Disclaimer: I own neither Star Trek: The Next Generation, nor Sherlock Holmes, nor the short-lived TV series Pushing Daisies. Please don't sue me or steal my strange little story. Thanks! :)

Croaked

By Rowena Zahnrei

Chapter One

At this very moment, on the colony world colloquially known as Cuore dei Cuori, Nedra Tompkins is eight years, four months, one week, two days, and twelve hours old.

Two hours, eighteen minutes, and fifty-nine seconds earlier, while Nedra was busy presenting an oral report on the life cycle of the Terran frog to her third grade class, a superheated piece of space debris had impacted with the Tompkins Family's garage...taking out most of the house and yard as well.

Now, young Nedra stands with her mother and father on the outskirts of the still-smoking crater that had, just that morning, been their home, her frog and its terrarium clutched tightly in her arms. Emergency Service vehicles encircle the area, officials in official uniforms scanning the wreckage with tricorders, analyzing the collected data, and comparing notes.

"Hey, it's over here!" one of the officials calls, and six other officials quickly surround him, efficiently digging a large, oblong object, like a giant black pill, from the smoldering ruins and hefting it onto an antigravity sled.

As the officials push the mysterious capsule toward the largest Emergency Service vehicle, Nedra sets her frog's transparent aluminum terrarium on the sidewalk, and strides closer to the wreckage.

"Be careful, honey," her mother calls. "The fire may be out, but the crater is still very hot!"

Nedra hears her mother's warning, but does not listen. She feels drawn to the oblong object, her curiosity growing with every step she takes.

"It looks like a torpedo," one of the officials says.

"I say it's a coffin," another weighs in.

"That's morbid," the first retorts, but a third official shakes his head.

"No, Alia's right," he says, and holds out his tricorder so they can see the readings for themselves. "Look: human remains."

"That's sick!"

"No, not really," Alia says. "Starfleet does this sort of thing sometimes, usually when a particularly honored officer dies in the line of duty. They plant the body in an empty photon torpedo shell and shoot it out into space. You know, like a contemporary homage to the way Ancient Earth sailors were sewn into their hammocks and tossed into the sea when they died aboard ship."

"So, you're saying, this family's house was totaled by a dead Starfleet officer's coffin? With the dead Starfleet officer inside?" The first official shivers and rubs his arms. "Yeesh. How messed up is that?"

"The casing is still intact," the third official says, and snaps his tricorder shut. "I say we open it. See just who might be inside..."

"Hey, you think it could be somebody famous? Like Captain Sulu or someone?"

As the officials busy themselves satisfying their own curiosity, young Nedra sidles up beside them, unheard and unseen. When the strange, oblong pill slides open, little Nedra must stand on her tiptoes to peer inside.

The face she sees there is unmarred by time and decay, the airless void of outer space having preserved the dead woman's youthful features exactly as they appeared on the day her life was taken. To eight-year-old Nedra, who has never before stood this close to the dead and doesn't quite understand, it seems the blonde woman is merely sleeping; perhaps a traveler locked in stasis. An odd, dark blotch on the woman's otherwise pale cheek catches her eye, and she reaches out to touch it...

It's Nedra's father who realizes the potential danger first. Breaking out of his stunned, post-traumatic stupor, he calls out in alarm, leaving his wife's side to dash after his daughter— But, although he immediately pulls the girl away, lifting her into his arms and carrying her back to the sidewalk, he is not in time to prevent her finger from brushing the dead woman's skin. A spark, like a small jolt of electricity, passes between them, and the dead woman sits upright with a gasp.

"What the hell happened!" she exclaims.

That question will be repeated many times, by various experts across a variety of fields, before a satisfactory answer is finally entered into the Federation's official database. That answer, however, though highly technical, having to do with dormant synaptic energy, the cryogenic effects of deep space, and the jarring, superheated jolt of hurtling through a planetary atmosphere to impact with a fairly standard, prefabricated suburban home, was, in fact, entirely false. The truth of the matter was far stranger, and far, far more implausible. For that reason, the possibility was not considered, and the truly important questions were never asked.

Which was a very lucky thing for young Nedra and her family, who had carefully and, often, rather craftily kept the secret of their life-giving powers for uncounted generations.

Not every family member possessed the ability to 'wake' the dead with a touch but, for those who did, one important caveat always applied. That caveat was: a death for a death. Once someone dead had been revived, there was a grace period of only one minute before the scales of life and death balanced out and someone living bit the dust in the formerly dead person's place.

To prevent this contingency, the revived person had to be touched a second time before that one minute was up. One touch alive, two touches, dead. And once twice touched, one could never be revived again. That dead person was dead for good. Why this was, no one really knew, but the caveat had been tested too many times over too many years with far too many unfortunate results to leave much doubt as to its veracity.

Young Nedra had lived a protected, sheltered life up to then and, as yet, had not been told about her family's peculiar gift…or, perhaps, their curse. As for Nedra's father, he did not realize his daughter had actually touched the dead woman's skin until fifty-two seconds had passed…and, by then, it was too late to turn back. Eight seconds later, the third official dropped dead of an aneurysm his colleagues, and coroner, would presume had burst as a result of the shock of watching a reanimated Starfleet officer climb out of her torpedo-shell coffin and demand to know the whereabouts of Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the starship Enterprise.

With the Starfleet officer up on her feet, walking and talking, and the Emergency Services official lying prone on the ground, Nedra's father was terribly aware that his brief window to re-dead the once-dead woman without inciting question, alarm, or panic had closed, and closed tightly. And so, the Starfleet officer remained alive.

Three weeks, five days, and two hours later, the debris from the crash had been cleared, the crater filled in, and the Tompkins' prefab home rebuilt, as good as new. Following a startling, and mildly traumatizing, bedtime story told by her father, Nedra took to wearing gloves to school…until she came to realize just how uncommon an occurrence death really was on a peaceful Federation colony world. Before long, she'd all but forgotten her inherited gift…and the woman she'd unintentionally revived.

As for the reanimated Starfleet officer, she knew to keep her mouth shut too. The prospect of being served up to Starfleet Medical as a particularly freakish freak of nature held no appeal for her so, instead of revealing her true identity, she offered her 'rescuers' a false name and a made-up backstory that sounded far more plausible than her real one. Once the colony hospital cleared her to go, she hopped the first transport to planet Earth.

It was seven years, seven months, three weeks, and four days since her sudden death on Vagra II, and Lt. Natasha Yar felt herself at loose ends. She wanted desperately to reconnect with the friends she'd made in her brief time aboard the Enterprise-D…the crewmates who had, somehow, managed to become more a family to her than simply fellow officers.

Yet, upon arriving in San Francisco, Tasha learned, to her great dismay, that the Enterprise-D had recently crashed on a distant world called Veridian III. Starfleet regulations stated that whenever a ship was lost, a court martial was mandatory – particularly when that ship was the Federation's much-lauded, even legendary, flagship – and the captain and his senior staff were due to face a tribunal at Starfleet Headquarters in five days' time…

To Be Continued...

References include TNG: Skin of Evil the movie Generations and the TV series Pushing Daisies and Dead Like Me.

I hope you enjoyed this chapter. Until next time! :)