It Always Watches: A Star Trek Discovery Horror Story

V: Visitations

From its lair beyond space, it felt them. New minds and new flesh, the scent of them reached it through the keyhole between dimensions, between realities. Gleefully he probed into their world, reached its tendrils out and tasted their minds...

Ensign Todd Colwyn stretched out on the long, narrow bed, and tried not to sleep. Ever since the perpetually-chipper doctor had deposited him here he'd been fighting this losing battle. The initial adrenaline dump, the blast of endorphins, all the residue from his evacuation of the Messik had burned away, leaving him only with leaden exhaustion.

But every time his eyes closed, he was back there, running through the choking, burning corridors of his old starship. And then the corridors gave way to the electrified walls, studded with holograhic projectors and sensors, of his training center. That was the real torture. His mind reminded him of the hundreds of hours spent running through simulations—every scenario Starfleet Security could imagine—until he'd mastered the response to each. He knew how to repel a boarding party, how to fight past enemy shock troops to clear a path to safety or to escape. He knew how to fortify a position hard enough to bleed an enemy into tactical anemia as they threw wave after wave into his phaser fire.

And it was all worthless.

They trained against the tactics of Orion pirates, of marauders and terrorists from the Blue Zone, but not Klingons. No one had fought a Klingon in their lifetime, hell, they barely knew what they even looked like outside of some outdated academic texts.

When the attack came, the great, ornate ships emerged as if out of thin air and hammered Messik with disruptors and torpedoes. The compact, Hoover-class ship had taken the pounding and lashed back as best it could, but within minutes the shields had collapsed, and crouched in his tactical position at the juncture of two main corridors, Colwyn had gripped his rifle a little tighter and steeled himself for the fight to come.

Except it hadn't.

More explosions tore through the ship, and more systems failed, and soon Messik bled atmosphere and power into the void. In the meantime, the Klingons carved up the ship like a cadaver on the slab. As a locomotive of fire and superheated gasses plowed through the corridor before him, carrying errant crewmembers like toys on its leading edge, Colwyn had the sudden, sickening realization that the Klingons didn't care about a stand-up fight, and didn't care about taking prisoners. They were going to pound the ship to ash from a thousand kilometers away. All his training and skills were completely and utterly worthless, and so was he.

Visions of his own obsolescence and uselessness greeted him as he drifted off, his eyelids losing the fight to stay open. He dreamt of battles and destruction and starships burning brightly against the endless, inky black curtain of space.

Eyes watched it all.

In his dreams, Colwyn couldn't make sense of them. He couldn't even fully define or describe them. They were something just out of the reach of his understanding. He couldn't say whether they large or small—the size of moons or of starships. He couldn't say if they had color or shape. He only knew that they were there, set into a fabric of the universe, forever watching.

And in the world that they watched, the Klingons boarded the Messik. They blew holes in the hull and sent wave after wave of shock troops to capture the ship. Colwyn repelled the attacks with a trio of security personnel. They hardened their positions and established overlapping fields of fire. They did everything they had been trained to do, and it worked. It all worked.

It was a better world, a better reality, than the one he had fallen asleep from, and Colwyn understood the implicit choice offered to him. Of the two, he preferred this one.

In his dreams, Colwyn fought heroically in a war that he understood, a war in which he could prevail. In reality, in the bunk aboard the Pretorious, his body began to change...

********

Nomi Lyssa dreamed of a universe at peace, where no races took arms against one another, and all sentient species worked together as one to push out into the vastness of the universe. She tumbled through the cosmos, watching world after world bloom like flowers, and their people stand and reach out toward light—a thousand worlds pulsing with life, glowing like enchanted jewels against space...

...Space, where the eyes watched.

And she gladly made her choice. It was no decision at all. Wasn't this reality better than the one she currently exited within? Wasn't this the best, most perfect existence?

The eyes saw all and transformed all that they saw. Including Lyssa's corporeal body.

She sprouted mandibles.

********

Michael Burnham was too frustrated and annoyed to sleep, so instead she knelt on her bunk and meditated. It had always been one of the few things she could share with Sarek during her childhood, and she had carried the habit into adulthood, where she found it helpful in quieting a mind that had become markedly more riotous since rejoining human society.

Tonight, she let her mind go a dun grey as she sought to let the burning, unhelpful emotions of the past day drain away like dirty water.

"Why do you believe you are entitled to any sort of peace of mind when you are the source of so much of the galaxy's chaos?"

Sarek? She groped for his mind with hers, seeking any trace of the lingering connection they shared ever since they'd melded minds a lifetime ago.

"How many thousands have died due to your actions? How many millions are yet to die before it is over?"

I tried to prevent it. I tried to do what you told me...

"What you tried and what you intended are quite irrelevant. The only thing of importance is what you accomplished. Have you adequately taken stock of your accomplishments? The Klingon attacks? The dying crew members of the USS Messik?"

No! I...

"And what of the damaged psyches of the crewmembers you rescued? Minds irretrievably warmed by violence that are now so malleable and susceptible?"

Sarek what are you talking about?

"If you could repair what your have done, would it not be logical to take any measures to do so? Regardless of personal cost?"

If there was a way...But we both know that there is not.

"But of there was, would you bear any cost?"

You yourself said that engaging in fantastical hypotheticals was a 'childish exercise and a waste of mental faculties.'

"Would you?"

Sarek?

"WOULD YOU?!?"

Immediately, Burnham knew it was not Sarek's consciousness she had touched and she reached out with her mind even further into the endless grey void.

And then she saw the eyes.

All at once her body seized as if she'd touched a live wire. The flood of thoughts and feelings that filled her mind were raw and vile and totally devoid of any reference she could find. It was not simply alien, it was more than that, beyond that. It felt like nothing that belonged in this world.

The eyes squinted at her.

"Pity. You would have been useful."

Against the grey nothingness, she saw two hideous silhouettes that grew larger as if approaching. Someplace in the corner of her mind she understood that these shapes were perversions of some natural form.

"But I suppose we can do this the hard way, too."

Burnham leapt from the bed and bounded for the door. The voice echoed in her mind.

"And when I'm finished you'll be horrific."