by Dayton Ward
“Concentrate fire on that target!” she yelled above the howl of the Tomol lances, aiming her phaser and adding the weapon’s discharge to the increasing din. Theriault and the rest of the Endeavour landing party followed suit, and within seconds the creature was caught in a web of phaser and lance fire. It tried to dodge and weave around the attacks but continued to be struck no matter in which direction it moved. Finally, the winged demon altered its flight path and shot straight up, vanishing from the clearing into the night sky.
“Look!” Lerax yelled.
Stano turned in the direction the Edoan was pointing and saw more discharges from Tomol lances ripping through the air and catching another of the Changed in a three-way crossfire, and unlike its leader, this creature succumbed to the attack and fell from the sky, disappearing somewhere among the trees to Stano’s left.
“Not all of them are as powerful as Nimur,” Kerlo shouted. Wielding a lance of his own, the Tomol leaned out from behind the tree he was using for cover and aimed the weapon into the sky before releasing another burst of whatever energy it commanded. Two of his companions and three members of Lerax’s security detail joined in the attack, their fire congregating on another of the Changed. Their strikes were only glancing blows as the winged creature was able to avoid the worst of the assault, flying past the clearing and disappearing in the forest somewhere behind Stano.
“Our weapons are having only marginal effect,” Lerax called out between shots. “We are already at our maximum settings.”
Theriault, gripping her phaser in both hands, took aim at something Stano could not see. “We’ll drain our power packs if this drags out much longer.” She fired the weapon at another Changed, her shot joining three Tomol lances. The creature’s body lurched from the force of the attack and it fell motionless from the sky, crashing through the high branches of a towering tree at the far edge of the clearing, beyond one of the impact craters inflicted on the area during the Endeavour’s orbital bombardment.
“Incoming!” someone shouted to Stano’s right, and she turned with weapon raised in time to see one of the Changed swooping down and reaching out to snatch one of her security people. Cries of pain and terror split the air as the creature skimmed past the trees and back into the sky. Several phaser beams attempted to track it, but the Changed evaded the attacks, its maneuvers laced with the agonized screams of the hapless Endeavour crewman in its grip. Then the creature emitted its own chilling shriek, and a wave of horror and disbelief overcame Stano as the Changed tore the security officer’s head and legs from his torso. Blood, bone, and tissue exploded in all directions as pieces of the mutilated corpse fell from the creature’s grip before the winged monster flew away.
No!
* * *
Were it not for the unchained heat of her rage, Nimur would have collapsed in an exhausted heap and dropped to the forest floor. Her mind was a blur of frenzied and disjointed thought as the attack progressed. What she had assumed would be a quick and devastating strike against the strangers had grown beyond her ability to comprehend. The fire lances wielded by Tomol as well as the strangers’ own weapons were proving at least somewhat effective, forcing Nimur and her followers to take defensive action to avoid injury.
There had been no time to relish the form she had taken, her wings spread out to either side of her body as she held massive claws before her, searching for prey. The wind in her face was intoxicating as she willed her new body to sail among the clouds. In the sky around her, she sensed the uncertain thoughts of Kintaren and the others as they struggled to adapt to the chaotic situation.
Momentary grief seized her as she felt Tane’s consciousness fade, the Changed unable to escape the concentration of fire lances that found him in the sky. Nimur saw his limp form falling to the ground as she spread her wings and soared away from the battle, intending to circle the area in search of a new line of attack. Rage flared within her, a shroud of harsh crimson falling across her perceptions. This could not continue, or all would be lost. Like Nimur herself, her fellow Changed were guided more by instinct than experience or skill, relying on the strength flowing through their bodies and their ability to alter their forms as a means of intimidating and overpowering the strangers. So far, the results had been mixed, and for a moment it seemed as though the strangers might have the advantage.
Then she sensed Kintaren claiming a prize. Her mind’s eye tracked her sister as she swooped down and snatched the red-garbed stranger and ascended back toward the clouds. Her quarry struggled in her grip, but only until she ripped its head from its body. Nimur felt the surge of gratification rushing through Kintaren, as her sister—now fully in the throes of the Change—screeched in triumph before darting back toward the ground.
The ground.
Yes, Nimur decided. Attacking the strangers from the air had proved hazardous. Perhaps a new approach was in order.
We must take our fight from the sky. Follow me. She cast the command toward Kintaren and the others, sensing their understanding as they turned and prepared to attack again.
* * *
“What the hell are they doing now?” shouted Theriault, and the Sagittarius’s first officer took aim with her phaser and fired. Without thinking, Stano turned in the same direction and leveled her weapon, but before she could press its firing stud she gaped at the new nightmare advancing across the clearing. Having dropped from the sky, the Changed had altered their forms again. Their wings were gone, and their humanoid appearance had grown and expanded. Their green skin had darkened and hardened, reminding Stano of the hide of a large reptile, and that resemblance was strengthened by their flattened, elongated heads and facial features. Their mouths now sported long rows of jagged teeth and their arms ended in enlarged hands with long, curled claws. Four of the creatures were crossing the burned, devastated expanse of the crash site, and Stano was certain that their eyes were locked on her.
“Fire!” she shouted, taking aim and firing as Theriault continued to shoot. Along the tree line, members of the Endeavour landing party and the Tomol were shifting their fire to engage the new threat, but tracking the advancing Changed was proving harder now that they had taken to the ground. The creatures were jumping and dancing over the obliterated soil, almost taunting the defenders and their weapons. Stano fired her phaser as one ran to her left, catching it in a crossfire with two of her security people and a Tomol lance. Another of the creatures got close enough to the first line of fallen trees and other debris acting as nominal protection for members to reach into the foliage. When it pulled back its massive arm, it had in its grasp one of the Tomol, and Stano watched in horror as the victim was eviscerated in seconds. Still reeling from the loss of one of her own people, this latest casualty further rattled her. The Changed had halted itself, enjoying its dismemberment of its victim long enough to attract weapons fire from the trees, and a moment later it succumbed to the new attack, falling limp to the darkened soil. Someone, one of Stano’s people, fired at the motionless Changed as though to ensure it stayed down.
“Commander!” Lerax shouted, snapping Stano from her shock, and she looked over to see the lieutenant tossing something in her direction. The security chief’s communicator landed at her feet. “It’s the captain!”
She held the device to her lips. “Stano here!” She followed the call with a phaser burst at one of the Changed darting by overhead. “It’s getting crazy down here, Captain.”
“Kate,” Khatami said over the communications frequency, “we’re tracking something heading in your direction. It looks to have been launched from the vicinity of the Preserver artifact and that underground cavern.”
“It’s not Nimur or more of the Changed?”
“This isn’t a life-form. We can’t tell what it is, but it’s coming at you damned fast, too fast for us to get a weapons lock. Get ready for beam-out. I’ve already got security teams standing by in the transporter room. We�
�ll deal with the Tomol once you’re back aboard.”
Had Nimur summoned more followers from the unchanged Tomol, or—worse—found some Preserver weapon or other technology to use against Stano and her people? The idea that Nimur might now have control over something from the subterranean complex was even more frightening to Stano than the scene continuing to unfold around her.
And that’s saying something.
“Copy that,” she replied. “In fact, tell the transporter room to hurry the hell up.”
An enormous dark mass crashed through the trees to her left. She flinched and rolled to her side as something thick and heavy swung through the space her head had occupied only a split second before. She caught a glimpse of the towering creature that had just missed her with the claws of its massive right arm and heard its growl of frustration. Pushing herself to her feet, Stano threw herself over a fallen tree and rolled into a small culvert. She ignored the dirt in her eyes and mouth, scrambling and crawling over another large rock even as she heard the heavy footfalls of the Changed pursuing her.
“Stay down, Commander!”
The warning came mere heartbeats before multiple beams of energy cut through the growing darkness, each illuminating the menacing creature as it struck. The Changed howled in pain from the ferocious barrage, staggering backward toward the clearing. Behind her, Stano heard footsteps coming closer as members of her team and at least two Tomol pressed the attack, pushing the creature farther from the forest and onto the open ground. A final salvo of phaser fire collided with the Changed, and it fell backward, over the lip of an impact crater, and disappeared from sight. Leading a charge forward, Lerax, flanked by two of his security people, verified that the creature was down.
Still holding Lerax’s communicator and trying to catch her breath, Stano barked into the unit, “Endeavour, what’s going on? Why are we still here?”
Khatami replied, “The transporter room’s reporting some kind of interference on the surface that’s preventing them from getting a lock.” After what to Stano felt like an eternity of silence over the open channel, the Endeavour captain’s voice all but exploded from the communicator, “We’re not going to make it, and we can’t track it with phasers or torpedoes. It’s coming down right on top of you! Take cover!”
Shouting warnings to her people and their Tomol charges, Stano dropped to the ground behind the boulder, trying to pull herself into a ball while squirming to keep the clearing within her field of vision. Something in the distant sky was growing larger, arcing over the horizon. A faint, dull rumbling accompanied it, and within seconds Stano could make out a trail of flame and smoke gushing from the object’s back end as it altered its trajectory and began a plunging descent. Members of her team were yelling final calls to take cover, but then Stano’s attention fixed on one of the Changed.
Still exhibiting its hideous reptilian appearance, the creature had stopped its advance on the tree line fifty or so meters from Stano’s position. To her amazement, the thing turned and craned its thick neck so it could look skyward as though transfixed by the approaching object.
What does it know?
It was a silly question, Stano decided, and it would go unanswered. With just enough time to pull herself back behind the boulder, she hunkered on the ground and raised her arms over her head an instant before everything around her flashed white.
14
On the Endeavour bridge’s main viewscreen, a pale dot appeared on a computer-generated topographical map and began expanding. Atish Khatami stared in open-mouthed horror, certain she was watching the obliteration of more than a dozen of her crew.
“Picking up an energy surge!” shouted Stephen Klisiewicz, lifting his face from the sensor viewer at his station and turning toward the screen, and Khatami saw that the lieutenant’s face was a mask of confusion. “But it’s not reading like an impact or a detonation.” He scowled. “I don’t understand.”
Khatami watched the pale circle at the center of the viewscreen cease its enlargement at the same time several pinpoints of light began appearing, superimposed over the map representing the Klingon bird-of-prey crash site and the surrounding region of the Suba island. What were they witnessing? The deployment of a force field, or some kind of electromagnetic pulse? Just as long as it meant her people had not been vaporized, Khatami was happy to entertain any and all explanations no matter how bizarre they sounded.
“What the hell is going on, Klisiewicz?” She pushed herself from her chair and crossed the command well to the railing separating her from the science officer.
His attention fixed on his sensor readings, Klisiewicz replied, “Sensors are showing multiple energy discharges, Captain. I . . .” He paused, and to Khatami he looked as though he might be trying to press his head even farther into the hooded viewer. “Whatever it is, it definitely wasn’t an explosive. Judging by these readings, the object is carrying out some sort of automated firing sequence, like a drone weapon, though I can’t figure out what’s controlling it.”
“Get me Commander Stano,” Khatami said, glancing toward Lieutenant Estrada, “or any member of the landing party. I want an update on their condition.” She knew her first officer’s communicator had gone dead moments earlier, but those carried by other members of her team still appeared to be functional.
“Trying to hail anyone, Captain,” replied the communications officer, “but I’m not getting any indication that our signal’s getting through.”
“Keep on it.” Looking over her shoulder, Khatami asked, “McCormack, can you get a lock on that thing yet?”
At the navigator’s station, the lieutenant shook her head. “No, Captain. The object is emitting some kind of inhibitor that is affecting our sensor and targeting systems.”
“What the hell is it?” Utter helplessness was on the verge of seizing Khatami in its viselike grip as she considered the plight of Stano and her team on the surface. What sort of insidious weapon had Nimur found to use against her own people, and what threat did it pose to the Endeavour or the Sagittarius and their crews?
“Captain,” Klisiewicz said, “you’re not going to believe this, but the object isn’t targeting our people. It’s going after the Tomol . . . I mean, the Changed.”
* * *
It took Katherine Stano an extra second or two to verify that she was not, in fact, dead.
The burst of intense white light should have come with a thunderous roar and a shockwave that shredded her body at the subatomic level—assuming they were fortunate enough to be offered instant death by the incoming weapon—but instead all the commander heard was the whine of discharging energy accompanied by an odd rumbling in the ground. Cries of alarm peppered the forest around her, all of them fainter than the chilling shrieks Stano heard coming from the clearing up ahead. Pulling herself from where she lay huddled against the boulder, she peered around the massive rock and got her first look at the latest bit of weirdness this planet had to offer.
Hovering overhead the glade was the newly arrived object, a squat cylinder with rounded ends and featuring a set of what to Stano looked like six stabilizer fins mounted in evenly spaced intervals around its core. The thing emitted a constant low hum, which was accented by rhythmic higher-pitched pulses that were synchronized to the energy discharges bursting forth from a dozen emitters positioned along the object’s outer skin. Each of the emitters was releasing a white-blue beam of energy that swept across the desolated expanse of the crash site, and in the beams’ wake, Stano could see that what was left behind was . . . dead?
Not dead, she told herself. This is . . . something else.
“Oh my god,” Stano heard Theriault saying, as the Sagittarius’s first officer pushed up from where she had thrown herself behind the thick trunk of a fallen tree. “Are you seeing this?”
Stano could only nod. Even with the dim illumination afforded by the dying rays of the Nereus sun as dus
k loomed, she was able to see the silhouettes of several trees that had survived the Endeavour’s bombardment, only to be caught up in whatever weapon the hovering drone was employing. Moments ago, their towering branches had been swaying in the slight breeze playing over the clearing, but now they stood still, devoid of motion as well as the vibrant orange-green colors of their leaves and their auburn trunks. All the life they once had exuded was gone.
“That damned thing’s petrifying everything in its path,” she said. It was like a vision spawned from legend, an ancient tale reimagined for the sole purpose of terrifying her. What was the name of that monster from Greek mythology? The repulsive female with a head of snakes rather than hair, with the power to turn to stone anyone who dared gaze upon her?
You can look it up later.
The object’s saturation of the clearing lasted for at least another full minute, by Stano’s reckoning, at which point its barrage of energy beams ceased, and the area fell to near silence save for the weapon’s low hum. Even the wind itself seemed to have faded, as though the very air surrounding the crash site had solidified. Stano raised her phaser and aimed it at the object, even though she suspected that her weapon was feeble if not useless against whatever had been set against her and her people.
Not us, Stano realized. Them.
“It was targeting the Changed,” she said.
“This is what Ysan, the Tomol priestess, told us about,” Theriault replied. “She described the wordstone turning Changed into stone. She called them ‘the Endless.’ This must be what that meant.”
Stano watched as the object rotated in place before lifting from the clearing and arcing back into the sky whence it had come. Only after it had disappeared from sight did the first officer ponder something she probably should have considered when the mysterious drone had arrived.
“Damn it,” she said, rising from her crouch and stepping around the boulder. “Did anybody think to scan that thing?”