Chapter Ten

"Destroy them!" Susan begged. "Blow them up. Do it right now!"

"Susan," said Tholiar gently, "those are our ships. Our people."

"No they're not!" The Augment gripped Tholiar's wrist desperately, her little fingers digging into the Andorian woman's flesh. "They're monsters. Blow them up! Launch torpedoes!"

Green couldn't stand children at the best of times and he shouted, "Shut up, you brat!"

"You idiot!" Susan shot back. "You tiny little idiot!"

And then she was suddenly gone from Tholiar's side. The girl squirmed up through the bridge rail and dashed around the upper deck to the tactical control panel. Before Brok could stop her, her fingers expertly found the photonic torpedo controls.

"No!" Barked Brok, trying to stop her, but it was too late.

Torpedo tube one discharged its deadly load. A bright yellow star raced from the Endeavour's spherical main hull and exploded amongst the Von Braun shuttles, vaporising three of them and pulverising the other one into rubble.

The officers stared aghast at what had been done. Susan paid them no mind, her little hands reaching for the phase cannon controls to finish off the tug-shuttle. This time, Brok was quick enough to stop her. He closed his big hands around her wrists and pulled her away from the control console. Shook her and shouted, "What have you done?"

"We have to do more! We have to kill all of them!"

"Those are our people!"

"Idiot!"

And suddenly Brok wasn't on the bridge anymore. He found himself standing on a ledge in the middle of a snowstorm, mountains rising up all around him, cutting the sky off from view. He felt the wind whip through his thin uniform, and although he came from an arctic world with he still shivered bitterly. Icy droplets of snow were falling on his exposed hands and hairless head. He could feel his flesh freeze where the snow touched him.

This is a trick, he told himself. She's put it into my mind somehow.

Try as he might, he couldn't dispel the illusion. He was trapped in the world of snow and ice that Susan had created in his mind.

Free of Brok's grip, Susan leapt at the tactical console again. Ensign Hoskins tried to intercept her and she lashed out with her psychic powers again. The engineer missed his lunge, his world suddenly disappearing into blackness as she blocked the signals between his eyes and his brain. His head struck against the bridge rail and he lay on the deck moaning.

Susan scrabbled up into Brok's empty chair and jabbed at the phase cannon controls, bring the weapons on line, targeting the tug, charging the firing coils…

Tholiar shot her in the back with a phase pistol.

Brok found himself shivering on the bridge. Susan's little body was lying sprawled by his chair. He checked her pulse. She was just stunned.

"Get her to the brig," Tholiar ordered, holstering her phase pistol again. "I want her completely isolated from the rest of the crew. Lock her in a cell then remove all of the security forces from the brig area. Seal off that whole section. No one is to go near her until further notice."

"Aye, Commander."

He passed the unconscious Augment to two of the bridge security officers and they carried her into a turbolift. Brok hoped that she didn't wake up before they had her contained, now that he knew what she could do with her psychic abilities. He also hoped that she could not reach his mind from the brig. That snowstorm she had plunged him into…it had felt so real. So perfect. Every flake of snow had burnt his skin, the wind had ripped through him right to the core, and he had utterly believed it. He still expected to see patches of raw, red, frozen skin when he glanced at his hands, but they were perfectly fine.

She hadn't meant to hurt him, he was sure of that. She had just wanted to disable him, force him to let her go and keep him from getting in her way. What could she have done to him if she had meant to kill?

"Mr Brok, tactical report," requested Commander Tholiar, getting her bridge crew to focus on their jobs, to put the disturbance of the past couple of minutes behind them.

"The Von Braun's shuttles are all destroyed," he said unhappily. "The tug-shuttle is still on approach."

"Are they hailing us?"

Tucker checked his boards. "No, sir."

That was strange, thought Tholiar. The occupants of that tug had just seen the ship fire a photonic torpedo that had obliterated the other shuttles, and not only had they not altered their approach they hadn't attempted to contact the ship. That wasn't right.

"Hail them."

"Hailing now, sir." After a minute he said that line that Tholiar had already heard from the comm officer so many times that mission. "No response, sir."

"Sensor scans, Mr Green."

"What for? They're obviously our people."

She didn't try to keep the anger out of her voice. "Sensor scans, Mr Green."

"Fine, fine." He prodded the console into action. "Scanning. Huh? Wait…those aren't human bio-signs."

"The shuttle's picking up speed," said Ensign Hill, navigation officer.

"Mr Brok, disable that vessel."

Susan had already programmed the phase cannons to lock target on the tug, all he had to do was press fire. As he jabbed the red button he wondered whose mind she had pulled the knowledge necessary to work this console from. His?

Pink streams of light stabbed into the tug-shuttle, but it was built to survive all kinds of assaults. Its shields flashed and successfully repelled the starship's blasts. Its impulse engines fired and it accelerate hard at them.

"They're on a collision course!" Warned Hill. "Too close for evasives."

"Shields to full. Fire again, Mr Brok."

The second volley pierced the tug's shields and obliterated its cockpit, but it was too late. The Endeavour lurched violently and alarms began to blare. Tholiar pulled herself to her feet, using the command chair as an aid. The main lighting was down, either damaged or because the power had been rerouted to more essential systems. She could hear crewmen moaning softly, and in the dim light cast from control panels she could see medical and damage control personnel getting to work. "Report."

"The tug crashed into the forward hull before the shields came up," said Brok. "Deck five section thirteen. Emergency force fields are in place and holding. Damage control parties have been dispatched."

"Have Inogashira send a security detail as well. Damage report."

"We have a hull breach, obviously," said Green. "The tug wreckage is plugging the gap for now. Primary power is offline above deck five – the tug hit one of our EPS lines. We've also lost access to the secondary computer core."

"Casualty report."

"We haven't received one yet."

Tholiar frowned. "The medical teams should be there by now."

"They should, but they haven't sent any word to us."

"Tucker, get in touch with those medics."

He tried his controls and shook his head helplessly. "They aren't responding, sir."

What was going on now? Tholiar wondered. First the Von Braun wouldn't talk to them, and then they had lost contact with the away team, and now this!

Then a new set of alarms went off and she knew her problems had just been added to.

"The intruder alert."

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"They rammed my ship!"

He and Annabelle had ended up at a view port on the Von Braun's observation deck, and a part of him believed that whatever was behind this Hell had intentionally put them there so that he could see his ship being attacked.

He hadn't understood when the Endeavour had fired on the Von Braun's escaping shuttles. He had worried that the monsters had already spread to the starship and were using its weapons to slaughter the survivors trying to escape from the Von Braun. But he had it the wrong way around, he saw that now. Tholiar had realised that the shuttles were dangerous and she had shot them down to try and protect the Endeavour. She had been too slow to destroy the tug, though.

"They want to escape," said Annabelle and she sounded apologetic, as though this was all somehow her fault. "We destroyed the Von Braun's engines so that Hell couldn't go anywhere. But your ship can still fly! That's why they want it."

"Tholiar won't give it to them."

"I hope she can stop them, Will, I really do. Alex seemed to think it was possible, but…" She shook her head. She didn't want to say anything that would further upset Drake; she could see that he was taking the attack on his ship hard.

There came from behind them a sound that Annabelle hadn't heard aboard the Von Braun for a very long time: laughter. It was warm and rich and genuinely amused, but there was something just a little dangerous beneath its surface. "Heh heh. You should have a little more faith, Annabelle. You don't know what our crew can do. Does she, Will?"

"Alex!" Exclaimed the captain joyfully.

She was approaching them from the far end of the corridor, carrying her particle cannon in her thin hands, her phase pistols holstered. Her odd clothes were smeared with dirt and there was blood on them; most of it was the reddish-black that the monsters bled, but some looked a lot more human. She had a cut on her right cheek, crusted blood covering it, and her vest had been torn at the waist; she had a bloody bandage wrapped around her stomach.

She had been through Hell, but she was still smiling.

Drake rushed over to her and impulsively embraced her. The young woman chuckled a little and returned the hug, briefly, before pushing him gently away. She wagged a finger and kidded, "Annabelle will get jealous."

Annabelle ignored the comment. "What happened to you? I looked…I couldn't find you anywhere."

Alex shrugged. "I obviously ended up somewhere else to you. The anomaly is a sentient, malicious force. It's been intentionally trying to keep us apart to prey on us."

"I met someone who said something similar."

"Really?" Alex's red eyebrows hitched up, intrigued. "Who?"

"A Von Braun survivor. Corvin, I think he said his name was."

"Corvis, perhaps?" She suggested instead.

"Corvis?" Annabelle was appalled. "That bastard! He did all of this! He's still alive? I hoped the monsters had killed him by now."

"Heh heh heh. Oh, they won't kill him. He's far too important to them, you see. Do you see? No, you don't." She sighed. "Explanations. They're always a bugger. I'm much better at hiding things than explaining them. So much more practice. I'll give it a go, though."

"Alex…slow down. You're rambling."

She grinned. There was something dancing in her red eyes. Something…oddly playful. "Corvis is the key to all this. He was the first person to enter the anomaly. Like I said, it's a living thing. It infused him, messed about with his little brain, made him a part of it. He's a physical extension of the anomaly. It's host, sort of it. He controls the thingies running around this ship."

"That's crazy, Alex."

She nodded. "Insane, stupid, impossible. True, though. He's the controlling force. And you know it, Will. You met him. I can see it in your eyes. You're thinking back to that meeting. How odd was he? Confident and intense, despite everything that's happening."

Corvis wasn't the only one acting that way, Drake reflected. He had known Alex Nain for a long time; he had seen her in a variety of moods and in all sorts of situations. She was no stranger to this sort of terrible danger. He remembered standing with her as she faced down a small force of armed Sa'keth, opportunistic scavengers who had used the Romulan War as an excuse to steal territories from Earth and her allies. He recalled the way she had looked at their knives and fierce faces almost pityingly, and how, although he and she had been unarmed, she had been in absolute control of the situation. He had seen icy evil flare in her eyes and seen her murder dispassionately. He had seen her eyes narrow and blaze with fire, her whole personality filling with so much roaring anger that her very voice burned. But he had never seen her like this before. All of this was a game to her. A joke.

He wondered if this place was doing something to his friend.

No, he thought. Can't be. I'm fine, and so is Annabelle. Alex is just strange – she always has been. This is just her way of dealing with all this.

"If we find Corvis we end this," said Alex firmly.

"How do we do that?" Demanded Annabelle. "If you're right, and he's the devil in this Hell, he's not going to let us get anywhere near him, is he?"

A scratching, scurrying sound came from the opposite end of the corridor. The three Starfleet officers turned sharply, in time to see something emerging from the darkness. It slithered along the ground like a snake, but it had a shark-like head full of teeth, and long, thin tentacles reached from its body, probing at the corridor and the air around it. The three humans backed up slowly, Alex bringing her particle cannon to bear. She suddenly stopped and sniffed the air. Frowned. "Can anyone else smell gasoline?"

The monster screeched and belched a streamer of fire at them. Drake grabbed Alex's waist and threw them both to the floor as the burning ray of white flame shot at where they had been standing.

Alex laughed hysterically as she rolled out of Drake's grip. She fired the particle cannon from where she lay, the cone of energy vaporising the monster's head. The shot ignited the fuel the creature carried inside itself in a gland, and an eye blink later the whole monster exploded in a ball of orange flame and thick black smoke. Alex had guessed what would happen when she fired the gun, and she was already on her feet, grabbing Drake and Annabelle by their jackets and hauling them along with her. Flames licked up the corridor after them and Alex pulled her friends close to her, then threw herself through a door that was labelled 'antimatter fuel cells' but actually lead to an empty crew cabin. The three of them crashed to the floor, Alex rolling with the impact and coming nimbly back to her feet, the other two lying sprawled.

"That was new," she chuckled. "Fire-breathing snake monster. Don't see that every day. You two all right?"

"We're alive," Annabelle scolded, pushing herself onto her hands and knees. Drake helped her the rest of the way up while Alex looked on with cheeky cheerfulness loitering in her gaze. "Brilliant. Let's go and kill Corvis now, shall we?"

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"We're getting reports from the security teams on deck five. They've found some of the medical teams. Apparently, the medics say that they were attacked by…"

"By what, Mr Tucker?"

"Monsters, sir," he said uncomfortably. "Demons, snake-creatures, spider monsters, floating heads, all sorts of really weird things, sir."

Tholiar considered the report carefully. It sounded preposterous to her, but no one would make up something like that in their current situation. She had to believe that it was true, however unlikely that seemed to her. "Additional security forces to that deck. Seal off all passages off deck five and post teams at every access point. If they see anything other than one of our crew, they are to kill it."

"Aye, Commander."

She sat in the centre chair, but she was itching to be down on deck five, helping Inogashira and the security teams. The prospect of having a live rifle in her hands again, an enemy to shoot at, blood to spill…she had to work to keep such temptations out of her head.

At least repairs were proceeding smoothly, she told herself. Primary power had been restored to the bridge, and engineering assured them that the secondary computer core would be operational again within the hour. That was good news. And she trusted Inogashira to contain the situation on deck five.

Something else flashed on Tucker's panel – she saw it before he did. More bad news? She dreaded the thought.

The communications officer pressed a pair of buttons and a new graphic appeared on his screen. "Commander, we're receiving a hail from the Von Braun."

Her eyes widened. "What? How?"

"It's being routed through one of their subspace telescopes," said Green. "Clever. The telescope is a more powerful array than the standard comm dishes."

"And someone reconfigured it to transmit to us. Let us hear it, Mr Tucker."

The comm link fizzed and crackled with interference, but the voice was unmistakable and its message clear. "This is Lieutenant Nain to the Endeavour. I hope someone's hearing this. Things are a bit FUBAR over here. The ship has been overrun by nightmarish entities – monsters. The team's been scattered, and the anomaly is constantly reconfiguring the ship, making it impossible for me to tell where I'm going. I haven't had any contact with the rest of the team since we got aboard. I hope they're all right. Under no circumstances should you attempt to send in further rescue parties, and any ship that approaches without first confirming beyond any doubt that it's piloted by one of us should be fired on. We can't let this thing spread. I'm recording this message as I speak it. The computer's set to rebroadcast it every five minutes. Hopefully you won't have to listen to it too many times before I have something new to report."

"That's it, sir."

At least one of them was still alive, thought Tholiar happily. She had been losing hope.

"Can we send a reply?"

Green was the one who answered. While the helmsman had been speaking he had been making further scans of the rigged-up transmitter. "No. The telescope can't receive our messages. Frankly, I'm amazed Nain figured out how to use it as a transmitter."

The science officer had a low opinion of everyone's intelligence, but in this instance Tholiar was inclined to agree with him. Alex Nain was a good pilot, but the Andorian seriously doubted that she had a brain in her head.

"Monitor that frequency for further transmissions, Mr Tucker. And raise Starfleet Command. I want to talk to Admiral Archer. Mr Green, start working on a way to reconfigure our sensors to penetrate the anomaly's interference. I want to know if Ms Nain is the only survivor aboard that ship or not."

"Can't be done," he said stubbornly, sitting back in his chair with his arms folded, not even willing to make an attempt.

"Mr Green," said Tholiar tiredly, "if Ms Nain can turn a telescope into a transmitter I am quite sure you can boost the resolution of our scanners just a little."

Properly affronted, he set to work.

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"You must think yourself quite clever."

"Clever?" Retorted Alex. "I'm a bloody genius. And you're a satanic madman. Crovis, isn't it?"

"Clever," said the voice over the comm. "Clever, clever, clever. Won't do you any good, of course. Your warning came a little bit too late."

"What do you mean?"

"The Endeavour has already been boarded. My children are spreading through her even as we speak. Soon that ship will be ours and we will use it to spread throughout the stars."

"You're a real screw job, you know that right? I mean, seriously, your brain's turned to pulp or something. Your little monsters won't take the Endeavour. They're too easy to kill." As if to demonstrate, she used her particle cannon to obliterate the spider-like creature, roughly the size of a dog, that had been creeping along the ceiling, getting ready to pounce on her. "See? Miho will wipe them all out."

"My children are without limit."

"Over here, maybe. See, I've worked that bit out, too. It's the anomaly that spawns these horrible things. But, and here's the funny bit, that little magic trick only works in here, inside this tormented space."

"Is that really what you believe?"

She laughed at his feeble attempt at a bluff. "If it wasn't you wouldn't need the Endeavour, would you? Or any ship at all. You'd just pop your 'children' into existence all across the Federation, and that would be that. But you said it yourself; you need the ship to spread. And since you used the shuttles to board her – I saw that, by the way – they're safely outside of your spawning range."

"For now." He sounded irritated. Good. That's what she had been going for. "That ship doesn't have to move far to be in range, though."

"Trust me, it's not going anywhere."

"You're a very irritating person."

"So I'm told. Since we're having this lovely little chat, Corvis, maybe you can answer a question or two for me. Like why are you doing this? And why did you go into the anomaly in the first place? That seems…a little rash to me."

He laughed. "Rash? Oh Nain. You're not as clever as you think you are. I knew what this was all along. I knew what it could do. I wanted it. Why else do you think I came here? Why do you think I brought the Von Braun here?"

A smugly superior grin popped onto her face. "Oh Corvis, I really am as clever as I think I am. I had been thinking about that. Von Braun's a science ship, and they don't usually stray far from the explored and charted territories. We're out in the unknown here. I had been wondering. Thanks for clearing that up. So you'd been planning this insane little venture for a while?"

"Ever since I found out about this place, Nain. Ever since he told me."

"Who's that?"

"The King of Bad Dreams, of course," Corvis said, and he laughed, the sound echoing around the corridor. Alex was quite glad when he finally turned off the comm and she didn't have to listen to him any more.

"He's definitely insane," she remarked.

"Unquestionably."

"That king he mentioned? Do you think that's the dark presence that's been troubling you?"

Kana shrugged. "Without knowing who or what the king is, it's impossible to say. But it's a good theory."

Alex kept walking. They had left the stellar cartography lab shortly after she had sent her message to the Endeavour. She hoped that the starship had received it. Judging from what Corvis had said to her, she imagined that they had, but it was possible that he had been trying to trick her for whatever reason.

That brief conversation had consolidated her resolve to find and kill Corvis as soon as she could.

He wasn't in any hurry to let her reach him. Every door she had gone through had taken her anywhere but where she wanted to be. She had been to the ship's hydrogen fuel storage pods, the main computer core, the mess hall, three crew cabins, six turbolift cars, the hydroponics garden, the arboretum, and five science labs, and in each place she had been forced to fight for her life. She was sore, tired, and bloody now. Her particle cannon and both phase pistols were severely depleted. She had armed herself with knives when she had found herself in the mess hall, glad that Kana had taught her how to throw and wield bladed weapons. She had to conserve as much of her remaining ammunition as possible.

She came across a door labelled as a medical storage room. Not expecting very much, she forced it open and went inside, stunned to find that she did actually end up in a medical storage room. She scrounged through the medpacks scattered around the floor until she found a stimulant, which she injected straight away, without first checking whether it was for humans, Vulcans, Andorians, or laboratory mice. She trusted that if she had accidentally just shot herself full of something dangerous, Kana would transform it into something beneficial.

Her strength returned, slowly. Alex knew that it wouldn't last. Only a good long rest and something nourishing to eat would do that, and neither was an option at the moment. The meds would have to do.

She wasn't the first to raid this room, she noticed. And then looking again she decided that she might not even be the first human to raid the room. It looked like this place had been smashed up. There was blood on the floor and walls, supply boxes had been knocked over, and at her feet there was a hyperspanner that was sticky with black monster blood. She explored the small room, finding a human and a monster corpse. The monster was one that she had seen before, a bull with crab pincers attached; the human was a Von Braun crewman, male, a hole in his chest. Oddly, it looked more like he had been shot than killed by the bull-thing.

"What do you make of this, Kana?"

"I don't know. But you should look at this."

Alex came over to where her friend was standing. "What is it?"

Kana pointed at the bulkhead and replied, "More names."

"Pratchett, Chattaway, S'jek, and what's this? V.B. x2?"

The words were burnt into the bulkhead in crisp, clear block capitals. Alex ran her finger over the scratches, feeling the rough edges where the molten plastic had accumulated. A phase pistol had done this, she was sure of that. It wasn't the first time that she and Kana had found names shot into walls aboard this ship. "That brings the total to what? Twelve?"

"Yes. That we know of."

"Twelve SSAR persons," Alex mused aloud. "And then this two times V.B. You think that could be Von Braun?"

"A sensible guess."

"Someone's got a list. And they're crossing names off it."

Kana nodded. "It seems so. The question is where are the bodies?"

Alex hadn't thought of that. "Good point. There's one back there, but where are the other five? And all those other names we've seen. You don't think they've been…eaten, or something?"

"No, Alex. That would be stupid. We would still have found bones."

"Oh yeah." She was thinking about something else. Names. A list of victims. She knew all of them, in one way or another, but none had been particularly close to her. But she had only seen a very small part of the ship. What if…somewhere else…there was Will's name on a wall? Or Sarn's?

She punched the bulkhead. The pain in her hand gave her something else to think about.

"This isn't the time to be injuring yourself."

"Shut up, Kana!"

The other her looked very deeply hurt, before she could get her angry mask back in place. Alex sighed deeply and apologised, "Sorry, Kana. I'm just worried about our friends."

"So am I. But beating yourself up won't help. We have to find Corvin and kill him, remember? That will sort all this mess out."

"Right." She nodded. "Right. Let's get back to it, then. Have you got all you need?"

Kana nodded. "We've been through the dimensional shifts enough times now. I've worked out how they work. We can control our destination now."

"Fantastic. We'll check the bridge and the engine room first. If he's not in those places we'll swing by the armoury to restock and then keep searching."

She stepped out of the storage room and felt the dimensional rift greet her. She and Kana had been studying it since they had left the stellar cartography lab, working out how Corvis was able to send people across his ship at will. Now they understood, and now they could control the rift as well as he. She felt it tugging her in one direction and knew it wasn't the way she wanted to go. No, she silently told it, projecting all of her will behind that word, and the destination that she had in mind.

She opened her eyes.

She was standing on the bridge.

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At least, it had once been the bridge. Before the Von Braun had entered the anomaly, this place had been its high-tech control centre. Now it resembled something more like a medieval torture chamber. There was blood on all of the walls, fleshy growths everywhere; chains and barbs dangled from the ceiling, fires flickered in bits around the edges of the bridge. The ship's captain dangled in the middle of the room from a hook through his throat; the other bridge officers were dead and mutilated as well. Alex was standing in the remains of the first officer. Skull and bits of brain were sticking to her boots.

There was something with her on the bridge, another creature. What it was she never saw. The particle cannon vaporised both it and the helm desk, then shut down. Its power cell was utterly depleted. She threw the weapon away and swore, feeling frustrated and useless.

The bridge was a charnel house, the crew slaughtered like animals. Alex thought she knew why. Annabelle had told her that Corvis had never got along with the Starfleet officers in command of the ship; there had been constant arguments.

Looked like he had had is revenge.

The comm snapped on again. "Very clever, Nain. But it's pointless. You won't find me."

"Don't count on it, you bastard!" She shouted back.

Corvis chuckled. "Such passion! Maybe you're right. Maybe you will find me. Maybe you'll kill me. But it's too late now."

"What does that mean?"

"Such an interesting nightmare you have." She could hear him smirking. "Such an interesting fear."

Alex felt her blood freeze. "Oh shit."

"What?" Asked Kana. "What is it?"

"We have to find our friends."

"Too late. She's already with them."

Alex's voice when it came was very cold, inhuman. "I'll kill you for this."

"I imagine so."