GESTURE
Planet HB22147-C, Gaza Strip
Stardate 2260.365
- 1522 hours -
To Spock's lack of surprise, it was far simpler to devise a plan of action than it was to communicate that plan to the ground teams. For tactical purposes, he'd elected to coordinate from the air in the shuttlecraft, high enough and far enough that he could see the mission area without accidentally drifting into Enterprise' line of fire or spooking the sapients away from their haven.
Spock reasoned that a proper defense of the Mosque Camp would require at least twenty men with phasers in good firing positions, but he also had to figure out how to pick firing positions that would be perfectly visible to the sapients so that their actions would be obvious to even the most imbecilic observer. On some level, he felt there was something a little unsettling about using Starfleet officers and weapons in such a blatantly contrived display of solidarity, but logic allowed for little other recourse. He could not use the shuttle's phasers, since there was no guarantee the sapients would connect the shuttles with his ground teams, nor could he rely on Enterprise' phasers for the same reason. Likewise, simply beaming their query aboard the ship was problematic for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which was the basic fact - given human psychology - that the sudden abduction of their entire group into a technologically advanced setting would generate a first impression of sheer terror that would poison any future dealings with them. It had to be done this way: a gesture of friendship, of risking one's own life to save the life of a stranger. To humans there were few more powerful gestures, and with any luck these humans weren't all that different from their "Real Earth" counterparts.
Each of the seven participating teams were directed to their proper starting position, in well-concealed spots where the sapients wouldn't notice them. Once they'd passed, they were to take defensive positions near the Mosque and use phasers to keep the Reavers at bay, hopefully stunning enough of the Alphas that the rest would loose heart and look for less troublesome prey. Of course, in the event that this was some kind of feeding frenzy, Spock left open the possibility that the away teams would fall back to within the Mosque structure and leave the balance of the predators to the Enterprise' phasers; after all, there were limits to the lengths he was willing to take just to make a gesture.
"There they are!" Ensign Rand was watching on the sensor screen next to her head, high resolution and high magnification as the first of the sapients came into range. The excitement in her voice reflected the importance of this find: eight days they had been on this planet, searching for exactly this.
And then, "Oh my god!"
Spock detected a new emotion in her voice: horror. "Ensign?"
"Look at that!"
He looked at the monitor, and to his extreme distaste, shared that cold rush of horror. The wave of fast-moving sapients was, in fact, a running mob of rail-thin children, mostly between six and twelve years old, making a military-style retreat down a narrow roadway, firing behind them as they went. He identified their weapons as Kalashnikov-types, though a handful were armed with shotguns and a few of the older children with bolt-action weapons with which they, more than their peers, seemed especially proficient. Further down that same road, the Reavers were in a disorganized rushing pursuit that more resembled a stampede of frightened chickens than the merciless feeding frenzy it really was.
"Fascinating," Spock said.
Rand was almost ready to climb through the cockpit window. "We've got to help them, Commander!"
"We are, Ensign." Spock tapped the comm panel and put the general call to all teams, "Sapients approaching as expected, three hundred meters. All teams assume positions."
- 1522 hours -
Echo Team had found themselves a perfectly suitable spot, divided up between two rubble piles that had congealed around the rusted-out frames of old automobiles. Lima Team found an even better spot with better visibility, tucked in behind a contraption of tubes and leavers that was probably some kind of modified rocket launcher centuries ago. Bravo Team had to be directed to an overturned truck since their chosen hiding spot would be visible to the sapients after passing but before the Reavers were close enough and Spock worried about one of the children accidentally machinegunning his landing party before they realized whose side they were on. The other teams found their spots without incident, mostly in doorways and the stoops of partially collapsed buildings that were probably used by Palestinian guerillas ages ago for exactly this kind of military ambush.
At the three hundred meter warning, only Charlie team was still out of position. The reason became evident - as Spock could see from the air, and as Sulu had just found out the hard way - that the building they had taken position on top of wasn't nearly as stable as it looked, and most of the roof was about ready to cave in. A ten foot patch of it suddenly did, and Sulu suddenly found himself lying in a cloud of dust staring at a hole in a rapidly crumbling ceiling.
"The damn building's coming down!" someone shouted. It sounded like Lieutenant Kruzman, but with the adrenaline that suddenly poured into his veins it might as well have been Buddha.
Another section of the ceiling caved in a few feet away, and Ensign Buckley followed behind it. There was a sickeningly humorous moment when Sulu watched the man apparently land on his feet, then collapse like a pillar of salt as both of his knees bent the wrong way and collapsed under his weight.
Kruzman was more fortunate, or maybe just smarter. As the rest of the ceiling crumbled, he plummeted from the roof through the same hole Sulu had fallen through and missed landing on him by handful of inches. That just left Ensign Rao, who was standing at the edge of that same hole staring down into it with a look of sheer awe plastered on his bronzed, pampered mug. "Rao, get your ass down here before you bring the roof down!" Sulu shouted to him, making it an order and not a request.
Rao did it without thinking, landing on his feet, but loosing his balance and spilling over on top of Sulu.
"Two hundred meters," Spock's voice flowed from the communicator.
Damn the luck. Fortunately, it looked like the rest of the building was stable enough even if the roof couldn't support their weight. Sulu pushed Rao and Kruzman towards a corner of the room where the ceiling was still solid - no sign of crumbling - then whipped out his communicator and keyed Enterprise' frequency, "Charlie Team to Enterprise. Ensign Buckley is having a very bad day."
"Scans show two broken legs and a ruptured appendix," Uhura answered from the bridge. "We're locking on his signal. Standby..."
"Spock to Charlie Team. Your present position has insufficient visibility for proper defense of the camp..."
"Yes, Sir, I can see that," Sulu answered, now that he realized the room he was in had only one door and a single row of windows that faced the Mosque and nothing else. Around this time he heard the musical whine of a transporter beam on the other side of the room and saw the glow out of the corner of his eye as the injured Buckley vanished into a matter stream, bound for the safety of Enterprise. "Any suggestions?"
"There is a store front twenty meters from you around the northeast corner of your position. It will provide concealment from the sapients, but you will have to reposition to properly cover Flank Three."
Sulu gestured for his team to move out, and almost as one, they did. Outside the door, Rao and Kruzman spotted the northeast corner of the street and ran around it, diving into the store front and crouching down where the remnants of ancient shelves and furniture would hide them from view. Before he got there himself, however, his eyes fixed on something on the side of the road, a deep depression carved in the ground that looked like a blast crater of some kind. It wasn't completely empty, there was something that looked like a dead animal of some kind lying in it, but Sulu imagined he could bear the unpleasantness just long enough to stay out of sight. He checked his bearings to make sure he knew which way to go, then dropped down into the hole and crouched down next to the carcass.
"One hundred and fifty meters. All teams standby."
Sulu checked the power setting on his phaser rifle, confirmed the "Stun-III" setting, then flipped open his communicator, "Charlie Team's in position, more or less."
"I can see that, Mister Sulu. Standby."
Sulu checked his tricorder with his free hand, linking up with the sensor feed from Spock's shuttle and the aerial probes. The Reavers had closed to one hundred meters, the sapients were closer still, and from the way they were moving it looked like they had completely given up shooting at the reavers and were now simply running scared. His first thought was that this would make their job that much easier since the sapients were less likely to turn around and shoot the away teams.
His second thought immediately rendered the first irrelevant, as around this time he discovered that the thing in the crater with him wasn't actually dead.
- 1522 hours -
"They're just children." Ayala redoubled the magnification on the scope. Not only children, but extremely young children, between toddlers and preteens. They were moving in a ragged military formation that looked more Hollywood than experience, and most were firing their weapons in that frantic, squinty-eyed-style so characteristic of conscripts tossed into the path of cannons with too little training. They obviously weren't novices, but they were hardly the battle-hardened survivors she'd expected.
And then there were the reavers, waddling through the streets after them, their enormous arms waving in the air like meaty pendulums to balance their impossible bulk. They were ridiculous looking brutes, and if they weren't so vicious Ayala might have found them comical. "Targets in sight," she whispered into her communicator from her balcony perch. Russel had helped pick this spot out, second story of a rotting apartment building next to a dangerous looking rubble pile that was just stable enough to climb down if they didn't land on it two hard. With Onise still stunned they were a man short, not that it mattered in a situation like this. "You sure you want to take them from here?" Russel asked, "We'll be in trouble if they come up after us."
"They won't. They're all instinct and emotion, not much for strategy."
"Heh." Russel checked his power levels and squatted down behind her, "Well, you're the expert."
"Shut up, Russel..." there was a crashing sound off to one side, around a corner closer to the Mosque. Ayala turned that way and saw several humanoid figures on top of a rising dust cloud... then several of those figures dropped into the midst of it and vanished. "Oh my God..." she snapped out her communicator and called "Kilo Team to Charlie Team. What just happened to you?"
Static at first, then a low pitched beep to indicate a contact code but no direct response, save that from Mister Spock on the all-team channel, "Two hundred meters."
Ayala flipped open the cover. The communicator's tiny screen showed their three positions on an overhead map of the area, and at the same time, showed one of the four fading out as a transporter beam whisked him away to orbit.
"Building must have fallen in..."
"Spock to all units. Charlie Team has repositioned near Flank Three. Kilo and Lima teams, you're to concentrate fire in your sections for three minutes, then fall back - if possible - to cover open position Flank Two."
"Kilo Team, acknowledged..." A burst of machinegun fire erupted extremely close. Ayala looked down the street and saw two teenagers standing on top of an overturned truck, one holding an ammunition belt as the other fired a .50 caliber machinegun mounted on the axle of the truck like a gun nest. They had remarkably good position there, enough angle to fire over the heads of their comrades and still keep the reavers at bay. A planned strategy, from the look of things.
Or so Ayala thought. Someone in the middle of the retreating formation began waving their arms in a frantic "stop!" motion, and then the shooting ceased. Too late, though, as the sudden clatter of sound from both sides had converted a dozen of the children from an orderly withdrawal to a state of panic, many dropping their guns and falling into a sprint in no particular direction. The Reavers tracked them as they lost cohesion, and those fallen to panic were quickly enveloped by piles of waving arms and long clawing fingers. A scream trickled out of the bedlam, followed by thick blood spray as one of the the children was torn clean in half by the predators.
Russel gagged and tried not to vomit. Ayala's finger tickled the trigger, but she forced herself not to shoot. If she opened up now, there'd be no protecting any of them.
The silver lining became that pouncing on the few stragglers had slowed the Reavers' advance. The sapients now ran like the frightened children they were, none of them even daring to look back let alone shoot at their pursuers. A few of the reavers saw fast-moving bodies and resumed the chase; they were much faster than the children, but their prey had a head start.
"One hundred and fifty meters. All teams stand by."
"Charlie Team's in position, more or less."
"I can see that, Mister Sulu. Standby."
"Remember, you'll have to hit center of mass to stun them. Extremities won't cut it." Ayala squatted down lower to make sure the children couldn't see her. The machinegun opened fire again and this time kept firing. The children ran right past it, and the Reavers began to collapse in stride as projectiles the size of hypo sprays ripped into the mass of them. She noted with a sinking sensation that the machinegun nest was too far ahead for her to cover it, and hoped anxiously that the kids running that post were smart enough to run for it when their friends had passed them.
"One hundred meters," Spock said.
The last of the children passed the machinegun nest. The kid holding the ammunition belt jumped down and ran after them, but the boy behind the gun remained, firing wildly into the approaching stampede. The line of reavers converged directly on him, their snarling trippling in intensity while his comrade tried to flee.
"Fifty meters. All units, engage on my mark."
A single shot rang out from below. Then another... then a third... five shots in under ten seconds, and extremely close to them. Russel followed the sound to a robed figure crouching on the rubble pile just a few feet from them, shouldering a Soviet SKS rifle with some kind of telescope duct-taped to the back of it. He recognized it as the same figure that had waved at the machinegunners before. A girl from the look of it, much older than all the others. The kid from the gun belt kept up his pace, and every time a reaver would come close to him the girl on the rubble pile fired off a single shot, hit her target right between its beady little eyes, buying her comrade another five seconds to live.
"Protective range... mark. All sections, begin firing."
Ayala popped up and discharged her phaser rifle across the machinegunner's nose. Two Reavers ran through the blue-white phaser beam on their way to tackle him, and both lost muscle control and instead plowed head first into the side of the truck. The kid behind the gun hesitated, and thanked his good fortune a moment too long; Ayala fired again, but the Reaver was already jumping, and one swing of its enormous arm swatted his head clean off his shoulders. Meanwhile, the girl on the rubble pile spun around and saw Russel and Ayala standing there, firing off their phaser rifles at the approaching stampede. She stared at then just long enough to determine that they weren't about to eat her, and since this basic fact defined them as "friend," she tossed the gun over her shoulder and took off running after her peers.
A dozen phasers opened up at once now, quick bursts against carefully selected targets, through each Reaver's center of mass. The streets were ablaze with fiery blue light, and the closer they got to the Mosque, the more the children began to slow, looking back over their shoulders wondering who or what had finally come for them.
- 1523 hours -
It was trying hard to look like it was dead, but it was undeniably alive. It's eyes were closed, its mouth slightly open, breathing softly to make as little sound as possible. This gave Sulu pause, not to mention a cold sweat, and he performed his first instinct and also pretended to be dead.
"One hundred meters."
The creature blinked at the sound of the communicator. As its eyes flicked open, it caught Sulu's gaze for an instant and then quickly closed both eyes shut again. Then it carefully opened one eye, seemed to realize it had been noticed and then turned both of its eyes - but not its head - and stared at him. Sulu stared back, and the two lay there, staring at each other out of the corners of their eyes, each waiting for the other to make a move. Sulu held his breath; the thing next to him did the same.
"Fifty meters. All units, engage on my mark."
Sulu coughed.
The creature blinked, then made a small cooing noise that might have been an attempt to speak.
"H-Hello... I um... I didn't see you there."
It blinked again, slowly this time. Something electronic and very powerful sounding whistled under his feet, and Sulu looked down to see a row of blinking indicator lights flashing in some kind of sequence. The lights were mounted on something attached to the creature's ankle like a bracelet.
That was confusing on so many levels.
"Protective range. All sections, begin firing."
"I'm supposed to crawl out of this hole now, so don't freak out when I do..."
The creature blinked again, and this time made a low, semi-musical rumbling sound.
Overhead, the sound of a dozen phasers crackled through the air, but much closer came a voice almost directly in Sulu's ear, "Why? What's going on?" the voice came from his communicator: a generic computer-generated translation of what the databanks calculated the creature was probably saying to him.
That was confusing on even more levels. The sound of phaser fire overhead was suddenly light years away. "You have a translator?"
"Translator... yes. Do you?"
"Yes."
"That is interesting."
Sulu took a shot in the dark and asked, "You're from that ship that entered orbit a week ago, aren't you?"
"My ship entered orbit recently. Yes."
"Why are you here?"
"Mission."
"What mission?"
"Orders."
Phaser sounds intensified around them, followed by the shrieks of dozens of surprised and pained Reavers as finely-tuned energy pulses scrambled their collective nervous systems. They were getting close, in fact without looking out of the hole Sulu realized his position had probably been overrun by them already. Popping up now would make no difference except to run, as fast as he could, to the safety of the mosque before the beasts could pummel him to death.
He didn't really know the protocol for first-contact scenarios, much less first contact in a foxhole in the middle of a firefight. Since this creature didn't seem like it was going to eat him, at the very least he could count on getting a few basic contact principles established. "My name is Hikaru Sulu. My species is known as Human. We come from a planet called Earth."
"Human?"
"Yes."
"Earth?"
"Yes."
"Here?"
Sulu squinted at it, "No, not here."
"Your planet... is..."
"Earth."
The creature made its largest movement yet, turned to face Sulu in the crater so he could see all of it. It was obviously bipedal, wearing some kind of form-fitting uniform that showed off a compact but muscular frame perhaps five feet tall when fully erect. From what Sulu could see it had thick scaly skin and a long flexible neck that ended in a reptilian head set by a pair of powerful jaws and broad, yellow eyes. It reminded Sulu of a kind of anthropomorphic gecko; not nearly as scary as the reavers, in fact it might even make a good pet if it wasn't obviously sentient. "What planet do you call this?"
It took him a moment to realize what this thing was asking him. The implication made his hands shake. "We have no name for it yet... this planet is..." he took a breath and narrowed himself down to the most relevant thoughts he could arrange, "We came here to because this planet is completely identical to ours. Our mission is to find out who created it and why."
"Planet... created...?"
Sulu continued carefully, "Yes, created. This planet is a copy of our world. There are a few small differences, but it's definitely a duplicate."
"Copy. Duplicate." The creature briefly lowered its head on its long neck and then tilted it completely horizontal, probably its equivalent of a nod. Overhead, the shrieking of Reavers and the whistling crack of phaser blasts tripled in intensity before it began to rapidly fade towards silence.
"What about you?" Sulu asked, "What is your name?"
It blinked a few times, processing the question. Then it answered ponderously, "I am Fifth and Twelve cycle the Runner."
Sulu blinked slowly, "That's... um... an interesting name. What species are you?"
"To outsiders, we are called Gorn. We come here for orders."
"What are your orders?"
"I do not know. I have not ordered yet."
In any other time and place, Sulu would have interpreted that as a joke. Here in a foxhole with a sentient hyper-gecko, nothing would have surprised him. "You mean a dinner order?"
"Dinner... is... meal? Yes."
"What kind of things do you eat?"
"Tailed Water Claw, Small Water Claw, Many Leg Worm, Eight Leg Trapper, Poison Tailed Claw, Pollinating Hive Fly."
Sulu picked up on the pattern and guessed, "You're an insectivore?"
The creature made its strange shrugging motion, and this time Sulu was sure it was nodding. "Yes. We come now to investigate change."
"A change in... the planet or the animals?"
"A change in planet... a change in people. When we first came there were cities and lights. We came quietly, take our orders without being seen. On the fourth cycle after, another ship returned, and cities were ancient, the lights were gone. Many creatures gone, but many more have changed. We have come to take our last orders from this planet before it comes to ruin."
"So your ship is... what? A fishing vessel?"
The Gorn blinked, but didn't answer the question. It didn't even seem to understand it.
"My ship is called the Enterprise. It's a Federation starship, designed for deep space exploration and reconnaissance."
The Gorn responded in kind, "My ship is called Francium. It is designed for killing and recovering."
"Killing what?"
"Our meals, our criminals, our enemies. We bring these back to our harbor."
"Is Francium a... warship?"
Again, the Gorn blinked stupidly. This could be a good sign if the Gorn had no concept of war or ships dedicated to fight them, or a bad sign if Gorn motivations were so alien that their equivalent of war was incomprehensible to even the translator's logic circuits. The latter was far more likely considering what Starfleet already knew about the Gorn and their seemingly warlike nature. "How many years have you been coming to this planet?"
The Gorn processed the question for a moment, as did the translator. It apparently did a conversion between Terran years and Gorn "cycles" and came up with the answer, "The first ship arrived three years ago. Fourteen months later, this planet was dead."