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Tachyon

Breathing Life into the Nightmare

“Breathing Life into the Nightmare”

Ensign Perry White

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“Fall the hell back!” the security officer shouted. She aimed her phaser at one of the creatures and let loose at point-blank range.

 

The phaser had no effect.

 

This registered on White even as he put the officer’s advice to good use and began running, something he had a lot of experience doing thanks to serving under Commander Admiran and Captain Corizon. As he ran, he turned his head to see the two security officers continuing to fire in vain at the approaching creatures. It was no use. They were coming. They were angry.

 

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Thirty minutes ago.

 

Ensign Perry White was, for the moment, the only person aboard the Augustine. He was by no means unaware of the profound creepiness of this situation. Every small beep and chirp from a piece of equipment, every creak of his chair, was a cause for him to start and look around the bridge. He had spent nights alone in engineering before, but this was different. Then, other people were a deck—or less—distant. There was still no indication of where the entire crew of the Augustine had gone. The bridge might be deserted, but everything was in working order. The rest of the away team had returned to Excalibur to prepare for an investigation of the Dominion base on the planet below them. He had been left behind to get to the bottom of a power drain.

 

White sighed as he packed up his gear and prepared to leave for sickbay, where his scans had localized one of the power drains. He wasn’t convinced this mystery was worth solving—so the ship had a few blips in power usage. If it were up to him, he would have left with the rest of the away team and be back in engineering right now, writing a report and basking in the presence of all the other people around him. Of course, it wasn’t up to him. It was up to his department head, whose reputation among the junior officers of the Excalibur was well-deserved. Yet White had to admit that if Commander Admiran thought this power drain was relevant, it probably would be. He was a competent enough engineer and very good at working under pressure, but he wasn’t the most creative or insightful of his colleagues. White’s talent was perseverance, not perspicacity.

 

The turbolift ride to the sickbay deck was uneventful, as was the short trip to sickbay’s doors. They were unlocked. He could just walk in right now and access the EPS taps for this section. But he had been told to wait for a security and engineering team—and he had no intention of going in there alone. Giving the doors a wide berth, White settled himself down against the opposite bulkhead. He waited.

 

A few minutes went by before the telltale static charge of an annular confinement beam caused the hair to rise on the back of his neck. With a soft hum that slowly ramped up into a whine, four people materialized to his right: two security officers and two engineers. White suppressed a groan when he saw who was leading the security detail.

 

Ensign Mahdiya Khatib quickly took in her new surroundings, a hand on the phaser at her hip, ready to react at a moment’s notice. White and Khatib had gone through the Academy together and been posted to Excalibur as their first ship. It said something about them that hey had stayed—in White’s case, he genuinely enjoyed his department and his superior, even if it meant a little more mortal peril than was good for him; for Khatib, Excalibur was probably the only ship remote enough to satisfy her sense of adventure. She was a better security officer than White was an engineer, and she should have been a senior lieutenant somewhere else by now. But Khatib had an impulsive streak in her that made some Klingons look calm, and White was always nervous when on away missions with her.

 

“This the place?” Khatib asked, gesturing at the sickbay doors. When White nodded, she said, “Right. We’ll enter first, make sure it’s secure. Follow only on our signal. Ready?” She looked to the entire group..

 

White and the others gave a general assent. The security officers went to work. Khatib’s partner went to one side of the door, phaser drawn. Khatib took the other, waited a few seconds, then nodded at her partner. She pivoted. The door opened, and Khatib entered, her phaser ready. Her partner followed on her heels, and they spread out into sickbay. After a moment, Khatib called back into the corridor, “It’s clear!”

 

“The EPS tap is just behind that bulkhead,” said White, pointing at a wall between the main biobed alcove and several secondary beds. “Luthor, you and Kent go ahead and open up the access panel. I’ll run a power diagnostic on sickbay systems here.”

 

As his fellow engineers went to work, White moved to the main sickbay console and pulled up the diagnostic suite. He ran a check on the log integrity—nominal, unlike the main computer logs or sensor logs—and then checked the power usage data for the sickbay systems. “Hmm. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

 

“That bad?” Khatib asked.

 

“Not good, for us. It means this anomaly really is an anomaly.”

 

Khatib gave him a dangerous grin, the type she reserved for situations where the universe was delivering her some long-awaited action.

 

Meanwhile, Luthor and Kent had accessed the EPS tap. As Kent set the panel to one side, Luthor crouched and peered into the crawlspace. With an abrupt exclamation, he backpedalled until he hit a biobed, at which point he lost his footing. Kent glared at Luthor, then looked toward the crawlspace. His glare dissolved into confusion and apprehension before finally settling on terror.

 

“What is it?” White approached the others, the security people following.

 

Inside the crawlspace, two of the exoskeleton-like artifacts were nestled up against the EPS tap. They were moving ever so slightly.

 

“What are those?”

 

“We don’t know. The ones we’ve found so far have all been dead.”

 

“Those don’t look dead to me.”

 

“No,” White agreed. “They look like they’re … feeding … directly from the EPS grid. Which is strange for a number of reasons. Direct exposure to that much plasma should incinerate them.”

 

Khatib put her arm out in front of White and raised her phaser in her other. “Shall we take care of them?”

 

“Are you crazy? Shoot a phaser at a live EPS tap? Do you want to blow us up?”

 

“Uh, sirs?” Luthor attempted to interject.

 

Khatib gave White a look that said well-I’m-just-trying-to-solve-the-problem. “What do you suggest?”

 

“We leave. We report this back to Excalibur. They tell us what to do.” White didn’t necessarily lack initiative when it came to engineering matters. But this was not a simple engineering problem any more, which made it outside his area of authority.

 

“No, really, sirs, you need to look—”

 

White and Khatib turned to Luthor, both of them in unison saying, “What?” only to see Luthor, pale and terrified, pointing back at the crawlspace.

 

The brief but heated discussion had evidently interrupted the creatures’ meal. Both had turned to face delicate yet sharp mandibles in the direction of the away team. From somewhere within their thorax came a low rumbling sound that reverberated off the walls of the crawlspace.

 

The creatures charged. The lights in sickbay flickered, dimmed, and went out.

 

This was the part where they ran. Only, as a graduate of Starfleet’s security program, Khatib used the more optimistic language of, “Fall the hell back!”

 

The engineers did not have to be told twice. They dropped their equipment. Kent, who had backed himself away a considerable amount already, was quickly out the door. Luthor vaulted over a biobed and followed. White and the security officers were the last ones left.

 

As White ran out the door, Khatib and her partner stopped and fired their phasers at the creatures. The phaser beams hit the creatures point-blank and were just absorbed into their jet black exoskeletons. All it did was make the creatures angrier. “Cease fire!” Khatib shouted.

 

She followed her own advice, but her partner only had eyes and ears for their adversaries. He continued firing his phaser wildly at the two creatures, his feet planted firmly on the ground. Khatib grabbed at his arm and tried to shake him out of this paralysis. “Natapos, we have to go!”

 

The closer of the creatures reared up on its hind legs. It seemed to swell for a moment, puffing up in a way that its exoskeleton shouldn’t have allowed. Then it belched a ball of plasma in the direction of the sickbay doors.

 

Khatib ducked and rolled out of the way, but not before a last-ditch attempt to take her partner with her. The ball caught Natapos full-on, quickly reducing him to the charred remains of a security officer. Its heat scorched Khatib’s left arm and leg, the blisters and burns causing her to scream as she pulled away, but left her otherwise intact.

 

They were out of sickbay but weren’t safe yet. The creatures were still coming. White tapped his combadge and yelled, “Excalibur! We need immediate beam out! Now!” There was no response, though, and with a sinking feeling White realized that the creature’s burst of plasma had left residual ionization in the air around them. Their combadges would be useless until the ionization decreased or they got out of this section.

 

“We need to get out of here!” he said. But Khatib was slowed down by her leg injury, and he could see from his vantage point at the intersection that she would never make to him in time. He could see the other creature rearing up and preparing to belch more plasma.

 

White bit his lip. If he didn’t do something in the next few seconds, another person was going to die. This was not his element, though. He was an engineer, a systems expert, not some kind of guerilla pest exterminator. All he knew how to do was reprogram computers and reroute EPS conduits—

 

As that last thought raced through his mind, White was already in motion, sprinting for the closest control panel. He keyed in an override sequence. The panel beeped furiously at him, because what he had just told it to do was “not recommended.” To hell with that! He tapped the override button.

 

The console emitted a brief but satisfying alarm. Then sickbay exploded.

 

Khatib was far enough away by this time that she managed to dive around the corner before the explosion consumed her. The creatures, positioned directly outside the sickbay doors, were not so lucky. They could absorb, digest, and even regurgitate electroplasma like it was a gourmet meal—but the explosion that caught them was several orders of magnitude nastier than the ball of plasma that they had generated.

 

White knew that the power drain would have caused an imbalance in the EPS tap’s flow regulator. An engineer in the right mindset—that was, an engineer completely terrified and out of his right mind—would be able to exploit that imbalance and trigger a catastrophic failure of the EPS tap, resulting in an overload and a very bad day for the Augustine’s sickbay.

 

He reached Khatib’s side and helped her to her feet. Luthor and Kent rejoined them from their refuge around the next corner. “We need to contact Excalibur,” Khatib said.

 

“Somehow I think this will get their attention,” White said.

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