Watching their approach, La Sala recalled the mission briefing as delivered by Captain Khatami, who in turn had relayed Commodore Reyes’s instructions on attempting to communicate with the creatures. As a Starfleet officer, La Sala understood and valued the need to make such overtures. The Federation’s philosophy of peaceful expansion and the seeking of mutual friendship and cooperation with other species throughout the galaxy was worthless if it was not embodied by every single person, like her, who swore an oath to defend those lofty principles.
Did that apply to situations when the other party appeared incapable or unwilling to listen to such reason? Not so far as La Sala was concerned. If the creatures—be they intelligent beings or mindless animals—attacked again as they appeared to be preparing to do, she and her people had the right to defend themselves.
Assuming we survive,she mused, we can try talking afterward.
“Here they come,” she called into her communicator, which lay open near her left elbow and tuned to the frequency she had established for all members of the landing party working in the base camp. “Everyone hold their positions.”
If the looming apparitions noticed or cared about the forcefield now insulating the base camp, it was not indicated by their actions. As they approached, La Sala saw them split up, veering to her right and left even as they continued their advance toward the outpost. She kept her attention on the one which appeared to be coming in her general direction, tracking its movements through her phaser rifle sights. The distance between it and the forcefield shrank with every beat of her heart; it grew larger in her sights with every step, and still it defied all her efforts to make out any sort of identifying characteristic. It was nothing more than a featureless obsidian humanoid, moving with deadly grace over the snow-covered terrain.
Without slowing so much as a single step, it plunged headlong into the invisible barrier.
An unrestrained fury of energy charged the air as the creature made contact with the forcefield. La Sala winced at the piercing sound elicited by the miniature maelstrom, sensing the effects of the violently released discharge playing across her own exposed skin. She watched spasms and convulsions rack the thing’s body, yellow radiance reflecting off its dark, featureless hide with the same intensity that sunlight might be refracted through a prism and—for a moment, anyway—giving the creature an odd crystalline appearance. Then the effect was over as the creature stepped back from the forcefield. It stood motionless, less than fifty meters in front of her, appearing to stare straight ahead as though pondering its next action. Its elongated, pointed upper extremities hung still and useless at its sides.
La Sala could not shake the sensation that it was looking directly at—if not through— her.
“Good god!” Roderick exclaimed, his attention split between the sight before him and his tricorder. “The power drain on the field generators was enormous!”
As if to punctuate his report, another bout of unleashed chaos lit up the dull gray sky to their left, and La Sala turned to see that—in the distance—the other creature was attempting a similar assault at another point along the perimeter. The result was the same, with the thing moving away from the charged boundary only to stand, unmoving, mere paces from where its approach had been rebuffed.
“ Lieutenant La Sala,”said a composed voice filtering through her communicator, “ this is Ensign Sulok. We are detecting immense strain on the forcefield perimeter in response to the creature’s attacks.”
Recognizing the voice of the Vulcan engineer sent down from the Lovell,La Sala picked up her communicator even as she kept her attention focused on the motionless humanoid before her. “We’re seeing that, too, Ensign. You S.C.E. types have any ideas?”
“ Not at this time, Lieutenant. We are examining our options, but thought you should be aware of the potential for the barrier to be breached.”
La Sala opened her mouth to reply but the action was stifled as the creature lunged forward, impacting against the forcefield once more and eliciting the same vicious, cacophonous response.
They’re going to get in.
It was only a matter of time now.
“Get to the control room!”
Xiong heard Diamond’s order over the dissonant howl of unleashed energy as the thing—identical to the creature he had seen kill Captain Zhao—for the second time threw itself against the forcefield now blocking this section of the underground corridor. He could not be sure but he imagined he heard the nightmarish, featureless humanoid crying out in pain as it was subjected to the hellish discharge of energy feeding the protective barrier.
He saw Diamond motioning for her security detail and the other members of al-Khaled’s team to get moving even as she held her ground, her phaser rifle aimed at the creature which stood before the still-humming forcefield—as frozen as the earth from which it had come. Xiong’s eyes were drawn to the menacing lances at the ends of its arms, imagining them piercing the fragile bodies of Captain Zhao and Bohanon just as he had witnessed during the earlier attack. Dread gripped him, holding him frozen in its grasp while it waited for its servant to penetrate the barricade separating it from its prey.
“It won’t stop until it gets to us,” he said, feeling his fingers tighten around the handgrip of his phaser.
“We’re not finished yet,” al-Khaled replied from where he and Ensign Ghrex crouched next to a piece of ungainly equipment, both engineers wielding tools and scanners and working at a rapid pace.
“Can you get that thing running or not?” Diamond called out, backpedaling until she stood abreast of her shipmates.
“Almost there,” al-Khaled replied without looking up as he fused one end of a length of optical cable to what Xiong recognized as a power-distribution node—a very oldmodel of power-distribution node.
Xiong could not even be sure he understood how the engineers were proceeding with their admittedly outlandish scheme. After studying the power signatures recorded by the Endeavour’s sensors during the ship’s previous visit to Erilon, al-Khaled and his engineers had set about building a device to counteract the host of communications signals detected between various points around the planet.
Whereas he had expected to see some form of state-of-the-art technology resulting from that effort, a sterling example of twenty-third-century engineering prowess, what Xiong instead found himself looking upon appeared to be cobbled together from a host of surplus detritus scrounged from a salvage yard. Optical cabling and tools littered the ground at their feet as the engineers worked, seemingly oblivious of the scene unfolding around them.
We’re all going to die.
Xiong flinched at the flare of energy created by the creature choosing that moment to once more slam into the forcefield. Shadows fled from the corridor as multihued tendrils arced between the pair of emitters positioned on opposite sides of the passageway, playing across the humanoid’s opaque, austere form.
Then the light died and the omnipresent hum of the emitters faded, and the creature stepped forward.
The whine of weapons fire echoed across the open ground and La Sala felt the tingle of discharged phaser energy washing across her skin, but she ignored it. Her focus now was the haunting vision of hell that had just broken through the forcefield and that was at this instant moving toward her.
“Back! Everybody back!” she shouted before firing again. The beam struck the creature high near the right shoulder, its skin seeming to absorb the energy while leaving no trace of her attack. As it continued to advance, La Sala pushed the phaser rifle’s intensity setting forward as far as it would go, adjusting the weapon’s power level to maximum. She fired once more, the rifle’s high-pitched howl playing across her ears and causing her to wince from the discomfort.