Carter opened her eyes to pain. She felt herself lying on her back on a hard surface with a cold wind blowing across her skin and the smell of burning in her nostrils. Above, the sky was mostly black, but interspersed among the stars were momentary flashes of colored light. A space battle.
Against the protests of her bruised and battered body, she levered herself up onto an elbow and looked around. She was on the edge of a broad, flat plain, artificially smooth except for the still-smoking craters that had been blown into it. Nearby was the rock face of a tall cliff, the foremost ramparts of a tall mountain, and at the bottom was a dark cave opening. Clustered all around were demolished pre-fab buildings, bombed-out and mostly empty. This must be Rostella IV, she reasoned. The cave was the entrance to the dilithium mines, and the tarmac and buildings belonged to the small spaceport that serviced the Ferengi operations.
Then she noticed the bodies.
They littered the ground in every direction; human, Mulluran, Ferengi, and some type of large biped creatures she had never seen before; carnivorous, judging by the fangs and claws. All were mutilated and blasted into pieces by what must have been some of the most vicious and brutal fighting in recorded history. It was clear from the carnage that no quarter had been given or accepted. The battle for Rostella had been a bloody one. Most alarmingly though, beside her lay the body of Jazz Phoenix.
Stricken into speechlessness, Carter just stared at her unmoving body for she didn't know how long. Eventually though, it dawned on her that Jazz's chest was rising and falling in regular intervals. She was still breathing! How could that be? She had seen her starfighter get swallowed by the explosion that had ended the life of that Mulluran warship.
"Lee!" called a voice behind her, startling her from her stupor. "Thank goodness you're awake! We were so worried." Sam Beckett walked into her field of view, a look of concern on her face.
"What happened?" asked Carter, suddenly realizing she had absolutely no idea how she got here or why she was even still alive. Or why Jazz wasn't burned to a crisp. She tried standing up, but gratefully took Sam's proffered hand to help her. She wobbled for a moment or two regaining her land legs, then steadied and let go of Sam.
"Your Banshee caught the outer edge of the Mulluran ship's explosion and got shook around real hard, knocking you out cold," explained Sam. "Jazz's Banshee is a new model straight from Starfleet R&D, and it's got some fantastic new kind of outer sheathing. It's damaged, but Jazz survived the explosion. The rest of us tractored you two down to a safe landing here, to take care of your injuries and fix the damaged planes."
Carter saw Max come around the corner of the nearest building and stride onto the edge of the tarmac, followed closely by Jo and Alex. She found it nearly impossible to decide which of them looked the unhappiest. She settled on Max. Big surprise. While Jo and Alex had a look of disappointed long-suffering about them, Max had a righteous thunderstorm brewing behind her eyes. She squared off in front of Carter, hand on her hips and demanded, "What the hell were you thinking!?"
"Well, I--" began Carter, unprepared for this unprovoked attack.
"Charging off like that to rescue Jazz, who was clearly beyond rescue! And letting us follow you into the exploding warp core of a dying starship! That would have been a fitting end indeed for the ignominious VMX-1! And what about letting Jazz slip out of control like she did in the first place! What the hell kind of Wing Commander are you?!?" By this time in her tirade Max was livid.
As second-in-command of Banshee Squadron, it was Max's responsibility to assure the well-being of the other team members including Carter, the commander, but Carter was pretty sure she was taking her duties way past the extreme, and had no compunctions about telling her so. "Lieutenant Commander!" she barked, emphasizing the 'Lieutenant', making sure Max still knew who was boss here. "I was trying to rescue a member of my team, a good personal friend of yours if I'm not mistaken. And I don't recall ordering any of the rest of you to follow me; that was all your idea. The fact that we're all here arguing about it proves that I was right!"
"Why you arrogant--!" Max took a threatening step forward, balling her fists at her sides.
Off on the sidelines, Sam, Jo and Alex stood agape, appalled at what they were witnessing. Any one of them would have stepped in to stop the fighting, but the energy sparking between Carter and Max was almost a physical thing, barring entry by outsiders.
Carter advanced a step in response to Max's aggressive stance, tensing her body for attack. "You think you can take me?" she asked, eyes narrowed, trying to goad Max into rash action. "You've always wanted the job of Wing Commander. Well here's your chance."
Max sprang at Carter, but Carter was ready. She swung with all her might at Max's head, but to her great surprise, Max wasn't there; she was behind! A staggering blow landed on her head as Max counter-attacked, and she suddenly realized what it meant to fight someone with precognitive esper powers.
The other three Banshees dove into the fray trying to separate the two main combatants, but Max eluded them all, managing at the same time to land telling blows on all of them. Thrown back, bruised and bleeding, Sam, Jo and Alex lay panting on the tarmac watching helplessly as Max closed in on Lee, preparing for the final blow.
Carter steeled herself, knowing she had little chance of catching Max off-guard and emerging victorious, but refusing to give in nonetheless. Max advanced, confident in her abilities, but there was one thing even her vaunted esper skills couldn't protect her from -- a stun beam set on wide focus. Both she and Carter were caught in the low-power beam, and they slumped to the tarmac, dazed. Jo kept her phaser leveled at them as they crumpled, not willing to take any chances.
The moment the two combatants fell apart and went semi-comatose, a glob of green goo slurped from Jazz's left boot and sloshed across the gravely ground, seeking escape. Spying it out of the corner of her eye, Sam dashed over and scraped up the jelly using the discarded helmet of the nearest dead body as a scoop.
Immediately, a pungent, almost intolerable odor filled the air, the tell-tale indicator of a dissatisfied Smelly Jelly. Jo and Alex instinctively shrank from it, while Sam was forced to shut off her cybernetic olfactory sensors. Carter and Max revived under its powerful influence, shaking their heads to clear away the phaser stun, but just as quickly holding their noses against the stink. "I think I'd almost rather have you shoot me again," commented Max woozily.
"Why don't you go dump that thing somewhere," suggested Carter to Sam.
As Sam moved off, Carter turned to Max and regarded her erstwhile opponent for a few seconds. It was obvious their actions over the last few minutes had been instigated by the malicious slime, but there was also something else familiar about the situation. "Why do I have the strangest sense of deja vu?" she asked, unable to mentally pin down what it was.
"Because we've been at each other's throats before," replied Max, highly annoyed at being manipulated so by a mere protoplasm.
"No... More than that," said Carter cautiously, trying to remember.
"It was during the last Mulluran War!" exclaimed Jo, stepping forward, eager with memories. "Last year, remember? We were on Az'reel where the fighting was the worst. We landed at a supply camp that was near some of the bloodiest fighting of the war and found some Smelly Jelly in Sam's helmet." ( see Starbase 901 episodes 729, 730 )
"I remember now," said Carter, not enjoying the memories of that time.
"Man! Can't the guy who writes this stuff come up with anything different for a change?" asked Max, disgusted at the writer's obvious contempt for originality.
"Yeah, why can't they write us in someplace nice for a change, like Risa or Wrigley's Pleasure Planet or someplace," complained Jo. "Why do we always have to be battling evil aliens or killer robots on dark mucky planets?"
"Or how 'bout a mission where we have to go to a planet with nothing but handsome, single men," suggested Alex wistfully, "and we have to strip-search them all, one by one, and then spank them because they've been very, very naughty..." At that point, Alex just sort of drifted off dreamily, the rest of her private fantasy hers alone to relish.
"Riiight... Well, after almost forty years of episodes they're probably running out of new ideas," remarked Carter, choosing to ignore Alex's erotic meltdown. She stood, then offered Max a hand up, their brawl of two minutes ago already forgiven and forgotten since neither of them was to blame. "But we still have to get out of here."
Alex took that as her cue. "I'll go work on the Banshees," she volunteered, and walked off, back around the building to where the planes were parked.
Just then a grunt from Jazz's pallet caused the others to turn and look. The former Wing Commander of Banshee Squadron was sitting up rubbing her head groggily. "Who's been playing a drum solo on my head?" she muttered crankily.
Jo stepped over and gave Jazz a quick once-over with her tricorder. "You're banged up, but there's no sign of concussion or any other major damage. You're lucky; that new Banshee of yours saved your life, not to mention your thick skull."
"Funny... I don't feel lucky..." grumbled Jazz, ignoring the jibe. Max had stepped to her side and now helped her stand on two wobbly feet. "What the hell happened?" asked Jazz.
"You don't remember?" asked Max in turn, casting her a puzzled frown.
"No. The last thing I remember for sure is covering that Yukon Synthetics Merchantman vessel from the Mulluran warship." She turned to Max for explanation.
"You kamikazeed that Mulluran warship and blew it up! We had to drag your damaged plane down here with tractor beams."
A worried frown flickered across Jazz's normally stoic face -- it was the first time Carter had ever seen her lose her confidence, and she found it somehow disconcerting. Despite their differences, she'd always looked up to Jazz as a role model, from the earliest days when Jazz was Banshee Wing Commander and she was just a rookie pilot, to later on when she assumed the role of squad CO and tried to emulate at least part of Jazz's command style. To see Jazz so hesitant and vulnerable now was a blow to the image she'd always carried in her mind of their fearless former leader.
"There must be an explanation," she said, needing there to be one for both their sakes.
"I've got it!" exclaimed Jo. "It was the Jelly in Jazz's boot! It messed with her mind enough to cause her insane behavior, and the amnesia about it afterwards."
"Smelly Jelly can't do that," countered Max uneasily.
"We don't know what it can do. The stuff defies analysis," replied Jo. "But we do know that it means us no good." She indicated the endless field of dead bodies all around them. "There's probably Jelly all over the place out there."
Carter suddenly had a very bad feeling in the pit of her stomach, and the hairs on the back of her neck were standing at rigid attention. "Let's get the hell out of here," she said with sudden resolution. The instant Jo had mentioned that the Jelly was likely still present all around them, she'd gotten the overwhelming impression that they were being watched, their every move meticulously studied by a monstrous mind, lurking just outside of their physical perceptions. Or maybe the feeling had always been there, at the back of her conscious thought, awaiting only a tiny impetus to make itself felt consciously. Whatever the case, her overriding instinct now was flight.
She turned in the direction Sam and Alex had gone and set off at a trot, not wanting to appear anxious, yet not wanting to waste another nanosecond. Jo, Max and Jazz were close on her heels, picking up on some of their leader's unease themselves. Carter could now hear a growing sound coming from somewhere out on the tarmac; the sound of scraping, as well as a low moaning that seemed to emanate from deep within the very ground itself. She looked over her shoulder as she trotted and froze in horror. The others saw her reaction and stopped themselves and turned to look.
Some of the dead bodies, at least those that weren't hacked up too badly and still had most of their limbs, were rising from their prone positions, jerking spasmodically to their feet. They turned their stiff necks and looked around with dead unseeing eyes, but the unwholesome green glow emanating from those lifeless orbs could see. Droning, forlorn moans escaped haggard, parted lips as the zombies spotted the four petrified women, and they began a halting shuffle in their direction, waving arms, baring fingernails, and brandishing the weapons they had died with, all the while leaving a sticky trail of green slime in their wakes. Green splotches of Smelly Jelly could be seen splattered on all of them.
When the first disruptor blast exploded a new crater in the landscape right before Carter's feet spraying her with debris, she reawakened from her horrified disbelief and shouted to the others.
"RUN!!!"
back to TOC