The Transformation

---COPYRIGHT/DISCLAIMER NOTICE---

This is a work of fan fiction and the characters and concepts of Star Trek belong to Paramount Pictures and the Gerry & Silva Anderson respectively. This story must not be sold or distributed for financial gain of any sort.

This is another Space 1999 story that I found a long time ago and felt it was time that I shared it with everyone.

The Alphans encounter a Starfleet emergency transporter that beams Maya onto the Enterprise-D. Far from Tony, she finds herself growing closer to Commander Riker...

Chapter One

For three months, nothing had happened.

It was as if they had reached the end of space, and the moon had fallen off the edge of the universe. The stars above them seemed to have stopped. A general feeling of lassitude on Moonbase Alpha was interrupted by the discovery that a young woman in hydroponics, Carol Earnshaw, was pregnant. Because of the far-reaching implications, a command meeting was called to discuss the situation. Maya attended reluctantly, feeling that it was none of her business, and anxious to get away for a scheduled reconnaissance flight.

"There's no point asking 'what are we going to do'," said Helena. "There is nothing we can do."

"Was this deliberate?" asked the Commander.

"She says not. Equally, she's determined that she won't have an abortion and we can't force her."

"I could talk to her..?"

"That wouldn't be a good idea."

"What could you do to her anyway?" said Tony. "Discipline her?"

"There is nothing we can do," said Helena again.

Maya said, "Carol isn't married."

"No, she isn't."

"She doesn't even have a boyfriend, does she?" said the Commander.

"She says the father is Michael Jones from metallurgy. They were together for a brief time, three months ago, when he and Angela Carter temporarily broke up. They're back together again now."

"I don't understand why we've spent all this time talking about Carol," said Maya. "If Michael's the father of the baby, why hasn't anyone asked him to give an account of himself?"

"I think it's something they both want to forget, Maya," said Helena.

"But they can't, not if there's a child involved! How can Carol want to have a child without its father, and how can Michael want to forget it? On my world, it was considered a great tragedy for a child to grow up without both parents."

"Didn't marriages break up?"

"No, never, it wasn't the way people behaved."

"And didn't girls ever get pregnant accidentally?"

"If they did, then the parents married. That was the way things were. On Psychon, Michael would have been ostracised - he would have lost his job, the respect of every decent person - if he behaved as he's behaving now."

"What, you want Michael to leave Angela, even though they're happy together," said Tony, "and go and set up home with Carol, even though they can't stand each other?"

"If they can't stand each other, then they had no business creating a child in the first place."

"I never knew you had all these strange views, Maya."

"They are not strange views. On Psychon, that was the way everyone thought - there was no question about it."

The Commander her up his hand. "Hold on, we're getting side-tracked here. I'm not interested in a debate on morality. We have to decide what to do with the situation as it is."

"John, I repeat," said Helena, "there is nothing we can do."

"We all know the problems. One woman having one baby could open the floodgates, and our resources could be swamped."

"Open the floodgates," said Helena.

Maya looked up from doodling aggressively on a pad on the table in front of her. There was a silence in the room as all attention focused on Helena. Tony had been perched on the edge of a couch, studying his boots with a dark expression, but he lifted his head and caught Maya's eye briefly. Alan Carter shifted backwards. The Commander was motionless for a moment.

Helena placed her fingertips together and looked straight at him.

He stood up. "No. You know my views on this, and this isn't the place to bring it up again."

"I'm talking about survival," said Helena earnestly, pressing forward. "This is our sixth year in space. Most of the women are still young, but how much longer do you think we can ask them to wait? Twenty-two people have died since Breakaway - "

"And how do you propose we allocate twenty-two babies?"

"If there were more, we could still accommodate them. Babies don't consume as many resources as adults. Our systems have become more efficient - hydroponics has increased its yield by over thirty percent in the last two years - this could be it, you know. Has that occurred to you? This lull might not be a lull, it might be the way it ends. It could be us drifting in empty space forever, dying out in the end because we were too cautious to do anything about it." She sat down again, her expression unwavering.

"Comments?" the Commander snapped at the others.

"The doctor's right," said Alan.

"I'm with you, John," said Tony. "We can't take risks at the moment. We're all breathing each other's air as it is."

"Maya?" said the Commander, after waiting a moment.

"I don't know what the answer is. I think it's a difficult question. Intuitively, I would be inclined to agree with Helena but rationally I know how precarious our resources are."

"This is all going to resolve itself anyway," said Helena. "We can't sit around this table deciding fundamental things like this for other people. Carol says her pregnancy was accidental and I believe her, but once it gets around the base people are going to act on their own initiative. I just think we might as well give it our blessing or we could end up with mutiny."

The meeting ended inconclusively and in an atmosphere of muted antagonism. Maya left hurriedly for her Eagle flight, feeling lonely in an alien culture. She was lulled for most of the time into a sense of belonging to the Alphan community, but every now and again she was jolted by an unsuspected difference in values or outlook which made her remember that she might always be an outsider.

She was due to meet Douglas Mullins in the docking bay at eleven hundred hours, and the meeting had made her late.

"How about that," said Tony, catching her up. "You could actually hear Helena's biological clock ticking."

"That's not a very nice thing to say, Tony."

"What was all that between John and Helena anyway, have they had an argument or something?"

"I don't know. And if I did, I wouldn't tell you, I don't gossip."

"She doesn't usually speak out against him in public like that, though."

"No, the Commander was taken aback, he wasn't expecting a confrontation. Maybe you're right."

"What did you really think, then, did you agree with her?"

"I agreed with her when she said it's probably going to happen anyway." She stopped in front of the travel tube entrance. "I've got to hurry, I have an appointment with an Eagle."

"You're going right now?"

"Yes. See you in a couple of days."

"Okay." He kissed her. "Be careful."

"There's nothing to be careful of," she said, reflectively, pausing while the travel tube arrived. "I really don't think there's anything out there. We're going nowhere."

Since Moonbase Alpha, which had never been designed for space flight, had no long-range sensors, the only way of telling what was up ahead was to go and take a look. Maya had been looking forward to the flight. Although she had a lot of work to do on Alpha itself, she was as bothered as everyone else was by the uneventfulness of the past few weeks and a reconnaissance mission, though routine, held the promise of variety. Twenty-four hours into the flight, after a night of uneasy snatched sleep on an uncomfortable bunk, she was finding Douglas Mullins claustrophobic company. The great lost passion of his life was the classic cars he used to restore, and his conversational repertoire consisted entirely of small talk about engine parts.

"When we get back to Alpha," he said, "you must come to my quarters and I'll show you the pictures. I've got a whole album of Mini Cooper engine shots."

Slightly shaken out of her daze, Maya wondered if this was a proposition. "Thank you, Douglas, I'd love to," she muttered. It was probably innocent enthusiasm and if it wasn't she could handle it, once she'd had some sleep anyway.

"Nearly time to turn around," said Douglas.

Maya flicked through the Eagle's small array of sensor readings once again, without expecting a response. She sat forward immediately as something registered as a rhythmic blip on the wavelength sweeper. She refined the tuning until a signal stood out against the noise of space, and filled the Eagle cabin with a complex repeated pattern sound.

"That sounds like it comes from a transmitter," said Douglas.

"It's definitely a signal of mechanical origin."

"Hey, this could be our lucky day after all! Can you decode it?"

"I don't think it's trying to say anything. It's repeating the same eight tones over and over. It may be a standard signature to some spacefaring race, but it doesn't mean anything to me. I'll feed it back to the computer on Alpha just in case."

She called up Command Centre. At this range, communications were breaking up and the Commander's face jolted in and out of focus on the tiny screen.

"How long will it take Alpha to reach the source of the signal?" asked the Commander.

"Our current trajectory won't take us anywhere near it. If we want to investigate, it will have to be by Eagle in the next few days."

There was a pause, as, Maya assumed, a consultation took place off-screen.

"Go ahead and see if you can locate the source of the signal," said the Commander, when he reappeared. "We'll send a refuelling Eagle to your current position. I know you haven't got a full survey team on board - "

"Maya counts as a full survey team in her own right, doesn't she?" said Douglas.

"Don't take any risks."

"Now this is more like it!" said Douglas.

"The source of the signal might still be beyond our range," said Maya. "We'll travel in its direction as far as we can."

"You can't tell how far off it is?"

She shook her head. "Maybe there's some navigational information encoded in the radio signal, but our computer simply doesn't recognise it."

It was an easy matter to set the Eagle guidance system to travel in the direction of the signal's source, and since there was nothing else to do Maya tried to get a few hours' sleep again. She found it almost impossible to let her mind relax enough to lose consciousness, even when she was exhausted, unless she was in her own surroundings. It was only recently that she had stopped being afraid of sleep every night, as the nightmares had become infrequent.

She had just managed to drift into a queasy semi-doze, with the lights up and her arm locked over her eyes, when Douglas shook her awake again.

"There's something on the screen."

It was a tiny planetoid, which Douglas said had appeared suddenly in the Eagle's visual range.

"That's the source of the signal all right," said Maya. "But this is hardly more than an asteroid. It's about half the size of the moon." She scanned for life signs on the planetoid, but there was nothing. As the Eagle approached closer, they both saw a red cross sign constructed on the surface large enough to be visible from space.

"Wow, that's something," said Douglas, "There's civilisation down there."

"No there isn't, at least not any more. I can localise the signal to a point on the surface which should be at the centre of that cross sign."

"I'll take her down."

"I'm not sure."

"Oh, come on, you said there was nobody alive down there."

"That doesn't mean there's no danger. The Commander told us not to take risks."

"Well, we're out on our own now, we're outside communications range. We can't come all this way then go back and say, hey, there was a big red cross on a little planet."

"I hoped we might find some people."

"Maybe we will if we land, these Eagle sensors aren't exactly state-of-the-art." He pulled back the thruster stick and took the Eagle into the gravity pull of the planet, without waiting for her assent.

Maya was annoyed at this neglect of her authority, but she said nothing. The Eagle glided smoothly towards the planetoid.

"Something doesn't feel right," said Douglas, then, "Hey!"

"What is it?"

"It's taken over!"

"What's taken over?"

"Nothing I'm doing to these controls makes any difference! Something down there on the planet's guiding us down!"

The planet's surface filled the whole screen. Maya could distinguish structures on the red, apparently artificial terrain.

"Full reverse thrust!" she said. "Get us out of this!"

"I'm trying! Nothing's happening!"

"Haven't you got a manual override?"

"Of course I have, I tell you it isn't working! All the controls are dead."

Maya ducked down and opened the inspection hatch underneath the control panel, but she was not an expert on Eagle design and the neat tangle of circuitry and cables meant nothing to her at first glance. Her immediate idea had been to cut the wire to the autopilot, but she recognised in a moment that she would not be able to find it quickly enough.

"You shouldn't open that panel while the Eagle's in flight!" said Douglas, sounding incongruously scandalised.

"Do you have any ideas yourself?"

"It's too late, we're landing."

Maya snapped back the hatch and scrambled into her seatbelt. For a sickening moment they seemed to be on a collision course with a wall that slammed up to the screen, then the Eagle stopped smoothly and she realised that they had been guided into some kind of enclosed docking bay.

After the panic of the previous minute, there was an anticlimactic silence. Carefully Maya unlocked the seatbelt and ran sensor readings. Once again, the instruments registered no life outside. "Breathable oxygen atmosphere," she said. "Temperature, normal and pleasant for human life forms."

"Seems almost too good to be true," said Douglas. "Okay, you're the boss, are we going out?"

"It doesn't look like we've got much choice - now."

As she was packing a bag of equipment at the back of the Eagle, Douglas stood awkwardly in the cabin door. "You mean about bringing her down without your order."

She looked at him, but said nothing. It was the thing she found most difficult in her role on Alpha, to assume a command function. Partly because she was conscious of her youth, certainly because she felt as an alien she had less natural right to authority, and probably because it was simply not in her personality.

But Douglas looked genuinely abashed, as if he really did care about stepping out of line. "I got carried away, it won't happen again."

She handed him his bag and smiled. "Come on then."

The docking bay was huge. At first Maya had thought the lights were dimmed, but in fact the interior space was so large that they could illuminate it only in part.

"This was built for something a lot bigger than us," said Douglas. His voice echoed off distant walls.

The air tasted perfectly neutral and the silence was undercut by a hum that Maya supposed was the operation of an atmospheric circulating system. She lifted each foot up. "The gravity's normal. They must have an artificial generator like the one on Alpha."

They walked cautiously across the floor, which was made of some kind of plastic composite that was warm to the touch and, Maya imagined, impervious to thruster burns. Far up above in the walls and ceiling she could see what looked like extendible rigs. "I'm sure this is a repair and maintenance bay," she said.

"Maybe we'll come across a spacefaring service station. I wonder if they serve hamburger and chips?"

There was a door at the side of the bay, which slid open with a quick whoosh as soon as she stepped up to it to examine it. Beyond was a wide, well-lit corridor, empty.

"Hello?" called Maya. Her voice sounded nervous to her own ears.

Deferentially, Douglas was hanging back behind her. She noticed that he had his gun ready at his hip. She set hers to stun and moved out into the corridor.

"We don't mean any harm," she called out again. "Hello?"

"This place is deserted," said Douglas, in a low voice.

Maya felt instinctively that he was right. The corridor was built in a short curve and had a few doors leading from it. One, at the far end, opened into a dormitory with several neat, empty beds and no signs of occupation. Another led to a smaller room with benches along each wall, cupboards, and lit wall cavities. The cupboards contained what seemed like vacuum-packed food.

"Combat rations!" said Douglas, after he had peeled the packaging off one and sniffed at it. "I bet that's what this stuff is - the equivalent."

"No hamburger and chips, then."

"You didn't have that sort of food on your planet, did you?"

"No - but I've heard about these things. I wonder what these machines in the wall are? For heating the food?"

The room next door, which they entered less tentatively now that they were almost certain that the place was uninhabited, was undoubtedly an emergency medical centre.

Maya moved a wall-mounted instrument across an examination couch. It glided to her touch as if it were suspended on air. "This medical equipment is very advanced. I don't understand its function, but it's much more sophisticated than anything Helena has back on Alpha. And yet - you know, this is odd, and it's hard to describe, but it has a similar idiom. It's not at all like a Psychon medical centre. For all I know the technology is equivalent, but - it looks more like Alphan design than anything else."

It was the same dja v? feeling she had had on first stepping out of the Eagle. Douglas had made no comments, but it was possible that she could see the similarity more clearly for being an outsider.

"This must be some sort of base." said Douglas, when they entered the room at the far end of the corridor. "I wonder why it was abandoned?"

The last room was small and had four cubicles set into the wall, which looked as if they were designed for a humanoid form to enter. There was a bank of controls opposite, which Maya examined quickly. A wide screen was evidently for visual communication, but the coloured touch-pads on the instrument panel were incomprehensible at first sight.

"All this stuff is supposed to do something," said Douglas. "What's it for?"

"I've no idea."

"I thought you were supposed to be the expert."

"I may be an expert on systems that are familiar to me, but I've no more seen this technology before than you have."

"I can't get on with electronics," said Douglas. "I prefer moving parts you can really get in touch with. That was what those old car engines had - you could have a physical relationship with them."

"Mm. I could probably work all this out if I had the time, but I don't think we can stay this far from Alpha for very long. It's infuriating - I'd love to know." She stepped into one of the cubicles. noting that its three walls were lined with a highly reflective metal and that there was a radiating circle etched into the floor under her feet. She ran her fingers over the circle but it had no texture, and she was just about to straighten up again when Douglas yelled.

She was an instant too late to react. A transparent door glided shut smoothly, closing her inside the cubicle.

Douglas mouthed frantically, but the cubicle appeared to be totally soundproof.

A flashing caught the corner of her eye. Two square buttons had lit up on the side wall beside the door. One was yellow and the one above it, pulsating urgently, was red.

She tried to pull the door open with her fingers, but the seal was invisible. It might be breakable by some creature stronger than herself, but it was equally likely that she or Douglas had inadvertently activated an automated mechanism and that one of the lit controls was simply the door control. Flashing red for danger - she touched it.