LtCmdr Jovenan – How about we don’t get anywhere near there and just wait until they die of old age or something?
Jovenan
((Bridge, USS Artemis))
The Artemis slipped through the space in the wake of the Nascaik warship. They might have been nominally partners moving on with the pursuit and the investigation, although it was difficult to agree with that in practice. The Nascaik Captain wasn’t interested in the evidence, not even so much so to review their findings or to hear who and why they actually suspected of the destruction of the supply ship. They might have been on the same side, should the Afalqi turn up hostile and they needed to fight it, but anything beyond that was questionable. No one knew yet who would get the main perpetrators to their possession and if they would get a fair trial. No one even knew if they would actually apprehend the suspects or if the Artemis and its passenger would be forced to pay for the blood of the Nascaik. Jovenan felt particularly sorry for the Secretary. His life had turned upside down when the Afalqi had been stolen under his nose, and now, it was at the risk of ending prematurely because of that. He showed courage by accepting to stay. Maybe that would become useful down the line.
Jovenan: Secretary, if I remembered correctly, you mentioned that Mister Havun had no prior connections to the Nascaik that you knew of. What about the Thama? Could his motivation be connected to the former hostilities of the two civilisation?
Munro: The signal we managed to capture might have some information about Havun's intentions. I've sent it to Commander K'Wara and their team. The decryption has almost completed.
Storm: Hopefully, it will yield something we can use to our advantage.
Jetripar: Response
Right. There was little they could do on the Artemis, or at least on the bridge, to discover the true nature of Mr Havun’s or his accomplishes’ motivation. Their guesses varied wildly as new information came through, and although there were multiple civilisations and species involved now and the investigation had brought them to a foreign space, it might not even have anything to do with galactic politics or broad philosophies. No one knew.
Jovenan turned to follow their path on the screen of her science station. Since the Nascaik ship had tabs on the Afalqi’s trail and flew ahead of them, there wasn’t much for her to observe that she didn’t normally keep her eyes on anyway. At least she could try and estimate their destination based on their trajectory. They had taken a few minor course adjustments – perhaps the Afalqi didn’t know exactly where they were heading either, or maybe they were trying to throw them off – but mostly, it had been straight towards something, and she wanted to know what that something was. As the calculations compared their stellar charts, there was one primary suspect.
Jovenan: Captain, the Nascaik warship seems to be heading towards a system. Seven planets, one of which is Class P. No know habitation.
MacKenzie: Tell me whatever you can about the system. Why might they be interested in it if it's as unsuspecting as it sounds?
Munro: More deflection? Or something else? I noticed this area of space is remote, no trade routes nearby and a vast distance from any populated systems.
Storm: Rats prefer the dark.
Letting her gaze run through the text and the tables and the figures on the screen, Jovenan tried to learn as much as she could from the limited information they had of the system and this part of the Borderlands – the truth still was, they knew very little of the uninhabitable, strategically and economically unimportant rocks outside their borders.
Jovenan: The Kurtûl system. The third planet is Class P, others are incapable of supporting life. Starfleet hasn’t done a survey in here before, but the remote observations haven’t found signs of life or noteworthy natural resources. The wider area has been nominally claimed by the Nascaik about a decade ago, but they haven’t done anything to establish control in this particular system yet.
Jetripar: Response
The Captain was reading something her own console, something long enough to warrant her attention, making Jovenan unsure if she had listened her report on the system.
MacKenzie: We appear to have quite a mystery on our hands... Reports from one of my teams seem to confirm Romulan involvement - the box we recovered contained an active folded-space transporter device that transported a wounded Romulan woman into the lab who later died as a result of a Da'al weapon. It looks like she was implanted with a device designed to mimic other species' genetic markers, and a data rod they recovered suggests that the Afalqi was deliberately modified with concealed systems to support the additional technology.
Jovenan almost gasped hearing the Captain’s situation report. Folded-space transporters were awful method of transporting anything, let alone living biological matter, and if the Romulan had been stored inside the device… god. Whoever put her there must have been desperate – or cruel. Jovenan imagined what it must have been like in the sealed-off HazMat lab when they transported the Romulan woman out only to witness her die. She worried how Vitor must have felt like.
MacKenzie: That's quite damning, isn't it?
Munro: Did you know about the device?
Jetripar: Response
Storm: Like I said earlier, it might not be Havun. If the device that the woman was implanted with was meant to mimic other species DNA….
MacKenzie: I want to know what we're warping into so that way we minimize any additional... surprises.
If only that was easy. Jovenan scanned the system ahead with everything that reached it, but until they got closer, they were partially blind. There wasn’t anything to say that the Afalqi even went to the system or stayed there; it could have changed course in the last minute or go through the system, hoping that the stellar and planetary forces messed up with their pursuit. At least the long range sensor readings were coming in now.
Munro: Long range scans do indicate that there's been warp travel to and from that system. Recent. Frequent :: reviews information :: looks like the ships diverted course from this localised trade route, they would avoided detection by Nascaik forces. Likely they posed as traders and merchants?
Storm: If it’s not the Afalqi that’s been coming and going…then we need to ask ourselves who has been, and why the Afalqi wants to meet up with them?
Jovenan: With a remote system like this, they might have even just left something for the Afalqi to pick up without significant risk of anyone intervening. ::pause:: All the recent traffic to and from the system seems to be diverging from the third planet.
Jetripar/MacKenzie: Response
Munro: Captain we're entering the system now. The Nascaik ship is approaching the planet.
Setting up all the relevant scanners, Jovenan glanced at the main viewer. Another new world to explore, albeit not in the best possible circumstances. From this distance, the main star of the system was a distant fleck of light, while the planets weren’t any different from the remote stars, not to the naked eye. The sensors and scanners, though, were much more receptive to details, and from the first glance at the data, it was obvious to Jovenan that the planet wasn’t as devoid of life as the remote observations led to believe.
Storm: I’m picking up a planetary-based defense network.
Jovenan: Energy and limited subspace communication readings from the planet’s surface.
Jetripar/MacKenzie: Response
Munro: :: wide eyed :: I think there might be some kind of a complex on the planet?
Jovenan bit her lip. Structures took time to built, as did setting up planetary defences and all that other technology she was reading. For how long had it been there? Had Mr Havun, his accomplishes or employers built that in secrecy in the last… months? That didn’t seem likely. Surely it would take a fleet of ships to built up something like that in a short period of time, and the Nascaik would have noticed it. How long had the plan be at work? Or was the structure there beforehand?
Storm: Maybe, but getting to it is going to prove difficult.
Jetripar/MacKenzie: Response
Storm: I’m reading a network of forty planet-based…plasma cannons? The readouts of the type of cannon are sketchy, but there are definitely forty of them.
That was a lot of plasma cannons. Where would someone need so many plasma cannons? The Federation worlds were light in planetary defences – infamously so, as the couple of attacks against Earth in Jovenan’s lifetime had demonstrated – but that many planetary turrets for such a remote and relatively small location seemed an overkill. The density of turrets reminded her of the one she and her team had taken over and used in Ki Baratan of CloQ’s alternate timeline history. They had just found one in the building they were in.
Jovenan: Lifesigns are difficult to read, but they are only in limited numbers. Not in thousands, maybe even just in dozens.
Jetripar/MacKenzie/Munro: Response
Storm: This is an entirely different type of cannon than I’ve seen before. My best educated guess is that it can shoot into orbit, but not by far.
Unknown type of weaponry was unexpected. They could have recognised standard Da’al, Nascaik or Romulan weapons, but if these weren’t either of those, what were they?
Jovenan: Heavy short range planetary defences would imply that they depended on a fleet for long range defence, right? ::reads from screen:: Besides us and the Nascaik, and the Afalqi’s trail, I’m not seeing indications that there would be other ships currently in the system.
Jetripar/MacKenzie/Munro: Response
Storm: I’m not sure we can safely get into transporter range, and unless we come up with a really good distraction, we aren’t likely going to get a shuttle past them either.
Jovenan: Could we cooperate with the Nascaik to get our team there?
An uncomfortable thought came to Jovenan’s mind: if the Nascaik wanted revenge, let them have it. If – if – Mr Havun and the other people involved with the Afalqi were there and ready to use the weapons to fight against them, the Nascaik would fight for their view of justice until each of the perpetrators were killed. The Artemis didn’t need to get involved with this, if the Afalqi crew were smart, they would have surrendered to the Da’al or Starfleet before getting the Nascaik involved. She grimaced from the thought of it; their method of justice, blood for blood, reminded her too much of a certain other black-and-white view.
Jetripar/MacKenzie/Munro/Storm: Response
Jovenan scanned the structure in the surface. Its weird nature and the danger getting close to it posed more questions than answers regarding the theft of the Afalqi. With this heavy weaponry to defend it, she had to ask the question: did they even want to transport down there?
Jovenan: The structure is rather expansive underground, and it has portions that are more heavily shielded than the others. The energy output is large considering the relatively small people currently there. Based on the accumulation of radon and its decay products, I’d say it’s decades old and has been abandoned for a large portion of it.
Jetripar/MacKenzie/Munro/Storm: Response
Still reading the scanner data, something caught Jovenan’s eyes. She knitted her eyebrows and leaned in, moving everything else on the screen aside but that one figure. The awful feeling of something twisting in her stomach rushed over her when she realised a potential implication of what she was reading.
Jovenan: Captain, I’m receiving theta-band radiation decay particles in ranges that… I don’t have definitive proof, but they could be a by-product of experiments into thalaron technology.
Jetripar/MacKenzie/Munro/Storm: Response
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Lieutenant Commander Jovenan
Chief Science Officer
USS Artemis-A
E239911J11