Chapter 29: Skin of Evil — Part 1
[USS Enterprise-D — Bridge — 2364, Day 120]
The distress signal came at 1423 hours and Cole's world narrowed to a single point of light.
"Priority one distress call." Worf's voice was clipped, professional. "Shuttlecraft 13, Counselor Troi aboard. Emergency landing on Vagra II in the Zed Lapis sector."
Vagra II.
The name hit like a physical blow. Cole stood at the auxiliary engineering station on the bridge—his assigned post for this rotation, the position that put him close to the action and far from the decisions. His hands gripped the console. His knuckles went white. The blood drained from his face fast enough that he tasted copper.
It's today. Not in twelve days. Today. The timeline shifted. My presence, the butterfly effects, something moved the schedule and it's happening NOW.
Picard was already in command mode. "Set course for Vagra II, maximum warp. Number One, assemble an away team. Medical and security."
"Aye, Captain." Riker stood from the command chair. "Yar, you're with me. Data, standard away configuration. Two security officers."
Cole's hand hit his combadge before his mind authorized the action. "Captain, request permission to join the away team. Shuttle systems may require field repair—my engineering background could expedite the rescue."
Picard's eyes found him. The assessment was swift—the captain measuring Cole's request against his recent service record, the Datalore incident, the conditional trust established in the ready room. "Granted. Report to Transporter Room 3."
Cole left the bridge. The turbolift felt slow—twenty seconds that stretched like hours, each one a calculation: Did I train enough? The absorption capacity—is it sufficient for Armus? The projection—can I redirect alien energy, not just phaser fire? What if Armus is different from anything I've practiced with?
He stopped at the weapons locker on deck 7. Standard phaser, type-2. He checked the charge, the settings, the emitter alignment—mechanical actions performed with the automatic precision of a man whose mind was somewhere else entirely.
In the show, Armus kills Tasha with a single blast of psionic energy. No warning. No buildup. She approaches, it strikes, she drops. Dead before she hits the ground. The most pointless death in Star Trek history—a character killed not for dramatic purpose but because the actress wanted to leave.
This isn't the show. This is my life. And Tasha is not a character who can be written off.
Transporter Room 3. The team assembled: Riker, calm and commanding. Data, precise and ready. Tasha—Tasha, in full tactical gear, phaser rifle slung across her back, the combat readiness of a woman who treated every away mission like a potential war zone because she'd grown up in one.
Two security officers flanked them. Ensigns. Young. The kind of young that made Cole's chest ache, because in the original timeline one of them might have watched their Security Chief die and carried that weight for the rest of their careers.
"Ready?" Riker looked at his team.
Cole positioned himself beside Tasha. Not obviously—not close enough to be noted, not far enough to be useless. The exact distance he'd calculated during three weeks of planning: two meters to her left, within arm's reach if he extended fully, close enough for his enhanced reflexes to cover the gap between standing and intercepting.
"Ready, sir."
"Energize."
---
[Vagra II — Surface — Day 120, 1500 Hours]
The planet tasted like ash.
Vagra II was dead in ways that went beyond ecology. The black sand stretched in every direction under a sky the color of old bruises—gray-purple, heavy, pressing down on the landscape like a lid on a coffin. No vegetation. No movement. No life.
The shuttlecraft lay three hundred meters ahead, half-buried in the sand, its port nacelle crumpled, hull breached. Troi's biosigns registered on tricorder—alive, stable, trapped.
Between the away team and the shuttle: a pool.
Black. Liquid. Wrong.
Cole's energy perception detonated. Not the controlled sweep he used for diagnostics or the passive scan he ran during routine operations—a full, involuntary activation that flooded his awareness with the most profoundly disturbing energy signature he had ever encountered.
The pool was alive. Not alive the way a humanoid was alive, with structured biology and organized consciousness. Alive the way a wound was alive—raw, suppurating, seething with an energy that was simultaneously ancient and infantile. Hatred given physical form. Despair condensed into liquid. Every negative emotion that a civilization could produce, stripped from its context, concentrated into a substance that existed for no purpose except to make other things suffer.
That's Armus. That's what I've been training for. God help me.
"Tricorder readings are... anomalous," Data reported. "The substance appears to be a living organism, but its molecular structure does not correspond to any known biological classification."
"Spread out," Riker ordered. "Approach the shuttle from—"
The pool moved.
It rose—not like water displaced by pressure but like something deciding to stand up. The black liquid gathered itself into a column, a shape, a figure. Humanoid but wrong. Arms, legs, a head—all formed from oil-slick darkness that reflected no light, absorbed no color, existed as a hole cut into reality.
"I am Armus."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Not sound—vibration. The air itself recoiling from the entity's communication, the words pressing against Cole's perception like fingers against a bruise.
"You will entertain me."
Riker stepped forward. The commander's instinct—meet the threat, establish dialogue, control the situation. "We're here for the shuttle crew. If you'll allow—"
"I will allow nothing." Armus's shape shifted—the not-face arranging itself into an expression that approximated amusement the way a corpse approximated sleep. "You will do as I say. Or you will not do anything. Ever again."
Cole's perception tracked the entity's energy output in real-time. The malevolence wasn't metaphorical—it was literal, measurable, a directed field of psychic aggression that pressed against every living mind within range. The security officers shifted uncomfortably. Data's positronic brain, immune to psychic assault, registered the energy as data. Tasha's hand tightened on her phaser rifle—the reflexive response of a woman who'd learned on Turkana IV that the correct response to threats was to be ready to kill them.
The energy pattern. It's concentrated—focused, like a phaser on narrow beam. When Armus attacks, it won't be a diffuse blast. It'll be targeted. Specific. A single strike directed at a single person.
In the show, that person was Tasha.
Cole adjusted his position. Half a step closer to her. His hand hung at his side, fingers loose, ready. His perception mapped Armus's energy field—the fluctuations, the gathering points, the subtle shifts that preceded action the way thunder preceded lightning.
"What do you want?" Riker asked.
"Want?" Armus laughed. The sound was physical—a wave of psychic force that hit the away team like a gust of foul wind. "I want what I have always wanted. To make others feel what I feel. To share the gift of despair."
The entity's attention swept across the team. Cole tracked it—the psychic focus moving like a searchlight, pausing on each member, evaluating, assessing. It passed over the security officers. Lingered on Riker. Skipped Data entirely—the android's positronic brain offering nothing for Armus to feed on.
Settled on Tasha.
No.
Cole's perception screamed. The energy shift was unmistakable—Armus's field concentrating, tightening, gathering itself into the focused strike that would cross three meters of dead air and hit Tasha Yar in the chest with enough psychic force to stop her heart.
The gathering took 1.3 seconds. Cole's enhanced reflexes measured the interval with crystal clarity—each millisecond a universe of time in which his body was already moving, his muscles firing, his consciousness making the decision his mind had made three months ago in a corridor on the Enterprise when he'd first looked at Tasha Yar and thought: she doesn't die. Not this time. Not ever.
He reached her in 0.8 seconds. His left arm caught her shoulder, shoving her sideways—hard, graceless, the desperate physics of a man trading precision for speed. She stumbled. Her mouth opened—surprise, anger, the beginning of a protest.
The blast hit Cole in the chest.
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