Star Trek Discovery- Fear Itself

by James Swallow

  “Just unconscious,” said the nurse as he applied an injector to her neck. “I think she fell and struck her head.”

  Saru glanced down at the Peliar. She was hairless, with skin the color of dry earth and a high, ridged forehead bisected by a long nasal rib. Like all Peliars, she had dual sets of nostrils and they twitched in unison as she started to come around. Saru checked his universal translator and held his breath.

  “What . . . happened?” Her eyes fluttered open and tried to focus.

  “You are all right. Please don’t make any sudden moves,” began Zoxom, in as soothing a tone as he could manage over the howl of the sirens.

  His request was ignored as the Peliar woman reacted in shock to the sight of the intruders aboard her ship. She jerked backward, snatching a beam cutter from the tool belt around her waist and brandishing it like a dagger. “Who are you? Keep back!”

  “I am Lieutenant Saru of the Federation Starship Shenzhou, this is Nurse Zoxom.” Saru raised his hands and tried to look nonthreatening. “We’ve come to help you.”

  “Nathal said there was another ship on sensors . . .” She blinked, distrust written across her face. “Did you do this to us?”

  “We are here to help,” reiterated Saru. “When we could not reach you via subspace radio, we boarded your ship.” He gestured upward to where the Yang had force-docked. “We mean you no harm.”

  “Get away from her!” The shout came from close at hand, and Saru spun to see more of the Peliar crew emerging from the smoke. Another female, this one in a similar uniform and headdress but pale green in color, led from the front. She drew a spindly pistol from a belt holster and aimed it in Saru’s direction. “Touch her and you’ll regret it!”

  “Commander Nathal . . .” The other Peliar spoke as she struggled to get to her feet, and Saru ignored the threat, helping her regain her footing. “I am all right.”

  “You are intruders on my vessel,” said Nathal, disregarding her subordinate’s words. “I have every right to shoot you where you stand!”

  “Your ship is malfunctioning and that’s your first thought?” Johar appeared behind Zoxom, holding his engineering kit tightly in one hand. “Shoot first, accept help later?”

  “What did you say to me?” Nathal’s face darkened.

  “I’m saying, don’t ignore the chance to save your vessel!” Saru had never seen Johar this angry about anything. “We don’t have time for niceties, so put that damned gun away and help us stop that core from breaching, or else we all die!”

  The chief engineer’s words were stark and cutting, and Saru found himself nodding. “Please,” he began, “I’m sure none of us wish to perish today.”

  “We can solve our own problems,” Nathal shot back, glaring at the other Peliar woman. “Hekan, you fell silent! I need your report!”

  “With respect,” said Hekan as she detached herself from Saru, “this is not a time to choose obstinacy over survival. We could use more hands.”

  Saru counted only a half-dozen Peliars on the platform. “Where are the rest of your engineering staff?”

  “This is everyone,” Nathal growled, finally jamming her weapon back into its holster. “The rest are injured.”

  “I can help with that,” said Zoxom. “Take me to your injured.”

  Nathal’s quadripartite nostrils flared, but then she relented, barking an order to another of her crew. “Dakas, take the alien to the infirmary.” Then she glared at Saru and the chief engineer. “Very well. You may assist us here. But if you try anything—”

  “Sure, whatever.” Johar was already turning his back on her, jabbing a finger at a sandy-faced Peliar in a blue outfit. “You! Where are the injectors?” The alien crewman pointed and led the engineer away.

  “Do all Federation officers speak that way to their superiors?” muttered Hekan.

  “Some more than others,” Saru admitted. “Is there a monitoring station I can access?”

  “This way.” Hekan led him to a U-shaped console with an interface of sliding control rods. “I was attempting to avert a photon surge when the deck shifted . . .” She touched her head where Zoxom had applied a dressing. “You have to forgive my commander, she’s quite protective of her crew.”

  Saru scanned the system. “Understandable.” A worrying number of warning flags blinked across the screen of his tricorder. “If you only have a small complement on board, perhaps we should consider evacuating all of you to our shuttle—”

  “No,” Hekan cut him off before he could finish. “We’re not abandoning this ship, there are . . . there’s too much at stake.” Her stubby fingers pushed and pulled at the sliders, but to no avail. “Curse this! The decay rate in the core isn’t slowing.”

  “Lieutenant Commander!” Saru heard Yashae shout through the haze, her voice coming from somewhere back toward the hatchway. “I think we can save this barge, but it’s not going to be easy! We need to bleed off the energy buildup and take the warp core offline, but the safety interlocks won’t disengage! It’s caught in a loop!”

  Saru peered at his tricorder and saw the problem. “The sensors governing the interlocks are malfunctioning.” He looked down the length of the shuddering core stack, picking out a broken section of the framework. The system that would normally have allowed the crew to attempt this risky override was unable to release, the computer doubtless still operating with false readings from damaged sensors telling it everything was working well.

  “I can’t switch off the interlocks from here,” said Hekan, her face creasing in annoyance. “They keep rejecting the commands!”

  “You must have a secondary reset control.” Saru cast around, looking for a manual switch.

  “We do.” Hekan pointed upward, to a narrow, enclosed catwalk that ran the length of the chamber and down toward the central spinal frame of the starship. “It’s inside the maintenance crawlway, a set of two levers behind a blue panel.”

  “Ah.” Saru belatedly realized that he had just volunteered himself to climb up there and throw the switches. He couldn’t stop himself from looking down, through the mesh plate of the decking beneath his feet, right into the black abyss of the engine spaces beneath.

  “You’ll need a gravity belt to get up there,” Hekan was saying.

  “I won’t,” Saru told her, slinging his tricorder over his arm and rolling his shoulders. This is a poor survival choice, said a voice in the back of his head. It sounded worryingly like one of the elders from his youth, admonishing him for venturing out after curfew. It could kill you.

  “Yes,” Saru said to himself. “If in doubt, assume everything will kill you.” The Kelpien crouched and coiled the muscles in his long, whipcord legs; and then, from a dead start, he leaped upward to grab the bottom of the catwalk dangling three meters over their heads.

  • • •

  The next few moments passed in a fear-charged blur for Saru. Acting on instinct, he hauled himself up onto the walkway and scuttled down the length of it toward the enclosed section. He didn’t allow himself to think about the empty space below his hooves, how one random shudder from the Peliar ship’s spaceframe could fling him off and send him down to be dashed apart on the machinery below. He only thought about one step after another and a set of levers behind a blue panel.

  The scorching thermal release coming off the damaged warp core rose past him in shimmering waves, and the spiracles in his bare skin itched as they bled off the heat. Saru ducked low and squeezed himself into the catwalk proper, bumping his head on the curved ceiling.

  “Do you see it?” Hekan shouted up at him.

  “Not yet,” he called back.

  An unpleasant electrostatic hum resonated through the frame of the metal, oscillating at a frequency that to Kelpien senses was like having a needle driven through one’s skull. That, and the heat, and the churning terror he was barely keeping under control, made it hard for Saru to concentrate. He screwed up his courage and pushed on, the access conduit widening into a small chamber
ringed with varicolored panels.

  Saru swept around and found the blue one, wrenching it off with a quick twist. Behind it there were the two levers, and he allowed himself the briefest flash of relief. He gripped them both and was about to pull when he heard a noise below him.

  The Kelpien looked down. Crouching there, beneath the mesh of the deck plate under his boots, sandwiched between the lower section of the catwalk and another crawlway, was a humanoid that was most certainly not a native of Peliar Zel. Heavyset and stocky, the being was likely from a high-gravity world. It wore ragged, unkempt clothing, and the alien had six limbs, a pair of thick legs, and two sets of muscular arms. Their eyes met. He glimpsed the mirror of his own fear in the other being’s gaunt features, the certain knowledge of imminent death only heartbeats away. The alien looked up at him imploringly, and Saru saw that one of the being’s arms was trapped beneath a baffle plate that had dropped into place when the overload began.

  The other being’s circumstances would be meaningless if Saru did not complete his task here. He braced himself against the deck and pulled hard on the reset levers.

  • • •

  The warp core gave off a sound like an animal in agony, and Saladin Johar winced in sympathy with the machine.

  Some of the junior ratings aboard the Shenzhou joked about him when they thought he didn’t hear it, suggesting the chief engineer was actually part Betazoid—but that Johar’s empathic sense worked only on mechanical objects and not organic life-forms. Perhaps there was some truth to it, he reflected. A good engineer could almost feel the stresses on their hardware like it was an extension of their own body. This might not have been his vessel, but still he could sense the strain as it resonated across the span of the Peliar ship’s hull.

  “Saru?” he shouted. “Did he do it?”

  “Reset is active!” called Subin, from a nearby control podium. “Emergency core shutdown cycle in progress!”

  “Everyone brace for the outage!” Johar grabbed at a safety rail as the throbbing glow inside the warp core slowed to a gradual stop and then went dark. He felt his body briefly grow lighter as the big ship’s gravity generators went through a power dip, before that passed and the core lit up once again.

  “Cycle complete,” Nathal said grudgingly, her hard gaze boring into a holographic display. “Hopefully the restart won’t kill us all.”

  The Peliar engineer in the blue jumpsuit ran his hands over a gestural interface, and Johar used his tricorder to remotely manipulate the firing sequence of the injector modules. He could see where the problem had originated; a misalignment had set up a destructive cascade effect inside the system that had built and built until it was self-sustaining. Part of his analytical mind-set was dismantling that revelation in the back of his thoughts, trying to understand why such a thing had occurred. But for now, it was more important to get the warp core up into standby mode. Without the power it supplied, other vital systems like life-support would fail and kick off a whole raft of other problems to deal with.

  The pulsing glow began a sluggish ascent from the lower section of the core, a twin band of light descending from the upper array to meet it in the middle. A wave of relief broke over Johar as the pulses moved in unison and collided in synch. The telltale vibration from the alignment error was absent. “Well, there we are,” he said, putting aside a burst of joy at the thought of not perishing. “A little teamwork, and a grisly death for all is averted.”

  “You can go on your way now,” said Nathal, turning her gaze on him. “The problem has been dealt with.”

  “You’re welcome,” Subin replied, with a snort.

  Johar shot the Mazarite a warning look, then glanced at Nathal. “Seriously? You don’t actually believe that we fixed this, do you?” He shook his head. “Commander, what just happened was an act of survival, not a solution.”

  “The human is correct.” The Peliar engineer offered the comment, but quickly wilted under Nathal’s stare and went back to his console.

  “I want you off my ship,” said the alien captain.

  “You have made that abundantly clear,” Johar replied. “But I do my job right, Commander. And I tell you now, if I leave this vessel with my people and you run this warp core back up to operating power, it’d be like I pulled a phaser and shot you myself.” He pointed up toward the injector array. “We need to track down and eliminate the cause of that nadion pulse, because if we don’t, it’ll happen again.” Johar met Nathal’s look. “And next time you come crashing to a halt, help might not be so close at hand.”

  “Or worse . . .” Hekan, the other Peliar woman who seemed to be the ship’s second-in-command, approached from across the platform. “What if it were the Tholians who came to investigate?”

  Invoking the specter of the quarrelsome crystalline beings gave everyone pause. Both the crews knew what kind of threat they represented, and certainly for the Peliars, who lived close to the Assembly’s borders, the danger was all too real.

  Johar released a sigh and raised his hand. “Starfleet respects the sovereignty of Peliar Zel and your authority on this ship, Commander Nathal . . .”

  “You have an unusual way of showing it,” said the captain, ice forming on the words.

  “But I cannot in good conscience leave this vessel until your crew is safe,” Johar went on. “I’m sure you have no desire to risk their lives.”

  Nathal glanced at Hekan, and then to her engineer. Both of them made a gesture with the flat of their hand that Johar guessed was their equivalent of a nod. At length, she spoke again. “When this is over, I will have some words with your commanding officer.”

  “I am sure she will be very happy to listen,” he replied, catching sight of Petty Officer Yashae as the other engineer came through the fading haze.

  “All systems are in low power mode and read stable,” she reported. “The lieutenant did us proud.”

  Johar’s eyes narrowed. “Where is Saru?” He looked around. The Kelpien was nowhere to be seen.

  “He went into the central maintenance channel,” said Hekan. “He didn’t come back out?” Her face fell. “I didn’t think . . .”

  Nathal’s expression turned stormy and she barked out an order to her crew. “Find him!”

  • • •

  Curiosity kills.

  There was a story that Saru had heard many times as a youth, a cautionary tale designed to instruct. It was a sorry narrative about a young Kelpien who disregarded the rules of his society. This fictitious youth, whose name changed depending on whoever was most deserving of admonition that day, grew curious about the prohibited places, to the point that he foolishly ventured into dark and unknown territory. It did not end well for him. For no matter what wonders he saw, the youth would ultimately suffer some terrible fate. And all because he became too inquisitive for his own good.

  Curiosity kills, the elders would say, nodding sagely.

  Now, as Saru carefully picked his way along the length of the curving, enclosed walkway, he wondered why he had never learned the lesson the story had been trying to impart.

  The act of pulling the manual reset levers had also caused the mechanism in the baffle plate to retract, freeing the trapped being beneath the decking. Before Saru could call out to him, the six-limbed alien scrambled away and vanished into the shadowed depths of the long catwalk, the clatter of his feet fading as Saru descended toward the aft spaces of the vessel.

  Saru should have turned back, returned to the gantry and the rest of the damage control party. But curiosity, that old fascination, pulled on him. Holding out his tricorder, Saru took one step, then another, following the non-Peliar into the bowels of the massive transport ship.

  In the dimness, it was difficult for him to estimate the distance he had traveled, but it felt like a long way. More than once, he halted and deliberated about turning around. Each time, curiosity drew him on, but with every step it was at war with his fear.

  The catwalk extended into the first of many
cavernous cargo modules, huge pods that were large enough to encompass an entire city block. Saru wasn’t certain what he expected to see in there—stacks of freight, storage tanks and the like, perhaps—but it wasn’t this.

  Ranged out beneath him, the interior of the module was a chaotic mess of cables strung from every available support, and between them were thick sheets of flexible metal or heavy sailcloth like one might expect to find on a wind-powered watercraft. Tents and enclosures hung from every corner, and bioluminescent lights cast soft, weak color into the darkness. The heavy warmth and earthy scent of living beings in close proximity wafted up to him, and as his eyes adjusted to the low light level, Saru became aware of figures moving around the suspended structures. There were a lot of them, dozens—no, hundreds or more.

  The tricorder in his hand chimed, and he studied the device’s display. He saw the same confused patterns of myriad life signs that Burnham had glimpsed on the Shenzhou’s sensors when they first arrived. What he had thought to be a scanner glitch was nothing of the kind. The cargo module was filled with people.

  Curiosity kills. The words echoed in his thoughts once more, but Saru shook his head to banish them and reached out to grab hold of one of the cables. The alien construct beneath him seemed threatening and gloomy, but Saru had come too far now to draw back from what he had discovered.

  Who are these beings and what are they doing here? He could not return without knowing the answer.

  Slowly and carefully, he descended into the shadows.

  3

  * * *

  The suspended cables and flexible floors formed a makeshift encampment in the middle of the cargo module. Stitched together out of mismatched materials, discarded storage crates, polymer shrouds, and more, there was a kind of threadbare ingenuity to the haphazard structure of it. As Saru worked his way down the cable to what was the “roof” of the settlement, he picked out sections that appeared to be dormitories, and others packed with barrels of some fast-growing fungal matter. Moving along the upper surface, he passed over inverted conical ducts that acted as dew catchers, collecting ambient moisture from the air, harvested from the ship’s life-support system and the exhalations of the people inside the module.