It Always Watches: A Star Trek Discovery Horror Story

IX: The Monster Blinked

The hunt had been sidetracked by the unexpected appearance of a civilian merchant convoy that stumbled off-course. They sent a distress call when their sensors detected the M'Chla-class ship bearing down upon them from the electromagnetic noise of an unstable star a few light years away. Once the first ship in the convoy was destroyed, the convoy transmitted their surrender and listed the contents of their cargo.

It meant nothing to the followers of House Hak'akrrl, who—their talents as shipwrites aside—were regarded with distaste and more than a little fear within the Empire due to their outsized bloodlust—bloodlust that eclipsed all else. Another house might have captured the convoy—if only to plunder the cargo. But House Hak'karrl cared little for the fortunes of war, only the death it brought. Privately, they were regarded less as a Klingon House of Nobility and more of a death cult.

Once the convoy was reduced to little more than ionized debris, they resumed the hunt, and, to their surprise and delight, detected a strong Starfleet warp signature. The pilot, it seemed, had tried to hide it from within the sands of a dark nebula. They dove into the dark cloud, charged particles lighting up the great ship's wingtips, until they pierced the cloud's, great, dark heart.

The bridge crew cheered at the view that greeted them: not simply a puny shuttlecraft, but a Starfleet ship-of-the-line, engaged in some sort of scientific pursuit that required so much power they'd bled their deflector shields to a bare minimum.

The ship's commander ran his tongue over his sharpened incisors and gave the command to attack.

********

From where they drifted in space, hundred of kilometers away, Burnham watched the distant points of green light that was the Klingon attack. A moment later a massive, blinding fireball bloomed as the Pretorious exploded. Camouflaged by the flood of subspace radio noise caused by the cataclysmic matter/anti-matter explosion, she powered up the shuttlecraft's systems and went to warp.

"It's not over," Stamets said after a moment.

"Pretorious is dead," Burnham replied as she sent a hail to the Discovery and plotted a course. "Their research is gone. Whatever it is. Was. It can't come through."

"We don't know that," Stamets whispered, his eyes fixed at some point beyond the streaks of stars outside the viewport. "It lives outside our plane of existence, but somehow it can see in. It's waiting for another chance to come through, and it's always watching."

They didn't speak for the rest of the journey back to Discovery.

EPILOGUE

Neither Burnham nor Stamets had been expecting to be welcomed back with an abundance of warmth or concern.

"Good thing we found the two of you," Captain Lorca said brusquely from where he stood behind his obsidian desk, "otherwise the spore drive project would be delayed incalculably."

When they reported on the strange events of the Pretorious, Lorca showed only the barest trace of interest, summing the matter up casually. "Good thing they didn't succeed. Nice thinking, Burnham, using the Klingons to take out the ship like that."

When they'd left his office, though, he frowned at the screen of the computer terminal to his left. After a moment, he logged into Starfleet's main database and used his command codes to access the files and updates from the USS Pretorious. He accessed the file named ABRAXIS.

As he read, he noticed faintly against the background of the screen, a pair of eyes regarding him.