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CHAPTER SIX

They were like manta rays standing upright and made out of grey wisps of smoke, they were all of different shapes and sizes and moved elegantly, silently. There were hundreds of them, they kept disappearing and reappearing in different places and the screeches were coming from them. They were moving fast and silently towards the four Starfleet officers.

Greg Eskina took a step back, there were too many of them. It would be a lost fight as soon as they would begin. One of the bizarre clouds of smoke began moving faster than the others and was going straight for Eskina. The commander fired a shot from his phaser rifle and it went right through the cloud. The cloud screeched and disappeared...

And reappeared...

He shot two more shots, the fire from the rifle was making the cloud shrink every time it disappeared and reappeared. After five shots, the cloud dissipated entirely.

"Well...That means they're not invincible." Rouen said.

"But it doesn't mean they're beatable." Eskina warned. "They're too many; we have to get out of here."

The clouds were now one hundred meters away.

"Aye." Ogden picked up Kaufmann who looked slightly better than before and began running. Rouen and Eskina stayed a few meters behind him to cover his rear.

The creatures had accelerated their pace and were approaching the Starfleet officers quickly. Eskina brought the power of his rifle to maximum and began firing at random enemies, Rouen did the same and it slowed the approaching clouds down a little.

But not enough...

The clouds were twenty meters away and closing...Eskina decided it was no use to fire at the clouds and told Rouen: "Forget it! Just run!"

They ran faster, but the creatures had almost caught up with them.

Suddenly, a red beam of light came down from the sky and hit the ground right in the middle of all the creatures. There was a thundering explosion that sent the Starfleet officers flying into the air and vaporized half the number of the black clouds, the surviving clouds quickly fled in the opposite direction, away from the away-team.

Eskina fell into a large pile of leaves that cushioned his fall, Ogden and Kaufmann crashed onto the floor and Rouen collided headfirst with a tree.

There was a loud noise and Eskina looked up into the sky.

A shuttlecraft was coming down towards their position.

When it had landed, the hatch opened and a man in a Starfleet uniform emerged from the shuttle. He walked to Eskina as some other officers came out of the shuttle and took Ogden, Kaufmann and Rouen into the shuttle. The man helped Eskina to his feet and said: "Sorry about that. We saw you running from the clouds and we wanted to help...We didn't know that the phaser blast would throw you into the air like that."

"That's okay...At least you got those things off our tail." Eskina managed a smile.

"I'm Commander Sheridan, the former commanding officer of Delta station."

"Nice to meet you." They shook hands. "I'm lt.commander Eskina. We came from our starship to see what was going on down here."

"Well...Now you know...These things have been attacking for days. They destroyed the Alpha and Delta stations and our planet-wide communications antenna."

"Where did they come from?" Eskina asked.

Sheridan shook his head: "We have no idea...The only thing we know is that they don't like us very much."

"Strange...I also deduced that myself." Eskina said with a wan smile.

They screamed higher than anything Kline had ever heard before, they were like cloaks of smoke that hovered around; there were hundreds of them approaching slowly.

"What is that?" Davies stared out the window at the creatures.

"I have no idea..." Kline said. "But they don't look very friendly."

"They don't look very evil either." That was Hamilton, always concerned with morality and ethics in dealing with alien species. Kline remembered their heated discussions during their days at the Academy about Starfleet's dealing with other species, especially the enemies of the Federation. "Maybe they just want to talk." She suggested.

"Well..." Stranson said, holding his rifle nervously. "I'd rather not take my chances."

"They're getting closer." Davies warned.

One of the clouds suddenly accelerated and threw itself against the window through which the humans were observing, the window was also polarized and it immediately threw the creature back a few meters, it shrieked and threw itself against the window again and again, the glass vibrating at every impact.

Then, all the creatures began slamming themselves violently against different parts of the station. The ground shook as the impacts continued for several minutes. Tompkinson rushed to a console and reported: "This is crazy! They're...adapting to the polarization frequency. They're going through the hull!"

"How's that possible?" Kline asked.

"I don't know...They're continuously phase-shifting and slowly getting deeper and deeper into the hull plating."

Suddenly, Stranson jumped back as a black cloud of smoke emerged from a wall next to him, it was one of the creatures, and it stayed in the bulkhead for a while, moving around, and swiping at Stranson then disappeared again behind the wall.

"They'll be inside soon..." Stranson said, staying away from the walls.

Tompkinson fingers flew across the console in front of her: "I'm trying to change the polari..." Suddenly, one of the creatures emerged from the wall that she was facing. It shrieked and lunged right at her. She was envelopped in the smoke of the creature, she screamed but the scream turned quickly into a grotesque gurgling sound and the commander crumpled to the floor. Davies fired several shots at the creature, shots that were joined with some from Stranson's rifle. The cloud dissipated once the cloud had been transperced five times.

Hamilton rushed to Tompkinson and scanned her with a tricorder. Davies turned the commander over to check the face. It was covered with little cuts; the eyes had also been sliced open. Davies checked for a pulse, first at the neck, then at the wrist.

Davies frowned, and then shook her head: "She's dead."

Hamilton, who was still scanning the body said: "The cuts are all over her body, the creature phased in-and-out of her while it vibrated. Their molecules mixed and it seems that the molecules that compose these creatures are like acid to organic materials."

"So we shouldn't touch them..." Stranson said.

"Right." Hamilton said as another creature half-materialized through a bulkhead and re-disappeared.

Kline rushed to the console where Tompkinson was standing a few seconds before. He studied the screen to attempt to figure out what she was trying to do. A few seconds thereafter he said: "She was trying to create a second polarized field around the already existing one...If I can just adapt this variable..."

Another one of the creatures went straight through a wall and Stranson dissipated it with a few shots. Kline was still trying to get the second polarization field up, he frowned in frustration: "Uh...Linda...Do you have any idea how to augment the output on the x axis of a polarization core."

She stared at him in incomprehension.

"Okay...I guess not." He turned to Dean who was firing at a creature with a hand phaser. "Mister Dean?"

"What is it?!" The civilian clenched his teeth as the creature dissipated.

"I need to...uh...wait a second." Kline glanced at the console, and then looked back to Dean. "I need to augment the output on the x axis of the polarization core."

"Unhinge the lateral clamps on the core's secondary security rotator. That should make the field more fluid to modulate."

"Okay..." Kline tapped in a few controls on the console and, then he said with a smile: "The second polarized field is up."

"So we're safe." Hamilton said with a smile.

Kline sighed: "For now..."

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