Rebecca couldn't help but feel tremors of excitement course through her as she stood in the transporter room waiting for everyone to get situated. As the Captain has promised, there were two security officers accomanying them. Their names were Talbot and Lavigne and they seemed nice enough. She fidgeted a bit under her jumpsuit which they had the landing party outfitted with to protect them against any bacteria or diseases that could be running rampant down on the planet below. She glanced to her right and saw Lea looking at her. When she caught her eye, Lea gave her a thumbs up and a smile. She smiled back, and looked over to her other side to see Carol staring ahead, seemingly lost in thought.

The Captain came in and stepped up to them. "I'll have Lieutenant Sulu send over the coordiantes to the station momentarily. He's adjusted it so that you should be beaming down right in the middle of the science station, where the original team should be situated." He paused. "I don't know what could have happened to the other crew, being that its an uninhabitated planet, but the danger is still real so I want everyone to be very careful."

They all nodded, and he continued. "Starfleet does however want a full description about what went wrong down there, whether it was an eqipment malfunction or some other issue. So everyone's documentation has to be precise. Any questions?" They looked at each other before shaking their heads.

The Captain took a step towards them and lowered his voice. "Lieutenants Talbot and Lavigne?"

"Yes Captain?" they asked.

Jim looked as if he was fighting back a smile. "I will have two very disgruntled highly ranked officers on my hands if anything happens to these girls," he said, looking at her and Lea. He locked eyes with Carol and paused. "They're special, so keep them safe, okay?"

The two men nodded as she felt a tinge of red creep across her face. Did the Captain REALLY just say that in front of everyone? She risked a quick glance at the others and saw Lea trying to hold back a smile and Carol was trembling slightly. Sheesh. She knew he could be a bit...laxidasical when it came to following protocol, but it still gave her a bit of a start to hear him mention their personal relationships out loud. She wondered if he would ever stop surprising her. She was startled to discover that she didn't ever want him to. As much as it scared her to think that way, the Captain and some of the other officers were starting to feel like...family. The other night when her and Spock had attended the party that Jim had hosted she had been surprised to find that she had enjoyed herself immensely, even though they didn't stay long. They felt so warm and familiar to her, like they had all known each other for a long long time. She found herself wishing they could all stay together forever.

"Alright," Jim said, "Find out what happened down there, see if they need help, and make contact with us as soon as you can." With a final nod to the away team he turned and walked away.

"Standing by for coordinates," the transporter operator said. A moment or so later he punched a sequence of buttons in and a warm tingling surrounded her as they beamed down to Psi 2000.

***

She could feel the cold seeping through her suit even before she opened her eyes. She looked around, startled to see that the doors to the station had been left open, and snow was pouring in the front of the building. Judging by the large piles of snow against the wall, it looked like the doors had been left open for quite awhile. Her and Lea rushed forward and pushed them shut, fighting against the screaming wind, while Carol looked around bewilderdly. "What happened here?" she asked aloud. The place seemed deserted; a fine layer of frost covered the desks and crunched underfoot as they crossed the room to get to the stairs. Talbot and Lavigne went first; phasers out, followed by Carol, Lea, and herself. Now that the doors were shut and the wind wasn't crashing through, an eere silence seemed to hang over the building. They entered the first room and stopped dead in their tracks. She looked over Carol's shoulder and gasped. There were five bodies laying on the floor, each one covered with a thin layer of frost. This room, as the one below it, had all the windows open. Carol pushed past the guards and stepped up to the first one, bending down to inspect it.

"Can you tell what happened?" Rebecca asked Carol softly. Despite the tone of her voice her words seemed to reverberate and echo across the room.

Carol inspected the body for a minute before responding, "Come here a minute. Tell me if you understand this any better than me."

She walked over and crouched down next to her. "What did you find?"

Carol nodded to the body. "What's your first impression?"

She looked down and almost fell over in shock. She couldn't tell before because of all the ice covering it, but once she got closer she could tell that the body didn't have any clothes on. She looked up at Carol in surprise as she nodded. "Why did this person take their clothes off? Especially if the doors and windows were all open?"

Carol shook her head and looked around. "I have no idea. There are piles of clothes everywhere, see? It looks like all of these people are naked. And those doors and windows all look as if they were opened from the inside."

Lavigne and Talbot shifted uncomfortably as they looked around the room. "Lieutenant Marcus?" Talbot asked. "It looks like they were maybe having a party."

Carol looked back at them. "What makes you say that?"

He gestured to the floor. "Look at all the glasses. And there are a few wine bottles too."

They all looked and saw he was right. Broken pieces of glass and empty bottles littered the floor, and it looked like there were plates frozen to the floor as well.

"It looks like all the equipment is in working order too," Lea called out from the other side of the room. "But, it was all turned off." She looked up confusedly. "Once I plugged it back in and rebooted the system I could tell it was all in working order."

Carol raised her arms in exasperation. "So the obvious conclusion is that these people just opened all the doors and windows, unplugged their equipment, took off their clothes, and decided to have a party? Is that what my report is going to have to say?"

They all looked at each other, at a loss for words. Logically, it was obvious that it happened as Carol had stated. Even though it didn't make any sense.

"The question is why?" Rebecca asked. "What in the world could have made these people do this?"

Carol looked around again. "How many people were in the original team?"

Rebecca quickly glanced over her notes. "Seven."

Carol counted again. "That means we're missing two somewhere." She looked over at Lavigne and Talbot. "Could you guys check out the other rooms up here, see if you can find them?" They nodded and left the room. "Ensign Foulks, why don't you see if there is any documentation or files you can find that may give us an idea of what happened here. I'll help Ensign Bowen with this equipment and see if we can salvage anything to take back to the ship." Rebecca nodded.

"I don't know if the cold and ice damaged any of these internal circuits but I'll see what I can do," Lea said.

"Sounds good," Rebecca said. "I'll see what I can turn up." She left the room and walked down the hallway. It was short, the building wasn't very big after all, and only three other rooms were left. As she approached the first one, she almost bumped into the security guards who were on their way out. "Found the other two," Lavigne said grimly as they walked past her to report back to Carol. She grimaced as she entered the room. Right on top of a pile of blankets were two people, entwined. Fascinated, she walked closer. They too, were naked, and it seemed as if they had died while embracing. She walked up to the open window and shut it, evrn though at this point it was basically useless. She looked out at the swirling gray and blue for a moment, lost in thought, before heading abck out the way she came to inspect the other rooms.

***

While she didn't find anything conclusive about what had happened to the crew, she did locate a plethora of information about the planet itself. This is really fascinating stuff, she thought as she leafed through some paperwork regarding the earlier periods of history of the planet. The archive could really benefit from this information. A started cry shook her out of her reverie. She jumped to her feet and ran to the room where the others were to see Carol berating Talbot. She walked up to Lea and asked quietly, "What happened?"

Lea shook her head. "Carol caught Talbot handlin something without his gloves on."

Rebecca's eyes widened. "Oh wow. We were told by the Captain to not, under any circumstances, expose ourselves to the elements down here, in case there were any contagions. Why would he go against his orders?"

Lea nodded. "Apparently, it was only for a second and it was to gather up the remaining glass pieces." She shrugged. "He said that they were easier to pick up that way. I'll tell you what though," she chuckled, "I wouldn't want to trade places with him right now, Carol is pretty pissed, rightfully so."

Rebecca agreed. She loved Carol as a friend, and respected her immensely as a lieutenant, and she didn't ever want to find herself on her bad side.

Talbot left the room, followed by Lavigne and Carol walked up to the girls and sighed. "I think we'll be okay. It was only for a second, and hopefully the cold would have killed anything that we may have been normally exposed to. So, really, I guess we should be thankful that these people left all the windows and doors open." She sighed again. "I'll have to make sure we al go through the decontamination process in the transporter thoroughly, just in case we did pick up anything unexpected. Still, I could have just flayed that prat for potentially putting us all in danger. I'll have to take it up with the Captain when we get back." She looked around. "Alright, I think we're done here. We got everything we could salvage." She turned to Rebecca. "Did you find anything useful with the records?"

Rebecca nodded. "Absolutely. I've already got it all ready to be transported back."

She nodded. "Good. I'll contact the ship and see if they can get us out of here soon." As they walked out of the room and headed back the way they originally came, Rebecca couldn't help but notice Carol absentmindedly scratching her hand vigorously.