Ensign Morton: Fury Unleashed
James
(( Arboretum Lower Level, Deck 9, USS Octavia E. Butler ))
Just out of reach, the harmonica lay still, silent… but not forgotten. The radio played softly. Not a lullaby, but a chain. For now, the entity slept, uneasy and dreaming.
Morton: ~ We don’t have any recordings from our dance special, but can you think of any commonalities between what we did then, and what happened now? Anything that might direct us in our next steps? ~
She didn’t know how long the silence lasted. Only that the storm had passed, for now, and what remained was a ship full of broken things. Broken furniture. Broken bodies. And a mind not quite put back together.
But they were alive. The infection had receded. The crew were themselves again. That mattered more than anything.
Around her, repair crews were mobilising, tricorders chirping softly like crickets after thunder. Her roots curled away from EPS junctions and conduits, relinquishing control she never asked for but had held too tightly. There was relief in that. Shared burden, at last. But also loss. Every retreat made her feel smaller. More Vala. Less ship.
She was no longer the vessel. Not the voice in the walls. Just one frightened science officer lying on a blood-warm carpet, listening to a radio whisper its soft tune. And yet… She had faced it. Fought it. Held the line.
She'd found a weapon in an impossible place, a song in the dark. And now, maybe, they had something real to build on. A pattern. A key. A way to fight back that didn’t require fire or fists.
Woolheater: MMMM-mmmmm…..NNN-nnnn. Nuh-uh…..cowmon.
During the fight for control of her mind, Vala had patchy awareness of what was going on around her. She’d been hurt badly and was trying to mask her own pain, get to drips with the current situation in the arboretum and beyond and think of a way to really take a final blow to the entity, before it got back up and delivered one to her. She’d won the battle, at a high price and the war waged on. Around the arboretum, many of the trees and flowers lost their flowers and leaves. Winter was coming and she needed to conserve as much energy as possible for the last battle. Lying on the floor of the farmhouse, her eyes drifted closed.
Nilsen: And I’ll be your nurse this evening.
Woolheater: ::thanks!:: Hey! No sleeping! Lieutenant! Ay!? C’mon…your patient doctor. She is not out of the woods.
Nilsen: o0 Ay. (beat) I miss him, so glad he's back from that Borg universe, we had the best time when we were cadets, he was so cute, there was this one time…hey, stop listening! 0o
Her eyes flew open as the radio seemed to turn up in volume just a notch.
Morton: ~ Huh !? Did you say something? ~
She turned her head, slowly. Her breathing became more shallow as her eyes reached… the spot. She gasped audibly as she caught sight of it - still there! How long had she nodded off for? A fresh sense of terror filled her. What if the entity had risen to kill her while she napped? She would doom them all over again. Meanwhile, at the base of her roots, Dr Nis was trying to guide Sam to save her life.
Nis: Ensign? Sorry, we-- :: shaking her head :: Okay, you got the ulnar vein. Now any other big bleeders. Find anything that’s weeping. Uh huh, that one. Now switch the regenerator to dermis. With this much skin loss, this will hurt us, Ensign. If we scream, please just keep doing it.
Woolheater: If we scream. Girl…every monster movie needs a screamer. We already had the monsters…now its time for some screaming.
It was only now that Vala started to fully and clearly comprehend the damage she had caused. To understand her friends had nearly died, and it was all her fault. The branches of her canopy creaked and sagged as though the will to hold themselves up had vanished.
Woolheater: Let it out….that’s right…it hurts like a sonofabitch…yeah…that’s right…you’re one tough customer doc.
Nilsen: Nice work, Doctor Woolheater.
Vala had no idea whether Dr Nis would pull through. Sweet doctor Nis who had been one of her first friends here on the Butler, and who had been nothing but lovely to her. This entity had made her do something unspeakable. Unforgivable. Even if everyone else eventually found a way to forgive her, she could not see how she could ever forgive herself. And that filled her with an explosive, volatile hatred for the entity. It didn’t burn hot like fire. It was cool and calculating. It hardened her soul like carbon pressed into diamonds. Well, it had made its very last mistake.
In the mindscape, Vala sat up slowly. Her eyes were glued to the entity the whole time and she barely dared to breathe lest it wake up and lunge at her. The sight of it was terrible to behold. A twisted eldrich thing no words could describe. In the real world, Woolheater was making some progress with the Doctor.
Nis: Response
Woolheater: …there you go…there you go…no problem…look at you…Vala is here...Nilsen here....you're good....you're good....mmm-hmmm…its all done…stay awake OK. No sleeping on the clock doc.
Nilsen: Hey. Jan Jane. Listen to the big guy. ::To just Sam:: How is she?
Nis: Response
Woolheater: Severe blood loss…she’s borderline shock…I need saline or something to pump in her. We need to evac the doc. :: to Nilsen:: She needs to go. To a real medic…right now.
That wasn’t an option. Vala recognised that all any of them could do was hope that some of the ‘grinners’ that had returned to their proper form were coherent and well enough to be able to lend a hand.
Nilsen: But no comms on the ship to call for someone. Right, here's the situation. The year is 2402. You have been under the control of an entity that changes people, but is blocked out by sound. My name is Lieutenant Commander Lhandon Joseph Nilsen. This is the USS Octavia E Butler. I will deal with all this when we are safe, but right now, I need you all to focus and work with me. Are any of you medics, doctors, or first aiders?
Thankfully, one volunteer put their hand up, a person in a Starfleet uniform from the 2380s.
Nilsen: Good, Nis needs help.
Vala tried to tune out some of what was happening around her for it was too painful, and it didn’t help her with her ultimate task - dealing with the entity. In the mindscape, she stepped forward on jelly legs and bent over, lifting the axe slowly, and silently, as though its mere passage through the air might cause the entity to stir. She wasn’t a vengeful person but it was hard to see any justification for all of this carnage. She didn’t believe things were 100% evil, or 100% good, but she could not see a single redeeming feature in this entity. It was really pushing her beliefs right now, and she was in a highly charged state. She wanted to make it pay for what it had made her do.
Nis: Response
Vala held the axe in a tight, two-handed grip and started to raise it when a new image arrived - bursting onto an old television set, seemingly from Lhandon and seemingly out of place. If it woke the entity up… Vala glared at it, for just a moment. She didn’t dare take her eyes off the entity, though it pained her just as much to look at it.
Nilsen: V… you seeing that? That felt like me, right?…
It had been him, or rather it had been another him. A tricorder had appeared in the mindscape. In addition, a model of the sensor dish of the OEB had also appeared next to it. Both had felt real. While Lhandon had been able to influence what he could make in this state of the mindscape, he hadn't been able to walk around; he had only been able to control the big picture and the broad strokes from up on high.
Nilsen: What's it say?
Morton: ~ We need to use the settings shown on the tricorder. Tune the dish to 0.175 hertz. It’s not something we can hear. It’s infrasound. ~
At that frequency, the sound was so deep into the infrasound category. On the farm, Vala perked up a little, to have a science hook to grab onto. She knew that even elephants, an animal famous for detecting infrasound, generally bottomed out around 14 Hz. And at such a slow vibration, one cycle every ~5.7 seconds, the “sound” was really more like a pressure oscillation than a tone. Ears weren’t designed to detect something that slow as sound.
Woolheater/Nis: Response
Nilsen: I know only half of those words, and what does he mean by that dish… is he thinking literally? I don't know, but I know that's a sound frequency, 0.175 Hz. That's really low.
Morton: ~ Oh. He means to use the deflector dish. ~
Woolheater/Nis: Response.
Lhandon set up his tricorder, and it emitted a sound. Vala felt the vibration in her roots. Not strong, but strong enough to wake the entity. It screamed in pain. In terror. And Vala was ready for it. She swung the axe down with all her might and almost cleaved it in two. The axe became firmly embedded in the wooden floor, the entity screamed and writhed but was pinned in place. Vala wished she could rip off her imaginary ears to avoid having to hear the dreadful soul-piercing sound and yet she knew there was no escaping it.
Nilsen: o0 Not now. Not now 0o.
The first warning was not a sound. It was a shiver. A subtle tightening in the air of Lhando’s farm. The colors dulled, the sky curdled from a summer blue into the shade of old milk. Somewhere, far out past the fence line, the fields began to sink. Not like soil shifting under rain, but as if the land itself had grown tired of holding together and let go. The axe vanished and the entity vanished like a puff of smoke. And was that a devious laugh she heard? It had been toying with her this whole time, hadn’t it?
Nilsen: Oh, Lhando, your timing is perfect. How many tricorders do we have?
Morton: ~ N. What’s wrong? ~
Woolheater/Nis: Response
Nilsen: It will do, V, Can we go bigger? What is something huge on this ship that could emit that sound, too? Could you use the deflector dish, maybe? ::beat:: meanwhile, I’ll ask him for help. Jan, stay with us, yeah. We gotta talk about that ops stuff in sickbay.
Nilsen: o0 Did Lhandon mean the deflector dish in the most literal sense? (beat) Sorry, 0o
Vala could see that Lhandon was confused and something was clearly wrong. Using the deflector dish was a breeze for someone so deeply rooted into the system, especially as she was well practiced at it by now. She wanted to help her friend, but wasn’t sure whether she could.
Morton: ~ L… Lhando, concentrate. I need you. We can go huge by using the deflector. I can even set everything up - you’ll just need to provide authorisation. What help do you need? ~
Woolheater/Nis/Nilsen: Response
Morton: ~ Lhando… ~
Her voice was thin in the mindscape wind, barely touching him before another shock rolled through the ground. The porch steps shuddered beneath Vala’s bare feet. The wheatfields around Lhando’s farm were collapsing in on themselves, stalks folding as though an invisible scythe had swept through. The air smelled of burning dust, hot metal, and rain that would never fall.
Lhando was shouting something she couldn’t hear. The barn was listing sideways, its red paint blistering and curling. The wind tore shingles free in sharp, snapping bursts.
And then the sky was looking at her. Not with eyes, not with anything human, but with the totality of an ancient, predatory mind. It leaned in like the shadow of a mountain passing over her soul, heat radiating in waves. Her knees almost buckled under the weight of its attention.
In reality, her roots had gone deep. Into conduits, structural beams, through the mesh of the Butler’s nervous system. The deflector dish’s skeleton was an extension of her spine, its gleaming surface curved toward the void. The frequency burned in her mind: 0.175 Hz. Too slow for ears. Too heavy for air. A note meant for stone and soil. The voice of the Earth itself. She poured herself into it.
At the farm, she pressed her palms to the boards, and the farmhouse floor felt like the bedrock of a continent. She let the power coil in her, pulled from every deep place she could reach, and sent it forward in a rolling quake. It was time to unleash the full weight of her fury and make the entity pay for all it had done, to her friends, to the crew, their ship and to countless others before. She was so locked in on controlling the deflector dish externally, and punishing the entity internally that her awareness of everything else dimmed.
The whole ship felt it. The first pulse landed like a single colossal heartbeat. The deck underfoot flexed imperceptibly, but every bone in the body knew it had moved. Loose tools jumped on workbenches. A ripple passed through the Arboretum’s pools, casting moonlike patterns on the ceiling and all the leaves and flowers shook and shivered.
The first pulse shivered up through the deck, faint but insistent, like a plucked string buried deep in the ship’s bones. It rolled outward in all directions, carrying a weight you couldn’t hear but could feel in your teeth.
Woolheater/Nis/Nilsen: Response
At the farm, the Entity staggered. It wasn’t much. Just the faintest recoil, but it was enough to split the blackened sky with a hairline crack of pale light. Her shape was shifting now. Bark and rock rippling up her limbs, her shoulders lifting into mountain peaks. Roots burst through the porch planks, plunging deep into the soil that was and wasn’t real.
The second blast came like a landslide in slow motion. A low vibration rumbled through the ship, up through the soles of boots, into calves, into the meat of the spine. Console displays jittered and steadied, the light from them smeared by the subtle shake. Glass trembled in its frames. The trees in the Arboretum swayed without wind. Somewhere overhead, the ducting groaned like a ship straining under pressure it was never meant to feel.
Woolheater/Nis/Nilsen: Response
She was the ridgeline now. Her voice the quake, her body the rock. The barn split down the middle, beams snapping like bones. The crack in the sky widened, and through it she saw the void beyond. Not the void of space, but a deeper one, a place where the Entity’s body waited. The shadow shrieked - not in sound, but in the grinding discord of its will meeting hers and losing.
The third pulse detonated like a tectonic plate breaking free. The Arboretum’s glass walls hummed in sympathy, leaves tearing free from branches in sudden showers. Soil shifted underfoot. The deep bass of it rattled teeth, pressed in on eyes, and set hearts pounding in its rhythm.
And then - silence. The air lightened. The oppressive heat was gone. Every readout blinked green, stable. The background static in the skull - that constant, maddening itch - was simply… absent.
Woolheater/Nis/Nilsen: Response
The Entity was folding in on itself, a collapsing star of shadow and malice. She felt it rip free of her mind. Roots it had driven deep tearing loose with satisfying violence. Fragments spun backward into that other place, into the prison it had once escaped. She pushed with everything she had left, a final surge that slammed the door behind it.
The land stilled. The farmhouse stood whole again. The wheatfields rolled green and unbroken to the horizon.
In the quiet aftershock, Vala could feel the Butler breathe. The text-based signal she sent to the shuttles came at the same time she addressed her team. The message was clear - the Entity was gone, reduced to a shadow of itself, ready to be bound again.
Morton: ~ It’s over. The entity is gone. Off the ship, out of my mind and bound in prison. ~
She allowed a moment for that to sink in. She needed a moment to allow it to sink in and to take stock of where everything and everyone was at.
Woolheater/Nis/Nilsen: Response
Ensign Vala Morton
USS Octavia E Butler NCC-82850
O240205VM3