The Operative (A Star Trek novel)

Chapter One

Jean O'Connor is having the dream again.

She is being chased down dark, dank tubes of stone, the rough-hewn surfaces dripping crystal droplets onto a floor whose slickness is almost organic. The air is thick and still, smelling musty, as if nothing living has breathed it for a very long time. Sounds of her running feet, her ragged breathing are muffled, die out after brief ghostlike echoes.

Behind her, always around a bend, but inexorable, comes...something. She knows what it is. But she can't see it. Maybe she has seen it, but maybe not. Maybe that was only a dream, a terrible nightmare that stubbornly refused to surrender to the sanity of her room and little bed. She does know that whatever is following her is hideous. She knows that if she sees it, if it gets that close to her, she will die.

As surely as it killed her father.

She rounds a corner, her breath coming in hot rivers down her throat, burning her lungs, echoing the adrenaline burning down her veins. A stitch in her side threatens to keep her from breathing at all. With a sickening realization, she sees a wall before her.

Dead end.

She tries to stop, but the footing here is not the best, and she slips, slides, and finally crashes into the rock wall that she knows will be her death. Her hands hurt from the impact, from the scrapes and bruises that will plague her tomorrow, if she lives. Her jumper is soaked through from a stagnant puddle on the floor and from blood oozing from her fabric-burned knees.

She turns, breathing hard, an animal at bay. She spreads her hands on the cold stones at her back, trying to become one with them, to melt into them, but they offer no shelter, no comfort.

Save for her breathing, which sounds perilously loud in her ears, the tunnels are quiet as a tomb. The thing following has paused, perhaps savoring the incipient capture of its prey. Now she hears it begin walking again, feet click-clicking on the uneven flooring, a clock tapping out the remaining seconds of her life.

A shadow—its shadow—oozes around the last turn she took. It is vaguely human-shaped, flickering in the guttering torch light, the last bit of light in the dim caverns. Time seems to have stopped. The shadow lengthens, but almost imperceptibly. Finally, an ink-dark silhouette appears, standing on the shadow's black feet.

She sees it as it steps forward, and her heart nearly stops. It looks like a man, not even an ugly man, but she knows better. She has seen it before, after all; that couldn't have been a dream. She remembers how quickly it moved, how gleefully it killed her father. She remembers its face as it did it, a face filled with wild inhuman ferocity, or perhaps joy or—her five-year old mind does not know the word, but she sensed the emotion—exultation.

Now the face is sculpted differently, the devil play-acting. It—he—is mocking her, pretending to be concerned, soothing. It reaches to touch her. She can shrink back no more into the unyielding stone; she turns her head away so hard the stone wall cuts her cheek, her eyes straining to keep him in view, until she looks like a terrified colt. He smiles, chilling her. His lips part, and she sees his teeth, pointed, gleaming cruelly like blood in the reddish light.

He opens his mouth wider, preparing to feed, and she screams until her throat feels like it is tearing.

Her screams awaken her. She is dripping with sweat. Several slow seconds pass before reality reasserts itself, before the enclosing rock walls, the bloody teeth fade, leaving her safe in the familiarity of her cabin aboard the starship Enterprise, years and parsecs away from her childhood horror.

Her cabinmate slumbers on undisturbed in his bunk against the far wall. It took only a few nights of screaming before he set the sonic deadeners to muffle her side of the room.