The White Tower

Posted on Thu Apr 11th, 2019 @ 6:24am by The Narrator & Staff Warrant Officer Blaise Birch

Mission: S1E3: Moments Of Consolidation
Location: The Campus Of The White Tower, Carpathia
Timeline: MD6 12.00PM

Sidim looked almost boyish as he shouldered his pack, looking around at...well, everything!

The tower's wide base ran up towards the steeply angled flanks like the base of a wine glass, with the goblet snapped off the top. The jungle's verdant depths came to an abrupt halt at the wide flat base, a base upon which the Runabout had landed on. From the jungle to the runabout was a good hundred-meter gap, with another hundred before the incline could be felt.

The material beneath their feet had the look of polished marble, promising a sudden fall with one misplaced step. And yet their footing was secure, as though each footfall were glued to the bone-white surface. As the tower ahead of them loomed higher, alcove like entrances could be seen, dark as soot in the blaze of sunlight from above.

"Amazing," Sidim said, laughing as he held up the tricorder, pointing its spectrometer at the haze of cloud drifting from the broken shaft at the tower's apex. "I have no idea what these readings could mean, but I am detecting not only oxygen and nitrogen in life-sustaining ratios but also some rather interesting long chain polymers. Maybe it's pumping out some sort of weird particle, something that can reflect the heat of the sun without diminishing the optical light? It would explain the climate without the cloud cover. A real terraforming engine! Put's my Great Wall to shame!"

Blaise continued his scans of the area, pausing only to note the upright hairs on his arm. "There's a piezoelectric field all around us," he said. "It appears to be separate from the dampening effect, yet it's reacting with sub-molecular particulate matter in an ordered pattern..." He looked to Sidim. "Almost as if intentional or guided somehow."

"And almost a polar opposite of the one we encountered on Xilos." Dania commented, looking at her own readings. "Still, lets be careful so we don't set off any traps in our fascination with this marvel of technology. Pretty things can be deadlier than ugly ones sometimes."

"Some sort of nanotech maybe?" Sidim mused, neatly ignoring the dire warning from Dania. He walked over to Blaise and glanced at his readings, nodding along. "Interesting. See the wave patterns? They're actively moving out of our volume so we don't breath them in. That suggests a level of awareness."

The terraformer looked up towards the pinnacle of the tower, shading his eyes as he studied the gagged tip.

"This is like a bank robbery. The Daystrom Institute could plant a research campus here and not learn a fraction of what's happening here," he grumbled, reaching into his backpack to pull out a large squat looking disc the size of a dinner plate. "And we can do little but take a snapshot. This seismic sensor should give us a good look at the overall structure of the tower."

What Dania didn't like, not at all were her readings. That and one other, even more concerning thing. "Be quiet for a second!" She spoke up, clearly listing for something.

“Well I...” Sidim began to say, before catching the look in Dania’s eyes and closed his mouth. He silently went about setting up the seismic sensor on the floor. He looked to Madrid, his assumed ally, for some sort of sign of his wrong doing.

"Can you hear it?" Dania asked quietly, looking at her companions.

Blaise flinched. There was nothing audible, yet a rumble penetrated his bones and made his skin hum. The feeling gave him pimply gooseflesh. "Our vitals seem normal," he called out, louder than necessary, "though..." His pale skin darkened a few shades, more charcoal than rosy in their blushing. "... seems I could stand to calm down a bit."

"This is a jungle. Jungles teem with life, teem with bugs. Yet not a sound, not a bug." Dania nodded at Blaise's words.

"You're thinking of a naturally occurring and evolving ecosystem," Blaise said. "This habitat is as synthetic as the runabout we flew in on. There's no telling how these plants germinate, pollinate, or even feed. I think we can rule out carnivorous plants for the time being, but only due to the utter lack of fauna. That's how far outside the box we are right now."

"Life still makes sound, Mister Birch and we should be detecting some around us." Dania lifted her tricorder for emphasis. "We're not."

"Maybe they're using the old animal instinct of knowing when to stay away from something," Elias muttered to Sidim.

"Fauna clearly is not essential to the synthesized flora's ecology," Blaise said. "That means... we're contaminating it, with no idea what could result." He turned grave as he explored that line of reasoning.

"Given that this world is hardly what I would call a sterile environment, it would not be beyond reason to assume this place has means of dealing with unwanted fauna that wanders in from outside," Sidim said, standing up and stepping away from the sensor as a self-test light blinked. Then from its centre, a round cylinder rose slowly, before slamming back down with a dull 'thud'. Tapping on his tricorder the terraforming expert projected a hologram of the sensor map.

"That's what I'm afraid of..." Blaise muttered.

In pulsing flickers the image grew more and more distinct with each thud of the sensor, first depicting the area of the apron they were stood upon, and then the sloping face of the tower. But more interestingly was the lower half of the tower that was beginning to appear. The apron of bone white material, that ran up to the jungle's edge, did not seem to stop there. It spread out underground further and further, soon stretching out into five long tendrils that dove down into the mantle and crust of Carpathia.

Hollow spaces within the tower began to appear, some were fuzzy and indistinct whilst other's were solid well-defined spaces. Viens of movement and seismic activity ran throughout the tower, picking out rivers of motion or the beating hearts of vast unknowable machinery.

Sidim said something indistinct and reverent under his breath, kneeling to get a better look at the holo map's lower levels.

"Taproots..." he chuckled, pointing to one of the large subterranean tendrils. "I designed something like this. Smaller scale, tiny, but a means for a self-perpetuating machine to gather resources and energy."

A red mark appeared on the map, hovering above the sloping plane of the apron in the rough area where the jungle resided. As if to mark this holographic omen of motion and activity, a mighty cracking sound rattled the air, and two massive three trunks were bowed aside as something pushed out of the forest. In look, it had the gait and stature of a centipede made in some sort of impressionistic period. Its bone-white carapace matched the structure of the tower, it's hundred legs were all angular sharp-edged joints as though made from scrimshaw. Each dodecahedron shaped segment of its body shone as though newly polished.

And its size would have given it reason to push a Runabout aside. And it was marching straight towards the landing party.

"Retreat!" Blaise shouted. "Back to the runabout!"

Elias glanced at Dania, the senior officer on site. She had not ordered retreat, so he wasn't going anywhere until she said so. Retreat, however, did sound like an excellent idea. Gulping down his heart he drew his phaser. "Stun or kill?" He asked Storm.

"When a scientist says run, you listen." Dania gulped, "move!" That said, she took began retreating towards the runabout.

The massive machine slowed down abruptly as Blaise, Sidim and Storm, and Madrid dived for cover. Its many legs chittered on the material of the apron until it grew deathly still as though it had been there this entire time for centuries. Then between the Starfleet away team and the massive construct, a hole puckered open in the surface of the apron. It did so with no obvious mechanism or sound, and the centipedes leading segment tilted forward, appearing to be staring down into the portal.

From the portal rose in a shimmering heat haze angular blocks of silvery metal. They glinted in the sunlight, turning as they drifted up from the bowels of the tower. When they bumped against the flattened face of the centipede they stuck fast, slowly sinking into the surface before vanishing. After a moment the stream of silver metal began to change, and brassy ingots began to appear in the flow.

"Those are pure elements," Blaise said, eyes glued to his tricorder. "That... thing... is absorbing pure elements." Looking to the others, he said, "I think we might have just met one of the builders of this place."

"Perhaps one of you should attempt First Contact?" Sidim said, holding his scanner in both hands as though its laminate coating would protect him from whatever came next.

Blaise raised his hands as if to say, 'Not I,' and looked to the two commissioned officers.

"Assuming it's even interested in talking to us, what language do we speak in?" Elias asked.

Dania, still fascinated with what had just transpired, shrugged. "Federation Standard, if that doesn't work we try the universal language of all things, math. If not that, between us we speak several languages. Maybe one will work." The nord gulped.

So Storm stood up, holstered her phaser, and faced the thing before her. "Uh....hello." She said entirely awkwardly.

The massive bulk of the mechanical centipede did not respond, as the stream of metal ingots continued to pour upwards from the ground. But being closer to the machine did let her pick out things the others could not. The material it was made of really did look like bone, hewn from marble perhaps, but porous and pitted here and there. Where the metal cuboids bounced into it, the white surface did not pucker and suck them in. Instead seemed to absorb them like strawberries falling into heavy cream.

"It must be like a cargo drone?" Sidim said. "Maybe this tower is but a node in a much more vast network of devices we have yet to discover on this world, a central logistics and control hub?"

Another rumble from the jungle announced a second machine, this one the same as the first in bulk and size. It minced its way to the far side of the base of the tower away from them and the runabout and began to engorge itself on a stream of raw materials.

"Could we plant a tracker on it?" The terraformer asked. "I mean, Landersfell is on the far side of Carpathia to this tower, over nine thousand miles as the crow flies. But that might not be such a long distance for a machine like this. And it might be useful to know where it's been."

Blaise slapped his empty pockets. "Nope, fresh out." His tone was even enough to veil the sarcasm laden deep within it.

Sidim reached over, plucked the combadge off of Blaise's jacket, and unceremoniously tossed it towards the tumbling mass of metals. The badge flew through the air and came to a sudden stop the moment it passed under the maw of the machine, soon rising up to be swallowed along with everything else.

"There," Sidim beamed. "What? Its not like it was useful for talking to the station. But if this thing roves out beyond the jungle, which is the perimeter of the dampening field, then we should be able to track it or pinpoint the location it visited to deliver cargo."

The gesture made Blaise feel naked. And violated. And, well, naked. "Throw yourself in next time," he said. Looking to Dania, he said, "Well, what now?"

"Falstaff has plenty of spare combadges," Sidim said with a dismissive wave of one hand.

"Still..." Blaise scoffed resentfully. His black eyes and lips contrasted with his pale face, making for a perhaps more hostile expression than intended.

Dania rolled her eyes, "provided it doesn't disintegrate within that thing, we should be able to track it beyond the field, yes. As for the rest of us, we still haven't set foot in the tower, so I suggest we do so. Or we go back to the runabout."

"You cannot possibly be considering that? Its barely past noon, and so far only-" Sidim's words were cut off as the machine stopped accepting raw material. The stream cut off, and the portal into the tower's base closed with a blink-or-you'll-miss-it quickness. It then reversed, appearing to have little trouble navigating forward or backwards, and began its march back into the quiescent jungle.

"Amazing..." he breathed with a grin, slapping Elias on the shoulder. "Who knows how long this place has been in operation, and it's still working! That's how you terraform successfully, you build it to last. I will have to talk to your Captain Ingram about the possibility of securing one of these machines for study. Oh, come now you two: self-repairing technology of that level of complexity would be worth the risk surely?"

Blaise was conflicted. "We can't secure one by ourselves. We need help, Sidim, which means we ought to go back to get it." Looking up at the white tower, his facial complexion nearly matching it, Blaise's black eyes saw doom. Then a thought occurred to him. "At the very least, I'm going to get another combadge."

Madrid's eyes were still fixed on the spot of jungle where the machine had departed. "If I were to build something like that, I'm sure I would include safeguards to ensure someone doesn't steal it." He exhaled sharply, then looked up to the sky. "Maybe we can rig a probe to watch it continuously from orbit. Or hell, we can get a vehicle down here and have people follow it in shifts." He shrugged.

"Like tracking a tiger in the wild," Sidim grinned. "I know of at least four people at the colony who would relish the opportunity to take out one of the excursion rovers. Now let's go have a look at that tower."

Over the next hour the group wandered around and over the tower, Sidim setting up a few more of his sensors and only further refining his map of the interior. Not no entrances. In this time four more of the great machines lumbered out of the jungle, though one of them seemed to be returning material rather than collecting it. Not once did the machines acknowledge their presence, even with the boyish antics of Sidim when he raced up to one and patted its leg. When asked why he did such a thing, he stated to ensure he was not dreaming.

The sun began to dip steadily towards the tree line, and the shadows began to work their way across the bone white campus of the Tower.

"Now, I think, we can return to the Runabout," Sidim said as he set down the last sensor.

Blaise had come and gone a few times--once to replace his missing combadge, another time to relieve himself among the dense foliage, and then... he stopped explaining. Once Sidim suggested they return to the runabout, Blaise said, "I already did that, Dad. Nothing I ever did was good enough, was it?"

After he said it, Blaise blinked slowly. "Yeah... let's get back," he said softly, though more like his old tone. He turned back ahead of the other three, muttering things like, "Mama did not make me soft.... Don't talk about her... I am strong, no thanks to you..."

"Heat stroke," Sidim said with a knowing look in his eyes, 'I knew a fellow who could work himself into a near dissociative state, having conversations with all manner of mentally created people, and still operate a core sample drill. I think he went into politics on Luna or something equally backwards and useless. Now let us return to camp, I can begin going over the data."