The shimmering blue light and hum of the transporter beam faded, leaving the away team in a dark corridor aboard the Vaadwaur ship. Dim red emergency lighting pulsed around them, each flash illuminating a fraction of the corridor. Half-collapsed bulkheads, hanging conduits, and scorch marks were visible everywhere the team looked.

Lieutenant Geral Loran’s boots landed against the deck plating with a hollow echo. The air was stale and tinged with something coppery and burnt. His pale green nose crinkled at the smell.

“Everyone solid?” he asked, his voice echoing off the curved walls.

“I’m good,” Bjornsen replied, pulling out his tricorder. “Readings are spotty, life support seems to be barely functioning.”

“No life signs,” Amir added, scanning with a hand phaser drawn.

Nurse Torel swallowed hard, her antennae twitching in a visual display of anxiety. “This place feels wrong.”

Loran moved forward, his hand gliding over some jagged scoring along the bulkhead. It wasn’t weapons fire; it was as if something inside burned its way out. He opened his tricorder, wincing as the display fuzzed and glitched.

“This isn’t battle damage,” Amir muttered.

The away team pressed forward, entering into a central corridor. The flickering red lights exposed more violent scarring, handprints smeared in dry, rust-brown blood, scraped along the walls. One door appeared to be half melted shut.

“The hall splits ahead,” Bjornsen said. “Engineering is down to starboard, the ops center to port. Should we split up?”

“We’re staying together,” Loral said. “We’ll head to ops; any logs should be accessible there.”

As they entered the operations bay, the room greeted them with a static hiss. Consoles crackled with fuzzy readings and buzzing signals.

Bjornsen got to work trying to route power to one of the console nodes. The Vaadwaur were said to use notoriously labyrinthine encryption, but this was more than that. Half of the systems were burned out.

“Sir,” reported Bjornsen. “Power was routed in nonsensical loops, like they sabotaged their own systems.”

“Geral, there’s a data core uplink here,” Amir said. “But it’s locked behind… what the hell… eight layers of physical and subroutine encryption?”

“Paranoid bastards,” Bjornsen muttered, walking over to the uplink. He started working through the layers, his fingers dancing across the alien interface. Every subroutine designed to resist access. Every code fragmented. More than once, he had to shut down the terminal completely and reboot to avoid recursive traps.

Amir swept his tricorder over the far wall… then stopped. “Geral.”

“What?” Loral replied.

“There’s a handprint here… still wet,” Amir said softly.

“Something is moving on this ship; I feel it,” Torel whispered.

Before anyone could respond, the data core console chirped… once… then again.

“I’ve got something,” Bjornsen said. “Logs, I think. Heavily corrupted, but here.”

He opened his tricorder’s display and connected to the data stream. Grainy audio played, broken with static.

“*** tshal*… M’takee** var** tkoni **”

“Connecting universal translator,” Bjornsen said with a few taps into the tricorder.

“***anomalous… cogniti** resonan**”

“Sorry, Sir, the logs are severely degraded,” Bjornsen said. Here’s another one, a little better.”

“It hears through **, likes our fear. It knows **(screaming) **”

The feed cut.

Bjornsen shut his tricorder slowly. A groaning creak echoed from down the corridor. Metal shifting.

“We need to go… now!” Loran said.

As they turned to leave, the dim red pulsing of emergency lights blinked out completely. Only their wrist lamps remained.

Then, in the silence, something whispered…

_________________________________________

The shuttlecraft Ponderosa shuttered as it hit the upper atmosphere of Nerathis IV, turbulence rattling through the hull, the bulkheads groaning under the strain.

Commander Arjun Mehta braced himself against the bulkhead with an outstretched arm as a sudden downdraft jolted the craft sideways. “Ensign Renn, talk to me.”

“Atmospheric entry is rough,” Renn Tanara called from the pilot’s seat with a faint grin, fingers dancing across the console. “Turbulence is at twenty-five percent over projections. Gravity fluctuations… magnetic shear is off the charts.”

“This is not turbulence,” Dr. Pell growled from her seat in the rear of the cabin, gripping her harness tighter as the ship dipped again. “This is the planet fighting us.”

“Don’t worry, Doctor, I’ve flown through far worse than this,” Renn replied.

Vama Dar sat across from Valis, gripping her seat tightly with one hand while reviewing the archaeological reports from the research team in the other. She looked paler than usual but focused.

Ensign Ryan was in the rear with Dr. Pell. He sat with fists clenched in his lap and his eyes tightly closed, but otherwise remained silent.

Lieutenant Valis was the only one seemingly unaffected by the rough ride, her Vulcan posture rigid and face calm and unwavering. “Gravitational harmonics are unstable, there could be a technological cause for this much shear. I look forward to investigation once we land.”

Another jolt, and sparks showered down from an aft bulkhead.

“Status?” Mehta barked.

“Sheilds holding,” Renn replied. “But if these readings keep climbing, we’re going to have to land fast or return to the Vallejo.”

“We’re not aborting,” Mehta said. “Put us down. Now.”

“Aye, Sir,” Renn said with an even bigger grin.

The shuttle began a rapid descent curve, pulling into a shallow glide over the craggy plains below. Most of the surface was barren rock, but there were patches of crimson forests, almost glowing against the reflected purple light of the nearby nebula.

As they approached the target landing zone, the dig site became visible only intermittently. Shadowy outlines were barely seen through swirling dust clouds and rippling pockets of distortion.

“LZ is clear,” Renn said. “But for the record, Sir, this place is creepy.”

“Noted,” replied Mehta.

Another burst of turbulence rocked the shuttle hard enough to dislodge a panel overhead. It clattered to the floor next to Ryan with a clang.

“We’ve got static discharges building around the hull,” Renn shouted. “Localized plasma arcs…”

Valis’s tricorder screeched. “I’m reading a resonance field; it is matching our hull polarity. This is not encouraging.”

“Five seconds to landing,” Renn snapped. “Everyone, hold on!”

The shuttle hit the landing zone just outside the research area with a screech of metal and a jolt that almost launched Dar from her harness. The entire shuttle tilted sideways for a breathless second… then righted itself.

Silence.

“Touchdown complete,” Renn exhaled, breaking the silence, slumping slightly in her chair.

Mehta stood slowly. “Alright, everyone, let’s make this landing worth it.”

Valis walked over to the ramp controls and keyed them open. The outer hatch hissed, and the first dry breath of Nerathis IV wafted inside.

Mehta stepped forward, phaser drawn, and Ryan did the same. “Let’s move. Eyes open, phasers at maximum stun. We have no idea what we are walking into.”

The team descended into the dust and silence.