The Other Side (Part 4 of 6)

Posted on 20 Apr 2023 @ 6:12pm by Chief Warrant Officer 3 Lamar Darius & Commander Scarlet Blake & Commander Allyndra illm Warraquim & Lieutenant JG Sofie Ullswater & Ensign Amanda Turell & Petty Officer 2nd Class Donald Andrews & Petty Officer 3rd Class Constantin Vansen
Edited on on 20 Apr 2023 @ 6:12pm

4,072 words; about a 20 minute read

Mission: Episode 18 - Cold Station 31
Location: Cold Station 31 - Level 1(3)
Timeline: MD 10, 1505 hrs

Previously, on Cold Station 31 (Part 3)...

Together as a unit, the two Starfleet away teams managed to carry three of their incapacitated personnel toward the open turbolift doors. The escape was so close yet so far; marred by splatterings of fresh blood strewn across the walls and the supernatural cries of the appendages deforming through the bulkheads. Yet the cadre managed it. Slowly and methodically, the combined members of both teams dragged their wounded into the turbolift's cramped quarters then defended their new position.

The moment the last person was in, Vansen pushed the up button on the turbolift, ignoring the little spark going through his fingers at badly conducted wires. He was almost immune to those to be fair.

And Now, the Continuation...

[ON]

Cold Station 31's turbolift slowed its ascent and came to halt. The overhead lights flickered for several seconds before returning to normal, after which the door hissed open and presented the two away teams with their new escape route. But was it an escape? Or some form of robust trickery? In front of the Galileans was now a view of the cold station's engineering bay -- the same room they'd originally escaped from not long before. The facility's familiar fusion reactors were back in plain sight for everyone to see as well as the semi-active engineering consoles lining the walls. They hadn't ascended to the support craft level...they were right back where they started.

"What...?" Blake moved out carefully, turning in a slow circle to take the room in with a mixture of confusion and frustration, her hands gripping her rifle tightly in readiness. "Are tricorders reading what we're seeing?"

Amanda was only a few steps behind Blake as the doors opened back into the engineering bay. "Ok...." She looked around the bay, the being that attacked them there was nowhere in sight. Unconsciously she took several steps back until her back hit the wall, "Everyone get back in, I'll just sit here and hold them off." She said somewhat groggily as she slumped down the wall to the floor.

Darius felt a sudden wash of intense anxiety pass through him. He raised his groggy head to look in the direction of the Marine commander, but when he saw the image of the cold station's engineering room in front of them through the turbolift doors, his dark eyes dilated and his feet started to kick himself back away from the sight. "...No...no, no, no...!" he cried out. "It won't let us go! I won't go back!"

Allyndra peered at the scene that presented itself. "Are we in some sort of weird holodeck simulation with the safety protocols off?"

Vansen took his tricorder, looking at the others. Darius was a mess. But he was more worried about Amanda's colour and her dislocated shoulder. The rest? Well, they shouldn't be alive right now, not with the core blowing up, yet here they were. So it meant a few things he wasn't going to ask himself. So. When you're trapped, you focus on what you can do. Same as being in a ship with no power floating through the black. "Doctor," he said, his voice oddly calm despite the horror of their situation. "Could you see to Ensign Turell's shoulder, I think she needs it popped back in again." He stepped out, to stand beside Blake before he started to scan. He frowned at the readings. Odd would be a polite way to put it. Downright useless would be better. There were some things he could tell though. "It's not a holodeck. It's, as far as the tricorder knows, real." He looked over at Blake before he took another step out into it all.

Allyndra still couldn't believe they were right back where they started. She had felt the turbolift move in only one direction. It was an innate sense for one that could fly. She shook her head and went to attend to the dislocation. "This is going to hurt." She pulled hard but a satisfying pop ensued.

"You don't need to tell me it's going to hurt doc, this isn't my first..... son of a bitch." Amanda almost screamed as Allyndra pulled on her arm, the joint ground and creaked as she manipulated it this way and that till it slipped back into its rightful place in her shoulder. Her whole arm tingled and flushed with warmth as feeling came back to it.

"Maybe you've had one before but this one got twisted as well. I guess it won't do any good to say be careful with it in this situation."

Sat in the turbloift, with her eyes scrunched shut and still barely conscious of what was going on, Ensign Ullswater started saying "We can't go. He told me this was going to happen." She repeated the last sentence a couple of times, first exasperated and then panicked. The room was starting to feel hot again, the distant roar of flames grew louder in her ears. She didn't want to go back.

Still in the turbolift Donald knelt beside Sophie trying his best to reassure her and coax her to her feet and out of the turbolift. If this turbolift had a mind of its own to circle them back here it could move again separating them from the rest of the team.

"No," Blake shook her head slowly, the hackles on the back of her neck raising with more than just the cold. She forced herself to look back at her team, seeing the state of them. "No. If there's a way in, there's a way out," she said firmly, her eyes hard and jaw set as she rolled her shoulders to try and shake the cold off of herself. "Let's take advantage of the quiet. Heal the injured, scan the samples of those things, see if we can get any data from the consoles here."

"Yes Commander," Vansen nodded, at the last bit of the order. He walked to the nearest console, frowning at what felt like a layer of dust over it. He brushed it away with his sleeve, eyes focused as he took out an instrument to crack the panel open enough to get to the inside of it. Huh. Black liquid. Could be a corrupted bio-neural gel pack. Or monster goo, and he tried not to think of the latter. Or, the blood of the people who had been here. The options were endless, so he closed his mind to them and the panicky bit of his psyche. Survival instinct was out the airlock, they shouldn't be alive. He started working, humming to himself to focus.

The recovering conn officer reached out to the away team leader. Darius' discombobulation was severe yet he slowly tried his best to work through the enigmas and scattered horrific images lingering in his present memory. "...Major Blake..." He coughed then vomited along the side of the bulkhead's wall, his head dipped low in private shame and recovery. "...It won't let us go," he tried to explain.

"He's right." Ensign Ullswater had let Andrews help her to her feet. She could barely think with all the cacophony of feelings and sounds assaulting her mind but through gritted teeth she continued "We are wanted here. We can't go, they aren't going to let us go." She wasn't really sure what she was trying to communicate but the inevitability of the situation was clear from what she had seen. This was a nightmare and those always end the same way.

"If there is planning, then there is intelligence." Allyndra quipped. She put her hands on her slim hips and called out. "So what is it you want of us other than to torture us or are you afraid to face us and answer questions!"

There was no reply to the Akkadian's verbal demand. Only silence, despair, and hopefully an escape which included a quick death.

Vansen glanced over at Allyndra before back at what he was doing. He grimaced slightly, pulling his hand away and studied the black goo. He smelled it after a moment, recognising something about it, before wiping it away. "The ant doesn't demand answers from the boot," he whispered, an expression he remembered his father saying. He looked around for a moment as the console started up again, the lights flickering and humming on it.

Blake held her hands out to quiet the team, looking around them and then to the flickering lights. She had no clue what they had gone through, but her main concern was keeping them focussed. She knew how easy it was for things to fall apart. Besides, getting a plan together took her mind off of how bloody cold she was. "One thing at a time then," she said firmly. "Vansen...see if you can get any data. Karras, see to Darius. This idea that 'it' won't let us go...is this just a feeling, or are you saying there's been some kind of intelligent communication from an entity here?"

Tears welled in Lamar's eyes, representing one of many negative emotions coursing through his body. He balled his hands into fists then punched at the vacant air in front of him with full conviction. Whatever ghost was there, he couldn't hit it. His shoulders momentarily trembled then slumped before he spoke angrily to those around him. "...It's not an 'entity'!" he yelled at the commander. "It's...existence...of pain.."

Allyndra had to admit that she could still easily recall her own pain and terror when whatever it was had grabbed her. There was something going on and she was determined to find out what it was. Reactors that blew and then didn't blow, pain and terror of disembodied hands and pieces, whatever that thing had been that had damaged her wings. "This is or was a research station. Is there any way we can get to the lab areas and figure out what they were working on? Perhaps there might be some connection we can determine. As a recall there was one Trelane from long ago that took great thrill in torturing physically and mentally a Star Fleet crew."

Ullswater was still swaying slightly on her feet. She could hear the voices of the other officers but with the discordant screams of fear ringing in her ears it was as if through water, like they were a mile off, like she was in a different room far far away. "There has to be an intelligence," She tried to recall the image in her mind of the flayed man entering her nightmare but just thinking of the sound of his voice made her shudder "He spoke to me."

"It didn't speak to me," Amanda said from where she sat against the wall. "It showed me a vision I couldn't shake of me lingering between death and life, doctors desperately trying to keep me alive when all I wanted to do was die."

Vansen, despite having also experienced the pain of being gripped by whatever it was, kept his mouth shut while the others debated their experiences. He had felt it as...a displacement. Like when you forget a step down the stairs and find yourself free falling. As if it didn't belong and for that moment, he had only experienced his own fears. He shook his head sharply as if to clear it, watching the console. "I got some access. Limited systems access, but I've found a backdoor to...I'm not sure what. I'm trying to get the schematics up, see if we can find some way of..." he stopped, more because suddenly he was unsure what their mission was. Escape was high on the list, but he wasn't sure they could escape. Find survivors? Maybe. Or at least find what had happened. "Anyroad. I got limited root access to the files, whoever was labelling it had a bad sense of humour because most of the time and date stamps are wiped."

Allyndra came over. "What have you found or can find? I suspect we will not have much time before something else happens. Still any tidbit of information is better than nothing."

Vansen looked at her before he shook his head. "I won't know until I try accessing them. They might be encrypted or corrupted." He looked over at Allyndra before looking at Blake. "But judging by the size, some of these may contain data from personal logs."

Allyndra nodded. "Anything we can drag out might prove useful. Do you concur commander?"

"Absolutely," Blake nodded to Allyndra before looking to Vansen, searching his eyes. They all knew that the last time they accessed the computer, everything had gone to hell. But they weren't going to get anywhere running around in circles, literally in the dark. "Vansen, get all the data you can," she ordered clearly and loudly, making sure he and the others understood the choice was hers and not his...in case it all went down hill.

Allyndra said nothing else. She fully agreed and there were wounded to attend to. They would need every bit of ability in case another attack was forthcoming.

Leaving Sophie's side Donald headed towards Constantin passing by Allyndra on the way. "Sir will you take a look at Ensign Ullswater, she's still very shook up."

"Indeed. I think we all are." Allyndra moved toward the Ensign. "Ensign Ullswater, I could use your help if you feel up to a task." If mostly something psychological perhaps Allynrda thought thinking on something else might help.

"I'm not sure I do, sir. I think I've burned my hands." The ensign held out her hands, even she could see that there didn't look to be much wrong with them, but she could still feel it. The pain told her that she had to be right, the oppressive heat she felt coming off the walls surely confirmed it. She was still in there, only half way out of the nightmare. "Sir, I might also still be asleep." She blurted it out, it didn't really make sense, but neither did anything else the Ensign was currently experiencing.

Allyndra looked at her hands and then examined them. There was nothing wrong with them, but then again whatever leftover effects there might be going on was something she did not have time to deal with. She pulled a hypo and set it to basically saline and then pressed. "Here that should help with the pain." She hoped psychologically that would help. "They are not as bad as you think."

The ensign looked unconvinced. They certainly felt bad but she closed her eyes and tried to swallow down the pain of it all. "Alright, well, let's get on with it then."

"Right where do you want me Constantin?" Donald asked as he got closer to where his friend worked.

Vansen looked at Donald, smiling weakly. "Keep an eye on the readings when I do this...I think I used spit and a prayer to get this console up and running, so maybe have a look and see if you can improve it?"

"I had this console running fine before that creature attacked us, it must have messed it back up." Donald said before slipping back under the console Vansen had been looking at. "Oh yeah, something did a number on this."

Allyndra wished she could do more, but until whatever was going on resolved, she was stymied. "Anything yet?" She was worried at how much time their current reprieve might last.

Vansen frowned as he worked, making a non-committing noise in the back of his throat in response to her, as well as raising his left hand with the thumb and little finger crossed over his palm. Not yet, soon. He decrypted the file, biting his lip at the level of corrupted data, before he suddenly tilted his head. "There's some specifications here for a transporter, but not like anything I've seen before. The calibrations are..." he paused before he brought up an attachment. It was meant to be a video file, but the file was frozen, corrupted. He discarded it with a sigh and kept looking, piecing together. "I have some scientists, just...initials, but I think I can use them to reference other files. But more importantly..." he stepped back from the console, suddenly. "I have a list of subjects. There's no...details, but I think...I think there's people. The subjects were people. And...and there's..." he turned his head to look at the others. "They were working on transwarp."

Allyndra was surprised but then again she knew that everyone wanted something faster, something better. *Didn't we achieve fold space technology?* Here thoughts drifted. "Commander Blake, I am a little out of depth, do you have more knowledge about such technology?"

Blake shook her head slowly, a confused frown showing as her fingers shifted against the grip of her rifle, stretching. "No...certainly nothing that would explain what is going on here. Vansen, can you dig into any logs? Maybe we can find out what happened, or even what their emergency plan and procedure were."

"Yes Commander," Vansen said, his fingers moving on the console as he worked. He frowned as he opened a log, but it started playing aloud before he got the chance to bring the transcript up. The voice was male, calm and collected...well educated if nothing else.

"So far, the experiments have all failed. CS31 are yet to receive a subject. We're running out of them. At this rate, I will have to consider plan B. I doubt she will object, she is as obsessed with solving this puzzle as I am. As for the Director? I can deal with him if he stands in our way....

The log was interrupted by static, sounding almost as a scream, and briefly a face flashed on the console's display, a humanoid male with grey eyes and blue eyes and a face that appeared emotionless, before the screen went red and then black. The text appeared from the transcript, but it wasn't the same. Words repeat, again and again, the same sentence, in a language that Vansen didn't recognise. Realising that the others couldn't see it, he spoke it aloud. "Facilis descensus Averno." And the universal translator took care of it care of it.

The descent to Avernus is easy.

"Its said by Sibyl, in the Aeneid." Ensign Ullswater blurted out. She tried her best to grasp onto that memory of reciting ancient Earth poems at school. Try to picture it clearly, keep nightmare at bay. This was something she knew, a moment to try to be useful again. "Its a myth from Earth, it was the foundational story of one of their ancient cultures. The prophetess warns Aeneas that though its easy to travel to the underworld getting back is much more difficult."

"It makes no sense, this should be a transcript of the log. But all I get is that...word. And we heard the log, didn't we?" Vansen looked around at the others, with some confusion. "You...all heard that, right?" he checked, before he looked back at the console, to see if he could bring up another log.

Ullswater nodded "CS31 are yet to receive a subject. We're running out of them." she repeated it back. She didn't need to add context, the implication behind those words seemed obvious. This was why this place was being kept secret. She tried to turn away and collect herself from the revelation but it felt like a wave of heat was coming in from every direction she turned. There was no respite, no way out. They were going to be trapped and forgotten here, along with all the Federation's darkest secrets. Almost as if it was intentional.

As Allyndra listened she grew ever more concerned. "What do you mean we are running out of subjects? If they did not arrive there, then what and where did they go? And what has that to do with some tale from Earth? Speculation, please?"

Though clearly aggravated by the heat she was perceiving the ensign's tone was still readably bitter "Speculation is that we have stumbled across a secret Federation research project in which sentient test subjects were used. The invocation of the Aeneid is poetical, though in the time of the poem no moral judgement was placed on this underworld, it would become synonymous with the Earth concept of hell. The implication being that the aforementioned experiments were morally dubious, the researchers found themselves justifying more and more extreme measures to achieve their results. I speculate they experimented on sentient life without informed consent. I speculate that these experiments went badly wrong and we are standing in the midst of that failure."

There was a pause while Ensign Ullswater winced as she felt another wave of heat enter the room. A moment to let it all sink in before she continued with her last points of speculation. "I further speculate that the Federation does not want people to know what happened here. We've already experienced, at Latari," She invoked the name of their last mission with a fearful reverence "how the Federation tries to hide its scientific mistakes. Thusly, with all these previous points borne in mind, I speculate that we will not make it off this station alive." She spread her arms as if apologetic "I think its all over for us."

"I don't believe that for a second," Blake said firmly, almost sharply, but through emphasis of her depth of feeling. "If there's a way in, then there's a way out," she added, as if it were as simple as that. She didn't believe in the intangible. Only what she could see, feel...in this case, shoot. Unknowns were just facts that were yet to be established or experienced. And until they were, giving up wasn't an option.

Vansen frowned as he brought up another log, or at least it was marked as a log, this time another man's voice, excited almost. "...so I have volunteered. A simple reconfigure test, which I approve of, but I'm unsure why they need me for it. Anyway, it's good that Mulder and Quil finally notice me. That is something anyway..." there was the sound of interference, followed by an inhuman scream and Vansen gritted his teeth against how it felt. Like it dug itself into his soul.

"See?" Ullswater snapped back, as if this piece of evidence that confirmed some of her speculation vindicated her whole viewpoint "How can you look at this situation with any hope? There are no ways out, just more death and more horrible secrets. What makes you think we could find a way out if they could not? Its like the transcript says: the thing about the descent to Avernus is that the way in is easy but very few ever find a way out." She sounded almost annoyed that the rest of the team weren't accepting the fate she had prescribed for them. The pained look on her face hid nothing of the hopelessness she was feeling "You're so wrong. You're so wrong I don't even know what to say. There's no way out."

Vansen looked at her, frowning before he looked back at the console. "We breathe," he said, after a moment. "While we breathe, there is always another way. And if that way leads to death, then at least we have gone out while trying to find a way out.." he said before he searched through the logs. And then stopped. Staring at it. "Gods below, Prophets and all..." he shook his head, eyes narrowing. "Transwarp beaming. I...I got..." he opened the file, staring at what looked like just a line of text. And underneath it....

Just a body on a slab, eyes missing.

To Be Continued...

[OFF]

--

CWO3 Lamar Darius
Conn Officer
USS Galileo-A
[PNPC Saalm]

CMDR Scarlet Blake
First Officer
USS Galileo-A

CMDR Allyndra illm Warraquim
Chief Medical Officer
USS Galileo-A

ENS Sofie Ullswater
Deputy Science Officer
USS Galileo-A

ENS Amanda Turell
Security Officer
USS Galileo-A
[PNPC Mimi]

PO2 Donald Andrews
Engineering Officer
USS Galileo-A
[PNPC Mimi]

PO3 Constantin Vansen
Operations Officer
USS Galileo-A
[PNPC Rice]

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