• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Mister Chekov, once we lost a crew member—” Giotto didn’t say because of you, but Chekov felt it was understood. “—this stopped being a survey mission and turned into a rescue mission.”

Feeling his face grow hot, Chekov lowered his gaze and inspected his tricorder screen. “It might do the job,” he admitted, returning to the security chief’s previous question, “but the damage could be catastrophic. Too much power.”

“I was afraid of that,” said Giotto. He looked over at the captain, who was listening to Seven Deers explain that she could not find a release mechanism for the doors. “But I’m sure we could improvise something.”

Unfortunately, without the Enterprise their options were limited. They’d brought no photon grenades or other explosives, and they could not dig their way into the tunnels from above because they had no excavation equipment.

“Everyone over here!” Kirk ordered. Chekov looked up to see that the captain was now talking to Crewman Tra, the security guard, by the base of the large tree that dominated the chamber. Rawlins and Tra had joined Chekov and Seven Deers after being recalled by the captain, and they’d made their way to this place together.

Chekov and Giotto scrambled through the darkness to where Kirk, Rawlins, and Tra were staring at a tricorder. Chekov noticed Seven Deers shoot the captain a questioning look; he shook his head, and she continued to work on the door.

“Share your report with everyone, Mister Tra,” ordered the captain.

The Arkenite man nodded, holding his tricorder out so that everyone could see its screen, showing strange squiggles and swirls on the sides of buildings. “We found a large amount of what we think is graffiti on the surface. Most of it seemed to be incoherent scrawls—”

“No underlying linguistic patterns,” chimed in Rawlins.

“Exactly. When we were called back here, we took quick scans of everything we could see, and I’ve been sifting through it, and I found this.” Tra pressed a button, and an image of a group of creatures standing under a curved black line appeared. They resembled furry octopi as drawn by a preschooler, and each one was labeled with some kind of alien text. “It’s the only thing we’ve found that clearly represents something.”

“Are these the inhabitants of Mu Arigulon?” asked Giotto. “Could they have taken Yüksel?”

Even though the wall graffiti wasn’t very detailed, it at least gave the landing party an idea of what the inhabitants of Mu Ari V might have looked like. An elongated body with a large “head”—actually not so much a separate body part as a bulbous top, crowned with what could be horns, ears, or eyestalks—formed the center of the creature, and five differently proportioned limbs extended from it in all directions, making it difficult to get an exact idea of the aliens’ anatomy. The color was washed out from decades of being exposed to the elements and covered in dirt.

Assuming this was an accurate depiction of a typical native sapient, it could be extrapolated that the planet had been inhabited by sentient invertebrates.

“Mister Tra,” Kirk said, “forward these scans to the Hofstadter. I’m sure Mister Spock will be fascinated. I want Mister Saloniemi to work on this also.”

“Aye, sir.” The text was the first instance of the alien language they’d encountered, too.

There was just one thing that troubled Chekov. “How do we know these are the aliens, sir?” he asked. “I used to draw dinosaurs on my bedroom wall.” He’d hate for them to get all excited over what might well turn out to be a made-up creature.

“Good point, Mister Chekov. We’ll keep that in mind.”

“They’re inside a dome or building,” said Rawlins. “And the writing looks like dialogue to me. I mean, I’m not an art expert, but—”

“Anthropomorphic animals,” Chekov pointed out. “They might simply be figures of—”

“Captain!” Seven Deers’s voice interrupted them as she ran up to the group.

“What is it, Ensign?” asked Kirk, the graffiti apparently forgotten.

“I think I found a way to open