Title: L’Horreur
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek TOS
Characters: Yeoman Thompson
Disclaimer: Story written for entertainment purposes only.
Summary: A newly transferred yeoman worries about her future on the Enterprise.

This world is wet and cold, drowned in a dismal fog. During the times when the fog lifts from the ground, the streets of the city are revealed: filthy, abandoned, and littered with the decay of memories. Then the fog descends again, having shown a glimpse of its secrets, and the world becomes hazy lines and inklings of what was lost.

A yeoman shivers, no longer fretting over her purpose in the landing party and now more frightened that she was included. The dark-haired woman adjusts her slightly tremulous grip on her phaser. She hates holding it, but it is better than walking empty-handed through this thick mist. She looks down, dismayed that she cannot see below her calves. No one is here to see her fear but she would rather own up to her feelings than continue to be alone. She would tell the Captain himself that she is afraid, terribly so, if it would produce her missing communicator and get her back on the Enterprise.

She continues to shuffle her feet, edging forward with caution, hesitantly testing some of the objects blocking her path that she cannot see, kicking aside other objects with agitation. The wall she is following seems to be unending, which—given the parts of the city she had seen before the descent of the fog—makes no sense.

There it is again! Soft clicks, like the claws of an animal tapping across the cobblestones. She waits, barely breathing, until the sounds fade.

Keep the phaser steady, Yeoman Martha Thompson reminds herself sharply, and keep moving.

“Hello? Anyone?” The words are swallowed, the grey fog returning no echo of her cry.

Why would Captain Kirk put her name on the landing party roster? He takes Mr. Spock on away missions. He takes Dr. McCoy. He takes Security. Maybe—maybe she shouldn’t have mentioned she was considering training as an officer. The rank would be nice; sometimes it galls her that others do not consider a yeoman’s job important. If anything, her work keeps her harried full-time; no one knows better than a yeoman the volume of paperwork required to run a starship. (This mission, she decides, is not helping her stress level.)

The name Janice Rand comes to mind. Janice, Thompson has heard, was the kind of yeoman that took no crap from her peers. There are so many stories about Janice Rand, the captain’s yeoman, some of which make Thompson think that an underlying respect for her type of work must exist somewhere aboard the ship, if only as an aftereffect of Janice’s infamous tenacity in handling Captain Kirk.

Oh. Oh, wait. Didn’t Rand go on an away mission too? Thompson thinks hard on that for a moment. She is certain her information is correct. Janice did go on an away mission… involving a plague.

Thompson stops walking, looking at the fog curling around her wrist with a new apprehension.

The female yeoman survived the mission but transferred to another vessel soon thereafter. Martha thinks she might consider a transfer, too, if this fog turns out to be as unnatural as it appears.

That settles it in her mind. Away missions are not for yeomen. Leave the danger to the officers.

The wall ends, finally. She pauses. “Captain?”

No answer. Can her voice even reach through the fog?

“Mister… Spock? Is anyone there?”

Never has she imagined that she would willing seek out Commander Spock’s attention, but beggars cannot be choosers. It matters less and less that she finds the Vulcan rather intimidating, even when he is simply standing in the same room and not looking in her direction.

Oh, this is foolishness! How come the ship’s sensors did not pick up this strange weather pattern before they beamed to the surface? And why does Captain Kirk have to act like they will have a grand time exploring an empty planet?

Stop it, Marty, she chastises. Anger breaks your focus. That’s what her father would say, were he with her: Don’t lose focus, Marty.

Click-click-click.

She presses her back to the corner of the wall. What is that sound, and where is it coming from?

“Who’s there? A-Are you following me?”

Silence.

She drags in a breath. “I am Yeoman Martha Thompson of the starship Enterprise. I—” No, say nothing of your weapon. Anybody, even a yeoman, knows that much. Marty repeats determinedly instead, “Are you following me?”

Silence, pressing down, hampering her hearing like the fog is hampering her sight. Once Marty’s heart returns to a manageable rhythm, she moves on.

What would Captain Kirk do? In fact, what is the captain doing right now? Is everyone separated or just her?

When the landing party had formed on the planet, the air was clear, the day bright. Surely Captain Kirk would never have brought down a team if he had known about the fog. What’s the point of exploring when you can’t see anything?

She rubs the palm of her hand against the niche in her belt where the communicator should be. Rules be damned, if she had it she would comm the Chief Engineer directly and demand to be transported, thank you! Whatever is going on down here, it’s dangerous and they are not welcome.

The last time she had seen her captain, a security officer—Lieutenant Willard, ‘Evan’ as he had introduced himself to Martha—had pointed out the mist sneaking around an eastern street corner. Kirk had frowned, stepped closer to look at it. Within seconds, it was gathered about their ankles. The First Officer remarked too calmly that there were no life sign readings, never mind that the soft mist appeared plenty sentient to Martha. But there weren’t any creatures the landing party could see (minus the rolling fog). Sunlight glinted off metallic surfaces in the street—and there was a lot of metal. Trash, too. Broken objects. Lumps of cloth. All that was missing were diabolically clean bones.

Martha was as chilled then, in the sunlight, as she is now in the fog.

The Senior Medical Officer, Dr. McCoy, had voiced her opinion quite succinctly: “Jim, I don’t like the look of this place, and the last thing we need is to wade through pea-soup!”

Kirk said nothing for a moment, then flipped open his communicator and called, “Kirk to Enterprise. Come in, Enterprise.”

And that was the last time she saw the landing party. Thompson had started forward, per orders of her captain, to close in the ranks of the group, and the fog had suddenly spilled out from everywhere in retaliation. Not just winding through the dirty streets, but over and down the buildings, and—she could have sworn—up from the ground itself.

Visibility was gone in a snap, like someone switching off a light. She was pushed at from behind—there had been no one behind her, so Marty screamed on instinct—and she stumbled to her knees. Then she cried out “Captain!” both as a warning and a plea.

No one called back to the yeoman. In a split second, she was alone. Communicator missing. Taken? Her phaser, given to her by an amused security officer she didn’t know, was still hooked into her belt.

So fast—too fast. A strike, an attack, her father would have called it. She shivers now, stubbornly trying to ignore a sense of menace creeping up her spine.

Marty tries again. “Captain? It’s Yeoman Thompson! Captain, hello?”

Shockingly, a resounding Captain, hello? comes back to her. It’s faint, but it is her voice—and the first time she has had a response to anything, even a hollow echo. The dark-haired yeoman tugs at her bottom lip, decides she hasn’t any better options, and starts walking in the direction of the sound. Occasionally she calls out as a test and as a reassurance that she isn’t crazy.

She becomes aware, too, that the thing following her is at her back. It walks in time to her footsteps, matching her pace. If she stops, it stops.

Click. Click-click. Click-click.

Martha had worried that she might need to stun something with her phaser. Now she flips it to a higher setting on instinct.

The fog thins without warning, brightens. She shudders in relief when her eyes can delineate an archway. Beyond the arch is a large space which clears to reveal a courtyard. There’s something in its center, standing tall—the figure of a person?

Martha takes another step, then another. “Who’s there? This is—”

The fog is gone. She barely has time to suck in the next breath. “Evan!”

Stumbling, trying to run, it isn’t until she is an arm’s length away that she realizes what’s wrong with Evan. Her wide eyes skip from his smiling face down to his dark-stained shirt—then down to his right hand.

He raises the head of James Kirk, severed at the neck, the captain’s mouth slack with horror. She screams.

Evan says, “The Captain made the wrong choice, but you won’t make the wrong choice, will you, Martha?”

Her next scream is partly a sob. Evan tosses his prize at her feet.

Marty doesn’t think, can’t think. She flings her hand up in terror, phaser shaking, and points it at Evan. He looks disappointed, and someone—something—barrels into her body from behind. The yeoman falls under its weight, losing her phaser as she goes down. Her mind is too stunted by shock to recognize her assailant, not until it growls, its teeth-baring muzzle perilously close to her face.

A wolf. A large, grey-as-the-fog wolf with too intelligent eyes and bloody handprints in its fur. In her peripheral vision, Evan has the same twisted expression. When the beast leaps for her throat, Marty blacks out.

~~~

“Hey, are you okay?”

Martha Thompson blinks and turns to the inquirer. An ensign she doesn’t know by name smiles kindly at her. Her return smile is wobbly. “I’m fine.” She peers along the length of the replicator line in the mess hall and sighs. “It’s so long.”

“This is a busy time. In another twenty minutes or so, it won’t be this bad.”

“Oh.” She isn’t really hungry anyway, not after last night’s nightmare. The dark-haired yeoman sighs and steps out of the line, but the ensign catches her arm in passing.

“Want me to get you something?” she is asked in concern.

Marty shakes her head. “I have a snack in my desk. Thanks, though…” She hesitates.

“Paul,” says the ensign, smiling lopsidedly.

“I’m Marty,” she supplies and shakes his proffered hand. After a pause, Martha decides it couldn’t hurt to ask. “Paul, are—are yeomen allowed on landing parties?” Maybe the Enterprise is vastly different than the last starship she served on.

Ensign Paul gives her a strange look. “I guess it’s sanctioned but I doubt a yeoman would get that kind of assignment.”

She tries not to ponder too hard over the knot easing in her belly. “That’s what I thought too.”

“Who knows. Did you ever meet the captain’s last yeoman? I hear—”

Marty interrupts him mid-chuckle, making the excuse that she just remembered a report on her desk that needs an immediate relay to the correct parties for processing. The last thing Yeoman Martha Thompson wants to hear about is Janice Rand trapped on a plague planet. Her awful nightmare and subsequent lack of sleep is a result of that bit of gossip—true or not.

No, Marty decides firmly, it’s best to forget all about what-if’s and maybe’s. She isn’t putting a foot on a planet that isn’t Earth or a starbase that doesn’t belong to Starfleet. And when it so happens that she runs into Lt. Evan Willard on her way back to her quarters, well, Thompson valiantly ignores his call of “Martha! We’re having another party tonight—more drinks and more stories! Want to come?”

Forget Willard, too, with his sharp, grey eyes and wolfish grin. That man is obviously bad news.

She stays in her room until Maintenance shows up to take care of that annoying click-click noise in the vent above her small bed. Later, however, her mind will circle back to the same question: Why, oh why, does she have this ominous foreboding about her recent transfer to the Enterprise?

-Fini

*Interesting Note: Yeoman Leslie Thompson is a character from the episode By Any Other Name, a member of the landing party to be transformed into a cube and crushed by the Kelvan Rojan, who wants to make a point to Kirk of his superior power. Martha is a play on Leslie. Hee. This is a tribute to all ST yeomen who do end up on landing parties.

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