The Gorge

Posted on Jul 04, 2014 @ 3:32pm by Commander Jacob Crichton
Edited on on Jul 04, 2014 @ 3:42pm

Mission: All Our Yesterdays
Location: Alpha 12 Moon

= The Gorge =

(cont’d from “Send In the Cannon (Fodder): The Battle Hymn of the Redshirts”)



LOCATION: ALPHA-12 MOON

SCENE: Forest

STARDATE: [2.14] 0615.1936



Jake, Russ, and Kane tore their way through the brush, dodging around the vine-like trunks of the tree-flowers and crashing their way through the buzz-bushes. From somewhere behind them, the creature bellowed again. It was hard to tell, but it sounded like it was getting closer.



The beast covered ground at an amazing rate, but its size made it hard to maneuver through the dense forest. The three humans could easily bob and weave their way around the thick peduncles of that tree flowers, but Gorillasaurus Rex kept getting tangled up. Jake and his crewmates were slowly gaining ground, but they also had no idea just how far the creature meant to chase them.



“This isn’t much of a plan!” Russ shouted through his rebreather as he juked his way around a mass of buzz-bushes and nearly tripped over a half-buried rock.



“I’m open to suggestions, Lieutenant!” Kane shouted back.



“We could split up!” Russ shouted. “It can’t chase all three of us!”



“What about the one it decides to keep chasing?” Jake shouted.



The three men wove their way through another line of giant flower stalks and stopped short. They were looking down a drop of at least 20 feet onto a patch of mossy boulders, which sloped slightly downward before coming up on another line of tree flowers some 30 feet beyond. The gorge continued on in both directions, far enough to bend out of sight. Too far for them to go around, and a long enough drop to make climbing down at speed a dangerous prospect.



The creature ‘s roar sounded again, from not too far inside the treeline behind them.



“No easy way down from here,” Russ said, scanning the area quickly. “Too far to jump, too steep to climb down without any gear.”



“No choice!” Kane said. He approached the lip of the gorge and slowly lowered himself down. The wall was crumbling mud over a rocky foundation, and chunks of boulder poked out here and there, giving him a series of treacherous hand and footholds that were spaced just slightly too far apart. Behind them, there was another bellow and a nearby crash, and then Jake and Russ were climbing down as well.



Kane’s hands gripped the rock with desperate strength, each finger locked in place like an iron rod. He slowly lowered his foot onto a bit of stone that bunched out from the wall, but as his weight began to settle the foothold crumbled away, and he nearly lost his grip. He hung in place for a moment, too focused on maintaining his grip to have time to worry about what his next move should be. Beside and slightly above him, Crichton and BaShen didn’t seem to be having much better luck.



They weren’t making good enough time.

The next roar came from directly above them. They all looked up, into the reptilian face of the creature as it leered over the lip of the gorge. It bellowed again, and slammed its powerful forearms into the ground. It was enough to shake Russ’s grip, and as one of his hands detached from the wall it carried the weight of his shoulder, his torso, with it, and for one terrible moment Russ thought the grip in his other hand would fail too.



But the creature stopped pounding and stared down at them again. Russ gripped the wall again and held tight, staring up into the spiderlike eyes of the beast above them. It was close enough that it could reach down and pluck him from the side of the mountain, if it wanted to. Except it didn’t reach for Russ.



It reached for Jake.



“Look out!” Kane yelled, as the leathery hand closed around Jake’s arm. It hauled him easily upward, and fire blossomed in Jake’s shoulder as it did; dislocated for sure, Jake thought. The creature held him out, dangling him by his arm as Jake’s legs kicked frantically beneath him. Then, almost casually, the creature tossed Jake to the side, as if it had suddenly lost interest. Jake landed roughly in a patch of rocky grass near the lip of the gorge, gaining a few cuts and bruises to go along with the pain in his shoulder.



The creature turned again, looking down at Russ and Kane. It bellowed again, and began to pace along the lip of the gorge, never taking its eyes off them. Not wasting any more time, Russ and Kane began to scramble down again, quickly getting beyond the creature’s reach. The climb was difficult, and as they neared the bottom of the rock wall, Kane’s grip eventually failed and he dropped the remaining six feet onto the mossy boulders below, badly scraping up the palms of his hands as he tried to keep his grip. Russ managed to keep a precarious grip on the wall until he was low enough to jump safely down beside Kane, and both men looked up as the creature continued to pace 20 feet above them.



“Crichton!” Kane called.



Above them, Jake peeked his head over the side of the gorge. He had a gash on his forehead that trickled blood into his eyes. He was favoring his injured shoulder, and with his other hand he waved Kane and Russ off. The creature continued to pace only 10 feet away, though it wasn’t looking in Crichton’s direction but down at Kane and Russ.



“He doesn’t have a tricorder,” Russ said. “Even if that thing goes away, there’s no way he’ll find his way back to the runabout.”



“We can’t get to him,” Kane said. “We need to draw the creature away, give him a chance to hide.”



“And after that?” Russ asked.



“After that, I don’t know,” Kane said, giving Russ a look of cold determination.



“Shit,” Russ said. “Alright.”



He began to run along the side of the rocky wall, shouting and waving his arms upward at the creature. Kane followed, and the creature bellowed again and began to follow them, crashing through the shrubs at the lip of the gorge and leaving Jake behind.

Jake waited until it had disappeared around a bend, and slowly sat up. He winced at the pain in his shoulder, as well as the stinging pain from the cut on his forehead. He wiped some blood out of his eyes with his free hand and looked around. He could still hear the cries of Kane and Russ, getting fainter and further away, as well as the sounds of the creature smashing its way through the foliage, but it was far enough away now that the forest’s eerie silent stillness was beginning to creep its way back around him. He had no idea where he was, or how far it was to the runabout, nor even what direction he should be walking in.



“Great,” Jake said quietly. “Xana’s going to kill me.”



-----------------------------------------------------------------------------



LOCATION: USS DISCOVERY

SCENE: Jefferies Tube



The exocomp floated along the access tunnel, its damaged hover-emitter causing it to list slightly to one side. Its risk/reward assessment subroutines were buzzing angrily in the back of its central processor, but the machine ran a bypass to override them. It did not do this lightly- its mandate for self preservation was hard-wired into its very code, and risk/reward assessment subroutines existed for a reason. It had run thousands of scenarios already, and had concluded that its participation in the events unfolding aboard the USS DISCOVERY would be of little impact and would certainly lead to its destruction. Every decision-making algorithim the exocomp had was telling it to return to stasis, try to repair its internal damage, and wait to be reactivated.



But this exocomp was different. And as it had learned in its time, sometimes it was better to grasp at straws than to do nothing at all.



As the exocomp came to an access hatch, it stopped. A small tool shimmered into existence on the device’s nose, and it floated gently over to the control panel at the side of the hatch. The exocomp used the tool to work the controls on the panel, and a moment later the hatch hissed open. The exocomp then floated up and out the hatch, into a corridor. It stopped, beeped once, and ran a scan of the corridor beyond. It detected no lifesigns ahead.



The exocomp’s electronic brain wasn’t quite complex enough to grasp all the ramifications of what was happening, but it had a dim enough understanding to have arrived at a few tentative conclusions: it had witnessed the Vulcan entity, designation Stonn Commander, attack the human that had reactivated it. This attacked was severe enough to trigger the exocomp’s programmed mandate to protect organic life. The attack later, where the Federation marines had nearly shot the human entity, designation Crichton Jake Commander, had also been a violation of that mandate. This was enough data for the exocomp to conclude that Stonn, and whoever followed his orders, was not to be trusted.



It floated gently down the corridor. It was heading for Main Engineering, because it had concluded that was the best place to effect any significant change on the situation. It couldn’t kill the mutineers- in fact, it was so programmed that it was literally unable to conceive of any such plan- but that didn’t mean it was out of options. The exocomp had already started the calculations to determine the optimal atmospheric mix to put everyone aboard the ship to sleep with doing permanent damage. There were a lot of variables to consider- weight, species, age, infirmity- and it couldn’t do all the math without access to the ship’s medical records of the crew. But it never hurt to have a few irons in the fire.



Yes, this exocomp certainly was different.



-----------------------------------------------------------------------



LOCATION: ALPHA-12 MOON

SCENE: Forest



Russ and Kane picked their way slowly across the wide patch of mossy boulders. The creature had given chase for at least a few hundred feet, but eventually the lip of the gorge started to bend away in another direction and Kane and Russ eventually lost sight of it. They could still hear the best growling and huffing from somewhere above them, and waited several minute for it to reappear. But eventually the creature’s cries grew faint and stopped altogether, and Kane and Russ found themselves alone again.



They decided to follow the rock wall until finding a way back up, where they could continue in the direction of the objects Russ had seen. They’d lost a lot of ground running in the wrong direction, and it was getting late in the day. Neither of them much liked the prospect of spending a night out here, and they had also decided that their best chance of getting Crichton back was to get a transporter working as soon as possible and scan for his lifesigns.



And, of course, they had to hope they didn’t run into big, green, and scaly again, too.



“Jake’s rebreather won’t last forever,” Russ said as they picked their way across the rocky terrain.



“I know,” Kane said.



“We don’t even know if we’ll be able to get the systems repaired without him,” Russ said.



“I know.”



“You don’t think we should try to find him?” Russ asked. “I can scan for him with the tricorder, even with all this interference we might be able to isolate-”



“We don’t have time,” Kane said, turning to face Russ. “His situation is not that much worse than ours, Lieutenant. *Our* rebreathers won’t last forever either. And if you *drop* that tricorder the next time something chases us, we’ll be as lost as he is.”



He sighed, and continued more quietly.



“I don’t like leaving him either, but our best chance to help him is to get our ship repaired,” Kane said. “We need to keep moving.”



“Okay,” Russ said. “Right.”



They continued on, eventually finding a place where the rock wall gradually eased into gentle slope, and began to pick their way back up the hill.





Shawn Putnam

a.k.a.

Jake Crichton, Commander

Chief Engineering Officer

USS DISCOVERY