Commander Ariele and her team cautiously entered the doors of Cargo Bay Four, where it felt hot and humid, much like the planet surface. That only compounded the fact that they were incredibly scared, and made it almost unavoidable to sweat profusely. The medical assistant moved towards the area where his superior, Dr. Centress, was last seen. He looked in horror when he realized that there was no actual body to be found, only remnants and his blood that were literally scattered throughout the cargo bay, coarsing deeply through the veins of the green vines.
“Dr. Centress is dead,” said the medical assistant, noting the nearby blood-soaked leaves that covered a huge portion of the cargo bay wall. Some of the leaves still flapped. “He’s been…absorbed.”
Ariele understood just by looking at him. “Be careful. Get your weapon ready. Something tells me we won’t have a lot of time.” She hadn’t realized it, but she was whispering as she was giving them instructions. It was impossible to tell if the aliens could hear or understand them, but this was no time to take chances. “Everyone be very quiet.”
“The colony of Annecta appears to be enveloped by some kind of biological armor, similar to the exoskeleton that we saw that protected the alien humanoids,” the medical assistant whispered. “Our phasers may not work against them.”
“The first attack should pack quite a punch,” one of the security officers said. “The tip of the warhead is equipped with a device that isolates a very tiny amount of antimatter; when the warhead hits, the antimatter is exposed and reacts with the surrounding matter. Needless to say, it has an extremely high explosive yield, high enough to penetrate even our tritanium hull. It should be effective against them, too. After an opening has been exposed, the second part of the attack will follow, which is the toxin.”
The Commander tapped her combadge. “Captain, we are getting ready to deploy the weapon in the cargo bay.”
“Understood,” Santiago replied. “You may use it when ready. We’ll be watching closely from the bridge.”
Without warning, six giant ‘arms’ from the center of the alien mass reached out to grab the officers like they had grabbed Dr. Centress, but the security officers responded quickly and began firing repeatedly at them. They couldn’t kill them by phasers alone, but the alien arms seem to squirm wildly from them, and retreated from the team when hit. Their phaser rifles were at a very high setting, and had the effect of causing seemingly painful cramping in the arms.
All of a sudden, the security officers that were firing the phasers screamed. They began to gasp desperately, and within seconds collapsed to the floor. For a few moments they were convulsing, but then laid disturbingly still. The others began to grow scared, even Commander Ariele. “What…?” she said.
The standing medical assistant who stood by immediately scanned the fallen officers. “The two have been poisoned…with some sort of paralytic agent. Whatever it was…it paralyzed their lungs…”
He turned one of them over to quickly look for sites of skin penetration, and immediately noticed two puncture marks on his neck. When he turned the other officer over, he noticed the same thing on her, too. It was as if an invisible vampire had come and…
And then the medical assistant remembered one of the species that Dr. Centress had been studying in the laboratory. “Computer, adjust lights to emit UV radiation only. Switch back to normal light after ten seconds.”
“That action is not recommen—“
“JUST DO IT!!” The room turned a very dark purple, and he immediately adjusted the settings on his tricorder. He pointed it to the other officers, and through the screen of the tricorder could see the culprit behind the attacks.
It was the invisible spiders. They were all over their uniforms. And each one was larger than the size of their hand.
