Shifting Sands
Posted on Sun Jan 5th, 2025 @ 8:58pm by Lieutenant JG Zub Enel
Edited on Tue Jan 7th, 2025 @ 6:42pm
1,747 words; about a 9 minute read
[ON]
Location: USS Firebird, Junior Officers Quarters
Timeline: Present day
Zub Enel held the duraglass vial up to the light and tapped it with a claw. The red grains shifted. It was a powdered spice blend for salads that Kalstri, the beloved four-armed chef, had made for him. He felt a wave of sadness mixed with dread. The texture of the red grains flecked with black specks reminded him of the day he had died. Unbidden, it all flooded back to him.
Location: Mindscape
Timeline: 18 months before
Zub Enel, USS Umberland’s Security Investigations Officer, stood alone on a planet that circled the blazing HR 6819 triple-star system. Halfway up the sky stood two bright blue stars. The biggest had an iridescent swirl like a tress of cosmic hair lifted by a breeze. Intellectually, he knew this was stellar mass being drawn into an unseen black hole that the two blue-giant stars orbited. The second bright star also had a delicate swirl of light that curved in a pearly crescent toward the first star, like an arm reaching a hand to touch the hair of the first star. The unsurpassed beauty of this celestial sharing of light made him ache. No such white-hot sharing graced his own life.
A cold breeze riffled the soft down that rose from between his scales. He inhaled the acidic scent of the swaying, spiney yellow plants that dotted the surrounding iron-rich plain. The terrain rose gently for several kilometers to low, rounded hills that ringed the plain. HR 6819b - the planet’s prosaic designation - was an ancient, heavily cratered world. Its rugged surface had softened and flattened from its pummeling by meteors, a barrage that ceased in a past so deep that it was lost to reckoning. Uninterrupted for eons, wind and vegetation had reduced any high ground to crumbly red sand.
His golden eyes swept up again to the two blue stars sharing wisps of light. He felt his inner ache intensify. His insides felt hollow, vast and deep, a black shaft dug far into the crust, an empty space entirely devoid of light. This lonely darkness yearned for even the most impoverished spark. Yet, standing alone on a deserted planet, there was no one to spare him even one photon of their light.
The pain grew so sharp that he took in a shuddering breath. He contorted his scaly face against the agony of tears burning through ducts atrophied and collapsed from disuse. His tears stalled. He flexed his three-fingered hands into fists. He thrust out his chest. He exhaled slowly.
His breath etched him away in a stiffening breeze, like he was molded entirely out of powdery red sand. A plume of red dust etched away his bulging chin, his chest, his biceps. He watched himself erode. He felt no alarm. As an empty husk, he served no purpose. He felt it was best if he allowed himself to return to the universe for reuse by some other luckier creature.
The wind made a low roar. Not hurricane force, simply a strong one coming from behind. Grains of his crested head twirled off in red twisting tendrils. He felt his ears disintegrate; they too carried downwind as sand. He felt himself being reduced to just another dune on a soon to be uninhabited planet circling blinding blue stars.
His arms lifted and curved away. They rose like he was preparing to direct an orchestra to start playing. Instead of a downbeat, his arms stretched out into long streaks of flying sand that dispersed across the plain.
His head eroded in the breeze. His neck joined gracefully twinning strands of himself. He felt like a sand sculpture abandoned on a beach after the judging. The wind performed an egalitarian reclamation of him, winner or loser.
Despite no head or brains, he at last began to puzzle his situation. He surmised he must be dying. He’d always imagined succumbing during a fight, in agony from many wounds or the searing moment of being disrupted. He had vowed that he would die fighting for every scintilla of consciousness. Dying in battle meant that not surrendering to Death, he would fight Death. It had never occurred to him that dying could be peaceful, prosaic, as soft as shedding spores into a breeze.
He stood in that scented bowl of that ancient crater like a broken statue with only his lower half remaining to tell the tale of his existence. His legs softened, rose and stretched downwind like thick red smoke that dissipated into nothing.
Only his boots marked his existence. The wind whittled them until only footprints of where he stood remained. He looked at his footprints sunk into the red dirt; the last testament that he ever existed. The wind herded little sand dunes forward until the tracks were filled. He stared at where he had been. No trace. An empty life utterly lost to the elements.
The ache in his heart remained, as sharp as before, but floating in air.
Location: USS Umberland, Sickbay
Timeline: 18 months ago
Enel heard Doctor Sofia Andersson say, “That’s got him back.” She must have been standing close because he smelled peach soda. He opened his eyes. Her Human face framed with sweat-straightened blonde hair, stared intently at him. Opposite of her, Ships Counselor Nicole Dima’s Trill face was pinched with deep concern.
His heartbeat boomed from the biobed monitor overhead. His hands tingled like they had fallen asleep. His feet tingled. They felt grainy. The part of his massive head crest that had nerves sparkled to life; the prickling sensation so strong he winced. His voice rattled, rough. “What…?”
The blonde doctor sighed hard into his face. Her hand dropped to thud on his chest. “You went stone cold dead. I couldn’t stop you. You were supposed to let me carefully control the end of your life, but you drifted away.”
“Like I blew away in the wind?” He started to rise, but her hand firmly held him down.
Nicole said with a mix of relief and pride. “Sofia brought you back!” Her blue eyes glowed toward the doctor as brightly as the mass-sharing stars of HR 6819.
The Chief Medical Officer took a moment to press a small folded white towel to her sweaty face. She rubbed it on her blonde hair. Her hair cascaded in messy loops down to her shoulders. Her eyebrows were almost touching each other as she continued to frown down at Zub. “Don’t *ever* die on me again.”
“Yes, Doctor,” he said, his voice still rough. He smiled at both women. It was clear they cared about him. Not cared *for* him in a romantic sense but cared just the same. His passing had distressed them. He simultaneously felt guilty and pleased.
Andersson tossed the towel out of sight behind her. She studied the readouts over his head. “No sign of the virus. You are coming back stronger by the minute. Do you remember anything?”
“I was on a planet orbiting in this star system.”
Nicole’s dark filigree gracing the sides of her neck and face floated on warm pink. Her sapphire eyes focused on the middle distance. Her tone was academic, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if there really is a planet surviving out there in this crazy system?”
Sofia’s lips formed into a line momentarily. She said to the scaly Voth, “You went nowhere. Your vital signs faded. I shot you full of stimulants, but you still sank away. Eventually, you flatlined.” Her gaze returned to the monitor over his head. “I’ll need to check the exact timing, but I think the virus died with you.”
Enel recalled their plan. There were suicides all over the Umberland. Sofia had isolated a virus that sent people into despair. Everything she tried against the virus had failed. On a hunch, she surmised the virus was engineered to kill people by turning their minds against themselves. When the person died, perhaps the virus died too, its job done. He’d volunteered to test her theory.
Zub Enel felt more than a little jittery from the stimulants. He asked, “How did you bring me back?”
Doctor Andersson held up a small device with a slivery T sticking out the top. “Hurrah for electrified cardiac technology,” Sofia declared. Setting the device on a small white tray next to Zub’s elbow, she continued. “External Defibrillator. You’ve got a lot of bone and tissue tucked into that massive frame of yours. I had to apply it several places and for a long time. You have burns all over your torso.”
“I don’t feel them. Yet.” He added, “Thank you anyway for not allowing me to permanently join the rusty dunes of HR 6819b.”
Sofia didn’t smile, but she took time to comb her fingers through her drying hair. “One hopes this has cured you. We need to monitor that the virus doesn’t return.”
“And verify you’re now immune to it.” Nicole shook her head like she was trying to shake away the memory of his untimely death. “These killer nightmares. I’m glad we have a solution to them, albeit controlled death and resurrection is truly extreme.” Her eyes shone brightly at him. “ Most people would not volunteer to die.”
Zub Enel smiled up at Counselor Dima. “We are all Starfleet. Everyone will step up. Especially now.”
Sofia Andersson’s brown eyes focused on him. “Remember, you hunk of gristle, you’re so full of stimulants you won’t sleep for a week. Maybe by then we’ll have beaten this thing and be back to fussing over laundry.”
Zub nodded. Both the Doctor and the Counselor looked down at him with relief. His skin stung in many places and his heart felt like it beat twice as fast but at least he no longer felt that big empty ache.
Location: USS Firebird, Junior Officers Quarters
Timeline: Present day
Zub Enel found himself staring at an upheld vial of spices in the living room of quarters he shared with two other junior Security officers. Thankfully, neither were there to see his odd pose. He smiled. If he made friends like the CMO and Counselor on the Umberland, surely he could make friends like that on the Firebird.
[OFF]
Lieutenant JG Zub Enel
Security Investigations Officer
USS Firebird NCC-88298
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