A haze of a deep purple hue hung over the sky. The air was filled with a steady breeze that was deceptively gentle. However, after only about thirty seconds the members of the landing party realized that a deep, tingling chill to the bone was creeping through them.
The ground was soft, almost claylike beneath their boots. Consequently walking was something of a chore. So there they were, with the ground defying them, the wind starting to freeze up their joints, and the dark sky adding to the general air of gloom. All in all, not the sort of atmosphere that lent itself to high spirits or jaunty feelings of exploration.
Harriman himself was leading the landing party. It was a practice that had been common enough back in Kirk's time, certainly. Federation policies had begun to shift, however, when other captains followed Kirk's example. In following this practice they displayed bravery and ingenuity; what they did not display, however, was Kirk's almost supernatural luck.
This was not to say that captains were dropping like flies; far from it. There had been, however, several hideously close calls … not to mention two cases of lost limbs, and one unfortunate and wasteful demise when a captain had unknowingly trod on a small patch of land that seemed utterly routine. He had no way of knowing—indeed, probably never even had time to realize—that it was an alien equivalent of quicksand, except ten times faster and a hundred times more corrosive. There had barely been enough left of him for DNA identification.
Certainly no one would have been "happier" if it had been the second-in-command, or a security guard, or someone of lower rank who had met such a ghastly death. One life was not intrinsically worth more than another. But what it boiled down to was the cold, hard realities of space, and of training for that hostile and unforgiving environment. In that respect, captains simply had to be considered in a different class.
Plus the Daystrom Institute had produced a fascinating, if somewhat controversial, study.
Thousands of landing-party assignments had been fed into a vast database, processed through positronic circuitry as perfected in the M9 computer. The computer made its own selections, which were then turned over to a Starfleet blue ribbon panel for comparison. The panel's decision, which sent something of a chill through the Fleet, was that the computer's picks made more sense. They couldn't be swayed by cronyism or other, even subliminal, human considerations.
The most conspicuous inequity was in the selection of captains spearheading away teams. The computer dismissed the need for the ship's chief commanding officer in ninety-five percent of those cases, describing them as nonessential personnel.
Consequently there was already word of changes filtering down through Starfleet regulations. The right of a captain to lead a landing party, previously sacrosanct, was now up for discussion and review.
This was a hard pill to take for many captains. First and foremost, they were explorers. They had joined Starfleet to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and everything else described in the literature. Being stuck on the bridge while everyone subordinate to you was given the opportunity to do so firsthand seemed a less than stellar reward for years of dedicated service.
What it all boiled down to was that Harriman should have been—indeed, was—aware that his presence as leader of the landing party was questionable, particularly given the current atmosphere within Starfleet.
Harriman decided, however, that he didn't care. He was going to do what he wished to do, and if others didn't like it, then they could go to hell. He did not like the feeling of always second-guessing himself, and he was going to put a stop to it. The selection of the landing-party lineup seemed as good a time as any.
Given all that, Harriman still couldn't help but wish that he had chosen to lead a landing party into a tropical, lush paradise, instead of this relative hellhole they were staggering around in.
Well, maybe next time.
Demora Sulu huffed a bit as she made her way across the uncooperative terrain. From just behind her and to the right, Lieutenant Thompson muttered, "What were you thinking?"
"Pardon?" said Demora.
"You wanted to come along on this detail?" said Maggie as Demora slowed down, allowing her to catch up. "Good lord, why?"
"May I remind you it was your suggestion?" Demora pointed out to her. "You told me that the signal being in Chinese was an interesting coincidence. You said that I should approach the captain about it."
"Nooo, I said if you were interested, then you should. I didn't really think you'd volunteer. Good lord, Demora, of all places to want to attach memories of your first landing party, and it's this place?"
"It's exciting," said Demora with genuine enthusiasm. The ground started to incline and she braced herself as best she could before pushing herself up it. Maggie followed nimbly.
"God protect us from newbies," Maggie Thompson commented, but she couldn't quite keep the smile off her face. "I'll tell you one thing, Sulu: Your enthusiasm is easily the best thing about this pile of … whoaaa!"
The outcry came as a result of the ground going out from under Thompson's feet. Demora turned just in time to see Thompson fall to her belly and skid back down the short but steep hill. She left a deep groove behind her in the claylike surface.
"Lieutenant!" called Demora. "You okay?"
Slowly Thompson pulled herself to her feet. Her uniform was covered with the clay. It was also in her face, and she spit out a large glob of it that had gotten into her mouth during her abortive outcry.
"Oh … fine," said Thompson, making no attempt to hide her aggravation. She brushed off the filth as best she could, but her best wasn't even close to adequate. "See, Demora? If you hadn't come along, see what you'd have missed?"
Demora waited patiently as Thompson found another, slightly more hospitable way up.
From behind them, they heard Harriman's voice. "Lieutenant! How close are we to the origin of the distress call?"
Harriman, along with security officer Kris Hernandez and medtech Adrian Tobler, was bringing up the rear. He walked with easy steps, apparently not the least bit perturbed by the terrain. Both Thompson and Sulu were slightly envious. The captain was disgustingly surefooted.
"Just ahead, sir. Over that rise, as near as I can determine," she said as she checked her tricorder.
Harriman paused and regarded her. "Took a tumble, Lieutenant?"
"I'm fine, sir."
He nodded and started for the same embankment where Thompson had run into trouble. Demora started to say something in warning, but Thompson rested a restraining hand on Demora's forearm. The message was clear: Shut up.
Then Harriman suddenly seemed to pick up speed. He took several long, sweeping strides, and then vaulted up the side of the embankment as if gravity were of only passing interest to him. He landed at the top in a crouch, next to his junior officers.
"Nice bit of exercise you get around here, wouldn't you say?"
"I would indeed, sir," agreed Thompson reluctantly.
"Any signs of life-forms?"
There had been none when they'd first gotten there. But it had been difficult to be absolutely certain, because the atmosphere was heavily enough charged that it might be interfering with the ship's sensors. Now, on the ground, Thompson checked her tricorder once more. "Nothing so far, Captain. Still a remote chance, but …"
"But not likely." He nodded. "That's what I was afraid of. Still, we're obliged to check it out thoroughly. Let's go."
Demora, for her part, didn't like the smell of the place. Her enthusiasm as they made their way across the surface remained undiminished. But the air had a certain staleness to it that made her lungs burn after a time. She did the best she could with it through slow, steady, controlled breathing. But it was still something of a hardship.
And then, utterly unbidden, thoughts of her father came to her.
He had told her so many times about the occasions when he had been standing on an alien world. He had made it sound somewhat romantic, just as he seemed to take a romantic view of most aspects of life. He regaled her with incredible stories about far-off spheres. About worlds with time portals, or run by supercomputers, or populated by white rabbits and samurai (although the latter even the gullible Demora had thought sounded somewhat farfetched).
He had made the universe sound like an incredible place.
So why hadn't …?
Demora quickly shut down that avenue of thinking. There was no point to it, no way of resolving it. That way lay any number of concerns and problems that simply had no business being addressed. And she wasn't about to start now.
"Sulu!"
It was Harriman's voice, from farther up ahead than she had realized. "Taking your time, aren't you?" he called to her.
"Sorry, sir," she said, chiding herself. She had to stay focused, rather than let unresolved concerns about her father cloud her thinking. The consequences of muddied concentrating, after all, could be extremely disastrous.
She had to stay on her toes.
Then she felt something tug at her ankle. She looked down in surprise and gasped.
Her last fully aware thought was an echo of Maggie's words: See what you'd have missed?
Thompson had no idea how long the distress beacon had been there, or who had placed it.
Harriman stood several feet away as Thompson closely inspected the device. It stood approximately three feet tall, on a tripod. It looked weather-beaten and a bit corroded, but it was still resolutely sending out a signal recorded by a person or persons unknown.
"Any idea of its pedigree, Lieutenant?" asked Harriman.
Slowly she said, "Well, that's what's odd about it, Captain. It has a general look that says late twenty-second-century Earth … but there's markings on it I've never seen before." She tapped the metal exterior. "Not only that, but if you look closely, you'll see variations."
Harriman studied the markings. "You're right," he said. "Several different styles. It's as if it's printed in several different languages, suggesting some sort of … joint venture. Any of them Chinese? Sulu, is—?"
He stopped and looked around.
There was no sign of her.
"Sulu!" he called again.
Still no answer.
Hernandez and Tobler glanced about them. Lieutenant Thompson straightened up, and now she looked around as well. "Sulu!" she shouted. But the only thing that came back to her was the sound of her own voice.
She started to reach for her communicator, but Harriman had already flipped his open. "Harriman to Sulu, report." He paused a few moments and then repeated himself. There was no response from the other end.
If Harriman was concerned, he restrained it well. "Tobler … Hernandez," he said matter-of-factly, "backtrack, would you please? See if you can locate our wandering helmswoman."
"Aye, sir," they echoed each other and headed back.
"Permission to aid in the search, sir," said Thompson.
"I already have two people looking for a third, Lieutenant," Harriman said briskly. "That will be sufficient, I'm sure. Now, let's get these markings translated. They might tell us …"
Then his voice trailed off as he saw something. There had been some cloud cover, but the clouds—swept by the winds of the planet's surface—had parted to reveal a city.
Or the remains of one, in any event. High towers stretched along the horizon, but many of them were battered and broken, the jagged edges quite visible. It was impossible to tell from that distance what they were made from—stone or steel, or something else.
But even from that far away, Harriman knew that the city was dead. There were no lights burning anywhere. Death and decay, in Harriman's imaginings, were draped over it like great shrouds.
"'Behold my works, ye mighty, and despair,'" he said softly.
Thompson looked up from the distress probe with polite confusion. "Pardon, sir?"
"An old poem, Lieutenant," said Harriman, unable to tear his gaze away from the far-off ruins. "A man traveling in the desert discovers the broken remains of a statue. And there's an inscription that reads, 'I am Ozymandias, king of kings. Behold my works, ye mighty, and despair.' The point of the poem was the transitory nature of man's accomplishments. Here was this great and powerful 'king of kings,' who apparently had ruled a vast empire … and there was nothing left of him or anything that he had done except a ruined statue. The rest of it had been lost to time."
"We all get lost to time, sir," said Thompson matter-of-factly. She had flipped open her communicator. "Z'on? You got it?"
"Got it," came Z'on's voice. "Analyzing now."
Thompson turned to Harriman. "I fed the images of the markings into the tricorder, and from there up to Lieutenant Z'on."
"Good work, Lieutenant." Harriman looked in the direction that Hernandez and Tobler had gone. He frowned a moment in concern and then spoke into his communicator once more. "Harriman to Hernandez." What Harriman found a bit daunting is that he had absolutely no idea what he would do if Hernandez failed to answer. That would mean that he had more than a lost crewman on his hands; he had a genuine situation. Couldn't anything go routinely for him at any time?
Fortunately enough he was spared having to concern himself. Hernandez's voice came through immediately in that customary, laconic tone of his. "Hernandez here."
"Any sign of Ensign Sulu?"
"We found her tracks, sir. Following them now. But they seem to just go in a circle. We're trying to find another possible trail."
"Keep me apprised," said Harriman as he closed his communicator. Thompson looked away from him quickly, obviously trying to mask her own concern and maintain as much as possible her professional demeanor.
Thompson's own communicator beeped and she flipped it open. "Thompson," she said crisply.
"Got a translation for you," Z'on's voice came back with no preamble. "Two problems: It's somewhat rough, and it's somewhat useless."
"What does it say?"
"It says, 'If found, please return.'"
Thompson and Harriman exchanged looks. "That's it?" she said incredulously.
"Yes, ma'am," Z'on said. "None of the symbols were anything vaguely Terran. I managed to cross-reference it off similar, already translated symbols from digs on Minox Nine and Alpha Prime Twelve. It corresponds to the known written language of an ancient, apparently long-dead race called …"
He paused. Thompson frowned. "Called what?"
"The Blumbergs."
Harriman stepped over. "Say again?" He couldn't quite believe he'd heard it correctly.
"The Blumbergs, sir," said Z'on with an air of resignation.
"The Blumbergs?" Despite the dreary atmosphere, despite the concern over the missing Ensign Sulu, it was all Harriman could do not to laugh. "What kind of a name for an alien race is that?!"
"Apparently, sir, the kind of name given them by the man who first discovered traces of their existence and has written all the major papers and studies regarding them. That man, as one might guess, being Dr. Matthew …"
"… Blumberg," both Thompson and Harriman said in unison.
"Correct."
"All right. Thank you, Lieutenant. Thompson out." She snapped off the communicator and looked to Harriman, who shrugged expansively. "I don't know," said Thompson after due consideration. "Kind of a different name for a race, when you get down to it."
"Oh, absolutely, Lieutenant. The Klingons, the Romulans, the Blumbergs. All of them names to strike terror into the hearts of millions." He sighed, looked around once more. "This is a waste of time," he said finally. "There's no sign of habitation here, or any sign that there ever was habitation. No sign of a crashed ship, no sign of natives, no sign of anyone attending to this distress beacon. Whoever left it here is long gone. Let's find Ensign Sulu and get the hell out of h—"
There was a low growl behind them.
Harriman knew, even without turning around, that the life scans of the planet had been wrong. There was indeed some sort of indigenous life on Askalon V. And from the sound of it, it was big … it was most likely covered with very thick fur … it probably had teeth the size of steak knives … it was very hungry … and it was long past its dinnertime.
Both Thompson and Harriman, as was standard for landing parties, had their phasers strapped to their belts. The growl seemed to be coming, best guess, from about twenty feet away. For a predator about to spring, that distance was nothing at all. It could cover it in one leap, and Harriman's first inclination was to turn and shoot as quickly as possible. But if he moved fast and rushed the shot—and in so moving, spurred the creature to spring instantly—he or Thompson (or both) could be down beneath its claws before there was time for another action to be taken.
The creature growled again. By this time both Harriman and Thompson had their hands resting on their weapons. Their gazes were locked on each other and Harriman mouthed the word Slowly to Thompson. She gave a nod so slight that her head didn't even move, but the acknowledgment was there all the same.
Slowly, ever so slowly, they turned to face the creature who threatened their lives.
Their jaws dropped in mutual astonishment.
It was Demora. Not only was she barely recognizable as herself, she would barely be recognized as human.
She was crouched on a boulder overlooking them. Her uniform was gone; she was stark naked, her hair so wildly askew that her eyes were barely visible beneath it all. But when the hair did blow aside enough to reveal her eyes, there was nothing in them but a feral, animal gleam.
Her lips were drawn back and her teeth were bared. Spittle was hanging from the corners of her mouth. Her fingers were spread in a palsied, clawlike manner. Her entire body was trembling, like a barely restrained missile wanting to tear itself loose from its moorings.
They froze there for a moment, the three of them, like some bizarre tableau from an alternate universe where humans were stalked, not by animals, but by animalistic humans. The only sounds were the whistling of the wind and the distant rumbling of the seething sky.
Thompson could barely get a word out. "D … Demora?" she stammered.
The word broke the spell, and Demora leaped.
Incredibly, impossibly, as if she'd been possessed by a puma, Demora covered the entire distance in one leap. She crashed into Thompson, knocking her back, sending her head slamming into the distress beacon.
Thompson went down, the beacon crashing atop her. With the howl of a wild beast, Demora leaped upon Maggie, and at that moment she looked completely capable of ripping Thompson apart with her teeth.
Harriman brought his phaser up and fired.
The blast hit Demora squarely in the small of her back, knocking her clear of Thompson. Thompson didn't get up, and Harriman saw a trail of blood from her forehead.
He started toward Thompson, taking for granted that Demora was out cold. The first and only warning he had of his error was the full-throated roar that ripped from Demora's throat, and then Demora plowed into him, bearing him to the ground.
He couldn't believe it. From that distance, with that intensity, the phaser blast should have knocked her unconscious. The only indication that Demora seemed to register from having been shot was to go even more berserk.
Her fingernails raked across Harriman's forehead. He screamed as they drew blood, and Demora's howl of triumph was earsplitting. If he'd heard a recording of it, there was no way he would have thought any human at all could ever produce such a sound, much less an eminently civilized, charming, and witty human such as Demora Sulu.
And even as the thought flashed through his mind, even as he saw that Demora's frothing mouth was poised directly over his throat, he realized that he was still clutching his phaser in his right hand. He angled it around, jammed it directly against her bare skin, and fired.
The blast knocked her clear of him. The pressure momentarily gone, Harriman tried to get to his feet. He grunted in pain, his leg twisted back around, and then, oh God, she was getting back up. A little bit less steady, but no less angry, no less dangerous.
Blood poured into his eyes from the cuts on his forehead and he heard her roar once more, sensed rather than saw her charge. Blinded by his own blood, he desperately thumbed the power level on his phaser, jacked it up, and fired in the direction of the sound coming toward him.
The whine of the phaser combined with the shriek of its target, and Harriman couldn't see what the result was. He scrambled back across the ground, trying to put some distance, however meager, between himself and his frenzied helmswoman. He drew an arm quickly across his eyes to clear them of blood and then brought his phaser up, doublehanding the grip to keep it level.
That was when he saw Demora.
She lay on the ground, sprawled on her back. Her head lay still and lifeless, her eyes staring at nothing. Her torso was dark with burns from the close-range phaser blasts. Her legs lay twisted.
Harriman's breath was ragged in his chest. He couldn't believe it. He simply couldn't believe it. What had happened? What the hell had just happened?
He heard movement from just above the ridge, whirled with his phaser, and came within a hair of firing blindly before he realized it was Tobler and Hernandez.
They skidded to a halt, appalled at the scene before them. The captain, his face smeared with blood as if he'd been in a war. Thompson, down and unconscious. And Demora … dear God, what had happened to Demora.
Tobler's communicator was already in his hand, however. "Tobler to Enterprise! Medical emergency. Beam us all directly to sickbay!"
Harriman nodded in acknowledgment of the order, and said nothing else as they vanished from the surface of Askalon V.
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