Chapter

2

M alk had fully expected to live his entire life without ever seeing a twelve-meter-tall, two-meter-wide green scaly creature with yellow eyes.

Then again, he had also fully expected to live his life as a farmer on Maeglin with all the comforts of twenty-fourth-century living.

This, he thought as he stared up at the twelve-meter-tall, two-meter-wide green scaly creature with yellow eyes walking toward his farm, will teach me to have unrealistic expectations.

Things had been bad enough these last few months. Maeglin had been colonized about a hundred years earlier by a group of Tellarites who wanted to “get back to nature.” Malk had always found that bitterly amusing in light of recent events.

Maeglin was not part of the Federation, and so when the third straight year of bad crops meant that the colony was in serious trouble, they didn’t have an immediate recourse. Some advocated asking the Federation for help, but others were against that. Adding fuel to the fire was the presence of the Androssi, an alien race of technicians who offered a solution to all their problems for a very cheap price.

Ultimately, it came down to a bidding war with Starfleet, in the form of one of their vessels full of engineers, the da Vinci. The da Vinci offered a method of reenergizing the soil that would take time and mean another difficult year, but with tremendous long-term benefits, and no deleterious side effects whatsoever. The Androssi offered instant gratification, but would not let the authorities (or the da Vinci crew) examine the specifications, and they were vague about the long-term consequences.

Despite the lack of consensus, some Maegline went ahead and struck a deal with the Androssi. As a result, they had good soil again-but the equipment used to revitalize the planet’s ground also released a duonetic field into the atmosphere. Suddenly, no electronic equipment of any kind could work on the planet. Both Maegline authorities and the da Vinci tried to stop the Androssi, but to no avail.

However, the engineers on the Starfleet ship were able to retard the effects of the field, enough so that at least some equipment would work. Their crew were regarded as heroes, and they went on their way. Malk, for his part, didn’t see them as heroes. If they were real heroes, they’d have stopped the Androssi in the first place.

This all served to explain why Malk could only get his equipment to work about a quarter of the time, and why he’d been reduced to such menial and outmoded tasks as hoeing and weeding and mowing.

It did not explain why there was a twelve-meter-tall, two-meter-wide green scaly creature with yellow eyes walking toward his farm.

Then, about three meters from the farm, the creature stopped.

Malk’s nearest neighbor was named Dav. When the duonetic field first hit, Dav had dug up an old projectile weapon, saying that he, at least, would be safe. At the time Malk had thought Dav to be insane.

Right now, Malk was wishing Dav was nearby. Malk had a phaser somewhere in the farm, but phasers weren’t the most reliable weapons these days. Besides, it would take him several minutes (if not hours) to find the damn thing, and who knew what the creature could do in the meantime?

The creature started making an odd kind of noise and gesturing. Malk didn’t understand a word of it.

“Go away!” he shouted, knowing how ridiculous it sounded.

More noises and gesturing.

Again, Malk shouted, “Go away!” Then, for good measure, he added, “Get out of here!”

Still more noises and gesturing.

“Damn you, get off my farm!” Malk cried, shaking his fist.

Suddenly the creature screamed so loud that Malk’s ears rattled, and then it stomped forward, right into the farm.

Within minutes, Malk’s farm, his equipment, his possessions, his food, and everything else he kept in the structure-which was made out of a plastiform that had withstood various nasty weather conditions with nary a scratch for three generations-was shredded.

Malk couldn’t believe it. His jaw drooped from his snout. The chair his mother had given him. The clothes he had replicated. The food stores for next week’s market. The kitchen. The only-sporadically-working comm and the old-fashioned radio, either one of which he might have used to call for help. All of it was reduced to rubble by the large green thing in the space of about five minutes.

And then it stomped off-heading, Malk dimly noted, in the direction of Dav’s farm.

Maybe it’s susceptible to projectile weapons, Malk thought with little hope. If it could tear his tough old farm up, he doubted that Dav’s silly antique would have much of an effect.

Malk had thought, like most Maegline, that the day the Androssi came was the darkest day in Maeglin history. Now he had to wonder if it would have competition for that distinction.