[Cavan] Protect ya neck and do the Bruce Campbell

[Lynzie Austin]

Protect Ya Neck and Do the Bruce Campbell

“You know,” he began, his voice low and incredibly earnest, “when I said you helped me lay down a weight I should never have had to carry alone... I meant that. You didn’t just help me build a new path, Ellie… you’re my home. Despite of how tonight has been—-”

Ellie felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. She really wished she had food in her stomach and not a flight of tequila shots in her. He slowly sank to one knee right there on the ballroom floor, his eyes glistening, a soft, tremulous smile on his face. He reached into his pocket.

“So, Elinor Fa Cavan,” he said, his voice clear and sure, cutting through the last of the evening’s tension. “My brilliant, terrifying, perfect Raven... Will you marry me?”

She did not say a single word, she simply took her palm and guided him up to his feet by his chin and kissed him. Ura and Brennan clapped. Ellie pressed her forehead against Reynie’s with a hint of a smile as he beamed at her. “I cannot fathom why you would do this in a crowded room,” she whispered only loud enough for him to hear. “We are going home.” 

Her stomach roiled, the absence of food was beyond noticeable and her head swam. She was not angry, however, she was completely incredulous. Walking so fast to the runner that Reynie had to jog to keep up. 

“Rave, is this a no? Are you mad?” He sounded frantic.

The doors for the runner opened with a hiss and closed behind them before Ellie could even look at him. “It was not a no,” she looked paler than normal, which was in itself a feat. Paper would be impressed. “It is also not a yes.”

Reynie ran his hands through his hair, undoing the dashing slickback he had so carefully crafted for the night. “Why? What do you mean?”

“I do not want to be proposed to in that way,” she said bluntly, her speech was slurring. “In front of a room full of people, that was horrifying.”

“I—-” he stopped himself. “You wouldn’t at all.”

“In uncomfortable shoes?”

“And these shoes,” he agreed. “And babe, what have you been drinking? You smell like—”

“Tequila, I have not eaten!” She threw herself on the sofa, the dress splayed out around her. “I am hammered and I just tore your mother a new asshole.”

“Babydoll,” he slid in next to her. A bright sympathetic smile grew across his face. “That’s the girl I want to marry.” 

She gave him an appraising look, the alcohol demon had clearly had a full claim on her now. “I have not said yes.”

“You have not said no either,” Reynie pulled her in closer. “So, what does that mean, my love?”

“That you are going to have to ask me right,” she curled into him, closing her eyes. 

He let out a chuckle. He pulled the medal from around his neck and placed it on the table, feeling the weight of her getting heavier as she began to slump into sleep still dressed for the party. 

With another laugh, he scooped her up and carried her to bed. Taking care to pull her uncomfortable shoes off, hurling them back into the recesses of the closet where they belonged, taking her jewelry and putting them back into the little boxes so she would not lose them as she was prone to do. He started unbuttoning the cuffs on his shirt with a soft sigh.

“Reynie,” she whispered in her sleep. Her face embedded in her pillow. “I love you and does wants some time forever.”

“I does want some time forever too, my Raven,” he leaned over and kissed her hair. “Next time when you’re not three sheets to the wind.”

“I is not,” she began loudly snoring. 

“Obviously not, I wouldn’t dream of insinuating such a thing,” Reynie said to the cat who looked at them both like they were crazy. 

The smell of slightly-burnt toast and fresh coffee coaxed Ellie from the depths of a deep, dreamless sleep. She blinked, the morning light filtering through the trees outside their window. For a glorious moment, there was no Starfleet, no medals, no terrifying parents. There was only the quiet hum of the forest and the weight of a real quilt.

The bedroom door creaked open. Reynie stood silhouetted in the doorway, holding a tray. He was wearing his ratty old sweatpants and a black band t-shirt, his hair a glorious, uncombed mess. The sight was infinitely better than any man in a tuxedo.

“Don’t get up,” he whispered, his voice rough still shedding off the last vestiges of sleep. “You have officially been served breakfast in bed by a Star Cross recipient. Try not to be too intimidated by the prestige.”

He placed the tray across her lap. It held a cup of black coffee, a glass of water, two pieces of toast (one decidedly charred), a small bowl of fruit he had clearly chopped himself, and two painkillers.

“The whole food pyramid,”  Ellie noted, her voice still thick with sleep. She picked up a good piece of toast. “You spoil me.” 

“Only the best for my future wife,” he let out a little yawn, getting back into the bed careful to not jostle anything. 

Her face turned seven shades of pink. Clearly, she had missed something. The pounding in her head was a clear indicator that she had missed something important. She remembered a lot, but clearly not everything. 

Ellie picked the aspirin and the water, her hands trembling. She was not wearing a ring. That was the start of her deductive reasoning. But, he said wife. He said future wife. She blinked trying to recall, there was Reynie on his knee with the Star Cross around his neck… 

Son of a… 

Ura and Brennan were clapping.  A cold dread washed over her, colder than any morgue drawer. Had she said yes? In her tequila-soaked, righteous fury, had she just agreed to marry him in a crowded ballroom, the one scenario she would have hated most in the universe?

She took the aspirin, the water doing little to wash down the sudden lump of panic in her throat. He looked over at her, his expression soft and happy, completely oblivious to the internal crisis unfolding beside him. 

An alert sounded from the wall panel. Far too loud for Ellie’s liking at this moment. It sounded like it was trying to blare directly into her skull with a sledgehammer. 

“Computer, uh answer it,” she winced in pain, holding her head. 

“That’s not how it works, Angel,” Reynie kissed her temple. “Computer, Secure Line Reynard Alpha Foxtrot Whiskey Delta One, Go for Cavan and Reynard, Admiral.” 

“Hate to be cutting into the wedding planning,” Brennan said beaming at the two of them. “Oh by the Prophets, Raven, you look like you drank the worm last night. Get your fiance some castor oil and a raw egg, Aralim. That’ll fix her right up.”

“Here I thought you were a pickle juice man,” Reynie said with a hearty laugh.

“Not after that we did re-con outside Barisa Prime and you threw up that concoction Quartermaster Gibbons made… smelled like pickles and cheese for six weeks in my ready room,” Brennan shivered. 

Ellie held her stomach. “You called for a reason Nikolai? Not just to make my stomach flip?” 

“Right, right,” Brennan nodded, returning to business mode. “I got a job that slid across my desk last night. A deep-space research vessel, the SS Campbell. They were studying a newly discovered, non-humanoid ruin on a planetoid in the Beta Stromgren sector. They stopped responding. A patrol ship found it... perfectly intact. Life support, systems, all online.”

“The crew of forty-five is... still at their posts. But they're gone, Raven. No life signs. The initial scout team reported everything looked normal, until they realized no one was breathing,” Brennan added solemnly. “There’s a bunch of odd things as well.”

“What kind of odd things?” Ellie asked, holding onto her coffee mug like it would brace her for anything and causing the hangover to recede into the background.

“No one has fingerprints,” Brennan put his forehead in his hand for a brief moment. “Not a single one. Smooth as glass. And the med-scanner showed all their dental records were wrong. No fillings, no unique wear patterns. It's like someone replaced the entire crew with... idealized mannequins.”

“The transporter is known to remove them— fingerprints that is,” Reynie chimed in, stroking his chin in thought. 

“It gets weirder. The initial bio-scan picked up a single, 'pristine' human DNA sequence. The techs thought it was a glitch until they realized... It's the same sequence. Repeating for every single person on that ship,” Brennan replied. 

Ellie sipped her coffee for a brief moment and put it on the tray. “Perhaps they were replicated? But why would anything want perfect replicas?” She began muttering under her breath about how something could try to improve the DNA sequence. 

“Starfleet Engineering is having a meltdown, need you both to go out there and have a look,” Brennan concluded. “Give us a report on what or why something or someone would try to do something like that, before they dismantle everything. Need a perspective that isn’t chickens falling from the sky. Brennan out.”

“Heard Admiral,” Reynie gave him a salute and shut the monitor off. 

Ellie finally looked at him, her green eyes finally free of the fog. “Ten minutes. My standard field kit. I will need the portable sequencer and the quantum-lattice scanner.” She pulled herself out of bed with a renewed sense of self. Even if her head still disagreed. As she moved towards the closet to change, she paused, glancing back at him. The personal and the professional collided for a single second.

“And Reynie?” she said, her low and serious. “We are not using that transporter. Or any other transporter between here and there.”

A grim smile touched his lips. “Not a chance in hell, Raven. I’ll call down to the pad and have them pre-flight the Runner. Some mysteries are best investigated from a safe, familiar distance.” Their personal runner was dismally old, fairly unglamorous, and smelled faintly of old coffee, but every circuit in it was known and trusted… and probably rusted.

Reynie tapped his commbadge. “Reynie to Starfleet Logistics, prep our Runner for an extended forensics run, priority one. And someone needs to come up to the cabin and cat-sit. Yes, again. Just keep him in treats and don’t let him on the console.”

From his perch on the sun-drenched windowsill, Cathulu let out a slow, unimpressed blink, as if he understood every word and found their mission profoundly beneath him.

Fifteen minutes later, they were striding across the landing pad towards their waiting ship, duffels in hand. The older, boxy runner, its hull scuffed from a dozen rough landings on alien worlds. Their real home.  Reynie slapped the hull affectionately. “Ready to go poke the universe’s most pedantic murderer, my love?”

“As ever,” she nodded as the hatch opened. “No rest for the wicked. Here we go again.” 

The sky faded behind them into stars as the runner pulled into the atmosphere leaving Terra firma far behind. Ellie poured over the files, pulling her hair into a bun and muttering to herself while Reynie punched in the co-ordinates with Starfleet Command. “It’s only a quick little jaunt,” he announced from the pilot’s seat. “We’re cleared for warp 5, evidently there’s a lot of nearby congestion, but we shouldn’t notice it at all with the course that I plotted and it’ll take two hours.” 

“That is good news,” she replied without looking up from her PADD. No one had left their stations. Everyone had placid, vacant expressions on their faces. Almost like mannequins in a shop. Ellie scribbled in her notes. 

Reynie watched her with a sparkle in his eye, occasionally bringing her water and coffee, brushing a stray hair back from her forehead and placing it back into her bun with a kiss before returning to the pilot’s seat. “Approaching the Campbell’s coordinates, doll,” he announced with a transatlantic accent. “The temperature is a balmy 74 degrees, according to the sensor readings and also, Starfleet notes that they didn’t move and I quote ‘a damned thing, that’s you Ghouls’ job’. End quote. So, it should smell fantastic in there.” 

“Love them for that,” Ellie grimaced. 

“It was really thoughtful,” Reynie nodded in agreement. “What was that body count again?”

“Forty-five.”

“Excellent,” he said with sarcastic enthusiasm. “Maybe they hung one of those little pine tree air fresheners on one of our dead guys for us.”

“I would take that contamination for that consideration… but I doubt it.”

Reynie let out a heavy sigh. “Bringing us in to dock with the Campbell, plug your nose, baby.” 

The Runner connected with the Campbell’s airlock with a series of solid, metallic clunks and a hiss of equalizing pressure. The familiar sounds did nothing to dispel the profound silence emanating from the other side of the hatch.

Reynie stood, phaser on his hip and a heavy-duty flashlight in hand. He looked at Ellie, all traces of humor gone from his face. He seemed profoundly worried. A gear had shifted in him. 

“Scanners show the atmosphere is breathable. No pathogens, no toxins,” he reported. “Just… really frickin’ quiet.”

Ellie nodded, hefting her forensic kit. She activated her tricorder, the low hum a comforting sound in the eerie stillness. “I guess we will go then.”

Reynie entered the override code. The airlock door to the Campbell slid open with a squeal of metal. There was no smell of decay. No stench of death. That was the first, most wrong thing. The air was sterile, recycled, and cold. The second was the light; the emergency lights were on, casting long, dramatic shadows down the empty corridor.

And the third was the body.

A young ensign was slumped over a science station just a few meters from the airlock, one hand still resting on the console as if he had simply fallen asleep. His skin was waxy and pale, his eyes open and vacant. He was, as Brennan had said, perfect. And utterly, completely dead.

Reynie shone his light down the corridor. In the distance, another crew member was visible, and collapsed near a junction.

“Right,” Reynie interrupted the silence. “We stick together. No heroic solo investigations, no ‘you check that deck, I’ll check this one.’ We stick together as a unit.”

“Agreed,” Ellie said, her attention already locked on the ensign. She moved forward, tricorder whirring. She did not touch the body, instead circling it slowly, the device held out like a divining rod. “No visible cause of death. No lividity, no rigor. It is as if his body just... stopped.” She leaned closer, her brow furrowing. “The epidermal ridges are completely smooth.”

Reynie kept his back to her, his hand on the hilt of his phaser. “So our killer is fastidious. And has a thing against unique identifiers.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Any chance he just... polished them off?”

“Not unless he had a microscopic sander and an obsession with dermatology,” Ellie replied, her tone dry as bone. She tapped her tricorder. “I am getting that same, single DNA reading Brennan mentioned. It is much like a factory reset.” She straightened up, turning toward the wall to see the deck listing. “We need to find the main lab. Where they were testing the replicator. The answer to 'how' is there.”

“By your side,” Reynie said, falling into step beside her, his flashlight beam cutting a path through the unnerving stillness. “I’ll keep the spooks off your back, babe, while you do science.” 

“Much appreciated, but I do not think they are going to start bumbling around.”

“See when you say those things out loud,” Reynie put his arm around her. “That’s exactly when those things happen.”

“You are asking for zombies then?” Ellie side-eyed at him skeptically as she ran her tricorder scans. 

“They’re coming to get you Elinor,” he kissed her cheek before returning his hand to the handle of his phaser. 

“Stop it you are being ignorant,” Ellie played along for a moment. She stopped at a door that was slightly ajar. Her tricorder whirred, its pitch shifting.

“Readings are different here,” she murmured, all traces of humor gone. “Massive power residue. High concentrations of Nadion particles. This has to be the main lab.”

Reynie gently moved her aside with an allow me gesture, raising his phaser. With his foot, he carefully pushed the door into the recess in the wall. 

The lab was a disaster, but a strange, organized one. Consoles were dark, but a central platform—the replication stage—glowed with a faint, eerie, internal light. And seated in a chair before it, perfectly poised, was a woman in a science officer's uniform. Unlike the others, her head was tilted, her eyes wide, as if she had been watching something unfold right up until the very last second.

“That must be Dr. Aris,” Ellie said, consulting the crew manifest on her PADD. “The project lead.”

Reynie swept the room with his light and phaser. “Clear— all things considered,” he gave a half-shrug. Posting himself in the door as sentry so Ellie could inspect the body without interference. 

However, she did not go to the body. Her eyes were locked on the replication stage. On it, hovering in a stasis field, was a single, perfect, red apple.

“Reynie,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “Look.”

He followed her gaze. The apple was flawless. Too flawless. Its skin was a uniform, deep crimson without a single blemish or variation. It looked more like a plastic prop than a piece of fruit.

Ellie scanned it. Her blood ran cold.

“I do not want to sound alarmist…” She inhaled slowly and turned her tricorder to face him.  All the blood drained from her face. “But this apple has the same DNA matrix as the crew… It seems that they were not trying to make some kind of replicator— but some kind of universal matrix before it went haywire—” 

She swallowed hard. “And it is trying to replace everything.”

{. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RurifG1Lh0M }