Commander Jo Marshall - Sweetness On the Air
Jo Marshall
((Central Chamber, Mysterious Structure, Gateside Dimension))
Jo reached the chair and had mixed feelings about sitting in something that had turned to face the door of its own volition not twenty minutes ago, and the thing sitting in it had been wearing someone she was responsible for as a coat.
Marshall: Can you remember any of it? Sequence, symbols, what it was making you press when the grids went down?
Fenn: ::gesturing to various points on the holographic display:: Just that these points lock and unlock the cells.
Kovar: Anything more? I realize it may be difficult or unpleasant to recall, but any information will be essential if we are to assist the Kobliads.
Maezel closed her eyes, and whatever she found behind them made her grimace like a woman seriously reconsidering the entire trip over there. She reached past Jo's shoulder and tried a different sequence, something more muscle memory than mind.
Fenn: I'm not sure what that was meant to do but I…
Whatever she'd touched on the display, it didn't wait for her to finish. It reconfigured, showing eight interconnected chambers, linked by a turbolift shaft running up the left side like a spinal column. In the lowest chamber, three orange circles pulsed in a steady rhythm. Two floors above, two more circles—one grey and motionless, the other pulsing frantically, orange and urgent. Jo didn't need to guess what the grey one was.
Marshall: This facility's brig. Has to be. They built this place away from their own dimension specifically to hold it whatever the hell that is. Somewhere it couldn't do whatever it is it's trying to do now.
Fenn: Agreed, it seems to be some sort of map. ::She pointed to their chamber.:: I'm guessing that's us and those dots above us must be the Kobliads.
Kovar: Indeed, and I find the grey marker to be concerning. We do not have sufficient data to determine what either the colours or pulses mean, but I am concerned about the state of the injured Kobliad.
Marshall: ::Quietly,:: Yeah.
Their entire mission there was to see the Kobliads back safely, as many of them as they could. How they'd even got there in the first place was another mystery, as the shuttlecraft had made its way back to their dimension just fine. Something didn't sit right in Jo's gut, where things usually did sit right to some extent or other.
Fenn: The real question is, where is the entity and why doesn't it show on here?
Kovar: That is curious. I would hypothesize that this sensor array, though in a different dimension, is still calibrated for three spatial dimensions. And the entity appears to extend through additional dimensions, rendering it invisible to conventional sensors.
Jo nodded, turning that over in her mind. It tracked. The builders of the tower had understood what they were dealing with, well enough to construct a prison for it, yet apparently not well enough to put it on a map. Either that, or they;d known perfectly well and simply decided a thing you couldn't see coming was a problem for whoever was dumb enough to release it.
Marshall: Which means we're moving toward two people in unknown condition with a predator hunting the same targets that our sensors can't track.
She glanced at Fenn, who still had her phaser rifle in her EVA suited gloves and wore a recently had their body borrowed without permission expression and was not feeling philosophical about it.
Kovar: That is still only a hypothesis, which I admit may be faulty based upon the data at hand. The more pressing matter at hand is determining the manner of containment that this facility’s operators achieved. Any insight into that might aid us the inevitable conflict ahead.
Fenn: It was imprisoned here. Perhaps its cell might offer some answers?
Marshall: Response
Kovar: Response
Fenn: Well it was kept locked up there for oceans knows how long and yet it managed to disappear through walls when let out. The answer to containing it must be in there.
She was right, Jo couldn't argue with that. Jo watched Fenn step inside the cell, watched her clock the state of it with the torchlight from her visit, the smashed mirror, the dead lighting, the slow drip from the ceiling, and pulled out her tricorder. If the Bolian was angry about recently being worn like an overcoat, it didn't factor into the way she still worked methodically. Glass from the broken mirror crunched under her boots in the silence.
When she was back in front of them, Fenn showed Jo and Kovar the tricorder results.
Fenn: There seems to be an energy signature behind the walls of the cell. What do you both think? Can we use it somehow? If this system runs through the entire structure then perhaps we can keep this thing locked up in the structure while we make our escape with the Kobliads?
Checking the readout, the signature was woven through the walls, like a hidden tapestry behind them, invisible to their eyes, a cage made from containment. Threaded into the very architecture of the looming tower complex. It had held for centuries, and all it took were some inquisitive Kobliad scientists not knowing any better.
Wasn't exactly a first for scientists.
Marshall: Right. We know what we need, and we know where they are, and one of those things is more urgent than the other. The mechanism isn't going anywhere. The Kobliads might be. Grab the generator and let's get moving.
Fenn / Kovar: Response
She was already hauling ass toward the turbolift before the sentence was finished, taking out her phaser and checking the settings, feeling the weight of it in her hand, maybe even praying a little that she wouldn't have to actually use it on anything that wasn't Death itself.
Marshall: We go up, we get them out, and on the way back down we work out how to close the lid on this thing and make sure it stays closed. ::It sounded easy, it felt far from it.:: Stay together. If something moves that isn't one of us, don't wait. Use it.
Fenn / Kovar: Response
The platform waited for them at the bottom of the shaft. It hummed with energy fed from somewhere, elsewhere in the structure, where physics prevailed. When they stepped onto it, the platform rose without a sound. None of the stiff, mechanical complaints the doors had lingered on. Jo inhaled, and through the EVA suit filtered through the smell of old stone and something almost sweet she didn't have a name for. Fermented dark, maybe.
The first floor they passed had cells. Jo spotted them through gaps in the shaft wall, rows of them, faintly lit with amber cast, laser grids activated. Her heart hammered in her chest, her vital signs reading the increase in rate on her forearm display. Nothing a few deep breaths of the sweetened air could fix. She glanced at Fenn and Kovar, checking them both over, more Bolian than Vulcan, and for the first time felt herself worrying about what the end was going to look like.
When the second floor arrived, it opened up into a short and wide room, the same black architecture as everything below, and two heavily engraved doors at the end of it, both of them fling open and embedded into the walls.
In the middle, a Kobliad stood, arms at her sides, face tilted slightly upwards toward the ceiling, toward nothing visible to the naked eye. Motionless. Motionless in the way a pendulum stops at the top of the arc for just a fraction of a second before it decides which way to fall. Behind her was another, a man whose face was a void where a face used to be, showing only hollow emptiness staring back.
Her head turned, smooth as Caedan's cake batter, until the face was pointing directly at Kovar. The eyes were open, irises bright white, gleaming with intent. When it smiled, the rapidly beating heart within Jo Marshall stood still.
Marshall: Subspace, now!
Fenn / Kovar: Response