STAR TREK: TNG - The Genesis Wave, Book Two

by John Vornholt

  Of course these wails are real, she thought disgruntledly. They have to function as a prison cell. As Carol washed, she was very careful not to disturb the string tied around her finger. Getting out of the shower, the old woman toweled off and put on a fresh jumpsuit from the closet. She felt a bit weak and hungry, but otherwise fine.

  As if somebody had read her mind, a transporter beam flashed, and a tray of food appeared on her vanity table.

  “Thank you,” she said cheerfully as she crossed to the table and grabbed a slice of toast. She lifted the cover off a bowl and smelled the contents. “Ah, oatmeal with cinnamon. My favorite!”

  “You feel better?” asked a disembodied voice, which sounded vaguely like Jim Kirk.

  She told herself it was Kirk. “Yes, Jim, I feel much better. My compliments to the doctor who took care of me. He did a great job.”

  “Yes, he did,” agreed the voice. “Your vital signs look excellent.”

  “How does the project go?”

  The fake Kirk hesitated before he responded, and Carol tried to keep a cheerful disposition while she waited and ate.

  “Not so well,” said the voice. “There have been some complications with the initial wave. We’d like to do another discharge.”

  And wipe out how many more planets? Carol thought briefly. She purged that thought from her mind and concentrated on how delicious the food tasted, even if it came from a replicator.

  “Whatever you say,” she answered with her mouth full. “I’m always ready to go to my lab.”

  “There’s just one thing,” said this Jim Kirk, who suddenly didn’t sound as confident as before. “You’ll see us, but we still can’t come into close contact with you. It’s not safe.”

  How interesting, thought Marcus. For whom isn’t it safe? she wanted to ask. Instead she concentrated on a problematic equation for the Genesis matrix, so they would think she was working.

  “No kisses or fooling around for a few days,” he added.

  Carol tried not to let her stomach disgorge all the food she had just gulped down, and she forced a laugh. “I just want to see some people—I’m tired of being cooped up in here.”

  “Of course, my darling,” he answered, sounding chipper again. “Sorry, but it was necessary. You were very sick. And we wouldn’t want a relapse, would we?”

  “No, you took good care of me,” answered Carol, injecting a note of truth into the conversation. There was a hint of apology in Kirk’s words, as if they were responsible for getting her sick ... by accident.

  “Anyway, too much kissing isn’t good for anyone,” she said offhandedly.

  Suddenly her bedroom door clicked, then it creaked open a few centimeters. Carol polished off another couple of bites, wiped her mouth with her napkin, then rose to her feet. She walked briskly out the door, anxious to see what was out there with sober eyes.

  The first thing she noticed was the darkness and the outdoor breeze, damp and sulfurous smelling. She had never noticed that smell before. Her island might be out there—or a facsimile of it—but all she could really see were a few dark shapes outlined by a canopy of stars. It looked like every star in the universe was out; she had never seen such a vivid night sky before. On the other hand, she seemed to be on a world bereft of life or light.

  “We’re going to be staying on Regula I from now on,” said a cocky voice. She turned to see the fake Kirk standing about twenty meters away. A pang of love drove deep into her heart, and she was overwhelmed by all her old feelings for the dashing young officer. For a moment, she was certain that she had to be mistaken. Surely, Jim was real!

  Then Carol looked at the thread around her finger, and her memory returned. The Kirk in front of her grew a bit indistinct to her eyes, and she instantly turned her mind to neutral thoughts.

  “Is David on the station?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then it’s all right with me if we stay there.” She smiled wistfully. “I’ve spent plenty of nights there, I can tell you.”

  “That’s good,” said Kirk with relief.

  “What went wrong with the project?” Marcus asked innocently. “The last I heard, it was going better than the simulations.”

  “So it was.” He turned away from her and looked at the brilliant starscape, his face covered in shadows. “The transformation was incomplete on some of the targets. There was interference—a kind of phase-shifting. But we’ve isolated it, and we need your help to make the carrier wave immune to it. We thought we would try again, in a different trajectory.”

  “I’d like to see your scans, the raw data,” replied Marcus, feigning concern.

  “Patience, my darling, we have time to fix it.” The fake Kirk opened an old-fashioned communicator and spoke with his familiar clipped tones. “Kirk to Marcus. Beam us up, David.”

  Carol Marcus tried to maintain a benign smile on her face as her molecules were rearranged and then whisked off to a place that hadn’t existed for ninety years.

  Data stood in a dismal forest, surrounded by towering trees, the sunlight obscured by layers of thick, hanging moss. The android checked his tricorder, then gazed at the trees. Very deliberately, he took a stride forward. At once, clouds of moss came fluttering out of the treetops, bombarding him with fluffy gray tufts. In a few seconds, the moss draped over him like an old ragged overcoat, but it slipped off at his slightest touch.

  “Interesting,” Data said aloud, recording his voice on his tricorder. “Apparently they are alerted to the presence of prey by vibrations.” Even more clumps of moss fluttered down, and he watched them fall like filthy snow. “They are also alerted by sound. Even though I can attract the moss creatures, they do not recognize me as a host animal.”

  Stepping lightly, Data walked a bit farther into the woods, coming upon a black, soupy swamp. There he found several moss creatures being dragged through the mire on the backs of ugly amphibians. The slimy white animals were about two meters long and looked like giant newts.

  Data followed them for a bit, plodding through the muck and recording his log: “I have also observed the moss creatures feeding upon mobile amphibians. These would seem to be their preferred host species, as they were programmed into the Genesis matrix to be abundant.”

  Suddenly, his tricorder beeped, alerting the android to a preset condition. He stopped, standing chest-high in filth, and checked the readouts. To his surprise, he was picking up a huge group of humanoids—tens of thousands of them—moving in his direction. Since he had programmed the tricorder to alert him to the presence of survivors, Data turned and sloshed off in that direction.

  A few minutes later, he strode out of the swamp and was once again slogging through thickets and thorn bushes. There was no doubt that the huge crowd of humanoids was headed in his direction, almost as if they, too, were following a tricorder.

  He looked forward to meeting more survivors and finding out how they had fared in this bizarre new world. At last he saw a wall of blue-skinned figures, tromping through the woods. They were unusually quiet for humanoids—he heard breathing, but no talking. Mixed in among them were a few humans and other species, but the vast majority were Bolians. Data quickened his step, and so did they, until he was almost on top of them.

  At that moment, it was too late. He didn’t see the moss draped all over their backs, growing into their ears, noses, and mouths until they were on top of him. Although Data was as strong as fifty humanoids, he was surrounded by thousands of them, all crawling over the others to get to him. They beat and ripped at the android—with bare hands, knives, or whatever tools they had. Some sunk their teeth into his body in a frenzy of destruction.

  With great struggle, Data just barely managed to stay on his feet. Five beefy Bolians had a hold of each limb, while a wild-eyed human bounded over the others, flattening them. With disappointment, he recognized the female with the auburn hair and thick muscles, although her vine-covered face and bloodshot eyes were barely recognizable.

  “Miss
ion Specialist Dolores Linton!” he snapped. Attention!”

  Dolores twitched for a moment and stared at him, while moss curled around her head and entered her ears, plugging them tightly. Opening her mouth wide, showing fungus growing over her teeth and gums, she lunged viciously at the android’s face.

  eleven

  “The moss creatures are able to control their hosts’ mobility ... and drive them to attack,” said Data into his tricorder, speaking until the device was ripped from his hand by one of the thousands of mindless Bolians who were trying to tear him apart.

  Dolores Linton was gnawing at his face, but he was able to hold her at bay; still the others kept coming in their mindless attack. Fortunately, the android had been prepared for this exigency. With a superhuman effort, he wrenched an arm free from the clutching Bolians and drew his phaser pistol, which he had modified. As soon as he pressed the trigger, the weapon emitted a stun field instead of a single beam, and the attackers closest to him collapsed to the ground, unconscious. He caught Dolores Linton as she went down, then he retrieved his tricorder.

  Outside the stun field, about ten meters away, the infected Bolians kept coming; but Data finally had room to take a leap. With Dolores Linton and a pile of moss in his arms, the android bounded upward and sailed in a mighty arc over the advancing horde.

  He barely missed landing on two of the Bolians, and the others shifted direction to chase him. Carrying Dolores as if she were a large pillow, Data dashed between the disorganized humanoids and the trees, moving much faster than they could. Although the possessed Bolians were formidable in numbers, individually they were slow to react. Jumping and leaping through the forest, Data was able to get far away from the mindless throng.

  As soon as he was able to find a clearing, he laid Dolores on the ground and began ripping the moss from her ears, nose, and other orifices. Pulling thorns and suckers from her skin, he detached the moss from her back and cleared away all of it that he could see. Data was concerned that the sudden separation from the parasite might harm her, and that she would become ill from fungal infection, but he wasn’t going to leave her in this condition.

  As soon as he cleared her trachea, she gasped and with difficulty began to breathe. “Please wake up,” he said, gently shaking her, but she refused to comply.

  He held her tightly with one hand. With his other hand, he tapped his combadge, sending a signal to the waiting shuttlecraft orbiting the planet. A simple signal was the best communication he could manage, but it worked. The two of them immediately disappeared in the blazing swirl of a transporter beam.

  Mot sat perched on the top of the sanctuary, not feeling too confident about the makeshift scaffolding that supported him. The tiled dome was still a slippery slope, although enough vines were creeping upward from the ground that he could probably catch hold of one if he slipped. What he wouldn’t give for a level balcony and a folding chair, thought Mot, as he gingerly shifted his weight.

  Using the sanctuaries as shelters had been a good idea, Mot decided, but using the sanctuaries as forts against the demons outside wasn’t such a good idea. The sanctuaries weren’t built securely, and they had no good vantage points. The survivors finally had to smash out the skylight and use a ladder to climb out onto the roof. Then two house painters had built the scaffolding for him.

  As usual, Mot felt indebted to be the first one to try the new watchtower, because of his limited experience on the Enterprise. “I’m a barber, not a security officer,” he muttered to himself, but in truth he didn’t resist.

  Maybe, he thought glumly, I’m trying to escape responsibility by always being the first one to volunteer to go outside. It was getting rank inside the sanctuary, both in odor and in civil discourse. There were constant arguments, complaints, and recriminations, especially against Starfleet.

  The survivors couldn’t say that Starfleet had sold them a bill of goods, exactly. It had all happened so fast—the warning, the panic, then the destruction—that they hadn’t had time to consider what they were getting themselves into. The Federation had done what they said they would do, which was save lives, with no thought as to what would happen afterward. Although most of them had lived, their planet had died a grisly death—to be replaced with a cold, smelly mire of horror. Thus far, no one who had entered the gruesome forest had ever returned, and no one had visited them, except for Data. They seemed to be all alone, abandoned on this quagmire of a planet.

  And there was nothing Mot could do for his charges. All the good cheer and brave words he had employed in the beginning now sounded deluded. There was no happy spin he could put on the situation, not after what they had seen coming out of the trees.

  All in all, he had good reason to hide up here on the roof. It was almost better to face the monsters than forty thousand embittered Bolians. What could he tell them? That Starfleet was on their way, ready to ride to the rescue? No, they knew Starfleet had one android and a handful of technicians on the planet, and that was all they were going to get for the foreseeable future.

  When a clump of moss floated down from the trees, Mot lifted his phaser and blasted it into gray confetti. Something moved in the thick brush below him, and he took a long look and decided it was more moss, which he disintegrated with one blast. The barber was getting good at destroying the vile plant, but what good did it do? The moss was all around them, hanging from every branch; it seemed to mock him as it waved in the damp breeze. Only a raging forest fire could get rid of all of it.

  Hmmm, Mot thought to himself, a forest fire. That was the way the enemy had fought, with their dastardly Genesis Wave. Why should the survivors show them any mercy? They hadn’t shown any to the inhabitants of Myrmidon.

  Suddenly a head popped out of the hole behind him, startling Mot. He nearly fell out of his perch, but he managed to grip the ropes and hang on, clattering noisily on the golden tiles.

  It was his father, looking very worried. “Son, you had better get in here. Ten of our number have hung themselves in the rectory.”

  Mot gasped, hoping his father was mistaken; but the elder Bolian was a practical man, not given to exaggeration. Mot sighed and lumbered back into the hole, stuffing the phaser into his father’s hand. “Stand guard on top.”

  “But I ... but I don’t know what to do!” protested the elder.

  “Neither do I, but I’m trying anyway,” answered the barber. “Just keep watch and let me know if anything unusual happens. A few moss creatures aren’t unusual, but thousands would be. If there’s any sign of Starfleet—”

  “Right,” said his father, not sounding very confident about that prospect.

  “Where did you say they are? The rectory?”

  The old Bolian nodded, and Mot climbed down the ladder to the main attic, which was crowded with surly, frightened people, including his mother. Even children were hanging from the exposed rafters that bolstered the dome. The barber said nothing—what was there to say?—as he brushed past them and descended a flight of stairs, which was packed with people at every step.

  Finally he made his way to the rectory, which had been the humble dwelling of the Mother in charge of this Sanctuary. On the first day, she had fled into the woods with the Crown of the First Mother tucked under her arm, never to return. So they had given her little apartment to ten people to share.

  Holding his breath, Mot pushed open the door, and it thudded against something heavy. Pushing hard against the door, he managed to squeeze inside, but he wished he hadn’t. They hung from the rafters like blue punching bags in a gymnasium.

  He bumped into a child at the door, and she peered curiously into the room.

  He pushed her back and said quickly, “No, little girl, I don’t think you should look at this.”

  Big black insects hovered around the bodies, and the smell was like the sweat and waste in the rest of the building, but with a sickly sweet smell added in.

  “Are we going to eat them?” asked the little girl. “My mother says that when we ru
n out of food, we’ll have to eat each other.”

  “No,” muttered Mot through clenched teeth. “Nobody will be eaten.”

  “What are we going to do about this?” cried another voice. The outer hallway quickly filled with grumbling.

  Mot squeezed out of the room and closed the door behind him. “We’re going to cut them down, then vaporize them.”

  “After that?” snapped his interrogator. “If you don’t do some thing, more of us are going to choose the path of no suffering.”

  Mot frowned and looked at the closed door. “I don’t know if strangling to death is a ‘path of no suffering.’”

  “What are we going to do?” shouted someone else, and a sea of angry countrymen pressed toward him.

  Mot stammered, trying to find some words that would mollify them. “I ... I have a plan to kill all the monsters ... and clear the forest.”

  “What?”

  “How?”

  “We’re going to burn it down!” vowed Mot, righteousness surging in his veins. “I don’t know what we’re going to use for fuel, or how well it burns, but I’m tired of that ugly forest and the foul beasts within it!”

  “Right! Burn it!” bellowed the man who had interrogated him.

  Soon everyone took up the chant, and the dome reverberated with the cry of “Burn it down! Burn it down!”

  People began running around like children on a hunt for treats, and Mot soon realized they were looking for articles that would burn. Rags, oil, perfume, trash—it was suddenly a monstrous scavenger hunt.

  The barber recoiled, a bit startled from the frenzy he had unleashed. His mouth dropped open as he realized that they were going to carry out his vengeful idea right now, without any further discussion.

  “Wait a minute! Just a minute!” he shouted, waving his hands in the air. But no one was listening to him now.