Chapter Text
As Una watched, the planet grew larger and large through the Galileo’s viewscreen. It was not long before the entire screen was filled with white, green and blue – they were close enough that the blackness of space was no longer visible.
On the planet’s surface lay an abandoned structure that was giving off strange readings. It was made all the more interesting by the fact it was the only evidence of civilisation on the planet, leading Spock to theorise that it was not built by a native population, but by a visiting population at least a millennia ago. It was the mission of the away team she was leading to investigate.
It was her personal mission to resist the urge to check the shuttle’s instrument readings twenty times every minute and instead just sit back and let Erica glide the Galileo down to the planet’ surface. A few months earlier Chris had finally convinced her to only be an executive officer, but she was still having a hard time letting being a pilot go. It seemed to have stuck.
Erica appeared to have picked up on what Una was thinking as she gave Una a smile and a nod.
“Miss it?” she asked.
Una just gave her a knowing smile response, noting as she did they were now close enough to the surface to make out individual trees. The area of the planet close to the structure was covered in Earth-like forest. Una was forever having to restrain herself from asking if anyone else noticed how similarly life had evolved across the galaxy. If they didn’t wonder if there was something to it?
It was then that she felt it. Something not dissimilar to an electrical shock: a sudden rush of activation inside every single cell in her body. It was as if thirty trillion switches had been flicked within her all at once.
She gasped, too shocked to effectively hide her surprise.
Then the shuttle lurched to the right.
“Birds!” Ortegas yelled in warning to everyone sitting in the shuttle. “Or bats,” she continued talking, although completely focused on flying the Galileo. “I don’t know – some kind of flying things, but lots of them.”
Una looked on the viewscreen. What seemed to be thousands of creatures were ascending in a flock from the trees below, creating a dark cloud of life. The occasional small winged creature flying into a shuttle’s path should not normally be an issue, but the sheer amount of whatever things were flying out of the forest did pose a challenge.
“Really big moths?” Erica continued with her observations as she took evasive action to try and avoid the swarm of creatures.
But Una could not focus on either the flock of moth-like creatures blacking out the sky or Erica’s attempts to keep the shuttle on course while being buffeted by them, because what was going on inside her at a cellular level was taking up all her attention.
The feeling was for the moment subtle, a kind of heat. As if her skin being exposed to the direct rays of a sun, but the feeling was internal. It was how it always started. Her cells were preparing themselves.
It had been over twenty five years since she had last transformed her body, but each time it had been something she had triggered and controlled. This change seeming to be her body acting on its own will. For the first time in years she instinctively reached to her genetic memories for help, only to find them still cut off from her while she was still nearly entirely Human.
As the shuttle lurched again, she closed her eyes and grabbed her harness. She focusing on the form she wanted, the form she currently occupied, hoping that would stop her body. But it was as if she had suddenly fallen into a river and she was being carried away. She had no control, her attempting to will her body into stopping was achieving nothing.
The energy within her was growing. She was reverting to her true form.
As the shuttle crashed through tree branches, she turned to look back. Behind her sat Lieutenants Spock and Kirk from science, Lieutenant Roshanak from security and Cadet Uhura. They were all focused on the viewscreen and not her.
“Hold on!” Ortegas called out, as the shuttle sliced through trees.
Una lurched against her harness as momentum propelled her body forward, until finally the shuttle stopped and she fell back. Dozens of warning lights switched on across the control panel.
Una’s first instinct was to run for the door, but all her years in Starfleet helped her fight it. She was the commanding officer on the away team and she had responsibility for everyone on the shuttle.
She could feel it though, starting in her gut. Her insides moving, churning, changing.
“Any injuries,” she called out, looking back. Everyone seemed to be conscious, nobody seemed to be bleeding.
There were nods and calls of no.
It took three tries to unhook her harness. Her hands were shaking. If she couldn’t escape….
“Commander.” Next to her in the pilot’s seat Erica gave her a concerned look.
“I’m fine,” Una said, attempting to straighten in her seat, trying not to wince as she felt a sudden escalation of the change within her organs. Her digestive tract, her endocrine system, her excretory system, her reproductive organs – systems required by humanoids were dissolving as specialist Human cells became multifunctional Illyrian cells.
She needed to get away from the shuttle and everyone within. But she still needed to take care of the others.
“Uhura, contact the Enterprise and update them. Ortegas, run a diagnostic on systems.” She turned to Spock, sitting behind her, hoping desperately there were no visual signs of what was going on within her. “Spock, determine our exact location and how far away were are from the structure.” She decided that should keep them all occupied long enough for her to get out of sight.
She got up, thankful her legs were still working even though they felt weaker. Muscle cells were also now being converted.
“I’ll go outside and visually check for damage,” she said, moving towards the shuttle door as fast as she could without appearing to be rushing.
“Commander, are you certain…?” The was a questioning look in Spock’s expression. Something she knew to be concern.
“I’m fine, Spock.” She cut him off before he could finish his question. The mechanisms on the door seeming to take forever.
The shuttle door finally opened. “Determine our location.” She repeated the order to him before he could think to follow.
She headed around the back of the shuttle, walking like a drunk person pretending to be sober as the change started to take on a more rapid pace. As soon as she was out of sight of anyone within the shuttle, she headed directly for the forest, needing a place to hide.
As she reached the edge of the trees, her legs gave out and she felt to her knees, hitting her knee against a tree root as she did so. She almost cried out in pain, but as she stifled her cry she feel her throat close. The change had reached her lungs and her heart.
Panic raced through her. In the twenty five years she had been pretending to be Human, and in the years before, pretending to be mammals of increasing size, she had become accustomed to breathing and of having a heart that constantly beat. Of needing oxygen circulating through her system to survive.
Illyrians didn’t need to breathe, but she did need to be well out of the way of the shuttle.
Una knew she would not been able to stand again, the muscles in her legs were too far gone, so she began to craw as best she could along the forest floor.
Looking to her hands, some of her fingers had stuck together, the flesh merging. Her skin was becoming translucent, transforming into an Illyrian membrane. Beneath it she could see her muscles and blood turning black as they became Illyrian cells. The walls of the cells absorbed all light so no matter their configuration, she would be camouflaged when she was within in her natural environment.
In her rush to get away she hadn’t noticed the sound of her limbs dragging across the forest floor or the rustle of wind through the trees or the sounds of creatures in the forest. She did notice though when those sounds became muffled, and moment later when the world went silent.
Before she could give that consideration, everything went black as she lost her vision. When she blinked out of habit, she felt her lids stick.
She was blind, deaf and mute.
The thought struck her that the rest of the away team could have found her. They could be standing over her right at that moment, reaching for their phasers, and she wouldn’t know. She wasn’t able to see them, hear them, or plead with them to stop.
Except they were Starfleet officers, she reminded herself. They would ask question before they resorted to violence.
But they were also humanoids, and creatures like Illyrians seemed to trigger some base revulsion within them. Could that ever be overcome?
The only sense she had left was the one she shared with humanity: touch, and she used that to continue on, using whatever she had left that still worked to propel herself against the forest floor away from the shuttle. Until she couldn’t. Until all the muscles in her arms, her torso, her legs was gone and all she could do was lie there, something no longer Human, but not yet Illyrian. A mass of black Illyrian cells in transparent membrane in a still vaguely Human-shaped outline. Still encased in her Starfleet uniform.
A convulsion wracked through her. Her body was done converting cells. Her true form was establishing itself, but first it had to expel the parts of her Human form that it could not convert: bones, cartilage, hair, nails and teeth.
She couldn’t feel her nails and hair falling out, but in a moment of vanity she mourned those aspects of her appearance. She had taken pride in her hair and her nails. Being able to use them to express herself was one her favourite parts of being in a Human body.
Her teeth falling out of what was left of her month and then it closing up after them was unsettling. Like a nightmare she once had.
But it was her bones that were agony. Her body writhed and twisted as they were moved and expelled through her outer membrane. And she felt it. Illyrians like Humans felt pain. Both species benefited from knowing when something was wrong with their bodies, and Human bones being trapped within Illyrian flesh was something wrong with hers.
The convulsions finally ceased once the lingering remnants of her physical humanity were expelled from her form. What was left of her limbs and head had retracted into her body. She knew if she could see herself, she would appear to be just a blob of Illyrian flesh. Illyrian flesh surrounded by her bones and wrapped in what would be left of her unform.
When she was at her most revolting to humanoids that she was at her most vulnerable. She could sense the ground beneath her but that was it. She had no understanding of what was going on around her, no way to move and no way to communicate.
And she was tired. She had not been prepared to revert to Illyrian form. Genetic memory had taught her to gorge herself for a few days to work up the energy for a complete physical transformation. All she had eaten that morning was a bowl of granola with yoghurt and strawberries.
It was possible to become stuck part way. To run out of energy. To be left trapped as a defenceless mass of cells. Whoever found her could do whatever they wanted. Kill her or capture her. Or just leave her.
Finally, and to her relief, appendages started to burst from her body. One, two, three…and then she lost count. They emerged sharp and fast, piercing through and tearing her uniform as they did. Appendages for movement, appendages for digestion, appendages for communication and most importantly, appendages for sensing the world around her.
Suddenly her mind was filled with new information about the her environment, experiencing it in ways she hadn’t been able to since she was last in Illyrian form.
Through the forest could sense the shuttle. She could sense the electromagnetic fields that the electronic components emitted, sense the radiation from the engines and sense the heat the Galileo had absorbed as it had entered the planet’s atmosphere.
To her relief the away team were still at the shuttle. One person had left, but was standing maybe a metre or two from the door. She could sense their body heat, their bioelectric fields and the subtle sound waves produced by their breathing and the beating of their heart.
She could also taste, in her way. She could determine one chemical from another by touch alone. She could taste the calcium and phosphate in her Human bones, and the polymers in the fabric of her unform. She could taste the organic matter in the soil beneath her appendages; the rotting forest debris and living bacteria and fungal cells.
It brought back a visceral memory – one of her earliest – back when she was the same size and approximate mass of a dandelion seedhead. Crawling across an endless desert of concrete until for the first time she tasted soil. She encased herself within it, living off decaying plant matter, nematodes and mites until she had achieved the size and strength to kill, consume and become an earthworm.
Then, like another sense, it unveiled itself to her: the layers and depth of millions, billions of years of genetic memory, so rich and deep that she instinctively only ever dared to skim the surface for fear of losing herself within it. It was how she knew what she was despite never meeting another of her kind. How she knew how to survive in galaxy that was now hostile to forms of life like herself. Of how she knew of the time before humanoids, the rich diverse life that flourished before the cataclysm happened that forced life in the galaxy to become uniform.
The person by the shuttle moved and she pulled herself back.
At a guess, they were looking for her. They yelled something, she could feel sound waves radiate from their mouth. Her name? Likely, but she could not know for certain. In her natural form, she did not so much hear sounds as fell them – and understanding something as complex as Human speech was beyond her.
Neither could she tell who it was. She could tell their size and their mass and the approximate position of their body and limbs, but for all her senses she could not hope to distinguish or read a face.
Fear spiked with her. Fear was another thing shared by both Humans and Illyrians. A healthy sense of fear kept an individual alive.
Una had to leave before they stumbled across her. She was depleted and weak and surrounded by the detritus of her Human form. They wouldn’t think she was Una Chin-Riley, they would think she had killed and consumed Una Chin-Riley.
She had managed a full transformation on her breakfast alone – or maybe it was the lasagne and tiramisu Chris had cooked the evening before which had saved her. Either way, she would need to consume something before she attempted to transform back. She also needed to find someplace more private, she could not risk being stumbled upon during a transformation. She knew how it looked and what her crewmates would think.
She also knew the Starfleet protocol for encounters with Illyrians. If they figured out exactly what she was, none of them would be allowed to leave the planet.
With half her appendages she gathered up as many of the bones as she could carry, holding them close to her core, then she did what she could to cover up the rest of the evidence of her Human form with soil and leaves while in a body that had not evolved to perform such tasks.
She grasped at the trunk and branches of a nearby tree and climbed up before starting to move from trunk to trunk. Travelling above the ground she would not leave a trail that could be followed.
---
Spock called out for the Commander once more, still receiving no response. The Galileo was in the middle of dense forest, so the Commander could easily be nearby yet out of sight, but she was not responding to him calling her name, and he had noticed when she left the shuttle in haste, that she had not taken with her a communicator.
Lieutenant Ortegas stood in the shuttle door. “Anything?” she asked.
“No, it is unusual,” Spock replied. Yes, moments ago they had experienced a difficult landing which had the potential to cause emotional distress, but he could list at least five other shuttle landing experiences they had both experienced which were similar or worse, and the Commander had not on those occasions reacted in such a way as to cause concern.
“She looked pale, may be she went off to vomit?” Ortegas did not seem convinced by her own hypothesis, likely for the same reason he was not convinced: Commander was a seasoned pilot.
Another possibility was that it was nothing to do with the shuttle crash and she had encountered some difficulty when examining the shuttle exterior. Hostile fauna or flora, or unstable ground.
Spock reached for his tricorder. If the Commander was in trouble, a scan for life-signs would point them in the correct direction to reach her location and provide aid.
After a few seconds, a message flashed up on the tricorder screen. Species 154 detected. Protocol enacted.
Spock puzzled at the message. He was not aware of a species designated 154, let alone a specific protocol.
“Are you familiar with Species 154?” he asked Ortegas. She shrugged.
Ortegas turned to the shuttle, likely to ask everyone within, but was interrupted.
“Umm, I think you both need to get in here,” Cadet Uhura called out. “Is this normal?”
Spock made his way to the shuttle, reluctant to have a third mystery added to Commander Chin-Riley disappearing and Species 154.
As he reached the shuttle entrance he noticed a message had appeared on the viewscreen.
Enacting 154 Protocol
Ortegas had returned to the pilot’s chair and was trying to input something, but she appeared to be locked out of the controls and the message remained.
“What is 154 Protocol?” Uhura asked.
But before Spock could respond that he did not know, the shuttle door closed and he heard the locking mechanism whir.
The shuttle was plunged into darkness as the power cut off.
---
From what Nyota was describing, it seemed the shuttle crew were all still in one piece. Spock reported that they were within an few hours hike of the structure and according to Erica none of the shuttle’s systems were too badly damaged. They were just waiting on Number One to return from an external inspection and give her verdict on whether the mission was still viable.
While waiting to hear more, Chris lent back in the captain’s chair trying not to consider how much he would like to be down on the planet himself. Still, it was unfair to Una if he took all the away missions.
“From Spock’s earlier assessment, the moth-like creatures are herbivores,” La’an announced, reading off the console. She would be using the information to update the mission risk assessment.
Chris turned to reply, “Just didn’t expect so many all at once.”
“Captain,” Jenna called, drawing his attention forward and to the viewscreen.
A message flashed across it in red. Species 154 detected.
He trawled through his memory, trying to recall an encounter or a briefing or even a mention of a ‘Species 154’ but nothing came to mind.
He turned again to La’an as the Head of Security. “Lieutenant?”
She was frowning at the message before it changed. Enacting 154 Protocol.
“Lieutenant, what is ‘Species 154 protocol?” he asked, feeling slightly foolish that as captain he didn’t know. But it was one thing to feel foolish, it would be actually foolish to pretend he knew what was going on.
“I don’t know, Sir,” La’an admitted. Lieutenant Noonien-Singh had only been on the Enterprise a few months but he knew she modelled her approach to being a Starfleet officer on Number One. If she didn’t know of a procedure or protocol relevant to her position as Head of Security, the only explanation would be because that procedure or protocol had been withheld from her. That meant they were dealing with something classified.
Suddenly a graphic of the planet below appeared on the screen with instructions.
Planet under quarantine.
He got up out of his chair. Jenna turned back to look at him, clearly also thinking what he was: they had six people on the ground on that planet.
All communications terminated.
“Hail the Galileo,” he instructed Ensign Lowri sitting at the communications console.
“Captain, the Galileo, their communications systems are not responding. They appear to be offline.”
A final instruction appeared on the viewscreen.
Return to nearest Starbase.
Like hell he was going to do that.