by David Smith
‘Hello Lieutenant-Commander. How can I help you?’
O’Mara smiled. She’d taken quite a liking to the nun after her initial scepticism of her religious leanings. She particularly admired the good grace with which the nun had accepted that her religious beliefs were in fact a complete shambles. The fact that her first thought was still what she could do for others spoke volumes.
‘Oh nothing really. I thought I’d just pop down and see how you are.’
The tall nun smiled ruefully. ‘As well as can be expected, thank you. It comes as a bit of a shock when you find the spirit that you’ve been seeking all your life is actually sorry that they ever came to you in the first place.’
O’Mara sat down next to her. ‘Hey! That wasn’t a personal thing! Long made it quite clear that they like you. The Thetans just didn’t go much on the way the Church of Scientology was run.’
Sister Matic sighed. ‘Not many people were. Truth be told, even within the religion the main body of the church was seen as a bit of a liability. That’s why there were so many splinter groups and factions.’
There was an awkward silence before O’Mara asked the question that had prompted her visit. ‘What are you plans now?’
The nun sighed and looked out towards the distant stars. ‘I don’t know. I suppose it’s a bit of a cliché in religious terms to go wandering in the desert looking for answers, but I think that’s where I am. I’m the last member of my order, and it seems that what we hoped for has not come to pass. I had great ideas about finding the origins of the Thetans and founding some sort of ministry where we could worship them and promote them. Sadly it seems that they want no part in such things which leaves me at something of a loose end.’
‘But nothing has really changed’ suggested O’Mara.
The nun looked at her, clearly surprised and O’Mara had to explain ‘Well you were right about the existence of Thetans, it’s just that they don’t want any religious edifice built around them. That doesn’t make a difference to who you are or how you lead your life, does it? The values you have of forgiveness and assistance are as valid now as they were before. So what has to change?’
‘Nothing, I suppose’ she admitted with a sigh.
O’Mara smiled and broached another subject. ‘We’re a long way from anywhere out here, and the skipper says he can’t justify turning the ship around to drop you off, so I’m afraid you’ll be stuck with us for a good few months.’
‘I know, and I appreciate the help and support the whole crew has given me’ she nodded. ‘I’m terribly sorry to be such an inconvenience.’
O’Mara smiled. ‘Ah it’s a big ship, we’ve got room for one more, and you’re no inconvenience. In fact the crew will be glad to see you stick around a little while.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, to be sure! You have a knack of putting them at ease. A lot of them have said how much you’ve helped them with the odd little chat.’
The nun smiled. ‘I admit it has been nice to have been able to offer words of comfort and guidance to those who need it.’
O’Mara smiled ‘Well there’s a good number of people aboard this ship who need all manner of guidance. I’m sure you’ll be a proper asset.’
The nun smiled again. ‘Well in that case, I will be glad to stay for the while. I don’t know how long that will be, but it’ll be good to be part of a family again.’
O’Mara took her leave of the nun and went back to the Bridge, where the Captain was sat in his chair, waiting for her. ‘Did she buy into the idea?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘Ok. We’ll let it ride and see how it goes for a while. If she’s as good at the pastoral care business as I think she is we may even have to find a new role for Lieutenant-Commander Ozawa.’
O’Mara shuddered. Most starships carried a Counsellor these days to offer guidance to the crew, but any session with Tiger’s counsellor required a thick skin or better still body armour. ‘Perhaps, sir, but I’ll let you tell Ozawa that.’
Chapter 10: ‘The Solace of a Quantum’
Personal Log: Crewman Jonah James
Star Date 9531.9
I was accosted by Crewman Sarah Cumbers again today.
I’ve always assumed that she’s harmless but I can’t say the same about myself. Everyone who gets to close me, emotionally, physically . . . in any sense of the word . . . gets hurt.
It’s obviously not a coincidence that I’ve ended up in treaty space. I can feel something building up. My Uncle Zack was lost out here serving aboard USS Magellan when I was just a kid, and I’ve often wondered if that was the first manifestation of my curse.
I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve the bad luck I get. I’m not a bad person, and I’ve never done anything out of the ordinary, but no-one who knows me would argue that I, or more specifically anyone around me, suffer from impossibly bad luck.
That’s why I’ve always been happy to take the night watch on the comms station: I’m on my own, so there’s no chance of anyone getting hurt.
Unfortunately Sarah Cumbers keeps visiting me while she’s off duty. She’s convinced that it’s not possible for me to have the bad luck everyone tells her I suffer from and she’s determined to study me regardless of whether I want her to or not.
She keeps going on about the theory that there’s no such thing as random chance, just an infinite matrix of possibilities tied into some kind of N-dimensional fabric like space-time that we can’t access.
She seems obsessed with the idea that my bad luck means I’m a phenomenon that might prove that theory.
Unfortunately, I’m no mathematician and it all goes over my head. All I know is it freaks me out when she bangs on about killing a cat owned by some guy called Schrödinger. I can’t see how that’s going to prove anything other than what a sick individual Cumbers is.
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Commander Ramon Ruiz sat in the Captain’s chair as Lieutenant Janice Lyle took Tiger into the Sigma Epsilon Rho Seven system.
It was close to midnight ship’s time and the Captain had offered to let Ruiz start the process of surveying the system. As Manny Vainatolo had already visited system and seen very little of note, they were expecting a short and not overly interesting visit.
The science and mission operations consoles to his right were manned by quite junior science staff. Chief Wang Shou was directing the efforts of crewmen Sarah Cumbers and Louis Marseille.
The ship swept through the system, long range scanners logging planets, moons and asteroids. As always, the scientist’s main interest focused on the small rocky worlds in the so-called ‘Goldilocks’ zone, where radiation from the star would generate the conditions for liquid water, and therefore life, to exist.
There was only one world within the zone, but it wasn’t a rocky world with a solid surface. It was a gas giant, a Jupiter-sized ball of swirling clouds with a liquid core, a type of planet rarely home to life-forms. After a broad scan for organic activity, the scientists quickly switched their attention to the moons around the gaseous planet.
Sadly these were mostly too small to hold a significant atmosphere. One was in a wildly elliptical orbit and was in danger of breaking up, but before long interest was beginning to wane. It was nearly three hours later before anything of interest at all happened.
They were looping around the largest of the gas giant’s moons, which was orbiting quite low around the planet. Crewman Marseille was watching the planet’s cloud formations on the main view-screen when his attention was drawn to a flashing light on his console.
He checked the alert. On a small screen data appeared indicating some kind of structure on the surface of the moon below. He brought the ships main sensors to bear. The moon was a rock. It was geologically inert and made almost entirely of silicates. There was no atmosphere to speak of and the surface temperature varied wildly between the moon’s light and dark sides.
It was lifeless and unappealing, but there was definitely somethin
g there, nestling in the surface. It was something small, but definitely not a naturally occurring structure. The area was showing a lower density than average for the moon as a whole, and a clear magnetic signature underneath the surface indicated there might be a steel structure there. Somebody had built something on this barren and inhospitable moon.
‘Commander, we have a surface construct.’ He put the data from the sensors up on the main view-screen for Ruiz to view.
The Commander looked over the information scrolling across the screen. ‘Any signs of life?’
‘No Commander.’
‘Any signs of any sort of activity? Or obvious function?’
‘No Commander. There’s a concrete structure on the surface, but it only looks like an access point. There’s a shaft leading down from the structure to what looks like more chambers below ground, but there’s no apparent power source or atmosphere in either.’
Ruiz mulled it over. It wasn’t worth waking the Captain for, it was a dead structure. However, it still irked his curiosity and they weren’t going to find out what it was for from up here. ‘Ok. We’ll take a look. Chief Shou, assign a couple of bodies to an away team and get them to meet me in the Transporter Room.’
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They materialised in the dark, and the lights on either side of their environment suit’s helmets came on automatically, creating pools of light in the cold, unwelcoming space.
Ruiz and the three scientists took out their tricorders and began scanning the area, while the two security personnel made a quick sweep of the immediate area to ensure they were alone.
They didn’t need their tricorders to feel that he structure was dead. Although it was sealed and there was no dust build up or visible decay, it had the indefinable feel of having been empty for long centuries past.
There was very little in the space. The concrete structure was lined with a thin alloy, and in one wall a small air-tight door presumably led to an airlock. There was a small console fed by plasma conduits in one corner, and from it wires ran to points in the concrete structure. Ruiz took a look and opened an access panel in the side of the console. He recognised some of the components instantly.
‘This is some kind of screen generator. Probably shielding too. Who ever built this place wanted to keep it secret.’
Petty Officer Preetam Dhillon had joined the away team and came over to study the consoles controls. She was one of the previous Captain’s cadre of Yeoman, but had transferred to the Archaeology and Anthropology team when it had been discovered her previous employment in a Lawyer’s office had given her considerable knowledge of alien languages.
‘I recognise the script here. Manny Vainatolo has shown us examples of this. It’s Jevean.’
Ruiz had never heard of them. ‘Jevean?’
Dhillon nodded. ‘Yeah, apparently they were part of some big alliance in the war in this sector about a thousand years ago. They were never big players militarily, and were almost wiped out when their home world was destroyed, but they were really clever. The Alliances technology lagged a little behind that of its enemy so they kept the Jevean out of the way and let them work on new weapons and strategies. According to Vainatolo there are still a few of them left but they’ve pretty much given up and are slowly dying out.’
Ruiz considered this. ‘So this probably dates from the war and the Jevean have lost interest in it.’
Crewman Sarah Cumbers wandered off to one side of the space. ‘There’s a lift shaft here, but I wouldn’t imagine the lift has moved in a couple of hundred years.’
‘Can we get it moving?’
She scanned the structure more carefully. ‘Unlikely. The gearing is probably seized up. I think there are ladder rungs down the side of the shaft though?’
Ruiz came over and sized up the door to the shaft. He pushed his fingers through the narrow gap at the side of the door and levered it aside to reveal the shaft. He looked up and down the shaft. Above him the gearing mechanism for the lift lay idle and corroded, but the bottom of the shaft was hidden in darkness, beyond the reach of the lights on his suit.
The shaft seemed solidly built, and his eyes came to rest on the rungs Cumbers had referred to. To his surprise they looked in reasonable condition too. Reaching across he placed a hand on one and gave it an experimental tug. Solid.
Knowing he was the heaviest present, he went first. ‘I’ll call when I reach the bottom. Follow me down one at a time.’
Ruiz clambered down into the darkness. The shaft was deeper than he had imagined, but he noted that there were no intermediate levels. He finally reached the bottom of the shaft to find a cage structure that had acted as the car in the lift shaft. There was a hatch on the top and he opened it and lowered himself into the car.
He did a quick check on his depth. Nearly thirty metres. Whoever built this place made sure it was well hidden.
He turned to find the door to the cage had been opened, and he immediately noted the implication: whoever had been here hadn’t left this level. There was a single corridor leading away from the lift shaft and he could see that there were doors into several compartments off each side.
He called back to the surface and asked the security team to join him first. Whilst he wasn’t expecting trouble, he wasn’t sure what they would find, and the security team were probably less squeamish than the scientists. When Crewmen Handley and Larkin both reached the bottom he sent them ahead to check out the structure.
It seemed to take an age for the science team to descend, and some of the scientists were already getting jittery.
‘That’s a long way down’ said Cumbers breathlessly. ‘Gonna be a bitch climbing back up.’
Ruiz ignored her and was just about to lead them away when he got a call from Paige Handley. ‘Got some bodies sir.’
‘Dead?’
‘Long, long dead’ confirmed Handley. ‘We’re in a compartment about fifty metres along, on the right.’
Ruiz led the scientists down the corridor, looking inside the other rooms as he went. Most were banal. Sleeping quarters, storage spaces, what appeared to be a galley, a mess hall. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Eventually he spotted other lights and went through a door to find Handley examining two small bodies, slumped over control consoles.
They were desiccated husks of a species that he didn’t recognise. They were both wearing thick layers of clothing and he guessed that the species would have been quite delicately built.
Dhillon took her tricorder out and began examining them more closely. ‘Definitely Jevean. No signs of obvious trauma.’
Ruiz was looking around the space, which was clearly some kind of control room. There were screens all around the walls and in a couple of places large white boards were covered in hand drawn diagrams that looked vaguely familiar from his days studying particle physics at the Academy.
Cumbers was immediately drawn to the boards and he asked her ‘Are those Feynman diagrams?’
Cumbers tilted her head, obviously unsure. ‘No sir, the style is similar, but the concept seems to be much more abstract than sub-atomic particles.’
Ruiz was no great physicist and considered all such things abstract. ‘Get a record of the boards Cumbers, we can examine them in more detail when we get back to the ship.’
Larkin’s voice came across the comm-link ‘Got another body in here.’
He was across the corridor in a plant room, crouched over another little body. Dhillon examined this one too. ‘No trauma. The bodies are too old to confirm it without taking them to a lab, but if I had to guess, I’d say the cause of death was either hypothermia or asphyxiation.’
That made sense to Ruiz. This poor unfortunate had apparently expired trying to get the electrical plant in this room working, and the two in the other room appeared to have expired peacefully where they had sat.
He sighed. ‘There’s nothing we can do to help them. Let’s move on and see if we can work out what happened to them.’
>
They were over halfway down the corridor now and the compartments became less familiar as they went. There were rooms dedicated to huge amounts of computer equipment and other spaces that contained odd pieces of equipment that no-one recognised.
The final space was the largest. The entry was through an air-lock arrangement with heavy steel doors and the structure of the walls was much, much thicker. Ruiz needed help to open the doors into the compartment and when he did he found a space that reminded him of Tiger’s Engineering Deck.
Immediately inside the airlock they stepped onto a steel gantry that ran around the mid-level of a large space, three times the height of the rest of the structure. In front of the gantry a large barrel like structure was suspended and from above and below it, pipes and conduits ran away from manifolds to other pieces of equipment spread throughout the large space.
Crewman DeMarcus Jones specialised in industrial archaeology and recognised it immediately. ‘It’s a thorium fission reactor.’
Ruiz was surprised. ‘Fission? I thought the Jevean were supposed to be an advanced species?’
Jones nodded. ‘They might well have been. Fission reactors that use a Thorium-Uranium cycle have a lot of advantages. They’re incredibly tough and stable, and they have a very low energy signature. Fusion reactors or a matter-antimatter warp core generate so much energy they’re visible from massive distances. The old thorium reactors use a thermal cycle that generates very little power in comparison, but is incredibly easy to conceal.’
Ruiz mulled it over. That seemed to make sense if this was some kind of secret facility, but it still didn’t explain what had gone wrong.
The rest of the team had thinned out through the space. There were ladders leading to other gantries at various levels although peering into the gloom, Ruiz could see that the near half of the space was a good deal more congested than the far half.
There, a single gantry led to an isolated platform that supported a single square black box. A plethora of cables, conduits and pipes led to the box, all feeding in through its underside so it appeared like some bizarre alien plant with multi-coloured roots dangling in space.