Picard looked at the planet around him, Kharak VI. It had been charted six months ago by an exploratory Miranda class ship that had been on a deep space mission beyond the Federation's borders. It had been sending back a stream of data on the newly discovered planets, but Kharak VI had been one of particular interest. Many of the discovered planets had supported life of some kind, but Kharak VI was the only one who had been home to a sapient species. A mammalian species that looked to be in the middle to late stages of an industrial revolution.
Excited with their discovery, Captain Pyre Sh'tatrol of the USS Fortitude had arranged an away team to form a temporary observation outpost, disguised with holograms, to observe the natives while the Fortitude had continued on its mission. The outpost had been reporting regularly on all new findings with the natives, particularly after they had made a breakthrough in deciphering their language.
In a very short time, the Federation had learned quite a bit about the natives of Kharak VI. Dozens of different nations dotted the surface of their planet, all of them separated into about five blocs of power that had been formed through alliances. There had been a recent string wars that had broken out when industrialization had first begun, which had led to the five alliances being formed. Thankfully, the wars had remained low scale, with other nations forcing ceasefires before things could escalated out of control. Things were not without tension, trade wars seemed to be even more prevalent between the alliances than those involving military conflict. There was a working theory that the natives were practicing some variant of mercantilism
A week ago, there were signs that emargos and blockades were starting to form between nations over a dispute for a resource rich series of islands.
A week ago, 800 million people had lived on this planet, across nine different continents, practicing thirty-seven major religions, with tens of thousands of years worth of history.
A week ago, Kharak VI had been alive with a thriving biosphere.
Now? Now the planet was dead.
When the Enterprise had arrived in system, Picard had initially thought that there had been a navigation error. Instead of a planet teeming with life, they had found a barren, lifeless rock, identical to hundreds of millions of planets throughout the galaxy. No atmosphere, no life, no buildings, no marks of civilization, nothing. Even the bodies of the 800 million natives had mysteriously vanished. If the Fortitude had found this planet like this, it would've been ignored. Another unremarkable planet that would be good for nothing outside of a potential vacuum sealed mining outpost. Now? Everything that had made Kharak VI was gone, and Picard was determined to figure out how and why.
"Captain?" Picard turned around. He and the rest of the away team he was wearing were wearing hard suits to safely work on the now airless Kharak VI, with the exception of Data. The android, never having any issue working in a vacuum, was kneeling in the soil, a probing device planted between his legs. "My preliminary scans of the soil are complete."
Data looked down, making a quizzical look as the datafeed was transferred to the tricorder in his hand. "You look as if you saw something you weren't expecting," Picard observed. If Data was puzzled by something, then it was most certainly something out of the ordinary.
"I am picking up readings of bacteria living in lower levels of the soil," Data reported, "but they are quite sparse and would not have been able to survive above ground. The planet's atmosphere would have been toxic from them. These bacteria match those found by Fortitude's away team perfectly. We are on the correct planet sir, and these bacteria are the only survivors of whatever happened."
Picard digested this. A planet's atmosphere being destroyed was hardly something incomprehensible. Mars had once had a much thicker atmosphere before solar winds had torn it down to a shadow of what it had once been. But remnants of the old Mars had been left behind, namely its polar ice caps. Kharak VI had been 60% covered by oceans and seas, and yet the Enterprise had only been able to find pitiful pockets of water underground, ones that were heavily spaced out. Even if the planet's atmosphere had suffered total failure overnight, something of what the planet had once been should've been left behind.
"Data, are you aware of any event that the Federation has observed that compares to this?" Picard asked. There had to be something. Centuries of exploring the stars, they must have found something that, if it wouldn't tell them what had happened here, would at least give them a clue.
However, Data shook his head in response. "I'm afraid not sir. While there are hundreds of records of planets sustaining major damage to both their biosphere and atmosphere, such as Ceti Alpha V, it has never been as sudden and as total as what has happened here." Data took another look at his instrument. "It is odd. Early soil samples from this planet suggested that the soil was fairly nutrient rich, particularly in this area. But I can not find any in my scans. Even if this soil was moved to the perfect environment, nothing would be able to grow within it." He frowned. "Captain, the destruction of the atmosphere should not have caused all nutritional value to disappear."
"Agreed," Picard said, checking his tricorder again as Data's scan results, which confirmed what the android had said. "Mr. Data, I've been pondering a possibility." Picard didn't want to have to consider it, but he was starting to feel like there was no other explanation. "What are the chances that this was damage done by a hostile outsider to this planet?"
Data cocked his head. "What do you mean sir? I can think of no species with both the capability or the motivation to do this. Perhaps a few with one, but none with both. The Borg may have the technology for this, but the natives were too technologically primitive to acquire their attention."
"True, but there's always the possibility that this was orchestrated by a force we haven't encountered yet." Data made a thoughtful expression on his face as he nodded. "We know that there are beings out there in the galaxy as powerful as Q. Beings that can wipe out far more than 800 million beings in an instant. We know that there are some who can manage to kill as many as 50 billion without even meaning to. What are the chances that something like one of them did this?"
Data paused a moment before answering. "That is a difficult question sir, and I cannot give a precise answer. I can, however, estimate that it is a possibility, and not an unlikely one. We may wish to scan nearby systems to see if anything similar has happened there."
"Agreed. Even if this wasn't done deliberately, that would be a wise move." Not looking forward to the prospect of finding more dead worlds, Picard pressed his com badge. "Commander Riker, any progress on finding the away team outpost?"
"As a matter of fact, I think we may have something captain," Riker replied. "We found the outposts black box. It was buried pretty deep underground, Starfleet regulations, they don't want pre-Warp civilizations digging them up by accident, and we're beginning the decoding progress. No sign of the away team though. I hate to say it, but unless this black box gives us anything to go on, we may have to list them all as deceased."
"Understood," Picard said, "we're on our way there, I'm going to want to see this for myself. Picard out." He always hated it when when young men and women from over a hundred species came to Starfleet, excited to discover the unknown, only to be killed by the very unknown they had come here to explore. It was a cruel twist, one that he felt they had all deserved better. Every last one. "Data, how much longer do you need?" Picard asked.
"More in depth scans of the soil will take some time captain, but I can quite easily do that on the move," he said as he pulled his spike out of the ground. "I am ready when you are."
"Excellent," Picard said, switching channels. "Transporter room? Site to site transport, beam us to Commander Riker's location."
"Yes sir," came Miles O'Brien's voice. After a brief shining of blue light, Picard felt the tingling sensation of being disassembled and reassembled. An odd feeling that one never got completely used to, but learned to recognize. A few seconds later, he was standing in another part of the planet. This area was almost identical to the first, barren, lifeless, and unremarkable. The only difference was that Commander Riker was standing nearby with his away team, a pair of phase drills near a giant hole, while he and a few others worked on a data core.
"Captain, any luck on your end?" Riker asked, standing from the data core.
"None," Picard responded, "aside from the fact that, with the exception of a few single celled organisms, all life has been utterly sapped from this world. And we're not any closer to figuring out how or why, barring a few theories. Are there any traces that suggest that the away team survived whatever happened?"
"Sadly captain, it looks like whatever claimed the natives took them as well," Riker said sadly. Picard had to restrain a sigh of frustration. 50 people were next to nothing compared to 800 million, but Picard had been secretly hoping that some pocket of life, no matter how small, had been spared from this destruction. There was a loud beep from the datacore. "The decoding process is finished," Riker said. "Audio and visual." With that, he pressed a button on the core.
A screen on the very top of the datacore flickered to life. A battered and terrified looking Starfleet officer pressed his hands against the sides of the camera he was looking into, his face stained with blood and sweat. "They came out of nowhere, at first we thought it was some kind of odd pollination that happened when the planet shifted to spring, but it was them seeding the planet," he babbled, as if he was afraid every word would be their last. "Our subspace communications stopped working, at first we thought it was a coincidence, but it was them!"
Picard and Riker exchanged quick glances, and through the faceplate of Riker's suit, Picard could see that his XO looked like he was feeling the same confusion and slowly encroaching terror as him. The both looked back at the screen, watching the officer composing himself. "I need-I need to make sure you know everything, whoever finds this," he said, "the Federation is in danger. Three months ago, we started seeing an upscale it what looked like cult activity, violent cult activity, but it was organized. The cultists always targeted military installations, sabotaging vital defense points all over the planet. Then the spores started."
The man looked over his shoulder at something Picard couldn't see before turning back to the camera. "There were ships, living ships with numbers our scanners couldn't properly count. Tens of thousands at the very least. And they all dropped spores onto the planet that grew into lifeforms of massively varying phenotypes, but all part of the same composite species. They flew, they swam, they tunneled, and they all moved from one end of the planet to the other, killing and eating everything in their way."
The man swallowed, looking as if he was about to start crying. "Most of the planet is overrun by now, only one or two of the nations are still holding out, but I think they have hours at most. We hid scanners at various points all over the planet and we're doing what we can to record what we're seeing here and hide it in our blackbox. These creatures, whatever they are, they're beyond counting. They have more warriors than the entire population of this planet combined, and they keep making more of them. But there's a reason they came to this planet and I think...I think they came here to feed."
"Those living ships?" A brief image of a unbelievably large swarm of ships briefly flashed across the screen, all of them converging into low orbit. "They would require a vast amount of nutritional energy in order to avoid starving to death. The biomass of the planet is-well, they've been collecting it." Another image flashed on the screen, this one of great pools of sickly colored liquid, giant stalks growing out of them and stretching up towards low orbit. A few hunched and multicolored creatures were gathered around the pools and were...jumping into them?
"They even have organisms tunneling into the ground for mineral deposits they can use," the officer continued. "I don't know what they want or if they can be reasoned with, but these things have to be stopped. With size and numbers like these, one planet's biosphere might sustain them for now, but they'll need to feed again." There was a deafening sound, the sound of metal being torn by something. The man looked over his shoulder again, fear splattered across his face, as the sound of phaser fire filled the audio feed.
"Every last bit of data we could get is in the core," he said, spitting his words out as fast as he could. "Phasers have some effect on them but only at max setting, their armor is very thick. No other planets nearby are suffering like this one, I think they came from outside the galaxy, from below the galactic plane. I think this fleet is the only one of it's kind but it's so big that it could overrun the entire Federation unless we do everything we can to prepare. Please-PLEASE! Don't let the rest of the Federation end up like-" but he was cut off as a the side of the base he was giving his recording from was torn off.
A dozen different multi-armed alien creatures charged in, dark black armor, purple faces and long rolling tongues shining in the outpost's light. The man turned to raise his phaser, but he only got one shot off before they were upon him. Within seconds, he was torn to pieces, the creatures flooding into the base and silencing the screams of the surviving Starfleet officers.
Then the recording ended.
Picard and Riker looked at each other, not sure what to say. They both knew the other was thinking the same thing however. They needed to get to the nearest Starbase. Now.
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Author's Note: For those of you wondering, yes, these are Tyranids. It was the request from the Patron. I just didn't include it in the description for the surprise. It's a little short because it was only supposed to be about the crew discovering the Tyranids, and there's only so much you can do, but I think it turned out all right. I hope the Patron enjoys it.
I would like to thank my Patrons, SuperFeatherYoshi, xXNanamiXx, Ryan Van Schaack, RaptorusMaximus and Davis Swinney for their amazing support.