Lifeforce: A Star Trek Discovery Horror Story

The Creatures and the Dead

Doctor May led Landry to a large holding room several floors below her office. Despite the building's architectural style—it was the standard Federation pre-fab colony design—the interior was surprisingly warm and inviting, with furniture and accents that look to have been modeled after Earth décor from the previous century or so. Landry didn't know much about interior design, but she recalled seeing it in movies. It made the specimen-holding room even more stark by contrast.

In the center of the room, hanging in a zero-G field, was something torn from a nightmare.

The first thing Landry saw were the wings. Massive, leathery wings, fully unfurled, hung from spindly arms that ended in claw-like hands. They didn't belong on anything living, anything with language or intelligence or culture, but rather on an ancient depiction of some unholy beast, some herald of evil and damnation. The body was lean and sinewy, covered in a membranous hide that only barely concealed spidery veins and arteries and fibrous muscle. The great, bifurcated head held small mean eyes above a huge, snakelike mouth filled with sharp, fang-like teeth.

Landry felt the flesh on her arms raise and grow cold as a wave of pure, primal fear—the kind she hadn't felt since she was a child—rolled through her body. "What the hell is that thing?" she gasped.

"Whatever it is—was—it was in stasis in one of Yamanaka's research labs. There are a couple more there, too. Fourteen, to be precise." Doctor May crossed her arms as if against a sudden chill.

"Is it alive?" Landry felt her gun hand twitched toward the laser pistol in the cross-draw holster at her hip.

"There aren't any life readings," Doctor May said. "That said, it's not showing the level of desiccation or deterioration we'd expect in something dead for a pronounced period of time."

Landry didn't find that terribly reassuring. She toyed with the idea of putting an energy bolt through the thing's evil skull just as a precaution, then shook the idea away. She was a professional, goddamn it, not some frightened colonist with an itchy trigger-finger. "Did Yamanaka pick these things up?"

"We assume so, given their presence in the labs under standard quarantine protocols. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to access the ship's logs remotely, so all we can do is speculate."

Landry suddenly thought of the question she hadn't asked. "You haven't sent anyone to the Yamanaka yet?"

Doctor May nodded gravely. "We had stood up a medical team, but then our scans picked up these...things. We beamed them out, but our transporters aren't as precise as Starfleet models—we don't do the kinds of things you do, the kinds of missions and that sort of thing..."

"Doctor, what are you getting at?"

"We...we picked up some of the crew from the research lab when we beamed out the creatures."

Landry shrugged, not comprehending. "So? What did they say?"

Doctor May regarded her with an expression on the edge of collapse. "They didn't tell us anything. They couldn't. It's why we couldn't send anyone to that ship."

Now Landry's whole body went cold. "What did you beam back?"

********

The four bodies laid out on parallel slabs in the morgue were desiccated husks, grey and withered, and sick-looking. They had once been human. They had once been crewmen aboard the Yamanaka, though now their blue Starfleet uniforms were baggy and bilious over their shrunken frames. Their hair was brittle and abrasive-looking, more like wire than anything else. From her vantage in the observation area, Landry couldn't even tell their gender.

"What happened?" she asked May.

"We don't know. We've been waiting to turn them over to Starfleet for examination." Landry threw her a look. "We don't have any xeno-pathologists here and didn't want to disturb the bodies or destroy evidence," Doctor May shook her head and let out a small sigh. "We just have too many questions and no answers, Lieutenant."

Landry turned away from the viewport and the shriveled bodies. "The answers," she said, "are on that ship."