Chapter Text
Charlie Morningstar sat up, yawning and stretching. Her joints popped in response to the movement. Her hair was tangled from sleep but it wasn’t anything a quick brushing wouldn’t fix.
She pushed herself out of bed and slowly puttered her way around her cottage as she gathered up her clothes, hair ties, and hairbrush.
As the morning stiffness in her muscles faded, she pulled on her clothes— a red and white jacket with shoulder pads that curved up into points, the sleeves of which she rolled up, a pair of black gloves, loose black pants, a brown belt that contained her tricorder and some scientific equipment including vials, and white boots.
She also pulled on her prized golden snake bracelet, which curled up her arm and nearly touched her elbow. Over her other arm she slipped her communicator.
She then sat down in front of her bedroom mirror, which sat on a dresser placed against the wall, and started brushing her hair, wincing in pain as the brush pulled part knots and nerves in her scalp were triggered by the repeated action.
Once she was finally done and the knots plaguing her hair were defeated, she used her hair ties to band her hair back twice in a low ponytail.
She gave herself a final onceover and smiled. She stood up and popped her knuckles as she strode over to her cottage door and opened it. Fresh air swam in, filling her lungs. Virinat’s sun cast an orange glow over the colony, bathing it in a gentle early morning warmth.
She spotted Tovan Khev standing at the foot of her cottage’s porch, his brows furrowed in concentration as he tapped away at the PADD in his hands.
Charlie quickly trotted up to him and smiled, clasping her hands behind her back. Tovan quickly looked up, startled for a split-second. The surprise quickly melted into agitation, though it was clear it had nothing to do with her.
“There you are!” he said. “The security chief was looking for you earlier, there’s been some trouble down at the vineyard. Apparently Avrak’s been filling reports all night about Khallids chewing at the vines. He’s really worked up!”
“Avrak being worked up sounds pretty normal, but Khallids in the vines?” Charlie asked, surprised. She frowned. “That doesn’t.”
“That’s what I said,” Tovan replied, snorting and smiling faintly with amusement. “Something must’ve annoyed them. Who knows… maybe they’re just ‘party poopers.’ That’s what humans call people who hate parties, right?”
Charlie laughed at that. The colony was preparing to throw a big celebration that night. Maybe Tovan was right and the Khallids really were just secretly haters of all things festive. Too bad for them.
“Anyway, Avrak left a bunch of messages on your console. You should probably give them a listen before you head out.”
Charlie cringed at the thought, but nodded anyway.
As much as she did not want to listen to Avrak shrieking about Khallids in his vineyard and how ungrateful everyone was for all his hard work and so on, the sooner she listened to the messages and dealt with the Khallid problem, the less likely that something would go wrong during the big party tonight.
Avrak did indeed do plenty of yelling. By the end of the second message his voice sounded hoarse.
Tovan, who stood next to Charlie as he plus the other Romulan colonists within a ten foot radius, all winced and stared as the high-strung man made his frustrations very loudly known. Charlie rubbed her forehead, cringing the whole time, her face warm and her stomach in knots from the second-hand embarrassment.
The one day she decided to sleep in…
At least by the third message Avrak was much calmer, and even apologized for losing his temper. That was something.
“I’d go with you,” Tovan said as Charlie turned back around to face him, “but the chief’s got me looking into some odd comm chatter we picked up yesterday. I’ll tell you more about it later.”
Though curious about the comm chatter in question, she knew she had to get moving before Avrak decided to send a fourth message with even more screaming. So with a sigh Charlie could only nod and say, “See you later.”
After going back into her cottage for a bit to grab a pistol, she set out to deal with the Khallid problem.
Avrak was still looking pretty pissed by the time she got there.
“Finally!” he said. “I mean— which message did you hear?”
“All of them,” Charlie answered, raising an eyebrow at him.
Avrak’s face flushed a vivid shade of green from embarrassment and he coughed into his fist as he struggled to regain his composure.
“Uhm— ahem! Never mind that! It’s chaos out here! The Khallids have gone mad! They’re tearing our pipes apart!”
He gestured to the vineyard behind him and Charlie stepped forward, moving to his side so she could get a better look. Sure enough, the Khallids were in a very unusual, massive frenzy, tearing apart the metal pipes that were part of the colony’s irrigation system like knives cutting into butter.
Not only that but the bugs looked as if some strange green growths were sprouting out of the gaps in their carapaces… like they were infected by something.
“I’ll shoot the Khallids,” Charlie told him, “and you fix up the pipes. Deal?”
“Deal,” Avrak replied immediately, no doubt as eager to nip this problem in the bud as she was.
Charlie gripped her pistol tightly in both hands and followed Avrak into the vineyard as he made a beeline for the first busted pipe. Water sprayed out of the gaping hole like a fountain, and the Khallids were already on their way to making more. Charlie took aim at the closest one and fired.
The green beam of energy cut through the insect’s carapace easily, cooking its insides and thus killing it instantly. In a quick succession, the remaining four Khallids also suffered the same fate and in mere moments, the vineyard was decorated with their corpses.
Charlie stood at Avrak’s side as he knelt down and pulled some tools out from his belt to begin repairs. Meanwhile, Charlie pulled her tricorder out of her own belt and squatted down by the nearest Khallid corpse. She began scanning, and her mouth curved into a frown when the tricorder simply listed the growths on the insect as “unknown infection.”
She scanned again, and once more received the same results.
Whatever this was, it wasn’t in their database. Luckily, being a scientist meant that Charlie carried the equipment needed for gathering samples. Using a scalpel, she scraped off some the growths and surrounding tissue and pushed them into a vial which she immediately sealed with a metal lid.
The rest of the pipe repairs went just as smoothly as the first one did— Charlie would kill any Khallids they came across, especially if they were near the irrigation system’s pipes, and Avrak would patch up the holes as best he could.
“The pipes are fixed and the flooding’s stopped,” Avrak said as he stood up from the fourth and final pipe he just finished repairing. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if even more crazed Khallids dropped by just to undo all my hard work.”
“Nevala might know something,” Charlie mused thoughtfully. “She’s the Khallid expert around here, right?”
Admittedly, she didn’t know Nevala that well. They rarely spoke to each other. Not out of animosity, but purely because they hardly ever needed to work together, and their social circles didn’t exactly make a metaphorical Venn diagram.
Long story short, their paths rarely crossed.
“Yeah,” Avrak replied. “Assuming she and her lazy ass aren’t goofing off again… look, do whatever you need to. As long as no more Khallids show up, it doesn’t matter.”
It didn’t take too long for Charlie to find Nevala and catch her up to speed.
“He said I’m what?!”
The other woman was, understandably, furious at the implication that she was lazy.
“That blasted old coot… he’s just trying to make me look bad so he gets a promotion!” she grumbled, scowling. “Whatever, I need your help. We need to gather samples from some of the Khallids. Specifically samples of the strange growths and some of the surrounding tissue.”
Charlie pulled out the vial she had stored a sample of the Khallids’ growths and tissues in and showed it to the Romulan in front of her.
Nevala grinned. “Nice work. We’ll need more than that though for a proper analysis. I’ll kill some Khallids and cover you while you grab more samples. Okay?”
Charlie nodded, smiling back at her with a sense of determination as she replied, “Let’s do it.”
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“It looks like some kind of fungus,” Nevala said after a moment as she used her PADD to better analyze the samples she and Charlie gathered. The two sat at a wooden table a few yards away from the gate that led to the Khallids’ cave so they could examine the growths in relative peace. “It’s eating away at the Khallids’ flesh, and both the pain from that as well as the toxins the fungus is releasing is driving them mad.”
Charlie nodded along, her own data also leading her to the same conclusion.
“It doesn’t look like the fungus is native to Virinat either,” Charlie added as she looked up from her own PADD. “Its genetic makeup is too vastly different.”
“I don’t think it’s even from our galaxy,” Nevala replied. She laughed. “Sounds a bit like you.”
Charlie snorted. Two years ago she had woken up under Tovan’s care with no memory of her past, wearing a ruined scorched red and gold dress, with a strange lack of wounds despite the damage to her clothes.
The only thing she remembered was her name: Charlie Morningstar.
No one had a clue where she had come from, all they knew was that she had been found unconscious just outside their colony. From scans they figured out she was half human and half something else— something that wasn’t in their database.
“The Flying Khallids have been coming out of the cavern, which is very strange,” Nevala added. “I think they had the game growths on their carapaces too.”
“Maybe whatever’s causing the infection is somewhere in the cavern then?” Charlie suggested. It was also possible that the ground bound Khallids may have brought the infection into the cavern, but at the moment they had no other leads.
“Possibly,” Nevala admitted. With a sigh, she set down her PADD. “We won’t know for sure unless we investigate.”
Charlie smirked and lifted her pistol.
“You’ve got your rifle, I got my pistol,” she said. “Might as well go check it out now.”
Nevala grinned again. “And Avrak thought I’d be goofing off.”
With that, the pair put away their equipment and made a beeline for the cavern, blasting holes into any aggravated Khallids that crossed their path. As Charlie and Nevala set foot in the cavern, a knot of unease began to tighten in the former’s stomach.
Maybe it was just the creepy atmosphere of the cavern, but…
Focus, she told herself, shooting another Khallid before it could get within ten feet of the pair.
They had to find the source of the infection. People were counting on them. The same people who welcomed Charlie into their colony, their home with open arms. The same people who treated her like a fellow Romulan. She couldn’t get distracted now.
Their boots thunked against the gradually declining metal path as they walked, and the sound echoed off the stone cavern’s walls.
Then, as Charlie and Nevala rounded the corner, they were met with the horrific sight of several shriveled Khallid corpses on the ground. The growths had spread all over these corpses, and so much flesh had been consumed that the bodies almost looked mangled.
“Poor things,” Nevala murmured in sympathy as she stood there, looking down at their corpses.
Charlie placed a hand on the other woman’s shoulder in an attempt to comfort her.
“Come on,” Nevala said, pulling away. “Let’s get moving.”
Charlie cast a final glance down at the Khallid bodies before following after the Romulan. Nevala suddenly yelped, pointed her rifle at something, and fired.
“What is it?! Are you okay??!” Charlie rushed to her side, and found a pile of smoldering, twisted metal lying on the ground in front of them. It almost looked like the remains of a mechanical spider…
“That,” Nevala said after a moment, still breathing heavily from shock, “that thing isn’t from around here.”
Charlie cautiously knelt down and pulled out her tricorder. She scanned the pile of metal, and sure enough, there was no match.
She stood up and gripped her pistol tightly in one hand. “I doubt that was the only one in here. Stay sharp.”
“Don’t need to tell me twice,” Nevala muttered.
Sure enough, as they rounded another corner they were met with two more of the strange robotic spiders. Both quickly met their ends at Charlie’s and Nevala’s weapons, and the pair moved forward.
There was no doubt in Charlie’s mind now. The source of the infection had to be in here. And if the strange genetic makeup of the fungus plus those mechanical spiders were anything to go by…
This wasn’t a natural infection. This had been done deliberately by someone. The question was, who? And why?
The pair stepped into a much larger chamber, and in the center sat a strange looking device, with tubes that glowed an ominous lime-green. The thing was at least two feet taller than Charlie, and wider than even a Flying Khallid. As they slowly, cautiously approached, Charlie scanned the machine with her tricorder. The same fungus they saw growing on the Khallids grew on the ground here in small patches, with the largest one directly under the strange device.
“No match to any known technology,” Charlie said, “but I think it’s safe to say this machine’s the source of the infection.”
She then connected her tricorder to the device and once she got past the firewalls, began disabling the device.
“It’s gonna take me a bit to disable this thing,” Charlie continued. “Cover me in case any more Khallids or spider-things attack.”
“Understood,” Nevala replied. She stood close by Charlie’s side, her rifle raised and ready to fire at the first sign of trouble.
The hum of the strange device went silent as Charlie managed to trigger the shutdown sequence, and the tubes flickered as the glow in them died.
“We’re gonna have to tell the Malori about this,” Nevala muttered as she stared at the machine. “Whoever planted this here is bound to notice the device has been shut down. And who knows what they’ll do if that happens.”
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Upon leaving the cavern, Nevala told Charlie to look for D’Vex.
“If that machine was spitting out the fungus that infected the Khallids, chances are it’s been genetically altered, if not straight up artificial,” she had said. “D’Vex was an engineer in the Romulan military before the homeworld was destroyed. The chances are slim, but maybe his tech will be able to see something in the samples we missed. If not, then you can bring him to that machine we found and he can take it apart. Maybe he’ll find something that way.”
Nevala then sighed, her shoulders sagging slightly.
“In the meantime,” she continued, “I’ll check in on Avrak to make sure no more Khallids ripped up the irrigation system.”
And so with that, Charlie asked around and eventually found D’Vex. The man was sat at a table in his rather spacious workspace, in the middle of reading something on his PADD.
“Eh, hello?” Charlie greeted awkwardly to grab his attention.
She grinned sheepishly as he looked up at her with a frown.
“What do you need with an old spacehound like me?” D’Vex asked drily.
“Nevala and I got samples of a strange fungus that infected the Khallid,” Charlie explained. “It came from a machine we found in the cavern.”
“That… sounds bad,” D’Vex said. A bit of an understatement.
“She said you might be able to help me?”
“Let me see.”
D’Vex held out his hand expectantly, palm facing up.
Charlie placed one of the vials containing the samples in his hand.
He then carefully pinched it between his fingers as he lifted it up so the sunlight hit it. His brows furrowed as he studied the sample. Already the fungus had consumed most of the remaining tissue in the vial.
D’Vex hummed thoughtfully.
“I’ve seen something like this before,” he said.
Charlie stared at him, wide-eyed.
“Well? You can’t just drop that bombshell and not elaborate,” she said, trying to sound lighthearted. She wasn’t sure she succeeded.
“My crew and I, we were out beyond the Eridan Belt,” he explained. “We detected a distress call from a mining outpost there and went to investigate. But when we arrived… all the people were gone without a trace. We found signs that there was a struggle, as well as a beacon and very similar looking fungus samples to the ones you brought me.”
He then marched over to a nearby console, and put on a pair of gloves before then opening the vial and carefully pouring the samples onto it. Charlie then followed suit with the rest of hers, and when they were done, D’Vex pressed a button on the side of the table. A dome-shaped forcefield materialized over the samples.
D’Vex then began tapping away at the console, brows furrowed. Charlie stood next to him, peering at the screen and swaying back and forth on her feet anxiously as the minutes dragged by far, far too slowly.
D’Vex paused for a moment, staring at the screen, and then turned to Charlie with an air of finality.
“This is bio-tech,” he said firmly. “The same bio-tech my crew and I found at that mining outpost.”
“Were you ever able to figure out who was responsible?” she asked.
D’Vex shook his head.
“No, I’m afraid not,” he answered. “But the fact that you found a strange machine in the cavern that released the very same fungus is troubling. Whoever made those miners disappear may be planning to do the same thing to us.”
Charlie nodded, her lips pressed into a thin line. The knots that had begun forming in her stomach had only tightened. She couldn’t shake the feeling that something very bad was going to happen, and soon.
“I’ll go tell the Malori about what we found,” she said. “If you find anything else or something happens, you come find me, okay?”
D’Vex nodded and offered her a reassuring smile.
“Hey, don’t stress yourself out too much, kid,” he told her. “We’re all Romulans, including you. Whatever comes our way, I know we’ll handle it.”
Charlie couldn’t tell if he genuinely believed that or if he was just trying to reassure her.
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“Malori Melem?” Charlie piped up as she approached the man in question.
He turned to her and grinned, clapping her excitedly on the shoulder. She frowned as she smelled the ale on his breath.
“Morningstar! Jolan tru!” He then inhaled and continued, “I heard Avrak yelling all the way over here. I’m sorry you had to deal with his problems, particularly today of all days.”
“Listen,” Charlie began, anxiety continuing to slowly pool in her gut. “Something happened…”
She played with her hands nervously and the words began spilling out faster and faster.
“Nevala and I found something in the Khallid caverns. A machine that was spitting out some kind of fungus that infected the Khallids and drove them all crazy. We disabled the machine, I took some samples of the fungus to D’Vex, then he said he and his old crew found the same fungus and a beacon at a mining outpost past the Eridan belt, and— and!!”
By this point she was practically hyperventilating. Brows furrowed in concern, the Malori turned and said something to the Romulan colonist beside them watching with concern, and then faced her once more. He then placed a firm hand on her shoulder, and squeezed gently. Suddenly, he handed her a glass of water.
“Drink,” he ordered.
Charlie didn’t know how, but she managed to drink the water without it going down the wrong tube and sending her into a coughing fit. She realized that he must have asked the colonist to grab a glass of water for her.
As her breathing finally steadied, Charlie finished recounting what she had learned.
“A mining outpost that had sent out a distress signal but was completely empty by the time they got there, save for the fungus and beacon.”
The Malori hummed.
“That is rather troubling to hear,” he said after a moment. “At least you’ve taken care of the immediate problem. You have my thanks.”
“But whoever made all those people disappear at the mining outpost might be planning to do the same thing to us!” Charlie exclaimed. “We have to do something, we can’t just—”
“Morningstar,” the Malori interrupted firmly. “Until we know more, there isn’t much we can do. I’ll send some engineers including D’Vex to examine the device you found and set up some surveillance around the cave.”
“That’s not enough—”
Charlie began to protest, and the Malori squeezed her shoulder again.
“Morningstar, do you trust me?” he asked.
“I—” she closed her eyes and sighed, shoulders slumping slightly. “Of course I trust you.”
“We’ll talk again tomorrow when the engineers have finished their analysis of the device,” the Malori told her. “In the meantime, why don’t you try to relax for a while? Enjoy the festival.”
“Alright,” she said, pulling away. She made it about five feet before her communicator beeped. She lifted the arm it hung around and pressed the button to answer the call. “Charlie Morningstar here.”
“Hey, I’ve just finished up with the security chief. I’m heading over to the restaurant now. Want to meet me for a drink when you’re done?”
A drink sounded pretty good right about now.