Serpents

[Atoz 77]

SERPENTS >>

[Lucius gave me the idea for this story, so he gets to be the hero.]

The shuttlecraft Telemachus glided silently down through the dismal grey clouds, just skimming the treetops of the tropical forest. It hovered, turning smoothly in midair as its atmospheric wings folded back against its hull, then gently settled into the clearing. After a moment, the side hatch slid open and the crew stood looking out at the rain.

"It's really pouring down, isn't it?" said Ensign Penner, grinning. Like many Lunarites, she could never get used to seeing water falling out of the sky like this.

Lieutenant Caeli didn't express an opinion one way or the other. He was from an Earth-like planet called Romana Magna, and rain didn't impress him. What did impress him was the fact that he had duty to perform. "These are the correct coordinates," he said fretfully. "Do you see anything that looks like a camp?"

Penner shook her head. After looking up at the sky for a minute, she said, "Isn't it going to stop?"

In spite of his preoccupation, Caeli had to smile at her naivete. "A slow, steady drizzle like this can go on all day."

Her eyes went wide in utter disbelief. "What? Not a whole eight hours?"

She was thinking in terms of a duty watch. "I mean all day," he said. "Even longer, if it's the rainy season." Saying this brought Caeli's mind back to the mission and he fumed with impatience, anxious not to screw up his first independent command. "I'm going to go outside and take a look..."

The communications panel of the shuttlecraft chirped once. "Hello, shuttlecraft," said a pleasant female voice. "This is Kikuro Tujimori. Are you receiving me?"

"That's affirmative, doctor," said Caeli, tapping his comm badge. "This is Lieutenant Caeli and Ensign Penner."

"Very good," the woman said. "Our site is not far, to the north of the clearing. Please join us."

Putting on lightweight Water Repelling cloaks, the two of them stepped out into the rain and found a well-defined path leading away into the jungle. Five minutes of walking brought them to a cluster of three large tents. As an additional shelter against the rain, a wide awning had been erected, standing out from a sheer cliff face. Under this, five civilians -- three men and two women -- were working at various tasks. They all looked up in surprise as the two Starfleet officers stepped under the awning and drew back their hoods.

A beautiful young Asian woman put down was she was doing and walked over to greet them. "I am Kikuro Tujimori," she said, giving a little bow with her head. "Welcome to Tarleh IV. Please excuse the smell. We have been conserving water for drinking purposes only."

"Um... that's no problem, Dr. Tujimori," said Caeli. "Do you have everything packed?"

"Well, it is like this, lieutenant..."

"Yes or No, doctor."

Her face tightened in response to the shortness of his manner. "In that case... no."

"I talked to you almost two hours ago, ma'am," Caeli said patiently. "I told you to be ready when we arrived. Didn't you understand?" It had admittedly been a short conversation, text only, and tri-axialated so that it wouldn't be picked up by the Cardassians.

"Of course I understood, lieutenant," she replied, planting her hands sternly on her hips. "Naturally I assumed your starship would be picking us up by transporter. If I may ask, where is your starship?"

[Atoz 77]

"Captain's log, Stardate 51862.6: The Odysseus is currently cruising at Warp Factor One well outside the cometary cloud which serves as the boundary to the Tarleh star system, which is also the border of Cardassian space. Long range sensors have picked up the warp signature of a Cardassian cruiser in the nearby Mishta system, but if he has detected our presence, he has shown no sign of it."

Captain Atoz switched off the log recorder just as the attention signal for his ready room door chimed. "Come in!" Atoz said, reluctantly because he had a good idea who his visitor would be.

Sure enough -- tall, white-haired David Shaughnessy of the Terran Academy strode into the ready room. There were three chairs for visitors, and without being asked, Shaughnessy plopped down into the one farthest from Atoz' desk and began to talk. "Goodness me, Captain! I know you space people can't get enough of this plodding back and forth amongst the stars, but really! I don't understand why we can't just go pick up Dr. Tujimori and her students." He looked up, blinking with apparent surprise that Atoz hadn't already vaulted over his desk to join him.

"I would be more than happy to do that, Professor," said Atoz, standing up and walking around the desk. "But the planet Dr. Tujimori chose for her dig is in Cardassian territory." Fortunately not a planet they had gotten around to colonizing yet.

Shaughnessy scratched his enormous nose. "Well, yes, she is a little bit headstrong, I'll admit. But surely the Cardassians fought alongside us against the Dominion? I don't keep up on current history very well, but I do recall hearing something about that on the news holos..."

"Only after the Dominion had turned on them first, Professor," said Atoz, remembering his conversation with Admiral Matthews when he had received his orders for this mission. "That's a very shaky basis for an alliance." At last report, the Cardassians were still ruled by their military caste. If they got wind of an unauthorized science team on one of their planets, Tujimori and her group would be arrested and interrogated. Even when their purpose turned out to be innocent, the always suspicious Cardassians would certainly not let the incident pass, and all the diplomatic progress made since the Dominion War would be erased overnight. The only way to avoid that scenario was to remove the archaeologists quietly and without fuss, if at all possible.

"Yes, I suppose you could be right," admitted Shaughnessy. "But once she dug up that old report that there might be -- might be, you understand -- T'konian relics on Tarleh IV, there was no stopping her. You cannot imagine how difficult it is to make a name for yourself in science these days, Captain."

"I began my career in Starfleet as a science officer, Professor," said Atoz. "I think I remember how it goes."

"Yes, quite right," said Shaughnessy, somehow expressing with one raised eyebrow his low opinion of Starfleet science officers. "As nearly as I can piece it together, she managed to find a Tellarite smuggler who was willing to drop her team off on the planet. But then she left behind a timed message that would inform me where she was in the event she couldn't arrange return transport..."

"And naturally you informed Starfleet as soon as you knew," said Atoz.

"Well..." The professor shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "I felt that I owed her two weeks at least. A remarkable girl. If only I were thirty years younger..."

***

"That's the story, ma'am," said Caeli. The rain had stopped, and the heavy, tropical air seemed to press down on them like a blanket as the others gathered around to listen. "The Cardassians' subspace early warning fence would certainly detect a starship or even a runabout, but our Chief Engineer rigged up a damping field to mask the shuttlecraft's warp signature."

"That is all very fine, lieutenant," said Tujimori, crossing her arms, "but we will need more space than--"

"No ma'am," said Caeli. "We're only taking personal effects."

"But our specimens..."

"Only what you brought with you, ma'am. Everything else stays. Those are my orders."

"Well, we don't take orders from Starfleet!" said one of the male students, bristling with indignation as he pushed his way into Caeli's face. "If you don't like it, you can go. We'll take our chances with the Crass-heads..."

"Siggy, please," said Dr. Tujimori, stepping between them to make peace. She gave a sigh of resignation. "We have tricorder records of everything. That will have to satisfy us. Continue packing up, please."

"Only because you say so, doc," said the belligerent one, shooting Caeli one last angry glare as he turned away to begin disassembling the heavy equipment -- a tripod-mounted sonic diffuser and a portable cold fusion battery.

"Sigmond Holbek," said Tujimori, by way of explanation. "Our resident Techie. He is normally easy to get along with, but I am afraid this expedition has tried his patience."

Penner had already managed to get on a first name basis with the female student, helping the dark-skinned African organize their remaining supplies. "The Temple was in amazing condition, Amelia," the other girl was saying. "Once we got it unearthed, that is. We found some burials that dated to nearly 3,000 years ago!"

"No kidding, Orice?" replied the communications officer. "Were they humanoids?"

The other girl nodded. "Reptilian, like Cardassians. They were in above-ground sarcophagi, so the ground water didn't get to them. They were sealed tight, too. With the tricorder scans, you can make out the clothes they were wearing and everything. We didn't actually dig them up because we didn't have a stasis pod to preserve the remains."

"Were they kings and queens?" asked Penner in rapt attention.

"Well, that's puzzling really, because they weren't buried with weapons, the way you'd expect a king from that period... "

Mason, a grizzled man who looked a few years older than the others, was packing up their archaeological tools -- including hand-held diffusers, ropes and climbing equipment. Fortunately the group had travelled light. Instead of a replicator, they had been living on pre-packaged foods.

The third man seemed to be standing around as if he were uncertain where to begin. All three of the men had apparently gone without shaving for several days, but his face had a hollow, emaciated look, and his green jumpsuit draped on his tall, thin body as if it were two sizes too large. Caeli noticed that he smelled a bit riper than the others as well, and wondered if perhaps he were recovering from a sickness. "Cortez, come and help me with this," said Holbek irritably, and he responded by lurching across the work area uncertainly.

"I really am sorry, ma'am," Caeli said, anxious to stay on Dr. Tujimori's good side. "But you have no idea how much danger we're in. If the Cardassians knew we were here..."

"I understand your position, lieutenant," she said, rewarding him with a thin smile. "I have only one further request, as a personal favor. Please do not call me ma'am. I believe that the two of us are approximately the same age, yes? Please call me Kikuro."

Caeli was surprised into a broad grin himself, so relieved was he to know that he hadn't totally alienated her. "You can call me Luke," he said. He started to say more, but was interrupted by Holbek's voice, raised in alarm.

"Hey, man, cap that feed before you--"

A loud ZAP! came from the fusion battery. Cortez, in attempting to pick it up, had brushed against one of the power feeds. The resulting discharge hurled him four meters. The acrid smell of ozone and burnt skin filled the air.

"Orice, get the medikit!" shouted Dr. Tujimori, racing Holbek to his side. A good part of his jumpsuit had been burned away by the electrical blast, leaving his skin raw and oozing blood. Penner arrived a second later, opening her tricorder.

"No!" grunted Cortez, pushing backwards with his spindly legs. "I'm not... I'm not hurt."

"Be calm," said Tujimori soothingly. "Let me see that arm."

"I won't hurt you; I just want to check for nerve damage," said Penner, waving the tricorder.

"NO!" Cortez backhanded her across the jaw, knocking her off her feet. Even though Holbek was practically lying across his body, trying to hold him down, he scrambled upright as if the engineer's 90 kilos was nothing, hoisting him off the ground with one hand and throwing him into the trees. With a roar of rage, Cortez snatched up one of the duralinium tripod struts and advanced on Tujimori, who was apparently frozen with shock.

Without even thinking of the phaser at his side, Caeli charged, catching Cortez in the mid-section and knocking him back two meters. Then he spun around and ducked as the man swung the metal strut, missing him by only a few centimeters. Again the makeshift club slashed the air with a swish, but by then Caeli was behind his opponent, seizing his wrists. The strut thudded to the ground.

"Take it easy, friend," said Caeli, thinking that he had the upper hand. In his day, he had been the Academy wrestling champion for his weight class, and he seriously doubted any injured man could break his hold. But Cortez was struggling like a wild man, seemingly oblivious to the pain his burnt flesh must be causing him in Caeli's grip.

Caeli felt the man's muscle and skin tissue slide unnaturally beneath his hands, and with another incoherent yell, Cortez broke free! Caeli had the presence of mind to drive his boot upwards into his opponent's stomach, following it up with a flurry of three rapid blows to his jaw as he stood upright. He put all his weight behind the third, and actually felt Cortez' jaw dislocate. The man stood swaying for a second, then pitched over backwards like a marionette with its strings cut.

"Man, did Starfleet teach you to fight like that?" said Holbek, brushing wet leaves off of himself, apparently unhurt -- at least not seriously -- by his fall.

"High school gladiator team," said Caeli absently, as he checked to make sure that Penner was also okay. "Does anyone have any idea what got into him?"

Orice had come running up to hand over the medikit to Dr. Tujimori. "He's been lethargic for the past three days," she volunteered. "We assumed it was just a tropical bug of some kind."

"It is worse than that," said Tujimori in a flat voice. "He is dead."

"That's impossible," said Caeli, as a dull, grey fist of guilt seemed to strike him right in the guts. "I didn't hit him that hard."

Tujimori stood up, her place immediately taken by Orice and Holbek as they tried in vain to revive their fellow student. Penner, with a glance at her tricorder, was shaking her head solemnly. "I am sure it was not your fault, Luke," said the archaeologist. "As Orice said, he had been suffering some kind of fever for days. We gave him antibiotics, but none of us is trained in medicine beyond simple first aid. No doubt his illness weakened him sufficiently for your blows to be fatal."

"He didn't seem that weak to me, doctor," was all Caeli could say. Then he realized with embarrassment that it wasn't the most tactful thing to say at the present moment. "I'm sorry. That didn't come out right..."

"Lieutenant," said Penner, still looking at her tricorder with a puzzled expression, "I'm not sure what to make of this, but it looks to me like his entire body has been invaded by some kind of infection. Judging by the state of his T cells, he should have been dead hours ago."

"Let me see that," said Dr. Tujimori, taking the tricorder and pushing buttons. "Unfortunately, I am an Archaeologist and not a Medical doctor. I can make no sense of this, either."

"You should have brought a Medic instead of me," said Penner, folding her arms sadly.

There hadn't been any choice about that, really. Telemachus only had seven seats, and there were five passengers. And a communications officer had been needed to send tri-axialated messages so that the Cardassians couldn't tap into them. "Don't sell yourself short, ensign," Caeli said. "I haven't yet seen any reason to regret picking you."

[Atoz 77]

There were three tents -- one for the women, one for the men, and a third for storing supplies. Orice wouldn't allow the corpse into her supply tent, so it was temporarily placed in the men's tent. The archaeologists hurriedly packed their spare clothing and personal belongings into rucksacks. Their portable cots and work tables were taken apart and packed along with the other equipment and supplies. Mason volunteered to remain in camp and seal Cortez' body into one of their air tight specimen bags, while the rest of them carried the first load to the shuttlecraft.

Even without the falling rain it took nearly fifteen minutes, loaded as they were. While Caeli lugged the fusion battery, Holbek carried the heavy sonic diffuser across his shoulders, and its awkward length kept getting caught in the vines that overhung the trail, holding up the entire line. All of them were hot and tired by the time they arrived, but gratified that the hardest part was over. The only things left to fetch now were their rucksacks, the tents themselves, and of course Cortez' body.

As Caeli and Tujimori were carefully stowing the gear away in the shuttle's cargo space, Penner's tricorder beeped. "It's finished analyzing the infection I found in Mr. Cortez, lieutenant," the communications officer said, pushing buttons on the screen. "It looks more like some kind of parasitic growth."

"You mean like a fungus?" said Holbek, peeking over her shoulder.

"Sort of," said Penner, "but it's got animal characteristics, too. It looks very weird."

"Why don't the rest of us have it, too?" the engineer asked, but nobody had an answer for that.

They returned to the camp ten minutes later to find the supply tent flat on the ground. Both Mason and Cortez were missing. "Are there any predators here that you know of?" asked Caeli, looking for footprints in the soft ground.

"Nothing large enough to drag off a body," said Holbek. "None that we've seen, anyway."

Caeli began calling Mason's name, but Tujimori told him that the thick tropical foliage absorbed sound like a sponge. She reached into the pocket of her camp shirt and pulled out her e-phone. "Mason!" she said into it. "Answer me, Mason!" Caeli kicked himself for not thinking of this sooner, and immediately tuned his own comm badge to the same channel.

"All right, then," he said, after she had tried several times with no response. "Let's spread out and look for him. He's probably not far. How many of you have phasers?"

It turned out that the expedition only had two type I phasers, for use against dangerous animals. Tujimori had one, and Mason himself had the other. Caeli and Penner had type IIs, and for that reason Caeli decided to form a line with the two of them at either end, but keeping the members of the group reasonably close together.

***

As it happened, they found Mason very quickly, lying on the path leading to the spring where they had been drawing their water. He was flat on his back, and Caeli could tell at a glance that he was still alive. In fact, even though his eyes were clasped shut, he stirred slightly as the five of them approached.

"Mason? Speak to me!" said Tujimori, kneeling beside him and pulling the medikit from her belt.

"Lieutenant, look at this," said Penner, offering her tricorder.

Caeli frowned at the display. It was showing the same infection that had claimed Cortez, but more than that, there was definitely something moving underneath his skin. He held the device closer, nearly in contact with Mason's body, and did a slow sweep. "It behaves almost like a fluid, spreading through his body." He touched another button. "It's organic, whatever it is."

"Yes!" groaned Mason, opening his eyes and looking around at them. He was sweating and breathing heavily, obviously in extreme pain. Tujimori, about to give him a stimulant, changed her mind and injected him with an anesthetic instead. "It was in... Cortez! Infected me with it... took my phaser..."

"Are you telling us Cortez is alive?" said Holbek skeptically.

"NO!" said Mason, clasping his eyes shut again as he winced. "The organism! It has tendrils... in the spinal cord. Controlling..." He paused to gasp from the pain. "I can feel it now... probing... reaching into my nervous system..." He cried out in agony, his arms and legs going into spasms.

"Is there nothing you can do?" said Tujimori, turning to Penner.

"I'm not even sure what it is!" the communications officer replied helplessly.

Caeli thought wildly, grasping at straws. "Stand back, everyone. I'm going to see if stunning has any effect." He set his phaser to the lowest Stun setting, pointing it at Mason, but before he could fire, Holbek grabbed his arm.

"Hold on a minute," the engineer said. "This thing is trying to access his nervous system, right? That means it must be made of neural matter itself. I've had some experience with artificial neural interfaces. If you can tune your phaser to a frequency in the Delta band, there's a chance it would stop the thing."

"Delta Rays would also kill Mason," said Caeli. "They coagulate proteins."

"A quick series of pulses in the five to seven millisecond range," said Holbek, "might inhibit the neural interface without permanently harming him."

Caeli glanced at Tujimori for confirmation, but she merely shook her head. How was she to know? She depended on Holbek for technical details. So this is what it means to be in command,thought Caeli. Holbek might know what he was talking about -- probably did -- but if even by a one-in-a-thousand chance he was wrong, it would still be Caeli's responsibility.

He quickly programmed the phaser and fired. The visual spotting beam that always accompanied a phaser beam danced out and played over Mason's body, and his seizure seemed to slack off immediately. "That's... better," Mason gasped. "You didn't kill it, but you slowed it down."

"We've got to get him back to the ship!" said Penner. "Doctor Pierce will know what to do."

Another decision to be made. "All right, you four carry Mason to the Telemachus," Caeli said, "while I look for Cortez. Keep your phasers on Heavy Stun, and don't hesitate to--"

"You're crazy, man!" blurted Holbek. "Look for him? Cortez is dead protoplasm by now!"

"We don't know that for sure," said Caeli. "Until we do, he's my responsibility."

"Oh, come on! Don't pull that Starfleet crap! We'll all be--"

"Siggy," said Tujimori firmly, placing a restraining hand on his arm, "do as the lieutenant says." As he turned, she handed him her phaser. "Pick up our belongings as you pass the camp. Leave the tents. We will not be long."

The engineer looked at her for a long moment, then put the phaser in his belt and hoisted Mason's arm around his shoulder. With Penner supporting Mason's other side and Orice leading, trying to clear the way, the four of them limped away rapidly down the path.

For just a moment, Caeli considered ordering Tujimori to go with the others, but he thought better of it. Instead he looked around at the deep tropical jungle. "Well, Kikuro, you know the area better than I do. Where should we start? Do you have any idea where he might hide?"

"I am not certain about that, Luke," she said. "But there is something I think you should see, in any case."

[Atoz 77]

Alone in his ready room, Captain Atoz paced back and forth before the porthole. It was one of those ironic situations distressingly common in Starfleet. At maximum velocity, a shuttlecraft would take eight hours to go from its drop-off point to the planet, say nine hours with a prudent margin for safety. But given that long, tedious, eighteen hour round trip, the most critical period was the relatively brief time that the Away Team would spend on the planet itself. That was when the Cardassians were most likely to detect them.

The Odysseus had already received a terse, coded message acknowledging that Caeli and Penner had arrived on the planet safely. Now Atoz was awaiting an equally brief message which would indicate that they were on their way back. That was why he was pacing.

What was taking them so long? Had they crashed on lift off? Was the "headstrong" Dr. Tujimori herself making trouble? Atoz found himself wondering if he had made a mistake sending Lt. Caeli. Perhaps he should have sent a more experienced officer -- Fawkes, or Rosh, or Weir. But the painful truth, he had to remind himself, was that officers do not become experienced unless they are entrusted with missions. Unless they are allowed to prove themselves.

The comm system attention signal chirped, followed by the voice of Lt. Rosh, the Tactical officer. "Captain, the cruiser we detected earlier has changed course. It is now heading back in the direction of Tarleh IV."

"What velocity?" asked Atoz.

"Approximately Warp Three, Captain," Rosh replied. "Its course will carry it through the outer edge of the system."

Apparently not going anywhere in a hurry, Atoz thought, staring out his porthole at the stars. Just like a routine patrol. Of course, that might change if it had occasion to scan the planet and detected a shuttlecraft there. "Thank you, Mr. Rosh. Keep me informed if anything changes."

***

The ruin was mostly covered in dense foliage, which is why Caeli at first thought it was just part of the mountain. But Tujimori ducked confidently under a sprawling tree root as thick as a standard plasma conduit and stepped through a cleft in what Caeli had taken to be a cliff face. It was only then that he noticed the oddly-shaped dome thrusting up in between the trees. "We have been calling it the Temple, for want of a better name," she said, leading the way into a dusty, rough-hewn chamber, lit by shafts of light filtering down from the ceiling. "But really we have no idea what it was for."

Caeli looked cautiously around, his phaser held at ready. Three quarters of the walls were covered with dense, pictographic writing, which he didn't recognize. "Can you read this? Is it T'konian?"

There was an enigmatic smile on her face now, half regret, half embarrassment. "No. We were encouraged initially because some of the writing seems to refer to the T'konian Empire, but ultimately it was just another dead end. Come here." She walked down a narrow corridor, down a flight of steps and into long chamber with high ceilings. Two archways led away into other rooms, and along each of the long walls was a line of seven octagonal stone slabs, covered with the same style of writing. One of the slabs had been broken, revealing that it had been a plug, sealing shut a short, horizontal shaft. An opening high up in the ceiling admitted some light, but it was too dim to see clearly what was inside the alcove. Caeli wondered what the room reminded him of, and then it came to him -- a morgue.

"These are reminiscent of the Tubular Sarcophagi of Gamma Geminorum IV," explained Tujimori, sounding as if she were giving a lecture to her students. "And so naturally we assumed they were the burial chambers of kings. But tricorder scans showed that the deceased were buried only with the clothing and ornaments they were wearing at the time. And no weapons. It was extremely puzzling, but now I know the answer."

If she had figured something out, Caeli was still a long way behind her. He picked up a fragment of the stone and noticed that it was a relatively recent break. "Why did you open this one?" he asked. "I thought it was standard procedure not to open a burial without a full repressor field in operation, and a stasis pod nearby to hold the remains."

Tujimori nodded. "Correct. It was Cortez who opened this one, alone and without authorization. He is young and impatient. And I think that he wanted to impress me."

Caeli was beginning to see what she meant. "And this happened...?"

"Four days ago."

Caeli knelt by the shaft, trying to see what was inside. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he could just make out a desiccated body, little more than a crumbling skeleton. "So the parasite was sealed in here with the body. Cortez must have let it loose."

"Luke," said Tujimori, moving closer to him, "I have been thinking. There are many examples of symbiotic beings. If this is an intelligent being, do we not have a duty as scientists to help it?"

"Help it?" This was an angle that Caeli had simply not considered until now. "But Cortez is brain dead. You saw Penner's tricorder scan. It killed him, and it's just using his body as something to move around in! Even now it's trying to do the same with Mason!"

"I understand what you are saying," said the archaeologist, "but perhaps killing Cortez was an accident. It was sealed inside the crypt for many years. At least we should try to learn about it."

"If we had time I'd say yes, Kikuro. But we don't. Under the circumstances--"

And just then a large rock cracked against Caeli's skull, nearly knocking him out.

[Atoz 77]

In the camp, the afternoon was moving towards evening. Holbek and Mason paused for a rest while Penner and Orise quickly gathered up the rucksacks. Penner thought about taking the tents down, too, but there would only be herself and Orise to carry them, and they were already loaded down with five duffle bags. They would just have to leave them behind.

As she was thinking this over, Penner heard a noise in the jungle, just beyond the clearing. Bushes were waving as if something large were moving. She put down the bags she was carrying and climbed on a rock to get a better look. There was Cortez, reeling along at a fairly steady gait, cutting across the trail and lumbering through the jungle. His torn jumpsuit was hanging in ragged streamers on his tall, slender frame, making him look like an animated scarecrow.

"It's him!" Penner shouted. Fumbling for the phaser on her belt, she slipped off the rock and landed hard on the soft dirt. Scrambling to her feet, she fired in the direction she had last seen him. She heard pounding feet behind her as Holbek ran up, firing Tujimori's phaser wildly in the same direction.

"What? Where is he?" demanded the engineer, pulling to a halt and peering around.

"I don't know," blurted Penner. "I think I got him." Cautiously she advanced a few steps, with Holbek reluctantly following to cover her. It was pretty clear that she hadn't hit him at all.

***

Caeli's comm badge chirped at the same time as Tujimori's e-phone, but he was too stunned to answer. "This is Orice, doctor. We've just seen Cortez pass the camp. He was heading in the direction of the Temple. Do you want us to chase him?"

"Lieutenant Caeli and myself are at the Temple now," Tujimori replied, reaching down and snatching his comm badge off of his uniform. "Wait for us at the shuttlecraft. I think the two of us can handle him."

Caeli reached one hand up to his aching head, feeling the blood seeping into his hair. He struggled to fight off the dizziness, tried to focus on finding the phaser he had dropped, but he could hardly even see.

Tujimori beat him to it, reaching casually down to pick up the weapon. "We came here 3,000 years ago," she said, "when our own world died. But we were too hungry. The primitives discovered our presence too soon." She turned to stroll along the long wall, gesturing at the octagons with Caeli's phaser. "They could not kill us, so they sealed our hosts inside these sarcophagi. Fourteen of us."

Caeli's vision was starting to clear now. His head was throbbing, but he could rest his back upright against the wall without falling over. "What are you, then? Just parasites?"

"We are a superior form of life, Luke," the parasite said, smiling with Tujimori's face. "We pass on our memories genetically. We can exist indefinitely, absorbing our food from the electromagnetic waves of the universe itself. But we require a host body for Reproduction. We are easily able to access your primitive neural systems, and from that point on the host becomes nothing more than our vehicle."

Caeli shook his head, which nearly caused him to black out again. "Cortez broke you out, and as a reward, you destroyed his mind. Is that what you're saying? We're nothing more than vehicles to you?"

"The one you call Cortez released my parent," she said sweetly. "After two days, She converted his bodily tissues and underwent fission, giving birth to me, who infected Tujimori. It is unfortunate that he injured himself, thus leading you to use your sensing device. But that is no matter. Once I release the other thirteen with this weapon you have so obligingly provided, you will help us to infect the other humans. And on the Odysseus, there will be many hosts."

"Help you?" scoffed Caeli, groaning softly from the pain the movement caused. "I don't think so."

She strode towards him, reaching up with both hands and tearing open the front of her camp shirt. The skin of her chest was glistening. At first Caeli thought it was merely perspiration -- he was sweating rivers himself in this sultry atmosphere -- but the shiny, faintly luminescent surface was moving. As she leaned closer, tiny tendrils began to separate and weave themselves together into a vaguely snakelike form. "Yes, you will," the alien said. "As you see, I am about to give birth to my own Daughter..."

***

"You can fly this thing, can't you?" said Holbek, giving the side of the Telemachus a good kick.

Penner looked at the engineer as if he had suddenly grow two extra heads. "You don't seriously think I'd leave Lt. Caeli and Dr. Tujimori behind, do you?"

"But you can fly it?"

"Well, I took a basic piloting class," the comm officer admitted. "I can turn on the engines and program the course, but that's not the same thing as--"

"Excellent!" said Holbek. "I've flown civilian shuttles. Between the two of us, we won't have any problem---"

"Yes we will, because it's not going to happen!" said Penner, not quite logically, but with plenty of emotion behind her words.

Just then, Orice's voice cried out from inside the shuttle. "Amelia, what's happening?"

Mason had been strapped into one of the starboard side seats, which had been reclined all the way back to form a couch. As soon as they came through the hatch, Holbek and Penner could tell that he was in distress. Orice, who had been sitting talking to him, was backing away in alarm. "Where's your phaser?" demanded Holbek. "Give him another shot of Delta rays! Quick!"

"No, wait a minute," said Penner, opening her tricorder. "This is something different." Mason was shifting restlessly in his seat, but he wasn't crying out in pain as he had before. "The parasite's metabolic rate has jumped 20%. Why would it do that?" She swept the tricorder around the compartment, punching buttons and making comparisons. "It's feeding on the slight EM radiation coming off the engine pods!"

"Feeding?" said Orice, wrinkling her nose in disgust.

Holbek fumbled with his own phaser, raising the setting to maximum. "We've got to kill it now, then. No other choice. I'm sorry about this, Mason..."

"Wait!" said Penner. "Let me think. If it feeds on EM frequencies..." Suddenly she sat down in the co-pilot's chair and began frantically pushing buttons on console. A wailing burst of noise came out of the cockpit speakers, causing Orice and Holbek to clutch at their ears. Penner, with the long practise of a communications officer, merely placed one finger in her left ear and ignored it.

Mason had stopped squirming. He lay back in the couch with something like a sigh of relief, as something began wriggling underneath the front of his shirt. Holbek cautiously reached for the seam and tore it open, holding his phaser ready in the other hand just in case.

A tentacle-like appendage, as transparent as clear jelly, was emerging from the middle of his sternum, waving slightly like a snake-charmer's cobra. As they watched in horror, several slender tendrils joined it, merging with it and making it thicker. The wormlike thing began crawling, over the front of his shirt and across his abdomen. Once it was completely detached from his body -- and it was surprising how much of it there was -- it plopped to the deck of the shuttlecraft. Holbek immediately fired his phaser at the thing and vaporized it.

"What did you do?" asked Orice, still panting from the shock of seeing the thing.

With the click of a button, Penner turned off the noise. "I figured if it feeds on EM, there's got to be some frequencies it likes and some that it doesn't. Some might even be poisonous to it. It just hit it with as much tri-axialated white noise as I could. I think it was the Epsilon band that did the trick."

"I bet you gave it a heck of a stomach ache!" said Holbek. "If it had a stomach."

"What do we do now?" asked Orice.

"We go help Lt. Caeli," said Penner, setting her face in grim determination. "You want to fly the shuttle, Mr. Holbek? Now's your chance!"

[Atoz 77]

A loud thud echoed through the chamber above them, followed by the patter of shambling footsteps coming down the stairway. Cortez emerged into the burial room and paused, a slow smile of triumph spreading across his face. Tujimori nodded in greeting.

Caeli took full advantage of the distraction. With his back braced against the stone wall, he drew up both legs and he kicked out in front of him, catching Tujimori on the knees. She tumbled over backwards, but unfortunately didn't drop his phaser. His head pounding from the exertion, Caeli scrambled to the right, picking up a chunk of rock nearly the size of a football.

Cortez was coming after him, taking aim with Mason's phaser. Then he lowered the weapon again. "There's no need to damage the host," he said, glancing down to change the setting. Caeli threw the rock with all his strength, catching the other man squarely in the chest. Cortez merely shrugged off the impact, but the lieutenant followed up by leaping on him, grappling for the phaser.

His opponent was strong, wiry, and apparently unable to feel pain. Caeli tried a wrestling hold that applied pressure to the already badly burned arm, but Cortez held that same smug grin on his face. It was then that Caeli truely realized that the man he was struggling with was only a dead shell. There was only the alien parasite, clothed in the tattered remains of what had once been a man named Cortez. And behind them, Tujimori was rising to her feet.

Caeli twisted around, kicked out at his opponent's left leg, and executed a reverse body slam, bringing his weight down on the flexors of Cortez' forearm. The hand gripping the phaser popped open. Without thinking any further, Caeli snatched up the weapon, turned it around, and stabbed the trigger as he rolled clear.

The alien parasite, planning to blast open the stone slabs that were keeping its fellows prisoner, had adjusted the phaser to its highest setting. The beam splattered Cortez across the far wall in the form of a disintegrating layer of ash. "NO!" Tujimori yelled.

Caeli rose to his knees, breathing hard, the wound on his head throbbing and sending fresh rivulets of blood down his face. Tujimori looked disdainfully at the phaser he was trying to keep pointed at her. "Luke," she said, flashing him her most engaging smile. "Do you think I am unaware of your attraction to this host? You inferior beings are such slaves to your emotions, especially emotions of love. I do not believe you have it in you to kill her." Caeli raised his left arm to wipe the sweat out of his eyes, realizing as he did so that she was right. He couldn't do it!

"Put down that weapon and surrender to the inevitable."

There was a faint rumbling noise from overhead, like distant thunder. For a moment, Caeli in his despair thought of cave-ins. Maybe the whole temple was going to come crashing down on both of them, and save him from making this decision! Something momentarily blocked out the light filtering down through the aperature, and only then did he recognize the whine of the Telemachus' atmospheric turbines.

His comm badge, lying somewhere on the floor, chirped twice, and the faint voice of Ensign Penner echoed thinly through the dark chamber. "Lieutenant? Lieutenant Caeli? Are you there? Please respond!" Tujimori looked down at the tiny device, regarding it as an inconsequential distraction at the apex of her triumph. She raised the phaser to blow it to pieces...

...And the most awful racket anyone could imagine poured out of it! It was like a thousand off-key banshees screaming at once. Caeli thought his head was going to split open.

But Tujimori's body jerked upright and rigid, every muscle quivering in one massive spasm of contraction, her mouth open in a soundless howl of... of what? Of frustration? Of surprise? Of defeat?

A clear, transparent snake, as large as a boa constrictor, began flowing out of her body and coiling on the stone floor. Immediately following it came a second parasite, much larger. Caeli didn't stop to wonder what was happening. He raised the phaser and vaporized them both.

The horrible banshee sound ceased, and Caeli hurried, stumbling, to Tujimori's fallen body. "Kikuro?" he said, gently slapping her face. "Kikuro! Speak to me! Please, say something!"

Her eyes fluttered open. "Lieutenant?" she whispered. "What has been happening?"

"That's a long story," he replied, grinning with relief. Only then did he register Penner's voice, still patiently calling to him. He frantically clambered across the floor, groping for his comm badge. "I'm okay," he said. "That is, we're both okay. Can you get us out of here?"

"You bet, sir!" Penner answered.

***

Doctor Pierce insisted upon a forty-eight hour quarantine, to make absolutely certain that not a single cell from the parasites had managed to smuggle itself onto the Odysseus. During and after that, they were all subjected to medical examinations and debriefings, so that none of them had much time to be alone. "There's no reason for you to feel guilty that you couldn't save Paulo Cortez, lieutenant," said Pierce, four days later during yet another visit to Sickbay. "If you saw Ensign Penner's tricorder, the parasite had already decimated his cerebral cortex. Not to mention his postcentral gyrus and his corpus callosium."

"Thanks, doctor," said Caeli, trying to smile as he made for the door. "I'll keep telling myself that."
As he walked down the curving corridor, he heard the raucous laughter of Professor Shaughnessy up ahead. Two seconds later, the entire group came into view -- Shaughnessy, Tujimori, Orice, Mason and Holbek, being escorted to the transporter room by Captain Atoz and Ensign Penner.

"There you are, my boy!" crowed the professor, as he caught sight of Caeli. "The Aurora is waiting alongside to whisk us homewards, but I couldn't take our leave without extending my thanks once again for a Job Well Done! You are a credit to that uniform, sir! An absolute Credit!"

Caeli said something modest in reply, but his heart really wasn't in it. As they all moved into the transporter room, good-byes were said all around. The men shook hands, the women hugged. He looked in Kikuro's eyes for the last time, and it suddenly came home to him why he had been avoiding her since their return. He had been attracted to her, and she to him (he thought). There had been a chemistry there. And then to discover that she had been controlled by an alien parasite, that it had all been nothing more than a ruse, her only thought to use him to help spread her brood as widely as possible...

Professor Shaughnessy clapped his hands to get everyone's attention. "Well, we mustn't keep the Aurora waiting, my friends," he bellowed, and after wringing Captain Atoz' hand one final time, he shooed his students onto the platform as if they were a flock of errant chickens.

Caeli was standing at parade rest, his eyes on the deck plates. "Lieutenant?" said a voice, softly, tentatively. "Luke?" He looked up.

"I wanted you to know," Kikuro whispered, leaning very close to him so that the others wouldn't overhear, "that the parasite tapped into my higher neural functions in order to use our language and our customs. Being unfamiliar with our species, she had no choice but to copy my emotional states as well, to behave as I would."

Caeli couldn't believe what he was hearing. Was she saying...?

"If you noticed a certain affinity between us," she said, giving him that smile he remembered so well, "I wanted you to know -- that part was genuine." Then she reached up, kissed him on the mouth, and hurried to join the others.

The shimmering blue lights of the transporter effect had faded completely away by the time Caeli could move again. "Is there a problem, Mr. Caeli?" said Captain Atoz, discreetly breaking into the whirlwind of his thoughts.

He turned. The Captain was, to all appearances, politely waiting for an explanation why his chief helmsman was standing there with his mouth wide open. Behind him, Penner was trying hard to suppress a snicker. "Uh... no, sir," said Caeli. "No problems at all."

--- THE END ---