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Excerpt from a letter from Razka on Sarindar to Marig on Nalor, sixteenth day of Sendrak, twenty-third year of Togh

. . . I watched as Commander Gomez stood on the dish’s edge. The monster shii climbed the rest of the way up. She raised her weapon. The creature, however, moved faster than expected.

Actually, that is not true. The creature had been moving fast all along. It is simply so fast that it’s difficult to comprehend just how fast it is. I suspect that Commander Gomez failed to anticipate this. One cannot blame her. This monster is very easy to underestimate.

The monster attacked her, knocking her weapon out of her hands. She lost her balance, and fell into the dish. The rifle, though, fell down the outside of the dish and plummeted to the ground.

This presented me with something of a dilemma, Marig. You see, Commander Gomez needed that rifle in order to stop the shii. Which meant that I needed to grab the rifle and get it to her. However, that meant getting much closer to the shii than I particularly wanted.

Besides, I knew that if I picked up the rifle, I would freeze again. I remembered Commander Gomez’s words. She told me of the engineer’s axiom that when garbage goes in, garbage comes out. I am like that. I hold a rifle, I freeze. It is the way of things.

But I promised Commander Gomez that I would continue to do my job. I had told her that that was why I stayed behind. Of course, that is not the real reason. The truth is that the other workers did not want me with them on the Culloden. They also did not want Commander Gomez with them. While not all of them believed her to be bad luck, enough of them did. And enough of those also thought I fell into that category. That was why they waited to take off until they knew that she was away from the camp. However, I did not wish her to know that. Besides, what I told her was true. I wanted to redeem myself, to do my job. I owed her that much. I owed myself that much.

So I ran for the rifle. I picked it up. And I climbed the ladder, trying not to pay attention to the scream of pain I heard from the inner workings of the dish . . .

First officer’s log, supplemental

. . . I tumbled into the inside of the dish, the duranium panels colliding with my body in a nastily bone-jarring manner. I managed to halt my descent, stopping myself at what appeared to be fifty meters down into the dish—or halfway to the center. It was about where the dish started to flatten out a bit and get less steep.

I quickly tried to get my bearings, attempting to stand up and keep my balance. The rifle was nowhere to be seen, which made my life a helluva lot more complicated. The shii was still at the perimeter of the dish. Since I was unarmed, and could barely keep my balance, I was at a distinct disadvantage.

Then it started running down the dish toward me, its “paws” having morphed back into shii form, since that was much more efficient for decapitating.

This worked in my favor, actually, as the claws—which could easily get a grip on the crystalline surface of Sarindar—couldn’t grab hold of duranium. So, instead of loping gracefully down the inner surface of the dish, it slipped, slid, and tumbled down the dish, past me and toward the center.

I just needed to be able to press this advantage—unfortunately, no real opportunity to do so presented itself. Instead, I found myself facing this creature from fifty meters away, with it standing between me and my only legitimate means of escape—the center of the dish. There was a small hatch in the center that was my best bet for getting out of there—climbing up the edge of the dish wasn’t going to be much of an option.

Then the creature somehow managed to get enough of a grip on the dish to take one giant leap toward me. Starfleet training kicked in, and I managed to roll with the impact as it landed on me—rolling upward at first, then tumbling back down toward the center as gravity took over from the force of impact. I took a kick at it, but before I could, it slashed at my cheek. I cried out in surprise as much