Down, Down, Down

Posted on Wed Sep 15th, 2021 @ 2:41am by Lieutenant Commander Emni t'Nai & Commodore James Smith & Ensign Noah Balsam & Lieutenant Sovaan & Lieutenant Cassian Pell
Edited on on Wed Sep 15th, 2021 @ 2:44am

Mission: The Place of Skulls
Location: Asteroid Mining Facility
Timeline: Mission Day 16 at 1200

The room was spartan, drab grey walls dusty and grimed with age met the same drab grey on the floors and ceilings. A large double door was inset into the rock that made up the far wall, the space cracked just enough to let a person in or out--seemingly stuck in place. No lights shone although the placement light fixtures were visible lining the ceiling in an orderly line that seemed to point straight to the double doors.

Two desk-like consoles sat to either side of the doors, their tops cleared of any indication of who had operated them before they fell dormant. A few tools lay in the corner nearest the double doors, dust coating their surfaces, and age making them of questionable use.

It was into this space that the golden sprites of the transporter beam placed the away team. Emni had been quick with her selections, notifying Lieutenant Pell, Lieutenant Sovaan, Midshipman Balsam, and the now-Lieutenant Smith that they should meet her in the transporter room in 30 minutes, diagnostic tools in hand.

In her hurry to get everything settled she had left the Bridge without grabbing Lieutenant Pell, so it was with a slightly sheepish feeling that she had to ask him to be relieved of his Bridge post to join her 5 minutes later.

You're safe... this isn't Bagra Tigiri... they can beam you out... you have air... you have heat. Noah breathed steadily in, and steadily out. He pictured his boat on an angry ocean and slowly coalesced control of his ocean. The skinny engineer could feel the weightless quality of the room, with only microgravity at the floor. The magneto servos in his suit did the rest. His walk was the slow, shuffling deliberateness of microgravity, to keep his feet on the ground. No sudden movements- unless one wanted to go floating off.

"Th-this looks like an Assay Office..." Noah commented idly. His dark eyes scanned, with help from his hand flashlight the doors and the rock face beyond. "I-I've seen Warren Colonies like this. Bright Foundation has one... But theirs i-is a Last Resort, um, Space." he shuddered. Noah intentionally pushed down on his engineering kit to keep the strap on his shoulder from loosening and floating his gear free. He shone his light toward the ceiling. "Tha-that's interesting..." He commented as his light met an aged hatch in the ceiling, looking about as large as a humanoid could fit through.

Noah's voice had come across the shared comm circuit in their suits making him sound as if he were standing right next to each of them rather than investigating the space. For a moment the sound had startled Emni, a reminder that she hadn't done much of this before. She nodded, then realizing that the motion wasn't going to be obvious to anyone, added "What do you think that is?" as she came over next to Noah, adding her own handheld light to his beam against the ceiling.

The feeling was strange and interesting at the same time; anchored only by his boots, Cas sort of enjoyed this feeling of weightlessness for a moment. And then his every not so helpful mind supplied facts and figures about people who had lost that connection to a solid surface and drifted away helpless. Okay, he thought, maybe not so wonderful. He walked about the room taking in the details. "Modular construction," he said as he ran his tricorder over the walls. "Not Federation standard but ... it shouldn't come down on us either."

He crouched over a pile of drones and ran his tricorder over them. While engineering was not his specialty, some things were apparent. He listened to the conversation being held around him with one part of his mind while the rest focused on the drones. "I'd say its a way for the drones to leave the facility, get outside, but that's sized more for a humanoid."

"M-my guess is it's multi-use," Noah added. "Drone chute... ventilation... but also like u-our Jefferies Tubes. A-all you'd need to do to get up there is not wear grav boots." He turned his attention to the structure itself, his gloved fingers reaching for a wall control that didn't respond to his touch. His sensor palettes were, meanwhile, sampling air and the engineered materials. "Puh-probably at least 200 years old from the vacuum degradation of the hull materials."

The youth fumbled for his engineering kit and opened it. In the spongeform molds he went for a square box with striated indents across it. Delicately he pulled it free. It spun in the air, very lazily drifting down. He took it and pressed it against the panel. With a few squelchy sounds, the panel flickered to half-life. "Th-the system's been damaged. These c-controls are frozen. Like someone did a hard shut off." Noah's eyes narrowed. "I-I don't recognize the language. I don't... don't think it's Klingon but..." Noah frowned, uncertain. "Lieutenant, sir?" Noah stepped out of the way with his footfalls hissing to keep him secured, while he gave up the space to the Chief Science Officer.

Cas walked over to stand beside Noah and bent to take a closer look. "No, No," he said, "That is Klingon, I think, but an easy mistake to make. This is an older dialect. Don't see many examples of it." He beamed at Noah as though he had uncovered a great treasure. "I'm just going to take scans of all this for Remy. He'll want to see it, I'm sure."

"OK," Noah nodded and stepped further back to give his superior full access. Meanwhile, he began to inspect the door and a smattering of old tools which seemed to be just barely floating against the surface of the floor in a grouping of common gravitational attraction. Noah squatted down, resting his elbows on his knees. "These are eh-excavation tools," he tapped one and it began to tumble free of the mutual gravity the tools had together. "They're t-too small for Klingon hands. Maybe, um, slave labor. Or prisoner labor." He put his long hand around a handle, cocked his finger into the pistol grip, and pulled. Nothing happened. "The powers, um, d-dead." He released the tool despite his curiosity.

Despite some trepidation, it seemed that the door held most of the answers. Noah studied it at a comfortable distance. It looked jammed but he shone his light on the pitted, grimy door to get a better idea. "Pressure-treated carbon duranium composite... s-sort of the plywood version of ablative duranium."

Sovaan approached the door, phaser in one hand, light in the other. He tried to sight down the hallway beyond the door, but couldn't see anything clearly enough. Motioning for Noah to stand back, he curled his fingers around the edge of the door and braced himself to pull.

"I'm going to try to widen the opening," he announced. "We may be able to get a better idea of what's behind the door." He took a deep breath and pulled as hard as he could, and with a loud grating sound the door gave, widening the space by a foot or two.

"Too small for Klingon hands these days," Smith began as he stepped near the door holding the gloves slowly expanding into the space, "but there was a time they would have fit perfectly. Eugenics." He added as if he had eaten something rotten.

Noah's nod was somber and uncertain, the mere idea of some kind of genetically enhanced Klingon seemed too much to handle. They were formidable as they were.

Cas finished the scans he had been taking and thought about a complex that started with a small assay office and then a long corridor leading down. He made a mental note to research mining facilities a bit; to him, it seemed oddly laid out. As though it were missing some vital pieces up at the top. It wasn't his field of expertise though so he kept quiet. There was more to the Klingons than just warriors and he was interested to get a glimpse into the side of that proud and fearsome race that didn't hold a bat'leth in one hand and blood wine in the other.

Noah, meanwhile, retrieved his inductive battery pack- with a crackle it detached from the console Cas had scanned.

Emni had listened to the discussion quietly as the team converged on the door. She walked the perimeter of the room as she did so, noting the general unease of the group along with the focused curiosity. Arriving next to them she craned her neck to see what, if anything, was visible through the door.

"Seems like the only way for us to go from here is through," she remarked, hoping her trepidation wasn't obvious in her voice. "Mr. Sovaan if you would take point, I'll take up the rear. I'm not sure we're going to find anything that can tell us why we're here until we get power back online."

"Come on, muscles. Let's see where the dark, creepy hallway goes," joked the engineer as he clapped Sovaan on his shoulder and nudged him towards the door. "Stay close, Noah, you take the high bands, and I'll take the low," James added, waggling his tricorder at the Midshipman.

"Be careful," Cas said from his place to the rear of the two. "There's something off about this place. A commercial mining outfit would have more to it than this. Where are the warehouses? Quarters for workers, slave or otherwise? There's a lot that goes into mining, from a logistical standpoint, that's not present here."

Carefully each of the team members threaded their way through the gap that Sovaan had made in the door, hand lights bobbing down into the dark hallway ahead of them. Small piles of drones littered the floor as though they had just dropped from where they were into heaps. Dust settled on them giving the football-shaped figures a strangely soft fuzzy look.

The hallway wasn't long, perhaps 50 meters, and ended in a door that seemed to exactly replicate the one they had come through. This one, however, was shut tightly.

As Emni approached from the back of the line she pointed her hand light at the sides of the door, hoping some sort of way through would present itself.

Sovaan took a close look at the door and ran his fingers along the jamb. "I think I was lucky with the first door because it was already partially open, but this one is sealed," he said. "I won't be able to get enough of a grip to pull on it, not with these gloves, in any case." He turned back around and started to investigate the walls and floor around the door. "There ought to be an emergency manual release somewhere nearby. If we can't find it, we will need to pry the door open with something."

Noah's eyes, through the bright cool light of his handle torch, focused on what Lieutenant Pell had picked up: what was glaring in being missing. There were many reasons to build a room in an isolated space- but Noah had a hard time coming up with any reason that was good news. While he looked, he studied what little he could see that suggested any kind of internal systems. He noted that, about every ten meters, there was a terminal built into the rock. But thus far they all looked nonfunctional. They needed power- more power than his portable battery could provide.

"Look," Noah noted. He shone his light in a bow showing a very sudden change of the rock color. "Um. I-I think we've been in one acc-acc... one accreted body and we're moving into less differentiated material." And yet, distracted, Noah refocused on the other end of the corridor. With each boot scuffing the shaft's flooring to keep gravity, Noah made his way to the door controls. "I-I might be able to give the servos enough kick to unlatch but um, then we'll have to pull." Noah reported while he put his battery pack to the door plate. It latched and beeped. Noah tapped and its controls. With a shrill beep, there was a thunk sound.

Noah furrowed his brow, pulled his battery pack away and tucked it back into his kit. Next he pulled out his hull scalpel- It warbled with a pulse of red energy and Noah carefully began to draw a line around the door's insert control panel. It was slow work and Noah was precise. But the cadet finally flipped off his tool and stood back. "OK. The locks sh-should be completely disabled." Noah looked back at the people who far outranked him with a scanning gaze before he pulled what looked like two sets of small chisels with a sharp right angle to their wedges.

"I-I'll need some help wedging them open." He flashed a grimace, "These are reinforced containment doors."

"As a mere lowly Human," began the Chief Engineer, "I think I'll defer to our Vulcanoid brethren to provide the brawn for this task." His eyes glinted as they flickered between Sovaan and the Executive Officer, adding, "Go show that door whose the boss."

Emni raised her eyebrow at Smith, a glint of humor in her eyes, before turning to Sovaan and nodding that he should take the opposite side of the door. Gingerly she accepted the tool that Balsam had magicked from his bag and silently she made a note to point out his preparedness to the Captain when they were back. Carefully she wedged the thing against the seam of the door, smacking it with the butt of her palm for good measure to make sure she wasn't about to go flying backwards. She waited for Sovaan's nod and then, planting her feet, pulled.

Grunting with the exertion for a moment it seemed as though the door was not going to budge despite the work Balsam had done to disable the locks. Shoulders straining she reset her feet, throwing herself backward as Sovaan did the same from the other side. The door rewarded their efforts with a loud creek and the rumbling of old machinery grinding against itself, as a thin gap appeared between the two sides.

Panting, she released the tool and dropped it to her side. A wild smile lighting her features as she looked across to meet eyes with Sovaan who appeared to be doing the same.

"Ok," she said, through deep breaths, "now what?"

Delicate fingers tapped and touched at the panel he had cut; Noah, lip bitten in concentration, extricated the bulkhead piece and set it almost reverently aside with a stoop. He reached inside, his skinny arm moving up into the panel. His eyes narrowed and he said "Ow," once. But there was a massive outgassing hiss and he pulled his arm and hand out- plus a dusted and bloodied knuckle.

"N-now," Noah said as he braced against the door. And it moved rather easily on its track. Noah stepped inside the dark, "Y-you guys coming?"

Emni's grin widened as the doors parted. She looked from one officer to the other before hurrying after Balsam. "You heard him," she called through their shared comm.

The space behind the double doors differed from the entry point and hallway they had traversed so far. This space was wider, a set of four standard doors radiating off the sides. At the far end of the space an arch signaled entrance to a much larger room. It may have, at one time, had a doorway made of transparent aluminum, but all that remained was an empty track and piles of dust on the floor.

Not waiting to check the four side doors, Emni made for the arch, stopping to inspect it before shining her hand lamp into the space. The pointed beam lit on an array of consoles, lights and interfaces dead and dusty. A far panel looked promising, catching her eye as she lifted one magnetized boot to step carefully over the threshold.

"Smith, Balsam," she called through the comm. "Come take a look at this?"

Swiftly she made her way across to the panel, eyebrows creeping up as she recognized a small space next to what appeared to be a series of power relays. The space resembled the arrangement that Kodak had described to her from Cho'thil. A small bowl-like depression next to a haptic interface, roughly the correct shape for a person's hand and upper arm. Unlike what he had described to her, however, this space was entirely metallic, built into the machinery next to it.

"I think we've found what we're looking for," she commented wryly, moving out of the way so that Smith and Balsam could see what she was looking at. Turning fully she eyed them both. "What do we need to do to get power to this place?"

Noah's dark eyes studied this odd intrusion. His brows creased at his nose while he nibbled his lip. "Um." The young one squatted down and examined it more thoroughly- but a cursory glance told him that someone had wedged this piece of technology into an older, existing system. At that moment he wondered why- why make finding one's people this difficult, and in such difficult places? Even if the Federation saw it as an internal affair of a non-member species, surely someone could help? Boslics? Tyrans? What were they afraid of?

Noah pushed back on the plight of a refugee species, not out of apathy but because he had work to do. For the second time, he said, "Um." He sighed which fogged up his visor for a moment. He went for his battery pack again and placed it on the console. He tapped it. It clicked again and with a suctioned hiss the console flickered to half-life. "I need help.... d-does anyone, um, read... or-or speak Klingon?" He asked while he withdrew his tricorder. He scanned the text.

"Ev... um... Evnaqh... Qev? Evnagh qev? Does that mean anything to-to anyone?"

"What I wouldn't give for a goddammed Dynamic Mode Converter, this tech is at least a century out of date for our equipment, and I haven't seen a DMC replicator pattern in years," he lamented before his attention was drawn to the Midshipman's question. "Uh, subspace road, I'm ninety-nine percent sure. What else you got?"

Noah frowned and he tentatively touched at something promising, "What, um... what about..." he scanned the text, "Um. Wuh-woj... woj choHwI' nagh?" He blinked, "The woj ch-choHwi' nagh is um... tol.... tla...tlhogh."

Smith's eyes rolled, his sigh one of mock exasperation, "Jesus, are they not having kids read Bill Shakespeare in the original Klingon these days? taH pagh taHbe'! That's the Primary power reactor, offline though." Scanning the panel, he smiled, "These old Klingon reactors weren't very efficient, but they were reliable as hell. Aux tank still has a little reactor mass available. Look for De'wI' and activate it."

"De'wI.... de'wI.... de'wI...." Noah mumbled while a gloved, searching finger circled, his tricorder oscillating visual translation. Noah brightened, and he pushed what looked right. There was a loud, resonant ponging sound that bounced around the rock face. "The... the original Klingon?" He asked Smith. "The de'wI is online but only at... wa'maH?"

"Reactor warming," Smith plied the trickle of power with the console with the practiced ease of an engineer sure of his job, but an amber light flashed trouble, "ah shit, primary coupling is blocked, ghom, ghom, where is ghom?"

"Ghom... ghom-ghom... I feel like I'm a funny square droid right now..." Noah said in his gentle, slightly adenoidal speech. "I-ironically looking for power. Um. Ghom?" He pointed with a look for approval at his superiors. It was a pulsing red button with a red ring and key-shaped ray rutting to the right. "Ghom." Noah pushed it. With a crackle and a straneg series of snaps, the room was bathed in light while the consoles hummed to a half-life.

Cas couldn't resist opening two of the doors on his side of the corridor; curiosity was all but a living flame inside him at the best of times. Two doors opened to two rooms of roughly the same size and he saw it in his mind as two boxes that connected to the corridor. Probably they were all the same in that regard. Functional if uninspired design-wise. Still, not quite right. He stepped out into the corridor, measuring with his eye the width between the doors, and then stepped back in. No, he thought, not quite right.

He swung the hand-lamp around and found a door set into the shared wall between the rooms and upon opening, found a rudimentary bathroom. Furnishings in both of the rooms were similar. Camp beds, never meant for long-term use, overturned crates as makeshift tables and a few stools. Makeshift. Nothing in the way of clothes or personal effects remained though there were over-sized mugs scattered about.

The doors locked from the outside only. He knelt beside one of the beds which was about when the lights came on. Interesting, he thought. Voice recognition or did someone decide when it was lights out for all of them by some other means. No blankets but there were thin pillows, worn and frayed along the edges, and stained. He took scans of everything for later analysis. There were patterns of abrasion on the frames of the bed though that meant little since the beds themselves were neither particularly sturdy or heavy. No evidence of restraint devices but then, no real evidence of people living here.

There was a decided lack of personal mementos in both rooms. No, this was a place where they came to sleep but little else. Still, he would check every room because you just never knew. Come on, Cas found himself thinking, a letter home, a journal, holovid of the family ... something. Maybe analysis would reveal something. DNA traces in the bedding.

"Nothing on this side," Sovaan commented. "This place is more spartan than a bedroom at P'Jem...which really says a lot."

Emni grinned widely as the lights kicked on, the humming sound of power, even at a low level, giving her a moment breathe.

"Pell, Sovaan," she called to the other two officers who had been exploring the remaining rooms. "Head into the control room when you're done. Let's regroup and talk next steps."

She looked from Balsam to Smith and back. "Good work, both of you," she remarked.

She leaned over the console where Balsam and Smith had been working. Her own Klingon was far rustier than Smith's, but she recognized the symbol for life support as it flickered to life, icons on the screen indicating that it was coming back online. "Looks like we may be able to take these blasted helmets off in a moment," she commented, finger tapping the screen next to what she was looking at. As she said it a whoosh of air compressing and then being cycled through vents could be heard as simulated atmosphere began to reassert itself.

Scanning the space, Emni flicked the control in her suit to open a channel with the Sojo. "t'Nai to Kodak," she remarked directing her message. "Sir, we appear to have reached a central power station. Balsam and Smith are working on power, but it appears that everything is coming back online, life support among those elements."

She paused then, looking to the team around her. "We're checking the mining operations and will evaluate if there are logs or other data banks we can retrieve to bring back with us, sir." She took a breath then, "we appear to have found the interface that will require your presence, sir, but I want to make one last sweep before you come down. Standby and we'll let you know when we're ready for you. t'Nai..."

She didn't get to finish the message closure as a loud klaxon blared throughout the space, red alarm lights flaring as the sound filled the area around them.

Warning, the alarm intoned between blaring alarms, Intruders detected.

"Shit," Emni remarked, closing the channel without ceremony.

"I think you're right about that," Sovaan said, pulling out his phaser and dropping into a defensive position. "I have a bad feeling about this."

To Be Continued...

=/\= A mission post by... =/\=

Lieutenant Emni t'Nai
Acting Executive Officer

Lieutenant James Smith
Acting Chief Engineer

Lieutenant Cassian Pell
Chief Science Officer

Lieutenant Sovaan
Chief Security Officer

Midshipman Noah Balsam
Computer Systems Specialist