Scent of Smoke - 2. Act I: Lost Property (part II)

Some twenty minutes later, Nathan stumped into the main tent at Base Camp. The white canvas structure was circular and about ten feet high. Some ten large tables piled with innumerable objects: tools, computers, artefacts, were dotted around the place. It was to the centre of the tent, however, that Nathan’s attention was drawn. He slung the tool pack off his shoulder, deposited it at the foot of the nearest table and made his way over.

“Anything new?” A voice, the same voice he had spoken with earlier, hailed him from one of the dim edges of the tent, and a woman wove her way towards him. She was a head shorter than Nathan, her dark skin contrasting brilliantly with her smooth, white hair. Helena Knight grinned as Nathan gave the tiniest start of surprise; the tent had appeared to be empty at first glance.

“What were you doing, hiding under your desk until I got back?” he said grumpily.

“Something like that, yeah.” Their attention was diverted for a moment as Will pushed open the tent flap and stepped inside, depositing his rifle and earpiece without ceremony on the nearest table. Helena shot Nathan a look that clearly asked ‘what’s he doing here?’, but Nathan shook his head and she did not pursue it.

“Anyway,” he said. “You can go ahead; I’ll sort this lot out.”

Helena nodded in gratitude and moved away. Nathan heard her stifling a yawn as she exited the tent.

“So, that’s the ‘big find’, huh?” Will had sidled up, unheard, beside Nathan, and was looking down into the wide, two-metre-deep hole in the ground at the centre of the tent. A three-legged metal winch had been set up over it; the thick cables descending from it wrapped around a huge, square tablet, at least three metres on a side, hoisted half out of the ground with one edge angled upwards. He could make out no details on the earth-covered surface in the half-light, but a large monitor to his right still displayed a detailed scan of the object, revealing a complex sequence of intersecting circles around the centre and more of the cursive script they had seen earlier around the edges. “A map?”

“Looks like…” Nathan reached out a hand and touched the edge of the tablet, brushing away a layer of centuries-old encrusted dirt, and caught a gleam of polished white marble beneath the remaining dust. “Such craftsmanship,” he murmured, almost to himself. “It must’ve been the centrepiece of a monument or commemoration.”

Will looked puzzled. “Commemorating what?”

Nathan dropped his hand and looked at him in disbelief. “All that talk about a military presence and you don’t even know what we’re here for.” The officer shrugged.

“It’s your mission, not mine.”

Nathan smirked. “Well, talk to the captain about it. If anyone knows, it’s her.”

“We’ve been to thirteen different worlds since we left port and you don’t know either?”

Nathan’s smile became more pronounced; enigmatic, even excited. “Oh, I know. And I know we’re getting close. This is the clue we’ve been searching for. The answers to all our questions are on that tablet, somewhere.” And he looked again at the monitor, at the computer still trying to glean some meaning from the pattern of circles and the endless, illegible script.

*

Ship’s night aboard Starship Beltane. Nathan had proven surprisingly resistant to his casual questioning, so Will had left him to it, transporting back up to the ship not long after he had made his mysterious comments. He didn’t feel much like sleeping, however; his conversation with Nathan and the rumours flying around the ship were bringing up question after question in his mind. So it was that he found himself in the mess hall at oh-two-hundred, several empty glasses before him on the small, square table, staring moodily out of the panoramic viewports that currently showed nothing but the dark side of the planet below.

“Feel like being disturbed, Lieutenant?”

Will’s head snapped around and he made to stand. “Sir…”

VarinKar th’Den, first officer of the Beltane, raised a hand in dismissal. The Andorian was a thaan, one of the two male genders of his species, and bore the same characteristic blue skin, white hair and antennae that were the identifying traits of his race. The lines on his face, however, were not due to age; this Andorian was heavily battle-scarred and walked with a slight limp in his left leg. Will had never asked about his superior’s injuries – he knew Den had been a front-line general of ground troops in the War a decade earlier, but he did not dare bring those times up in conversation. He could never tell whether the threat behind some of the Commander’s remarks was affected or genuine.

“Hey, at ease, soldier. I just thought you could use the company.”

“Actually, sir, I was about to turn in for the night.”

Den raised an eyebrow, casting an amused look at the litter of glasses on the table. He grabbed a chair and sat astride it opposite the lieutenant, plonking what appeared to be a steaming goldfish bowl with a straw down upon a coaster. “Really,” he said drily.

Will gave an apologetic grin. “No. I couldn’t sleep, I’ve been thinking too much.”

The Commander smirked across at him. “These are dangerous times, indeed.” His face furrowed, his tone a touch more serious. “What’s on your mind?”

Will took his time answering, choosing his words carefully. “Us. This,” he gestured towards the windows, the black mass of the planet still the only thing visible. “Our purpose here, I guess.”

“Speak your mind, Lieutenant.” It was not an order, but Will felt compelled to obey nonetheless.

“I guess I'm just trying to figure it all out… I mean we’ve been out here for months and found not a trace of this ‘Motherworld’, yet here we are still.”

Den nodded. “Theirs is a very slow profession,” he said sagely, his lips finding the straw protruding from his ‘drink’.

Will did not reply; the steam pouring from the first officer’s goldfish bowl had cleared somewhat with his first sip, affording him an unobstructed view of the table once again. Cast upon it from an overhead light source were the small, circular shadows of his empty glasses, and the large shadow of Den’s bowl. The pattern they formed was uncannily like the pattern carved upon the tablet he had seen hours earlier. Absently he reached out an arm and tapped a finger in the centre of the table.

“That’s weird,” he said.

“Isn’t it,” Den agreed.

Will looked up, distracted. “What?”

“Hm?”

It suddenly became clear to him he had killed the conversation; the first officer’s smile was both amused and a little teasing. Will cast about randomly for something else to say. “Warp core breach?” He nodded at the goldfish bowl.

“Yeah. The bartender at DS9 got me near enough hooked on them. They’re not what you’d call nice, exactly, but…”

“That’s great, sir,” Will cut across him, an idea burning in his mind. “Would you excuse me?”

Den gave a bemused shrug. “Of course.” Will was way ahead of him; already on his feet, he was halfway to the door by the time the first officer had finished his words.

*

Something was tickling his ear. Nathan shifted irritably, moving his head to deny the assailant access. A moment later, however, the sensation returned, this time on the other side. Fighting his way past semi-consciousness, he raised a clumsy hand to swat his attacker away, but succeeded only in hitting himself rather hard in the side of the head.

“Good morning, sunshine!”

That voice. He raised his head off the desk at last, vaguely aware of a sheet of paper clinging to his temple. Will Gates stood there, that infuriating cocky grin on his face as always, a long blade of grass in one hand.

“Bastard,” Nathan mumbled, and the other man laughed out loud. “What time is it?” He looked around, bleary-eyed, and saw the tent was flooded with morning sunlight, but otherwise empty.

“Oh-six-thirty. I thought I’d come see how you were doing.” Will’s eyes roved over the desk, a mass of ink-and-paper scribbles, calculations and drawings were visible on the sheets that were not crumpled into balls or littered across the ground. “But it looks like you’re getting on fine, so I’ll leave you to it.”

“Okay,” Nathan folded his arms upon the desk again and settled his head on them. “See you later.”

A moment passed in silence. “So, what have you got then?”

Nathan made an incoherent noise into his arm. The sudden awakening had made him feel slow and stupid, and in no mood to be bothered by questions, or to explain his failure to decipher the tablet. “Load of circles. And words.”

“Right, which mean?” Even in his sleep-addled state, Nathan could detect the bite of impatience in Will’s voice. Questions he may not like, but he was aware of himself enough to realise he wanted a repeat of yesterday’s spat even less. He raised his head again and looked Will in the eye, defeat in his face.

“Alright, you’ve got me. I have no idea. The script doesn’t match anything from the previous digs, none of the ciphers we have make any difference. It’s just gibberish.”

“I could’ve told you that,” Will quipped, grabbing a chair from an adjacent desk and sitting across from Nathan, who gave him a disdainful look.

“You’re funny.”

“I thought so.”

There was another moment of silence between the two men. Nathan was still unsure what to make of his new ‘friend’, who seemed to alternate between a beguiling charmer and an irritating dickhead, with no apparent transition or middle ground. He had little doubt Will was having similar thoughts; very few people had ever been able to correctly interpret what he was feeling, and it wasn’t for lack of trying on his part or theirs. People just didn’t get him, just as much as he didn’t get them.

“So yeah… I can’t translate this in a few days, or even a few weeks. There are a few commonalities with the languages we uncovered on the other planets, but unless there’s a Rosetta stone under there too,” he waved a hand in the general direction of the tablet, “I'm stuck trying to translate the hieroglyphs when I don’t even know where the Pyramids are or what Egypt is.”

Will shrugged, apparently lost for words. He grabbed a few of Nathan’s discarded drawings, seemingly at random, and pulled them towards him. The pieces of paper all bore roughly drawn copies of the tablet – six circles of different sizes around a common centre. He could see where Nathan had attempted to marry up individual stars with some of the innumerable thousands carved into the tablet’s surface, but given the many contradictions and crossings-out, he had made no progress here either. Remembering his conversation with Den in the early hours of the morning, he looked at the annotation at the centre of each drawing: “XIII”.

“Thirteen?” He pushed the drawings back towards Nathan, tapping the note in the middle of the topmost sheet. “You’re assuming the tablet is a map of this system and surrounding space?”

Nathan nodded bleakly. “Makes sense, doesn’t it? I figured they’d place this planet at the centre of any map they made but I’ve exhausted every possibility.”

Will’s brow creased, recalling something Nathan had said the night before. “It’s not a map,” he said, shaking his head.

“What?”

“Well, you said so yourself. You said it was a commemoration or a monument of some sort.”

Nathan gave him a condescending look. “Yes, I did, which is why I'm now working on the writing that will actually tell us something useful.”

“Not what I mean.” Will stood up and began to pace, his thoughts racing ahead of him. “This isn’t some Indiana Jones holonovel where the mysterious ancient guys leave us exactly the clues we need, this is the real world where they create stuff that’s relevant to them.” He glanced over at Nathan and, simultaneously agitated and animated by his incomprehension, continued. “Who would commemorate this planet? It’s just a ball of red dirt with one tiny city on the entire surface. Why is it so special it needs a monument like this?”

Nathan’s annoyed frown returned. This newcomer to the field he had dedicated his adult life to had the nerve to try and solve his puzzle for him, using nothing but conjecture and blind guesswork. “Sorry, why don’t I just look back five thousand years and tell you what this planet was like back then?”

“Fuck me, calm down.” Will looked around the tent again, as though hoping to spot something that would back up his argument. “Okay, we know that these people were dangerous, right?”

The archaeologist nodded, his frown intact. “So the myths go. Rains of dragon fire, cities turned to ash and death, all that.”

“Which we would interpret as pretty advanced and powerful technology, yes?”

“Obviously.”

“And what do dangerous, advanced and powerful people do?” Nathan gave him another blank look. “They build empires. As soon as their own planet isn’t big enough for them, they go out looking to steal other people’s. I’d hazard a guess that this isn’t the ‘Motherworld’ we’re looking for?”

“No, it’s a holiday resort,” Nathan replied sarcastically, then decided to humour his ‘student’. “You think this is some kind of outpost or vassal world?”

“Exactly!” It brought a smile to Nathan’s lips, almost in spite of himself, to see the amateur so excited at the professional’s approval of his theory. “And if I wanted to commemorate my home world and the capital of my empire, I’d put it right there.” Will’s finger tapped, once again, the centre point of the drawing.

Nathan nodded slowly. “Not bad… but you’re forgetting one crucial point. I’ve already explored that, and came up blank.”

Will’s brow creased again, and he was silent for a moment. “Nathan… have you ever read the reports on Iconia?”

Nathan’s eyes widened slightly, greatly surprised that the lieutenant knew the name, let alone the story. “Sure I have. They were part of the recommended reading list for the extended course at the Galen Institute. I wouldn’t mind going there myself someday – oh wait, Starfleet blew it up, didn’t they?”

Will ignored the barb. “And? How did they find the planet?”

“A team unearthed a star map near the neutral zone, but two hundred millennia of star movements made it useless in today’s terms. Did it not occur to you I may have already thought of that?”

The officer shook his head, drawing down the zipper of his black, grey-shouldered uniform jacket to reveal the gold undershirt beneath. “Bear with me, I have an idea.” He strode over to the monitor beside the tablet, the computer still attempting in vain to find some pattern in the inscriptions. “If I…” his voice trailed away.

Nathan raised an eyebrow. “Just so you know, you didn’t finish that sentence out loud.”

“Yeah, shut up I'm onto something here.”

“Oh, good. Let me know how it goes.”

“I’m instructing the computer to calculate the past movements of the stars in this area,” Will said, his fingers moving more slowly than they would normally over the unfamiliar keyboard. “If I’m right…”

The annoyance was back again. “Tried it, tried it, tried it,” Nathan droned, cutting across Will’s explanation. Undeterred, Will entered a final sequence of commands and hit execute.

“Five thousand years?”

Nathan nodded once. “Give or take,” he said. Will stepped back, giving him a clear view of the screen. The display was now divided into two halves; the scan of the tablet on the left, and a local star map on the right. Each star on the map was slowly creeping further to the right in accordance with Will’s computer model. A timer in the lower right corner of the monitor was counting backwards from zero, coming to a halt at -5,000 years. The map and the graphic of the tablet moved to meet in the middle of the screen, and the female, rather tinny computer voice announced her results.

“Analysis complete, no match found.”

Nathan got to his feet, pulled the rest of the drawings towards him and screwed them up into one large paper ball. “Oh well, you tried.”

Will gave a snort of irritation. “One thing I did learn is to not give up that easily. Computer,” he said, directing his voice at the keyboard, “resume count back until indicated otherwise.”

Silently the computer obeyed, the two images returning to their respective halves of the screen, and the clock restarted. Minus six thousand years… minus seven thousand… by the time it had reached twenty thousand, at the sight of the stars falling into place, the shit-eating grin was firmly in position once again on Will’s face.

“Analysis complete, correlation identified. Probability of match: ninety-eight percent.”

Nathan was speechless for a full five seconds, staring at the perfectly aligned graphics and the flashing digits in the corner. “Twenty-five thousand years?” His voice was hoarse, and Will folded his arms, practically bouncing on his heels.

“Does that mean I’m right?”

“It means…” Nathan swallowed, meeting the other man’s eyes with a very slight trepidation. “It means you’re right.”

*

The briefing room aboard the Beltane was cramped at the best of times. Space was always at a premium aboard a starship, never more so than in the Nova-class, but still Nathan could not see why the designers couldn’t come up with a more comfortable place in which to cram half a dozen people for unspecified periods of time. Besides himself, the table hosted Will, Helena, the captain and first officer, and two other women; one of whom he knew, the other he did not.

Pushing aside for the moment his discomfort at being so close to this many people at once, he got to his feet and aimed a pointer at the metre-wide screen along the aft bulkhead. The now familiar graphic of the map of local space superimposed over the tablet appeared there, annotations branching out from prominent individual stars. Will had given a triumphant preamble upon the assembly of the meeting moments earlier, basically consisting of “we’ve found it,” leaving Nathan with the job of presenting his–their–case to the captain.

“Uh… basically we used the Iconian mission from twenty years ago as a precedent. We conjectured that the tablet was too outdated for the computer to decipher on its own. I’d already had the idea of compensating for local star movements, to see what the area looked like five thousand years ago, but I came up blank. It was… Lieutenant Gates here,” he gestured slightly reluctantly towards Will across the table, who gave a none-too-modest grin, “who insisted we not give up so easily. We had no reason to believe that the tablet was any older than the rest of the artefacts, but I guess he had a hunch. The tablet is a representation of this area of space as it appeared around twenty-five thousand years ago.”

Helena, sat directly to Nathan’s right, chimed in. “Twenty-five thousand years is nothing in the grand scheme of things, but it was just enough to throw our computers off the scent.” In stark contrast to Nathan’s barely concealed unease, her excitement was palpable, boiling like water beneath her words.

“That’s our Motherworld, right there?” First Officer Den pointed one blue finger at the centre of the graphic.

Nathan nodded in assent. “Heading zero-eight-eight mark zero-zero-nine. There’s no way to be a hundred percent sure, but we’re fairly confident.”

At this, the captain sat forward in her chair for the first time, elbows resting on the table and hands clasped in front of her. “How far away are we talking, doctor?” The direct sunlight blazing through the windows behind her cast a halo through her dark hair, making it near impossible to see her expression, but the feeling in her voice was different to any who had yet spoken; calm, measured yet–was it possible?–slightly tense.

“Nearly a hundred and fifty light-years. Over a month at maximum warp speed.”

“That’s a hell of a detour if you’re wrong.” The captain’s voice was not admonitory. On the contrary, she sounded faintly amused. Nathan managed a smile at last.

“I don’t think I’m wrong.”

The captain nodded slowly. “Alright. Alright, we’ll check it out. Doctor, advise your teams to begin packing up immediately. Anything they can’t clear away by nightfall is to be left for the next expedition, understood?”

“Got it.”

She rose to her feet, the movement a de facto dismissal of the meeting. “Commander,” she directed at her number one, “ready the ship to leave.” Den bowed his head and departed, the others filing out of the briefing room and onto the bridge one by one until finally only she and Nathan remained. She crossed the short space to the port-facing windows, hands held behind her back, gazing down upon the world below.

“What do you reckon?” Nathan’s voice was quiet and level, no trace of the anxiety he had been displaying a moment ago. A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth.

“I’ve waited this long. What’s another month?”

Nathan nodded, and took a step towards the door. “I’ll have my team leaders put together a report on the outpost for whenever you’re ready.” He remained for another silent moment, before he too turned and exited the room.

The captain strode out onto the bridge, the briefing room doors snapping shut automatically behind her. She directed her silent question to the young Terran woman working the console to the right of her captain’s chair.

“Departure preparations are underway, ma’am,” the operations officer reported, turning in her seat. “Doctor Carson is en-route to the Base Camp to oversee the operation down there.”

“Very good, ensign,” the captain replied. “Please take care to remind our doctor he has less than three hours to recover what he can… and ‘suggest’ that if he complains about it, he can always wait for the next expedition to pick him up.”

The ops officer grinned, taking the captain’s joke and nodding. “Understood, ma’am.”

*

Sunset on the outpost plain. The white tent and its contingent of desks were gone, as were the spotlights that had littered the area this time the previous day. All that remained of their presence were the open trenches, a single stack of cargo crates and the winch, still holding the giant tablet above its hole in the ground. As Nathan cast one last, sweeping look across the plain, the crates dissolved in a brief hailstorm of blue light and a whoosh of disturbed air.

“I wish we could take this with us.” He ran an almost wistful hand down the edge of the stone tablet.

“You’ll still have your scans,” Helena replied, striding up to him, though looking as though she felt the same way. “Besides, you heard the captain, there’s no more room in the cargo hold. It’ll still be here.”

Nathan huffed. “Yeah, until one of those lion things decides it’d make a great lamppost and pisses all over it.” Helena chuckled.

“That thing’s survived intact for twenty-five thousand years. It’ll keep a few more months.” Nathan knew she was right, but didn’t want to just let it go, not without a good complaint at least.

“Just imagine what else could be under our feet, just waiting for us to find it. And we’re just supposed to leave?”

Helena’s expression darkened in the half-light. “You know the military,” she said grimly. “They tolerate the scientists for as long as they have to, then…” she waved her arm in a gesture of dismissal.

“I don’t think the captain’s like that,” Nathan countered. “That’s not what she’s out here for… she’s a good person.”

His friend smirked. “Well, how else do you think she resisted shoving you out the nearest airlock every time you opened your mouth?”

“Bitch!” Nathan laughed loudly, jolted completely from his momentary self-pity.

“Oh, yes sir!” She gave a winning smile, but Nathan’s face had fallen into a scowl.

“Don’t you start that Starfleet crap with me, too.”

Helena’s smile widened into a leer. “Come on! Don’t tell me you haven’t seen the way he looks at you. If you ask me, he wants to show you more than his phaser.” She waggled her eyebrows lecherously.

“Fuck off! You’re disgusting.” The laughter had returned, and Nathan was glad of it; it hid the flush he could feel creeping up his cheeks. No way was he ever going to admit that he knew exactly what she was talking about. “Well,” he said with a deep sigh. “Let’s go before they leave without us.”

Helena nodded, still chortling, and touched the badge above her breast. “Beltane, that’s the last of it. Two to transport.”

“Stand by,” came the reply. The pair stood in silence, taking in the twilit plain for the last time. Then the same blue hailstorm descended upon both of them, and they too, were beamed away.

*

High, high above the planet, the Starship Beltane was in motion. Lifting her triangular primary hull up and to starboard, the deep red impulse engine atop the engineering section suddenly flared a brilliant orange, pushing the little vessel beyond the planet’s gravitational influence and towards deep space.

“We’re clear for warp speed, captain.” The flight control officer’s fingers hovered above his controls in anticipation.

The captain nodded her acknowledgement. “Locate the G-type star along heading zero-eight-eight mark zero-zero-nine. Maximum sustainable warp factor.”

“Heading input, Captain, zero-eight-eight mark zero-zero nine, warp factor eight-point-five.”

She allowed herself one moment of delicious agony, feeling the tension on the bridge climb in waves, every eye on the forward viewscreen. “Engage.”

At the con officer’s command, the copper grilles along the Beltane’s elongated wedge-shaped warp nacelles flashed a brilliant blue-white. Instantly enveloped in the physics-defying subspace bubble, the ship was pushed beyond relativity and light-speed, bound at long last for her ultimate destination.

The captain shifted in her chair, observing her crew. The moment was over, and they were all attending to their stations and duties once again. At last, she thought. The wait is almost over.

Leaning back and relaxing into her chair, Captain Ariss Temaga allowed herself the first small smile of victory.