Just borrowing Star Trek characters for a little while. Will put them back in place as soon as I'm done.
"Incoming communication from Starfleet, Captain… for you." Archer couldn't help the sense of excitement that ran through him at the announcement. Finally something to relieve the boredom of mapping out a space quadrant with very few planets and very rudimentary Vulcan space maps. Archer's guess was that the Vulcans had found the whole endeavor to be stupefyingly dull and decamped as quickly as they could for better horizons. If the Vulcans found it dull, this particular human could be excused to find it unbearably, mind-numbingly, boring. He got up, glad for the opportunity to stretch his legs "Patch it to my ready room. T'Pol, you have the con." The Vulcan didn't even bother to look up from the science scanner she was staring into. Archer agreed silently. Their journey so far had been so uneventful that even a command responsibility was not worth changing stations.
Admiral Gardner's face materialized on the screen. "Admiral"
"Captain Archer," Gardner nodded back a greeting, then went straight to the point "we have received a communique from Vulcan asking for Starfleet's help." Archer made a face and Gardner frowned at him, but didn't comment. He leaned into the videocom "Apparently, there is a Vulcan colony on Tau Ceti Sector V, not far from your quadrant of space. The Vulcan High Council just received a distress call from the colony that they are under attack. The nearest Vulcan starship is two months away, but Enterprise can be there much sooner than that. They have asked for you to divert to the planet and help in any way you can." Gardner paused "Here's the catch, Captain. The message from the colony got caught in the gravitational pull of a newly developing black hole, which slowed its transmission. Appreciably." He stared intently at Archer "The distress call was sent over five years ago." Gardner pushed off from the videocom, fingers crossed in front of him on the desk. "There is no telling what you will find on the planet, so this may end up being nothing more than a post-mortem survey. I am attaching the communication from the colonists. Good luck, Jonathan." With that, he signed off.
xx
The attention of all personnel on the bridge was riveted on the main screen, where a Vulcan male talked straight into the camera, the only indication of emotional stress his clipped enunciation, coming across even through the universal translator. "This is Leader S'erhik of Colony Na'gseihr of Planet Minshara 405 of Tau Ceti Sector V. We are under attack. I repeat, we are under attack." The screen shook as the sound of bombs hitting close-by could be heard. "We do not know the identity of our assailants but the pattern of attack indicates their intent is to eradicate the outpost. If you receive this communication, please forward it in its integrity to Vulcan. Let it be known that the feathers of the sunbird shine green when the sun rises. I repeat, the feathers of the sunbird shine green when the sun rises." The man looked up from the camera as a Vulcan woman approached behind him, lurching to keep her balance as the bombardment intensified. The man turned to her and she splayed her fingers on the side of his face. He returned the gesture. There was no mistaking the picture of a loving couple saying good-bye. A flash of indescribable brilliance bathed the screen and the transmission went dark. Hoshi swallowed hard, conscious that Travis next to her was fixedly looking down at his station. Nobody spoke for several long seconds.
Archer turned to T'Pol "Any idea what that last part meant?" She didn't reply, her unfocused stare the only sign that she was processing through everything she knew for an answer. Then she blinked and looked at Archer "The children" she said hesitantly.
"The children…?"
"The children are still alive." T'Pol's tone was now definite. All activity on the bridge stopped. Everyone was looking at her. T'Pol went on "The feathers of the sunbird is the title of an ancient Vulcan poem from pre-Surak times, about a couple who is promised by the deities that they will have more children than a sunbird has feathers. Due to atmospheric and biochemical peculiarities a sunbird's feathers cannot be seen when the sun rises, and therefore the attackers could not see the children. Green is the color of blood, which is a synonym for life."
Archer nodded. That would make sense to a Vulcan. "They put it in code in case the communication got intercepted" he hazarded.
T'Pol nodded. "Which is why the logical deduction are that the children were still alive, or they would not have needed to code the message."
"That was five years ago…" Archer let his voice trail off. There was no need to voice what everybody already know. The odds of finding the children alive were not in their favor, unless "What where the ages of the children in the colony's manifest?" He had handed T'Pol the roster of all the colonists on the planet, with the usual overabundance of detail to be expected from Vulcan authorities, a fact of which he was, at the current instant, extremely glad. The next comment from T'Pol deflated his belief in the perfection of Vulcan bureaucracy. "I would expect not all the children were on the roster. The colonists were on the planet for seventy years, there would have been children born almost every year. Vulcan records would have been updated over time, but one must expect a temporal lag before communications could reach Vulcan."
"How current is the list we have?" Archer asked.
"The last update to the list was eight years ago, three years before the attack. One would expect there had been additional births in the meantime." Archer raised an eyebrow meaningfully at T'Pol. Three year lag? It certainly seemed like the colonists were not as strict record keepers as one would expect of Vulcans. "But don't they have to register the DNA of all Vulcan children with Vulcan?" he asked, based on their experience with the bombing of the Terran embassy. "That is true of all children born on Vulcan" replied T'Pol, "but it is not always practical or feasible for Vulcan children born on other worlds or colonies to be registered at birth. The births are usually kept in local records and updates to the DNA database are made when the children return to Vulcan for their kahs-wan or at other times." Archer did not have a mental picture of the Kahs-Wan from when he shared Surak's katra, the ritual had evolved post-awakening as a way to preserve survival – and warring – skills, but he knew it was both compulsory and perilous. Fairly far removed from the 'participation-prize' activities preferred by many human parents. He absent-mindedly wondered whether there was the equivalent of Vulcan baby boomers, who were born and died offworld, and made a note to ask Travis. But first, they had duties to attend.
"T'Pol, lay out the shortest course to the planet. Travis, let's get there as fast as you can. Trip, do you think you can give us warp five for a good long while?"
"Aye, Captain" "I'll give you everything I have" simultaneously answered Archer's requests. There was no similar utterance from the science officer. It was illogical to confirm a direct order since the chain of command made it an obligation to obey.
xx
"What are we looking at?" Archer asked T'Pol. The two of them were alone in his ready room, where he had asked for a report on the children of Colony Na'gseihr. She looked at him nonplussed, then at the data padd in her hand and Archer corrected automatically "How many children can we expect to find?"
"There were fifty-three children at last count, approximately two to three years before the attack," she handed him the padd. "Since the colonists were almost all of child-bearing age, the expected birth rate would be of seven new births per year, on average. Accounting for the normal ageing out of the oldest children, there would have been an estimated fifty-eight children at the time of the attack. Even if all of them survived the attack, not all of them would have survived the severing of the parental bonds."
Archer looked at her questioningly "The severing of the parental bonds?" did Vulcans ever do anything simply?
T'Pol explained "The death rate for children under the age of one who suffer a severing of the parental bond is 92.3%. For those below the age of two, the death rate is approximately 68.2%, and for those aged two to four years old it is about 40.8%. There were nine children age two to four years old in the roster. Extrapolating for the severing of parental bonds and new births until the attack, there should be a total of forty-two children remaining on the planet."
Archer frowned "That's not very many."
"That is forty-two more than zero."
x x x
"There do not seem to be any bio-signs on the planet." T'Pol announcement resonated across the bridge. Archer tensed up as he felt the wave of disappointment ripple across the bridge. He hadn't fully realized how the slim hope they had that the children would still be alive, five years after their outpost was destroyed, had been shoring up the crew over the long past five weeks. "Due to the volcanoes there is a dampening field over the entire hemisphere," T'Pol hurried to add as the feeling of disappointment circled around the bridge back to her emotional shields. She looked up from her scanner "I am unable to ascertain whether there are any bio-signs on the planet, either people or animals." Archer could have sworn he almost heard a twinge of frustration.
The entire bridge crew stared at the planet on the screen. Planet Minshara 405 of Tau Ceti Sector 5. It seemed Vulcans were intensely pragmatic in naming their planets. Archer was pretty certain the Vulcans would never have referred to Planet Minshara 405 other than by its full name, possibly dropping the Tau Ceti Sector 5 reference on occasion, but humans abhorred spending much of their relatively short life span pronouncing complicated names, and the crew had quickly proceeded to rename the planet PM405. As it rotated slowly on the screen, Archer mentally went over all the information they had spent the past five weeks learning about PM405 and the colonists. A Minshara-class planet, with a fairly lush environment, or at least temperatures and humidity close enough to a temperate zone and able to sustain a fairly lush environment, and a half-ring of volcanoes which were a distinct geological rarity of some kind and the reason why a colony of Vulcan scientists had proceeded to settle on PM405 and learn more about the phenomenon. Colony Na'gseihr was formed seventy-five years ago. Plans had been that the colony would remain in place for 250 years, or longer if it turned out that the volcanoes phenomenon was even more interesting than thought to the planet Vulcan, itself loaded with volcanoes. Some of the scientists had gone with their entire family, the rest were mostly couples. Every ten years, a Vulcan ship left Vulcan to bring equipment and supplies, pick up returning passengers, and bring additional staff and researchers. Otherwise the colonists were on their own. The direct trip on a transport from Vulcan took eighteen to thirty months, depending on other stops along the way. The last transport had left the colony soon after the roster was updated. The youngest child on the roster would now be ten years old, the oldest twenty-seven years old, on the cusp of teenage years by Vulcan standards. The unknown was how many children there were that were not born at the time of the colony roster. And what happened to them? How could any child that young have survived at that age without any adults, and for five years? Vulcan or otherwise.
Archer shook himself back to the duty at hand. Whatever answers were to be found, they were not going to find them sitting on the bridge.
He entered the command center right on the heels of Reed for the pre-landing briefing. The other senior officers and a team of MACOs were already loosely gathered around the center console. Archer launched directly into the meeting "The Starfleet officers on the initial away team will be myself, Commander T'Pol, Commander Tucker, and Lieutenant Reed. I have asked Lieutenant Reed to cover tactical operations for the landing party. We believe that a group of children may remain on the surface, Commander T'Pol will cover that last."
Reed spoke first. "All we know at this point is that the colony was attacked, and we believe, destroyed. There have been no responses to our communications and assumptions are that the outpost was entirely destroyed. But at this point we do not know if hostiles remain on the planet or if they booby-trapped the place or whether there are any survivors. The first away team is going to be limited to eight, four officers and four MACOs. We will transport to the surface in two shuttlepods, and land approximately 1.5 miles from the settlement. Once we reach the settlement, we will fan out in teams of two, one Starfleet and one MACO. Our initial survey will be limited to securing the perimeter." Reed glanced over the assembly. "If we find that there are no remaining risks, additional teams will be transported to the surface to look for the children. Commander?"
T'Pol's voice was level as always. "Based on the latest roster from the planet, there were fifty-eight juveniles approximately two point five years before the outpost was attacked. Based on expected rates of reproduction and accounting for premature deaths by reason of the attack, there should be roughly forty-two children remaining."
"You have your orders." Archer ended the meeting, looking over the room and reading the same thought in Malcolm's and the MACOs' and on Tucker's face. How difficult could it be to locate 42 children?
xx
If it had not been for the obvious signs of destruction, the outpost would have been a haven of harmony, Reed thought, looking at the how the ruins were organized in intersecting circles around open plazas. He did not have much of an appreciation for grace and beauty unless it was a knock-me-over-the-head kind of beauty, like T'Pol's, but even his untrained eye could recognize the harmony pervading the abandoned settlement. He had a brief reminiscence of a concept long ago learned and forgotten, something about a golden ratio. He would not be surprised to find that Vulcans built everything according to some super harmonious kind of mathematical formula.
Bringing himself back to the reality of the destroyed dwellings, the scorch marks on anything still standing, and the general air of catastrophic disarray, with encroaching vegetation hard at work at reclaiming the settlement and returning it to land, he motioned for the away teams to fan out in twos as planned, each pair consisting of a MACO and an officer, each with its own reconnaissance map overlaid on the outpost blueprint.
It only took a couple of hours before the teams regrouped inside the main building, identified on the settlement plans as the main research center and still partially standing, though nothing remained of any floors over the first floor other than half-broken columnar supports. Archer had an inkling that the higher floors were where the Vulcan couple had sent the distress signal from. Communication equipment would have been elevated to minimize the geomagnetic disruption from the volcanoes. As they entered the building, the search teams reported back to Reed that there were no signs of life or attackers or any of the 550 plus colonists that had last been listed on the roster. Archer's breath caught in his throat. This was the second colony he had seen entirely destroyed, and as far as he was concerned that was two too many. The fact that he did not have to deal with the possibility that he had destroyed the colony through his own actions, as for Paraagan II, was small consolation. He did not want to have to go again through page after page of faces and biographies of interesting people that he could have easily related to if they had met on a space station somewhere in the area, just so he could prepare a memorial. All the potential wasted, the brilliance that would never be. Believing that the children were still alive had been his guiding hope and he had refused to read anything about them in the roster, he would have plenty of time to learn about them when he met them. Especially now that half or more of them were adults, at least in human years.
Reed walked over to Archer, who shook his head to forestall hearing what he already knew. The colony was destroyed, the sensors were not working, and there were no traces of either the colonists or their children. "Let's check the science center out. Trip, T'Pol, see if anything is left upstairs." Archer and Reed led the way, carefully stepping over fallen steel beams into a very dusty hallway. Archer motioned with his phase pistol and two of the MACOs fell in step behind Reed and him, two more followed Trip and T'Pol. They soon came to a couple of large stone doors, one broken, the other half-hanging from its brackets. The top beam was on the floor behind them. Reed stepped over, closely followed by Archer. The room was a scientific command center of some kind, full of highly specialized, though broken and dusty, equipment. Reed saw something on the floor, bent to scan it. "Blood." He looked up at Archer. "Vulcan." Reed had a vague sense of déjà vu, frowned until recognition hit him. The Selaya. That was almost the same thing he had said when he first noticed blood on one of the bulkheads of the Selaya. Reed made a fervent plea that this would not end up the same way, nervously looking over his shoulder in case Vulcan zombies started jumping out of the woodworks.
They retraced their steps, as there were no other places left on that side of the building. Trip, T'Pol and the other MACOs were just coming down the stairs as they walked by. Trip shook his head. "Nothing to see upstairs. The roof was blown open and everything there is either ruined or destroyed."
"No signs of life?" Archer asked.
"No signs of life, no bodies, nothing."
Archer turned to T'Pol "Anything else we could try doing? Perhaps there are special features of Vulcan buildings, a little like tornado cellars in some states, or air raid shelters. Anything that would have protected people from an attack. Or signs that they left and relocated somewhere else, a message encoded in the remaining ruins…"
She raised an eyebrow at him. "It may be worthwhile to go over the settlement again. Any shelters would have been created underground. I would advise everyone to look down at their feet for any signs of unevenness in the ground, or differences in the color of the substrate. "
Trip spoke up "if they did build shelters, here or somewhere else, plans and materials would be in the colony's database. If we could transport a power cell down, I could try and bring the computers online, see if there is anything we can restore."
Archer nodded. "Good idea, Trip. Get a couple of guys from Engineering to come down help you. The MACOs will help clear out a path to the computer room." He turned to the rest of the away team. "Since there are no life forms around, let's spread out and cover more ground. Using the science center as the center, I'll cover the northeast quadrant. T'Pol, you cover northwest. Reed, take the southwest, and McKenzie southeast. Meet up at the command center in two hours at the latest, by 1615."
xx
T'Pol took a step between the buildings, eyes down, looking for any sign of additional construction or irregularity in the ground cover, scanner at the ready on the outside chance there would be irregularities in the dampening field and she could actually scan something else than white noise. Suddenly her scanner came to life. She stopped in her tracks, looking at the readings. She sensed a movement just out her peripheral vision, looked up, but there was nothing to be seen. Focusing on the scanner, she started towards where the movement seemed to have been. There was nothing there, other than the ruins of houses empty of occupants, doors and roofs open to the skies in silent screams of anguish, and the rapidly encroaching tropical vegetation. Again she caught a movement from the corner of her eye. Her scanner flashed that yes, there was something there. Possibly a biosign. T'Pol took another step towards the forest, and her world exploded in a green haze of pain that bled into darkness.
xx
Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Archer felt a headache building out of frustration. He had arrived back at the science center, just short of the two hour limit, to find that Trip had been able to power up the computer system but that the main drive had been wiped clean or corrupted by time and the atmosphere, they didn't quite know which yet. The others were already there, as empty-handed as he was. All that was left to do was collect T'Pol and go back to the Enterprise. Archer's thoughts were on contacting Starfleet and then Vulcan, let them digest the news and decide on what the next steps would be. While they were doing that, Enterprise would revert to a being a vessel of exploration, and they would find every damn last thing there was to discover about this planet and the volcanoes, so that the colony's demise would not have been in vain. Now, where was T'Pol?!
Trip looked up from where he was fine-tuning the electrical array feeding into the computers, frowning. He waited for a few moments, then went back to his task. He had had a very brief and sharp headache, but it went away. T'Pol and he had known that the dampening field would play havoc with their ability to sense each other more than at a subliminal level. In these conditions he had to believe that the pain must be coming from a budding headache and not from her. He could still sense their bond in the back of his mind, and decided that he was unworried.
That was precisely the moment when Archer walked over to where he was "Have you heard from T'Pol?"
"No, Captain. I thought she was with you."
"We were all supposed to meet back here fifteen minutes ago." Archer frowned. "It's not like her to be late."
Trip got up. Now he was worried. "I don't know, Captain." He frowned, remembering the stab of pain he had felt "but I have a bad feeling about this."
Archer eyed him for a couple of seconds, turned on his heel. "McKenzie, Reed, we need to find T'Pol. Trip come with me. Everybody stay in pairs."
xx
'stupid, stupid, stupid.' Trip's mind rhythmed each step he took. By now Jonathan should have known better than to allow the members of the away team to go explore on their own, without backup. What was it that made him constitutionally unable to learn? By the time nightfall interrupted their search, he had a bad headache and all they had to show for their efforts was... nothing. Especially not a certain Vulcan science officer that he desperately needed to get back. Back on the Enterprise. He was worried.
TBC