Down in the Underground (Part 1)

Posted on Fri Nov 27, 2015 @ 3:35pm by Commander Caden Aldrex & Captain Maritza Soran & Lieutenant Benj Amoran & Lieutenant Kivan Ta'Gas & Ensign Jessica Mayhew

1,668 words; about a 8 minute read

Mission: Pangaea (Wrap up)
Location: Caves of Pangea
Timeline: MD 4/1400 (the day after the planet emerges)

The Ararat descended deep into the hole in the earth, the light from the sun above throwing the ship’s shadow down onto the smooth banded limestone over half a kilometer below the surface. It came to rest in a shallow depression, throwing up the rain water that had collected there, sending it spilling down the weathered channels leading from the depression down further into the caves.

When the ramp unfolded, the away team got their first good look around. The hole they had entered in was a good 200 meters across and let natural light fill most of this section of the cave system they had scanned from orbit. The roof of the cave was supported by a dozen massive limestone stalactite/mites that had formed thin columns billions of years ago and then been covered and covered and covered again until they were now solid pillars, a dozen meters thick and ribbed with multiple little runoffs and rivulets of dripstone in shades of yellow from sandy to sulphurous.

The floor had formed from undulating layers of flow stone with mirror flat ponds collected here and there, reflecting perfectly the ceiling above, with its ribbons of calcite snaking around fields of thin crystalline straws hanging down.

Commander Soran checked the direction on her tricorder and pointed away from the landing site down to where a glass clear river was running deeper into the complex. "Let’s start there and follow it downstream. The infrastructure the probe found should be about a kilometer. Has everyone got everything they need?"

Jessica hiked her pack onto her back and checked her phaser and tricorder on her hip one more time. She felt honored to get out from behind the desk in the Security office and be assigned an actual away team mission.

“Ready!” the young blonde security ensign said chipperly, looking around the cavern. She held out her tricorder, scanning for threats, even though they had already done that with the ship’s sensors as they landed and before they opened the hatch.

Ensign Osyr, a Saurian from Geosciences, flipped open his tricorder with a flourish while his other hand searched for the flashlight on his utility belt. "Ready, sir," he said absently. He was still taking it all in, barely containing his excitement. His tricorder warbled as it began accumulating data.

Ensign Kivan Ta'Gas stayed towards the rear of the away team as the ramp unfolded and the group unloaded from the vessel. He used the vessel's comm unit to establish a continuous tightbeam link to a previously deployed satellite within the planet's orbit. Starfleet hadn’t been able to thoroughly establish a technological footprint on the planet or even within the system, therefore traditional comm units were not going to be as effective.

The shortwave burst would allow the two away teams to maintain continuous communication with one another and, when necessary, send limited communication back to the station.

"Sir, we have limited communication with the second team and the station. However, I do not recommend anyone venturing too far beyond the two kilometer zone," the young Cardassian said as he began to walk down the ramp. His tricorder attempted to scan the area; however, the atmospheric interference was disrupting the imaging of the surrounding area. One of the few pluses that Ensign Kivan could immediately determine was that the humidity and temperature was similar to what he'd expect to find on Cardassia Prime.

Jessica’s blonde hair was already starting to limp in the humidity. “It’s cooler farther in,” she noted. “Tricorders are minimal. I can’t guarantee it will detect hostiles much before they’re on us,” she told the others. She punched a few buttons and set it for a continual low-level perimeter scan for any life signs without a Starfleet badge.

Reade scratched his head - his main reason for being on a starbase was that he didn't have to go out in the field. His life was in the labs, and whilst he could deal with the admin that being an assistant chief brought (in truth it meant he had to talk to people and interact - something he might have shirked without that responsibility) it meant he could stay where he liked to be.

Where Reade liked to be was not moving deeper and deeper into a series of unexplored caverns on a planet that had popped into existence bare hours ago. He focused on his tricorder readings. They confirmed what the others had gleaned. If only he could go back and analyze the data, not gather it.

Soran set a brisk pace. Despite the dampness of the floor, the going was easy. The entry cave sloped gently down for the best part of four hundred meters, so the underground river moved only slowly, and there was a broad bank they could follow as it left the great cavern they had entered, meandered through a narrower, lower connecting tunnel, and opened out into a great open space, a hollow in the earth.

A carved facade filled the rear of the open space from floor to ceiling, just shy of forty meters. It was made from a pinkish stone, pockmarked and rough. There were hints of figures carved around roughly rectangular openings set with heavy lintels.

Benj was at home in this kind of humid heat and he likened this to some very interesting places on Bajor. Most of those, however, were holy and this did give him a sense that perhaps they shouldn't be tramping around here. He tagged along anyway, using his med scanner on anything he found that seemed to be interesting.

Jessica pulled out a pair of night vision scanners, running them visually around the new cavern, outside their hand lights to get a better view. It was better than she was getting with her tricorder, though it wouldn’t reveal anything that might be unseen.

“I’m not seeing anything,” Jessica said, slipping the scanner back to her belt.

Ensign Osyr found a smooth, flat wall. He scanned it with his tricorder and then ran his slender, reptilian hand across it. "Remarkable," he said quietly, as if he were in a sacred place. "It looks as though it were carved out of the surrounding rock. Then as the centuries passed the rock began to regrow around it." He followed the wall to see how far it extended. Perhaps there was a door somewhere.

"Be mindful of what you touch or tamper with!" Ensign Kivan said from farther behind the away team. "We have not had the chance to thoroughly investigate the seismic activity of this location, let alone the stability of this cavern," he said as he continued to scan the area with his sensor equipment. "The last thing we need is to trigger some form of tectonic event and become buried inside of here," he said without a hint of humor in his tone.

“Right,” Jessica confirmed, not at all comfortable with the idea of being buried alive. “Thanks for putting that image in my head, Ensign,” she said, flashing her light around. “Should I set up the lamps?” she offered. They had some high powered lights on a grav-sled with the rest of the equipment.

"Just a few. I want to save what we have for in there." Soran looked around the cavern and then to the building ahead. "Give me two strong ones to light the path back to the joining tunnel. We had ambient light there. Then let’s have one to put on the middle door." She could fix that one up herself. "While we're doing that, the rest of you each take an opening and see if you can see where they lead."

Following Soran's orders, Osyr went down a narrow pathway that was barely big enough for one person to walk through. The "man-made" wall he had been exploring had ended here. Now he was making his way down some sub-cavern. The walls here were more irregular and rough, suggesting that he may not find anything of note. He was careful to remember the way back. It helped that he could still hear everyone talking behind him.

Jessica nodded and handed Soran one of the lights from the sled. She put away her tricorder – though still set to scan and alert – and hefted the other two lights, heading back a bit the way they came to start setting them up so they could illuminate the way back.

As the lights switched on they began to get a better idea of the size of this cavern. They also saw other artifacts that had been sitting in the dark for untold centuries. Obelisks, disks, and other markers carved from granite and engraved with symbols. Some were intact but others were broken or in the midst of being consumed by the living rock around them.

One particular figure was a humanoid statue that blocked the path to the edifice ahead. In the semi-darkness it had been indistinguishable from the other stones. But under the lanterns its details were now clear. It was a humanoid, with two arms, two legs, and a head. The head, however, was large, with eight eyes, two sets facing in all four directions, and four mouths, also facing in every direction. It was covered head to toe in battle armor. In one hand it held a long bronze spear and in the other was a bronze sword with its hilt covered in gems. It rested on one knee, waiting.

When the light from Jessica's lanterns hit its eyes the statue opened its four mouths and drew in breath. Then with the ghastly sound of grinding rock it stood and held its spear out, the sharpened tip pointing at the away team. "Góshé śatam?" it asked. "Sas saptá mezēnai!" It was a guttural, spectral voice.

To be continued

Ens. Jessica Mayhew
Security Officer
NPC Caleb Ryan

Ensign
Kivan Ta'Gas
Engineering Officer
NPC Thom

 

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