Episode 64 Artifacts
by
Jay P Hailey
"I have good news and bad news." Kamaline said to me.
"Go ahead." I said. With a set up like that, who could resist?
"The good news is this - it's completely powered down. Utterly inert." Kamaline said.
I nodded, now the punchline.
"It's Rishan."
As she said it, the yellow alert klaxon went off.
I squeezed the bridge of my nose. "Wonderful."
Lucas McCoy's voice sounded over the All call. "Yellow alert. Damage to Cargo bay 12-23-B. Lock down for a hull breach."
Kamaline was already up and moving.
"Get that thing off the Discovery!" I yelled as I followed.
-*-
Working our way down to the Cargo bay wasn't easy. Force fields were in place in the corridors and hatchways.
As we got there, the klaxon sounded a different, bone chilling tone. McCoy gave us the details. "Hull breach in cargo bay 12-23-B. Internal bulkheads holding."
We got to the doorway. Mishimi Miatsu was there with an Engineering crew, reinforcing the door.
"Get me a view in there, please."
Kamaline turned to the wall, activated the panel there, and called up a science station repeater. Her fingers moved blazingly fast.
On another panel they had a engineering schematic. I could see red lights indicating damage to the door controls and the door seals of out the outside hatch of the Cargo Bay. The Cargo bay could open to space to allow large cargoes to be loaded and unloaded.
I turned back to Kamaline's science panel.
There was a picture from an internal camera. I could see the thing we'd picked up. It was a sphere with odd details on the surface, made of some golden colored alloy.
It was cracked open along a vertical axis and what looked for all the world like fiber optic cables were strung out all over the place.
As I watched, they moved. A large multiscanner with an integral analysis computer was being rendered into chunks and eaten by the alien device.
Several of the ... fiber optic tentacles were sunk into the systems access hatchway next to the external hatch. It looked broken, and like the tentacles looted it before hooking in. They were glowing the same color as the ships power transfer plasma in the conduit.
That monster was hooked into the Discovery's power grid.
"Mister Miatsu, please cut all power to the cargo bay." I said. "Lucas, take external control of a shuttlepod and launch it. We'll use it to extract this thing from the Discovery."
"Aye, Sir." McCoy replied.
The screen went dark as power was cut to the camera inside.
I entered my over ride code and told the computer to blow the external hatch of the cargo bay off.
With a solid sounding thunk the door blew away.
Kamaline scanned the area of the cargo bay, I recognized the multicolored swirls and graphs as information about the Cargo bay.
Kamaline switched to a display mode that simulated what the sensors were showing. They showed the Rishan device wedged about halfway out the hatchway, stuck in a corner and by it's tentacles.
It kept moving and eating more of the equipment Kamaline was using to probe it. I noticed a burn mark on the side seemed to be healing over.
"What's this?" I pointed to the area.
Kamaline was grim "Damage to the object. It had some sort of high speed micro-meteor impact. It was dead. Utterly dead."
"I am really getting to hate the Rishans." I said. "New rule, Lieutenant: No Rishan artifacts on the ship. If you find that an object is of Rishan origin, refer to the first rule."
She nodded fiercely. "Aye, Sir."
"Kamaline." I said. She looked at me. "I am not blaming you. You're fine. I am blaming the Rishans."
She smiled at me
"How did the power cut off go, Mishmi?" I asked.
"The power is cut off, Captain. Unfortunately the alien device drew much energy before its source was interrupted." Mishimi said.
I settled in for the hardest part. Waiting for the shuttle.
The shuttle pod arrived, with an external tractor beam mounted on the nose.
"Lucas, tractor beam that thing and get it off the ship." I said.
"Yes, Sir." Lucas sounded confident.
We watched a broadcast view from the shuttlepod itself. It maneuvered in close, activated the tractor beam and backed away
The Alien device was pulled taut and stay there. I could see many tentacles give and damage to some of the access ports it was hooked into.
"Go ahead and overload the shuttlepod, Lucas. Better that than the Discovery." I said.
We saw the over ride codes codes go into the shuttlepod and then we saw it run its little engines into the red heaving on the Rishan artifact.
Eventually the pieces of the Discovery that the Rishan Artifact was hooked to broke and the artifact flew out of the cargo bay.
The artifact quickly smacked the Shuttle pod and started to wrap its tentacles around that.
The Shuttlepod's repeater screen lit up with red lights. "Oh hell," I said.
"It's eating the shuttle pod."
"Lucas, put the shields and weapons on hot stand by and watch that thing like a hawk." I said. I became aware that Miatsu and his engineering crew were watching over our shoulders.
"This is Mendez, Captain. Weapons and shields to hot stand by."
"Very good. Prepare to get us the hell out of here." I said.
As we watched the Shuttle was breached and spilled its atmosphere out into space. The tentacles seemed to just eat away the material.
Kamaline was scanning it. "It's drawing energy from the shuttlepod, now."
The shuttlepod turned and began moving away. We lost its signal.
"God job, Lucas" I said.
"I've lost control of the shuttlepod, Captain. The main computer was compromised." Lucas said.
"Acknowledged." I called up the view from the external scanners and focused on the shuttlepod and artifact
The Rishan artifact quickly dismembered the shuttlepod and consumed the pieces.
"It's repairing itself." Kamaline said.
Mishmi Miatsu looked over her shoulder. "Indeed. It has even scavenged some of the hull to patch the breach Lt. Darvon Ahk alluded to."
The artifact started broadcasting a telemetry signal. It was was gobbledygook to us, but was on the same frequency the shuttlepod's main communications suite used as a default.
The all at once it streaked off. It used most of the power it drew from the shuttle to get going.
It was heading for the g3 type star we were orbiting.
"Shall we follow it, Captain?" Mendez asked.
"No. No, no, no." I said. "We may still be far too close to what ever it think it's doing.
The inner system of that star was nothing worth talking about. Two nearly type M planets but nothing people could live on without respirators and pressure domes.
The artifact was heading for a reducing atmosphere monster. The second planet in the system was about 1.3 times Earth's mass and had an atmosphere like Venus, Super dense corrosive and super hot.
"How secure is this cargo bay?" I asked.
Miastsu looked grim. "I would prefer to have time to examine it closely. However I believe it would stay intact long enough for us to flee."
"Good." I nodded sharply "Good work people." I turned to Miatsu and Kamaline. "Let's go to the bridge."
-*-
We came out onto the bridge as the artifact impacted the planet. Our cargo bay doors and the half eaten shuttlepod drifted along with us.
There was a bright flash. The screen almost instantly darkened to account for it. I was left with spots in front of my eyes.
"Stephanie, report."
"It has detonated, but with far, far more energy than we were reading." Stephanie reported. "The planet has been vaporized."
"Captain," Kamaline reported "I am reading an energy pattern in the explosion. It almost looks like a transporter pattern."
I felt a shiver run up and down my spine. "What?"
"The explosion is doing something."
"Oh, my god."
-*-
We orbited the Earth. It was an exact replica, down to microscopic detail. At least, in so far as we knew of the Earth in 4000 BCE.
There were a few cities, in the middle east. Made of stones.
There were humans every where on the world, all consistent with what we knew of the archeology of 4000 BCE
Examining the planet gave us time to check the Discovery. Cargo bay 12-23-B was severely damaged, but there didn't seem to be anything left by the device. Miatsu and his crew had to weld the Cargo bay doors back in place. It would take a refit to return the cargo bay to factory specs.
We recovered the remains the shuttlepod, and after making sure it held no unpleasant surprises, we recycled it.
They had a moon. It looked almost exactly like ours. Except it was missing a few craters.
-*-
"The energy wave we saw was similar in may ways to something called the Genesis wave." Kamaline said.
"Genesis?" I'd heard the name somewhere before.
"In 2285, Federation Scientists created the Genesis device, which used massive energy and a pre-made replicator matrix to reorder the matter on a world."
"Wow." I said. "So one bomb, one terraformed planet?"
Kamaline nodded. "Exactly. But the Federation model used proto-matter in the matrix which rendered the results unstable. A world created with the Prototype Genesis Device came apart within months."
"And this world?"
Kamaline shrugged. "There was no protomatter in the Rishan device."
I looked at the displays. "How exact a replica is it?"
"The fidelity of the image used is incredible." Kamaline said "I don't think anyone programmed this. It's too detailed. I think we're looking at a scanned image somehow replicated."
I looked up Mendez, Lucas, Stephanie, Mishimi and I all looked disturbed.
Spaat spoke up. "It explains certain anomalies in the Galaxy."
"Miri's World," I said "Magna Roma. Omega."
"Earth." Stephanie said.
I rubbed my face.
"Captain." Marcella Burlington said, "Even if our home started from an image like this, what is the difference between those worlds and Earth?"
"Nothing." I said. "Nothing at all."
"Untrue." Marcella said.
T'Sing added "You represent the results of thousands of years of interbreeding and migration of people across the Earth. Genetically these people may resemble your ancestors, but they are not you."
Marcella nodded "Well, yes, but that wasn't what I had in mind. Captain, Earth is what we have made of it. It is what we wanted it to be. Something those other planets didn't get to do. We have remade the image to suit us."
I looked at her dubiously.
"We're here now," Mendez said, "We shouldn't waste the opportunity."
I nodded. "We proceed as if this world is a fresh, new one. We'll let the folks back on Earth argue about what it means."
-*-
I was tanned and a bit slimmer than when we started.
We claimed an Island named Cedros off the coast of Baja California. It had no permanent residents, but we had to rig up some interesting holograms to frighten away native fishermen, who were way too enterprising with rickety little boats.
I got some surfing in. Which is to say, I splashed around in the water a lot in the vicinity of a surfboard.
The ocean felt right. It smelled and tasted different. I was tempted to say "Fresher."
We beamed probes and bugs into locations worlds wide. We got languages, art works, scans of villages, towns and even a few cities.
We scanned life forms and ecological systems in a pristine condition all over from the deepest oceans to the polar ice caps.
We'd add more to a raging argument. The humans of Miri's world managed to crash their civilization about halfway through their 20th century.
This meant that the ecological destruction of the 21st century never happened there.
There were bitter arguments over whether the life forms of Miria's world were acceptable substitutes for transplantation to Earth to try and recover some of that damage.
Some people said "Close enough is close enough." while others insisted that the life forms of Miri's world could not be considered interchangeable with those on Earth.
Our Earth, anyway.
On our island of Cedros we got to relax.
We stayed at the new Earth for almost six months.
The stars in the night sky were different. Even the planets were different. I wonder what effect that might have on the future for these people.
There was no hint of the force that created the place. There was no hint of instability about it.
It was a beautiful place to vacation.
But eventually, it came time to push on for home.
-*-
I sat down across from Kamaline, placing my tray with juice and a sandwich carefully on the table.
She was tan. I swear she was still dribbling sand from the beach.
"How are you doing?" I asked.
She waved a PADD. "Still organizing our scans of... What should we call it?"
I smiled "Ussher's World."
"I beg your pardon?"
"James Ussher was a Clergyman in the 17th century. Using the Bible he calculated that the Earth was created at 9am , on the 23rd of October, 4004 BC." I explained.
Kamaline looked dubious. "Uh huh."
"Although largely discredited due to geological evidence, It turned out that he was closer to being right than we had any right to expect." I explained.
"Captain, How do we know anything about Geology?" Kamaline asked.
"I don't follow you." I said.
"Geology has been developed independently on several different worlds." Kamaline said. "We know what geological development looks like,"
I nodded.
"Captain, We have geologists on board. I'm not too bad at it myself for an amateur." Kamaline explained "The geology of Earth and the Geology of ... Well, Ussher's World is real. It is in no way fake. All the rocks read the right ages."
I blinked.
"I maintain. Who ever made that device and that world, they didn't make that up. They took a scan." Kamaline said. "They used a scan of a real world as their model."
"So Earth...." I began.
"Maybe, or maybe not." Kamaline said. "But somewhere out there-"
"There's the original that snap shot was taken from." I finished. "How in the word will we know it if we see it?"
"Good question." Kamaline said.
-End-