The Lighthouse

[Atoz 77]

THE LIGHTHOUSE >>>>>

Subspace Communications Relay Station Theta 3 was located on a barren planetoid in orbit around the quite ordinary red dwarf star 41 Sagittarius. It also happened to be next to an otherwise innocuous cloud of dark matter which concealed a tiny rip in space -- which was why the station also mounted a beacon to warn ships and a science team to monitor the fissure. The original team had consisted of twenty researchers from the Terran Science Academy, bursting with hopes of new insights into the wormhole phenomenon. Now, ten years later, the rift had turned out to be the dullest thing in the universe, and most of them had gone on to more interesting projects. Only three remained, far from enthusiastic.

And now the station itself had unexpectedly gone silent.

The starship Odysseus happened to be the nearest Federation vessel. As the ship dropped out of hyperspace, the first thing that arrested Captain Atoz's attention was the dark matter nebula -- partially illuminated by the light of the red dwarf, it looked something like an ugly purple bruise, and from within its depths came intermittent flashes from the wormhole, flickering blueish-yellow like a fluorescent bulb about to fail. Or, if you had the right kind of imagination, it might remind you of a single baleful eye, twitching and winking insanely behind a dark silk funeral veil. Atoz hastily shook that thought away.

"No response to our hails, Captain," reported Ensign Penner, shaking her head in puzzlement as the ship took up orbit around the planetoid. "I'm not even getting the automatic transponder beacon."

"Their power plant is operating only at the barest minimum, Captain," said Lt. Enir Rosh at Tactical. The two shallow ridges of cartilage which ran in a V-shape from the bridge of the Eminian's nose to the top of his skull, together with his short goatee, gave him a slightly devilish appearance as he looked down into his instrument panel. "Life support appears to be confined to the lower level of the living quarters. Only one life sign is registering."

Atoz exchanged somber looks with his First Officer, Commander Fawkes. There were supposed to be three members of the science team. "What happened, Mr. Rosh? Was it struck by a meteorite?"

The Eminian shook his head. "No damage to the structure that I can see, Captain. Also no indication of radiation or chemical toxins in the internal atmosphere.."

Atoz sat back in his chair, looking pensively at the drab, crater-pocked planetoid on the viewscreen. "You'd better take a look, Mr. Fawkes. Be careful."

Fawkes dipped his head in one quick, solemn nod, then made a come with me gesture towards the Tactical station. "Mister Rosh, have Lt. Vespis and Dr. Pierce report to the Transporter Room."

***

The outpost was a squat tower, four levels high. Buried underground was a small fusion power plant. At ground level were the life support and living quarters -- the galley and six small, double-occupancy rooms. The next level contained five more cabins and a recreation area. Above that were the control room and electronics module for the subspace relay and deflector screen. Higher still was the relay antenna itself and an observation deck. There was no elevator; straight down the center of the tower ran an access shaft approximately four meters in diameter, around which wound a long spiral staircase.

Four shimmering blue streaks of light appeared in the darkness, which quickly resolved into four Starfleet officers. "Don't anybody move yet," came the calm voice of Dr. Pierce, as he opened his medical tricorder and scanned the area. "It's okay," he said after a moment. "I'm not detecting any airborne pathogens, viruses or bacteria."

The room, as far as they could see with palm-flashlights, was a mess -- chairs, articles of clothing, and overturned equipment lockers were scattered at random, lit only dimly by the emergency lamps. Ahead and behind them were broad archways, through which corridors with closed doors could be faintly seen. The spiral staircase started to their right. Above them, the open shaft stretched upwards into darkness.

Fawkes and Rosh began to pick their way across the room and almost immediately found a dead body, badly charred from a phaser blast that they judged must have been level 10 or 12. "Markway, Kurtiss," read Fawkes, checking the man's ID bracelet.

"Here, Commander," said Rosh from the archway a couple of meters in front of him. The second body was a woman, and she had apparently perished from loss of blood. She had been stabbed over twenty times.

"I'm not a doctor," said Fawkes dryly, "but I'm going to take a wild guess and say these people didn't die from an airborne pathogen or a virus."

"Obviously not," agreed Pierce.

Vespis, the blue-skinned Andorian Chief Engineer, had stepped through the archway behind them, cautiously checking the doors and finding them all not only closed but bolted and sealed, the life support on the other side turned off. It was almost as if the scientists had been trying to barricade themselves in the central common area, to prevent something getting in. She was puzzling over this when the last door she tried unexpectedly slid open, causing her to jump back, her antennae quivering in alarm.

The room was pitch dark. Vespis found that her breath was coming in deep, heavy rasps and stopped herself. But the rasping noise went on. There was something alive inside the darkened room! Steeling herself, Vespis trained her flashlight through the doorway. It was a storeroom, and there was a woman in a gray coverall slumped on the floor, propped upright against a shelf. She was staring blankly into space and clutching a bloody knife with both hands as if it were a security blanket.

As Vespis stepped carefully through the doorway, the woman didn't react at all. "It's going to be alright," Vespis said soothingly, kneeling next to the woman and gently trying to pry her fingers loose from the knife. "My name is Vho. I'm from the starship Odysseus, and everything is going to be fine." Then... "Can you tell me what happened?"

The woman's eyes stayed rigidly in place as she shook her head. Dully her lips moved and she whispered something that Vespis didn't quite catch. "Excuse me?" asked the Andorian. "Did you say...?"

"It doesn't want us here. It doesn't want us here." Suddenly she lunged upwards in a frenzy, stabbing wildly with the knife at any part of the Andorian she could reach, screaming over and over again, "It doesn't want us here! IT DOESN'T WANT US HERE!"

[Atoz 77]

Captain Atoz stood out of the way, leaning against the Sickbay bulkhead, as Dr. Pierce finished his examination of Nora Cloverfield, the sole survivor of Relay Station Theta 3. She was lying, apparently unconscious, on one of the diagnostic beds as the doctor puzzled over the panel readings. At last, Pierce strolled over to him. "After that first outburst, she lapsed into catatonia," he said. "I've never seen anything like it. Even like this, her cerebral activity is off the charts."

"She said 'IT' doesn't want us here," said Atoz. "Any idea what that means?"

"We didn't find any other life signs," said the doctor. "You've got to understand, her hyperencephalogram is diagnostic of severe mental breakdown. Paranoia, delusions, borderline schizophrenia."

"What could have brought this on?" said Atoz. "The Ranger gave them their annual physicals only three months ago. They were presumably fine then." He paused thoughtfully as it became clear that Pierce had no immediate answer. "Can you revive her?"

"Even if I could, you wouldn't get anything coherent out of her, Captain." Pierce thought for a moment, seemingly hesistating. "I suppose I could do an eidetic probe. That would in effect give us a rough playback of her short term visual memory over, oh, the last few days or so. But that's usually done with the patient's cooperation."

"Can it be done with her catatonic like this?"

"I don't know," said the doctor judiciously. "It wouldn't be easy."

"Then let's hold off until we see what the station logs tell us."

***

In the outpost control room, Vespis was working on transfering the computer logs up to the Odysseus, an operation which had entailed first hooking up a portable generator to supply power. "At least I've solved one mystery, Commander," she said irritably, pulling out yet another dead circuit. "The reason she stabbed the other woman with a knife is because she had used up her frigging phaser shooting up all the outpost's computers!"

Fawkes was not far away, similarly trying to get the comm system online. "They couldn't call for help because their subspace transmitter was the first thing to go," he sighed. "Do you think you can spare Ensign Penner to replace it?" Once the life support was running and the light panels were working again, the away team had been shocked to find the interior of the station riddled with pock marks, made by a type I phaser at high power. While most were concentrated on the electronics equipment, many seemed to be mere random shots on the bulkheads, or through the safety mesh which surrounded the central shaft to prevent accidental falls.

"I've got her working on the subspace relay, darkskin," said Vespis, speaking from waist deep in the console. "You could always make yourself useful and do it yourself." Then she slid back out so that she could look him in the face. "Oh, but silly me, you're only here to watch me in case I go wonko, aren't you?"

"Doctor's orders," said Fawkes, with a slight grin. It did seem kind of absurd, the way she put it.

The engineer held up her right arm. The torn sleeve fell back away from her forearm where Cloverfield had ripped it open with her knife, but the wound itself was healed. "It was just a scratch! Doctor Pierce fixed it up with his protoplaser."

She had a point, Fawkes thought. The doctor's tricorder had found no trace of infection, and it had been nearly two hours now. "All right, then," he said, spreading his hands in surrender. "The Captain wants a report, anyway. I'll go downstairs and see how Gorski and Jameson are coming along with the power plant." He turned to leave, but paused in the open doorway. "Remember, Penner and N'maste are right across the corridor here."

"Yes, papa." Once he was gone, leaving her alone in the control room, Vespis was a little sorry that she had been so sarcastic. "It doesn't want us here," seemed to echo in her memory as she looked around the empty room. And... what was that? For a moment, the Andorian thought she saw movement. Climbing to her feet, she made to follow Fawkes out the door, but didn't get more than two steps before she saw them -- dozens of tiny, sparkling lights, floating in the air around the doorway. At first she thought they were merely dust particles, catching the light in an odd way, but as she watched, they seemed to be swirling in a definite pattern. Vespis stood still, hardly daring to breathe as they circled her. Suddenly she recalled where she was, turned and reached for her tricorder. But when she turned back, they were gone.

She rubbed her eyes and put it down to fatigue.

***

Captain's Log, Stardate 51843.3 -- "We have been here for three hours, and according to my Chief Engineer, repairs to the subspace relay will take two days. In the meantime, the Odysseus itself is acting as a relay station for this sector. At the same time I have two dead bodies, one woman in a coma, and no satisfactory explanations."

Atoz flicked off the log recorder switch and walked over to the Sciences station. "Have you found anything? Anything at all?" he asked.

Lieutenant Commander Diane Weir turned around in her chair to face him. "The planet is Class L, geologically inactive," she said. "It has a thin oxygen atmosphere, not enough to support anything more complex than moss. It was scanned for dangerous lifeforms before the science station was even built."

"So there is no 'IT'," Atoz sighed, leaning against the back of her chair. "I remember once, when I was on the USS Valkyrie, the ship was invaded by a psionically active organism from deep space, which prevented many of us from going into R.E.M. sleep, and that caused--"

"--hallucinations," she finished, nodding thoughtfully. "I've been scanning for all known varieties of space-born gaseous or energy-based organisms. I can find nothing of that kind present."

Atoz gestured to one of the secondary scanners focused on the rift, which seemed to be winking at him mockingly. "What about that thing? Could there be some... Thing inside it, like the Wormhole aliens of Deep Space Nine?"

"I don't see how, sir," Weir answered doubtfully. "It's quite an ordinary spacial anomaly, not even a particularly stable one. It has an aperature of only a few millimeters. The light we see is merely doppler-shifted photons and gamma rays coming through from the center of 41 Sagittarius, which is where the other end of the wormhole terminates."

Atoz nodded, turning away to the Tactical station. "Mister Rosh, what about your investigation? In your opinion, did Nora Cloverfield kill those two people?"

"I see no other explanation, sir," the Eminian said, stiffening to attention. "The knife she was holding matches the wounds on the body identified as Janet Blair. We found two empty phasers, both with her fingerprints and DNA traces."

"What about the station's logs? Do they confirm that?"

"There was extensive damage to the computers, sir. Everything recorded in the past two weeks has been wiped. The surviving log entries are mainly of a personal nature."

Atoz shrugged, easing into his command chair. "We won't be going anywhere for a couple of days, anyway. Have someone glance through what you have. I don't want to put in my ship's log that they just went stir crazy, cause unknown. It doesn't make a very neat entry." The security officer muttered something under his breath. "I didn't quite catch that, Mr. Rosh."

The security officer straightened up. "I said, 'Jaliyen nuy lerrash Malex', sir. It is an Eminian expression. Roughly translated, 'Boredom arouses the Devil's laughter'."

"Very pithy," said Atoz, glancing over at Weir and catching the slightly amused look in her eye.

[Atoz 77]

Ensign Penner drew herself out of the access crawlspace and stood up, her hands automatically checking that her long blonde hair was still neatly pinned into its compact bun. As she took her place at the control station, she couldn't help darting a nervous glance over her shoulder.

"I pray that you will pardon my observation, Amelia," said Lt. (j.g.) N'maste, the felinoid Ops officer who was working on the life support, "but you seem particularly stressed and uneasy."

The communications officer gave a short laugh. "I guess I am a little jumpy. It's just... have you been seeing things moving, just out the corner of your eye?"

The Caitian turned his torso around, making a slow survey of the room. "I have not noted any such kinetic phenomena."

"They always stop when you look at them straight on," said Penner, trying to concentrate on her work. "Maybe the place is haunted."

N'maste tilted his head slightly. "I beg your pardon, Amelia. The word 'haunted' does not translate."

"Inhabitted by ghosts," she explained. "Spirits of the dead."

"Ah, we are comparing cultural narratives," said N'maste. "On my world, we believe that when the spirit is liberated from the flesh, it immediately ascends to a higher plane of existence, where it joins in communion with the Sha, the Universal Oneness."

"What about bad people? The ones who aren't ready to ascend? Don't they stay behind to torment the living?"

"I cannot imagine any reason they would," said the Caitian, removing an access panel.

"Don't you have horror movies where you come from?" said Penner. "On Luna when I was a kid, we'd have friends over to watch holo-vids about hideous ghosts. We were scared out of our p.j.s, but we loved every minute of it." N'maste merely looked at her as if she were a strange, alien creature -- which of course she was, from his point of view. Under the circumstances, he refrained from asking what a "peejay" was.

"What are you two talking about?" said Vespis , suddenly breezing through the doorway and making Penner jump.

"We were comparing cultural narratives," said the communications officer with a grin.

"Ghosts," supplemented N'maste.

Vespis laughed as she glanced over Penner's shoulder at the readings on her panel. "On Andor, we have legends about the vradlich," she said, moving away towards the life support station, "a spirit with no eyes that invades your dreams and drinks your blood."

"Brrrr!" said Penner, making a face and shivering. "Hey! I really am cold all of a sudden. Seriously. Is there something wrong with the ventilation?"

"It must be your imagination," said Vespis. "The blower system is shut down, pending replacement of the air filters. Isn't that right, lieutenant?"

N'maste frowned as he took out his tricorder. "Nevertheless, there is discrepancy of 7.2 degress Celsius, in an approximately spherical radius around Ensign Penner's station. Continuing to drop even as I speak."

Penner let out a quiet shriek and darted across the room, her feet touching the floor perhaps once in transit. "It's a cold spot!"

"Let me see that," said Vespis, taking the tricorder. "There must be a leak in one of the coolant pipes."

The three of them stood together, staring at the display on the tricorder. The cold spot circled the room once, spiralling upwards, where it simply dissolved through the ceiling.

***

By the end of the day, Lt. Rosh was able to report back to Captain Atoz that a cursory run of the station's logs -- beginning from the USS Ranger's visit, three months back -- had indeed turned up what might be considered a motive. "None of the three was in the habit of keeping a daily log, Captain," he said, as he inserted a data disk into the conference room's viewer. "There are long periods, up to thirteen days, when there are no entries at all, apart from routine sensor scans of the wormhole."

"It probably got to be a very dull," said Atoz, "seeing the same people year after year."

Weir, on the other side of the conference table, nodded as Rosh started and stopped the viewer, showing brief snippets of conversation. "I see there that a small meteorite disintegrated against their deflector shield almost three months ago. I'll bet they talked about that for days afterwards."

"You said something about a motive, Mr. Rosh?" said Atoz.

"It appears that Kurtiss Markway and Janet Blair were having a love affair," said the security officer, stopping the disk. The scene was the recreation deck, and the two people in question were dancing together, happy and carefree. In the background, Nora Cloverfield could be seen playing some sort of solitary game, every now and then glaring at the couple with naked jealousy on her face. Rosh fast-forwarded to a flaming argument, all the three members of the outpost shouting and insulting one another until the audio became completely incoherent.

"I'd have to agree with you, Mr. Rosh," said Atoz. "That looks like a motive, all right."

[Atoz 77]

Hoping to save the time and trouble of beaming back and forth to the ship, the repair party remained on the outpost overnight, bunking in the unused cabins on level two. After a leisurely meal in the common area, where they discussed their progress and made plans for the next day's work, the team split into pairs. N'maste and Ensign Evan Jameson took one room, while Lieutenant (j.g.) Anya Gorski and Penner took another. Gorski undressed and crawled into the top bunk, closing her eyes with a heavy sigh. Ensign Penner folded her uniform neatly and sat cross-legged on the bottom bunk, combing out her long, blonde hair, an activity she found relaxing after a long day.

And what an exhausting day it had been! Not strenuous, but tedious. She had had to check every circuit in both the receiver and transmitter, and most of them had been damaged in one way or another, so it amounted to practically building a subspace communications relay from scratch. When it was complete, it would be a job she could be proud of. Penner frowned as she heard voices from the guys' cabin next door. You'd think they'd be ready to sleep, too.

Hopefully tomorrow, when the new storage buffers were installed, the relay would be running again. Now the voices next door were louder, as if the guys were arguing. A sudden noise, like the slamming of a heavy object on the floor, made her jump. Penner glanced up at Gorski, amazed that she could still be asleep. She was about to go back to brushing her hair when, among the indistinct shouting, the word "Blood" came through quite clearly.

Penner got up and walked to the door, her bare feet cold on the duralinium floor. The argument from next door had moved out into the corridor. She held a quick internal debate with herself. There had to be a logical explanation -- she just couldn't imagine N'maste getting this angry with anyone. Curiousity more than anything led her to slide open the door and go outside.

The short corridor that connected the cabins was empty. The light panels had been turned off, leaving the corridor dimly lit. There was also no sound, no argument, nothing. She was about to go to bed when she heard a curious clanging noise from the direction of the central shaft. "Hello? Is that you, N'maste?" Penner called softly, advancing cautiously to the recreation space. The clanging sound came again, reminding her of an old-fashioned ship's bell. Ting-ting! Ting-ting!

Penner shivered. For some bizarre reason, it suddenly occured to her that she was behaving just like the heroine in one of those spooky holo-vids she used to watch as a teenager -- prowling around a dark, creepy place in her underwear.

A sudden movement caught her attention. Someone was on the spiral staircase, climbing up from the lower level, and continuing upward without stopping. The figure was that of a woman with pale, wispy hair, dressed in a white, gossamer-thin gown which seemed to trail in the air behind her like smoke. "Lieutenant Vespis?" called Penner softly. "Is something wrong, sir?"

The figure continued to climb, gliding gracefully up the stairs. Penner followed at a distance, past the third level, clear up to the observation deck. Ting-ting! Ting-ting! went the clanging sound. The figure suddenly stopped, and as Penner drew near, it turned to face her. Penner had the fleeting glimpse of a beautiful, angelic face, then it was lunging at her. It definitely wasn't Lt. Vespis! The hair was like cobwebs, the skin like that of a drowned corpse left in the water. Its pale blue face had no eyes, only horribly empty sockets. But it did have sharp, hungry teeth, and its long arms had grasping, razor-edged talons.

The only thing that saved Penner was that her foot slipped on the stairs. She tumbled painfully around the arc of the staircase to the third level landing. There she scrambled to her feet, running downward, glancing fearfully over her shoulder at the hideous creature right behind her, its talons reaching out to entwine her hair. Suddenly there was another pair of arms in front of her, grabbing her, enclosing her in a powerful hug. Penner screamed.

It was Anya Gorski. "Amelia, what's wrong?"

"That... that Thing!" Penner gasped, struggling to get Gorski to move. But together they looked back up the staircase. There was nothing there.

***

"I didn't imagine it, Captain," said Penner, trembling more from embarrassment at this stage than from fright. She was, after all, surrounded not only by the other four members of the repair team, but also by Dr. Pierce, Lt. Rosh, and Captain Atoz himself, who had been roused out of bed in the middle of the night and beamed down to the outpost. Plus she was still in her underwear.

"I'm sure you didn't, ensign," said Atoz.

"But weren't you and Jameson telling each other ghost stories at dinner?" said Gorski.

"Well, yes, but..." She had mentioned the cold spot, then one thing had led to another. It had seemed like fun at the time.

Vespis was hanging in the background, uncharacteristically quiet, glowering at Rosh as he scanned the area with his tricorder. Atoz glanced at the security officer and received only a brief shake of the head. "Ensign, there's no one here but the repair team. Even the ship's sensors don't detect any life forms of any kind."

"It wasn't a life form, Captain," said Penner stubbornly. "It was a ghost!"

Atoz turned to Dr. Pierce. "Elevated epinephrine levels, alpha rhythm and so on," the doctor reported quietly. "You don't need me to tell you something frightened her badly. Otherwise, she's perfectly fine."

Atoz was tempted to order them all back to the ship for the remainder of the night. But something told him that if he made too big a deal out of it, Penner would never live it down. At the same time, he couldn't allow her to think that he didn't take her seriously. "Mister Rosh, I want a security guard on duty here." The grateful smile he got from Penner let him know that he made the right call.

***

Early the next morning, the ship beamed down the replacement parts and tools they needed to complete the job. "What are you standing around for?" Vespis snapped. "Let's get this over with!"

The members of the repair team looked at one another in shock. It wasn't like the Chief Engineer to be so crabby. "Lieutenant, are you feeling all right?" asked Gorski, voicing the concern they all felt.

The Andorian rubbed her temples. "I apologize, Anya. It's just a headache. I haven't been sleeping well."

"That's okay, chief. Why don't you take a rest?"

Vespis looked around at the walls of the station, still showing the damage from the phaser shots. "I'll rest when we get about fifty light-years between us and this outpost," she said, frowning.

***

The work proceeded surprisingly smoothly. As Atoz was leaving the Deck 7 Mess Hall after lunch, Fawkes caught up with him. The latest progress report had them slightly ahead of schedule. The power plant was fully functional again, as well as the deflector grid, the computers, and the subspace transmitter. All that was left to do was recalibrate the new antenna and set up the new message buffers. "And then we can put this mission behind us," he said, keeping pace as Atoz turned towards Sickbay. "This is one I won't be sorry to see the arse end of, sir."

Atoz nodded, halting at a corridor junction. "I know how you feel. When you go back down there, give them all a pat on the back from me."

Fawkes stepped into the nearby turbolift. "I'll do that, sir," he said just before the doors closed on him.

Atoz froze. Beyond the turbolift, at the far end of the corridor, he could have sworn he saw a female figure dressed in white. Pallid skin, white hair, exactly like Penner's description of her ghost! But in that quick blink of an eye, the figure had disappeared around a corner. Forgetting his appointment with Sickbay, he quickly jogged over to that corner. There was nothing there. Could he have imagined it?

Just then his commbadge chirped at him. "Captain, I have something you need to see," said Weir's voice. "Can I meet you in the Deck 3 conference room? It's urgent, sir."

***

When Atoz walked through the doors, Weir was already there, loading a data disk. "These are the sensor logs Mr. Rosh uploaded from the outpost. I don't know what was wrong with the science team -- maybe they were getting sloppy, or maybe they were distracted by their personal problems, but they weren't even looking at the E band."

Atoz peered at the complex display of elecromagnetic lines and energy waves. "Diane, I'm not an astrophysicist..." he started to say, but then something tugged as his memory. "Hold on. The E band is where Berthold rays originate, isn't it?"

"Yes, sir," she said, pointing them out on the display. "Berthold rays."

"Berthold rays are deadly to organic life," said Atoz in alarm. "Are we in any danger?"

Weir shook her head. "The amount of radiation coming through the wormhole is harmless, or it would have been detected sooner. But do you see what else this means?"

Atoz thought it over. "Class M stars don't produce Berthold rays."

"No, sir, they don't," said Weir, triumphantly pressing a few buttons so that the display changed. The complex waveforms were now separated into two simpler shapes, color-coded to make the patterns easier to compare. "Apparently this wormhole has one exit -- the one we see inside the nebula -- and two entrance points -- 41 Sagittarius, plus a class A star I haven't been able to identify..."

"Wait a second," said Atoz. "A wormhole with three ends? That's not possible, is it?"

"No, sir. At least, that's what I was taught in Astrophysics 101." Weir pressed another button and the screen displayed a graphic illustrating her theory. It looked like a straight tunnel with a branch line joining it at an angle. "Admittedly this is an unstable wormhole to begin with. I can't begin to calculate what effect a third branch would have. Imagine a straight water pipe. It's easy to calculate the water pressure at any point, knowing the rate of flow. But add a third line, and you don't know where it joins or even where it originates..."

"I see what you mean." To carry on with her water pipe analogy, suppose the third line was a storm drain! The entire system might be subject to flooding an unpredictable intervals. "Obviously there's no theoretical model of a three-end wormhole. Do you have any ideas?"

"Well, sir..." said Weir hesitantly. "Arachne, do you have the information I requested?"

The diagram on the screen vanished, replaced by an avatar of a pretty young woman wearing a pale blue Grecian dress. Her light brown hair was arranged in elaborate ringlets around her forehead and her ears, the rest coiled into a chignon behind her head, held with a gold fillet. The expression on her face was cool and aloof. "Yes, Dr. Weir. My previous mistress, Pallas Athena, journeyed far and near throughout the galaxy, and she left within my memory certain theoretical knowledge of the enigma you seek. I believe I can confidently predict a violent eruption of what you term Berthold rays, sometime within the next few days."

"Within days?" said Atoz. "Can you be a little more specific than that?"

Arachne bowed her head deferentially in his direction, her expression warmer. "My Lord Captain, I much regret my inability," she said. "But the data at my disposal is inadequate for a more detailed divination of the future. With the aid of Odysseus' sensor array, I may be able to learn more."

"Work with the Sciences department, then," said Atoz, "and do what you can. Thank you." Arachne nodded gravely and vanished from sight. "Is it my imagination, or is her personality a little bit... different, lately?"

"You noticed, did you?" said Weir, her lips twitching slightly. "You've got to remember, sir. She's an artificial intelligence, and for her entire life -- something over a hundred years -- her only job was to guard a piece of military hardware. The only people she met were the people she interrogated as enemies. Now she's in contact with people for the first time in her life, and she's behaving quite a bit like an adolescent girl -- not sure who she is, eager to try out different personas, desperate to be liked." Now the twitch in her lips definitely became classifiable as a grin. "Besides, Captain, I think she has a crush on you."

Atoz groaned, slumping back in his chair. "That's all I need."

[Atoz 77]

Petty Officer James Poole, the security guard assigned to the repair team that morning, didn't mind helping out if it meant getting this over with sooner. While the engineering officers conferred together in the galley, he hauled one of the heavy replacement buffer modules all the way up the spiral staircase to the antenna on Level four.

On the Level three landing, he put down the unit for a brief rest and noticed that he could see his breath, like mist, in front of him. Why was it so cold in here? Ting-ting! Ting-ting! The clanging sound came from the level above. But weren't all the other officers downstairs?

"Is somebody up there?" he said, leaving the unit and proceeding on up the stairway. The door to the observation deck slid open silently before he got there. Putting his hand on his phaser, he crept stealthily inside... and found the room utterly empty and utterly silent.

He was just letting out a relieved breath of air when the thing leaped on him from behind -- pallid, hideous, its talons searching out victims for its empty eye sockets. Poole staggered backwards through the doorway and lost his footing on the staircase.

***

In Sickbay, Dr. Pierce had news about Cloverfield's condition. "This is a foreign substance I haven't been able to identify yet," he said, pointing to a display on the diagnostic panel. "I've found traces in her blood, but it shows a definite preference for her cerebral cortex. This is what's responsible for her mental state. Purely chemical."

"But you didn't find any in the atmosphere of the outpost, did you?" asked Atoz.

"Not with the quick tricorder scan I did on the lower level," said Pierce. "She could have been exposed to it someplace else. Whatever it is, I've already found an antitoxin that neutralizes it. She's going to be perfectly normal in a day or two."

Atoz described the experience he had had in the corridor, the thing he thought he had seen. "What do you make of that, Hawkeye?"

"The same thing I make of this," the doctor replied, beckoning the Captain over to his desk. "Cloverfield briefly regained consciousness earlier this morning, and I had time to do an eidetic probe. The computer has just now finished processing it. Take a look." On the viewscreen, Atoz could see a series of jerky, out of focus images, as if someone had recorded a film from Cloverfield's point of view.

It was the lowest level of the outpost. The three members of the science team were shouting at one another, hurriedly piling equipment lockers into a makeshift barricade. Markway suddenly looked up and fired his phaser at something out of the line of sight. The point of view quickly swerved, as Cloverfield herself began firing at some dark, misty something that could only indistinctly be seen. Neither of them was a trained marksman, and they were both obviously terrified; their shots were going wild more often than not. Even when they didn't, the phaser beams seemed to have no effect on the thing, whatever it was. One of Cloverfield's shots struck Markway, nearly cutting him in two.

There was a long gap in the picture. The two women were alone now, back to back, armed with whatever hand-held weapons they could find. A dark streak abruptly pounced right out of the wall, cutting across in front of Cloverfield. The point of view veered around as the woman turned to follow. And there it was, hovering in front of Janet Blair, apparently strangling her. Atoz peered closely at the thing. It was smaller than human, stunted, deformed, with no recognizable sex. What skin could be seen was gray and covered in warts and sores. The hair was black as tar, and hung like a lifeless rag around its shoulders. When it turned, its staring, red-rimmed eyes were like enormous, perfectly round pools of black water. Cloverfield lunged at the thing on Janet Blair, raising her knife...

"That's enough, doctor; I get the idea," said Atoz. "This isn't a delusion?"

"These are images taken directly from her visual cortex," said Pierce. "All three of them obviously saw it."

"But why is it... ?" Atoz was interrupted by the raucous blare of the Red Alert siren. He tapped his comm badge. "Mister Caeli, what is it?"

The duty officer's voice came over clearly. "Sensors are picking up a surge of Berthold radiation, Captain. Coming from the wormhole."

***

Weir was already on the bridge at her station when Atoz arrived. "It was only a mild burst, Captain," she reported. "But sensors are reading a much more intense one building up within the next ten minutes."

"Will our shields protect us?"

"At maximum power maybe, sir," she answered uncertainly. "But the outpost's deflector is not designed to screen out E-band emissions. They'll all be killed instantly."

"They have raised their security screen, Captain," said Rosh, anticipating his next order. "Transporters will not penetrate it." Fawkes was standing next to him, staring at the instruments as if calculating something.

Atoz tapped his comm badge. "Odysseus to Away Team. What's going on down there? Lower your deflectors!"

There was a slight pause, and Anya Gorski's voice came over the comm line. "We're all trapped inside the Level one storage room, Captain. Lieutenant Vespis sent us here for supplies, then locked us in."

"And she's turned off the life support, Captain!" added Penner's voice. "We're freezing down here!"

"Icicles..." That was Vespis' voice, sounding oddly muffled and distorted. "Pure white icicles... only way... to stop... vradlich... "

"Lieutenant!" said Atoz. "Lower the deflectors immediately! That's a direct order!"

"The vradlich! The vradlich is coming! Icicles..." The engineer lapsed into the Andorian language, then cut off her comm badge.

Atoz looked around the bridge. "If anyone has a suggestion, now would be a good time."

Fawkes stepped forward. "Captain, a simultaneous phaser strike could overpower the deflector screen just enough for the transporter to penetrate. You couldn't bring up the Away Team, but you'd have time to beam one person into the observation deck. I could make my way to the control room and turn off the security screen." Atoz and Fawkes both glanced at Rosh for his opinion.

"There would be no margin for error, Commander," said the tactical officer. "If the phaser beam is too powerful, it would destroy the outpost. If it is not powerful enough, your transporter pattern would be deflected and scattered."

Fawkes turned to face Atoz. "I still think it's our best option, sir."

[Atoz 77]

With life support completely off, the interior of the outpost had already dropped to several degrees below zero Celsius. Fawkes materialized on the observation deck. It was dark, the only light being that which filtered in from the transparent aluminum windows overlooking the barren landscape of the planetoid. It was bitterly cold; ice was already forming on the metal staircase. He started down.

"Who's there?" called someone below. Vespis was crouched in the shadows of the landing, looking up suspiciously, pointing Poole's phaser.

"It's me, Vespis. It's Fawkes." Quietly he drew his own phaser, set to Stun.

She shook her head. "It's a trick. Don't you think I know your tricks?" Her voice rose, becoming high-pitched, almost hysterical. "You know the ice isn't ready yet. You know..." Again she lapsed into Andorian. She fired her phaser, the beam lancing through the air just centimeters from Fawkes' left knee. He tried to climb back up, slipped on the ice and fell, dropping his own phaser as he scrambled to keep from tumbling off the staircase.

***

Atoz paced nervously in front of his command chair. "Time?"

Weir could only give him a bleak, helpless shrug. "Any second now, sir."

Atoz crossed his arms, hoping to hold his restlessness still by main force. Maybe it would be better to warp out to a safe distance while he had the chance. But that would mean leaving seven of his people to die...

***

Vespis' phaser was firing wildly, driving holes through the risers of the staircase. From somewhere above, Fawkes could hear a ting-ting! ting-ting! and, oddly enough, his brain found time to recognize the sound -- an old style radiation counter. It meant the Berthold rays were starting to trickle through the wormhole already.

The ghostly vradlich had materialized, hovering in front of him, its talons reaching toward him, its sightless face stretching down to kiss him. Of course, Vespis was taking aim at the apparition -- not that a phaser had any chance of harming it. Gambling on one last, desperate chance, Fawkes leaped, just as the stairs worked loose from the wall of the tower. Catching hold of the cold metal, he managed to swing down and drop to the next landing before the entire section of staircase went crashing to the floor.

Vespis was also there, struggling to her feet and trying to aim her phaser as the vradlich swooped down on her. Fawkes grabbed her and pushed her through the doorway to the control room. The two of them went down in a confusion of arms and legs, but somehow he managed to work the hypospray out of his sleeve and jam it into her thigh. Scrambling to his knees, he clawed his way up the control panel, pressing the three buttons which turned off the deflector shield. "Energize!" he shouted into his comm badge.

Having done all that he could, he slumped to the floor, still half tangled with Vespis, who was still struggling. As the sedative in the hypospray took effect, she went limp. Gently he shifted his position to bring her head into a more comfortable position in his lap.

"Papa," she said, smiling up at him as her eyes began to close. "You came for me." And with that, the blue shimmering light of the transporter took them home.

***

"Have you ever heard of kironide, Captain?" said Dr. Pierce, sitting behind his desk in Sickbay. "It's an extremely rare mineral which releases Higgs particles when ingested and broken down by an organic life form. The physicists tell me that these particles interfere with the quantum lines of force or something I don't quite understand, but the practical result is---"

"Psychokinesis," said Weir. "Moving objects by thought alone."

"Among other things," said the doctor. "I checked the sensor logs. The meteorite that crashed three months ago was almost pure kironide. Somehow the dust got into the ventilation system, and because it clogged up the air filters, was mostly concentrated in the control room, where Nora Cloverfield spent most of her time."

Atoz sat across from him, his eyes on the ICU bed in the next room, where Vespis was sleeping. "You're telling me Nora Cloverfield manifested the ghost herself, by psychokinesis?"

"Without even realizing it. Direct stimulation of the optic nerves. They all saw what wasn't there."

"But why in the world would she imagine a ghost, of all things?" asked Weir, still unconvinced.

"It took two months for her body to metabolize enough kironide to have any effect," Pierce explained pontifically, "and by that time, she hated her co-workers, hated the outpost, hated the entire project. Her unconscious mind created an entity who didn't want them here and was determined to make them leave. As the kironide continued to break down, it produced poisons that increased her mental instability and finally put her into a catatonic state."

"But that's just the thing," said Weir, raising an eyebrow. "If Cloverfield has been in your Sickbay ever since we got here, where did Vespis' creature come from?"

"From Vespis, where else?" They all turned to watch the peacefully sleeping Chief Engineer. "She spent all of her time in the control room, repairing the computer. Because of their antennae, it wouldn't surprise me that Andorians metabolize kironide much faster than Humans do."

"The subspace relay is working again," Atoz sighed, getting to his feet. "That's good enough for me. How is Poole?"

"He broke a few bones, but he'll live."

"Now all I have to do is try and make a sensible log entry out of all this," said the Captain, waving goodnight.

---- THE END ----