Chapter Text
They set out for the cargo hold some time later, armed to the teeth and Walter back in his natural form. They had a plan, the end was in sight, and Walter had a vague idea of where the creature was. It was following them, exactly like they wanted.
The cargo hold wasn’t very far from the armory, so it didn’t take long for them to arrive.
“Why are you on the Darwin anyway?” Barbara asked as they walked. “Did you really pick it yourself or were you…encouraged?”
“I really did choose the mission. I was due for fieldwork and a small ship on the far side of the explored galaxy seemed like a good way to avoid attracting attention. I’d been a sleeper agent for twenty-odd years, I was hoping they’d just forgotten about me.”
“They didn’t,” she guessed.
“I received orders to investigate the wreckage of the Unkar an hour before the Darwin did. There was intelligence that it had been a life form that had done it. I’m sure you can guess which one by now.”
She laughed, but there wasn’t any humor in it. Then she had another horrible thought. “You didn’t bring that creature aboard, did you?”
“Of course not, I’m not an idiot. I’m supposed to find out if it’s worth pursuing to add to the pool of genetic material for the bioengineers.”
“They want to make clones out of that thing? Are they crazy?”
“This is the Gumm-Gumms we’re talking about. I wouldn’t put it past them.”
“Were you going to follow through on the mission?”
“I hadn’t decided yet.”
“So you did decide?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Hold up.” She jogged a few steps to physically cut him off. “Tell me what that means.”
“What?”
“We’re about to risk our lives fighting that creature, I need to know where you stand.”
He wasn’t looking at her, but scanning the area around him. “Is this really the time for that?”
“You’re the one who keeps dodging the question. I want to trust you Walt, but you’re not making that easy.”
He sighed and finally looked at her, straight on. “I will not go back to the Gumm-Gumms. I’ve been compromised, the only chance I have to stay in their good graces is to kill you. I refuse to do that.”
One of the knots of fear that had been twisting her up inside finally unwound. “Okay.”
“And you? What’s your plan for me?” he asked.
Before she could answer, he twisted around to look behind him. She didn’t notice anything that might have attracted his attention, but that didn’t mean much.
“Think about that, when we have a minute,” he said. “We’re out of time. Get to the door controls, I’ll be right behind you.”
Barbara ran. She thought Walter was right behind her. But when she reached the control panel and turned around, she found she was alone.
“WALTER!”
He didn’t reply.
She readied the rifle he’d entrusted to her, the strongest weapon they found, and scanned the area around the loading dock. Their voyage was nearing an end, barely two months left, so many of their supplies were used up. Instead of pallets full of food and necessities, the aisles were full of preserved specimens, all carefully quarantined and inspected before being brought aboard. Some, like the more benign plants, were set up in hydroponic gardens akin to the system for their fresh fruits and vegetables. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there were some items sealed in secure containment that would be dangerous for their all-human crew to study extensively, but would be perfectly safe for an allied species.
The creature could be hiding anywhere among those things.
Somehow, she had to trick it into going into the loading dock all by herself, working off a plan that had included Walter. She blinked back tears. This wasn’t the time for that. She pulled the lever to open the dock doors and walked to the center of the doorway. Walter wasn’t here to be the bait, so she’d do it herself. She stood there and waited, staring down at the creature she knew was out there.
Finally, something stood out from the trickling water of the gardens. It was low and grating, possibly a growl. That wasn’t what she expected at all, the creature had never done anything to alert her to its presence before. Before she had any more time to think on that, there was an ear-grating screech and complete pandemonium ensued. She could hear, and occasionally see, stacks of supplies and specimens crash to the ground. Something was darting between the aisles and making a racket.
“BARBARA MOVE!”
She didn’t recognize the voice, but something was barrelling down the center aisle, coming straight at her. She didn’t think, just darted back to the control panel. There was a definite gust of wind as not one, but two of the creatures blasted past her and into the loading dock. For a horrible moment, Barbara contemplated the thought that there were two of those things to kill. Then, as they separated for a moment to size each other up, she realized they were fighting each other and one of them was very green.
That was not part of the plan. If they made it through this alive, she was going to give Walter a piece of her mind. She watched as the two of them fought, one hand with her blaster ready and the other resting on the lever to close the doors at a moment’s notice.
Finally, the green one pinned down the black one. “Just do it!” the green one, Walter, yelled in a grating voice.
“No! Not while you’re still in there!” she yelled back. She’d just spent several minutes thinking he was dead, she wasn’t going through that again.
He did try to make a break for the door, but the creature dragged him right back. There was a spray of the yellow-ish blood of the creature, though she wasn’t sure whose blood it actually was. This needed to end quickly.
Barbara looked around the loading dock for something that might help and spotted clamps in the wall, meant to secure cargo. Even if they wouldn’t hold the creature for long, it might be enough to give Walter time to escape. She stowed her blaster and started trying buttons and switches on the control panel, trying to find what connected to it. Finally, she saw the clamps activate.
“Walter! Get it to the cargo clamps, we can hold it down!”
The rhythm of the fight changed and it didn’t take long for Walter to slam the creature into the wall with the clamps, where he pinned it in place. Barbara activated the clamps, Walter leaped away, and the creature struggled against the clamps for only a few seconds before they broke. But it was enough. Barbara pulled the lever as Walter blew through the doorway and the creature crashed into the doors as they closed in its face. Another button pressed and the creature was sucked out into the cold void of space.
Barbara collapsed in relief as the main hatch closed again, the air lock empty. They were safe, neither died, they could go look for Jim without worrying about that thing hunting anyone down. She looked over at Walter.
He was still laying in a limp heap on the floor.
“Walt?”
He shuddered and made a noise, but nothing intelligible.
Barbara got up and hurried over. “Hey. Are you going to be okay?” she asked, kneeling down next to him. “Do you need anything?” She could already see some of the harsh features of the creature smoothing into the familiar ones of Walter’s natural form, wounds weeping yellow blood from beneath the creature’s segmented plates already melting away.
“Time,” he rasped. “Don’t watch.”
“Okay.”
Walter didn’t flinch away this time when she held one of his reformed hands and just waited there with him, her head turned aside, while he pulled himself back together.
Some time later, they were sitting on the floor up against an intact cargo crate, Walter half-leaning on her. He was dressed in a pair of coveralls she’d found, which only barely fit (tight in the shoulders, loose in the hips, sleeves and legs too short, the attached boots cut off and discarded) and was an obnoxiously bright yellow that clashed with his green hide. But they’d been in agreement that he had to look as presentable as possible when they found Jim.
“What happened back there?” she asked. “I expected you to be right behind me, but you vanished. We had a plan.” Barbara didn’t intend to sound accusatory, but didn’t entirely succeed.
“Plan B,” he replied, voice quiet. “I’d been observing it, I knew what kind of damage it could do if it caught me. Copying it confused it and put me on equal footing. It grabbed me early, I had to change things. Sorry I couldn’t tell you.”
She looked down at his hand, resting on his thigh, and took it into her own. “I was scared that it killed you.”
“It nearly did.”
“And telling me to open the airlock while you were still in there?“
“A last resort. I couldn’t take it down on my own.”
“You’re not on your own and you’re not disposable,” she said gently, interlocking her fingers with his. “I’ll keep telling you that until you believe it.”
He didn’t answer.
“Still with me?” she asked.
"You don't think I'm disposable."
She smiled. It was a start.
“You ready?” she asked several minutes later, squeezing their interlocked fingers.
He sighed. “Yes.”
She stood up first, easily. He was slower to stand, but there was no unsteadiness to his movements.
“And you’ll tell me if you need a break, right?” Her med scanner was useless on him, she needed him to be honest.
“I will.”
“Okay.” She hugged him and after a pause, he hugged her back. “Let’s go,” she said.
They walked through the corridors of the ship, trying to find a clear path back to Barbara’s quarters through the wreckage. It was where she’d left Jim when she’d left to do surgery to detach the creature from a crew member’s face, something that felt like an eon ago, but hadn’t even been two days yet according to the built-in clock on her med scanner. Neither of them had seen him in their roving through the ship in the meantime, so they figured it was their best bet for finding him now. Barbara had to help Walter maneuver round the rubble as often as he did her, a major change from their trekking earlier.
“You sure you’re okay?” she asked.
“I’m just tired,” he assured her. “I promise.”
“Good.”
They walked through another corridor when Barbara breached the subject that had been on her mind.
“I did do some thinking, like you asked.”
“About?”
“You asked me earlier what my plans were for you. And that kind of depends on what it is you want.”
“What I want?”
“Sure. You told me earlier you were hoping the Empire would forget about you. You don’t want to go back. Maybe you want to stay with the Fleet?”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because what happened today will happen again.”
“God, I hope not.”
“No, not that.”
He tightened his grip on her hand, drawing the two of them to a stop before stepping away so they could talk face to face. “I have spent nearly three years avoiding your med scanner and over twenty avoiding any extensive medical examination for the Fleet. I’ve been living on borrowed time and today I ran out. How much longer can I last in the Fleet? Something is going to happen again that I can’t impersonate or talk my way out of.”
“Okay. But that’s not what I asked. What do you want?” she emphasized, taking his hands again.
Walter suddenly couldn’t meet her eyes.
“Whatever it is, no matter how impossible you think it will be.”
“I wish the Unkar had never found those creatures.”
“Okay. Can you tell me why? Because I would love that too.”
“If those creatures weren’t found, I wouldn’t have been re-activated. We wouldn’t have been thrown into this–” He nodded at the destruction around them. “Mess. And you wouldn’t have found out about me.”
She held his hands tighter. “Has me finding out about you really been that bad?” At his silence, she continued. “I’ll admit I was scared at first. I didn’t know what to think. Were you going to turn on me, were you working for the Gumm-Gumms, was Walter Strickler just some make-believe man. But I didn’t need to worry about any of that. You’re still you.” She caressed his cheek. “There’s just more to you than I knew about. I wish you’d just told me about all this, but I understand why you didn’t. I hope going forward, you won’t be scared to tell me about things like this.”
He seemed to choke on his next words. “Going forward? You want to stay with me?”
“If you don’t want to, I understand.”
“That isn’t–you’re not–Barbara, I’m not human. I’m a clone, I can turn into horrific things and I look like this!” he said, ripping his hands away to gesture to himself. “Doesn’t that bother you?”
“No.”
“Oh.” He visibly deflated, all the tension that had been building up in his body suddenly slipping away. She was kind of concerned he might collapse actually, but he remained standing. She still decided to steer him into a nearby piece of rubble to sit down. “Well. Suddenly, all that agonizing seems incredibly pointless.”
She held his hands again. “I have lots of questions and I’m really curious about the answers, but I don’t think any of them are going to be deal breakers. Who you are is a heck of a lot more important than what you are. If the only big change is what you look like, I’m okay with that.”
He just nodded, still looking flabbergasted.
“So. What do you want?” she asked again, pretty sure she knew the answer now.
“I…I want to stay,” he said, leaning forward to rest his forehead against her. “With you. If you will let me.”
She let go of one hand to run her fingers through his hair and smoothed it down the best she could. “I want you to stay too.”
He wrapped his arms around her waist and held her close, freeing her to cradle his head in her hands.
“I didn’t want to go back,” he continued. “I haven’t for a long time. Turned out to be a terrible sleeper agent, I didn’t want to wake up.”
“Yeah?”
“Being with you, Barbara,” he said, his voice treating her name like a treasure, “Has been a dream I never wanted to wake up from.”
Her hands froze in place.
Walter took that the wrong way. He straightened up and pushed her away. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No! That’s not it. Walter. Walter!” She grabbed him and forced him to look at her. “That’s not it. I was just surprised. That was really sweet and I wasn't expecting it.”
“Oh.”
He looked terribly flustered, so she hugged him close to her again to let him save face. “You called me a dream. That’s a lovely thing to say.”
“It’s true,” he said. “You and Jim have been absolutely wonderful. Oh, god, I’m going to have to tell him about all this, aren’t I?”
She smiled. “You probably should.”
“He’s going to hate me,” Walter groaned.
“He’s spent his whole life around all kinds of non-human people in the Fleet, he’ll come around.”
The door was blocked.
They found evidence of the remains of a crew member, a smear of blood on the cracked floor. It was almost obscured by another door that had been ripped from the wall, claw marks in the door frame evidence of what had happened there. Steel beams, twisted sheets of metal, and shards of shattered plastic piled up around and against the door to Barbara and Jim’s shared quarters showed how extensive it had been.
“Now what?”
“Well, we’ll have to find another way inside,” Walter said. He was rubbing a circle on her back, grounding her. “The good news is, your door and wall look completely intact. If Jim is inside, he’s probably fine.”
“Right.”
“The ventilation shafts would be a way in, there’s one going into every part of the ship.”
“So we need to find an access point close by.” Barbara scanned the corridor, looking for a vent.
There was one they had easy access to only ten feet down the corridor, up near the ceiling. They shifted some rubble to create a stable platform for them to stand on. They climbed up and Walter put his ear up to the vent.
“I do hear a voice,” he said after a few seconds. “It sounds like Jim.”
Barbara sagged against the wall in relief. Then she gently pushed Walter aside to yell into the vent. “Jim? It’s your mom. Can you hear me?”
When the echo faded, Walter put his ear up against the vent again. Barbara gave Jim what she hoped was plenty of time to answer before she asked. “Do you hear anything?”
“Nothing,” he replied. “And he’s stopped talking.”
“Do we go in after him?”
“We might have to. Unless there’s a way for us to talk with him, he won’t know we’re out here.”
They improvised a screwdriver with a shard of plastic, unscrewing the vent cover to reveal an opening that was smaller than Barbara had hoped for.
“Jim should be able to fit,” Walter said. He looked her up and down.
“And I won’t,” Barbara said for him. “And you’re even bigger than I am.”
“Barbara, I’m a shapeshifter. I can make myself fit.”
She folded her arms across her chest. “You’re also exhausted.”
“I can manage a human Walter Strickler. That one is easy, I’ve had decades of practice.”
She glared at him, trying to determine if he was bluffing. Unfortunately, she just didn’t have enough experience with Walter’s natural form. She didn’t know any tells and she wasn’t familiar enough with his physiology to take a guess at how tired he actually was. “All right. I’m trusting you with Jim. Don’t overdo it.”
“I’ll do my best.”
At his request, she turned away while he shifted, opting to prepare the rope she’d been carrying coiled up and hanging off one shoulder across her chest like a sash. They were close to her quarters, it shouldn’t be too difficult to navigate the vents, but it would be good insurance for Walter to take one end of the rope while she held onto the other. She turned around again when he laid a hand on her shoulder and she scowled at the sight of him, or rather, his grayed complexion.
“You look terrible. We’ll figure out something else, we can–”
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “I won’t be good for much else, but I can maintain this long enough to get Jim out. I don’t expect he’ll leave with tall, green, and gruesome anyway.”
“You’re probably right,” she admitted. Jim had been very concerned when he’d seen the newsreels from Earth about the Empire changelings and Walter looked almost exactly like the one that had been found and killed. Considering what she’d learned about them though, that wasn’t exactly a surprise. “Be quick.”
Jim was sitting under Barbara’s desk, knees tucked up against his chest. He didn’t fit under there as well as he had when they’d first set out on the voyage, but it was a sturdy piece of furniture and a good hiding spot. He’d heard something make noise in the ventilation system, first one burst of sound and then after a pause, a prolonged stream of noise that got steadily louder.
“God I hope this is the right room. Jim, are you in there? It’s Walter.”
Jim pushed his mom’s rolling chair out of the way and ran over to the vent. “It’s me! I’m here. What’s going on?”
“A lot. Your mother is outside, we’ll explain when we get out there.”
“Mom’s okay?”
“Yes. You’ll need to get a screwdriver to get the vent cover off, can you do that? Barbara said there should be one in the toolbox by her desk.”
“I’ll get it.”
Jim found the tool easily and with Walter’s guidance, used some furniture to climb up and remove the vent cover. Walter was there behind it, smiling but looking very tired. There was a sheen of sweat on his face.
“Ready to go?” he asked.
Jim nodded. He crawled into the vent and followed Walter as he crawled backwards, following a rope that he said Barbara was holding the other end of. Sure enough, after Walter dropped out of the vent and let light inside, Jim could see his mother smiling through tears in the corridor outside. She pulled him out and into a tight hug without a word.
“I tried calling,” Jim said. “I called everyone I could think of, but no one was answering.” He looked over her shoulder and saw the corridor, once a pristine and smooth white, was twisted and burned, like a giant rampaging troll had been trying to win a contest for dismantling a ship the fastest. “What happened out here?”
“So much,” she replied. Finally, she let up on the hug so she could kiss his forehead. “You remember I had to go help with a surgery?”
“Uh-huh. There was an alien stuck to someone’s face.”
“Yeah. The alien turned out to be really dangerous. Most of the crew was…they didn’t make it.”
“They died?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to the alien?”
“It’s gone. Walter and I ejected it into space.”
“So it can’t hurt anyone else. That’s good.”
She smiled. “Exactly.”
“So what are we going to do now?”
“We’re all pretty tired, I think we’re just going to find a good place to rest, and then we’ll figure out how to get back home.”
“Do you think we can fix the ship?”
“I think we’re going to have to call for help.”
“Are communications working?” he asked. “I didn’t hear from anyone. I–”
He’d turned around to look at Walter to ask him something, but the man was gone. There was a changeling, just like the one in the newsreels, sitting against the wall.
“Mom,” he whispered. “There’s a Gumm-Gumm, right there!” She had to be able to see it, why wasn’t she doing anything?
“It’s okay sweetie. We can explain.”
A few hours later, the three of them were settled in the vice captain’s quarters. It was a nice suite of rooms, including a stocked kitchenette that they made use of while catching Jim up on all that happened. He was still wary of Walter, watching him while trying to avoid his gaze in return. Walter, in turn, was giving the boy a wide berth. But eventually, the stress of the day finally had Jim nodding off, so Barbara set him up with a bed on the sofa, where he fell asleep almost instantly. With him settled, she took her turn in the bathroom, cleaning herself up the best she could. She didn’t have a clean set of clothes to wear, but she was able to rinse the worst of the gunk out of her scrubs and dry them off on the towel dryer while she washed herself off.
When she emerged, dressed in her dry and semi-clean clothes, Jim was sound asleep. Walter, instead of in the bedroom where she’d directed him to earlier, was sitting at the vice-captain’s desk. She walked over and rested a hand on his shoulder.
“Hey. I’m surprised you’re still up,” she said.
He looked up at her over his shoulder. “I was waiting for you.”
She gave him a quick peck on his forehead. “Come on.”
She took him by the hand and led him to the bedroom, where he hesitated for only a moment before joining her on the bed. They settled into the large bed, Barbara tucked up against his back, arm draped across his waist.
“This is much more comfortable than your bunk,” she whispered.
“We didn’t exactly do a lot of sleeping in there.”
She laughed and finally felt him relax.
They all slept for a long time, but it was Walter who slept the longest. Jim woke up second, just in time to stop Barbara from ruining breakfast, and the two of them talked about Walter. The private discussion, allowing Jim to speak freely without worrying about offending him, seemed to put him more at ease, even when Walter finally emerged from the bedroom.
“Wonderful, breakfast,” Walter said as he walked in. “Dare I ask who made it?”
“Me,” Jim said.
“I know it will be good then.”
After breakfast, they set out for the central computer station in hopes of contacting Central Command. By that point, they were confident that they were the only survivors on the ship and none of them knew enough about maintaining a starship to determine if the ship was repairable, much less how to do so. They needed to call for help. They stopped by Walter’s quarters on the way to pick up something. When he emerged, Barbara didn’t notice anything different about him.
“What did you get?” she asked. “I thought you’d want to change clothes or something.”
“I don’t have anything that fits when I’m like this. I just got something we ideally won’t need, but I’m not keeping my hopes up.”
“Why not?” Jim asked.
He winced. “It’s not exactly legal.”
As it turned out, it was both necessary and very illegal.
The server room was trashed and the communications room was blocked, so they had to go all the way to the bridge to find any consoles that could potentially have the range and connectivity they needed to reach Central Command, or at least send out a distress signal so they could be picked up by a nearby Fleet ship. Unfortunately, even the bridge hadn’t escaped the creature unscathed. Several consoles were smashed and the freestanding chairs were scattered, but at least they didn’t see any human remains. Jim sat in the captain’s chair to play with the controls there while Walter and Barbara searched the consoles around the room, trying to find a functional one.
“This one is pretty good,” Barbara called out when she found one. There were a couple dead spots on the screen, but they were small enough to work around. And the system seemed functional enough, the only thing she didn’t see immediately was the icon indicating a functioning connection with Command. Walter approached behind her while she ran a diagnostic.
“This might be our only option,” he said. “Not without a lot of additional work.”
“It’s not going to do us any good if we can’t connect with the array outside. I don’t think we’ll be able to do the repairs on that either. We’ll probably need to go at it externally and there aren’t enough of us to do that without drones. Jim doesn’t know how to pilot one of those and I know for a fact that we don’t have a suit that fits him to allow for a space walk.”
The system diagnostic came back. There was indeed something wrong with the communications array, or at least the ship’s internal structure that connected to it.
“I have an alternative,” Walter said.
He pulled something out of one of the many pockets of his coveralls. It was a small box, about the size of a deck of cards, and made of a matte, dark gray metal. She could see some hair-thin lines on it, suggesting that it was made of several panels and likely opened up.
“I need some tools, we’ll need to open the console and access the hardware.”
“I got it!” Jim called.
Barbara turned and saw him jump up from the chair and ran over to the storage receptacle hidden in the wall to retrieve the tool kit stored there. “What is that?” she asked Walter, gesturing to the object he was holding.
“Standard issue for an agent in my…former position.” He brushed one of the narrow sides with his thumb and it whirred open, revealing something resembling a Fleet-issued comms device, though made with technology that was distinctly Empire-derived. “This is how I would maintain contact with my Gumm-Gumm handler. I was reactivated last week when I received the information about the Unkar and they are expecting me to use this to report back to them on what I found. I can hotwire it into the console and we can send a message from the ship by routing it through this. The communication link is still intact, we just need to alter the address.”
Jim appeared at their side with a full toolbox and a curious expression.
“Like I said,” Walter continued. “Not legal.”
“Definitely not,” Barbara agreed. “But that sounds like it should work.”
Around an hour later, with all the innards of the computer on full display after Walter and Jim had disassembled it and put it back together, the three of them were gathered around the console with Barbara front and center. She was the highest-ranking officer on the ship, it made the most sense for them to use her credentials to make the call. The other two were sitting just behind her on either side, Walt in his human form again and both sitting on the chairs that they’d retrieved.
“You’re sure you want to look human for this?” Barbara asked.
“I think they’ll have enough bad news to swallow for today as it is, don’t you?” Walter replied.
“Mayday, mayday, this is doctor Barbara Lake, chief medical officer of the USS Darwin . Our ship is disabled, our communications are limited, and the rest of the crew is deceased. The threat has been eliminated, but we require rescue and retrieval. There are three of us total, two crew members and one adolescent. Please respond.”
--
“This is Star Fleet Command, we read you loud and clear.”