THE LEMHAS CATCHER
by ardavenport
- - - Part 1
When 3Tusjaz found the Lemha, the surprise was as great for it as it was for our own. It literally stepped into 3Tusjaz.
It's standing appendage sank right down to 3Tusjaz's core. Predictably, it panicked. The thrashing caused 3Tusjaz's to solidify around the Lemha's appendage.
3Tusjaz panicked as well. The others answered the call rapidly, surrounding them. There were actually two Lemhas; even more of a shock. How had they ever gotten so far into the Outpost?
The Lemhas stung 3Tusjaz; energy weapons. They were tool users. Of course, I know that most Lemhas are, especially at the 14Tomo Outpost; I've seen far too many of them. But the others...they never expect it. And then the two Lemhas were working together, separating the trapped appendage from 3Tusjaz. In their own way. They did manage to divide them spatially at least. But they were still there.
3Tusjaz, 56Rosja, 89Xaja, 7Mija, 4Callulja, 8Ajaja, 26Tonuja, all scattered, dividing and reforming, absolutely the worst thing that they could have done, embedding the influence of the Lemhas even further than it already was. Time and time would be spent cleansing them.
7Mija had panicked less and had been a tuss15ja shaper and formed an enclosure needed for such work. More misery was spent forcing the Lemhas into it when they all would have preferred that the Lemhas disappear bcak to wherever they had come. But since no one knew how they had come to be in the Outpost so deeply, there was no way to know if they would go away, or go further in.
Once in the enclosure, that blocked their influences. A bit. Everyone withdrew from the Lemhas, but the stain of their presence still remained. Within and without of the whole area.
That's when they called me.
o*o o*o o*o o*o o*o
Ensign Kim grit his teeth while Captain Janeway unzipped his boot. His leg rested on her knees while her small hands worked the boot off his right foot. Kim desperately hoped his feet weren't too sweaty. What was worse? A broken ankle or offending the captain with bad foot odor?
Janeway pulled his sock down. She held her wrist light up while her fingers touched the already swollen and tight skin below his ankle bone. Kim gasped. It was broken. Heat and pain stabbed him from the tiniest movement. Great. Now I'm useless.
"I guess we're not going anywhere, anyway," Kim joked. He braced himself against the side of the box they were in. It was literally a box, with sides with hexagonal holes in them and all rounded corners. Janeway slid his sock back up over his ankle and he moved his leg to the side of their cage. There wasn't enough room for him to straighten his leg, so he sat propped up in his corner and trying to keep his knees out of Janeway's way while keeping his foot perfectly still. His own light was still switched on, lying on the cage floor next to him, an island of illumination in the darkness.
"Well, they'll be looking for us. I know Voyager got my distress call before they cut us off. It shouldn't be long," she reassured. Kim nodded, feeling embarrassed that he must look pitiful enough that he needed reassuring. He brushed his bangs back. His forehead was filmed with sweat and he swallowed and consciously tried to slow his breathing. He tapped his own communicator on the front of his uniform. It responded with the same stilted bleep that the captain had gotten.
Janeway activated her tricorder, it's colored lights making their own illumination. She crouched next to him, the top of her head still touching the roof of their cage. They each still had their tricorders, communicators and phasers. But the communicators were being blocked and the phasers had no effect on their captors, whatever they were.
The material of their cage was organic, but it wasn't anything the tricorder recognized. She was even getting life signs from it, but everything in the cave registered life signs now. The sub-space energy field that had first attracted them to explore this place was still there and was now obviously related to the life signs. But she'd never seen anything like them.
She sat back, taking her weight off her legs, her back to the side of their prison. Her foot poked Kim and she apologized and pulled her knees closer to her. He had his tricorder out and was scanning the cave as well.
She touched the sides of the box. It felt like tough, rubbery plastic, warm to the touch. She peered out, her light casting hexagonal shadows through the holes of the cage. The sides of the cave had gone from innocuous rock to slick golds and greens. The glow that their captors had cast was gone now and nothing was moving anymore.
o*o o*o o*o o*o o*o
I surveyed the enclosed Lemhas when I arrived. I surveyed 56Rosja, 89Xaja, 7Mija, 4Callulja, 8Ajaja, 26Tonuja. The pattern of the Lemhas lay everywhere, extending outward from the ones in the enclosure and getting worse. A river of discord. 3Tusjaz was the worst, naturally. They all fretted around me, bits of them nibbling at me for information. I dispensed only instructions to them. Not exchanged. To give anything else would have placed myself in the mire of contamination that they were already in. I knew how to be near Lemhas and their effects.
I have answered eighteen summons to smooth the disturbances of Lemhas. After the seventh, I was tasked to make a study of why there seemed to be so many of them. The reality of this Outpost seems to breed them. There are so many Lemhas, and so many varieties of them. A great stretch past the Outpost's haven will show their tracks in the strange void beyond. I have made many such probings and found many, many tracings.
I probed inward at these contained Lemhas. They twitched and moved the air and moved their bodies, but no coherent response returned from them. Within them are tiny little energies, similar enough to us to cause sympathetic energies within ourselves. That is how they leave their mark. The nature of these beings is to survive and breed, and so their sympathies survive and breed. I had prepared myself when the call came. None of their energies entered me. I mirrored their like to know their effects. The others were infested, and getting worse. I had them taken away, into an unexposed region of the Outpost. The loose, breeding contaminations would be expelled from them.
The Lemhas now had only me to touch.
o*o o*o o*o o*o o*o
"Captain!"
the glow reappeared from the now slick walls of the cave. Pink and blue, mottled bright and dim, it seeped out of the goldish-green walls and flowed down toward them. It surrounded the base of their cage like a pool of water. A touch of heated, stale air rose from the floor of the cave, but it was otherwise utterly silent. Tricorders hummed back at it from within the cage.
"It's a life form." Kim shook his head at the readings. "I think."
Coded patterns on her tricorder and the oozing glow outside the cage, Janeway's attention shifted back and forth between the two. She checked the memory and didn't find what she was looking for. But the tricorder didn't carry more than a few tera-quad, so it was possible that what she wanted was just too obscure to be included in the library of a field instrument.
"Hello," Janeway said to cave. "I'm Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Federation starship Voyager." They waited. Kim stared out at the glow on the floor of the cave, lapping just below the lowest openings of their prison. The air was dead of any sound or response.
"We come in peace. We mean you no harm. We didn't mean to trespass into your territory. If you'll allow us to leave, we won't return if you that's what you want." The phrases, 'We come in peace.' and 'We mean you no harm.' were actually in Starfleet's First Contact regulations under 'Suggested Introductory Statements', but they still seemed a bit inadequate to use on a life form that didn't talk and didn't even seem to have a body.
"Ensign, have you ever heard about some entities called the Birchat?" she whispered loudly.
"Uh...no."
"They're a type of energy creature that inhabits the Marfak system–"
"They've never been able to colonize that system," Kim eagerly leaped upon the fact that he did know. "There's some kind of energy field that keeps interfering with our technology. One group of colonists swore it was the spirits of a lost civilization."
"They weren't spirits," Janeway corrected, annoyed by such credulous information. "I was on a science team ten years ago that investigated them."
"Were they life forms like these?"
"Not really. About the only thing we could agree on was that they were life forms. But there were aspects of their behavior that indicated that they were intelligent."
"Were you able to communicate with them?" The blues and pinks from below them reflected from Kim's dark eyes.
"By the end of that mission we were having trouble communicating with ourselves. We never agreed on our results," Janeway admitted. "There were three separate conclusions from our analysis. But I signed onto the one that postulated that the Birchat were intelligent." Inconclusive science reports didn't travel very far, or get presented at many scientific conferences. Most people on the science team had sided with the idea sponsored by the two Vulcans in the group who had determined that the energy fields were a residual telepathic life form left over from an as yet undiscovered ancient civilization. Spirits. Janeway had rebelled at such a conclusion and Lieutenant Hamran had wisely deleted her nastier commentary from the report.
"But I was sure that the energy fields were intelligent and that they were looking us over. They were just...a life form that we didn't have any common reference points with."
Kim checked his tricorder again. "Were the readings similar?"
"No...they were different. But whenever they would appear, they appeared everywhere, in the ground, the air, the plants, everything. As if everything were alive with them. And there would never be any trace of where they would come from or go. Or how. Sometimes they would form shapes from the things on the planet." She pressed her hand to the side of their cage. "But we could never determine any purpose to it."
"It's kind of obvious what their purpose is here." Kim crouched next to her, in uncomfortably close quarters.
"I have to admit," Janeway looked around her as she ran her hand along the side of their prison, "the Birchat never formed anything this specific."
o*o o*o o*o o*o o*o
The Lemhas are a divided species. They come, one after another, in time. Pairs of them group to produce successors before they wither. There are two types; the bearers, the ones who create new Lemhas from themselves; the initiators, who begin the process. I have no notion of what the initiators impart to the bearers, but the initiators must be the ones to make the start. A time ago, I had once maintained several Lemhas in a now disused portion of the 14Tomo Outpost. More of differences between us and them came from that.
The enclosure that 7Mija had made contained a pair.
The initiator was larger than the bearer. The bearer moved around more than the initiator. They stayed separate from each other, each on their own side of the enclosure. Their total spatial volume fit within the enclosure easily, but they were folded, appendages drawn in close to their bodies. The digits at the ends of their fore appendages curled easily around the enclosure openings. They would quickly spread a film of their contamination wherever they touched in the Outpost without the confinement.
I examined the space next to them, the tiny, lifeless particles in the air about them, their surface coverings and the covering of their coverings. They stirred the air with subtle vibrations, magnifying them with the hollow spaces around the hollow spaces within them. They physically drew in tightly on themselves, two separate packages in the enclosure. But their influence increased hugely, so much that I withdrew my probings. Their presence filled the enclosure to overflowing and did not subside for a space of time after I parted myself from them.
They spilled toward each other, their lifeless outer forms bumping together. And they created more air vibrations. There was no more information to be gained this way.
o*o o*o o*o o*o o*o
"Hey!" Kim jerked his toes back from the glow that was now seeping into the cage with them. Janeway had the same reflex and they collided briefly before they each pushed into separate corners. The skin under his socks tingled as Kim watched it cover his feet. Janeway swatted at her shoulders when she felt it on her neck.
"Captain!" Mottled hues encircled Kim's chest; his arms reached for her as he receded. A river of blue had split the cage and was pulling them apart. Janeway opened her mouth and the prickly feeling filled it and down her throat. She gasped and sprang forward but they didn't even come close to touching each other. She felt as if she were swimming in static, drowning in it. Her vision clouded over; even with her eyes squeezed shut, she could still see moving pink and blue spots. She cried out, unable to form words, her movements increasingly sluggish.
Their former cage had split completely, fluid again and now vanishing into the floor. Energy seemed to harden around them, shaping itself to their bodies, forcing them into immobility.
Kim lay stretched out on his side, trapped just above the ground. At least it didn't feel like he was lying on anything solid. His heart pounded in his chest. He could feel the tingling all the way down into his stomach and his whole body twitched with the urge to scratch all over, to swallow anything that would force this thing out of him. His ears filled with white noise, he could only see moving spots. And his ankle hurt. The injury was still there, aggravated by the sudden motion and throbbing with his heartbeat.
o*o o*o o*o o*o o*o
I squeezed the enclosure apart and dispersed it. The Lemhas pressed toward each other. The bearer nearly squirmed away through the brief opening before I contained both of them again.
I had their stain with me now. Unavoidable. Lumps of separate life eddies swam at my edges. I flushed them aside. Later would be the cleansing, as with 3Tusjaz, 56Rosja, 89Xaja, 7Mija, 4Callulja, 8Ajaja, 26Tonuja.
Such a mess.
o*o o*o o*o o*o o*o
Janeway lay on her side, her arms raised over her head, frozen in the position she'd been in when she'd tried to escape. She could hardly breathe; her insides were boiling. Her eyes were still shut and she couldn't open them. Were they stuck that way, her eyelids welded together?
It was everywhere inside her. It had flowed into her ears, her nose, her mouth, invading all the way down to her stomach and further, invading her from her lower body as well. It rustled a faint white noise in her ears. It had her in every possible way, crawling around inside her and all she could do was wait for it to end.
Her mind pictured Chakotay and Tuvok finding her half dissolved body, their faces, especially Chakotay's, as they clutched at what was left. Her throat tightened, her eyes teared up. She wouldn't be able to speak; she could only watch while they tried...
The vision of melodrama broke her panic. She clenched her teeth together and concentrated on slowing her breathing. I'm not dead yet; I'm not dead yet...
- - - End Part 1