opal horns. "Thousands of years ago the Danai decided you would not understand these things. There are millions of little clues."