Erratic Nerd Writings

As they materialized on the planet, they were immediately greeted by a vicious wind that slammed into them, making them all hunch their shoulders beneath the thermal gear they had outfitted themselves in.  One of the security guards, an Asian human female whose name Kanor had already forgotten, raised her voice above the noise.

“Why the hell would the Zaranites want to establish a colony on this rock?!”

Kanor glanced over at Selorus as the Romulan frowned down at his tricorder, calibrating the instrument.  The two other scientists were doing the same, while Munson and his security team were scanning the surrounding area, their phaser rifles ready. 

“We have…adjusted our assumption the Zaranites were seeking to establish a colony on this planet.  Given the system’s dying white dwarf star and the harshness of the environment, we believe they were intending this to simply be their first live test.  They were going to set up a mock colony to run different scenarios, but not actually establish a permanent residence.”

Kanor, his Varon-T disruptor in his left hand, kept his eyes on the surrounding area as he sheathed his Mek’leth.  He pulled out his tricorder, calibrating the device without looking while Selorus directed the pre-arranged pairings of a Science officer and Security officer they had determined in the transporter room in different directions amongst the ruins.  Marcie had specifically requested Kanor be her “security”, and while Munson had protested the idea, Selorus had approved.

“What is it we’re looking for down here again?  I tend to tune out Selorus a lot of the time when he’s talking; I mean didn’t the Zaranites already go over these ruins?”

Kanor grinned as they moved off in the direction Selorus had sent them, sparing glances down at his tricorder as they moved, but mostly staying aware of their surroundings.  Selorus tended to have a very dry, stoic manner to his speech; that Marcie tuned him out like that he found amusing.  At times, the Lieutenant seemed more Vulcan than Romulan.

“They did, but they were merely a survey team.  They were looking for signs of intelligent life, determining the qualities of the planet and its atmosphere and how it suited their terraforming test needs.  The Enterprise has a better sensor suite and equipment to study the place with, and frankly, probably better qualified people.”

He glanced back at Marcie, walking just a couple of paces behind him to his left.  Her eyes were intent on her tricorder, barely aware of where she was walking.  The seemingly constant wind was making her raven-hued hair writhe around her head with a life of its own.  They were having to shout to be heard; Kanor idly wondered if any hostiles would be able to hear them coming or not.  Despite the lack of any lifeforms detected by the Enterprise’s sensors, he was always weary of something the sensors might have missed.

“Ah.  Well…it’s certainly pretty barren down here.  Even planet life is practically non-existent, at least in the surrounding area.”

“That star is dying a lot faster than I would have guessed for this region of space.  It’s a wonder there’s this much illumination down here as it is.”

While Kanor and Selorus wouldn’t have the same difficulties seeing as the rest of the team down here, the planet’s “daylight” would probably fall under “dusk” properties on most planets.  It was cold, and Kanor could feel the bite of that wind even through the thermal gear Enterprise had provided for him.  They made their way through the ruins, each of them gathering as much information as they could, but not finding much.  They stopped after a while inside a chamber that was largely intact; it was sunken beneath ground level, and had remnants of a roof overhead.  There was evidence wildlife had inhabited the structure before, but even that was extremely old.  Most importantly, the chamber provided some welcome relief from that wind.

“I’m just amazed this place has remained this intact for so long.  The preliminary dating of these ruins indicates the people that built this thrived a LONG time ago.”

Kanor nodded, studying his own readouts.  At least they didn’t have to talk so loud in here.  They had activated wrist-mounted portable lights upon entering; the far-side of the structure had collapsed, and that portion of the roof had caved in, but there wasn’t enough light coming in to see by, even for him.

“Most likely due to the location.  While these winds are…quite persistent, the mountain ranges surrounding the site seem to provide a natural buffer from the worst of it.  I doubt we’d even be able to keep our footing on the mountains or beyond.  That these winds haven’t worn all traces of these ruins away over time is, in of itself, curious.”

Marcie frowned, running her tricorder around in a circle where she stood in the middle of the room.

“I haven’t seen anything indicating a written language, though.  If it’s not meant for function it seems to be…aesthetically pleasing, not meant to convey any sort of message.”

Kanor crouched down, scanning with his tricorder where an intact wall met the floor.  He holstered his disruptor, reaching out with his left hand to brush along the wall.

“And I’m having a hard time determining what this is even made of; there are traces of stone AND metal in these walls.  Not individual components, but fused somehow, in flux.  Makes it difficult to scan.”

“Don’t you think it’s odd we haven’t run into any artifacts?  I mean take this place, for example.  Sheltered from the elements, and yet there doesn’t seem to be any objects of any kind lying around, unless you count animal remains.”

Kanor’s eyes swept around the room, noting the oddity.  Regardless of what this place had been used for, surely it would have had furniture of some kind, or evidence of its presence from before.

“I don’t believe the Zaranite surv…”

“Selorus to Doctor O’Neil, please respond.”

Marcie plucked the chirping communicator from her belt pouch, using one hand to hold it while she stretched a finger of her other hand away from the tricorder to flip open the grille.

“O’Neil here.”

“Report.”

Marcie rolled her eyes as she shot Kanor a glance.

“Not much to report.  Kanor and I have stopped inside a mostly intact structure to investigate, though there’s not a lot here to look over.  We’ve travelled…just under three kilometers from the beam-down location.”

“I will contact you again in another thirty minutes.  Contact me if you encounter anything of significance beforehand.  Selorus out.”

Marcie shook her head, replacing the communicator and refocusing on her tricorder as she stepped from the center of the room.

“He would, of course, get paranoid on an empty planet…”

Kanor got to his feet, shrugging his shoulders as he tried to find something else of interest in here.

“He’s being mindful; cautious, not paranoid.  That’s not a bad thing, especially on an unknown planet dealing with a civilization that hasn’t really been encountered before.  Besides, ruins like these, anything could happen.  Something crumbles, shifts just right…we’re trying to cover a large area, we should keep in regular contact just to make sure.  I’d recommend twenty minutes, personally, but…”

He trailed off as he saw Marcie standing still, facing a blank wall.  Her features were drawn together in puzzlement, her fingers adjusting the settings of her tricorder.

“Find something unusual…?”

“I’m…not sure.  Like you said, whatever this building is made of, it sends these weird fluctuations, makes in-depth scans difficult.  But…I swear, for a minute there…”

Kanor directed his own tricorder to scan the area Marcie seemed to be focusing on.  He tried adjusting the scanning parameters, to see if he could catch something odd, but Marcie beat him to it.

“There it was again.  A room, beneath this one.”

Kanor’s right eyebrow arched up.  He hadn’t caught it on his scanner, but Marcie might have hit just the right setting.  She held out her tricorder towards him so he could see the visual replay she had brought up on its screen, then paused it when it showed up.

“See, right there.  Shows a room beneath the floor; a basement or something.  Not big, but…”

“But where’s the door…?  There weren’t any hatches outside, and THIS room was sunken in below ground level, let alone another chamber beneath.”

Marcie shook her head, crouching down and waving her tricorder down in front of her.  Kanor crouched beside her, eyes narrowing as he looked for any minute oddities in the surface, or where the floor met the wall.  Something indicating a switch, an access device of some kind.

“I don’t know.  It SHOULD be here, but…in between fluctuations it seems like it’s just solid flooring.  Maybe it’s pressure activated or something…?”

She pressed her left hand down against the floor, her delicate-looking fingers flexing as she exerted pressure.  Kanor tried to envision what a door, similar in dimension to the other doorways they had encountered, might look like in the floor, and reached out to press his hand down in the imaginary center of it.  He flinched, drawing his hand back; something seeming to physically…flick inside his head.

“What the…” he muttered.

A grating noise rumbled beneath their feet, and a split appeared in the flooring where Kanor had envisioned the door.  He and Marcie both shuffled away from it, exchanging startled glances.

“What’d you do?” Marcie asked.

Kanor shook his head, his brow furrowed deeply, wondering what that sensation had been in his skull.  It was flitting, at least.

“I don’t know…tripped something, I guess…?”

They watched as the seemingly solid material seemed to simply shift in front of them, revealing the entrance to the chamber below they had been searching for.  Kanor was puzzled by the mechanics of it; there wasn’t a part of the floor withdrawing, or swiveling on some hinge.  The solidarity of the floor was simply moving, shifting in front of them to reshape around this new form of an entryway.  It didn’t flow, like liquid, or shimmer, like some play of light.  It was…more like some invisible hand was moving individual molecules of the floor.  Marcie took a step forward, craning her neck to see down into the dark pit, but Kanor’s arm shot out in front of her, blocking her.

“I’ll go first; we don’t know what’s down there.”

Marcie frowned, but stopped, waiting for him.  She shone her wrist light at the opening as Kanor withdrew his disruptor again, keeping aim on the hole as he maneuvered so he wouldn’t block Marcie’s light.  As he drew closer, his own light revealed a set of steps going down; whether they had been there before the doorway appeared he couldn’t be certain.  Stale, musty air reached his nostrils as he advanced, wafting up out of the opening and only getting stronger.  Whatever the place was down there, it hadn’t been exposed like this for a long time.  Marcie was studying her tricorder.

“I’m not detecting any lifesigns down there.  With that hole, I can scan the room now, at least.”

“That’s good…”

Kanor’s eyes shifted to his tricorder as he directed it down the steps, trying to see if there were any possible traps that weren’t alive he might be walking into.  He placed his foot on the top step and started heading down.

“I’ve never seen something…appear like that door did.  What happened?  You seemed to recoil right before the thing opened up.”

Kanor’s head was on level with the floor of the first room, now.  He turned in the stairwell to look back at Marcie, who was coming over to the top of the stairs behind him.  As he did, his hip brushed the wall of the stairwell, and he felt the material snag on something.  It didn’t rupture the fabric, at least.

“I’m not sure; it was like something…poked me inside my head or something.  It didn’t hurt so much as it was…unexpected.  Be careful coming down, the walls seem to be jagged down here.”

The second room was significantly smaller than the first; it didn’t take Kanor long to determine it clear of any dangers he could identify, at least.  He reholstered his disruptor, and Marcie followed him down once he called up the all-clear, though she was already leaning over the edge of the opening and peering around, her nose wrinkling at the stale smell.

“What do you think this place was used for?  All enclosed and hidden away and everything.”

Kanor shook his head, shrugging. 

“Who knows?  Maybe it was simply a storage area, some utility closet or something.”

“Guess it’s hard to speculate without any furniture…and without an understanding of their technology, their culture.  It’s featureless in here…”

She stepped closer to one of the walls, her eyes narrowing as she stared, directing her tricorder over everything.

“Is this stuff crystalline…?”

Kanor was scanning the floor; if there was one room below, maybe there was another?  A half-formulated idea of architecture that went down rumbled around in his brain.

“Hmm…?  Yeah, looks like it, I kinda snagged my suit on it coming down…the floor isn’t, though.  Both of them are made of different material than the room above.”

Marcie was shaking her head; she had detached her medical scanner from the tricorder’s casing and had started moving it over the surface.

“It’s not crystalline; I’m not certain, but…I think it might be…might HAVE been, biological in nature…”

Kanor frowned, glancing over his shoulder at her.

“Biological…?  Why didn’t we pick it up before?”

“It’s just like all the other stuff this place seems composed of; it fluctuates.  It’s certainly not alive, not anymore, but at one point in time, I think…it MIGHT have been.”

Marcie’s brow had furrowed, a deep crease forming between her eyebrows that…almost seemed comical.  She reached for the medical kit she had slung over her shoulder that rested against her left hip.

“I’m going to collect a sample to bring back to the Lady for study.”

Kanor’s scans of the floor had proven to be a dead end.  He nodded as Marcie pulled out a scalpel, a bright light coming from its end as she proceeded to remove a portion of the wall, and moved over to the stairs as she worked.

“It’ll be the only thing of note we’ve managed to uncover so far.  Hopefully the others are faring better than we are.”

Kanor’s eyes scanned the ceiling around the stairs leading up, trying to discern any signs of the engineering for the door device he had seemed to inadvertently activate.  There didn’t seem to be enough space between the floor of the top room and the ceiling of the bottom room to accommodate machinery, but then this whole civilization so far seemed to be of an alien nature unlike any he had heard of before.  They had collected some samples as they made their way through the ruins of various structures; the rough range of the age of this place seemed incongruous to the level of craftsmanship and methodology they were encountering.  Perhaps this had been a colony planet…?

“All done.  See something up there you want to take a sample of?”

Kanor looked at her, contemplated, then pursed his lips.’

“You know, yeah, actually.  This place is a lot more intact than any of the other places we collected from, though.  I might need to do some cutting myself.”

He paused for a moment, looking up the stairs.

“Maybe you should head up, first.  If I should trip something, and we both get caught down here…”

He’d be fine.  He was confident he’d be able to teleport out if the need arose, but he had never attempted to teleport anyone else along with him before.  Theoretically possible; he had constructed the command prompts for the bodyslide system with that contention in mind.  Once he had begun work on Cypher, however, the teleportation tech just…hadn’t really been his focus.  He had made it safe, worked out the kinks-well, as much as he could, stupid targeting orientation-but it got him the use he needed out of it, so he was content with that.

“Good point, though maybe you should be the one up top while I try to cut a piece out.  The door responded to YOU, you know, not me.”

Kanor shook his head. 

“No way.  Besides, that was just a fluke.”  He paused a moment, but couldn’t help a playful grin crossing his features.  “And I’ve got a trick or two up my sleeve.”

She grinned right back at him.

“Now THAT doesn’t surprise me…alright, fine.  But I’m giving you a full scan once we’re done here to make sure that ‘poking’ you felt wasn’t something more serious.”

“Yes, DOCTOR O’Neil…”

She started heading up the stairs, looking back at him and shaking her tricorder at him accusatorily.

“That’s Lieutenant Commander Doctor O’Neil to you, mister, and don’t you forget it!”

He waited until she was crouched at the top, looking down at him, trying not to look concerned though it was obvious she was.  He pulled out the engineering cutter from his kit; essentially the same thing as Marcie’s medical scalpel, but less refined and more powerful.  He went up a few steps, keeping his head below the edges of the doorframe (self-decapitation was a no-go, in his books), and glanced up at her. 

“Alright, back up a bit.  Not sure what I’m dealing with, here, don’t want you caught in anything.”

She reluctantly scooted back a little, though not much.  He didn’t like it, but had a feeling she wouldn’t budge any further.  He activated the cutter, taking an educated guess on where machinery to operate a door system might reside as he pressed it up against the ceiling…

…and nothing happened.  He frowned, deactivating the cutter, drawing it down to adjust the settings, then attempting again.

Still, nothing.

“Well that was certainly anti-climatic.”

Kanor didn’t respond to Marcie’s jab, instead jumping the cutter up to the highest level, it’s maximum output.  Yet again, not even a scratch.  Bewildered, he reached a hand up to brush over the surface; he couldn’t even detect a single marring of the material.  He turned at the waist and aimed the device at the crystalline-looking wall nearby; activating it caused an outburst of crystal-like material to go flying all over the place.

“Was that really necessary?”

“I wanted to make sure it was working properly.”

“The little glowy thing at the end wasn’t a good enough indicator?”

Kanor made sure the device was secure and deactivated, shooting her a disapproving look as he started heading up the stairs.

“You don’t understand.  That’s my personal engineering cutter; it’s industrial-grade, and I’ve done some…adjusting of the safeguards.  It’s not like the normal stuff you guys have on the Enterprise; that last setting should have ripped a hole right through there no problem.”

“You obviously haven’t gotten a good look at Skid’s box.”

Kanor’s eyebrow arched as he looked at her, an image of Skid’s body flashing across his thoughts.  The two of them wrestling, her legs attempting to maneuver for that perfect leverage, the…angles of view he was exposed to, however briefly…

Kanor’s blank stare prompted Marcie to follow-up.

“You know, her toolbox?  You wouldn’t believe what that woman carries around in there; I bet she’s got a cutter to make yours look like a children’s toy.”

Ahhh, Marcie.  She seemed so…blissfully, innocently naïve sometimes, especially when it came to sexual matters.  He mentally shook his head, clearing his thoughts.

“Regardless, that ceiling was…more resilient than it should have been.  The walls weren’t that way, why was the ceiling?”

“Well, we don’t know what the…”

Marcie’s belt chirped.  Her communicator.

“Munson to O’Neil.  Respond, please.”

“Does no one include the Klingon on contacts…?” he muttered.  He took the last step out of the stairwell, moving to Marcie’s side.

Munson’s voice sounded tight, urgent.  Marcie shut her tricorder, slipped it in her belt pouch, and grabbed her communicator, opening it with two hands.

“Doctor O’Neil here, with Kanor.”

“Emergency change of plans.  Double-time it back to the beam out location.”

Kanor had been given his own communicator for the away mission, but since Marcie’s was open and receiving…

“What’s going on?”

Munson sounded irritated by Kanor’s question, but answered it anyways.

“Enterprise just reported-that monstrosity we ran into the other day just dropped out of warp.  It’s heading this way.”

Kanor swore vehemently.

“What’s our course of action?”

“We’re getting the hell out of here, that’s what.  Enterprise can’t stand up to that thing, not when we don’t know anything about it.”

Marcie was securing her med-kit, eyes scanning around the room to make sure they weren’t forgetting anything.  Kanor, too, was ensuring his gear was in place and secured for quick action; that was his normal practice, but he always rechecked.  His tricorder put away, on standby.  His Varon-T secured, though capable of being quick-released.

“How were they able to follow us here?” Marcie said.

“Just get back to the beam site, pronto.  Munson out.”

Marcie closed her communicator and returned it to her belt, her eyes looking past Kanor.

“The door.”

Kanor glanced behind him, his eyes widening. 

“I didn’t even hear it…”

The stairs he had just come up, the doorway they had both just gone through to the room below, was completely gone, without a trace.

“If you didn’t hear it, I certainly didn’t.”

Again, there was no visible sign there had ever been an opening there.  Though…Kanor thought, with closer scrutiny, he could at least see some dust disturbance, which…was something, he guessed.

“Ready?”

Her face set, Marcie nodded. 

“Lead the way.”