Vama Dar’s head swam in the heavy, metallic air, as the screaming in her head softened… then stopped.

She opened her eyes, attempting to return to the world from wherever she was. With a sharp breath, she began gasping… then slowly stumbled to her feet, one hand against the obsidian-like wall as a pulse rippled outward from the platform. The glyphs pulsed brighter now, flickering red-white, like a heart about to explode.

“We need to leave,” she whispered.

Valis didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. Her eyes were locked on Commander Mehta.

He had stopped moving, standing rigid and motionless. His tricorder dangled loosely in his left hand; the other was clenched in a fist at his side. Dar then realized he wasn’t standing. His body was floating, his boots about six centimeters above the rock floor of the chamber. Sweat poured down his face, his eyes open and unblinking. His body began to tremble, jaw tight, and when his head snapped up, his eyes were glassy and black as coal… distant, but filled with rage. A sinister smile grew on his face.

Dr. Pell, one of his oldest friends, noticed it too late.

“Arjun?” she asked, stepping towards him as she attempted to scan him with her medical tricorder. “Your heart rate’s…”

A horrifying, inhuman scream tore through the chamber like a blade. Rage… agony… and something ancient twisting his voice into something of nightmares. Mehta lunged at Dr. Pell, teeth bared, spittle spewing from his mouth, kirpan drawn from his belt in a single motion.

“Deeaattth!” he shrieked in a fiendish, gravelly voice not his own, slashing downward.

She barely got her arm up in time. The blade tore into her sleeve as she stumbled backward, slamming into the stone platform.

Ensign Ryan didn’t hesitate.

“Commander!” he shouted, vaulting over the never terrain between them. “Stop! This isn’t you!”

Mehta turned on him, face twisted into a rictus grin of pure madness. His voice was wrong, layered, like multiple raspy voices speaking at once. Slowly, he licked the blood from his blade.

“She bleeds… We like the blood… the pain. Let us taste you next…”

Ryan pointed his phaser and fired directly at Mehta’s chest.

Nothing.

The phaser in his hand beeped uselessly… dead energy cell.

Mehta charged.

Ryan dropped the phaser and reached down to his boot in one smooth motion. His fighting knife came free, black baakonite glinting in the flickering light of the glyphs.

He couldn’t kill him, but he had to stop him.

Mehta swung wildly, blade slicing the air. Ryan trained with Mehta in bladed combat every week. This was not him… Ryan was far below the Commander’s skill level in every exercise.

Ryan ducked under another wild swing, pivoted, then struck… not with his blade, but with the ring-gripped pommel… smashing it into the base of Mehta’s skull. He staggered, slashed again, catching the edge of Ryan’s shoulder, as Ryan drove his knee into Mehta’s stomach. Ryan spun around and kicked the heel of his boot into the side of Mehta’s right knee, driving him down onto the cold stone floor.

Mehta’s body struggled to get up, rolling over onto his back… then went limp. As his head flopped to the side, Ryan saw that his eyes were no longer the terrifying jet black, but his normal hazel.

Silence.

Dar’s breathing was ragged. Dr. Pell was cradling her arm, blood seeping between her thick, stubby fingers, but she was alive.

Valis approached, calm as ever. “I believe the Commander was not in control of his own faculties,” she said flatly. “An intrusion. Psionic overlay. Temporary, but aggressive.”

Ryan stood breathing heavily in the thick air, still gripping his knife and watching Mehta. “Is it over?”

Valis tilted her head. “No, I can feel its presence behind us.”

A sound slithered through the corridor to the north. Low… wet… whispering.

The light in the glyphs surged again… angry and frantic.

Dar looked up, eyes wide. “It wants us to leave, too.”

“Maybe it’s scared,” Ryan said quietly. “We’re too close to this cell or whatever this is.”

He turned to the others. “We move. Now! I’ll carry Commander Mehta.”

“Can you, all the way back up, Ensign?” Dr. Pell asked, wincing as she tied a torn uniform sleeve tightly around her forearm.

Ryan looked down at Mehta’s unconscious form. “Yeah… I can.”

He sheathed his knife, slinging Mehta over his shoulder with a grunt, and turned towards the shaft.

“Go,” he said forcefully. “I’ll bring up the rear.”

As they ran… and then climbed, the darkness started to come alive in their minds. Slowly at first, weak… but then stronger and more vivid. Dar saw crewmates beaten to death by Cardassian soldiers. Memories from months ago… but in her mind’s eye, she was watching it again for the first time. The access shaft seemed to be getting smaller… more closed in.

Dr. Pell whispered two names through her teeth, over and over again. Her parents, lost in the Dominion War…she pictured their charred corpses engulfed by Breen weapons fire at the battle of Chin’toka.

Valis remained alert, eyes scanning the dark for real threats, urging the team to move faster.

Ryan focused on the weight on his back. Mehta was not a small man, and Ryan’s every muscle burned in protest as he made his way up the shaft back to the surface. He could hear whatever was behind them in his mind… laughing… taunting. But he focused on the climb, not the voice. The pain, his friend and commanding officer on his back.

Still, he could feel it driving them forward.

Feeding.

Hunting.

Ryan became very aware in that moment that time was running out.

_____________________________________

The storm outside hadn’t let up.

Crimson dust swirled around the shuttlecraft Ponderosa, scratching across the hull like nails on metal. Inside, the cabin smelled like ozone and sweat. Ensign Renn Tanara sat hunched over the systems console, her jaw clenched, eyes flicking between failing diagnostics and anomalous signal returns.

She hadn’t spoken in ten minutes.

The interface had worsened. Every attempt to raise the Vallejo, or even cut through to short-range telemetry, failed. It was as if the subspace bands were rotting away beneath her fingers.

She wasn’t giving up. Bajorans rarely did.

Renn muttered under her breath. “Okay… fine. Let’s try cheating.”

She killed the automatic modulation sweep and re-routed the auxiliary deflector to piggyback off the sensor harmonics. That shouldn’t work, not through this much scatter, but if she could match the timing of the EPS wavefronts to the ambient energy waves spiking around the area…

Static flared across the console. Only for a moment. Then it went black.

Renn initiated the sequence again.

A flicker.

The console lit again… faint, a pulse… but it was there. A repeating pattern between the scatter, just barely riding the wavefront.

Renn’s breath caught in her throat as her fingers moved with urgency.

Manual lock… compensate for phase drift… strip the carrier noise…

Behind her, Lieutenant Geral Loran stepped forward from the back of the cabin where his team was recuperating from their ordeal on the Vaadwaur scout ship. His uniform was still damp with sweat and dust, his expression tight with fatigue, but haunted emerald eyes narrowed when he saw the glow on the panel.

“Talk to me, Ensign,” he said, voice low.

“I’m not sure yet,” Renn replied. “But I think… I think we’re getting a signal.”

The signal jumped twice, then stabilized. A sharp spike.

Loran leaned over her shoulder. “Vallejo?”

She hesitated, eyes scanning. “Not local. They’re using my sensor harmonics as a carrier wave, amplifying our own signal attempt.”

The console chirped.

Then a voice cut through… broken, garbled, but unmistakable.

“…Ponderosa, this is Vallejo. Repeat, signal lock established. Acknowledge.”

Renn nearly collapsed forward.

Loran pressed his combadge. “Loran to Vallejo. We copy. We had to evacuate the Vaadwaur ship. We all made it, but Bjornsen needs medical attention. We have no communication with Commander Mehta’s team.”

There was a long pause…

Then, clear and sharp, came Captain Day’s voice.

“Lieutenant Loran. Acknowledged. We’re seeing telemetry spikes now. Renn, whatever you did, Lieutenant Vex was able to lock on to it. Maintain signal lock.”

“Understood. We’ll hold as long as we can,” Renn replied.

Loran turned from the console, looking past Renn toward the aft section where the others rested in silence. Bjornsen was sitting with his head back, eyes closed. Torel had her head resting on a bulkhead, eyes half shut but alert, antennae drooping. Amir stood watch at the hatch, phaser in hand, scanning the storm through a fogged viewport.

“Vallejo, this is Renn Tanara,” Renn cut in. “Do you have eyes on the dig team. We lost contact right after deploy.”

Kellan’s voice came over the comms, “Affirmative. We’re reading five biosigns moving through the canyon system. Seems to be some erratic energy increasing in the vicinity… almost as if the storm is following them.”

Amir looked at Loran sharply. “It’s following them… like it did to us.”

Loran grabbed his own phaser and walked back to the shuttle hatch.

“Renn, get a signal to Commander Mehta. We need to leave this rock… now!”