Scent of Smoke - 3. Act I: Lost Property (part III)

STARDATE 62188

10 MARCH 2385 CE

Shift change was always a busy time for the Beltane’s mess hall. There was the usual throng of officers and crewmembers coming and going, stopping by for a drink or a quick bite at either end of their duty shift. But this time the atmosphere was different, thanks in part to a particularly rowdy table in one corner away from the bar. Here sat Will with a round dozen members of his security team. Now that their final destination was mere days away, he had thought it best to gather his subordinates here once again for their ritual—after making sure there were no civvies present, of course.

“Okay, I got ‘em, I got ‘em.” The final member of the team was wending his way through the assorted tables and chairs towards them, the tips of fourteen straws poking above the top of his fist.

“Bloody hell,” Will jibed to general applause, “where did you go for them, the factory?”

The lean, blonde woman to his right sneered good-naturedly. “What did I tell you, boss? Never send a sniper to do a knifer’s job.” She aimed a punch at the newcomer’s thigh, and everyone present could tell, from the mixed laugh and curse, that she had hit her mark.

“Okay, okay, come on guys,” Will called over the renewed laughs and groans of sympathy. He watched as the sniper took his seat and held the straws in his direction.

“After you, sir,” he said with a grin.

Will stretched out a hand, then thought better of it. “Hmm, nah. I wanna see what I’m up against first.”

The officer shrugged and began offering his fist around the table. One by one, each member of the team withdrew a straw, followed by either a delighted exclamation or a despondent groan. The blonde ‘knifer’ let out a loud “Well, shit!” when she picked hers, drawing it up out of her teammate’s fist to discover it was barely an inch long, earning her a few elbow nudges and well-meaning jeers from her colleagues. Finally, it was just Will and the sniper.

“Okay guys, shut up a minute,” Will shouted over the chatter, and an excited hush fell over the table. “Drum roll!” The rest of the team began beating their fingers rapidly on the edge of the table.

“The winner,” called the sniper over the noise “of the fourteenth ‘guard the scientist’ competition is…”

Will hesitated for a fraction of a second, and chose his straw.

“Our beloved team leader!” crowed the blonde, jubilantly holding up her straw against Will’s half-inch length. “Congratulations, sir!”

“Fuck you guys,” groaned the lieutenant amid gales of laughter. “Oh god, just fuck you all.” As the team settled back into pleasantly animated conversation about what might lie ahead, Will looked over their heads towards the gleaming metal bar, next to which the doors were opening.

Nathan stepped into the mess hall, scanning the room with apparent trepidation, and hesitated just beyond the threshold. Will caught his eye and raised his glass to him. Nathan gave him an odd look, halfway between a smile and a frown, before moving to the bar and taking a seat with his back to him.

Will glanced around his own table. None of his team had noticed this moment of interaction. He took a sip from his glass and considered the straw again. He looked up at the back of Nathan’s head once more, and smiled to himself.

*

Nathan exhaled a long breath through his nose and closed his eyes, barely listening to the first officer’s report on ship readiness. This confinement on the ship was starting to take its toll. He was sick of breathing recycled air, eating replicated food, walking and sleeping in artificial gravity. He had never questioned his decision to go on this mission—it was, in part, his theories that had gotten them this far after all—but he didn’t see why Starfleet couldn’t have made the endless, tedious journeys a bit more comfortable.

“Doctor, what else have you come up with?”

He had been prepared for Captain Temaga’s question, and barely left his reverie to answer. “What, is my unearthing the location of the Motherworld not good enough now?”

“Doctor…”

He sighed. “Nothing of consequence.”

“What’s that, then?” Will, sat across from him again, gestured at the data pad on the table before him. Nathan shifted uncomfortably, brought back to the room at last.

“It’s my admittedly minimal progress on translating the inscriptions on the tablet back at Thirteen. No references yet to anything military, hence ‘nothing of consequence.’”

Will smirked. “What are we still doing here then?”

Nathan slammed his hands onto the table and jumped to his feet. Above all, he was sick of that man pushing him, questioning him, always trying to test the limits of his tolerance. Well, this time he had found them.

“Good question! Goodbye.” He was halfway to the door before Temaga spoke.

“Nathan, come back.” He halted and faced the room again, but did not return to his seat.

“If your people are just gonna sit there and ridicule my work…”

“Nathan, sit down. Please.” Temaga did not raise her voice, but there was an unmistakable authority in her words. Nathan looked resentfully at her for a moment, but acquiesced. Regaining his place at the table, he shot a look of daggers at Will as Temaga spoke again.

“Lieutenant,” she said, addressing the tactical officer with the same sense of power in her voice, “you are not to say another word for as long as you remain in this room, do you understand me?”

“Yes…” Will caught himself as Temaga opened her mouth, as though daring him to defy her. Realising this was no casual command, he pressed his lips together and nodded mutely.

The captain smiled sweetly at the room. “Excellent. Keep at it,” she looked at Nathan, “let me know what you find. Now I believe you two had some news about that last planet?”

She addressed this second remark to two women who had been present at the last briefing; T’Sera, head of the civilian science teams, and Ensign Hanar Dzhan, one of her junior operations officers assigned to liaise with them.

It was Dzhan who spoke first. The younger of the two, no older than twenty-five by Nathan’s reckoning, the Trill wore her long, chestnut hair in a loose ponytail down her back, and could have passed for Human were it not for the tattoo-like rows of leopardish spots that framed her face and neck.

“Yes, ma’am,” she said. Her voice was measured, but Nathan could hear the nerves beneath it. He wouldn’t have been surprised if this was the first senior staff meeting of her career. “Our teams were going over the geophys scans of the dig sites. We didn’t find much out of the ordinary, but when we paired them with the deep-ground images we took from orbit,” she aimed a pointer at the screen, “we found these.” The screen flashed into life with a rotating wire-frame graphic of the planet, marred from pole to pole with innumerable circular lesions.

“Impact craters,” Temaga said. Her face remained blank, but an almost casual hand moved to half-cover her mouth.

“Thousands of them,” Dzhan confirmed.

T’Sera took over at this point. Had she been Human, Nathan might have guessed her to be of Asian descent, her short black hair cut in a perfect line an inch or so above her narrow, deep-brown eyes. Her voice was the perfect match to her face: cold and rigid, with no emotion or inflection. That is not to say mechanical, however—Nathan knew this particular Vulcan to possess a razor-sharp sarcastic wit, of which he would not want to find himself the target.

“Such impacts in and of themselves are not unusual on a terrestrial planet,” she said. “However their distribution and apparent frequency struck us as a little puzzling.” At her cue, Dzhan aimed the pointer again. The graphic on the screen tightened to a particular cluster of craters, hidden beneath millennia of shifting sands.

“Those aren’t natural impacts,” Will said, earning himself an amused eyebrow raise from Temaga, but no further admonition. “Those are the work of bombs, and massive ones at that.”

“Correct,” said T’Sera, and Nathan repressed a snort of laughter at the wintry condescension in her tone. “Evidence thus far suggests the city was destroyed from orbit approximately five thousand years ago.”

“What sort of weapons are we talking about?” Will asked. “What level of technology?”

T’Sera raised a thin eyebrow. “Geophysical scans alone cannot provide such information. Any chemical or radiological analysis would require a physical sample to determine the type of weapon used. As we have none…”

“You said the city was destroyed five thousand years ago,” Temaga interrupted, “but those craters cover almost the entire planet. How do you explain that?”

Dzhan raised her pointer for the third time and clicked. The image of the planet returned, this time with the craters highlighted in different colours from bright green, through murky orange and finally dark red. “The civilisation may have only been wiped out five thousand years ago, but further analysis of the older geology indicated sustained attacks across the planet at precise, two hundred and twenty-year intervals.”

Nathan sat forward at last. Geology wasn’t one of his strong points, but he knew enough to see where Hanar was going. “The energy from any impact would metamorphose the surrounding rock. Could you date that?”

The ensign nodded. “If our picture of the rock strata is accurate, the inhabitants endured frequent sieges over a period of twenty thousand years, culminating in their destruction five thousand years ago.”

“Which fits with our most recent estimates about the Motherworld. Alright.” The captain’s tone was distracted, and Nathan gave her a quick sidelong look, which she ignored. “Okay, thank you. If that’s all…”

The congregation was clearly surprised at the abrupt dismissal, but gave no comment or complaint as they filed out of the room. Again, Nathan hung back, waiting as the doors to the bridge closed softly, leaving him alone with the captain.

“Surely you’re not worried, now?” Temaga’s smile was playfully reproachful. Her dragonish eyes—the only giveaway that she may not have evolved on Earth—sparkled with anticipation.

Nathan’s expression remained serious, almost grim. “I’m just thinking… to endure a siege for twenty thousand years, and still lose. I'm starting to wonder just how bad these people were. Not only defeated, but totally wiped out.”

Temaga’s smile froze, and something hardened behind her eyes. “I guess that’s what we’re here to find out,” she said softly after a moment.

Nathan nodded. “I’ll see you later,” he said, and left the room. Left alone with her thoughts, a troubled frown crept across Captain Temaga’s brow.

*

“Captain’s personal log, stardate: 62193.2. We’ve been travelling at high warp for almost forty days, but for me the time has passed in a second. I have awaited this day for almost as long as I can remember… and yet, on the eve of attaining our goal at last, I must confess that the thought of reaching this world is a little daunting… even to me.”

Temaga held court from the captain’s chair, her face that perfect mask she had practised for so long. Beneath her composed exterior, however, her heart was drumming a vibrant tattoo against her sternum, mirroring the excited bustle of activity she could see at every bridge station. She heard the turbolift doors behind her and to the right, recognised the limping footsteps as those of her first officer and turned in her seat to face him.

“How are we looking?”

“Drop-off prep is underway,” he informed her, stepping into the lowered command area and taking a seat rather heavily in the chair to the left of hers. “Hangar deck and both cargo bays should be ready to offload by the time we reach orbit, though it’s fair to warn you we’ll have a lot of pissed off deckhands if this isn’t the place…” He shot her a devilish grin.

“Thank you, Commander,” Temaga smirked. “I’m sure I can entrust damage control to you if that is the case.”

A high, steady alert sounded from the forward station. “Ma’am?” The pilot turned his chair about to face his commanding officers. “We’re approaching the termination shock.”

Temaga nodded. The termination shock—the point at which a star’s solar wind meets that of the rest of the galaxy—defined the outermost edge of a solar system, and though every molecule of her being was urging her to press forward, protocol demanded she not make any rash decisions. She glanced to her left and saw her own steely determination reflected in her first officer’s eyes. Best to do this properly, she thought, and she nodded to him, allowing Den to give the first order.

“Drop us out of warp and make safe the reactor,” he called, the order catching the attention of everyone on the bridge. “Ease us back to one-quarter impulse power while we check things out.”

“Yes sir, warp drive disengaged,” was the reply from the forward station. To accompany the pilot’s words came the barely perceptible shudder translated through the deck plates as the Beltane slowed and traversed back into normal space. The elongated stars flicking past on the forward viewscreen became distant and apparently stationary again.

Temaga inclined her head to direct her voice over her right shoulder at the Operations console. “Deploy advance sensor drones,” she ordered, “and notify Starfleet we are about to commence our investigation.”

Unwarranted, Temaga felt another thrill of anticipation that had little to do with her long-awaited arrival here. The order to notify her superiors at Starfleet was perfunctory; during their journey Beltane had deployed several subspace relays to facilitate communication with those back home, but they were so far beyond Federation territory her message would take over three weeks to reach Starfleet Headquarters… and any reply would take a further three weeks to reach her ears. She was well out of reach of the Federation bureaucracy by now. This was her mission—whatever happened next was her call.

The probe launch went off without a hitch. The two sensor drones—discernible only as two bright, fast-moving flashes on the viewscreen—leapt forth from Beltane’s forward torpedo tubes, located either side of the fork at the ship’s bow, and soared toward the heart of the system. The probes travelled at warp speed, but their extreme distance from the sun meant it would still be some minutes before any pertinent results came back.

Still sat in her command chair, Temaga’s fists were clenched, resting stiffly on her thighs. Her jaw was no more relaxed, lending a hardened quality to her face that few of her crew had seen before. She became aware of a rhythmic drumming—a boot tapping impatiently against the deck plate—and shot a filthy look around the bridge for the culprit. It was only as her gaze met Den’s smirk that she realised the offending foot was her own. She gave him a reluctant, twisted smile that clearly ordered him to say nothing, but both were at that moment rescued by the call of the duty science officer to Den’s left.

“Receiving telemetry, Captain.”

Temaga adjusted her posture to stare intently ahead. “What do you hear, ensign?”

“G-type main sequence star, that much we knew. Probes indicate at least three Jovian systems on this side of the sun.”

Unable to tolerate simply sitting down, Temaga had moved across the bridge to stand behind the science officer during her report. She now stood with one hand on the back of the woman’s seat, peering over her shoulder at the displays.

“Asteroids, a few rocky planetoids…”

“Closer to the star?” Temaga pressed.

The science officer chanced half a glance over her shoulder at the Captain. “Sensor resolution is still pretty poor at this range,” she said. “I’ll need a few minutes to get clearer readings.”

“Best guess, ensign,” Temaga insisted, gesturing to a monitor which displayed a half-finished map of the solar system with a few fuzzy, unidentified objects near the centre.

“I’d guess at least two planets within the star’s temperate zone.”

Temaga felt a satisfied grin form on her face, and she struggled to keep it in check. She straightened and removed her hand from the back of the chair. “As soon as you can, start looking for heavy elements, refined metals, synthetic chemical compounds—anything to indicate the presence of a civilisation.” She barely heard the officer’s answering ‘Aye’ as she moved across the bridge to the doors opposite the briefing room. “And have Doctor Carson join me in the ready room.”

*

Certainly a lot nicer than the briefing room, was Nathan’s first thought upon entering the Captain’s ready room for the first time. While it was essentially a mirror of the room opposite—roughly trapeze-shaped, the narrow edge opening onto the bridge and facing the three large, rectangular windows overlooking the dorsal hull—it was far more luxurious and spacious, or perhaps that was merely the absence of the table taking up half the available floor space. There was a large, comfortable-looking sofa underneath the windows, a richly polished desk against the aft bulkhead, and several personal effects mounted on the forward one. Nathan noticed more than one prestigious Starfleet wartime decoration among these.

Captain Temaga sat in the middle of the sofa, legs crossed at the knees, poring over something on a tablet. She glanced up as Nathan stepped over the threshold and the doors slid shut behind him. “Nathan, have a seat.” She shuffled along to make room for him. “Just, ah, updating my log,” she said as he sat down, holding up the tablet. She spoke in a would-be casual voice, but the laugh behind her words was nervous and slightly breathless.

“So, this is it, eh?” said Nathan, without preamble.

Temaga nodded, setting the tablet on the cushion between them. “So far, the evidence we’ve gathered supports your conclusion.”

Nathan smiled. “You never really doubted my ‘conclusion’, did you?”

“Oh, I had my moments,” she said lightly. “Eleven months and counting, thirteen planets, and nothing to go on but a few contradictory myths from a half-dozen species…”

“That tablet was the key. If we hadn’t found that we’d still be chasing myth and metaphor.”

“Even if we were, I’ve no doubt you would have found the way.”

Nathan twisted his face. “I don’t know.”

Temaga scoffed. “Please, save the feigned modesty for someone who’ll fall for it. I’ve known you too long. Hey,” she added as Nathan flushed and looked away, “your theories about Bajor and the lost city of B’hala… never mind groundbreaking, they were damned audacious. That’s the kind of ingenuity I need out here.”

Nathan let out a humourless laugh. “My ‘theories’ on that subject earned me over two years of academic exile from my peers,” he said, a none-too-small trace of bitterness in his voice.

“But they were never proven incorrect. Ridiculed or not, you thought outside the box, took a stand… made a name for yourself. You wouldn’t be here today if you hadn’t.”

Nathan pressed his lips together for a moment. “I suppose that’s true,” he admitted at last, “and I’m certainly ready for some vindication. I suppose the question is, what kind of a name will you make for yourself here?”

“Hmm,” the Captain considered, a playful smile on her face. “The Temaga system?” She shook her head. “That planet already has a name, Doctor. Let’s find out what it is, together.”

Nathan met her eyes and smiled more warmly. Before he could reply, however, the com beeped.

“Captain, we have a clear view of the inner planets.” Den’s voice announced. “Now’s the time.”