Engine Trouble In The Nth Dimension (Team Alpha)

Posted on Fri Apr 6th, 2018 @ 4:10pm by Captain Remas McDonald & Lieutenant Commander Shadi Zatra

4,433 words; about a 22 minute read

Mission: S1:2: Rubicon
Location: Wreck Interior, Engineering Section ?
Timeline: MD 14, 16.00PM

The vacuum stole a little of the fanfare as the Zheng He lifted off from the deck on her RCS thrusters. Her impulse engines still glowed but in the confines of the wrecks interior there was more risk of a high speed collision. As the lights of the Runabout faded into the vast blackness of the interior, becoming a singular star in the firmament, Team Alpha got to work.

Portable lights were erected, casting bleak sterile cones of light to mark the landing zone. The crated sensor gear was slowly being unpacked and assembled,with a portable antimatter battery pack supplying power. The HUD’s of all the EVA suits lit up with a wireframe map that slowly grew in detail, and complexity, as probing fingers of electromagnetic energy pried out secrets from their surroundings.

Conduits, pipes, things that defied simple explanation all began to appear.

Shadi’s found entrance was a opening in a large ziggurat like building, its staggered sides made of a polished brass looking material. The door into the ziggurat was four meters tall, tapering from the floor to the ceiling in an inverted triangle. The door itself kept trying to close, sliding down slender metallic vines only to stop halfway and then shoot back up into the doors lintel.

“It would be nice to know if there was another ziggurat on the opposite side of the drum to this one,” one of the OP’s techs said. “You know? One for each of the engine nacelles? Not that a species needs to apply symmetry to their lives but…symmetry!”

Shadi stared at the door that defied her. "If we can't reverse the locking mechanism, then we blast through."

"What?!" the Symmetric Op's tech blurted, the name tape on his suit reading 'Barnes, K'. "What this is a priceless piece of engineering! Its form and function rolled into one! Surely we could try opening fully before letting our bargain basement Marines do it with a photonic charge."

Shadi slowly turned her head and glared at the tech through her face plate. "Technician Barnes, pleassse repeat my order for me." Before Barnes could overcome his stammering, Shadi interrupted. "I said, 'if we can't reverse the locking mechanism, then we blast through.'" As Shadi spoke, her stance turned from upright and square to a more primal disposition. "Are you questioning my orders, Mr. Barnes?"

"Of course not," Barnes said through gritted teeth. He was the tall gangly tech who always sat at the back of the briefing room during Zark's morning meetings. Always grumbled that his skills were underutilized, or alternatively stretched too thin. "I...wouldn't dream of undermining you Ensign Zatra."

"And I wouldn't dream of devouring your young at birth," Shadi spat back. The smell of his angry pheromones lingered in her nostrils despite the filters. "Now get back to work."

Barnes got back to work, muttering a word that sounded a lot like 'wizard' but wasn't.

In the background, Rena was keeping an eye on the radiation levels to make sure they didn't spike.

Vic walked up with a smile on his face, "One welcome mat ready for your swift entrance Ensign." he said as he placed the charge on the supposed weak spot of the door. "You may want to stand back." he suggested as he looked at the Captain."On your order sir." he added. Right then he got a sudden feeling of dread that his desk was calling out to him in pain then suddenly silenced.

Remas's face looked back at Vic from tghe small pop up window on the inside of his suits HUD, and nodded his assent.

"I hope it's a minimal charge Chief, we just need an entrance, not a warhead," Remas muttered before his attention was called back to what was happening on the runabout. Not that anyone seemed to notice as the door suddenly whisked open.

The doors woven design unfurled back into the angled sides of the frame, leaving the breaching charge with nothing to grip on to as it fell slowly to the floor. A small brass sphere as large as a basketball rolled up to the charge from inside the ziggurat, coming to a stop just before it. It then slowly rolled around it, appearing to all the world like it was examining it.

It then stopped, serrated pannels on its sides popping open to reveal six mechanical legs and a series of three sensor eyes that it used to study the bomb. With a scissoring motion of its legs began to push the breaching charge back into the ziggurat.

Shadi gasped. "The bomb!" She ran for the open door to give chase after the mechanical insect.

Vic aimed his rifle and fired hitting one of the legs but not phasing the little orb, "Captain, permission to destroy the.. Orb robot thing!"

The two officers were followed by another pair of ExSec officers, and they all raced inside. The interior was, shockingly, much like the exterior: brassy. But here the metallic surface seemed to glow with a warm autumnal light illuminating everything in sepia finery.

The orb had reached the end of a corridor, which bifurcated into a number of other passages. It spun on its pole, peering back at the one who had shot it and then attempted to make its escape. But sooner had it tried one of its leg panels, marred by the blemish of a phaser blast, shot off like a spring-loaded novelty toy. This imbalanced the sphere, making it spin in place as its legs popped out and waved uselessly.

"At least we know we can damage the smaller things!" Vic exclaimed as they moved up the corridor, weapons raised.

Shadi dropped into a pounce position. "Hold your fire! It's mine..."

"Hey," one of the trailing ExSec officers said, pointing the barrel of his carbine up at the ceiling, the light under it reflecting off the high ceiling. "Whats that? Doesn't look the same as the rest of this place."

The light revealed what at first looked like a black spot in the corner of the wall. Glossy in texture, and no larger than someone's fists, an encrustation of angular black crystals could be seen. The way it was mounted to the wall made it seem as though the brass had extruded it.

"Source of the weird light maybe?" Vic asked Shadi

"What?" Shadi had curled herself into a tight ball around the broken robot spider. When she followed the trail of Vic's muzzle-mounted light to the ceiling, she squinted at the black crystalline formation. "It looks like how Lieutenant Arivek smells. Quick! Somebody get me a tricorder!"

Someone did hand Shadi a tricorder, but no sooner had that happened an ungodly wailing noise filled the comm network of each suit. The ball, now pinned by two officers on the floor was rocking back and forth manically, its sensor eyes unveiled along with a plethora of tools and machine mandibles. It seemed to be trying to reach out to Shadi.

As this went on a ragged ring of golden light appeared around the black crystal, appearing as flickering symbols arising from within the brass panel. Radiation detectors in each suit began to chatter excitedly as the ring around the crystal intensified...and then was gone. A perfectly cubic hole head appeared in the brass metal where the crystal had resided, leaving nothing but a raining cloud of onyx ash to fall.

Rena cringed at the noise, her hand instinctively going to her head and hitting the side of the suit, and shook her head a little when the noise stopped. Looking down at her tricorder, the Trill said through the comms, "while the crystal did... whatever it was, the radiation spiked up to 30 sieverts and it's now down to 14." As the ash got closer to the ground, Rena raised her tricorder toward it to try and get a reading of its composition.

"Sweet Blood Goddess!" Shadi exclaimed as she read her tricorder. "Whatever that golden light was, it matches the same readings as the unknown field that's coagulating our warp plasma. We may have found the source of our engine problems!" She lacked back at the tricorder and gave it a thump. "Whatever that black crystal was, though... I think it may have been alive... or at least self-aware." Looking to Rena, she asked, "Did you get any life signs?

"Did you get annnnnnnnny life signs?"

The voice echoed across the comm's, at once sounding familiar and alien at the same time as syllables in the middle were stretched out into static-laced cat cradles. As this voice repeated two more times streams of the golden glyphs played down the walls, flittering past like shadows cast by clouds.

Rena's brow furrowed as she tried to focus through the noise. "The ash has carbon and some unknown trace elements," she said, wincing as her voice joined the ensemble of echoes in the comms.

In time with this flittering the orb robot went still, its blue sensor eyes flickering before it suddenly closed up like a puzzle box at Victor's feet.

"Its some sort of comm's anomaly," Jansen said from his position at the rear of the away team. "Just random signals getting reflected back at us. Though pretty fucking creepy if you ask me. Which no one does."

Shadi's cold skin rippled with bumpy scaleflesh. "Space Ghosts," she whispered. "Swords and talons have no more use here." Reluctantly, she reached for the standard issue duty phaser on her hip and activated it. It was a coward's weapon, true, but if anything could make Shadi feel cowardly, it was ghosts.

A vibration ran through their feet, and the rad counters began to tick again at a lesser rate. From ahead of them, deeper into the ziggurat, a golden light flickered and flashed. An invitation, or a warning?

"Whatever that is, it must be the power source," Shadi said as she analyzed the tricorder. When the floor vibrated louder, she lowered the tricorder and raised her phaser. "But if it's turning on lights and other systems, it's probably reactivating more of these bug bots..."

"Well, I guess we proceed. Shadi stay behind me I'll take point." Vic double checked his rifle's settings then proceeded to move slowly down the hall towards the opening, his weapon aimed.

Nodding agreeably, Shadi let Vic take point. If only there were atmosphere in this place, she could strip down into her warrior suit just as the Goddess had made her. She would be ready for anything then. Alas, the phaser in her hand would have to do.

The group continued on. As they travelled more of the black crystalline growths could be seen protruding from the walls. Whenever a particularly tight cluster of crystals threatened to close in on them, another ring of golden light would appear around it, and shortly after vanish both itself and the crystal in a puff of dust. Each time the rad sensors ticked to life, but each time the dosage was lower and lower.

Rena tried to get a closer scan of the crystals, "these crystals are... they look like the same material that the hull is made of-" Before she could finish, a golden orb appeared and aimed a focused beam at the tricorder in her hand, effectively rendering it useless. Rena dropped it out of surprise and drew her phaser, but the orb disappeared just as quickly as it had formed. Picking up the device, she saw that it had been destroyed, and with a frown, pocketed the device.

Jansen and Barnes chatted the entire way through the corridor as they approached the source of the radiant light. It was the inane chatter of the terrified, commenting on the flickering glyph work of the brass walls, or the nature of the crystals.

All of which paled when they reached The Chamber.

They entered a catwalk that ringed the interior surface of a dome, its base vanishing far beneath them as the catwalk hugged the top. On the other side of the ringed catwalk was a large open area, a control booth or inspection area maybe? Because the massive device that lay below their feet was for nothing more than gawking at.

"That's...that's...it can't be a black hole," Jansen whispered, looking over the edge of the catwalk. "I mean we'd....we'd know right?"

Beneath them the eye of a devouring maw leered up at them, its slowly spinning accretion disk pulsing with a syrupy light. Brass rods reached out form the base of the dome to pin it in place, holding the monster of gravity at bay with that same golden radiance. Except...there had been other rods, their roots could be seen reaching out of the wall at the base of the dome. But their stumps were clustered with the black glossy rot of the crystals.

"Why not?" Shadi asked. "The Romulans use singularity technology. Though... they also use warp, which this vessel does not." She thumbed the faceplate of her EV suit in thought. "It would take multiple matter/anti-matter reactors or a black hole to move and power something this enormous." As she thought aloud, her eyes took in the broken rods. "Looks like some repairs are in order though."

"We'd need Worker Bee's and...and one hell of a tractor beam to do any work to repair those," Jansen said, looking down to the bottom of the immense dome and the slowly spinning singularity. He looked a little pale, even in the backwash glow of his suits HUD. "And I don't think the Romulan's use singularities that large. And shouldn't we be feeling some sort of tidal effect this close to it? Hey, Barnes head back up the corridor and see if time's passing norm-...hey!"

Jansen was looking at Barnes, who had left the main group and was walking the catwalk around to the control booth.

"You were gawking like a tourist," the snippy Op's tech said. "Answers to questions are going to be over here."

"Watch... watch your step!" Shadi called out to the intrepid Ops warrant as if she knew not what else to say. Command, even of a department and an away mission, was a heady concept with which she had yet to come to terms.

Barnes didn't reply to Shadi's warning call, and soon he stood in the control booth. The floor of the booth was lined with narrow glass sheets providing a view of the monster below. The sides of the booth were walled with pentagonal brass sheets, each of them a maze of strange symbols and oddly familiar diagrams. Suddenly all the flickering symbols seemed to blur, losing resolution, before returning in a shockingly familiar script.

Beta Gravity Sail Control, Skien Rigging, Gravity Point Source Control, Malignant Matter Contamination Index.

Other even stranger phrases and words appeared, along with symbols and controls that looked worryingly in compliance with Starfleet design standards.

"Maybe our tricorders are feeding it linguistic data?" Barnes mused "Or maybe this ship has a tap into the Traveller?"

"Maybe this ship is studying our dialect." Vic said he too becoming uneasy. "Make sure to collect all that data we don't want to miss any of it, something doesn't feel right and I don't think we're going to get a second chance to be here."

Shadi checked the power setting on her phaser. "Did you hear something? I didn't hear anything. Call your targets, Lieutenant!"

When no enemy presented itself, Shadi hazarded another glance at her tricorder. "Wait!" she called out while reading her scans. "The golden light radiation! It's beginning to emanate from that booth."

Both hands dropped to her side as she leaned forward. "Barnes! Get out of there!"

"I don't see any-" And then things got very interesting. In the fullness of honest events transpired a lot faster than they should have, but in the rehashing of events and the studying of tricorder data, there wasn't a lot more than could have been done.

The panel Barnes had been studying seemed to glitch, the now readable data stuttering midstream. Then black crystal sprouted from it, erupting from the metal with thin hair fine tendrils that thickened and bifurcated. They interacted with the material of Barne's suit the same way a knife went through butter, and due to their speed, it is entirely likely the Op's technician felt nothing. He certainly didn't feel any pain or hear the decompression alarm.

What would remain, in perpetuity and on the record, was the holographic image captured from a suit helmet cam. It showed a Starfleet issue vac suit sprouting a profusion of black crystalline shards of various sizes, from the mid-thigh area all the way through to the now evacuated helmet. The golden light radiation arrived a moment after the black crystal, burning them off at the root as Barne's lifeless body fell to the deck.

Shadi's already cold blood froze in her veins. Whatever those black space ghosts were, they were susceptible to the intense radiation of the golden light. After watching Barnes give up his own ghost, Shadi knew what she had to do.

"Run!" she hissed at the rest of the team. "Everyone, out of the chamber! Now!"

This was made harder, as from the other side of the catwalk from the booth, a carpet of brass sphereical robots were marching around to meet them. But instead of attacking them, the brassBot's simply rolled or skittered past their legs towards the black crystal studded body.

A body that seemed to be twitching.

"Kill it!" Shadi hissed, leveling her own phaser at the twitching, crystal-encrusted body. "Kill it with FIRE!"

"Don't have to tell me twice!" Vic shouted as he bumped his phaser rifle to max and began unloading shot after shot center mass on the former Barnes. He looked behind between shots and saw the exit was clear, "Shadi, fall back I got you covered!" not ceasing fire he began to move back slowly from the room.

Shadi yarded Jansen by the arm of his EV suit and ran for the exit where the brassbots had appeared. Between the phaser fire, zombie Barnes possessed by space ghosts, and the intermittent golden radiation, Shadi felt most of her hearts pound within her chest.

"Let's move it!"

In her haste, she crushed the seal of Jansen's suit at the wrist.

"Starve it!" Shadi tapped her combadge. "Ensign Zatra to Commander MacDonald! Team Alpha is in full retreat. We've stepped in our vomit hot and deep--casualties, possible pursuers, just a complete clusterfamine. Be on the lookout for mechanical bugs and black space ghosts!"

"Shadi this is Beck in the Runabout, cap'n's a might in disposed right now. Could you repeat your last, you're choppy with static."

Vic's shots hit home, staggering the figure back as it tried to rise. The phaser blasts burnt away parts of the EV suit, revealing skin that was blackening and becoming facetted. Instead, the arms writhed in jerky motions, seeming to ignore the way joints were meant to work. The form of the Thing rose on all arms, limbs stretched out in a scuttling motion and began to crawl along the ceiling of the catwalk towards them.

The brassBot's milled under it for a moment, before patches of their plating retracted and golden arcs of energy lashed at the Thing. It reacted violently, diving into the mass of machines and smashing them, crushing them in claw-like fingers. It was a losing battle as more of the Bot's were smashed, but they were taking a toll on the crystal monster.

They were buying Shadi and her team time.

"I repeat, Shadi this is Beck in the Runabout. Repeat your last. Anyone on Team Alpha."

"We're in full retreat, Beck!" Shadi yelled into the comm. "Come back and get us NOW!"

They made it through the door and into the corridor in full retreat, Vic stopped firing and threw a proximity charge on the wall next to the door as a nasty little surprise for that thing if it kept following them. "I wasn't paying attention, how much farther Shadi?!" he shouted not stopping his sprint

"Don't stop running till you hear impulse engines!" Shadi called back over her shoulder. She kept Jansen in a death grip, lest his suit decompress.

And Jansen, in turn, kept a death grip on the broken brassBot Victor had stunned earlier. Their progress out of the engineering ziggurat was easier in some ways than their entrance. A soft golden radiance bathed them in tickling fingers of radiation, evaporating the black crystalline spikes that tried to reach out from the walls to snag and pull on them.

They staggered out of the main entrance and into the open plaza that minutes before had been the landing site for the Runabout. Except now it was empty, save for the crates of supplies and the portable lights that shone back towards the brass structure. No Runabout. No rescue.

The ground under their feet rumbled ominously as an explosion went off deep inside.

"What in starvation was that?!" Shadi exclaimed. In her excitement, she let go of Jansen's damaged sleeve, which began hissing atmosphere at her. "Oh, sorry." She clasped his arm once again, then tapped her combadge.

"Beck! Get your monkey ass over here now!"

Silence answered her as the heavy doors to the ziggurat closed right on the heels of the last away team member. They began to glow with the same golden light, blazing into a cross cross pattern of energy that flickered and danced in distractingly abstract patterns.

Then the door buckled, a large dent at head height appearing. Then another dent appeared, larger and more forceful, pushing the metal into the frame work of the door.

“Beck to Away Team Alpha, don’t know what you fools are playing at but I can see that beacon of yours bright as day. We’re five minutes out on thrusters, so can the language carrion breath!” Beck shot back, clearly missing most of the conversation.

“We-we’re so dead,” Jansen sobbed, his good arm still clinging to the brass coloured bot. His voice was rising as shock set in. “I don’t wanna die. I DON’T WANNA DIE!”

"Jansen, listen to me." Shadi grabbed the helmet of his EV suit to face her. "You will live to see me make orphans of Beck's offspring. On my honor, you will live."

Rena instinctively reached for her tricorder, than remembered it was cooked to crispy, before gesturing to borrow someone's tricorder. When she felt it in her hand, she opened it and held it in front of Jansen. "You've got radiation leaking into your suit and air going out. The radiation levels here aren't enough to kill you yet, but the sooner we get him out of this atmosphere, the better. How big is the leak?"

As if to answer her the smart fabric of the EV suit began to pulse with colour across the chest. Words formed in blinking red on white: O2 LEVEL LOW, DECOMPRESSION WARNING! Jansen was hyperventilating his way into unconsciousness as the suit tried rapidly to refill the suit, backfilling the missing air with nitrogen to keep the balance.

From above in the dark sky a beam of light shone down, and without fanfare the Runabout hoved into view. Its ventral loading doors yawned up, revealing the large cargo bay hatch in its underbelly.

"Reckoned from your voice you kids could use a pick up after school," Beck commented, as with little puffs of debris lines were shot down to the on pitons. On each line was an attachment point to hook onto an EV suit. "Latch on and we'll get you all-WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT!"

The Runabouts spotlights had fallen on on the door as it was bent and twisted. The two-metre tall figure in a ruined EVA suit leant out of it, one arm free and scratching at the air with crooked claws.

"Go." Shadi pushed Jansen off onto Rena, then turned to face the black crystalline monster that had overtaken Barnes' form. "You took one of mine, hellbeast. The Goddess thirsts for vengeance." She tore the gloves and boots from her EV suit to expose her talons which glistened in the runabout's spotlights. "I will sate Her with your blood!"

Shadi charged the lumbering figure on all fours. At the last instant, she pounced to the side and drop-kicked its right knee. Her outstretched dewclaws should have severed the joints and ligaments, but her savage blow only succeeded in throwing the figure off balance.

Sudden realization dawned on her. Shadi deflected a broad swing from the creature with her frozen talon, snapping it off her hand. She only hoped the rest of team alpha had boarded already.

"Beck, get the Zheng-He out of here!" Somehow Shadi had managed to tap her combadge between dodging and countering. Bodyheat was bleeding through her glacial extremities, slowing her reflexes and sapping her strength. "Sing songs for me!"

It raised one long clawed arm and swung. It must have been odd, floating through the vacuum like that as piercing cold negative pressure warred over the senses. It was even stranger watching as a leg, her right leg from the knee down, cartwheeled off into the darkness. Odder still to watch it twitch and shake in space, spurs and curled knotted crystal structure beginning to tear it further.

And then Beck shot her.

The retrieval piton lanced through her right shoulder, exploding through the front of the EV suit as the clawed piton expanded to hold her in place. The high tensile line behind her twitched and began to draw her up into the air, revealing the courtyard and the black crystal monster.

"Zheng He to Traveller, Zheng He to Traveller, medical emergency! Multiple casualties on board. We are evacuating the derelict as soon as we get the second away team, acknowledge!" could be heard shouting into the comm. The retrieval line retracted Shadi like a fish on a hook, and soon she and the others were safe inside the cargo bay of the runabout.

Air rushed back into the hold, followed by heat.

Which made the blood ice-crusted stump of her leg crackle like dry ice.

Shadi gurgled blood through her mouth as she pulled her EV helmet off. "Ss...tarving... fools." And then her head listed to one side in unconscious surrender.

 

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