THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE

Talos-IV Stationary Orbit
USS Enterprise NCC-1701
Stardate 2261.41

- 0930 hours -

Doctor Danar and Lieutenant Uhura were just coming into the transporter room when Commander Spock materialized on the pad. They had already been briefed and given their instructions and he saw no logical reason to belabor the point and further impugn their professional pride. On the other hand he had learned long ago of the human need for affirmation and camaraderie and he greeted both of them with an approving nod and a look of calculated confidence.

Danar returned the nod and stepped up to the transporter pad. Uhura seemed surprised by the gesture, but made no comment. Spock heard the semi-musical trill of the machinery powering up as he the transporter room doors closed behind him.

Two minutes later, Spock stepped off the express turbolift onto the bridge and strode directly to the communications console where Lieutenant Hannity already had a palmcomp with a printout ready for him. Lieutenant Scott left the command chair and met him there and the three of them formed a sort of huddle around the communications console.

To: NCC-1701, USS Enterprise - Code 2 Priority -

From: Office of CINC-SOL, Vice Admiral Richard Barnett

***CODE 2 PRIORITY ***

Proceed at maximum warp to celestial coordinates 346x14.81x21.6. Destination is Zeta Leporis System, Earth Starbase 11. Await further orders upon your arrival. All other mission objectives suspended until further notice.

***CODE 2 PRIORITY ***

Spock read the message once, then slowed down and read it again. It was brief and to the point and incontrovertible at that.

But it also flew in the face of everything Spock thought he knew about Starfleet and the current state of affairs of the Federation. To begin with, the message was coming from Admiral Barnett himself, acting Commander in Chief of Starfleet's Sol System command; strictly speaking, Enterprise's immediate superior should have been Admiral Comsol, the director of the deep space operations division at Tau Ceti's Starbase Four.

The context was wrong too. There was no active conflict in the region that would imply a Code 2 alert either; the Orion Syndicate was still trying to annex the Laurentian Moons from the Tholians and Starfleet was still scrambling to keep the war from expanding. The Klingons were still jousting with the Romulans and the Romulans were still trying to stay off the Federation's radar. The Breen had stopped raiding Federation shipping lines and had turned their attention on the Nausicans, and the Nausicans were busy pillaging what was left of the Xyrillian homeworld. Things were tense - things were always tense in some way or another - but Code 2 Priority meant that Enterprise was being given the job of preventing if not preparing for an interstellar war.

Logic dictated that a confirmation was in order. "Ensign Chekov, Spock ordered, "compute a long-range vector for subspace communications. I will require real-time contact with Starfleet command."

"Real time? From this distance?" Chekov sounded surprised, then impressed with his commander for handing him such a stimulating problem to solve, "Ve vill have to have pinpoint accuracy to establish the link, Commander. And I vill need to plot a position outside the planet's magnetic field."

"I anticipated as much. As we are currently faced with an emergency situation, you are authorized to employ maximum warp power in order to more quickly reach the necessary transmission location."

Chekov thought about this, and then suppressed a smile. Of course, Spock was going about this in a very calm, rational, logical sort of way, but in other ways this entire maneuver - all eighty eight minutes of it if his top-of-the-head calculations were correct - was an incredibly elaborate "angrily dialing the phone" gesture on the part of the first officer. "I am moving the ship to a higher orbit, Commander. One quarter impulse power. Ve'll reach broadcast position eighty seven minutes."

"Very good, Mister Chekov," Spock said, and then sat back and focussed his attention on the viewscreen and the data feed from the away teams' tricorders and personal monitors. Danar and McCoy were on the surface now, he saw, and judging by their positions on the tracking screen they were almost finished with their survey of the Bo'Shan trading post and the surrounding area.

Spock clicked the contact switch on the arm of his chair and signaled the away team directly. After a long pause his favorite of all human voices answered, "Uhura."

"We are moving to a higher orbit, Lieutenant, in order to establish contact with Starfleet Command. Accordingly, we will be out of transporter range for fifty seven minutes and eighteen seconds."

.

Talos-IV, Southern Hemisphere
Bo'Shan Mountain Pass

- 0935 hours -

"Understood, Enterprise," Uhura answered, watching from a safe distance as Lieutenant Sulu finished cutting through the vaulted door to the underground tunnel with his phaser, "We'll proceed with caution. Away team out."

"Well that's great," grumbled Doctor McCoy, "Guess we're on our own from here on in"

Lieutenant Sulu clapped him on the shoulder, "You worry too much. If we run into anything we can't handle, Spock can be back in position inside of fifteen minutes."

"A lot can happen in fifteen minutes."

Sulu shrugged but didn't answer him. He and everyone else on this crew had learned by now not to begrudge Doctor McCoy his pessimism.

The tunnel entrance at the top of the Bo'Shan trading post had been mechanical once. The hinges were loaded on pneumatic pistons that opened the door outwards like a bank vault and could hold them open against their own eight. It wasn't at all clear what had powered the pistons originally, but whatever it was the power source had long since failed. One set of pistons was leaking hydraulic fluid and could no longer hold the doors open, the other had jammed in place and one panel of the door was stuck half open, revealing a gaping circular tunnel that angled down almost thirty degrees into the heart of the mountain.

The last piston came loose with a sharp metallic clang and the door fell open lazily, exposing the full circumference of the tunnel. The entrance, it seemed, was larger than the tunnel it opened into; smaller than the corridors of the Enterprise, the circular passage was low enough that Sulu could barely stand upright without hitting his head. "Well," he said, "This is going to be pleasant," and he ducked down into the opening and started his descent as the others followed him inside.

Lieutenant Uhura was no stranger to such environments. As a child she'd visited the catacombs of Ancient Rome and the tombs of the Pharaohs in Egypt. In high school she'd explored the underground rivers of Yucatan and the ancient city of Chichen Itza, and in college she'd camped out in the caves of Terra Nova just to study geology under the Master Diggers. As a graduate student, she'd spent six months crawling through the twisted and winding lava tubes of Malachi Prime, slithering through the cracks of the Iconian ruins that had been buried there for millennia. She knew by now that primitive civilizations dug into the ground because it was often safer there than on the surface, where the cold darkness of the cave could shelter them from predators, the elements of a turbulent world, even from the radiation of the cosmos sleeting invisibly down on them from the sky. She was much more comfortable here in the caves than any of her colleagues could be.

Colleagues like Doctor Elizabeth Danar, who had pressed herself against the downward sloping walls of the tunnel as if she was expecting a thresher maw to come screaming out of the tunnel after them. "What are we looking for down here, anyway?" she asked, shining her tricorder's light into the inky blackness below.

Up ahead of them all, Lieutenant Sulu answered over his shoulder, "Spock says the Talosians are primarily subterranean dwellers. All their most valuable possessions are buried underground."

"How does that help us, exactly?"

Lieutenant Uhura sighed, "Think about it. Any written records, weapons, technology, any special equipment that might still be working, it'll all be stored down here. It'll help us to better understand what we're dealing with here."

Danar perked up slightly, "It might help us understand how their telepathy works if we see how their devices are configured."

"That too," Uhura said.

The tunnel leveled off at a flat wide landing with two tunnels branching off to either side. Sulu scanned down both directions with his tricorder, and found that both tunnels opened into natural caverns that extended beyond the range of his detection. One cavern was partially filled with water, the other meandered back and forth before extended out of range. "Zhara, Hendorf, check these two tunnels," he said, gesturing at the openings, "We'll proceed deeper and see what's there."

The two security officers veered into the left tunnel first, heading in the direction of the flowing water. This made sense, Sulu thought; the previous landing parties had discovered that a semi-aquatic environment was an important part of the Talosian early lifecycle, so they were probably going to check and see if the reservoirs were still in use.

From far behind the they again heard a faint southern accent and the grumbling voice, "If the Talosians dug these tunnels for themselves, this is probably the tallest passageway in this entire complex."

Sulu grinned, but didn't answer. Doctor McCoy had a way of venting his frustrations that made everyone else in the room feel better about themselves just for not being in his shoes.

"My scans say this tunnel comes to an end another fifty meters down the slope," Uhura said, looking at her tricorder screen, "Can't tell what else is down there, but..."

"Doctor McCoy!" Lieutenant Zhara's voice echoed through the tunnel just as he passed it. He paused a moment and waited until the small lithe security guard with the pixie haircut rounded the bend and glared at him with eyes like a phaser lock. "We've got work you."

McCoy read the subtext easily enough: his whole purpose for being here was to conduct field inspections of Talosian bodies to get some idea of what exactly was killing them. "Swell," he grumbled, and started into the tunnel after her. Zhara winked at him and nodded back down the tunnel towards the reservoir. "Look on the bright side. You don't have to go any deeper."

"Huh... I guess that's true!" He followed her down the tunnel with a little extra bounce in his step and then both of them vanished into the darkness.

Sulu inched deeper into the main tunnel, scanning ahead with his tricorder and the LED light that was somehow becoming less and less useful the deeper they went. Finally the tunnel leveled out and widened into a small chamber that contained a small stone table in the center of it and a low wide archway against one wall. Beyond that archway, a perfectly flat floor and a perfectly flat ceiling separated by just five and a half feet stretched out into a sea of impossible darkness. Sulu leaned thorough the archway and scanned into the blackness as far as his instrument could read. It was exactly as it appeared: a vast flat room stretching out as far as the eye could see, as if someone had nearly sliced the entire mountain in half and then raised it five and a half feet in a single piece.

"This might be the place," Sulu said, and squatted down low to duck through the archway. Doctor Danar initially waited for Uhura to go through first, but in an instant the idea of going into this new space without someone friendly behind her lost its appeal and she ducked in after Sulu without hesitation. Uhura followed last, moments before all three of them heard Sulu ask, "Where's that light coming from?"

"What light?" Danar asked. She started to look around but saw only blackness.

Uhura assumed that Sulu was looking at something that he could only see from his angle, something obscured by an object they hadn't noticed yet. She moved towards him until she was right next to his shoulder...

And a faint halo of light appeared directly in front of them as if it had been triggered by a switch. "Wow... what?" she took a step back, and the light disappeared. Another step forward and it was there again. "Trippy!"

"It does that to me too," Sulu said. Then he realized something and gasped, "You can't see it now? I can."

"What if this is one of their mental illusions?" Doctor Danar frowned, pointing the tricorder at the source of the light as she stepped towards it. At the exact same moment the light reappeared, her tricorder picked up a heat source from the same direction. "Bet you a week's pay that's a Talosian hiding in plain sight."

Uhura fixed her attention on the green light for a moment, then panned her tricorder around, illuminating the ceiling and the floor in a circle around her. "I'm not seeing any signage or inscriptions in here. That's unusual for this level of engineering sophistication."

Sulu looked at her in surprise, "This cave system doesn't seem that sophisticated to me."

"Look again, Hikaru. This is an artificial chamber with a reinforced ceiling. It would have been tricky for our engineers to tunnel out something like this."

"But there are no vertical supports," Sulu said, "No walls, no columns..."

"I know. It's weird..."

"They might have eroded away with time," Danar asked behind them.

"Maybe..." Sulu took a deep breath and started moving towards the halo of green light. He couldn't be sure, exactly, how big it was or how far away it was, and he soon realized it was because he could not completely see the floor or the ceiling that far into the room. It was just a green light glowing through shadows that it somehow failed to illuminate on its own.

Danar followed close behind him and Uhura began panning her tricorder around in a circular sweep, spiraling the ground and walls and ceiling to make sure her instruments covered every inch of the room right up to the archway they'd come through. She repeated the same scan twice, once in pure acoustic mode and then as a dynamic chemical analysis, letting the tricorder's spectrometers pick through the chemical composition of its surroundings. It was in this last mode that the tricorder's screen suddenly showed a burst of activity in its otherwise tranquil line graph: seven distinct peaks appeared, bouncing and dancing up and down as she moved the tricorder and continuing to oscillate even when she didn't. "Got an odd reading on my dyna-scanner."

"I see it too," Danar said, watching watching the lines jump on her own tricorder a moment later, "Any ideas?"

Before Uhura could answer, Sulu was already asking, "Do you smell that?"

Uhura sniffed the air and then her eyebrow rose, "Smells like ozone."

"Really?" Danar switched modes on her tricorder, switching from electromagnetic readings to chemical trace. The device started pulling air through its built-in spectrometers and displaying the results in a new graphic on the screen, showing elemental and chemical signatures on a bar graph. In a handful of seconds, the graph flickered and the tricorder flashed a message over the top of the readout that almost sent Danar running. "Nanites."

Sulu spun on her, eyes wide, "What?"

"Eight hundred parts per million, and rising fast. Density increased by four hundred percent the moment we went through that entrance."

"A swarm, then," Uhura said, "Like the thing that attacked the Enterprise over Doppelganger."

"I don't know if they're exactly the same, but the composition is similar. We're standing in a fog of nanoparticles with the same basic molecular structure."

"Let me try something..." Sulu was switching his tricorder to back to its electromagnetic scanner as he answered, "Yeah... and there's that same Z-band carrier wave. If it's not the same technology, it's something very similar."

"Could there be Talosians in the tunnel with us?" asked Uhura.

Sulu switched his tricorder to acoustic mode for a moment, then a dynamic scan for biological markers before answering, "No recent activity. The Talosians here probably died years ago."

"Assuming they were ever alive," Danar said, panning the tricorder's light around in a circle, "This place looks more like a tomb."

"This Z-band reading gets stronger in that direction," Sulu added. His tricorder was now pointed directly at the faint green light source beckoning to them in the distance... whatever distance that happened to be.

Danar said, "I don't think we should be here, Lieutenant."

"It'll be alright," Sulu said, walking towards the green light, "But keep your phasers ready, just in case."

"In case of what? In case the swarm of tiny alien robots we are currently standing in decides to eat us?"

"You read the report, Danar. They can't affect macroscopic changes unless they form macroscopic structures first. So when they decide to eat us, they'll have form themselves into something with teeth. Which, if they do, we can shoot it."

"We're getting closer," Uhura said, reading the Z-band signal on her tricorder. Then her light glinted off of something ahead of them and a shape began to form. "What's all that?"

There was something in the middle of the room, a jumble of random shapes that seemed to be piled on top of each other in no particular pattern or order. Sulu pointed his tricorder at it and let the light attachment illuminate it for him.

It was a pile of bodies. Some of them were desiccated and mummified, rotting flesh beneath cracked and decaying exoskeletons. Some of them were fresh enough that might still have been alive, though most of them had left their shells behind long ago and their abdomens were withered and grey. They were a jumble of arms and legs and twisted limbs as if the entire mass of them had been trying to squeeze into the smallest space possible and then collectively died that way in the middle of that effort.

"What am I looking at?" Sulu asked, "Mass grave?"

Uhura moved off from the entrance to cover it with her phaser while Doctor Danar moved across the chamber, taking up a position close to the pile of bodies in case something dangerous was hiding in it. Sulu drew his phaser with his free hand and knelt down near the edge of the pile, poking at one of the bodies with the tip of his weapon. With even this slight touch, the Talosian corpse lolled to the side and rolled out of position, exposing three other bodies beneath it that began to slide awkwardly against each other as whatever nooks and crannies held them in place began to give way. "I do not think these bodies could have been posed this way."

"Why not? Looks like they're just dumped here."

"But look at them. Their limbs are all woven through and twisted up. It's like they were grasping at each other when they died. Besides, this is obviously the source of the Z-band signal we detected. Maybe the nanites compelled them to all pile up?"

"It doesn't seem like they all died at the same time," Ramirez said, moving a few of the crustacean bodies aside, "Looks like this pile has been growing over time. You notice how all the oldest bodies are on the outside?"

Sulu looked, and then he saw it himself. "The fresher corpses are deeper in." He saw something else too, though it wasn't worth mentioning just yet. The faint green glow that had initially drawn them to this spot was coming from somewhere beneath the pile of bodies; they had only been able to see it before because the corpses at the very top of the pile were backlit from within by it. Something glowing under there... machinery?

"So the new arrivals come here and they dig there way into the center of all this, and then they die there."

"Jesus..." Danar took a few large steps back from the pile, breathing deep and trying not to breathe in the rotting fish smell of Talosian decomposition. But here too, the smell of death was seemingly overwhelmed by the smell of ozone and the stingy odor of burnt gunpowder. The smell of nanites entering my body, she thought grimly. "So this is the place where Talosians go to die."

Sulu grunted. "I was just thinking that too. Is that a real thing?"

"Are you asking me?"

"I think I was asking Nyota."

"Asking me what?" Uhura said, turning away from the body pile and the tricorder scan.

"That's sort of a cliche, that there's a place where certain creatures go to die. Is that a thing that really happens in nature?"

Uhura turned most of her attention back to her tricorder, searching her memory as she went, "It's rare, but not unheard of. It is actually more common among sapient species as a ritualistic behavior than it is among animals acting on instinct. Syrannite Vulcans used to return to the katric shrines of their ancestors when their deaths were near. On Andoria, the Disciples of Regret practice Jia'Halrie, in where a dying warrior breaks into the tombs of his ancestors and performs a ritual self-mummification."

"So you mean it's a way for dying people to dispose of themselves and save their relatives the trouble?"

Uhura shook her head, "It's more like an attempt by the dying to reconnect with those who have already died. It's a way of preparing for the end of life by choosing your place among the dead and then taking that place of your own free will."

Danar knelt down next to her, looking at her tricorder screen and looking at the bodies themselves as if searching for clues.

"What would that mean for a race of telepaths like these?" Sulu asked, "I mean, can they sense the deaths of their comrades at a distance? Or long after the fact?"

"You know what?" Danar straightened up, then slowly backed away from the pile, raising her tricorder and pointing it at the pile, "I have an idea."

Sulu smiled, "Well, I'm all ears."

"However sophisticated the Talosians' telepathy may be, the ability to strongly affect sentient beings at a distance requires a massive amount of transmission power. A psionic field or a neural-electrical induction pulse can require tens of kilowatts even at close range, and their effects scale at the square of the distance. On the other hand, we have seen the Talosians influencing our officers at distances of several tens of meters..."

Uhura looked up suddenly, "You don't think the Talosians can generate the necessary power."

"I really don't. Most species capable of long-distance telepathy usually have specialized organs for generating the necessary electrical charge. Betazoid and Aenar telepaths both have charge-generating organs capable of produce up to seven thousand joules. But we haven't seen that in any of the specimens we've examined. There's no evidence of similar organs anywhere Talosian anatomy."

"Not in these either?" Uhura asked, gesturing at the pile of bodies.

"None that I can detect. Which suggests their abilities may be enhanced artificially." Danar gestured around the room, "Didn't that Trader say something about them having a subspace transmitter? That might be the source of the Z-band signal."

Might also be the source of that glow, Sulu thought. "Alright..." he snapped open his communicator and paged McCoy's set, "Doctor what's your status?"

"I'm in need of a new line of work."

Sulu rolled his eyes and repeated the question. "Besides that. What's your status?"

"Hundreds of bodies here. Mostly hatchlings, a few juveniles. All dead."

"Any idea what killed them?"

"Starved to death. Seems like the juveniles were cannibalizing the bodies of the dead, but it didn't get them very far. There's also something like four hundred unhatched eggs here but not a single adult in sight."

"It looks like all the adults are gathered down here," Sulu said, "Maybe they abandoned the children when things got rough?"

"That looks like it might be the case. Except that would kind of suggest this whole thing happened pretty suddenly, right? I mean parents don't just dump their children in a hellish nightmare like this..."

"Unless they convince themselves the hellish nightmare is actually a safe and supportive nursery where the kids will be safe for a while. As for why the parents never came back for the children," he looked at the pile of bodies again, "There's no food down here, no water. I'm guessing they also starved to death."

"Have I told you how much I hate this planet?"

Sulu nodded in agreement, "I think we're almost done here. Gather a few specimens and head back to the surface. We'll meet you in half an hour."

"Got it." Doctor McCoy, currently standing in the midst of a massive sprawl of twisted and contorted Talosian bodies, killed the signal from his end and tucked the communicator back into his belt. Not that he was happy with the prospect, but the need for it was clear. If the entire Talosian species was facing extinction, Starfleet was going to want to know why. "The most recent corpses should have the most promise," he said, and turning to Zhara and Hendorf added, "Whip out your antgravs. This is the nasty part."

Down below, Uhura and Danar were beginning to pull the pile of bodies apart, digging their way to the green light source beneath it all. Once, twice, three times Danar thought she saw movement out of the corner of her eye and turned in that direction only to notice the same inky darkness, the floor and ceiling fading smoothly into the too-near oblivion. "We should have brought floods. It's far too dark in here."

"No it isn't," Uhura said, with a casualness that belied the incredible creepiness of his words, "It's the nanites. The swarm is thick enough to block out visible light."

"You're kidding me..." As a test, Sulu pulled a small device the size of a gumdrop out of his equipment belt, pinched it in his fingers until he felt it pop, then tossed it away in a random direction. The flare lit up like a floodlight as it tumbled through the air, then dimmed, then vanished into a veil of darkness just ten meters away before it had a chance to hit the ground.

Over many years of practice, of slipping into and out of dangerous situations, in dealing with people and things that were not what they appeared to be, Lieutenant Sulu had learned to trust his instincts. He had learned a long time ago to pay special attention to that tingly feeling in the back of your throat when you know something terrible is close by but your conscious mind is not fully aware of it. The feeling of being in a bad place, a place where only bad things could possibly happen.

That was the feeling Sulu had now, and while he couldn't see what was threatening him, his Starfleet training and his experience with the Talosians had given him plenty of grounds to take a guess. "Hey... Liz..."

The science officer's attention was fixed on the pile of bodies in front of them. The arms and legs were all intertwined as if the bodies had been in the process of climbing through each other when they died. It was if they were all attracted to something that lay beneath the pile, and had probably died after reaching their goal.

"How come nobody ever removes the corpses?" Asked Uhura as she pulled another one from the pile and rolled it on its side.

"It's the same with that nursery upstairs," Danar said, "The Talosians recreate reality around them. They keep themselves from seeing what they don't want to see."

Uhura nodded in understanding, "Then maybe they didn't see this pile. They imagined it was something else."

And Sulu thought, What could be so valuable that they would ignore everything else to come looking for it? It had to be something was something that compelled all of them to come here, something that held universal appeal. Perhaps even something that they thought would really solve their problems. It was something much too valuable for them to easily let it go. He briefly recalled that the Novans had something a lot like that in their underground cities, a shrine of some kind to honor the memories of... Uh oh. "Hey, Liz," Sulu began, "There's something that worries me-"

"My god, look at this!" Uhura was pulling the last of the corpses away as the shape of the light source became visible. The green glow was coming from a bank of large circular LED switches on the top of a large metallic cube almost a half a meter across. It was covered in a layer of mold and grey, evil-smelling slime that was probably the dripping runoff from an entire generation of decomposing corpses laying on top of it. The cube itself was made of a sickly-looking green metal, probably some kind of copper alloy that had oxidized over centuries of neglect. Though solidly built, it was not perfectly smooth: its faces had patterns of intersecting lines that ran mostly diagonal and parallel, like etchings of 20th century circuit boards. A bundle of three thick cables was connected to one corner of it, one of which was warmer than the others and was probably feeding it electrical power.

"This is definitely the source of our Z-band signal," Danar said, glancing down at her tricorder. "Okay. So here's my idea. It's obvious that the Talosians can't generate a psionic field on their own. So they must be using some kind of artificial means to amplify their thought transmissions. Like a communications relay or something."

"Something like this?" Uhura pointed to the cube.

"Exactly like this. It's no wonder they're drawn to it when they're dying. The weaker they get, the harder it is for them to sustain a shared illusion. They get closer to it to get a stronger signal and then they starve to death because they're too weak to go back up to the surface for food."

Uhura nodded, "The illusion of survival is more important to them than the real thing."

"Right. It's just like those Iconian ruins on Malachi Prime. How all the fossilized bodies are closest to the command center..."

"... because that's what they wanted to protect most," Uhura nodded, "Even accidental mummies burry themselves with their treasures. That makes sense."

"Can you two stop for a moment?" Sulu was trying to keep the urgency out of his voice, but as long as he was sounding calm he couldn't break into Danar's thought stream. Actually, Sulu wasn't so sure of his own theory, considering Danar seemed unconcerned by it. And getting her attention to ask her about it seemed like a waste of time. But there were ways he could test the theory himself...

"There's an easy way to know for sure," Danar said, "If we send a Z-band transmission to the cube on the right frequency, it should amplify it and send it back to us."

"What?" Uhura looked at her quizzically, "That makes no sense. If this is a signal relay, it'll be programmed to respond to Talosian thought patterns. We don't know its transmission protocols, what it keys on..."

"Talosians aren't machines, though. They probably haven't memorized the protocols either. In the fact, I'd bet this nanite swarm all around us is part of the device. It's probably helping to relay their thoughts back and forth through the amplifier."

"Well then, if you send a Z-band signal, it'll affect the nanites too, won't it?"

Danar thought about this, "I suppose it might. Only one way to find... out... um... Sulu?" her train of thought was finally interrupted by the appearance of Sulu's tricorder less than a centimeter from her temple and the Lieutenant's deep frown. She hadn't noticed him gradually approaching her, step by step, frowning each time he came closer, any more than she'd noticed his attempts to raise concerns earlier. Now, however, he was impossible to ignore: he looked as if he had just discovered an armed photon torpedo lodged in Danar's hair. "Sulu, what are you doing?"

His expression was grim. "We're in trouble."

"Hey, Sulu," Doctor McCoy's voice crackled out of his communicator, "Before we head back up, I want to check out the other tunnel with Zhara and Hendorf..."

Sulu snapped open his communicator and barked, "Negative, Doctor. Drop whatever you're doing and return to the surface immediately."

Lieutenant Hendorf answered, "There a problem, Lieutenant?"

"Yes. Yes there is. Standby." He snapped the communicator shut and moved closer to Danar, "Doctor-"

"And I thought I was jittery," Danar said, taking a small step back, "What's gotten into you?"

"I don't have time to explain, Doctor. We need to get out of here right away."

"Lieutenant," Danar smiled softly, "You really need to calm down. This underground cavern is-"

"Probably safer than any place on the surface," Sulu finished for her, "Which all three of us know from experience. You know what else I know? I know all about the Iconian ruins on Malachi Prime, and the cave dwellers on Terra Nova."

Danar nodded, "Well sure, so do I. Why is that relevant?"

"Because I've never been to Terra Nova. And neither have you."

Danar's eyes widened. "Holy shit, you're right..."

"So wait," Uhura raised a brow, "You two are both experiencing my memories?"

"Not yours," Sulu said, "Lieutenant Zhara grew up on Terra Nova. And Hendorf went to Chichen Itza when he was a kid. That's what made him want to join Starfleet. And Liz, I happen to know you're the only person in Starfleet who's ever been to Malachi Prime. That entire system went under quarantine a year after you left."

"So then..." Danar turned back to the cube, then back to Sulu, "So what...?"

"That cube is scanning our memories," Sulu said, "And it's broadcasting them back to us. Which would be bad enough, except that it's being very selective about what it's broadcasting."

"Selective?" Uhura raised a brow, "You mean it's not sending back everything?"

"Only what it... well... what they want us to see."

"How can you tell?" Uhura asked.

"They who? The Talosians?" Danar looked at the pile of bodies all around them, "They're dead, aren't they?"

"Of course they are," Sulu said, "Nyota, do you have that antigrav rig?"

She flinched at the question, then realized its significance, and knelt down and pulled the two portable antigrav handles from her field kit. "Are we taking the cube with us?"

Sulu ignored the question. "Lock it up for me, will you?"

"Okay..." uncomprehending, and more than a little anxious, Uhura folded the antigravs out to full size and attached them to the cube, one on each side. They attached to the surface of the cube and then wrapped it in a subspace field that soon reduced its mass to almost nothing; it was light as a feather now and could be hoisted by a single person holding a single handle if need be. "Got it..."

"Okay. So. Whatever you do, don't panic."

Danar and Uhura traded a puzzled look, and then said to Sulu in unison, "Panic from what?"

Sulu walked around the back of the cube and looked at the thick electrical cables on the back of the cube. He reached into his pack and pulled out a long sleek handle twenty centimeters in length and pressed down a switch on its side. The handle shuddered in his hand, and piece by piece, segment by segment, the handle unfolded itself into Magnum Pro Series NZ350 competition-grade Katana: one hundred centimeters of self-sharpening lunar titanium alloy wielded by the hands of Starfleet Academy's two-time Continental Kendo champion.

Sulu raised the sword over his head and swung it through the air in a wide, sweeping circular path whose upwards orbit crossed right through the spot where the three cables connected to the cube. In an instant, the indicator lights on top of the cube went dark.

Sulu grasped the true reality of his surroundings for the first time and grappled with a sense of foreboding he hadn't been allowed to notice before. This entire space smelled of death and despair and had all the trappings of a mass grave in a nuclear holocaust in the middle of a famine during a pandemic. Where moments ago he had felt comfortable and at home here, he now saw that this was a terrifying place that looked dangerous and unsafe and all of his instincts were telling him he didn't want to be here.

There was a rustling sound from somewhere. A jostling, stirring, the sound of feet and fingers and claws moving rapidly as dozens of not-actually-dead creatures began shifting positions. Then those indistinct sounds of movement were drowned by the screaming of hundreds of voices. The screams came from from every corner of the room, from the tunnel they'd come through, from chambers in the distance they hadn't seen, and even from the pile of bodies they had moved to get to the device. They screamed in anguish and rage, in voices that were choked with decay or pumped with the alien equivalent of adrenaline. They screamed a single word in such perfect unison they might have been a choir group: "No!" The screams grew louder, less simultaneous, but caucophonous and deafening as they formed words, "The memories!" They screamed in broken, scattered unity, "Give them back now!"