LtCmdr Jovenan – What do you think the chances are this is an Iconian gateway and we can just leave right now?
Jovenan
((Faraday room, Garden Cave, inside the cliffs, Callis I))
Darkness rolled over them. As the ancient gears ground against each other again, the door moved back to its place and covered the opening. Left with nothing but their two torches for light, Jovenan turned her face to Bergmen and flashed him an apologetic smile when the door finally stopped with a clank. The rocks and the heavy door surrounded them in all directions, isolating them from their two fellow survivors and the rest of the world. They were at the mercy of the long abandoned room; the metallic sheet’s pictograms, if interpreted correctly, spoke of something changing, but Jovenan couldn’t tell, what would it be or if they’d even survive to describe it. The ancient dwellers of these caverns had left plentiful images for the progeny to decipher, but without any familiarity of their culture or biology, the task was nigh impossible. Closing the door could cause a circuit to close, or it could indicate the decontamination of its interior – or it might do nothing.
And it indeed seemed nothing was happening. The door sealed them into a space of utter silence. No circuits completed, no hum of long abandoned machine turning on its cooling mechanism, not even the barely audible whistle of the hot air of the garden cavern being replaced through the oculus of the dome. Only their withheld breathes, the rustle of the flames licking the torches… and a chirp.
Jovenan: Wait, what?
She recognised that sound. It had been several long days since she had heard it last time, but the motion came from her backbone: she brought her hand up to her chest and pressed the combadge. The small device responded with a similar chirp. Although no voice came through, she didn’t feel like the universe out there had just vanished any more; they were once again Starfleet, and they could expect response or rescue. It brought her to an elated frenzy, and she pressed the combadge repeatedly, as if not believing she had heard the device until it had made the noise half a dozen times. Her smile widened as each tap was met by the sound, not ceasing no matter how many times she made the motion. She turned towards Bergmen, who raised his gaze to meet hers.
Bergmen: ::pressing his with wonderful chirp sound:: Is it… ::looks hopeful::
It was not just her combadge that suddenly come back to live, but his device emitted the chirp as well when tapped. On a planet where none of their electronic devices worked, it could be no coincidence that closing off a door to a purposefully constructed room caused such an effect that mere caves and tunnels could not. They had interpreted the pictograms almost right, it was just that instead of a circuit, they completed a Faraday cage.
Jovenan: The structure of the room must be shielding us from the Maelstrom. Like an unconductive mesh cage. ::taps combadge:: =/\= K’Wara, Bancroft, do you hear me? =/\=
There was no immediate answer. Bergmen waited for a few seconds before trying the same himself.
Bergmen: =/\= Lieutenant K’Wara, Ensign Bancroft, come in. =/\=
Jovenan counted down the seconds silently in her mind, but there was still no answer from just behind the door. It shouldn’t have been such a surprise considering what they already had hypothesised, but it was a disappointment nonetheless. Bergmen didn’t hide it from his face, and Jovenan also sucked in her lips.
Bergmen: Looks like they cannot hear us, Commander.
Jovenan: Seems to be so. Their combadges must not work outside the room.
Either hearing their conversation or deciding that their time alone had passed, the door began opening again, screeching its opposition to being moved. The light poured back in, although not in large quantities, as the reflections of the sun and the flickering flames of the torches returned to the room. At first, the faces of their two companions were smiling – or almost so – but upon meeting those inside the room, they turned to surprised.
K’Wara: So, what happened?
Bancroft: ::suspiciously:: Have you two been… crying?
Jovenan brought her hand to her face and swiped her cheek. She must have cried without realising it. Shaking the teardrop off her thumb, she turned back to their two friends and nodded, teary eyes or not.
Jovenan: It wasn’t a circuit. They work in here. Electricity, our devices. They worked in here.
K’Wara: Did you try your combadge?
Unable to say much more right then, Jovenan just nodded more vigorously and bit her lips. Bancroft took his combadge from his pocket and tried pressing it. However, no sound came from the device. It further enforced Jovenan’s suspicion that it was the room – when completely shut off – acting as a shield from the Maelstrom or whatever else caused the devices to go silent. As soon as the cage was broken, the nullifying fields or radiation seeped in and killed the electronics.
Bergmen: Let’s say you are right, Commander, and this room is an unconductive cage. Our combadges... they weren’t destroyed by the field, and just didn’t work for some reason. That’s obvious, right?
Jovenan wasn’t too eager to declare anything “obvious”, since in the history of science, there were too many beliefs that were considered obvious only to turn out false. They didn’t exactly have the means to conduct experiments that would conclusively prove their hypothesis, but as far as she could work out an explanation to their discoveries, yes, that much seemed to be true.
K’Wara: Our combadges likely didn’t work for the same reason the Karnack crashed. Something in this area of space - likely the Maelstrom - disagrees with electricity.
Bancroft: No matter the reason, a combadge chirp would be the second best sound I’ve heard all week.
It was easy to smile to Bancroft’s sentiment. Although the combadges had fallen silent again, hearing them work at all was a blessing. They still had hope.
Jovenan: It was a nice thing to hear, even if no one responded. That would have been the best sound for me. ::pause:: Can we open and close the door from inside?
K’Wara nodded and, without a further order or request, walked back to the door, finding a lever to operate the ancient system from inside. The door moved once more, and the amount of natural light diminished again as the rock crawled back to its place. For a moment, the uncanny silence fell over them, and again, it was breached by the sound of the combadges regaining their life. The sound was almost as pleasant hearing it for the first time they tried closing the door, and indeed, Bancroft’s reaction was roughly the same as Jovenan’s: he fished the device from his pocket, pressed it, pressed it again, pressed it so many times and each time, it replied. Jovenan smiled looking at him sympathetically, but when he noticed he was stared at, he stopped.
They could have surely spent hours playing with their combadges, but they needed to return to work.
Bergmen: ::bites his lip:: Let me check something.
Raising her eyebrows uncertainly, Jovenan nodded. He tossed his backpack aside and pulled out another device, one that Jovenan didn’t immediately recognise, at least not in the poor lighting of the room. Its screen was lifeless at first, but after a few, select strokes on the keyboard, it blinked on. Jovenan’s eyes widened; it shouldn’t have been all that unexpected that other devices but the combadges worked too, but seeing it her own eyes was something else.
Bergmen: Holy Koala… it works… ::glance to Jovenan:: Accident data recorder from the escape pod… it works, ma’am.
K’Wara: Now I really wish we’d brought all our equipment with us.
Bancroft: Me too. But we couldn’t have known.
Jovenan: If we’re going to be staying here for much longer, we might as well try to return to our pod again. I would love to get my tricorder here, and all the medical tools as well. Maybe… maybe we could even try to figure out what happened to the others.
For a long time, Jovenan allowed her mind to wander to their friends, colleagues and loved ones. In the past days, it had caused her much pain to think of them, wonder if they had died when the Karnack came down, to the predator or to the elements or to hunger or thirst or diseases since then, or if they were hanging on like they were. Now, she wasn’t crying because of the hopeless dread and sorrow for them, but because in that sound, the simple chirp, they had hope.
oO Vitor, I’m coming. Oo
Bancroft: If other pods made it down here… ::thinking:: It’s pretty unlikely this is the only shielded spot on the planet, right?
Bergmen: Response
Jovenan: We’d have to figure out if the combadge signals carry outside the room anyway. And even if they do, and our friends have found another shielded spot, they might be out of the range. Without a ship to boost it, combadge range isn’t enough to cover but a fraction of the planet’s surface.
K’Wara: What about the Karnack? Maybe it crashed somewhere?
A deep breath. It hadn’t occurred for Jovenan to think of that during the entire time they had spent there. They way they entered the atmosphere, she was already aware that the escape pods would be spread all around the hemisphere, but where would the ship itself go. If it entered the atmosphere and survived the journey down to the surface in few pieces, they would be able to find much more equipment there necessary for their continued survival, and besides, it would be a natural spot for the rescue teams to start the search, and for other survivors to gather should they be able to come there.
Bancroft: I don’t remember seeing debris trails. If she’d broken apart in orbit, we would have seen something, right?
Jovenan: Don’t know. It would be large enough to survive the atmospheric entry, but it was also breaking apart when we left it… and well, it was already breaking apart when we boarded it.
Bergmen: Response
K’Wara: Maybe... But, there was an explosion, so the Karnack must have taken actual damage before losing electricity. And if it’d gone completely dead immediately, then we wouldn’t have been able to launch the escape pods in the first place. ::scratches their scalp thoughtfully:: Darn it, I really hope it crashed and isn’t just drifting in orbit somewhere.
Bancroft: Is there some way we can find out?
Jovenan shrugged. There might have been ways to discover the ship in the orbit or on the surface with the tools they had when they crashed down, but right now, she didn’t even know what did they have and what worked. Walking around and looking for specific types of radiations, materials and subspace fields in the proximity with the tricorder would give them a hint as to if the ship was on the planet at all, but even if they did go back to get the tricorder, they couldn’t take it out of the Faraday room. They didn’t even know if they could scan anything outside the room either, or if whatever material was blocking the Maelstrom’s effects would also prevent scanning outside it. The same was true for the communications.
Jovenan: I don’t know. Not with what we have, I reckon. Our time is best used by investigating what options we have. If you can come up with something we can do with combadges, the accident data recorder and, well, sticks, stones and backpack full of fruits, please share it with us. Otherwise, let’s see if the people here had something else useful tucked away.
Bergmen: Response
Bancroft didn’t apparently know how to rescue them from the planet with their selection of equipment, as he went straight into work to explore the room. Jovenan nodded to the two goldshirts, hoping that their speciality would allow them to figure something out, and if not, give them insight into finding something useful in the room. As for herself, she joined Bancroft in searching, but her mind was elsewhere. She thought of the physics of Faraday cages and spatial anomalies and radiation and subspace fields. Even though she shed light to the corners of the room with her torch, she only saw figures out of the University or Academy textbooks or the professors’ drawings. A cage like this would block radio signals, surely, but what about subspace? How did the cage work again? Was Faraday cages all they needed, or was it in combination with something else in their environment, like minerals or air or water? Would… would their rescuers be able to see them in there, or were they better of leaving the room, leaving the cave, in case someone was scanning for their signs right now? At least they left the arrow by the pod…
Her thoughts were interrupted by a sound that hadn’t been there just seconds ago. Clinging, then a soft pop. She stood up and scanned the room, trying to find the source. Bancroft was smelling something.
Bancroft: Woof. ::clears throat, voice rasping slightly:: That’s… distilled. ::studying the bottle:: Alcohol, high proof. ::spreading grin:: I can sterilize things now.
Jovenan: That’s great! But let’s all still continue to avoid getting cuts.
Bergmen/K’Wara: Response
Bancroft placed the bottles back to the shelves where he had found them. Jovenan supposed that the material of the bottles was fragile, considering how carefully he did so now that he knew how useful the contains were.
Bancroft: And when we get off this godforsaken rock? ::glances between the other three and the bottles:: Our homecoming party’s bar is going to be exceptionally well stocked.
Jovenan: Nothing beats feasting with historical artifacts of an extinct civilisation. When we have access to the sickbay, it doesn’t even matter if it’s spoiled. ::to Bergmen, K’Wara:: Do you have anything yet?
Bergmen/K’Wara: Response
Jovenan nodded. Doing miracles took time, and so did doing an inventory of a room. She continued her half-hearted search. The room had remained reasonably dry, so she would have expected to find something organic that had remained somewhat recognisable, such as the remains in the first tunnel, but there didn’t appear to be any. Paper would have been a great discovery, even if they couldn’t read their text, but she hadn’t yet found a scrap of it. If there had been any, it had all decayed already. It was also possible the resident of this room and of the caverns had figured that their work needed to be recorded for the prosperity in a format that better survived in the burning fire of that was the time. Hence the carvings on the walls and in the metallic sheets, and images and pictograms instead of writing. She felt sorry for the person, who must have seen that there was no way out for them or their people. They were the one that had given them the chance.
Bancroft: Hey… Jo– uh, Commander? Lieutenants? Wanna take a look at this?
Hearing that she was being called – funny how calling her by her name was now inappropriate now that they were back to being on a mission instead of just waiting – Jovenan walked across the room to see what he had found. A gentle whiff of dust floated around where Bancroft had pulled a cloth over what looked like a console. Jovenan pursed her lips. It appeared to be in a good condition from the outside, but who could say anything about what was going on inside.
Jovenan: Any idea what this is and how to turn it on?
Bergmen/K’Wara/Bancroft: Response
Jovenan: I doubt something that was built in a place like this would require much outside infrastructure to turn on. Can you see anything that could be a power source, or anything where we could attach one of our own?
Bergmen/K’Wara/Bancroft: Response
Somehow, against all odds, their team of specialist managed to get the screen flickering. Jovenan squinted how eyes to figure out what she was seeing there, but when she realised that the symbols and pictograms were just the same mess they had seen on carved to the walls, she let out an exhausted sigh.
Jovenan: I don’t know what I expected. ::pause:: At least it works. Good job. Now, anyone see familiar symbols?
Bergmen/K’Wara/Bancroft: Response
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Lieutenant Commander Jovenan
Chief Science Officer
USS Artemis-A
E239911J11