A Night in the Desert

Posted on 21 Feb 2014 @ 12:37am by Lieutenant Teth Miir

2,298 words; about a 11 minute read

Mission: Episode 05 - Solstice
Location: Vulcan, T'vera Park & Wildlife Preserve
Timeline: MD 28, 0200

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After laying sleepless in his tent all day, Teth managed to somehow fall asleep just before dusk. He slept int the very early morning hours. Though this gave him significantly less time than he thought he would have, he was not deterred. He unpacked his case and removed the tricorder and collapsible spade he had purchased in the town.

Tricorder beeping in hand he paced the area surrounding his campsite, searching for a cavity somewhere within six meters from ground level. After pacing and half asleep cursing, he finally found it, it's surface wall just under two meters from the surface, just to the left of his tent.

He broke into the baked red soil. Though it was quite compacted, he managed to displace soil with relative ease. At least for the first half hour. The following half hour was agonizing. He stopped for a while after that. In spite of his late arrival, he felt he was making good timing with the dig.

"You returned to the scene of the crime."

Teth froze in place at the sound of the voice. He recognized it immediately, like a sharp electrical pulse.

"I wouldn't really call it a crime." the caitian replied, not moving from his spot. Crouched near the hole, spade in hand.

"You could rationalize anything to yourself, Teth. That's what I liked about you. You genuinely wanted to be good, but you were so easily persuaded."

Slowly, Teth stood up, trembling and doing his best not to vomit. Just the sound cause a frantic drowning feeling. He struggled to breathe again, he managed to inhale and speak.

"I think we both know what's at the bottom of this hole. So who are you?"

"I'm probably some of that faulty Borg wiring of yours. Have you stopped whining about that yet? You never used to shut up about it before. That was always the problem with kids your age, so depressed and moody and suspicious."

"This isn't funny," he said pulling the low power phase pistol from his waist and slowly turning around, trying to find the other man. For some reason he couldn't tell which direction the sound was coming from. It was a sensation he found very disorienting.

And he couldn't find him.

"You know you won't find anyone."

"You're just a hallucination." Teth said, mostly trying to convince himself.

"Maybe. Probably not. Because some part of me will live on in you forever."

"Please stop speaking to me. Especially if you're going to offer platitudes." the Caitian demanded as he climbed back into the hole, starting to dig again. Hoping it could be that simple.

"It's not that easy to make me go away. Besides, you really don't want me to. You do wish I was standing right there next to you. We could go find a place to snuggle up for the night."

Digging as quickly as he could, the caitian was starting to become winded.

"No, actually, it will be very easy."

His spade hit something hard and smooth, he brushed sand away and it uncovered a curved surface. This was the time to be especially delicate.

"So what's your plan? Dig it up, crush it to pieces with the shovel and disintegrate it with that weak phaser? You were always awful with modifying even simple interfaces. You think your plan will work? Or do you just want to get caught? Then everyone will know where I vanished to."

Teth shook his head as he uncovered more.

"If you're just going to destroy it, why are you being so careful?

"Because I have to get all of it."

Teth worked quickly after that and had soon uncovered the head and upper torso, the legs would easily follow. The body was stained a fiery red from Vulcan's mineral rich soil. To the counselor's surprise, much of it was preserved. It was more in a mummy state than just skeletal remains. He hoped the remaining dry tissue would make it more combustible.

"So you're just going to lie to everyone about this for the rest of your life."

"I don't know." Teth said and he started trying to pull the mummy loose.

"I just don't see how drudging up ancient history would help anyone.

"Especially you, though. You just met that nice young Caitian lady, she's crazy about you. She knew you for a day and let you take her virginity? You must have become a lot more charming since we were together last. I wonder what she would think if she knew about us?"

Using the flashlight on the tricorder he purchased, he looked over the body. What were in life, very faint Romulan cranial creases had become increasingly apparent in death. Though the ears had shriveled away and fallen off, the tell-tale feature was still there.

And so is the necklace that had been around his neck that night. An ultra-strong tritanium chord, forever suspended on it, a gold ring. Teth tried to carefully removed the necklace from the body, but failed. The skull rolled off and into his lap. He gasped and stuffed the necklace into his pocket. He threw the skull to the side of the hole. He couldn't look at it, he had held the thing and suddenly everything became real.

Until this point, Teth had remained quietly dissociated from reality, his conscience had receded deep into his mind and was only vaguely aware of the fact that he was exhuming a corpse in the cover of darkness on an alien world. He pushed himself onto the edge of the hole and covered his mouth as he dry heaved, but managed to avoid losing the protein bar he'd had earlier.

"I guess you remembered that that was a person. It isn't so easy to just crush it to pieces and burn it. You couldn't even look at that head, how are you going to feel when you have to smash it apart? That's another thing I always liked about you, Teth. You were always weak and malleable. Easily frightened."

"Really, that's funny, I seem to remember you taking an iron lamp to the head."

With that remark he finally worked up the urge to look at the head. He went to the other side of the pit and picked it up. It had been repaired, but he wanted to know if there was a scar in the bone where he fractured his eye socket. But it was difficult to tell through the skin.

"Why did it have to come to this? Weren't you happy with me? Why did anything ever have to change?"

Teth sighed and picked the spade back up.

"If you're asking that, you obviously didn't know me at the time."

Then with a swift swing and an audible "whack" he cracked the skull with it's blade. It fractured into three large pieces and dozens of tiny ones. Many loose teeth on the ground, he gathered those as well and put them in his pocket before taking a moment to remove the rest of them. He knew they wouldn't burn easily and decided to save time and dispose of them elsewhere.

The rest of him was pulled from the ground. The next hour was spent breaking more bone into small fragments. He managed to push himself back into a dissociative state. His mind felt heavy and warm and he felt as if he were watching someone else entirely start to disassemble the microsuture device from his first aid kit. There was a special modulator and a transparent aluminum-alloy lens.


He had never had strong engineering skills. He went through survival training tailored for medics when he was in the academy. There he learned many creative and unusual ways to start a fire. One of the easiest and hottest burning involved modifying a phaser with components from various wound knitting devices.

"Look at you. Doing something more useful than talking about feelings and looking cute. You never were good at much else. Even the sex was mediocre at best. You just kept crying like a little girl. In fact, you reminded me a lot of a little girl. My sister specifically, well, a cross between her and my beloved pet denobulan-domestic kitten. And you would do whatever I wanted. What more could I have asked for?."

"Please be quiet."

He scanned the area for stray organic material matching the sample of a finger he had scanned into the device. There were sporadic chips in the dirt that he picked up and gathered into the hole along with the rest of it.

He tapped a code into the phaser before setting it inside the hole with the bone fragments. he had gathered the remaining scraps of clothing from the body and scattered pieces throughout, hoping the synthetic fabric would help the fire accelerate.

It began with a low red glow but quickly turned into a roaring fire that smelled worse than anything he could have imagined. Burning plastic and the scent of charred bone, distinctive in it's own right. All he had to do now was wait as the smoke washed over him. So he got on his hands and knees and vomited before rolling onto his back and staring at the unfamiliar sky. Rocks were digging into his back and the skin on his arms, but he didn't feel inclined to move. Just living with the pain felt more tolerable at the time.

"I wish i could be there next to you."

"I know." Teth replied emotionlessley to the disembodied voice he had manifested on that bright desert night. He kept near the flames, counting disappearing stars in the purple sky. The sun would rise soon and the fire would die.

"Don't you ever miss me, Teth? Was I really all that awful?"

"I do miss you. From when I thought you were a friend, in the beginning. When I used to look up to you. Before I found out who you really were."

His phaser was destroyed and the pit was filled with mostly ash. Any remaining fragments could quickly disintegrate into the soil. Koran would be gone forever. And Teth Miir was just a distant obstacle in his dead past.

He filled in the hole and packed his tent at the sun first crested the horizon. With his belongings all gathered and strapped to his back. He stared at the filled hole for a hard minute. For the last time. He turned his back to it and began walking through the desert.

"I don't think I'll be with you much longer."

"I thought you went away." Teth mumbled as he tried to readjust his pack.

"You won't have to deal with me. But why did you buy the knife? It looks just like the one the paramedics had to remove from your throat."

"I was feeling nostalgic."

The farther from the sight Teth walked, exhausted and delirious, the weaker the presence of the other man became. According to his tricorder there was a city ten kilometers ahead. He had most of his water left and was sure he could make it there withing three hours.


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It was the middle of the day when Teth arrived in the Vulcan city of L'tel, looking a great deal like the undead, covered in dirt and ash. He had scattered the teeth across ten kilometers of desert, not that anyone would know to look for them. It had been over an hour since his last audial hallucination.

There were citizens going about their daily business, milling through the streets and climbing into tall buildings. All of them intentionally ignoring the large, disheveled, black fur covered bipedal feline. He was sure there was some logical reason that they kept turning away and avoiding eye contact.

After wandering he managed to find a small soup kitchen on the corner of a busy street. He entered and ordered a bowl of plomeek soup using the external credit chip attached to an alias identity. Someone burnt a corpse in the desert last night, but it wasn't Teth Miir. He never left the Martian colony.

Next door to the kitchen was a general goods store. It had a selection of clothing for sale. He figured he would be better off to dispose of the clothes he wore that night entirely. After not very much thought he selected a new outfit. A dark gray robe, the Vulcan symbols for "unity" written up the lapel. A beige silky undercoat, a long, mauve covered scarf, and a pair of short brown boots.

The shopkeeper just stared at him with silent disdain as he donned the new clothing and disposed of the old, ash covered ones in a replicator. He strung the necklace around his neck, the weight of the ring felt unnaturally heavy.

"Have a nice day." he waved as he exited. For his entire time in both the kitchen and the shop, he managed to not exchange words with a single person. Though this was typical of his interactions with Vulcan locals, he couldn't help but feel especially nervous about it this time.

He felt like they were telepathically reaching out to him. The stench of what he had done must be palpable. But he knew it didn't matter. Six years after Koran's death, he knew it was finally time to stop being a victim. He was finally gone, save a few teeth that blend in with the millions of white pebbles on the desert floor.

Teth stepped into the street and wrapped his head in the scarf, obscuring his face. He kept his tail curled under his robe and he made his way to the nearest shuttleport. He needed to get home and forget that any of it ever happened.

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