Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft - Flatline

[Carter Schimpff]

(( Hazardous Materials Lab, Deck 11 – USS Artemis-A ))

Bancroft: So, whatever we’ve got in here has antineutrino residue and is trying to phone a friend. Possibly the same system, possibly two different but interconnected systems. Anyone have any theories?

Vitor nodded. 

Silveira: Yeah… Romulans.

Breys: The singularity core would lend to that theory, I’m just not sure why they’d make something like this. The Da’al could be using tech from multiple sources.

Cole: You sound pretty certain Sir. How certain?

Vitor shrugged.

Silveira: It’s a gut feeling more than anything. This feels like something that the Romulans would come up with. If we could get some evidence on it… ::Vitor raised his hand:: I am not saying I am right, if any of you have any other thoughts or ideas, please state them… But I really feel it's Romulans…

Cole: ::thinking:: It’s consistent with what we’ve seen so far.

Roy turned back to his console and began pulling the signal apart by layers.

It was not Romulan in the way a disruptor burn was Romulan. There was no emblem, no formal transmission structure, no convenient signature announcing itself to history. But the shape of it – the compression, the carrier modulation, the way the signal seemed to assume secrecy as a native condition – had familiar edges.

Bancroft: The signal has several structural similarities to known Romulan transmission architecture. Carrier compression, modulation behavior, a few encryption habits that feel less coincidental the longer I look at them. It’s not a smoking gun, Commander, but it is certainly gun-shaped.

Silveira leaned forward toward the crate, then looked back at the others. Roy could see the question forming before it arrived.

Silveira: Can we translate that? Make it discernible or have a way to talk back? Maybe that way we get to see logs or anything that gives us concrete evidence. I mean… What can explain the antineutrinos and that space pocket thing Ensign Tarsan explained? I… ::from the back of his mind a thought formed:: Wait… Isn’t that used by someone for transportation?

Breys: I’m reading starfleet’s data on spatial trajectors, and it just supports Tarsan’s theory. They definitely are generated by the tech. It says here the particles are incredibly damaging to federation technology as well.

Roy glanced sidelong at the crate. Naturally. Of course the thing was poisonous to their equipment in addition to being wildly offensive to physics.

Breys: It looks like folded space transporters in general emit antineutrinos, and the Romulans have been using those for at least thirty years.

Cole: That sounds incredibly dangerous. ::just quiet enough to sound honest:: And that says a lot coming from me.

Bancroft: Spatial trajector… hybrid singularity drive… the signal. The evidence is stacking up fairly quickly.

Vitor tipped his head.

Silveira: Oh really?

Breys: The density of antineutrinos we found earlier could imply that both technologies are at play here.

Tarsan: That’d make sense from the readings.

Roy watched the two ensigns build the theory between them almost faster than the rest of the room could follow: not a single technology, then. A graft.

Cole: ::raising an eyebrow:: So we’re dealing with some kind of technological hybrid. Interesting.

Bancroft: Which suggests this wasn’t scavenged together in a panic – making systems this distinct – from different species – work together takes some serious thought and engineering.

Silveira: Response

A warning snapped across Breys’s console.

Roy saw the color change before he read the alert. Amber first, then red, then an aggressive strobing insistence that made the lab feel several degrees smaller.

Whatever the crate was doing to remain hidden, folded, powered, sealed, alive – or some terrible mixture of those words – it was running out of ability to do it.

Breys: The shielding is decaying too quickly, we either need to open this thing or decode the signal.

Tarsan: Let’s see if we can get the signal first?

Cole: We do both. Decode while Gavrin gets us ready to open it. 

Bancroft: Good call, Nat.

Silveira: Response

Breys: I’m attempting to decode the signal now, something about the data feels familiar.

Cole: Gavrin, get us ready to open it. 

Roy split his display and sent what he had of the signal structure to Cole and Breys. The packet repeated at intervals that were close to regular, but not perfectly. That bothered him.

Machines repeated with precision unless damaged.

Living things repeated with variation unless damaged.

This signal sat somewhere in the middle..

Cole: I’ll run a security decryption program, that should help speed it up. ::looking over towards Breys:: Familiar how?

Bancroft: Trust that instinct, D’tin. Familiar usually means your gut has recognized a pattern that your brain just hasn’t been able to articulate yet.

Silveira: Response

Breys: The box is trying to transport something out of it, presumably with a folded space transporter. I can’t tell what the pattern is for though.

Roy’s hands stopped over the console – only for a breath – then they moved faster.

Transporting something out.

The phrase transformed the entire room. The crate was no longer simply evidence, or machinery, or a mouth shouting into a dampened jar. It was a threshold. A door with someone or something on the other side already reaching for the handle.

Tarsan: Do you think it’s trying to escape?

Cole: Through that forcefield and the isolation field Bancroft activated, It’s unlikely.

Bancroft: Unlikely isn’t the same as impossible, and spatial trajectors seem to have a fairly casual relationship with ‘impossible’.

Silveira: Response

Breys: I think the only way we’re going to find out for sure with the time we have left is opening the box.

Tarsan: Let’s do it, I think I have the last of the sequence

Cole: ::looking at Vitor:: Unless there’s anything you can think of, We’re as ready as we can be Sir.

Roy checked the containment layers one final time. There were no more comfortable choices. Only the choice to learn what kind of danger they were already in.

Bancroft: All containment protocols are active. I can’t promise this is safe – but we’re out of better ways to find out.

Silveira/Breys: Response

Gavrin activated the final sequence.

The last seal surrendered with a sound too soft for what it represented.

Then the lid moved.

Light spilled from the seam in thin, refracted bands, neither steady nor random. The HML’s forcefield caught the glow and bent it into a faint golden lattice around the opening crate. Roy felt the deck vibrate beneath his boots as the external power feed strained to keep the internal geometry from tearing itself apart.

The lid gave way.

Inside, the core hung in containment.

At first Roy’s mind refused to make sense of it. That was not poetic exaggeration. It was a neurological objection. His eyes could see the thing; his brain simply declined to categorize it. The core seemed compact and enormous by turns, folded through itself in impossible loops, all bright pathways and angled shadows and little violations of perspective. Looking directly at it produced the same sensation as trying to remember a word in a language one had never learned.

Tarsan: I’ve… never seen anything like it. Everytime I try and look directly at it it’s like my mind tries to comprehend the space and just goes… nope.

Cole: That makes two of us. I looked at it for three seconds and now my brain wants to speak with the manager.

Bancroft: Use the instruments, not your eyes – we need to stay sharp.

Silveira/Breys: Response

The blinking began to slow.

Roy saw it first in the rhythm, then in the power curve. One beat dragging behind the last. A tiny delay, almost nothing, except that every number on his display seemed to lean toward it in dread.

The core was losing coherence, the signal weakening with it.

Seven seconds became eight.

Eight became something closer to nine.

The room seemed to tighten around the count.

Tarsan: I don’t think our power can keep it going for much longer… we can’t just let it die! Any luck on that signal?

Cole: Working on it. ::typing faster::  I’ve got… Seventeen more percent to go. How close are you Breys? 

Bancroft: Pocket coherence is dropping with the signal strength. If those two are linked, we are about to lose both the message and the mechanism.

Silveira/Breys/Tarsan: Response

The pulses from the core dimmed again.

Roy had seen bodies fail in stages. A pressure dropping. A pulse thinning. A monitor finding new and inventive ways to announce that the window was closing. It was different here, of course. Machinery was not flesh. A folded-space transporter was not a patient.

And yet the pattern was close enough to make the old instincts rise.

Stabilize.

Airway, bleeding, circulation, field coherence, power integrity, signal capture.

Different vocabulary. Same panic held at arm’s length by training.

Cole: Gavrin, can you squeeze any more power, we’ve almost got it.

Bancroft: Increase in increments if you can. The regulator is already bleeding excess energy into the containment matrix.

Silveira/Breys/Tarsan: Response

A friendly chime emitted from Cole’s console.

Roy had always disliked cheerful system tones during emergencies. They suggested the computer did not understand the tone of the room, which was alarming behavior from a machine currently helping them negotiate with an extradimensional Romulan-adjacent mystery device.

Cole: Great Job Breys! ::beat:: What's it doing now? 

Roy read the answer before he wanted to.

The decoded structure aligned with the transport pattern. The pulsing colors were not merely communication. They were sequencing. The folded pocket was collapsing in controlled stages, not inward, but outward – pushing something toward normal space.

The core brightened once, then again.

For the first time since the crate had opened, Roy felt the cold certainty of being too late to prevent the next event and only barely early enough to name it.

Bancroft: It’s… I think it’s preparing to transport something. I don’t know if it can transport through the HML’s forcefields… if it can, I’m not sure we can stop it. 

Silveira/Breys/Tarsan/Cole: Response

For one terrible second, every instrument in the Hazardous Materials Lab seemed to disagree with every other one. The forcefield harmonics spiked. The antineutrino emissions surged. The pocket geometry on the displays folded in on itself with an obscenity bordering on the unbelievable.

Roy saw the transport event begin before he fully understood what was happening.

A point of refracted gold appeared above the deck plating, small at first, then widening with violent precision. Light sheared through itself in angular bands, bending around a shape rapidly becoming visible. The air snapped. The whole room seemed to groan and bend around them. Somewhere behind him, a console issued three separate warnings, then apparently gave up altogether.

Then the light broke, and a body hit the deck.

The form was humanoid, supine, curled slightly inward as if even physics-defying transport could not convince the body to stop protecting the wound. A woman. Sharp cheekbones, swept ears. Dark hair matted against one side of her face.

Then he saw the blood. Green, spreading across the deck like a wildfire in a dry field of wheat, glinting under the harsh clinical lights of the lab.

Roy moved.

His tricorder was in his hand, flipped open with a flick, scanning before he’d even cleared his console.

Bancroft: Romulan. Severe hemorrhage. Abdominal disruptor trauma. Someone get me a medkit now!

He dropped to one knee beside her, the tricorder screaming data at him: blood pressure crashing, cellular disruption along the wound margins, massive internal damage, vascular collapse. Bad numbers. Final numbers, if he wasn’t fast.

As Roy turned her carefully onto her back, a data rod fell out of one pocket, rolling across the floor towards one of the other officers.

The wound – gods, the wound. It was worse even than the scan had indicated.

A gaping disruptor burn opened through her abdomen, the edges blackened and mottled green, tissue cauterized in some places and catastrophically open in others. The weapon had not merely cut into her – it had ruined her. Major vessels, organs, muscle, all of it horrifically mangled by heat and force and malintent.

Her eyes fluttered open and, for an instant, focused directly on his.

Romulan: ::weakly:: It… was… a mistake…

Silveira/Breys/Tarsan/Cole: Response

The medkit reached his hands.

Roy took it without looking, thumbed it open, and reached for the vascular regenerator. He was already assembling the treatment plan in his head: pressure, coagulant, cortical stim if she crashed, then emergency transport to Sickbay the moment the damping field dropped.

Part of him knew she was already too far gone, but he could still make a try of it. A narrow try – but narrow was not nothing.

Then his tricorder emitted a shrill, unbroken tone, the sound cutting through the lab with surgical cruelty.

He knew that tone.

Every physician knew it. Every physician hated it. There were alarms that asked for action, alarms that demanded speed, alarms that left room for argument.

This particular one did not.

The green pool kept spreading under his knee. Roy looked down at the woman’s face, at the eyes – now vacant – that had found his just long enough, and sighed heavily.

Bancroft: ::silencing his tricorder:: She’s gone. 

Silveira/Breys/Tarsan/Cole: Response

TAG/TBC!

===

Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft

Assistant Chief Medical Officer

USS Artemis-A

A240205RB1