Lifeforce: A Star Trek Discovery Horror Story

A Tale of Terror (II)

The captain's personal shuttlecraft was spacious and comfortable—almost more of a yacht than a shuttlecraft. It retained all of the capabilities of a long-range transport, but the seats and benches were designed more like the furnishings of a luxury resort than the spare, functionality of a Starfleet vessel. "Captain's prerogative," Paredes explained. "My family's in the furniture business, and I had one of my cousins redesign the interior of this shuttle. Now it's the Captain's Personal Transport."

"Very nice," Landry said, looking over the simulated wood console. It seemed like a colossal waste of time to her. In the viewport, Tobe VI loomed, and Wilco Colony was a growing green patch on its barren surface. "Now, why don't you explain to me precisely what's going on, so I know what we're telling the Colonial Authority."

Captain Paredes sighed and turned her seat to face Landry. "Did you review the logs?" she asked.

"Some," Landry answered. "I got interrupted."

"Then you know we encountered some kind of ship. Something never seen before in the Federation's collective memory."

Landry nodded. "I heard that part. It got patchy after that."

"We went aboard. I took an exploration team. The Yamanaka is a research vessel, so I didn't have any shortage of xeno-biologists to accompany me. The ship's interior was...it unlike anything I've ever seen before—unlike anything any of us have seen before. It was this bizarre fusion of organic and stylized designs that were just...one moment we were floating through a corridor constructed with living tissue, with muscles and mucus, and...and then we'd be in a room that looked like a modernistic cathedral. All glass, and stone, and metal...but huge. The size of a stadium. It was..." she shook her head at the memory.

"Two members of the team had to take a moment. They were overwhelmed, mentally overwhelmed. It can happen, you know. The brain just becomes overloaded trying to make sense of nonsensical, contradictory things. That's what that place was like...but then we found them."

"The bat-people?"

Paredes gave Landry a hard look. "Would you stop calling them that, please? It's not very scientific."

Landry put up her hands placatingly. "Sorry. Continue."

Paredes narrowed her eyes but went on. "The inhabitants of that ship—I don't know if they were the crew or not—were all dead and totally desiccated like mummies or any corpses exposed to space for centuries. Our working theory was that the ship was under some type of autonomous control, and that the inhabitants had simply died off hundreds of years ago and the ship had kept going. We set up pattern enhancers and Yamanaka beamed several of the things back.

"We wanted to explore the ship further, find its bridge if it had one. Or its engine room. Crew quarters. The design was so...alien...I think we just wanted to find something familiar. Anything we could recognize."

"But you didn't?"

"The problem was the size," Paredes shook her head. "Two-hundred and forty kilometers long...without sensors, that's like mapping out an entire city on foot. It would take months at best.

"The ship was showing some unusual power readings, so we decided we should withdraw for safety reasons and return if there was no indications of danger—maybe bring some mapping equipment next time—but Lieutenant Carroll, one of our xeno-biolosists, picked up something on his tricorder. Life signs. Human life signs.

"We found them in one of those cathedral-like rooms. It was immense and filled with these great, black hexagonal crystals, like...coffins. There were thousands of them. Tens of thousands, a sea of them and building toward a central mass. At the top of it were three transparent crystal coffins. And there they were, naked, perfect, serene, as if in the most peaceful sleep you can imagine.