Raptor 3-9 – USS Tirpitz
En Route to the surface of an object tentatively classified as an Iron Star
Beta Quadrant
─•~:~•─
The mood on the Raptor was sharp enough to cut with a knife.
Every Marine aboard was completely silent.
Except for the shuttle pilot – who had only enlisted a week before The Lonely Queen of The North left Scapa Flow – all of them had been at Tranbir Nine, and except for Staff Sargent Kala Anjar who was with Reaper Element, all of them had stood alongside Major Ginny Tatum in front of Outpost 15 as part of Charlie Element.
And none of them had ever forgotten the sight of turning the bright green grass of the outpost red with blood.
Kala broke the silence, looking at Ginny, "Permission to speak, Major?"
All of the Marines were fully armoured up, and the two Starfleet Officers with the twenty-man RRF unit, Commander Yue Tanaka, and Science Officer Ensign Kath, were also wearing Environmental suits.
The faces of the Fishies were visible in the bubble-shaped helmets, but the faces of the Sharkies were not, with only an opaque visor breaking up the solid metal of a Molotok helmet.
"Granted, Sarge," she replied curtly.
"Ma'am, I wasn't just hearing things, right? That was really the sound?" he asked, knowing that Ginny would know exactly what 'sound' he was talking about.
"Yep," Ginny replied.
"Fuck. Should we be going down there then? I mean we're armoured up, but…is this a good idea?" Kala again asked, with uncertainty creeping into his voice.
Ginny shook her head, "Orders are orders, Sarge. But if it makes you feel better, I don't think it's a good idea either."
Suddenly, from the pilot's cabin, Yue rose and stared directly at Ginny, taking a point to make sure she remembered which Molotok she was wearing.
In armour, all Marines looked the same, with the only difference being their height and small shoulder markings in white paint with rank insignia.
Ginny had her Major's UFP globe above the letters FM, while Kala had his Staff Sargent's three-pointed chevrons with a pair of rifles at the bottom.
Leftenant Ryhr Th'ichysris, seated to Ginny's right, had a four-pointed diamond with another UFP globe inside over the same FM letters as Ginny.
Enlisted Federation Marines followed the concepts of the old United States Marine Corps, given their home of Camp Shirthu Nath was on Parris Island, the old home of the USMC.
Officers on the other hand followed the British Royal Marines, given that they shared their home of Sandhurst with that long, gone institution.
Just like the RM, Sharkies called themselves in the third person "bootnecks" and used the USMC's slogan of Semper Fi.
It was their way of honouring long-lost family members.
Yue didn't care about all that, "Alright, I want to know just what the hell it is that has all you tough Marines so scared right now!" she all but screamed in Ginny's armoured face.
The SF Enviro-Suits had had their auditory emulators switched off, and the bootnecks had turned up their filters on full.
They were now communicating via interlinked QC, and to Ginny, it sounded like her friend might as well have been screaming in her face.
"I can't tell you, Yue. It's classified, straight from the top brass," Ginny replied apologetically.
Yue was not impressed, "To fuck with classified, that's just a way for people to hide the truth."
Yue brought herself barely inches away from Ginny's helmet, "And right now, I'm Commander Tanaka. And I am giving you a direct order, Major Tatum. I want to know what happened on Tranbir Nine, and I want to know everything that you know about this ELF sound. Is that understood, Major?"
Ginny rose to her feet. Out of armour, Ginny at six-two stood a full foot taller than the five-two Yue.
In Armour, at just over seven feet tall, the top of Yue's helmet barely passed her chest plate.
Ginny made a point to look down at the Commander, "Understood, Commander. Staff Sargent Anjar, please note for the war journal that I have been ordered to open sealed mission packet nineteen by Commander Yue Tanaka, XO USS Tirpitz and that I intend to comply with this unlawful order for the purposes of unit cohesion and safety to my ship."
Kala hit a button on his wrist comm and replied, "Noted, Major Tatum."
"Yue, understand that before I tell you this story, I was given direct orders by General Castle himself not to discuss this with anyone who wasn't there. And your own Fleet Admiral Douglas Mitchell countersigned similar orders for Starfleet. I am disobeying those orders because you are my immediate superior, and you're my friend."
"But I hope you realize that by me opening that sealed mission packet, I will be in for a harsh court-martial, at minimum, and I'll probably spend the rest of my life in prison," Ginny said, clearly.
Yue looked up at Ginny, "What happened on Tranbir Nine?"
"You know how Dean said on the bridge it was a farming colony on the Miradorn border? Population of three thousand or so, right?" Ginny asked as she sat back down.
"Yes, as far as I know," Yue replied, still standing.
"A year ago, almost to the day actually, it was one hundred and forty-three thousand," Ginny said, quietly.
She continued, "The Federation lost contact with the colony for a month. This was just after the Risa attack. So, wanting to look strong for the Miradorn, Starfleet sent a six-ship task force to Tranbir Nine. And in case the Miradorn had landed on the colony, 3 Battalion was sent with the task force."
"I was a Marine Captain then, in command of Charlie Element as Charlie Actual, reporting to Colonel Mor who was Charlie 1-9. Staff Sargent Kala there was Reaper 2-7, under S1 Jack Marshall, who was Reaper Actual that day."
"Every Marine on Tirpitz except for the medics and the combat engineers came from 3 Battalion, either with me in Charlie, Kala in Reaper, or with Hammer Element, and only two Marines survived from Hammer. One is my DM who spends his off hours growing flowers in the arboretum, and the other is the guy driving the Argo beside us." Explained Ginny.
"Keep going, Major," Yue said.
"Charlie's assignment was to sweep and secure the Starfleet outpost on the planet. Reaper was supposed to search the main colony site, Halfway To Paradise. Hammer was held back as a reserve. When we got down to the planet, it was practically deserted. None of the colonists were around."
"The Outpost was empty, and so was the town. There were no signs of an attack, no viral pandemics or diseases in the atmosphere, no indication that they were beamed away, or any sign of them at all. It's just like, they weren't there," Ginny said, softly, before she continued, "And then Reaper got to the hockey arena. Tell the Commander what happened next, Sarge."
Kala spoke up next, "We were just getting ready to search the building when some dude wandered into the street. J-er, I mean, S1 Marshall, went to go check on him. He ran up to the S1 and started screaming in his face about some noise he was hearing, but then he had a brain aneurysm and died right in front of our eyes."
"And then the main entrance of the arena swung open, and hundreds of colonists started charging and hitting us with pipes, knives, even their bare hands. We tried flash bangs, Tetrazine gas bombs, even knocking them out with our bare hands. And then…" he paused, took a deep breath, and then continued, "And then some dude pulled an Argo gunner out of his seat. He jumped up on the chain gun, and lit us up."
"Oh my god…" Yue gasped.
"At the same time that was happening, a harvest combine that was on fire charged over the hill towards the outpost. My heavy weapons team blew it away, but then chem-rockets shot down a pair of HK Drones. And after that, three hundred colonists charged down the hill and started shooting at us. They had weapons they stole from the Provost Marshals detachment, weapons they stole from fallen Marines, and even their bare hands," Ginny said, taking back over.
"What did you do?" Yue asked.
We had no choice. We opened fire," Ginny replied.
"W-why couldn't you subdue them? There are so many options. Tetrazine, Force fields, Neurotropyne-" Yue started saying, before again being cut off
"Nothing was working, there wasn't time to stop and ask, and we were under fire! We're Marines, God Dammit! If someone takes a shot at us, we shoot back, and we kill our targets!" Ginny shouted, forcing Yue to take a step backwards.
Ginny took a deep breath, and continued her story, in a softer tone, "We didn't have a choice. It was them or us. They kept charging over that fucking hill, thousands of them. I lost count of how many people I killed that day."
"I think… I think Clarice Hathaway was there. The Captain's Wife. Did you see her?" Yue asked in shock.
That name struck Ginny's mind like a rifle round through her skull. The one name she remembered out of hundreds, thousands, of dead colonists. The first person that Ginny Tatum had ever killed.
What she hadn't told Scott Hathaway, what she hadn't told Yue, what she hadn't even told Dean, was that the battle was still the only time Ginny felt alive.
Just telling the story was already getting her excited, and Ginny had to take a huge effort to push those good feelings back down.
"I don't know, Yue. I shot more than my share of people that day. We didn't have time to identify the bodies. We… We just applied disintegration tags whenever we caught a break. That was all we could do," Ginny said.
"This…this is…insane. But you still haven't told me what the sound is?" Yue said, sitting down beside Kala.
"They called it magnetic interstellar friction or something like that. I don't know Yue, I'm a Marine, not a scientist. Something about two of the planets getting close to each other in space and one making the other crystallize gasses or something."
"But whatever causes it, it produces an ELF sound. 12 MHz, on a wavelength eight thousand kilometres long. Ordinarily, you can't hear something like that, but your body still perceives something, and it ends up sounding like that low-droning noise we heard on the ship," Ginny said seriously.
The Commander looked at the Klingon Science Officer, seated beside the shuttle pilot at the front of the shuttle, "Kath, is any of this making sense to you?"
Kath nodded in her enviro-suit, "All of it, so far. Extremely Low-Frequency radiation, particularly at those amplitudes that the Major is describing, is well known to cause harmful psychological effects among humanoid species like Humans, Vulcans or even Klingons such as myself,"
"And what about this magnetic interstellar friction thing that she's talking about?" Yue asked.
"ELF signals are typically known to resonate in a planet's ionosphere during lightning strikes, Commander. The phenomenon has been observed on Earth, Titan, Kronos, Rigel Four, and Bajor. There are also observations from B-Series Neutron Stars, which are better known as magnetars, but those typically radiate at 30 MHz, on a much more powerful carrier wave," Kath replied.
The Klingon female stood up and read from a PADD, "From what I could pull from Starfleet Records, Tranbir Four and Tranbir Nine cross each other's orbital path every 100.32 years."
"At the closest approach, the two planets get within seven hundred thousand kilometres of each other and seamlessly blend their respective magnetic fields. Tranbir Four is an R-Class gas giant composed primarily of Helium-3 with trace elements of Neutronium-16 and Estonianium-27."
"Estonianium-27 is a common gas that can crystallize upon exposure to certain harmonic frequencies and begin vibrating in response. It's possible that vibration gets carried along the magnetic fields at the frequency that Major Tatum has claimed," Kath explained with an almost Vulcan-like logic.
Yue shivered, "We heard that sound for only a few seconds, and my whole body was tingling, and it felt like my head was going to explode."
Ginny spoke up next "Now imagine hearing that for a month straight, with no micro-filters. That's why we had to kill a hundred thousand people, Yue. And that's why the mission was classified at the highest levels."
"It was the FMC's first operational assignment, and we had to gun down Federation Colonists. And there's not a solid reason as to why. The Council would have disbanded the Corps right then and there. And Tirpitz would be neck deep in Tholians right now,"
Yue was still in shock, "I don't even know what to say…. that's just, insane."
Kath knelt in front of Ginny, "Major, how were the Marines able to stop this event?"
"Kala and his team recovered some Starfleet Engineers in the town. They had to fight like hell to get them over to me, but once inside the outpost, they were able to fire up an infra-sound generator, it put out a signal at 24MhZ along a wavelength sixteen thousand kilometres long, and it was able to displace the first signal somehow. You'd know better than I would, Kath," Ginny replied.
Yue lifted her head, "What are you thinking, Ensign?"
"That modulation matches a subspace harmonic filter of .279 precisely, Commander. Which, if you'll recall, was an instruction given to us in the second message we received from, well, whatever it was that sent us the first message," Kath replied.
It was always weird for Ginny to see a Klingon speak like a Vulcan.
"Okay, one thing that's still not making sense to me. Tranbir Nine is on the other side of the galaxy from here. And it didn't have an Iron Star there either, whatever that's supposed to be. How can the same sound be in two separate places? And are you saying that a star was talking to us?" Kala asked
"No one asked you, Sarge," Ginny added sharply.
Kath smiled with her Klingon teeth, "It's a fair question, Staff Sargent Kala. But until we know more, I can't speculate on what the relationship is between Tranbir Nine and this event. And even a Bajoran, especially a cute one like you, should know that stars don't 'talk',"
Kala smiled back, but Yue interrupted the flirting, "Enough, both of you. This is serious. And we need to find out what's going on here."
The shuttle pilot spoke up next, "We're about to touch down Major, twenty seconds."
Ginny stood up and looked over the pilot's console, "Do you have anything, and I mean anything at all on your sensors, Corporal?"
The Corporal ranked pilot shook his armoured head, "Nothing at all, Ma'am. Just us and the ship behind us."
As the shuttle landed with a gentle thud on the surface of the pilot, the Marines rose and faced the rear cargo door.
Ginny stood at the end of the twenty-man unit, between the two Starfleet officers, and issued her orders, "Condition one carry, weapons free. I want a standard perimeter around the Raptor."
"Aye Ma'am!" came the synchronized reply.
Ginny looked to the two Starfleet officers on either side of her, "Wait for my go. Once we've established our perimeter, you two can come out."
Kath and Yue both nodded.
Even though Yue outranked Ginny, the XO knew that protocol dictated that the OC-MCT oversaw all landings until a secure landing site was established.
Yue looked up at Ginny's armoured face, "Major…or Ginny. I'm sorry I snapped at you. If I had known what it was like..."
"You didn't know. It's okay, Yue. I'm scared too, but I'll keep you safe," Ginny replied, placing her armoured hand on her enviro-suit-covered shoulder.
The rear door of the Raptor swung open, and the Argo surged out of the rear of the larger shuttle, with the Marine manning the chain gun actively searching for targets.
Seconds later, nineteen of the twenty Marines followed behind and quickly formed into a rough semi-circle around the rear of the shuttle, covering every possible angle of approach.
After a few seconds, Kala called back via QC "All clear. Perimeter is up."
Ginny stepped outside of the shuttle and looked around.
Beneath her feet was a completely flat surface of metal, feeling as hard as the hull of Tirpitz she had to stand on for zero-g training.
It was mind-boggling to her that she was standing on the surface of a star, however different Iron Stars were from their hotter cousins.
There was no atmosphere present, and the only sound she could hear was the re-breathing filters of her Molotok Helmet.
She looked straight up, and all she could see was the blackness of deep space occasionally broken up by the white dots of other stars, hundreds of millions of light years away from her.
Starting to feel slightly dizzy, Ginny lowered her head and focused on Tirpitz, hanging just over the horizon on her right.
At this distance, the normally massive Lonely Queen of the North looked small enough to crush with a pair of her armoured fingers.
Except for the faint glow of the interior of the Raptor, it was pitch black on the surface of the Iron Star.
Ginny's visor automatically switched to low-light mode, and the metal surface of the star looked faint green against the blackness of cold space.
Kath turned on her wrist-mounted flashlight, and Ginny had to turn away as the bright flash overwhelmed her low-light vision until the filters could self-adjust.
The Marine was annoyed but said nothing. Starfleet enviro-suits didn't have the benefits of a Molotok display, instead shielding the wearer with a transparent repliplastic bubble.
Kath realized she had caused the Marine some discomfort and simply replied, "Sorry."
Kala, still with his rifle up and looking for targets, spoke up next, "Orders, Major?"
Ginny pointed at Tirpitz¸ "The ship is over there on my right, so we'll call that direction west. I want the Argo to drive straight south until it loses visual on us, then turn left and circle back in a north-northwest direction. If you see anything at all, call it in immediately,"
The Argo gunner nodded, and the vehicle sped off in the indicated direction.
Since she was wearing micro-filters and had the helmet's filters turned up to maximum, Ginny didn't hear the engine fire up.
The Argo just simply moved and started driving away from her in complete silence, a silence that was deafening in its sheer terror.
Next, she patted Kala on the shoulder, "Sarge, get your HK in the…air, for lack of a better term. Twenty-five kilometres above us. Fly it straight north for a hundred kicks, then circle it around east for another hundred. I want nano-cables dropped on every inch of this star, and if you pick up anything on your controller, I want to know about it before you do."
"Yes, Ma-jor!" Kala replied.
The Bajoran flipped open his wrist-comm and set the controls for the drone. Behind the group, the drone flew out of the back of the Raptor – also in complete silence – and took off in the direction as ordered by Ginny, dropping streams of nano-cables underneath as it flew beyond Ginny's sight range.
"The rest of you, hold the perimeter and call out any targets. Do not engage until identified, clear?" She asked the group.
"Yes, Ma-jor!" the remaining Marines replied in unison.
And silently, they took knees or prone positions and pointed their weapons into the blackness around them.
Beside Ginny, Kath opened her scientific tricorder and began her scans, while Yue was looking around in amazement.
"This is one of the more surreal moments of my career. And I even went to Shah-Ka-Ree once," Yue said.
"It's a first for me too," Ginny replied, looking around while holding her rifle tightly.
To her left, she watched the Argo disappear from over the horizon.
In a few minutes, it would circle back. But that fact wasn't giving her any comfort.
"I need to call in, can I borrow that?" Asked Yue, pointing at Ginny's wrist-comm.
Starfleet had yet to issue Tirpitz comm-badges equipped with QC, and Ginny had ordered that the ship not open any channels besides the quantum entangled particle pairs of her Marine's wrist-comm and the ship's unit, on the risk that the ship would again be exposed to the harmful effects of the sound.
Ginny held her left arm up, and Yue entered the needed commands, "Tanaka to Tirpitz, how read you this?"
Seconds later, the voice of Captain Hathaway responded, "Loud and clear, Commander. Anything to report?"
Yue shook her head, "Nothing yet sir. We've landed on the surface. It's pitch black here. The Marines are scouting the immediate area and Kath is conducting some scans. Has the ship picked up anything else?"
"Negative. Our sensors can't penetrate the surface, due to the Neutronium. Other than that, nothing new to report from our end. You're our only set of eyes right now Commander," the voice of Scott replied.
Yue nodded, even though the ship couldn't -actually- see her, "Understood, we'll call back as soon as we have something."
"Exercise extreme caution, Commander. So much as a hint of trouble and want all of you off that star asap. Tirpitz out," the voice of Scott said as the channel closed.
Yue closed the wrist-comm and Ginny's hand went straight back to her rifle.
Yue walked over to Kath and asked, "See anything interesting yet?"
The tall Klingon woman shook her head, "I'm sorry, Commander, my tricorder also cannot penetrate the surface. The Neutronium traces are blocking my scans. I'm also not detecting any magnetic fields or ELF frequencies of any kind, only the star's gravitational field."
Ginny cocked her head to one side, "We've got quite a lot of det-packs on the Raptor. What if we blow a hole for you? Would that help?"
For the first time in an hour, Yue smiled, "Oh you Sharkies. The solution to every problem is just to blow it up, isn't it?"
Ginny in turn smiled behind her helmet, "Hasn't failed me yet, Fishie."
Kath was less amused, "Even a direct hit from Tirpitz's entire magazine of quantum torpedoes wouldn't penetrate Neutronium, Major, much less your photon demolition charges. It would simply make a scorch mark on the surface. And even if we could create such a hole, we have no idea what lies underneath. You could be exposed to a stellar core, or be subjected to quantum tunnelling, or any number of-"
Before Kath could continue her warning, a motion drew everyone's attention to the left and "east", away from Tirpitz to the "west".
The Marines turned with rifles raised and watched as a perfectly circular piece of metal rose from the surface, leaving a hole where the metal had once been.
Seconds later, a lattice that looked like guard rails rose from the floating piece and formed a semi-circle, five feet in diameter.
Ginny raised a single fist, indicating for her Marines to hold fire.
Cautiously, she took a single step forward, and the "ground" in front of her lit up like an emergency lighting strip on Tirpitz.
It was a thin, white arrow, pointing at the circular piece of metal that was starting to look like a platform to her eyes.
"What the fuck is that Kath?!" Ginny asked sharply, still with her rifle raised and not daring to move any further, in any direction.
Kath quickly waved her tricorder, but looked dejected, "I'm not detecting anything different. There's no indication that this…arrow is reflected light or an artificial device of some kind."
Cautiously, Ginny stepped to the side of the arrow and peeked over the hole.
Her visor went to low-light automatically, but she couldn't see anything beyond a deep pool of blackness.
She took a step back and called to Kath, "What about in there? Anything?"
Kath shook her head, "Some indeterminate readings, nothing specific."
Ginny reached into her pack on her lower back and took out a chemical snap light.
She cracked it, and then tossed it down the hole and let the sensors in her helmet track its progress.
The sensors followed the snap-light down until it disappeared, but lost contact shortly after.
Unsatisfied, Ginny raised her rifle and fired a single shot down into the hole.
But after fifteen seconds, her sensors lost track of the tritanium wedge too and hadn't registered any impact.
Kath was not happy, "Is it really necessary to shoot at things, Major?!"
Ginny replied simply, "Sorry."
Yue sighed, "Well, I'm not a scientist either, but that looks like a platform, and the arrow seems to be pointing at it as if it's telling us 'please, step on'."
Ginny walked backwards in the same direction she came and stopped beside Yue, "I'm…not sure we should get on it."
Yue turned and smiled at her, "Oh come on, we're supposed to seek out strange new worlds, aren't we? Besides, we haven't found anything out here."
As if it could read Yue's thoughts, the arrow pulsed slowly twice, waiting for someone to step on the platform.
"There's only room for two people. I'll go. Give me your tricorder, Kath," Yue said.
The Klingon Ensign handed the tool over to her superior, and Yue walked forward and climbed onto the "platform", steadying herself against the guard rail.
She then waved at the Major, "You too Ginny, you are supposed to keep me safe after all."
Ryhr, kneeling to Ginny's right, looked up, "Major, in my opinion, you shouldn't go yourself, I'm more than happy to—"
Ginny cut her off with a wave, "You're gonna pull my ass out of there if something goes wrong, LT. Besides, what pussy Sharks are we if we won't go into a pitch-black hole on the surface of an Iron Star while a little Fishie will?"
Ryhr nodded, "Your call, Major. Sharkies lead the way."
Ginny walked, cautiously, and stepped onto the platform beside Yue.
Unlike the shorter XO, Ginny simply lifted a knee and pushed herself up.
She turned and looked back at the group standing in front of her, "Okay, now what?"
Suddenly, the platform began lowering itself slowly at a leisurely pace about half that of a turbo-lift.
Ginny watched as her head passed the edge of the hole, and then looked up as the hole sealed over with a layer of the star's metal.
Yue and Ginny were now stuck on a small platform lowering itself down to… somewhere.
Involuntarily, and forgetting that the Major declined her advances, Yue interlocked her gloved fingers with Ginny's armoured hand.
Ginny, still looking up in pitch darkness, simply said, "That's not good."