Echoes

Posted on Jan 23, 2016 @ 2:32am by Commander Jacob Crichton
Edited on on Jan 23, 2016 @ 2:32am

Mission: Promethean

= Echoes =

(cont’d from “Hunted”)



LOCATION: LAVENZA II Facility

SCENE: Laboratory Deck

STARDATE: [2.16] 0122.2156

They ran, leaving the creature behind. They ran until their sides ached, until they heaved each breath, and then they ran some more. They did not stop until they ran out of corridor, rounding a L-bend and coming up a dead end. Evaer cursed, kicking at the bulkhead in frustration. Brass’s legs were burning, and the Ferengi leaned up against the wall and slowly slid down, gasping for breath. Freed from the exertion, Crichton’s own legs suddenly went noodly beneath him, and he collapsed to his hands and knees. Soon, Evaer joined him, sliding down to the floor, looking like a very defeated man.

“What…” the Bolian heaved out. It was all he could manage, and he panted for another several seconds before finding the wind to finish his thought. “What the hell was that?”

Nobody knew the answer, so nobody replied. Evaer shook his head, as if trying to snap himself out of the unreality he’d become trapped in.

“Killed her,” Brass murmured, staring off into space.

The adrenaline was starting to thin out in Crichton’s blood, leaving him feeling shivery. His terror was like a silvery wire threading its way around the muscles in his legs, his shoulder, down his spine. Despite it all, Crichton felt himself starting to laugh.

“We have to find the captain,” Evaer said. This only made Crichton laugh harder. Who the hell was the Bolian talking to? Brass looked like he’d checked out, and if Evaer thought Crichton was still going to take orders after what they’d just seen, then Evaer was a mad fool. Crichton rolled onto his back, the laughs coming out in a rapid series of barks, like a coughing fit that he couldn’t hold it.

“Tore her guts out,” Brass murmured.

“What the fuck are you laughing at?” Evaer said, scowling at Crichton. The one-eyed engineer choked out a few more laughs before catching his breath enough to reply.

“Find the captain?” Crichton asked. “Did you hit your goddamn head when I wasn’t looking?”

“We’re not leaving Cassidy-”

“You just wait a second, baby blue,” Crichton said, his laughter finally starting to ebb. “It’s been a fun ride, thanks for the food and the memories, but you can’t seriously think we’re still playing pirate here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You can forget about ‘orders’, ‘chain of command’, all that shit,” Crichton said. “There’s something seriously wrong here, and I ain’t spending another minute creeping around this fucked-up funhouse.”

“You’ll do what I tell you to do, Crichton,” Evaer growled, his nostrils flaring. Crichton started to laugh again.

“Or what?” the engineer asked incredulously. “You’ll *kill* me? Newsflash, boss: we keep poking around down here, we’re all gonna die!”

“You think I’m going to let you just fly off with our ship?” Evaer asked. “Either you help me, or you can die right now. It’s up to you.”

“Big words, blue,” Crichton said, getting to his feet, his hands balled into tight fists. “Get up and give it a try.”

“No need,” Evaer said. Crichton saw a flicker of movement by the Bolian’s hip, and then Evaer’s blaster was up, pointed directly at his chest. Crichton frowned when he saw it, but he slowly raised his hands.

“Cheater,” he mumbled.

Evaer recognized Crichton’s acquiescence and nodded once. Then, without taking the blaster off Crichton, Evaer turned to look at Brass.

“What about you?” the Bolian asked.

Brass didn’t reply. He also hadn’t moved, and didn’t even look like he’d been following the conversation. His eyes were fixed on some invisible point about a meter past his feet. His lips were moving a little, but no sound was coming out.

“Hell-oooooo,” Crichton said. “Wake up, Dumbo! Good news, your share of the loot just went up again!”

“Brass?” Evaer repeated.

The Ferengi didn’t reply. He didn’t move, except for his lips.

“He’s cracked,” Crichton said. “You want to carry him, or do I have to?”

Evaer sighed. He adjusted the control on his blaster, and fired just to the left of the Ferengi’s head. The beam exploded against the wall, showering Brass with sparks. Brass flinched, ducking away first from the beam, then from the superheated bits of metal the shot had produced. He glared up at Evaer.

“What are you doing, Bolian?!” the Ferengi demanded. “You could have killed me! My uncle will have your genitals as his coin purse for that, you just see-”

“Glad to see you’re still with us, Brass,” Evaer interrupted, shaking his head. He turned the blaster back on Crichton and, slowly, got to his feet. Crichton considered rushing the Bolian when he had the chance, but the barrel of the blaster never wavered. Evaer stood for a moment, as if testing the integrity of his legs.

“We need to get to a computer terminal,” the Bolian said.

“We *need* to get the fuck out of here,” Crichton said. Evaer glared at him and shook his head.

“We find a way to raise Captain Rainner on the comms,” the Bolian continued. “Barring that, we find out where she’s gone and how to get to her. Then we collect our reward. Then - and only then - do we leave.”

“I did not come all this way to walk away empty handed,” Brass said. “I’ve earned my share of the take.”

“Don’t you people have some kind of rule about being alive to spend your money?” Crichton sighed.

“You misunderstand, hoo-man,” Brass said, flashing a toothy smile at him. “I say we take the ship.”

Crichton blinked his good eye. “Really?”

“You will help me, and in return I will allow you to stay aboard,” Brass nodded. “The ship is mine. That is the arrangement.”

“Whatever you say,” Crichton said, turning back to Evaer and smiling. “Reconsider, boss?”

“You’re forgetting I’m the one with the gun,” the Bolian said. “If either one of you makes a move for the Lament without my say so, I won’t kill you. I’ll shoot you in the leg and leave you for that thing back there.”

“This is madness, Bolian,” Brass said. “Your weapon didn’t even slow that creature down.”

“I don’t need it to work on him,” Evaer scowled. “Right now, I only need it to work on you. Now are you boys going to fall in line, or should I start carving stuff off you?”

Brass and Crichton exchanged a glance.



“It doesn’t matter,” Crichton said, looking back to Evaer. The facility’s still in lockdown. Computer terminals aren’t gonna work.”

“You’ll bypass the security,” Evaer said. Crichton chuckled.

“Will I?”

“You will if you don’t want me to put out your other eye,” Evaer said. “Now. First thing we do is get off this level and away from that… thing. Get moving. The sooner we find a terminal, the sooner we can get out of here.”

The creature’s scratchy roar echoed up the corridors, making it hard to tell how far off it was. In spite of fear, Evaer had to admit the sound punctuated his point nicely quite nicely. He motioned with the blaster, indicating for Brass and Crichton to take the lead.

“You will pay for this, Bolian,” Brass said, sneering at Evaer as he passed.

Crichton stared into the darkness of the corridor ahead and shivered again.

“This is nuts,” he said, shaking his head. Then he started off down the corridor again, moving slowly, ready to retreat at an instant. Behind him, Brass and Evaer followed.

=[/\]=

SCENE: Elsewhere in the facility…

They’d wandered around darkened corridors, jumping at every sound, searching for the turbolift shaft or some sign of their crew. A few times, they’d some kind of far-away roar, that nonetheless managed to sound big and very, very hungry. It sounded to Jake like the roar had been closer the last time they’d heard it.

Eventually, they discovered the lift. Aerdan stepped up to the doors expectantly. They didn’t move.

“Power’s off,” Jake remembered. “But I can override the doors.”

He stepped forward, quickly gutted the access panel beside the doors, then stood back as they hissed open. Aerdan leaned into the yawning shaft and stared upwards into murky gloom. He could see the maintenance access ladder, running up the wall near the doors.

“We move up one level,” Aerdan said. “Then we look around.”

None of them were looking forward into making the climb through the dimly-lit turbolift shaft, not with the memories of those creatures still scratching around inside their heads. Fortunately, the climb was uneventful; a few minutes labor brought them to another set of doors. Jake leaned out and flipped the release switch, and the doors hissed apart. The crew climbed out of the shaft, and looked around.

Workstations and lab consoles filled the room. Rows of test tubes lined the walls. Each one was filled with briny liquid and some kind of creature that Jake couldn’t identify. Aerdan looked them over and frowned.

“I don’t recognize any of them,” Aerdan said. “But without a more detailed scan…”

He trailed off. Jake realized he was thinking of the medical tricorder that Ensign Perry had been carrying. Jake thought he saw her drop it just before the creature had carried her off, but nobody had thought to grab it before beating their retreat. Jake didn’t like leaving a crewmate behind, and he hadn’t been shy about voicing that opinion. But Jake saw the way Commander Jos’s face fell slightly as he trailed off: his eyes going momentarily distant, his antennae drooping slightly. Jake realized the Andorian must be feeling as bad as Jake did, if not worse.

Then Russ had noticed the workstation, still active, its screen steadily pulsing the words “SYSTEM LOCKDOWN” again and again. Now Jake was staring at a sheet of chips and wiring, his engineering kit open by his side. It didn’t take him long to bypass the workstation’s internal security, and a moment later the station hummed back to life.

“That should do it,” Jake said. Russ helped him to his feet while Jos activated the controls. The display went blank for a moment, then the monitor was filled with a familiar image: the golden chevron of Starfleet.

“What the hell…?” Russ murmured.

“This base is a Starfleet facility,” Aerdan said, staring at the screen, his expression unreadable.

“That can’t be right,” Jake said. “Those pirates were definitely headed here. Why would they steal records from us only to deliver them to…”

He trailed off, his eyes widening with realization.

“The Neo-Essentialists,” Eve finished for him. “Edgerton.”

“This is his facility,” Aerdan said. “Or it belongs to his movement, at least.”

“But what is it for?” Jake asked. “What good is a research base on some frozen rock doing him?”

Aerdan looked up, staring at the test tubes lining the walls. He took a few steps towards the nearest row, gingerly removed a tube from its mount, and held it up, squinting at the thing inside.

“Bio-engineering research,” the Andorian said quietly, not taking his eyes of the thing inside the test tube. “That’s what this place is for. That’s what he’s doing here.”

“Those creatures in the tunnels…,” Eve said. “They must be experiments gone wrong.”

“Or gone right,” Aerdan said. He wiped sweat off his forehead with the sleeve of his uniform, and replaced the tube on its mount. Then he turned back to his crewmates. “I think I know why those pirates stole our medical records. They were going to sell our genetic information, raw data for whatever sick experiments they’ve been running here.”

“How would clones of us help Edgerton?” asked Eve. “We’ve all been declared traitors and terrorists.”

“I don’t know,” Aerdan said. “There must be something else going on here.”

“Commander,” Jake said, looking up at them from the lab terminal. “I think I found something.”

They gathered around. The screen filled with the headline “Project Promethean” before filling in with a wall of gibberish text and random characters. Jake went to work on the controls.

“It’s encrypted,” Jake said. “Might be the lockdown, or I might have nicked something I shouldn’t have when I was fiddling around down there.”

“Can you get past the encryption?” Aerdan asked.

“Let me try,” Eve said. Jake surrendered the controls, and Eve went to work. The computer rejected her first few attempts with an angry buzz and a flash of “RESTRICTED” in red block letters across the monitor. But on her fourth attempt, the computer seemed to purr happily beneath her.

“I found something,” she said. Jake smiled at her.

“Impressive, Lieutenant,” he nodded. “I couldn’t have managed that without taking the damn thing apart.”

“What I’ve got can’t be taught,” Eve grinned. Then she turned her attention back to the screen, and her expression hardened again. “It isn’t much. It seems to be a log entry of some kind, but it isn’t labeled ‘Promethean’. It says ‘Harbinger’.”

“What’s ‘Harbinger’?” Russ asked.

“It’s dated 15 years ago,” Jake said, looking at the screen over Eve’s shoulder. “This base doesn’t look that old.”

Eve accessed the file. The screen filled with the image of a middle aged man with sallow features, pristinely kept hair, and the soft blue of a Starfleet lab coat worn over what looked like civilian clothing. He appeared to be sitting in an office. He began to speak:

{{The old phrase "another day, another dollar" doesn't even apply out here. Would that I were getting paid, maybe *that* would compensate me a little for having to wake up each day to this place.}}

“It’s a personal log,” Eve said. “Doctor Andrew Elrich, Tarkan IV Science Colony.”

“Never heard of him,” Jake said.

“I have,” Aerdan said. “He was a geneticist of some repute. He disappeared… about 15 years ago.”

{{The ship came yesterday.}} the man on the screen continued. {{They brought us more supplies, we gave them our recent findings. Naturally, we kept the existence of our progress on ‘Project: Harbinger’ a secret. We're not sure that we want to show the Federation anything until we're sure that our findings are accurate. However, I'd be lying if I said I was comfortable sleeping with that monster in the same complex as me.}}

“Sounds like Doctor Elrich was having second thoughts about his work,” Eve said.

“Work they were keeping secret from the Federation,” said Russ.

Eve tabbed through the log entry, jumping ahead a little before resuming the playback. Doctor Erlich was no longer wearing his blue coat. He looked very tired.

{{We sent security teams to try to stop it, but it blew through them like they were nothing. Our phasers, even on maximum setting, have little effect on the creature. I must say I'm not surprised. We made Harbinger invincible, after all. We've locked off the laboratory and posted security teams all around it. We sent in two squads to find Harbinger... they haven't come out yet.}}

“His pet project escaped,” Jake said, looking around. “Sounds familiar.”

“Edgerton is trying to replicate Elrich’s work,” Aerdan said. “Bioweapons. Those things that attacked us are part of this Promethean Project.”

“Elrich said his creature was made to be invincible,” Russ said. “Those things that attacked don’t die easy, but they do die.”

“Steps along the path to perfection,” Aerdan said. “Elrich said his creature was made to be invulnerable. Promethean must be trying to to reproduce that. And we cannot discount the possibility that they succeeded.”

“Uh, Jake,” Eve said, looking down at the workstation monitor, her brow creased. “Someone’s pinging this workstation.”

Jake raised an eyebrow. “Someone else in the facility?”

“Yeah,” Eve nodded. “And they’re asking for you.”

Looking confused, Jake stepped over to the workstation to look over Eve’s shoulder. A message had appeared on the workstation screen:

CRICHTON IS THAT YOU

Then, as Crichton watched, another message appeared:

?????? ANSWER YOU SHIT

“Friend of yours?” Eve asked.

Jake reached down to the controls and typed out a response: “Thank you for calling tech support, may I have your incident number please?”

“Commander,” Aerdan said. “This is not the time to play games.”

“It’s those pirates,” Jake shrugged. “They have my name from the medical records. If they want to mess with us, I say we mess-”

But he was interrupted when a new message flashed across the screen: TRACE THE SIGNAL TO OUR COORDINATES, YOU’LL KNOW ME WHEN YOU SEE ME.

“If that’s the pirates talking, then why are they giving us their location?” Russ asked.

Then a new message:

GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE.

=[/\]=

NRPG: Doctor Elrich’s speech courtesy of 15-year old me, speaking from the faraway year of 2001. Thanks to Jerome for digging that old post up for me!

Meanwhile, Evaer’s control of his crew seems to be slipping. Will it be a knife in the back, or a monster claw to the guts for the Bolian scoundrel? And is the PHOENIX crew really going to trust some anonymous messenger telling them where to go next?

Also, who tastes better, Kass or Barton? Maybe Bronski will let us know soon. ;-)

Shawn Putnam

a.k.a.

Jake Crichton

Chief Engineering Officer

USS PHOENIX

and

Jake Crichton

Chief Engineering Officer

The Annabelle’s Lament