"Army of Darkness"

Author: Banshee Squadron
Earthdate: February 29, 2386
Location: Rostella IV dilithium mines

"Need any help with that?" asked Sam Beckett, after having disposed of the Smelly Jelly she'd scraped from Jazz's boot.

"Sure," replied Alex Dalton from inside an open access hatch in the side of Jazz's damaged fighter, the Sphinx. "Hand me that stembolt, will ya?"

Sam stepped over to Alex's toolbox and reached for the small device, but before her fingers made contact, Lee Carter came tearing around the corner of the hangar building, with Max Vasser, Jo Schmidt and Jazz Phoenix right on her heels. All four were huffing and puffing, out of breath, and Sam was about to ask what was going on when a disruptor shot blew a ragged hole in the side of the hangar, telling her all she needed to know for the moment.

"Start the engines!!!" shouted Carter between huffs. She skidded to a halt and spun around, leveling her phaser at something that was still out of Sam's field of view, squeezing off a quick series of shots. The high-pitched shriek of the weapon told Sam it was set to its highest kill setting and that it was beginning to overheat from overuse.

At hearing Carter's order, Alex had looked with dismay at the tangled innards of the Banshee fighters lying strewn across the ground. "I can't!" she shouted back in helpless contrition. "I'm cannibalizing parts from the others to fix yours and Jazz's planes -- they're not put back together yet!"

Max had skidded to a stop beside a pile of supplies and was pulling out all the spare phaser power packs and tossing them to Jazz. "Fine time to do a 30,000 mile tune-up, kid," she ground out angrily between clenched teeth.

"Well I didn't--" began Alex defensively, but just then she caught sight of what Carter was still shooting at and the rest of her sentence caught in her throat, frozen there by her first glimpse of the terrifying horde of shuffling undead that appeared around the corner. "What are we going to do?!?" she screeched.

"Into the mines!" shouted Jo.

Max and Jazz immediately took off in the direction of the Ferengi dilithium mine entrance, each cradling a dozen phaser power packs in her arms. Jo waved Sam over to the supply pile, and together they lugged a heavy pack out of it and lumbered after Max and Jazz. Alex was right behind them, but she paused long enough to shout at Carter. "Lee! Come on!"

Carter took another few pot shots at the advancing wall of re-animated corpses, but even though each shot dropped its target, another instantly took its place. If the sheer number of bodies out on the tarmac was any indication, there was a virtually endless supply of replacements -- there was no way she'd be able to stop them all. One final shot and her phaser was completely drained. Holstering it with a curse, she spun and dashed off after her teammates, a mere few dozen yards ahead of the zombies.

Explosions from disruptor fire threw up dirt which rained back down on the fleeing women in big clumps, battering them about the head and shoulders. Every fifty yards or so, Max and Jazz would stop and phaser down a dozen or so of the closer dead soldiers in order to cover Sam and Jo, who were bringing up the rear, still laboring under their burden.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the mine entrance was reached. Alex and Carter dashed into the dark tunnel first, followed by Sam and Jo by now almost dragging their pack on the ground between them. Jazz and Max took up flanking position on either side of the entrance, covering their comrades until all were safely inside. Sam and Jo dropped their burden and put their shoulders against the huge metal doors, swinging them on ponderous hinges. The panels clanged together with deafening finality right in the faces of the foremost of the dead army, pinching off a couple of reaching and clawing arms that got caught between. Green ooze spurted briefly, not blood. Max, Jazz and Carter kicked the grisly, still-twitching limbs aside, then joined in bracing the door panels against the zombies outside, who were already trying to bash their way in.

Alex thumbed her phaser to the highest heat setting and began welding the door shut. Carter could see the abject fear in her youthful but now uncharacteristically stress-lined face, but was proud of the manner in which she put aside her emotions and just did her job. It took only a few minutes of burning to seal the door panels shut, and Alex lowered her phaser and wiped the sweat from her brow. Outside, the sound of flesh pounding against the metal doors could still be heard. "That won't hold them for long," she said, a crack in her voice betraying her unease. "What the hell were those things out there?!? I've never seen anything so horrible before in my entire life!"

"Re-animated corpses of dead soldiers, inhabited and controlled by Smelly Jelly," replied Jo to the incredulous stares of the others. "Somehow the Jelly can control the motor functions of a host body and use it for its own purposes."

"I never liked that stinking slime," grumbled Max, "and now I know why." Behind her, Jazz nodded and said, "Amen!"

"Guess we're gonna have to rename it 'Deadly Jelly'," commented Sam.

Jo wrinkled her nose at the suggestion. "Doesn't rhyme," she complained.

Carter took this brief respite from immediate danger to take her first look around. This first chamber within the mines was fairly small, only about twenty feet square, and was bare of all furnishings or mining artifacts. In the wall directly opposite the main entrance was a smaller doorway, its black maw beckoning them deeper into the mountain. "This way," she said, motioning for the others to follow. They picked up their equipment and trotted after their leader, only too eager to put some distance between themselves and the unnerving pounding on the metal doors.

The inner doorway opened onto a dark tunnel which arrowed straight back, getting ever darker with every step they took. Carter felt a nudge at her elbow, and looked down to discover Jazz handing her a fresh power coil for her phaser. She accepted it gratefully, snapped it into its receptacle after letting the spent coil drop to the floor. Then, touching a special keypoint on her uniform above her rank insignia, she activated the built-in lantern function -- the white shoulder portion of the flight suit began emitting a soft luminescence bright enough to see by. The others followed suit, and presently the tunnel was as bright as a clear night under a full moon. They continued on at a quicker pace, the knowledge that a horde of Jelly-controlled undead was just a single door away urging them on.

Finally, they emerged into another chamber, this one much larger, with mine shafts branching off in all directions. Most were dark, but from the largest tunnel emanated an evil green glow. They stopped running, beset by the sudden proliferation of choices.

"Which way?" cried Alex. The dark and forbidding surroundings clearly were taking their toll on her. Carter fervently hoped she wouldn't crack before they got out of this mess.

Jo quickly took stock of the room they were in, turned to face one of the dark tunnels, and declared with complete confidence, "This way."

"How can you be so sure?" asked Jazz skeptically. "All these tunnels look the same to me."

"Yes, well, while you guys were busy goofing off and griping back on the Starbase that you were bored and wanted to do something, I was spending my time wisely, studying the layout of these mines in case we got sent to Rostella," replied Jo smugly.

Max made a face and rejoined snidely, "Don't you ever just have fun?"

"I'm having fun now!" riposted Jo happily, feeling justified.

Carter chuckled and commended Jo. "You go, girl."

She set off down the tunnel Jo had chosen, phaser in hand, softly glowing uniform shoulders lighting the way. She noticed that Alex had begun sticking close to her. The rest came after, Jazz bringing up the rear. The tunnel became more rough-hewn as they wended deeper and deeper into the warrens. In a few places, exposed veins of dilithium caught the light from their illuminated garments, focusing, intensifying and refracting it in a thousand scintillating colors, seeming to set the rock walls afire with miniature dancing aurora borealis. It was a sight beautiful to behold, and suddenly these dirty cramped mine shafts felt a lot less claustrophobic and sinister. At her side, even Alex seemed to be untensing a little.

Eventually, they came out into another chamber, for all intents and purposes identical to the last -- numerous passages leading away in all directions -- with one significant difference. There were signs of recent fighting here. Scorch marks marred the stonework, and a wooden crate lay smashed in one corner.

Sam crouched down to examine one of the oily, dark stains that mottled the hard floor, and after a moment looked gravely at Carter and announced her grim conclusion. "Blood."

"Blood? Where are the bodies?" demanded Alex in a high-pitched, trembling voice. "Who dragged them off? Or did they get up and walk off on their own like those things out there?!?" Alex's hands were visibly trembling now and her eyes had a wild look about them.

Carter caught Jazz's eye and could see the former Wing Commander was thinking the same thing she was: the rookie's mental state was rapidly degenerating into hysteria, and that would get them all killed as surely as if they walked back out amongst the zombies. She stepped over to Alex and grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her hard. Alex sputtered and flopped limply back and forth, making only a feeble effort to free herself from Carter's grip. "Ensign Dalton!" barked Carter in as authoritarian a voice as she possessed. "What are you, a Starfleet officer, or a spoiled little girl who wants to run home to her daddy when the going gets a little tough? Snap out of it! That's an order!" She gave Alex a last extra-hard rattle to punctuate her command, then stopped. From the corner of her eye, she could see Jazz nodding imperceptibly in approval.

Carter's sharp words had their intended effect. Alex visibly forced herself back under control, sobs subsiding. She stood up straighter, disengaging herself from Carter's hold, and wiped the tears from her face. "I'm sorry, Commander," she said, trying her best to sound as unlike a spoiled little girl as she could.

Carter put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. Still in 'command' voice, she asked, "You sure you're back to normal?" When Alex nodded, Carter replied, "Good to hear," then, after a moment, added, "And don't beat yourself up about it too much; it could've happened to any one of us." A sharp harrumph from the back caused Carter to hastily amend her last statement. "Any of us except Max."

"Yeah, besides, when you're signing up to join Starfleet, they never tell you the part about the evil space zombies," said Jo, trying to ease a little tension.

Any further cajolery was forestalled by the sound of shrieking metal echoing through the tunnels behind the group. "They've broken though the main gates!" announced Jazz unnecessarily, tightening her grip on her phaser. "We've got to get out of these mines."

Carter spun towards Jo. "Is there another way out of here?" she demanded.

"Yes... That way!" pointed Jo, selecting one of the branching tunnels. "There's a smaller gate that opens onto the outside a few miles south of the main gate."

To Carter and the others, it looked identical to all the other tunnels they'd seen so far, but Carter trusted her science officer. Hopefully, the Smelly Jelly didn't have zombies waiting for them there; otherwise they were certainly done for. "All right -- move out!" she ordered. "Double time!"

With Carter in the lead and Jo right behind to navigate, the Banshees fled further into the mines, following tunnels that generally led in a southerly direction. Carter soon lost all sense of direction, and thanked the Great Bird of the Galaxy that she had Jo on her team. The heavy pack that Jo and Sam had been lugging had been relegated to Jazz, who brought up the rear, not seeming to have been slowed at all by the added burden. Every now and then, the sound of angry pursuit caught up with their perked ears, hastening their steps all the faster.

This went on for what seemed to Carter like hours, but was in actuality not much more than thirty minutes. Then the six women burst from the rough shaft they'd been following into an immense cavern, so enormous that the far edge was lost in the gloom-shrouded distance.

Carter looked quickly about, trying to see where to go from here. The walls immediately around the doorway through which they had just come looked like worked stone, part of the mine complex, but the rest of the cavern was obviously a natural formation, probably accidentally stumbled upon by the Ferengi while digging the mine shafts. The stone ceiling overhead was lost in the pervading gloom, untouched by their shoulder lanterns, only a few long stalactites lowering their lance-sharp tips beneath the enshrouding murk above. Glinting in the dim light like stars in the night sky, dilithium extrusions were everywhere. There were several other tunnel openings behind them on the left and right of the shaft they had used, all by now echoing with the moaning and sickly shuffling noises of the pursuing Jelly-energized horde.

Time was running out!