Familiar Unfamiliarity

Posted on Fri Nov 22nd, 2019 @ 8:09am by The Narrator & Lieutenant Commander Mara Ricci & Lieutenant Commander Meilin Jiang

Mission: S2:1: Into The Drowning Deeps
Location: On board the RCN Dauntless
Timeline: MD 1 : 20:45

The rescue team rematerialised from the brightly lit transporter room into darkness.

Helmet lights on EVA suit clicked on, punching cones of light through the air of the compartment they were in. With the shield cladding and interference from the ship's energetic exit from the slipstream, this was as close as they were likely to come. They were in a cargo bay, racked with sealed metal containers clamped to the deck and walls. The crate nearest the away team had a label on it with a mix of languages on it.

Trill, Vulcan, and English all saying the same thing: Danger Observable Occlusion Ordinance. The heavy mechanical seals on the crate made it clear opening it would be a fun afternoon activity for an engineering team.

"There's a hatch over here," one of the Security officers said and gestured with the light on his phaser carbine towards it. It partially closed the outline of a humanoid form caught between the two halves. The figure seemed to have been caught mid-stride, the door pinching his waist so he hung with his arms and torso through into the compartment. He was in a vac suit, but streamlined and more like a uniform than anything else.

A pair of patches were attached t the shoulder of his uniform, the first was a circled of white with three blue waves crossing it. The other below looked like one of the old mission patches from the old days of space travel. 'RCN Dauntless, Fortune's Favour' along with a cyan blue spear bisecting a star.

As the beam of light from the rescue team washed over him, reflecting off the composite sheen of the vac suit's polarised faceplate, he seemed to twitch.

Seeing the twitch, Mara cursed. “Is he alive?” she asked, hurting over to check his vital signs. She got within two strides of him when she saw the breath fog up his faceplate and she cursed again. “Someone check for a manual release!” She ordered. “Sir!” she said the door guy. “Sir, are you conscious? Can you hear me?

While the others scrambled to find and access the door release, Meilin stood stock still and let her senses take in the environment. At least such as they could from within her EVA suit. Protocol dictated she should continue scanning, but she couldn't bring herself to focus on the tricorder.

"This place is wrong," she said. But the wrongness wasn't apparent. More instinctual, as just before a sudden windstorm kicks up. There was a 'bad wind' to this ship.

Nothing was showing for it. Meilin reverently set her internal red flags aside and started checking everything with every tricorder setting.

The figure in the trapped EVA suit made a sound. At least if his suit had a tear, the atmosphere of the ship still read as viable. One of the techs found the door release, triggering it's bisected parts to snap open again. The man fell out and into Mara's arms. Where the door's had caught him, the suit's material was changing to a livid lime green colour. At first, it looked like blood, but at a closure inspection, the suit's fabric was changing colour. Perhaps in reaction to physical injury or exposure to something like an old fashion X-ray film?

The suit's chest was a smooth shell of light fitting armour, with the name tag 'Rate2: McGillis, K' printed over the breast.

Mara struggles to lower McGills to the floor. She was strong, but he was a lot bigger than she was. She had no time to do anything more, though, when her attention was called elsewhere.

"Ma'am," one of the other engineers near the door picked up something that had fallen by the wayside. It was a glass tablet, one of the corners starred with cracks and spider webbing, but spinning on its surface was the same circle enclosed tri wave. Gingerly the engineer tapped an EVA glove to the surface, and a menu tree popped up along one side. Almost as soon as the menu appeared, a flashing red border appeared around it and the glass tablet fractured with a sharp screech.

LIght's began to play around the corridor from the far side, and two similar suited figures appeared. These carried weapons, glossy oil black bullpup rifles tucked into the crooks of their elbows. Flashlight illuminators on their undersides shone out, painting the away team in beams of cold light.

A static laced, broken garble of sound came across the comm link, as the oddly unfamiliar suits tried to open a channel to the Starfleet suits. More lights were filling in from behind the two soldiers, as again the garbled mash was barked again.

“I apologize.” Mara said to the two new figures from her place on the floor. “If you’re trying to contact us, we do not read. Can you hear me?”

Noting the Federation languages imprinted throughout the mysterious ship, Meilin put her tricorder away, stepped forward and presented her empty hands in a gesture of peace. When she had the armed men's attention, she slowly raised her right hand and spread her fingers in the Vulcan salute. If the ship used Vulcan script, then perhaps the hand gesture would mean something too.

The two soldiers parted slightly, and a taller humanoid in a similar EV suit stepped through. This one's nameplate read 'FrCmdr:Harris, L'. They held up their hands, gesturing for the soldier's to lower their rifles which they did grudgingly. He then raised his own right hand, mirroring the Vulcan hand gesture perfectly.

Then a voice buzzed from the suit's loudspeaker, passing through the atmosphere of the ship and vibrating through the suits of the away team.

"There are many questions," he said in heavily accented Federation standard, his words halting as though speaking a half-remembered tongue. "Time is not a friend to us now. Forward Commander Larkin Harris, of the Reciprocity of Carcosia Navy frigate Dauntless."

He pointed a hand towards the crate's of Observable Occlusion Ordinance, and slowly waved both hands down in a calming gesture.

"Please do not scan the Gorgon's," he said. "High energy particles of scanners can be hazardous around them."

He turned and said something that caught the Universal Translator's attention: 'Chief Engineer, now.'

He turned his attention back to them.

"Please do not remove your helmets. Contamination risk," he said slowly, waiting to see nods of comprehension.

Meilin asked what they were all likely thinking. "Greetings, Commander Larkin Harris. I am Lieutenant Commander Meilin Jiang. What is a Gorgon?"

Mara was just as curious about that; she was picturing a demigorgon, but twice the size. Somehow, she didn’t suppose that was accurate. “Not to mention the Reciprocity of Carcosia,” she added, now attempting to assist the medic they’d brought with them in examining the guy they’d found in the doorway. But, she felt like she was in the way, so she tried to keep clear unless he asked for help.

"From the look of it, I would deduce that an expedition from the short-lived Coalition of Planets which preceded the Federation lost its way and somehow wound up out here," Meilin suggested. "The similarities and deviations in technology, standard speech, and rank and structure would support this thesis."

"And in turn, you must be survivors of The Great War," Larkin said. He reached up and tapped a control on the side of his helmet. The polarised faceplate turned opaque, revealing a very human-looking face. Put him in a Starfleet uniform, and he would go missing inside of a week with the neatly trimmed beard and brown hair. "And from the station, also. Reciprocity of Carcosia is the home nation of the survivor of humanity, Trillius Prime and Vulcan. It is like trying to explain why the sky is blue, and the sea is kind. It is a fact every schoolchild learns."

(Which explained a lot; Mara hadn't gotten very high marks in history. She barely remembered when First Contact happened on Earth and that was celebrated every single year on the actual day.)

At some unspoken order, the two guards departed, and a loud clack of reconnected high voltage ushered in a new age of illumination. Harris pointed to the crates.

"Triple-Oh warheads. They can be....temperamental if not treated with great respect. Much like our Vacuum Reactor. We suffered an imbalance whilst we were transiting into your star system using a mode of transport we call Slipstream," Harris explained. "We currently on battery power until my Chief Engineer can fix the problem. Do you have experience with Vacuum energy? Perhaps computational false matter compression? Our scanners are only as good as looking out of a porthole at the moment."

"Not much," answered Mara. "Not first hand anyway. I mean, I know the theory. But, I have a lot of experience with looking at technology I don't understand and figuring it out fast."

The terminology seemed vaguely familiar to Meilin, but not the way Harris used it. "Vacuum Reactor? As in zero-point energy? The only way for that to be viable to power a console much less a starship would be if you found a way to regulate the Casimir Effect within the Higgs field. Such efforts were pursued but ultimately dismissed in the 21st century as pseudoscience after the breakthrough in antimatter research." Meilin cast a canny look on Harris. "It is a unique technological offshoot indeed. Would it amenable for us to see your systems for ourselves?"

"Wait you still use antimatter?" Harris said, a note of shocked disbelief in his voice.

At the same moment another EV suited figure appeared, their faceplate transparent. They didn't break stride as they entered the compartment, eyeing the people in strange suits.

"Forward Commander," they said in a feminine voice, a hand reaching up to press lightly against their left breast in what must have been a salute of some sort. "I don't want to tell you your business, but I can't fix the ship if I'm called away from fixing the ship."

"Chief Engineer Stroma," Harris pointed out. "If your Engineer could accompany her, as well as any spare hands you have, that would be agreeable. And I assume by your questioning you have some sort of science background? That might be useful."

Chief Stomra looked over at the strange suited figure, the dark spots of a Trill marking a small pixie-like face within crowned by blonde curls.

"I'm not a tour guide," Stroma began.

"And I am not asking you to be. But I am asking you to use what resources are provided. The first maxim: use what is provided freely," Harris said in a guarded tone.

Stroma thought about this for a moment, and then gestured for them to follow.

"Don't touch anything I don't tell you to touch, or Presence help you."