Episode 31: "The Angel is calling..."

The eyes. Captain McMillan would never forget the eyes of the statue, even though he only ever saw the back of it. But the image that it had caused in his mind had been so much stronger than he'd ever realised. It was threatening to take him over, to speak through him. It was killing him, slowly. If nothing were to happen, he and Commander Fearguis would soon be the latest in a long line of accidental victims of this entity. . . this Angel. For it was calling. . . calling out to them.

A few hours earlier...

A ship leaving spacedock was always a great moment. It was a tribute to the spacedock's engineers and to the crew of that ship. And it looked great, too. Captain McMillan had seen numerous ships exit spacedock in his time in Starfleet. But to command the Gibraltar now, once again, as it made its way out of spacedock for the final time... it was amazing.

The Gibraltar had been fully repaired and overhauled. All systems were working perfectly, and all the latest glitches had been fixed. The Gibraltar was ready for duty, as was its crew. McMillan was only one of the original crew, along with Lt.Cmdr. Braveheart and Cmdr. Fearguis. To have the latter as XO would take some getting used to, but hopefully Mr. Fearguis had figured out how to command at other assignments, before returning to the Gibraltar.

And he would need to have these skills, as the Gibraltar would soon be put to the test again: Starfleet had a mission for the Gibraltar crew, after all. They were to set course for Bengal IV, where rumours of a smuggler base coincided with some marvellous ruins of an ancient civilisation. McMillan and his crew were to go there, study the ruins and see if the rumours of smuggers, were true.

The trip to Bengal IV went smoothly, so before long the entire Bridge crew materialised on the surface of the planet. Starfleet had been right: these ruins were amazing. The scientist in McMillan wanted to stay here to study them, but he also knew he had to be on the look-out for smugglers. Nevertheless, he allowed the crew to explore a bit, which caused them to find the remains of a building, which was damaged by the hands of time.

In the middle of this building lay a circle, filled with some sort of light. Outside of it, with its back turned to this circle, stood a statue of an Angel. This obviously had been some sort of temple, in long lost times. Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary, until both Captain McMillan and Commander Fearguis stepped into the light... and were suddenly overcome with an urge to go to the Angel. The Angel was calling...

It didn't take the Gibraltar crew long to beam their CO and XO back to the ship, where CMO Talax and Nurse Mathy did every scan in the book. And while McMillan's condition improved, Fearguis' condition deteriorated. Before long *he* wasn't in control of his body anymore... the Angel was.

It seemed that the Angel was actually some sort of gasceous lifeform, trying to return to its own people. It had been trapped here, and had tried to communicate with the smugglers on the surface. Unfortunately, its way of communicating often lead to death... and that was where Fearguis was heading towards as well...

Luckily, Science Officer Portal managed to establish a transporterlock on Fearguis, dematerialising both him and the entity, after which she re-materialised only Fearguis. He was cured, but the entity's 'friends', which surrounded the ship, came in and took the entity away from the Gibraltar crew. It was home once again.

A while later, in the Captain's Ready Room, McMillan closed his eyes. He could still see the bright burning eyes of the Angel, calling him. Fearguis had it even worse: he could remember the entity's thoughts. We have been lucky, McMillan realised. Any longer, and they would have died. But what did this entity want, except going home? And why was it ready to kill for that? Those were questions he figured he might never have answered...

Well, such was the life of a Starfleet Captain. All he could do now, was to go on, towards the next mission. Because whatever Starfleet had planned for the Gibraltar, it would probably be big...