Chapter 30: Skin of Evil — Part 2
[Vagra II — Surface — 2364, Day 120]
The energy was alive and it hated him.
Not the clean, directed discharge of a phaser—that was mechanics, physics, energy following predictable pathways through understood systems. Armus's attack was something else. Something sentient. A concentrated assault of psychic malevolence that crashed into Cole's body and immediately began disassembling his nervous system with the methodical cruelty of a torturer who had eternity to work.
Cole's absorption activated. Instinctive—the same reflexive response that had caught Lore's phaser bolt, but operating at a scale that made the Datalore incident feel like catching a ball. The energy flooded his perception, his neural pathways, his cells, pouring through the channels he'd carved through weeks of training and overwhelming them the way a river overwhelms a garden hose.
He screamed.
The sound was involuntary—ripped from his throat by the sheer volume of agony. The energy wasn't just destructive; it was emotional. Armus had been created from the discarded negative emotions of an entire civilization, and every fraction of that psychic sewage was now flowing through Cole's body. Hatred. Despair. Loneliness so profound it felt like drowning. Self-loathing that twisted his perception until he couldn't distinguish his own thoughts from the entity's poisoned consciousness.
You are nothing. You were always nothing. A dead man in a stolen body, pretending to be alive—
His knees hit the black sand. His hands hit the ground. The absorbed energy crackled across his skin—black and amber, the colors of Armus's essence warring with the golden light of Cole's own projection, the two forces meeting and reacting like matter and antimatter.
"Unexpected." Armus's voice cut through the agony. Curious. Amused. "You taste... different."
Cole's vision fractured. The world split into overlapping layers—the physical reality of Vagra II's dead surface, the psychic landscape of Armus's consciousness, and the internal architecture of his own body fighting to survive an assault it was never designed to withstand.
Hold it. The Traveler's teaching. Thought becomes energy. Energy becomes thought. You exist on that spectrum. You choose what the energy becomes.
He tried to hold it. The absorption pathways screamed—designed for phaser fire, tested on controlled discharges, now being asked to process an alien psychic assault that operated on frequencies his training had never prepared him for. The energy didn't want to be absorbed. It wanted to destroy. It pushed back against his containment with the malicious intelligence of a living weapon.
Around him, the away team was shouting. Riker's voice—commands, orders, the instinctive response of a first officer watching a crewman die. Data's voice—readings, analysis, the calm precision of a being processing catastrophe as data. Tasha's voice—
Tasha's voice was screaming his name.
She's alive. She's alive. The blast didn't hit her. She's alive.
The knowledge was an anchor. Cole grabbed it and held on the way he'd held Data's hand in the maintenance bay—the way he'd held Tasha's hand in the observation lounge. The only fixed points in a universe that was trying to tear itself apart inside his chest.
The energy pushed. Cole pushed back. Not absorption now—conversion. The Traveler's teaching at its most fundamental: thought and energy exist on a spectrum. Change one, change the other. Cole reached for the hatred flowing through him and thought at it—not words, not images, but the raw conceptual force of a consciousness that had survived transmigration, that had rebuilt itself from nothing, that had learned to love people it was never supposed to meet.
You are despair. I am will. Let's see which one bends.
The energy resisted. Armus was ancient—millennia of concentrated malevolence, the psychic waste product of a civilization advanced enough to strip its own darkness and leave it behind. Cole was three months old in this body, with training measured in weeks and abilities measured in experimental thresholds.
But Cole had something Armus didn't: purpose. Specific, immediate, visceral purpose. Not abstract goodness or philosophical resolve—the concrete, physical, burning need to protect one woman's life. The need was a lens, and the lens focused his will, and his will focused the energy, and the energy began—slowly, agonizingly, increment by increment—to change.
The black-amber light on his skin shifted. The amber grew. The black receded. Not gone—not defeated—but being processed, converted from psychic poison into raw thermal energy that Cole's body could handle. Could barely handle. The conversion was imperfect, lossy, like translating poetry into mathematics—the structure survived but the meaning was destroyed.
Cole gathered the converted energy—the thermal output of processed despair, meaningless heat stripped of its malevolent intelligence—and pushed it outward.
The projection erupted from both hands. Not the controlled stream he'd practiced in the cargo bay. A raw, desperate detonation of force that hit the ground between him and Armus and exploded. Black sand became glass. The air superheated. A shockwave of thermal force radiated outward, throwing Cole backward, throwing the away team off their feet, and—for the first time in millennia—making Armus flinch.
The entity recoiled. Not in pain—Armus existed beyond physical harm. In surprise. Something had taken its energy, processed it, and thrown it back as something else. Something Armus hadn't experienced since the civilization that created it had left it on this dead world.
Cole hit the sand three meters from where he'd been kneeling. His body registered the impact as a secondary concern—the primary concern being that his nervous system was shorting out, his vision was dark at the edges and closing, his heart was beating in a rhythm that no medical textbook would recognize as compatible with life.
His hands were black. Not burned—stained. Armus's energy, the fraction he hadn't been able to convert, had settled into his skin like ink into paper. The darkness pulsed faintly—alive, residual, a trace of the entity's consciousness embedded in his cellular structure.
"Fascinating." Armus's voice was different now. Not amused—interested. The distinction was terrifying. "You converted my essence. Imperfectly. Painfully. But you converted it. No one has ever done that." The entity's shape leaned toward him. "What are you?"
Cole couldn't answer. His mouth wouldn't work. His lungs were burning, his diaphragm spasming, his body shutting down nonessential functions in a desperate attempt to keep his heart beating and his brain oxygenated.
Tasha was there. On her knees beside him, her hands on his chest, her face filling his collapsing field of vision. Her expression was—
He'd never seen that expression on Tasha Yar's face before. Not in the show, not in three months of careful observation, not in any simulation his meta-knowledge could construct. It was naked terror fused with something fiercer, something that went beyond professional concern or friendship or even the careful almost-romance they'd been building.
"He's alive." Her voice—to the team, to the communicator, to whoever was listening. Her fingers on his throat, finding the pulse that was barely there. "Beam him up. NOW."
"The entity is blocking transport," Data reported. His tricorder was scanning Cole with one hand while his phaser covered Armus with the other—the multitasking precision of a positronic brain operating in crisis mode. "I am attempting to recalibrate."
"Let them go."
The voice was Armus. The away team froze.
"The one who absorbed my essence." The entity's attention was fixed on Cole—the same predatory focus Lore had shown, but deeper, more fundamental. Not evaluation of a threat. Recognition of something related. "He carries a piece of me now. A small piece. But mine." A sound like laughter, or like grief. "I have not given a gift in a very long time."
The transport block dissolved. Data's recalibration wasn't necessary—Armus had simply decided to let them go.
"We will meet again," Armus said, to no one and to Cole specifically. "You and I have unfinished business."
"Enterprise, six to beam up, medical emergency!" Tasha's hand gripped Cole's uniform, holding him against the planet's surface as if she could anchor him to life through force of will. "NOW!"
The transporter beam caught them. The golden shimmer replaced the dead black sand, the bruise-colored sky, the ancient malevolence watching them leave with the patience of something that had already waited millennia and didn't mind waiting more.
---
[USS Enterprise-D — Sickbay — Day 120, 1600 Hours]
Cole's heart stopped twice during transport.
The first time, the transporter's biofilter caught the cardiac arrest and compensated—the beam's pattern buffer maintaining cellular coherence while the molecular reconstruction rebuilt a heartbeat that had deteriorated past the point of natural function.
The second time, he was on the biobed and Crusher's hands were already moving—the neural stimulator against his chest, the cortical monitor showing brain activity that looked like a lightning storm in a bottle, the cardiac regulator forcing rhythm into a heart that had forgotten how to keep time.
"His neural pathways are saturated with an unknown energy signature." Crusher's voice was professional. Clinical. The voice she used when the patient was critical and emotion was a luxury she couldn't afford. "It's not radiation, not psionic residue—it's something else. Something his body is actively trying to metabolize."
"The Armus entity's essence." Data stood beside the biobed, his own tricorder running continuous scans. "Lieutenant Coleman absorbed a directed psychic assault and partially converted the energy before redirecting it. The residual signature is consistent with incomplete conversion—fragments of the entity's consciousness embedded in his cellular structure."
"His body temperature is 41.2 degrees. His white blood cell count is triple normal." Crusher worked as she spoke—dermal regenerators, neural stabilizers, a cocktail of medications that represented the best twenty-fourth-century medicine could offer for a condition that twenty-fourth-century medicine had never encountered. "Whatever he absorbed, his system is treating it like an infection. Fighting it."
"Will he survive?" Tasha's voice. From the doorway. Cole couldn't see her—his eyes were open but his vision was a blur of sickbay lights and moving shapes—but he knew her voice the way he knew his own heartbeat. Rough. Barely controlled. The sound of a woman operating on the razor's edge between professional composure and something far more raw.
"I don't know." Crusher's honesty was brutal and necessary. "His physiology is... unusual. His body is doing things I've never seen—actively processing the alien energy, converting it, integrating it into his cellular structure. It's like watching an immune system fight a disease, except the disease is a sentient alien entity and the immune system is—"
"Something we don't have a name for." Data finished.
Cole tried to speak. His mouth formed words that his lungs couldn't power. The darkness at the edges of his vision was expanding—warm, seductive, offering the particular mercy of unconsciousness to a body that had exceeded every design parameter it possessed.
A hand found his. Small. Strong. Calloused in the specific pattern of a woman who'd spent her life gripping weapons and had recently learned to grip something gentler.
Tasha.
He squeezed. The effort cost him everything he had left. His fingers closed around hers—weak, trembling, barely perceptible—but present. I'm here. I'm alive. You're alive. That's what matters.
"Don't you dare." Tasha's voice was close. Her breath on his face. "Don't you dare leave me, Coleman. That's an order."
He wanted to laugh. Wanted to tell her that Security Chiefs couldn't give medical orders, that his rank technically exceeded her authority in this context, that the chain of command didn't apply to dying.
Instead, he held her hand and let the darkness take him. Not death—his enhanced physiology made sure of that, the same stubborn biology that ran hot and healed fast and demanded eight thousand calories a day fighting with everything it had against an alien poison that wanted to unmake him. But close enough to death that the distinction was academic.
The last thing he registered before consciousness dissolved was the pressure of Tasha's hand—constant, unyielding, the grip of a woman who'd decided to hold on and refused to let go.
And somewhere, in the deepest architecture of his altered cells, the fragment of Armus that had embedded itself in his being pulsed with a slow, alien heartbeat—dark, patient, alive.
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