It Always Watches: A Star Trek Discovery Horror Story

I: The Heat of Battle

"Burnham, look out—" But Burnham had already stabbed at her controls, and the shuttlecraft banked hard to starboard, straining against the gravity stabilizers forcing the craft's four still-living occupants to strain against their straps and grab whatever they could for purchase. Beside her, above the still-smoking ruin of his control panel, the dead pilot just slumped like an overstuffed rucksack. The interior of the shuttle strobed a deep and shocking green as Klingon's disruptor bolts went wide of the target.

"Jesus, Burnham, how about a little warning next time?" Stamets groused from his seat in the passenger bench in the cargo bay of the shuttle. His normally-sour voice had an extra edge of hysteria in it, and a compartment somewhere in the back of Burnham's mind wondered how long it would be before he began to lose control.

"This is some fucking rescue," spat Ensign Colwyn, the passenger seated opposite Stamets, a burly security officer in a torn and singed uniform bearing signage of the USS Messik, now a slow-burning mass of alloys and polymers and corpses behind them. "Your goddamn ship couldn't even bother to wait around until extraction—"

"Shut up, Todd!" shouted the other Messik evacuee—a slender, pretty science officer whose green eyes had remained saucer-big with incipient shock ever since they'd beamed her off her escape pod. Her voice was on the verge of breaking, too, but there was conviction behind it. "You want them to let the Becht go down just so they could babysit our recovery?"

"Don't tell me to shut up, Lyssa! I—"

"Both of you shut up!" Stamets shouted. "We risked our lives coming for you!"

Burnham didn't hear the rest, because her heart seized up as the M'Chla-class Klingon scout ship suddenly rose like a revenant in the viewport, close enough for Burnham to see the little disruptor cannons on the sides of its foresection. She let out and involuntary cry of alarm (an illogical display of emotion that does nothing to address your current situation, and therefore a waste of energy and focus, Sarek would say), and instinctively punched the engines up to the redline. The viewport flared green with the Klingon's disruptor-fire as the shuttlecraft sprinted between the bat-like wings of the scout ship.

Screams rang out from behind her, as Burnham allowed herself a moment to take in the unsettling view of the ship's skeleton-like structure, as if the carcass of some great avian had been resurrected by some terrible necromancy and then grafted with shields and sensors and guns. Even the most up-to-date Starfleet intel on House Hak'karrl was maddengly opaque, but the belief was that the bio-alloy skin of their ships, and even perhaps the spaceframes, contained biomass from enemies they'd conquered in battle. Not for the first time, Burnham felt her understanding slam up against the unscalable wall of Klingon culture.

"Hold on!" Burnham shouted without turning around. She engaged the warp drive, knowing they were too close to the Klingon ship, but not caring. The boxy little craft shuddered around them as it slid into warp space on a malformed warp field like a wrecking ball through a wall. Alarms wailed and the undamaged portion of the control console flashed warnings at her like a child desperate for attention. Suddenly, the ship lurched and the stars transformed from streaks back to pinpricks, as the shuttlecraft skidded into subspace.

"What's happening?" Lyssa asked.

"Our warp field collapsed," Burnham explained as her fingers hurried over the tactical controls. "We went to warp too close to the Klingons."

"You went to warp within minimum safe distance?" Stamets asked incredulously. "Are you insane?"

"We needed to get out of there," Burnham shot back. "They had a target lock on us. They would have shot us down in another minute. These shields can't stand up to a barrage from a warship."

Lyssa stepped on the acidic reply. "Can you get us back to warp?"

Burnham shook her head, feeling her stomach bottom out as the damage-control readouts scrolled across the panel by her knee. "Not any time soon. We threw the coils out of alignment. The whole warp-control system needs to reboot. That will take about an hour. Maybe more."

"We need to contact Discovery," Stamets said urgently. "Like, right now. This second. They need to get here and..."

A panicked squawk from the tactical control cut him off.

"What's that?"

"We picked up the Klingons on long-range," Burnham read off the sensor readout. "They're heading this way under impulse power. I guess we took out their warp field as well." She turned and faced Stamets. He was even paler than normal, something Burnham wouldn't have thought possible a few hours ago. "We can't hail Discovery. That will lead the Klingons right to us."

"You said their warp drive was down—"

"They have damage-control crews," Burnham said. "They can get their systems up a lot faster than ours."

"Goddamn it," Colwyn let out a shuddering laugh. "The Discovery rescued us for a grand total of fifteen minutes."

"Shut up, Todd!" Lyssa shouted at him.

Burnham shut it all out and concentrated on her sensor scans of the sector. "We need a place to hide...and I think I found it." She punched in a heading and the shuttlecraft veered off. The starfield outside the viewports slid portside until a greyish smudge in space the size of her fist appeared in the main viewport.

Stamets unbelted himself and made his way up to the console. He blanched for a moment at the corpse of the pilot, then fixed his gaze at the smudge "Is that a...dark nebula?"

"It reads like one," Burnham nodded.

"What's a dark nebula?" Colwyn asked.

"It a smokescreen in space," Stamets said. "All gas and dust...and the perfect place to hide."

"For a little while anyway," Burnham said as she set the coordinates into the nav system.

"Burnham...Burnham, what's this?" Stamets pointed to a weak, flicking readout on the pilot's smashed control panel. It was distorted from being displayed on melted polymer, but Burnham could recognize it as coming from the comm panel.

"Let's see..." she said and transferred comms to her control display. An IFF signal pulsed in blue lettering.

"There's a ship in there?" Stamets asked incredulously. "What are they doing parked inside a dark nebula?"

"Maybe they're hiding from the Klingons, too," Lyssa suggested.

"According to their signal it the USS Pretorious," Burnham said, reading off the data file that came up automatically as the shuttlecraft's computer recognized the IFF signal. "It's a specialized science vessel. Not much more data about it."

"Whatever they're doing, we stand a better chance with them than on our own," Colwyn said.

Burnham nodded. "Can't argue with that..." She adjusted the shuttlecraft's approach and gunned the engines. The little ship plunged into the nebula like a bullet into a body.