Lifeforce: A Star Trek Discovery Horror Story

Evil Comes Home

The exterior lights of the Operations Center still penetrated the darkness, but there were fewer lighted windows than Landry would have expected, and the sight of the scattered few—looking like remaining teeth in a mouth full of ruined bridgework—gave her an uneasy tingle at the back of her neck. It was a feeling she'd long ago learned to trust.

"Something tells me there should be more activity," she said as she brought the shuttle down on the rooftop landing pad.

"I'm pretty sure there is," Paredes said tightly. "It's the type of activity that we need to be worried about."

By the time they got to Doctor May's office, the tingle was edging toward genuine alarm. It was barely allayed by May's casual demeanor.

"Captain Paredes, it's so good to see you. I can't tell you how concerned we were when we couldn't find anyone aboard the Yamanaka. Obviously, we feared the worst." She smiled plastically, and perspiration glittered along her hairline.

"It was the worst," Paredes said bluntly. "And it's going to happen here too unless we can get to a subspace transmitter. Do you have anything like that?"

"Well, of course we have communications..."

"Not sector-wide," Paredes shook her head. "We need something that can punch a beam through space to the nearest starbase. Something long-range. A beacon."

Doctor's May blinked rapidly, the smile becoming more and more strained. "I...we don't have anything like that. But we do have a deep-space sensor array for planetary safety. I suppose they could be repurposed into a subspace beacon."

"We need to get there."

"It's right on the northern edge of the colony," Doctor May said like a hostess offering up deviled eggs. A drop of sweat rolled down her cheek, and she wicked it away with the back of her hand.

"Are you feeling all right?" Landry asked.

"Yes, of course. I feel amazing!" Her smile widened into something manic.

"Landry," Paredes said, cautioning.

"You've no idea what's happened since you left!" Doctor May's smile became inhuman—far wider than natural. Her face began to pulsate, the flesh seeming to want to break free of her skull and crawl away.

"Landry!"

But she was already drawing the laser pistol and thumbing the intensity tab in one smooth movement. "Get back!" she shouted and pressed the firing stud. The beam was an intense scarlet, and Doctor May's body was devoured by it, her shriek echoing in the room even after she'd vanished into a haze.

"Good thinking," Captain Paredes said in the sudden silence.

"Yeah, but I can only do it another six or seven times before the power pack is dead," Landry griped. "Come on, let's get out of here."

"We need to find the subspace beacon."

"We know where it is: the north border, we can take the shuttle, and—"

An explosion rumbled in the distance, and the sky outside through the windows flared orange. Landry and Paredes both stared out over the colony where fires were flaring into existence.

"Oh, this is bad..." Landry said and rushed through the doorway to the command center. The massive control room was a vision of chaos: alarms screamed, monitors flared with explosions all over the color, and the corpses...

...the corpses were alive!

Dozens of them; grey, withered things with immense, yellow eyes, and straw-like hair scrambled over consoles and chairs, clawing at one another with spindly, bone-like fingers, while lips parted in rictus grins as they moaned inhuman sounds...

The room throbbed with brilliant blue light as the things set upon the command staff, clawing and grasping and gripping, draining their living essence in vivid blue tethers of energy. One of the things—it used to be a woman—lifted its bulbous head on its spindly neck and fixed Landry with sickly, sallow eyes. Sandpaper lips cracked and peeled away from brown, splintered teeth, as its mouth opened impossibly wide. It pointed at Landry and Paredes with a withered claw and lowed like a barnyard animal. The rest of the corpses swung their skull-like heads at them and responded with the same excited utterances.

They scrambled like sharks to blood.

Landry shouted in alarm and slapped blindly the door's manual controls. It slid shut with an aggravating casualness. She blasted the locking mechanism with a low-power bolt.

"We need to get out of here," Landry backed away from the door as if it was on fire. "Why don't we just go back to the ship?"

Paredes was already sliding Doctor May's desk in front of the door. "Two people can't run a starship, Landry. We need assistance, and with comms fried, we'd just be coming back down here to that beacon anyway." Landry threw her a look of pure frustration as she grabbed the other end and wedged it into the doorframe.

"Well, we need a new command center to coordinate the evacuation and rescue efforts, because we're sure as hell not doing it from here."

"Landry, we if we don't get word out to Starfleet there's not going to be any rescue or evac. Yamanaka can't beam out that many people hat quickly, even with a standard crew working her systems."

Abruptly, the door began to buckle in the frame as a relentless pounding began from the other side. Landry scowled. "We don't have time to argue, let's get to the shuttle."

The turbolifts were out of commission, so they had to take the emergency stairs. In the stairwell, on dozens of floors below them, the sounds of inhuman moaning, screams, and the blue arcs of damned souls filled the stairwell.