The journey to the planet's surface was brief. From orbit, Memchr looked like a gray ball of rock cloaked in lighter gray ice. Closer to the surface, as the shuttle neared the spaceport, Hoshi looked out across the desolate landscape and realized this world lived up to its first impression. Bleak plains of broken stone were blanketed with ice and slush and scoured by curtains of wind driven rain. "For a colony world," Hoshi said, "it doesn't show much in a way of development." She nodded at the speck of a spaceport growing larger outside the cockpit's windshield. "If that's the center of town, don't blink or you'll miss it."
They stopped their conversation as the shuttle descended to a landing pad. It touched down with barely any sensation of contact, and the starboard hatch lifted open, admitting a spray of rain on a howling gale. The pilot looked back at Hoshi and Liz. "Get out." The two of them scrambled through the hatchway and out into the storm. Trudging against a stiff and shrill headwind, Hoshi noted that the spaceport amounted to little more than a few large, ramshackle buildings ringed by landing pads. A few other shuttlecraft were arriving, and several more stood on different pads, awaiting passengers.
Hoshi nudged Liz's arm and nodded at a handful of what looked like Breen civilians heading inside the spaceport. They wore helmets similar to those used by the Breen military, but instead of armor they were attired in drab, clothes, boots and gloves. Every square centimeter of their bodies were covered. "If follow them, they might lead us to the colony." She said.
"It's worth a try." Liz shrugged.
They trailed the quartet of civilians into a high ceiling facility that was alive with echoing footsteps and an oppressive droning caused by reverberations from the Breen's vocoders. A few armed Breen soldiers stood watch at various points on different levels of the facility. The place felt glumly efficient. Unarmed but uniformed Breen personnel ushered civilians through security checkpoints, verifying indentichips, and scanned both incoming and outgoing cargo and luggage.
They were unable to see past the dense knot of people ahead of them at the security checkpoint. "Can you see where they're going once they reach the other side?" Hoshi asked.
"No. But I don't see an exit on the other side, do you?" Liz asked.
Hoshi shook her head. She wondered if perhaps she and Liz had taken a wrong turn. Though she hadn't thought of herself and Liz as being in line for the checkpoint, when he tried to turn around, there were other Breen queuing up behind them.
"Keep moving forward." A Breen soldier said pointing at Hoshi.
Liz grabbed Hoshi's arm and pulled her toward the checkpoint. "Now we find out how convincing our indentichips are."
Their turn at the checkpoint was over in a moment. One guard passed a scanning device in front of Hoshi and Liz, and the other studied the readout on a small display. The forged identity profiles appeared on the second guard's screen, and he gave them a cursory once over before waving Liz and Hoshi through the scanning station to a downward sloped moving walkway that carried them in a blur.
"All right. We made it through." Liz said looking back.
"Great." Hoshi said. "But where are we going?"
Seconds later, she had an answer. The walkway leveled out and disgorged its passengers onto a broad thoroughfare, high above a chasm within which had been constructed a massive underground city. The subterranean metropolis was crisscrossed with bridges, walkways, cables, lights, and pipes, and it bustled with throngs of pedestrians and tiny antigrav propelled bots that zipped to and from. The air was heavy with food scents, hazy with smoke, buzzing with vocoders noise and alive with music. Looking up, Hoshi saw a dome of rough hewn stone festooned with hanging lights, antennas, cabling, and loudspeakers that filled the air with booming announcements in a stentorian voice of authority.
"Well, we now know why Breen colonies always look so sparse." Hoshi said. "They're ninety-five percent underground."
Every twist and turn Hoshi and Liz explored led them deeper into the Breen's hidden metropolis, whose lower levels were packed with civilians, all garbed in simple garments of neutral colors, grays and beiges, with an occasional hint of dark brown, and snout shaped masks that left Hoshi wondering how the Breen were able to tell one another apart.
Most surprising to her, however, was the sultry climate of the city's deepest environs. Heat surged up from the pitch black abyss that yawned in the center of the city, and the streets were hot and teeming with activity, thick and smoky haze and savory aromas. Atonal music wafted from distant chambers and mixed with the squawking of vocoders. A gaggle of short humanoids whose slightness of frame led Hoshi to speculate they might be adolescents flowed around her and Liz. As they passed, Hoshi noted that several of them were carrying swaddled infants in pouches slung across their chests or balanced on their hips. She looked more closely at one of the infants, hoping to see an unmasked Breen face, but saw only smaller, less detailed version of the Breen mask staring back at her.
Liz beckoned Hoshi with a sideways nod toward a distant intersection to which she followed her. Though she was grateful for the information provided by her mask's HUD, its constant intrusions into her field of vision had begun to annoy her. Many of its notes seemed superfluous, so she used her suit's internal voice command module to turn off certain notifications and override the translation of selected symbols. Only after she had done so did she realize why she had needed to. She was assimilating elements of the Breen language. This had been the hardest language to learn for her because of the vocoders. However, she knew with time she'd throw this into the pile of the many other languages she knew.
More elusive than the Breen's language were the tiny nonverbal cues that seemed to serve as the basis for communication between individuals. Because of their ubiquitous use of mask, the Breen could not take their cues from facial micro-expressions, as did so many humanoid species throughout local space. Instead, they appeared to have incorporated a subtle and complex form of sign language to augment their verbal interactions.
Observing exchanges of currency and goods, Hoshi and Liz noted that body language also seemed to play a role in Breen discourse. Distance, angle, and even the specific posture of the head, torso and limbs could convey meanings, telegraph emotional states, or be used to gain social dominance. It troubled Hoshi to think that a nod at the wrong time or a nervous fidget could easily lead to her and Liz being exposed and killed.
They neared a busy intersection beside a broad walkway that bridged the chasm. In the center of the crossroads stood a cluster of tall, four sided obelisks made of black granite. The faces of each obelisk sported a computer interface. Liz led Hoshi through the crowd to the nearest open computer terminal.
"It's a public information kiosk." Liz said, continuing to use their private comm channel. Breen symbols raced across the screen from left to right. "It's moving too quickly for my HUD to translate."
Hoshi moved closer and huddled against her so that she could see the screen. "What are you looking for?"
"Lodging. We need to get off the street and set up a base."
"I can't translate it either. It's moving too fast for even me to catch up. It might be a few more days before the learning circuits in our HUDs can keep up with that thing."
"What do we do for shelter until then? Knock on random doors and hope for the kindness of alien strangers?"
Hoshi looked up at the walls of the city, which were honeycombed with dwellings aglow with amber light. "Hardly. Maintaining a city this size underground requires infrastructure for power and ventilation. If we can find a way inside some of it, we can buy ourselves some time." She leaned against the bridge's railing and looked out and down. "There, between levels. See those fans? I bet those are part of air filtering system. I bet we'll find maintenance hatches down some of those empty alleys."
Liz just stared at the communication's officer. "Are you sure, you're just communications on the ship?"
Hoshi smiled behind her helmet. "You don't marry the chief engineer and not pick up a few things."
Liz noticed a passing drone that flew past them. "What if those hatches are monitored? Or secured inside official buildings? I doubt a people as paranoid as the Breen would leave vital areas of the civil infrastructure accessible to the public. Even the Cardassians were paranoid in the years before the Dominion War and they didn't even take extraordinary measures to secure their old water supply."
"They didn't need them after the introduction of replicators. Once they shut down the old plumbing, it was sealed off and forgotten. But the Breen's air system is open and active."
Liz was a bit surprised by Hoshi's knowledge of the Cardassian culture. Hoshi could feel her partner staring at her and she smiled again. "Dustin is also the ship's historian."
The two of them stared at the spinning blades of a giant fan that filled the mouth of a tunnel dozens of meters below the bridge. "If I were the Breen," Liz said. "I'd be more worried about defending the air system from an outside attack and not from civilians."
"Maybe. However, the air system might not be the best place to hide and it may not be our only option." Hoshi said.
"What do you mean?" Liz asked.
Hoshi walked to a narrow passage that had been excavated from the bedrock. She then looked up and then pointed. Liz looked up and saw that several groups of wires converged into the sliver of an alleyway. When she and Hoshi reached its dead end, Hoshi turned on her palm light and used its beam to trace a path of ladder like grooves cut into the rear wall. At its apex was a deep alcove containing a bulky piece of machinery to which all cables were linked. Beside the device was a metal door.
It was an easy climb, but the alcove at the top was barely large enough for them both to stand in at the same time. Hoshi pinned her arms at her sides to make room for Liz while she used dsome of her Starfleet Intelligence provided tools to disable the door's alarm and then pick its lock which released with a hollow clang. To Hoshi's relief, the door swung inward and into a long, gently curving passageway lit by widely set dim panels on its rocky ceiling. Its walls were lined with cables, power lines, and small components. It stretched away for nearly a hundred meters, past several intersections, before vanishing beyond its curve.
Hoshi moved past Liz and stopped a few meters inside. Liz stepped in, shut the door behind her, and used her tools to relock it. She tucked the tiny device back into its pocket on her disguise.
"Don't worry about the internal sensors. They're tied to the alarms, which I deactivated." She said. Liz removed her helmet and her sweat soaked brown hair tumbled in a mess about her face as she sighed with relief. She looked at Hoshi who was also taking off her helmet. "Welcome to our new home away from home."
