Act 1: Kvo'ratt

It might have all been prevented, T'Pol realized that in retrospect.

It hadn't even occurred to her to check at the time, yet such a simple thing had almost undone them all.

That simple thing was the kvo'ratt.

The kvo'ratt was a relatively harmless Vulcan insect save for the truly wild and aggressive subspecies found in harsh places like the Forge, though it was generally considered an ill omen to cross paths with the kvo'ratt as an effect of their ecological niche, for the kvo'ratt were the scavengers of the desert, and they were named Corpse Eaters in Vulcan, or sometimes Eaters of the Dead. The nearest translation to English would have been Zombie Cicadas, though the kvo'ratt were nowhere as benign as cicadas, despite the fact that they looked similar to those insects at one particular stage during their maturation cycle.

Now, the Vulcan fleet's protocols for preventing kvo'ratt from infesting their space vessels was centuries old. Followed meticulously at all times, of course - Vulcans were Vulcan, after all, and generally perfectionists - but such protocols were not given undue thought by other species.

The Enterprise had DECON procedures too. Barely adequate procedures to T'Pol's way of thinking, but usually adequate to prevent Terran vermin from infesting their food stores. It was also true that had the Enterprise picked up supplies from any other alien planet, the crew would have been more careful in handling these supplies, but Starfleet's cautious attitude towards Vulcans was being gradually undermined. Not entirely of course, but enough. Just enough that several tons of food supplies from Vulcan prompted only complaints about unpalatability, rather than fears of contamination, and nefarious consequences of such contamination.

And even then, even had these kvo'ratt been wild kvo'ratt, well, unpleasant as that prospect might seem, still no one would have died. Certainly not this many crewmen. No, while a normal infestation would have been unpleasant, it would not have been dangerous, but than, these kvo'ratt were no ordinary kvo'ratt, and these kvo'ratt had not been satisfied with refuse alone.

Michael Rostov pondered the proper shaving schedule which would leave him acceptably groomed for his morning work shift, but also roguishly handsome for his evening date. He decided that he would shave this evening. This would allow him almost 24 hours of growth for his date and would all but certainly escape the attention of Commander Tucker. The Commander was famously lenient about facial hair, provided it was not long enough to actually become caught in things. In fact, Tucker had even once joked that a little bit of fuzz might offer some protection, given that the damn consoles kept exploding whenever anyone looked at them sideways.

Whether that was true or not, shaving was about to kill Michael Rostov.

It was only a relatively small nick. The type of nick Michael was more than willing to endure to continue shaving the way his dad had taught him, rather than switching to the newfangled depilatory light wands. It was a link to the past, an unbroken line through the centuries. Certainly worth the odd drop of blood or two.

Although, it was a little more than a drop or two today.

Michael patiently blotted at his chin with a hand towel, until the blood beaded and stilled. Then he tossed the towel towards the hamper, and leaving it where it fell, just short. Untidy perhaps. The sort of thing which would make his mother roll her eyes, but not the sort of thing which normally killed you.

Afterwards, a Vulcan entomologist would declaim loudly to the survivors how fascinating it was that kvo'ratt, evolved to be attracted by the copper-based blood of Vulcan's higher lifeforms, could have so quickly developed a nose for the iron-based blood of the Enterprise crew. Shortly afterwards, the entomologist had a hairline fracture in his jaw, Commander Tucker had three broken fingers. No one in the room could quite account for it, as the Commander had definitely been way over on the other side of the room, when the Vulcan fell.

All that aside, the proximity of the blooded hand towel to the air duct, and the proximity of Michael's quarters to a nearby air filter sealed his fate. He would never keep this date, because he was, unknowingly, three hours from death, and no more than forty minutes from wishing he was dead.

"Where the hell is he?" said Commander Tucker. "Where's Rostov?"

"I don't know," said Lt. Reed. "I've looked for him."

"Look harder, would ya?" said Tucker. "We're on a goddamn spaceship! It's not like he could have wandered off."

"I know we're on a BLOODY SPACESHIP," said Lt. Reed. "That completely obvious fact has not escaped my attention. But I am telling you. I. HAVE. LOOKED!"

Commander Tucker and Lieutenant Reed were exceedingly worried about Crewman Michael Rostov's disappearance, as well as the fact that the man had apparently completely vanished from the ship, in deep space: there was zero chance of him jumping ship anywhere round here, for there was no planet to give him refuge. And now both Tucker and Reed were handling their anxiety badly, which only caused their respective teams consternation, including Crewman Delista, Rostov's date for this evening. Delista was borderline hysterical and was declaring in an ever louder voice that Rostov would have definitely gotten lucky after their date, though Tucker and Reed were doing quite an admirable job of pretending to be oblivious to this.

"Then look in more places," said Commander Tucker.

"I've looked everywhere!" said Lt. Reed.

"Then, look everywhere AGAIN!" said Tucker.

Delista began to sob.

"Would you two keep it down?" said the newly arrived third participant to their conversation, Archer: he was also quite worried, for he felt a deep personal responsibility for each member of his crew, and he channeled his anxiety into calling Tucker and Reed to heel, and refocusing their efforts.

In less than a minute he would join Tucker in demanding Reed search again, which Reed and his team would do - quite fruitlessly, as he did not know anything of the 4,000 Kvo'ratt which had bred up in the inner workings of Enterprise over the last two months months. Lately, the kvo'ratt had outgrown the supply of garbage produced by the crew and had gone in search of food. What's more, these were no normal kvo'ratt, and hunger here served only to heighten aggression, rather than induce hibernation.

In any case, not knowing about the presence of the kvo'ratt, Lt. Reed could not possibly have checked their stomach contents for the missing Rostov, nor could he have known, that fascinated by the oscillations of Rostov's shrieks, several Kvo'ratt had crawled down his throat, and torn into his vocal cords quite early in the process of consuming the Human victim, as their poison had already paralyzed the majority of the man's muscle mass.

Dr. Phlox escorted Elizabeth Cutler back to her quarters. On their way, they passed Sub-Commander T'Pol standing perfectly still in the corridor, her head slightly tilted, her face a mask of concentration.

But Phlox's attention was elsewhere.

"You should come back to sickbay," he said, referring to the Rigellian leech bite on Cutler's hand.

Cutler's eyes rolled. "It's a leech bite, from feeding your critters earlier today. It's happened before. It's fine."

Privately, Phlox agreed. He was looking for a pretext to avoid saying goodnight to her. He was lonely and he liked her. He enjoyed her company.

He would never see her again.

"I think it's the transporter."

Travis had tried floating this particular theory earlier on both, the hysterical Hoshi Sato and the nakedly skeptical Trip Tucker, but he now realized the paranoid Malcolm Reed was his best audience for this particular theory.

Reed's features were drawn and heavy. He'd been woken by the news of Cutler's disappearance. And that had been two days ago. Two disappearances ago.

"What?" said Reed.

"I think it's the transporter," said Travis. "Activating in the middle of the night. Beaming people into space."

Reed blinked slowly, then said, "You think the transporter is… haunted?"

"No! I think it's malfunctioning."

Reed rubbed his face with his hands. "I checked the transporter logs. I checked everything. I've looked EVERYWHERE."

Reed had looked everywhere, Travis knew that much. He'd looked everywhere personally by now.

"You should sleep, Malcolm."

Reed shook his head. "Four people are missing."

The next day it was six… the day after, ten.

Jonathan Archer eyed the Vulcan with irritation. His so called 'science officer' had been no help at all. The woman was unusually silent, even for her. He could swear she was spending her time listening to the bulkheads.

He surveyed the bridge.

He didn't need Vulcan hearing to tell that Hoshi Sato's heart was pounding like a jackrabbit's. Her eyes darted around the bridge near constantly. She jumped at the slightest sound; the clunk of a dropped PADD unit as it hit the deck, someone clearing their throat. He should never have brought her out here.

Travis Mayweather had lost it a few days ago, when his deputy had been one of the latest disappearances. He'd gone down to the transporter room and had begun tearing it's components out of the deck, cursing wildly.

Trip still hadn't fixed it.

And Malcolm Reed. Reed spent his days staring at the internal scanners. In theory, he was watching the crew's life-signs. In practice, he was policing the rigid "buddy system" he'd implemented after the fourteenth disappearance. But it wasn't working.

With a start, Archer realized that, apart from tearing strips from haphazard 'buddies', he hadn't heard Reed speak in over two days.

"People don't just disappear," Reed had said then. "They just don't."

Archer turned back to T'Pol. The damn woman was still staring into space, her head slightly cocked.

"How long until we rendezvous with the T'Karrad, Sub-commander?" said Archer.

"Five days, Captain."

Five days, thought Archer: there might be no one left alive on the Enterprise by that time.

"Don't you Vulcan's have any closer ships which could render aid?" Archer snapped: the one time the damn pixies weren't following them around with a damn pooper-scooper…

"The T'Karrad is closest Captain."

Five more days...

"No. I'm not taking a goddamn panic whistle in the shower with me, Lieutenant, and you aren't coming in either."

"But…"

"No," said Trip. "Sit down. That's an order."

Trip marched into his bathroom, difficult to do in a dignified way while wrapped in a towel, but dignity had gone out the window days ago, right around the time Malcolm Reed moved in with him. Still, it could have been worse. He could have been buddied up with T'Pol.

There was an exact water pressure setting which made the pipes moan slightly, one that Trip usually avoided, but today it would prove terribly useful to drown out Malcolm Reed's ongoing, passive-aggressive RANTING.

Should have ordered him to shut up, while I was at it, thought Trip.

He closed his eyes under the cascade of water, and let it wash over him. He'd hoped that it would give him peace, but his thoughts would not be stilled.

He had cut his hand slightly, racing through routine maintenance. A simple job he'd done a hundred times. Accidents were becoming more common. Between the extra shifts, and whatever mouth of hell was consuming there shipmates, people weren't sleeping.

And then, there were stories. Old stories. Told by the first deep space crews. Disappearances, unexplained deaths… strange happenings in the empty voids of interstellar space. Superstitions, Trip had always thought. Modern day Sirens, Behemoths. Mermaids. But what to make of all that was happening aboard the Enterprise now? Could there be something to those superstitions?

When he saw that damned thing, Trip wasted those first, best seconds to act, not really believing what he was seeing, and thus not reacting properly.

I'm hallucinating, he thought. Space crazy. An insect the size of a hypo-spanner did NOT just crawl out of my shower drain.

Trip closed his eyes momentarily, certain that he was hallucinating, and expecting that the nasty apparition would be gone when he opened them. Instead he was just in time to see the creature, and several of its kind, jumping for his face, while dozens more had apparently poured out of shower drain since the time Trip had seen the first, and had jumped on his legs and torso. Then kvo'ratt began biting Trip, and injecting a sedative into his bloodstream in the process.

By pure luck, Trip managed to scream. He regretted it for a second, when one of the damned things leapt down the back of his throat, but between the paralysis inducing bites which had just been delivered, and the mandibles biting into his vocal cords, it was his only chance to make a sound, and despite the shrieking pipes, Malcolm heard it, and were it not for him, Trip would have been eaten alive. Alerted by that single scream, Reed barged in, and then half dragged, half carried the sodden, bleeding Engineer out to the corridor and tore the bugs from Trip's throat and skin with his bare hands, saved only by the fact that the single minded kvo'ratt were focused on Trip.

Just then, the poison started to affect even the muscles of Trip's chest and diaphragm, and the man was shortly struggling to breathe.

Despite having neither eaten nor slept properly for several days, Captain Jonathan Archer ran with considerable speed to sickbay, leaving him feeling light-headed and nauseated. The sight which greeted him on his arrival, didn't help much. His best friend on a respirator, his doctor putting his tactical officer on another respirator… and his first officer carefully examining goo on the sole of a boot.

"What the hell is going on?" gasped Archer.

T'Pol glanced over at him coolly. "Kvo'ratt, Captain. Apparently, genetically engineered."

Archer tried to focus on T'Pol's explanation of the sand-dwelling zombie cicadas of Vulcan. About how their unique chitin made them difficult to spot using Enterprises sensors. About the ability of a moderately-sized swarm to consume the remains of large animals in a matter of minutes.

"Who the hell would genetically engineer these things?" said Archer. "And why see them brought to the Enterprise?"

"That remains to be seen, Captain, but it would appear, Captain, that these kvo'ratt have developed a taste for human blood. And, given that we have not found any remains from the 32 missing crewmembers, one would presume, the rest of the human corpora as well."

"You mean, these things… have killed our missing people, and consumed their bodies?" said Archer.

The words felt false in his mouth. It couldn't be true. Surely not!

One delicate eyebrow arched on T'Pol's smooth brow. "I believe these kvo'ratt have killed the missing people BY consuming their bodies."

Archer vomited.

For the last four days before the T'Karrad arrived, the surviving crew huddled in Engineering, armed with phase pistols, mallets and the antitoxin which Phlox had developed, and which had saved lives.

Once they did that, they only lost three more people. Two died when a panel gave way, and a swarm burst out from behind it, attacking twelve people at once. After that, Malcolm and Trip had worked together to find a way to fire a dispersed phase-pistol blast, and their innovation had saved what remained of the crew of diffusion converted a killing blast to a stun, but the rest of the crew were standing by, with mallets and boots to kill the stunned kvo'ratt.

That's how the T'Karrad found them. Huddled together in groups throughout the ship, pistols and mallets at the ready. Humanity's finest. Crew of the Great Warp 5 Adventure.

The final death had been Hoshi Sato's. She had been bitten the previous night, but unaccountably, she had told no one. And no one noticed when she curled up in a corner and let the poison take her.

"She's so small," Trip had rasped, his new voice barely audible: healing would take a few months, even with Phlox's help. "Light weight, ya know? Maybe she couldn't call for help before the poison affected her."

Maybe, thought Archer, but he didn't really think so. No, Archer thought, Hoshi had simply been exposed to more than she could handle, and she'd opted out… and he'd been the one who had brought her into all of this, and for that, he'd never forgive himself.

But someone had been behind all this, someone was behind every death aboard this ship, and Archer meant to find out who was responsible for these deaths, and he meant to see that justice was done, and just thinking of it, Archer realized that the suspects were a legion, but he would find them, that much was certain.

*This story, which was a collaborative effort with an author who considers this story too grim to be published, and was originally intended to be a short story, but in my opinion it has the potential to be expanded into something much more than this, as Archer seeks the answers for this plague, aided by the rest of his surviving crew. I hope I can sway my co-author to see the possibilities of this and expand upon this theme, which was her's to begin with, and the majority of the work was her's, and if I get my way, this grim story will have an ending which delivers some payback to the dastardly creators of these genetic horrors.

**I thought of allowing the originator of this dark story to remain veiled in secrecy as she fears the blowback, but if I'm publishing this dark story, and running for my life for doing so, well, then you're running with me. MostDismalFeldsparkle, take a bow!