Disclaimer: Star Trek and all associated characters and situations are the property of CBS studios. Star Trek Online is the creation of Cryptic and Perfect World. Tomb Raider and the situations therein are the property of Square Enix. All are here used by myself for entertainment purposes only, without permission or intent to profit. Stardates were calculated with the help of the TNG Stardate Calculator available on TrekGuide .com and may be slightly out of sync with those used in the game's lore.

Bodies and Histories

USS Nautilus: Shuttle One Crew, Senior Science Officer Carlin Agran's Log, Stardate 81627.7:

We've seen no sign of Sam Hayashi since the shuttle crash last night, but I know she must be alive. We believe she may have headed inland and set up camp inside a valley. We'll search the valley on our way inland to our next camp, splitting up to cover more ground. Tricorder scans and communications will be limited by the unexplained amounts of polaric radation on the planet, but losing track of each other isn't the only danger. Antori says he saw something or someone following us last night. We are not alone on this island.

"Alright, here's the plan," Antori said, after a breakfast of rations the next morning. "We're splitting up to search the valley for our missing crewmember. Carlin will be taking the left side of the valley. I'll be taking the right. Dr. Mor, I want you to cover the center."

"How are we supposed to search all of that?" Mor demanded, waving his arm at the rocky, forested wilderness. "We don't even have tricorders because of this polar energy."

"It's polaric radiation and it's not evenly distributed," said Carlin. "According to the scan I ran this morning, there should be areas of higher and lower concentration, possibly shifting across the surface of the planet. I can't predict exactly where or when those lower concentrations will appear, but when they do they'll provide windows for us to use our tricorders and communicators."

"Dr. Mor, I trust you still have a scanner and a communicator?"

Mor huffed, rifled through his pockets, and pulled out a brown, angular device, a Ferengi scanner.

"Good, I want everyone to make regular scans every fifty meters, and attempt to report in every hour on the hour, understood?"

"Yes, sir," said Carlin.

Mor grumbled but nodded.

"Good, now I want both of you armed. Dr. Mor, you had a phaser somewhere in that junk we sorted through last night. Please tell me you kept it."

"What do you take me for, an idiot?" He fished through his pockets and pulled out a small silver plasma phaser.

"Do you remember how to use it, in a life or death situation?" Antori challenged, stepping toward him.

Mor took a step back and held the phaser low in one hand. "I…I think so...Yes, it's all coming back to me!"

"For your sake, I hope so," said Antori. He unclipped the phaser from his hip and handed it, holster and all, to Carlin. "Here, take this."

"But what about you?"

"I'm the one who's been training to wrestle with Gorn, remember?" He winked. "I'll be fine."

"I'll kill you if you let the Gorn win," she reminded him.

"I'll keep that in mind." He picked up his pack, which was lighter now that they'd split the remaining rations three ways, and turned toward the valley. "We'll meet again up on that cliff on the other side. The first one to get there stays there. I don't want to have to search for two missing people, understood." Everyone nodded and Antori gave the order, "Move out!"

They split up and descended into the valley. Soon the grassy slopes gave way to trees and gray boulders. Carlin kept her tricorder out and made periodic scans. She definitely read lifeforms, but they were small animals mostly—surprisingly Earth-like species, but not human…not Sam. She made her hourly calls, but her combadge remained mostly silent, with only occasional bursts of static and snatches of the other searchers reports. Once she was able to have a brief conversation with Dr. Mor, confirming that he was alright, had found nothing, and was highly annoyed by the nature of the search, but then the signal went to static and cut out again.

Clouds rolled in during the early afternoon and Carlin decided to start looking for shelter before it started raining. She managed to find something just as the first sprinkles were falling. It was some sort of a ground vehicle with a squat, rounded design and gray coloration. It was flipped on its side leaning against a tree with its back hatch open. She ran a scan and detected no lifeforms. She cautiously stepped inside.

It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the dimness of the vehicle's aft compartment. When they did, she gasped at what she saw, and would have backed out of the vehicle if not for the rain that was starting to drum down on it. It was a body in an advanced state of decay. The remains were almost skeletal, covered with the tatters of some kind of uniform. She scanned them with her tricorder and got two surprises. The first was that the remains read as Vorta. The second was that the hand still held a data pad. She removed it carefully and used a power transfer from her tricorder to activate it. The display was in Dominionese, of course, but she ran a translation algorithm. "Looks like it contains some sort of audio logs." She tapped a button and the recordings began to play.

"It…it happened again," said the unsteady voice of a Vorta male. "It was Sixth Kusak'Uke this time. He was on gate duty at the main compound last night. No one heard or saw anything, and this morning, they found his rifle…nothing else. There were no tracks of his leaving, no blood, nothing! The power cell of his weapon was still fully charged—he didn't even get a shot off at whatever took him." The Vorta's voice dropped to a whisper. "The others are talking about Cardassian traitors, or maybe even Tal'Shiar agents. Damned fools! They have no idea what's happening here. I've read the files. I know the history of this place. It is the Oni who stalk us. The restless, evil spirits, they live in the old places of this world, mostly the very island where we've set up our main compound. We are trespassers here, and they are watching us, waiting. All these wrecks, the ruins, the complete lack of survivors…this entire planet is a graveyard. It is only a matter of time. The Oni will come for us, too."

"The Oni?" Carlin repeated. She had never heard of any race by that name.

The recording went on, beginning another log entry. "I was right, but there's no comfort in it," said the same voice. "Soon after we discovered the tomb, they came, the Oni. First the lights went out. Then…then the screaming started. Was it us or them? I didn't think Jem'Hadar could scream, but the sound, it still rings in my ears. Weaponsfire, shouting, blood…We couldn't stop them. The Oni are like nothing we've ever faced before. They wore the armor of the humans' ancestors. They carried no modern weaponry, but it didn't matter. They cut the Jem'Hadar and the scientists down with ancient blades. Everything turned to chaos, and then silence. Then they were gone." There was a pause, then the voice fairly whispered, "Why did they leave? Why didn't they kill us all?" Then, the voice got louder again, trying to sound calm. "Osak'Artek is First now. We…we are leaving the base, but not the planet. We're heading inland, to the Monastery. There is no other way. We must follow the Oni, all of us. If we cannot control the Star, we must destroy it. Osak'Artek is leading his men through the ritual now, telling his men they are all dead already, that they are Jem'Hadar and they go to reclaim their lives in battle, for only in victory is there life…but I know…I know there will be no life. Whether we succeed in destroying the Star or not, we…we are all going to die."

Carlin shuddered and realized she was pulling at her hair. She made herself stop. Whatever killed this Vorta and his Jem'Hadar did it over thirty years ago, judging from the decay. Whatever the Oni were, they're long gone by now.

The next log entry began to play. It was the same Vorta's voice, but he sounded different. He was breathing hard and in the background she heard sounds, as if someone were dragging himself along the ground. "We never…never had a chance," the Vorta said, obviously in pain. "They were waiting for us, hundreds of them. We never even made it to the sacred chamber. From the beginning, we were doomed. Now, I wait for the Founders to take me." There was a scrambling noise, then the voice whispered. "I can hear them. The Oni are killing the last of my Jem'Hadar, eating them, consuming their souls. So much death! I'm the last one. What is my fate? Will I become one of them? …Founders hear me. Please, take me away from all this. Take me to the afterlife. Let me die in peace."

Then, there was silence. Carlin looked down and saw that she'd just listened to the final log entry. It was chilling. She disengaged the power transfer and did a full scan of the remains. "Definitely a violent death," she said. "One of the ribs was severed by something extremely sharp." And that means what the Vorta said about the Oni could be true. She pulled at her ponytail, then tapped her combadge. "Agran to Drel."

There was silence for a minute, then a reply came, difficult to make out with the static, but definitely there. "This…Drel. Carlin, are you alright?"

She breathed a sigh of relief. She was in luck. "I'm fine," she assured him. "But I've made some rather alarming discoveries."

"What d…mean?"

Carlin decided to get on with it, before the interference cut the channel entirely. "I found a Vorta's body and some logs. There's evidence of an organized Dominion presence on this island over thirty years ago, but that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is the Dominion presence was wiped out by a race they called the Oni."

"Then at least we don't have to worry about the Dominion…any more," said Antori. "They probably set up a base here in secret during the War…years ago. As for these Oni, if they took out a Dominion force…are a serious threat. Any idea if they're still around?"

"None," said Carlin.

"Then stay on…guard. The rain…soon. Keep searching for…" The voice trailed off into static and then her combadge went silent again. Carlin sighed. She pulled out a ration pack, ate it, and then waited for the rain to stop.

When the rain stopped, she continued her search. Not far from the overturned vehicle, she found a Jem'Hadar plasma rifle. Its power cell was completely drained and there was no sign of its owner. She remembered what the Vorta had said about his Jem'Hadar's last stand against the Oni. From then on, she traveled with her phaser in one hand, her tricorder in the other, and the pack containing her medkit slung across her back.

An hour after leaving the vehicle, she was walking along the base of a cliff. There was some sort of a cave opening on her left, with its entrance braced with wooden beams and decorated above with faint lime drawings she couldn't quite make out. She ran a scan and gasped. She was detecting a subspace distress beacon, on a Federation emergency channel. It was weak, but it was consistent with what one could generate using a Starfleet combadge. It was coming from somewhere inside the cave. "Sam!" she shouted. "Sam! It's Carlin, can you hear me?" There was no answer. Carlin set her tricorder to track the distress beacon and followed it into the cave.

There were definitely signs of activity inside the cave, recent activity. Before the daylight from the entrance faded, she came to a place where a crude oil lamp hung, a simple metal bowl filled with burning petroleum. There were several crude wooden torches hanging on the wall beside it. She holstered her phaser and lit one, then proceeded deeper into the passageway.

The ceiling lowered so that Carlin almost had to duck, then turned to the right. There, along the wall, she found several small carved niches, each containing an engraving of a humanoid figure, most of them seated. The carvings were too worn for her to make out anything else. The passageway continued and she was still reading the distress beacon ahead. She continued on, crouching to pass under a particularly low section before coming to a chamber with carved niches identical to those in the first. There were also discarded modern containers, too, though she didn't recognize any of them. The passage ended at a hissing wall of water. It seemed she was under some sort of small subterranean waterfall. The distress beacon was still ahead, though, so she braced herself and stepped through the sheet of water.

The cold soaking was a shock. The darkness as her torch went out, even more so. The only light was the display of her tricorder. It was reading a blockage of loose rubble just ahead, with the distress beacon somewhere beyond it, in open air. She dropped the extinguished torch and drew her phaser, setting it to its highest setting and firing at the blockage. Rock vaporized and the rubble shattered, exploding to leave her a clear path. Light filtered in from an exit somewhere up ahead. Carlin descended the slick stone slope, careful not to lose her footing, and soon found herself just outside the cave, at the edge of a swamp.

The water was hip deep and there was no recourse but to wade into it. Fortunately, it was warm, unlike the waterfall earlier. There were definite signs of ancient inhabitation here. There was a wooden arch and several larger-than-life statues of human women in long flowing robes, one still standing, and the other fallen and submerged so that only the face was above water.

There were bodies, too. The first she saw dangling upside down from a rope near the entryway. She swallowed and scanned it. It was human, judging by a skeletal system, but it was badly decayed and had been there probably for years. There was no indication of what had killed him, but Carlin's mind leapt to the descriptions of the Oni. She kept her phaser at the ready. A little further on she found the second body, washed up on the margins of the swamp and stripped of all clothing. It was probably only a few days old, though it was already beginning to decompose. The corpse was male, and clearly Romulan. A disruptor burn on the back of its head gave a clear cause of death. Her scan revealed residual hadrons and ions, consistent with Klingon disruptor fire. That's horrible, Carlin thought, resisting the urge to tug at her hair—mostly because her hands were full. As if the Oni weren't enough to worry about, now there are crash survivors running around shooting each other in the back of the head and dumping the bodies in swamps!

She checked her tricorder. There were still no lifesigns, but the distress beacon was up ahead somewhere. She came around a bend and gasped. There was a Peregrine-class fighter crashed in the swamp, held up out of the water by several trees it had impaled itself on in landing. Beyond it were some wooden towers with a highly stylized architecture built beside an enormous statue of a woman in flowing robes. The architecture reminded Carlin of some of the recreations of traditional Japanese buildings that Sam had taken her to see back when they were at the Academy together. But if those are the original buildings from over 2,000 years ago, how are they still standing? She checked her tricorder and got another surprise. The distress beacon was not coming from the downed fighter, as she'd expected, but from a room at the top of the nearest tower.

"Sam!" she called out. "Sam, can you hear me?" There was still no answer. She may be unconscious. I'll just have to go in there and find her myself.

The problem was she could see no way of reaching the top of the tower. There was a rope strung from its roof to the top of a wooden archway. It would serve as a good zip line, but there was no way to reach it from the ground. She examined the fighter. It was heavily damaged, its systems no doubt inoperable, but it might still have a more basic use. If I could lower the bow, I could use it as a ramp to climb up to the roof of that first building. From there, a hole in the building's wall provided access to the interior.

She made her way through the swamp till she sighted a thick trunk that was supporting the weight of the forward sections of the fighter. She fired her phaser at it. A portion of the trunk vaporized, and the rest shattered and caught fire, only to fall and be extinguished in the swamp. Then, the bow of the fighter pitched downward as its balance shifted. It was now in easy reach, and its tail almost reached the roof of the old building.

Carlin scrambled up onto the fighter. She paused to examine the cockpit, but it was empty. She continued on to the tail, from which she was able to pull herself onto the roof. She ran a scan of the wood to satisfy her curiousity. It was suffused with polaric ions, which had put it in a state of temporal flux akin to a stasis field. I guess that explains the preservation, she mused. These ruins could be millions of years old and still not show any sign of decay.

She shook her head. The distress beacon was just on the other side of the wall. She stepped through the hole in the wall to the room where the distress beacon originated. The room was lit by a profusion of red candles and her mouth went dry when she saw what they surrounded. There was a human body, female, burned beyond recognition, bound to a wooden stake at the center of the room. More of her uniform remained than her flesh. It was an older Starfleet tunic, red on black, probably from the late 24th Century. A combadge was still on her breast, the casing cracked with heat, activating the emergency beacon.

Carlin gingerly removed the combadge and tapped it to deactivate it. She scanned it for an ID. "Chief Petty Officer Heidi Cook." She tucked it into her uniform pocket. "I'll make sure this gets back to your family, if they're still alive." For now, she had to make sure nothing like this happened to Sam.

She found a loose board and used it to descend the zipline, splashing down into the water at the bottom. Then she headed back through the cave. It was dark, so she took it slowly and carefully. She also kept her phaser at the ready, mindful of all the dangers on this island. She stepped through the sheet of water and felt her way forward. She forgot about the section where the roof came down, though. She bumped her head and stepped back, startled.

That was when it happened. Whatever she stepped on wasn't stable and shifted beneath her weight. Her right ankle went one way, and her leg went the other way. She heard something pop and she felt a sharp pain in her ankle. She cried out and fell. Her phaser and tricorder clattered away into the darkness. She managed to find the latter because of its bright, blinking displays, but the phaser was nowhere to be found.

"Who's there?" a male voice said from somewhere ahead. Carlin froze. "I heard you," the voice said. "Are you hurt? I saw the shuttle crash, and I'm here to help. I promise."

Carlin swallowed. She could feel her ankle swelling, definitely sprained, possibly broken. She needed time to treat it before she tried to move on her own, which meant if this man meant her harm, she was defenseless and he would easily find her. On the other hand…

"I twisted my ankle," she said. "I'm Lieutenant Carlin Agran of the starship USS Nautilus. Our shuttle crashed here during the ion storm."

Torchlight came around the corner, followed by a Cardassian man in worn civilian clothing carrying a wooden crutch. "Don't worry," he said when he saw her. A small smile spread across his lips. "I'll get you out of there, I promise. …My name is Matan."

Author's Note: In the Tomb Raider game, the Imperial Japanese army had several bases on Yamatai during World War II. I've substituted the Dominion, as they were the antagonists of the last major war the Alpha and Beta Quadrants fought. Thus the Vorta's logs are a compilation of the "Wartime Intelligence" documents recorded by an unnamed soldier in the game. The first of these documents is found in an overturned army truck early in the game and the rest are found scattered around the island throughout the game. I didn't want to have my characters constantly having to find and read lose scraps of paper and data pads, so I compressed these documents into a single find.

The Jem'Hadar ritual is mentioned in the DS9 episode "To The Death."

The second half of this chapter is based on a downloadable optional tomb in the game, "The Tomb of the Lost Adventurer." In the game, of course, it has zero plot relevance, but I needed Carlin to meet Matan somewhere, and also witness a preview of the dangers of Yamatai. The puzzle is greatly simplified, of course, and the reward at the end was an unspecified relic in the game, but here I made it a distress beacon Carlin would actually be interested in going after right now. The fact that combadges start broadcasting distress beacons if damaged was established in Voyager's "Time and Again." The weapon's signature of a Klingon disruptor is apparently from an episode of the Enterprise prequel series. Hopefully they haven't changed it over the past 300+ years?

There's apparently some debate as to what, exactly, a Peregrine-class is. I just went with the STO explanation and made it the unnamed fighter class used in "Sacrifice of Angels." Another mystery for me was the presence of well-preserved Japanese buildings on Yamatai in the Tomb Raider game, when supposedly these buildings had not been cared for in almost two thousand years. I resolved this with polaric energy, which is established to have subspace and temporal effects—and those can do anything: so there! :P

Matan returns! What will become of our heroine now?