Table Of ContentNight of the Living Trekkies
by Kevin David Anderson
and Sam Stall
ATTENTION ALL STARFLEET PERSONNEL
The following text is an original work of fiction/horror/parody. Night of the
Living Trekkies is not sponsored by, affiliated with, or endorsed by the owners
of the Star Trek® brand. Any personnel claiming otherwise will be sentenced to
one year of hard labor in the penal colony of Rura Penthe.
“It isn’t all over; everything has not been invented; the human adventure is
just beginning.”
—Gene Roddenberry
“Horror is the genre that never dies.”
—George A. Romero
Prologue: Space Seed
“Space, the final frontier . . .”
“Shut up.”
“These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise . . .”
“I said, shut up.”
“Its five-year mission: to explore strange worlds, to seek out new life and new
civilizations . . .”
“You’re pissing me off.”
“To boldly go where no man has gone before.”
“Quit rubbing it in, okay?”
First Lieutenant Mallory Kaplan, U.S. Air Force Medical Service flight nurse,
finished her recital and smiled triumphantly.
“Actually, that last bit doesn’t quite capture the current situation,” she said.
“Plenty of men—and women—have already gone where I’m going. But I’ll be
the first person currently in this room to make the trip.”
The room of which she spoke was an underground bunker. She and her senior
watch officer, U.S. Air Force Captain Les Marple, spent four eight-hour shifts
inside it each week, studying images and readouts on computer monitors. During
the long, boring stretches when nothing inside the almost completely automated
facility required their attention, they passed the time by harassing each other.
“You’re being unprofessional,” Marple said. “I’m your superior officer. Show
some respect.”
“Can’t help it,” Kaplan said. “I’m so excited about my uniform.”
“You’re dressing up?”
“Of course. That’s half the fun of attending a Star Trek convention. I’m
portraying one of the greatest captains ever to command the Enterprise.”
“You mean Kirk?”
“Kirk’s a man.”
“I know, but I think you could pull it off.”
Kaplan smacked him lightly on the head with her clipboard.
“I’m going as Captain Rachel Garrett,” she said.
Marple shot Kaplan a puzzled look.
“Who the hell is that?” he said.
“The captain of the Enterprise-C, which served a couple of decades before the
Enterprise-D from Star Trek: The Next Generation. A temporal rift brought it
forward in time, changing future history. In order to repair the damage, it had to
go back to its own era, even though . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Marple said. “Seen it, bought the Blu-ray. What’s the
point of going as someone so obscure? No one will recognize you.”
Kaplan’s sly smile let him know that he’d walked into a trap.
“Oh, that’s right,” she said with mock concern. “You’ve never been to
GulfCon. You don’t know that the convention attendees like to go as incredibly
obscure Trek characters. It’s a joke that started at the first one, five years ago. If
you make it through the entire weekend without anyone guessing your identity,
you win a hundred bucks.”
“Screw that,” Marple said. “I’d go as Picard. He’s what inspired me to join the
Air Force. I kept thinking that one day I’d be exploring space and commanding
my own ship.”
“Me, too,” Kaplan said wistfully. “How’s that working out for you?”
Marple surveyed his surroundings. The bunker in which the two of them sat
was located on the grounds of the Johnson Spaceflight Center, just outside
Houston, Texas. Not that the general public—or, for that matter, most of the
center’s staff—knew that. Their duty station, secured behind a steel door that
opened only to those who passed a retinal scan, was a dimly lit, concrete-floored
room with a single long desk, upon which sat two massive computer monitors—
monitors that formed the centers of their professional lives.
“Not exactly like I’d hoped,” Marple said.
“At least you’re bald, like Picard,” Kaplan said.
“I’d rather have no hair than Janeway hair. First season Janeway hair.”
“You’d also make a great Orion. Since you’re already green with envy.”
Marple was about to tell Kaplan to stick her high-horse attitude straight up her
Jefferies tube when a single ding emanated from the monitors parked in front of
them.
“Box Seventeen,” Kaplan said, suddenly all business.
Marple’s fingers flew across his keyboard. A grainy black-and-white shot of a
steel-walled enclosure popped up on both their screens. Inside, a small four-
legged animal paced back and forth twice. Then, with its head pointed squarely
into a corner, it stopped.
“Haven’t seen this one before,” Kaplan said. “It looks like it’s been partially
skinned.”
“Back in the day, when they were still working on these things, some genius
decided to vivisect it,” Marple said. “Or maybe dissect is the correct word. It
didn’t go according to plan. The guy who tried it is in Box Thirty-two.”
Kaplan dutifully noted the incident in her log. Not that it was necessary.
Everything—absolutely everything— that happened in the facility was closely
monitored at an off-site command center. There was no need to send reports. The
Brass watched it all in real time.
“We’re getting dinged a lot today,” she said. “It’s like they’re restless or
something.”
Marple laughed.
“They’re not restless,” he said. “They’re not anything. They go in one
direction until they hit a wall, then go in another until they hit another wall.”
“Still,” Kaplan said, “four dings is a lot.”
Marple knew she was right. Often entire shifts passed without movement. The
four incidents they’d logged so far were noteworthy. Especially since they’d all
occurred in the last two hours. Each came from a different specimen, two of
which had gone months without so much as a twitch. Yet today they got up and
walked. Or staggered. Or crawled.
It was unprecedented. Kaplan and Marple hated it when the unprecedented
happened, because there was always the chance that it could quickly morph into
something horrible. Something that could never, ever be allowed to see the light
of day. Like the guy in Box Thirty-two.
“Sometimes I wish I was still back in a silo, serving on a Minuteman missile
crew,” Marple said. “It was less stressful.”
“Isn’t that why they picked you for this?” Kaplan said.
“Yeah. My psych profile was exactly what they wanted. Someone who
wouldn’t mind spending a lot of time underground staring at the end of the
world.”
His monitor emitted a muted alarm.
“What?” Kaplan said. “What is it?”
Marple studied the readouts on his screen. His eyes grew wide.
“There’s a problem with the security system,” he said. “Big-time
malfunction.”
“What kind?” Kaplan said.
Marple looked at the screen for a few seconds more.
“We’ve lost containment on boxes Nine and Twelve.”
“Does that mean . . .?”
“Give me a visual on Twelve,” Marple said. “Maybe it’s a false reading.”
Another black-and-white image of a steel-lined cell appeared on their
monitors. It was empty.
“Switch to exterior,” Marple said.
The view showed Twelve’s door. A door that hadn’t been un-sealed, so far as
they knew, in more than two years.
Now it was wide open.
“We’re screwed,” Kaplan said. “We’re totally screwed.”
“Keep it together,” Marple said, sweat beads dotting his forehead as he typed.
“A computer glitch sprung them. But we’re safe in here. Nothing can get through
a two-inch steel door.”
“Dammit,” Kaplan said. “More of them are opening! Lost containment on
Thirty, Twenty-Five, Eight . . .”
“Stop. I get it. Check Box One.”
Kaplan switched to the enclosure just in time for them to see the door open,
revealing a rectangle of impenetrable blackness.
The two watched the doorway in terrified fascination. The room’s interior
camera had malfunctioned months earlier. Since no one was allowed into the
room under any circumstances, the creature lurking in Box One remained a
mystery.
“Maybe it’s dead,” Kaplan whispered as they both watched their screens. “I
mean, really dead.”
Almost before she got the words out, something shambled out of the darkness.
The thing was naked, but it was impossible to tell its sex. Its desiccated skin was
drawn tightly over its skeleton. Its hair was gone, its eyes had shrunk into their
sockets, and its lips were drawn back over its teeth in a permanent grin.
Yet it walked.
“That’s twenty feet down the hall,” Kaplan said. “We’ve got to get out of
here.”
“No,” Marple said. “Something’s opening every computer-controlled door in
the place. We step out there and we’re dead. Worse than dead.”
“Every computer-controlled door?” she asked.
Marple caught her meaning. They turned together and gazed at the back of the
room. Just in time to see the door to their duty station glide open.
Outside in the darkness, something moaned.
Kaplan reached out and grabbed Marple’s hand.
“I’m sorry I said you were bald,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry I said you had Janeway hair,” he replied.
Marple looked up at the ceiling-mounted video camera perched directly in
front of them, dispassionately transmitting everything to the off-site command
center.
“What are you waiting for?” he shouted at it. “For God’s sake, just do it!”
Five hundred miles away, a two-star general leaned over the shoulder of a
technician, watching the nurse and the former missile commander’s last
moments. The general rubbed the back of his neck, surveyed the frightened faces
of the half-dozen officers surrounding him, and then spoke.
“That’s it,” he said. “Detonate the fail-safe weapon. Deploy the cover story.”
Chapter 1
A Private Little War
It was late winter of 2009 and Jim Pike was in Afghanistan.
He’d arrived there a few weeks earlier with the rest of his U.S. Army unit, the
10th Mountain Division’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team. It was windy and cold, and
the mountainous terrain looked like another world. A world composed almost
entirely of steep slopes and thousand-foot drops.
He was twenty-three years old and in full battle dress, leading a squad of
soldiers through an outlying neighborhood of Asadabad, the capital of Kunar
province. Kunar was a flyspeck of land wedged hard against the Pakistani
border. In good times it sheltered smugglers moving everything from illegally
harvested lumber to drugs. In bad times—and these were very, very bad times—
it harbored guerillas of every stripe, from al Qaeda to the Taliban to mujahideen.
Asadabad, a maze of narrow streets and walled compounds sheltering roughly
half the province’s thirty thousand people, was their unofficial capital. The
troops called it A-Bad.
Jim watched his six-member squad, the lead element in a three-platoon-strong
raiding party supported by Stryker combat vehicles and Apache helicopter
gunships, move down a dusty, crooked street. They kept an eye out for snipers
and covered one another as they advanced. An old man sitting on the curb, his
ragged, mud-colored chapan pulled tight against the cold, barely acknowledged
their passing.
They stopped near the door of a weather-worn house. They were pretty sure,
based on drone images presented during the pre-raid briefing, that it harbored a
cache of contraband weapons. The boxes stacked in the building’s dusty
courtyard, plainly visible in the photos, were the right shape and size.
The soldier on point tried the door. It was locked.
Jim was about to order an entry. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the
old man in the chapan stand up and disappear down an alley. In Afghanistan it
was never a good sign when people vanished like that. It meant they knew
something was about to happen. And that they didn’t want to be around when it
did.
“Hold up,” Jim said.
But his soldiers didn’t seem to hear. They bunched up at the entrance, ready to
