Deviation Actions
Literature Text
SAPIENTS
Planet HB22147-C, Gaza Strip
Stardate 2260.365
- 1445 hours -
If the culture on this planet was as similar to Real Earth as Sulu thought it was, this building must have been an old mosque at one point. The signs were too badly distorted for the tricorder to translate them all, but he'd been to enough old Mosques - and asked enough questions - to recognize them as old Jihadist propaganda slogans, something to the effect of "Death to the Infidels" or "God Destroy the Zionists" and so on and so forth. Another two hundred years of cultural evolution would have sharpened that unfocussed militarism into the Al Rafah fighting style, even now the most potent incarnation of Earth martial arts; this Earth, however, had been frozen in time before social evolution could transform the political tantrum of Jihadism into the more constructive philosophies that had become so indispensable to Starfleet trainees.
In that way, Sulu realized, this entire place was like old news footage of the Bell Riots: depressing to look at, but foreshadowing of better days ahead.
"Why here?" asked Lieutenant Kruzman, looking up from his tricorder screen with a slight wince, "The place was probably stripped down by looters."
Sulu shook his head, admiring the architecture. For some reason, something about the Mosque reminded him of the bridge module of a starship. It was intentional, of course, the intent by the architects to visually convey a structure of extreme significance to anyone who saw it. "Before the Enlightenment, these Mosques used to be the center of the Muslim social life. They doubled as community centers, meeting halls, lecture halls, they hosted militants, political rallies, some were even used as bomb shelters. I'd take a guess this is probably the first place the survivors would have gone during some kind of major cataclysm."
Kruzman conceded the possibility and turned her attention back to her tricorder. "Lots of material in there, but I can't tell what. And th-" she squinted at the screen and lifted the tricorder up a little higher.
"What's wrong?" Sulu glanced back at him.
"Funny. I thought for a second there was a life form reading. It's gone now. Must have been a shadow or something."
Sulu nodded and started up the low stairway to the naked main entrance to the structure. "Let's check it out."
"We have to meet up with Doctor Marcus in an hour."
"It shouldn't take long, these places aren't built with alot of nooks and crannies."
Kruzman followed, and the three security officers made pace behind him, waving their phaser rifles through the air and letting the targeting sensors see for them. The sun was already above the horizon, but this early in the morning the shadows from the ruins created dark spots in the most inconvenient places.
Sulu stepped in first and swept the place with his rifle's sensor incase something had been waiting for them. Nothing was, and now that he paid attention to his eyes instead of the targeting scope he saw them at the same time as the slack jawed Kruzman, "My God! Do you know what these are?!"
He understood her surprise, but not the nature of the question. "They're just tents."
"They're not just tents!" Kruzman stumbled towards them with his tricorder as if the room was full of buried treasure.
"They're not?" he looked at them for a moment, sized them up for any special significance. They were all extremely makeshift tents, come to think of it, apparently built out of some kind of animal skins suspended from ropes dangling from the ceilings. Altogether they amounted to structures that would never hold up to any wind or rain by themselves, in fact they served no real purpose except to conceal their occupants and trap heat. "They look like tents." Sulu gave up.
"They're suspension tents."
"Okay..."
"No indigenous population on Earth ever used suspension tents!"
"I can see why. They seem pretty flimsy."
Kruzman looked at him annoyed and then poured himself into detailed analysis. "Suspension tents are mainly used by castaways, campers... People who wouldn't normally use a tent. In urban areas, they're typically found only in post-cataclysmic societies, particularly societies where small numbers of survivors are trying to utilize existing structures. Sometimes they fall into a foraging pattern like hunter-gatherers and build semi-permanent dwellings in any structures that will support them, but nothing complicated enough that they can't leave behind or tear down in an hour."
Sulu nodded slowly, "So there were survivors here."
"There were." Kruzman smiled at the tricorder screen, "Just as I thought. They were here pretty recently."
"If the cataclysm happened two hundred years ago, then these tents could be decades old..."
"Try hours." Kruzman leaned into one of the suspension tents and pulled out a long strip of something dark and leathery, approximately shaped like a large rodent but too distorted to identify the species. "It's a rabbit."
"I'll take your word for it."
"It's been cooked." he held it up to his nose and took a small, dainty sniff. Since that didn't yield anything useful, he took a careful bite, chewed, and then nodded in appreciation, "Smoked hare. Still warm. Got an aftertaste too..." he took another bite and chewed thoughtfully, "It's not bad. You want some?"
"Knock yourself out, I already had breakfast." Sulu flipped open his communicator and keyed it to Alpha Team's frequency, waited a few seconds for someone there to answer the call signal and then reported, "Charlie Team to Command."
"Spock here."
"Mister Spock, we've got a lead on a group of sapient life forms moving somewhere in the strip. We've found an encampment in an old Mosque that's been used pretty recently. Wherever they went, I think we just missed them."
"Acknowledged, Charlie Team. Maintain your position and complete forensic analysis of the site..." Some two kilometers away, Commander Spock was in mid stride on his way up the steps of Shuttlecraft Fifteen where Doctor Marcus was waiting for him. He was met halfway by Ensign Riley and Ensign Torens, the latter handing him a palmcomp with a set of tricorder readings and genetic sampling data. Spock regarded the computer with satisfaction, then as a slight sting collided with his nostrils he regarded Riley with extreme dissatisfaction. "Is your base camp not equipped with a shower, Ensign Riley?"
The Ensign rolled his eyes before he remembered that Commander Spock wasn't in the habit of teasing people, then snapped to attention and said "Um... er... yes it is, Sir, but I..."
"Charlie Team," Spock raised his communicator again, "Recommend you begin a search of the immediate area and report your findings. I am diverting Foxtrot, Lima and Kilo teams to your location to assist you."
"We'll meet them here and fan out in a search pattern. Something tells me our friends might be returning to this spot pretty soon."
"At your discretion, Ensign. Spock out." he snapped the communicator closed and then turned his attention back to Riley, noting his torn uniform pants and a fading but persistent urine stain on the visible part of his boxers. "Please explain your dishevelment, Ensign."
Torens grinned slightly, "It's not his fault, Commander. Riley here literally snagged that Reaver by the seat of his pants. The transporter room hasn't sent us a replacement yet."
Spock shot the Ensign a stare so chilling that all possible humor in this situation died in his throat. "A novel use for fabric, Ensign, although I fail to understand why your field equipment was not sufficient for the task."
"It's... um... a long story."
"Then I shall expect a long report." Spock took one step to sweep past them, stopping just long enough to say, "After you have obtained a fresh uniform and a shower."
Torens and Riley both sighed and sculked off towards their waiting shuttle on the other side of the camp. "I think he hates me," Riley said, despondent.
Torens laughed and swatted him on the back, "Of course he does, Riley. Everyone hates you!"
"Thanks alot..."
"C'mon, champ, I'll loan you my spare until Enterprise beams down a fresh uniform for you."
At the shuttlecraft, Spock bounded up the ladder into the passenger compartment where Ensign Rand and one very frustrated Doctor Marcus were waiting for him, specimen containers piled up to the ceiling. Quantum dating was tricky business even with the best equipment, and from the look of things Doctor Marcus had nearly exhausted herself trying to get a good sample. "Doctor-"
"Don't even start. I'm sure the first sample was fine, we'll have to make due with that."
Spock raised a brow. "Explain, Doctor."
Marcus sighed, "For some reason, I can't get a good reading on subsequent samples. The first test - the one from the community center - turned back three hundred and ten years. The second test turned back three hundred and forty, so I took another one and it turned back forty five. And then things just got craz-"
"I assume you used three standard methods of analysis, Doctor. In-situ measurements, remote measurements, and lab-control sampling, in that order."
"Well, yes..."
"And in those three examples, I believe your situational measurements showed a discrepancy towards extreme age where isolated materials in a laboratory setting demonstrated extreme youth."
Marcus and Rand traded glances, confirming the question.
"Fascinating."
"What does it mean?"
"I don't have time to explain how, Doctor, but I suspect this planet is in a state of chronological flux. Parts of it are aging more rapidly than others."
- 1501 hours -
Ensign Ayala kept her attention focussed on the tricorder screen and nowhere else, because if she looked up right now she wasn't really sure what direct eye contact would do to Lieutenant Onise's libido. If he was paying more attention he would have noticed that the Orion communications specialist had spent the last half a minute scanning him instead of the surrounding area and therefore had an extremely good idea of his current physiological condition. Elevated heart rate, genital blood constriction, pupil dilation and respiration rate all pointed to a pattern that Onise was concentrating very hard on something other than making the rendezvous with Charlie Team. "Another eight hundred meters west, Lieutenant," she reminded him, pretending to be unaware of the Onise's growing erection.
"Yeah..." Onise was in dreamland already. She could have announced the arrival of a Klingon warbird for all the attention he was paying. And just her luck, those two civilian archeologists had wandered off again to take holophotos of some landmark somewhere.
"Is there a problem, Sir?" she asked, trying her best to sound hostile.
It didn't work, but at least Onise realized she was actually talking to him. "Hm?"
"You seem preoccupied, Sir."
"Oh..." Onise smiled as if she was a green-skinned beauty queen trying to conduct a publicity interview. "I was just thinking about something Lieutenant Olson told me before we left p-"
"It's a myth, Sir."
Onise raised a brow, "What's a myth?"
Ayala rolled her eyes. Human males were so damned predictable. "That old story," she said, exasperated, "that Orion women enjoy being raped. Not only is this untrue, it is very untrue."
"Oh... um..." Onise shank a few inches into his boots. "A-Are you sure?"
"As is the myth," Ayala went on as if she hadn't heard him, "that Orion women are half-feral nymphomaniacs who generate irresistible pheromones that drive humanoid men wild with passion."
"Uh..."
"That is a myth propagated by female con artists who use neurotoxins to burglarize male victims. Of course, they spread that myth with no regard at all for innocent women and girls who don't want to spend the rest of their pathetic existence toiling in a life of crime!"
"I ju-"
"Incidentally, that myth is also propagated by slave traders, cretins and Ferengi as a convenient excuse for raping Orion women. And ever since your idiot race got involved in the galactic economy, it's been a favorite campfire story of gutter-minded freighter captains who have spent too much time being henpecked by their self-conscious, unappreciated wives."
"Yeah... um..." Onise shrank even more, feeling a little like he just accidentally insulted her mother. In fact, for all he knew, he might have. "Look, I was just curious, okay? Olsen said he heard the story from an Orion merchant."
Ayala rolled her eyes. "Of course he did. No doubt a male Orion merchant trying to make a little money under the table."
"Well if it's such a false myth, why do your people still spread it around?"
"Because, Lieutenant, I come from this primordial, fatuous, dungheap of a culture dominated by a cult of patriarchal chowderheads who made fortunes, for nearly two centuries, by selling their own daughters into sexual slavery!" Ayala spat in the dust and stomped it with her boot, a cosmic spite to the entire Orion race.
"Oh..."
"And because interstellar law being what it is, this," she pointed to the Starfleet emblem on the front of her uniform, "is the only thing that stands between me and fifty parsecs of horny capitalists who wouldn't know morality if it walked up to them and bit off their legs!"
"Huh." Onise sighed and leaned against the wall, muttering to himself, "Figures I'd get the one feminist in the entire Orion species."
Ayala suddenly pulled up the phaser rifle from the shoulder sling and pretended to look at its status indicator with alarm. She did, of course, let the guide beam paint a target on Onise's torso without really looking at it. "Hm... sir, something's wrong with my phaser. I think it might discharge by itself."
"That's not fu-"
True to her warning, the phaser did discharge - though not exactly "by itself" - in a short burst that hit Onise right between his legs. To her surprise and mild amusement, his shield belt hadn't been active; the Lieutenant screamed in high pitched agony then keeled over on his face and shoulders as paralysis spread out from his public area throughout the rest of his nervous system.
Doctor Bates and Doctor Adel appeared a moment later, drawn by the noise, and seeing Onise crumpled up in the dust stared at the Ensign bewildered. "Phaser malfunction," she said casually, "He's stunned. We'll have to carry him with us."
"Right, well," the two of them rolled him over on his back, Bates picked up his ankles while Adel grabbed his shoulders. It would slow them down a bit, but their main goal at this point was meet up with Sulu's team a few blocks away, so it wouldn't be too much of an obstacle in any case. "Can you carry some of this other sutff?" Adel said, using Onise to lead his partner back the way they came.
"What stuff? Did you find something?"
"Russel found it. He wanted to get the Lieutenant's opinion."
Ayala nodded and followed their lead. It wasn't far, just a few dozen meters away where the two of them had been posing for photographs for the team scrapbook. There was a storefront there with a sign over the door, what her tricorder translated as Ali Bukari - Internet Cafe. This was more puzzling than almost anything else she'd seen in this city over the last two days. "Internet Cafe... some kind of alien coffee shop?"
"'Internet' was a precursor to the Global Optical Data Network," said Ensign Russel, leaning out of the doorway, "It wasn't very fast, but I guess it was good enough for the kinds of computers they had back them. And of course, unlike Godnet, it wasn't free."
This just raised even more questions. "So... What's an Internet Cafe? Were the fabricators networked too? Or is 'Internet' also the name of a coffee drink?"
Russel shrugged, bobbling an enormous specimen container slung on his shoulder, "Hell if I know. But I noticed they've got alot of computers in that building, and I figured if we pulled their memory banks we might get some useful data."
"Oh!" Ayala looked and saw the specimen containers were indeed packed with archaic looking electronic components. Appropriately enough, they looked like larger and less elegant versions of a Starfleet memory card, and Russel looked like he had pulled more than a dozen of them. "You know what, in that case," she snapped open her communicator and keyed it to Enterprise' frequency. "Kilo Team to Enterprise. Enterprise, how do you read?"
"Enterprise here."
"This is Ensign Ayala. We've recovered some computer records from a... I guess a computerized coffee shop in town, a good amount of material to go through. I worry about carrying it to the rendezvous with Charlie Team, and Lieutenant Onise has been injured by a phaser malfunction."
"Acknowledged, Kilo Team... um... you're traveling with two civilians... have Doctor Bates accompany the Lieutenant and the equipment. We'll do a transport relay to base camp."
Ayala nodded at Bates, who was close enough to hear for himself and was already helping to set Onise down in the doorway. Russel handed over the specimen containers, and Bates sagged from the weight of it. "They're ready now. Lock onto Onise's communicator signal."
"Locked on. Standby..."
Some twenty seconds later, both Onise and Bates along with the specimen container were engulfed in a swirling funnel of sparkling lights, and then both vanished, whisked into orbit by Enterprise's transporter beam where they would be briefly re-materialized in the transporter room, checked for any ill-effects, and then beamed back to the planet close to Alpha Team's base camp.
Once transport was complete, Ayala's communicator beeped again, indicating a coded channel from Enterprise. Ayala picked up the message and casually put some distance between herself and the others as Uhura's voice hissed, "Malfunction, Ayala?"
"It misfired."
"Phasers don't misfire."
"This one did."
"I can't believe you'd be that stupid! Your record is shaky enough as is it is with all those fights!"
"C'mon, Nyota, they can't prove it was intentional."
"You better hope not. Gaila isn't here to cover for you anymore. If you loose your commission over thi-"
"Hold it..." Ayala turned her ear to the wind, trying to recapture the sound that had caught her attention a second ago. It was familiar in a way that wasn't at all pleasant, similar but extremely different from some of the sounds her team had heard from a distance on the first day. At the moment, the sounds were anything but distant, and they were getting closer. "Uhura," she snapped open her tricorder and started to scan for cordite traces, "We're hearing small arms fire in the area. Do you have anything on sensors?"
"We're out of position now, but I'll route your channel to the nearest shuttle. And seriously, Ayala, you've got to watch that temper."
The signal crackled for a few seconds, then the call signal beeped a response. "Kilo Team to shuttlecraft."
"Fourteen here," answered the most sublimely logical voice in the universe that could only belong to Commander Spock himself.
Ayala smiled at her luck, and meanwhile zeroed in on the source of those cordite traces on the tricorder, "Commander, we're picking up small arms fire close to our position. Bearing..." the chemical signatures were too far away to localize, but she could at least get a general direction, "... zero seven three, about five hundred meters."
"I have visual, Ensign... Fascinating!"
"What do you see?"
"A small group of armed humanoids being pursued by a very large group of Reavers."
"Armed humanoids?" Russel leaned out of the doorway of the internet cafe, "Carrying firearms?"
Ayala nodded. "Must be the sapients we've been looking for... how should we proceed, Commander?"
"The sapients appear to be moving in the direction of their Mosque encampment. Your team will connect with Charlie and Lima teams to provide safe haven for them at that location."
Russel asked over her shoulder, "Why not use the shuttle's phasers to cover their escape, Sir?"
"There is no guarantee the sapients will show our landing parties any less hostility than they show the Reavers. We may facilitate contact by placing ourselves personally between them and their pursuers. Hopefully, they will interpret this as a gesture of solidarity."
"Hopefully..." Ayala tuned back to Enterprise' frequency, and after a few seconds locked back into Uhura's bridge channel, "Kilo Team to Enterprise. Three to beam up."
