Disclaimer: Enterprise, Star Trek and all related characters are the property of Paramount Pictures, Inc. No copyright infringement is intended. This story is for entertainment purposes only and no money has changed hands. The original characters and events are the sole property of the author and may not be used without permission.

"Derelict (Pt. II)"

by Darrin Colbourne

Though the transport process only took a few seconds, it was more than enough time for Archer to imagine all the hundred horrible ways that he might die attempting this stunt. He waited as the overpowering light of the transport beam surrounded him, hoping he wouldn't feel himself solidifying in solid rock, or in the hull of the strange ship, or anything else as ghastly.

When the effect ended, he realized he needn't have worried. He found himself standing in a large, softly lit room, occupied only by a few strange control panels in the walls and control station in the center. As he took in the whole scene, he realized they must have ended up in the ship's transporter room. He looked down at his feet. Instead of one large pad the boarding party was arrayed on six small ones, as if this transporter room had been specifically designed to transport people.

"Is this what you expected to find, T'Pol?" Archer said.

"Indeed, Captain." T'Pol said as she looked around the room, then started scanning. "It seemed reasonable that anyone who would include so few ways to enter the ship physically would be accustomed to some mode of access that did not require physicality. Molecular Transportation seemed the logical answer. In fact, the process was more efficient than I expected." With that she stepped off the transporter platform and walked over to the control station.

"What's that mean?" Tucker asked.

For a moment it seemed as if T'Pol didn't hear him, so intent was she on examining the controls, but she answered a moment later. "It appears that when the ship detected an incoming transport beam the transporter controls synchronized themselves to receive it, improving the accuracy of delivery and final reassembly of the incoming material."

"Like in a cargo transport," Archer said, as he and the others descended from the platform, "from a station to our ship, only automatic."

"Which was why we each landed on one of those separate pads." Will said.

"Precisely." The Vulcan said. From the tone in her voice, one might almost think she was pleased with the results of her experiment. Of course, her face betrayed nothing.

"This place is so...bare." Mercurio said.

"You noticed that, too?" Sato said. "No conduits or moldings, no track lighting or bare metal...just white walls."

"And carpet." Archer said, looking down. He hadn't seen carpet in months.

"There's some color." Tucker said. "Like this wall panel here...and these transporter controls." He went to join T'Pol. The surface of the control station was a deep red, and the control buttons were several different colors. "There's no markings for the controls, no numbers or labels that might explain which does what."

"They might not be necessary." Mercurio said, looking at the wall panel. "Maybe the colors follow some kind of code."

"That is possible, Ensign," T'Pol said, "but some of the controls are similar to those used by Enterprise's transporter. These three switches, for example, must be the energizer throttles."

Mercurio looked. T'Pol was indicating three flat, upright controls mounted in slides.

"Well," Archer said, "while this tour of the transporter room has been fun it's not getting us any closer to any answers. T'Pol, where inside the ship are we now?"

T'Pol checked her scanner. "The saucer, Captain, here." She said, showing him on her screen.

"How much of the ship do we have access to?" Will asked.

"All of the interior, Captain. There is no rock penetrating the hull."

"Is there a way to get around it quickly?" Archer said, adding quickly: "Other than the transporter?"

T'Pol checked again. "It appears a transit system has been installed within the ship. A network of large access tunnels throughout the interior, used to guide several lift cars."

"Handy." Archer said. "I'd like to see the Bridge. Will, you come with me. 'Trip', you and Ensign Mercurio check out Engineering. T'Pol, see if you can find a library or database somewhere and try to dig up some information. Take Hoshi with you. Will this 'transit system' get to all those places?"

"Certainly, Captain. There is a lift station near this room."

"Then let's not wait any longer." Archer said as he led the party out of the transporter room. The door opened for him automatically, with a familiar shhh, except:

"Is it just me," Sato said, "or was that door louder than usual?"

"There's atmosphere." Tucker said. "The sound is the change of pressure between the two spaces the door opens on. In this case the spaces are bigger."

"A lot bigger." Mercurio said. "This corridor is immense."

"And bare, again." Tucker said. "It's like a clean room in a lab, only without equipment."

"Where's the transit system, T'Pol?" Archer said.

"This way." T'Pol pointed, then led off. The party walked down the long corridor for a few seconds, then stopped at another door. This, too, opened automatically. The party looked inside at what seemed to be a normal elevator car with strange controls.

"It'll be cramped." Sato said. "Do we all pile in?"

"There will be another car to replace it when it moves." T'Pol said. "It might be best if each team took a separate car."

"We'll go first." Archer said, and he and Will stepped in.

"I'm detecting audio pickups in the circuitry." T'Pol said. "I believe it is partially voice controlled. Activate it with the control, then tell it where you want to go."

Archer looked at the control. There was a handle that looked like the fang of some giant animal. He wrapped his hand around it, seeing no other obvious switch, and said "Bridge."

When nothing happened, Will repeated the action with another controller. That made the door close and caused the car to move, accompanied by a quiet but annoying howling tone, that rose in pitch as they sped through the ship. After about a half-minute of travel, the door opened again.

The first thing that drew Archer's attention was the viewscreen directly across the circular space. He was surprised that it was only a little bigger than the one on his own bridge. There was a strip display under it, where two amber lights started across from either end and met in the center, over and over. As he and Will stepped into the room, they were shocked by the layout of the place. It was textbook Starfleet design philosophy: Captain's Chair in the center, helm just ahead, other bridge stations set up around the perimeter. Again, they noticed the sparseness of the decor, as well as the odd touches of color, on the panels and on the control buttons. Archer also noticed the other displays above the control stations. They were active, but didn't seem to be displaying any discernible information. Most of the images were just artistic wave patterns.

"Hey," he said, "that's probably the Science Station."

Will looked where he was pointing. "How can you tell?"

"See that scope extending up?" Archer said. "T'Pol has something like that at her station on Enterprise."

Will chuckled as they went over to the console. "Think maybe whoever built this ship had Vulcan Science Officers in mind?"

Archer smiled as he responded. "Maybe we started a trend." He looked into the scope. "It's turned off, just like the viewscreen. No way to look out of the ship."

"Judging from the way it's buried, there's probably nothing to see but rock anyway." Will's attention was then drawn to the Captain's Chair. Archer followed his gaze and smiled.

"Wanna try it?" He said.

"You first, by all means." Will said, sweeping his hand toward it in an inviting gesture.

Archer looked again, then said "Don't mind if I do." He walked into the low center of the deck and examined the chair for a moment. It was big, white and boxy, with shiny black cushions and a smattering of colorful controls on the armrests. Taking a deep breath, he climbed into the chair and sat down.

"It's comfortable, anyway," he said, "but feels a little bit more like a pedestal than a chair."

"On a ship this big, maybe you need the Captain to be a larger-than-life figure." Will said as he went to the forward stations. "There's two sets of controls here. One's got to be the helm. Maybe the other's navigation?"

"Split the functions? It's possible. Anything's possible."

Will nodded in agreement, then arbitrarily chose the seat on the left and sat down. He looked at the controls. Still lots of colors but no markings. On a whim, he pressed one. He was slightly startled by the sound of mechanical gears, and he watched in amazement as another scope emerged from the left side of the control panel. When it was in position, he looked into it.

"Targeting scope." He said, looking back at Archer.

"So it's armed." Archer said. He sat back in the chair and looked around the bridge. "What is it about this thing? Where did it come from? And why 'Enterprise'? Is it one of a kind, like my ship?"

"Don't think so." Will said. "Did you catch the number on the saucer when you saw the name? If we can take it literally, then somewhere out there there are seventeen hundred more just like it."

"Maybe...but I'm more interested in how Seventeen Hundred and One got here."

Sato felt kind of silly just standing in the open lift. T'Pol seemed deep in thought, but showed no other sign of what was going on in her head. Finally the Ensign couldn't stand it anymore.

"Okay, I'll ask." She said. "Where do we go?"

They had kind of a dilemma: the first two teams had got off without a hitch, mainly because they knew exactly where they needed to be, and thus could tell the lift. The captains went to the Bridge, the engineers went to Engineering. These names would correspond to sections on any ship, but the name of where they wanted to be could be any of a number of different things.

"It could be called anything," she continued, "like 'Historical Archive', or just 'Archive', or 'Computer Center', 'Data Center', 'Processing Center'...what do you think?"

"I think," T'Pol said, finally, "that I will defer to your opinion."

"My opinion? Why?"

"From what I've seen, this vessel could only have been built by humans or by a race familiar with human design philosophy. The most obvious clue to this is the fact that the name of the vessel is written in the Human language English. It is logical to assume, therefore, that a human with an academic knowledge of the English language would be best suited to finding his way in a strange ship under these circumstances. That makes your guess much more useful than mine. We need to find out information about this ship and it's origins. If we assume that information can be found in a single space, what would you call it?"

Then Sato became lost in thought. "It would have to be something simple," she thought aloud, "colloquial, that the transit system could take you to immediately. Something that everybody on the ship would recognize for what it was as soon as they heard the name, and if it holds information on everything..."

She shrugged, then grabbed the control. T'Pol followed suit, and Sato said out loud: "Archive."

The lift closed and started to move. Sato grinned and looked at T'Pol, who responded with a slight nod.

Tucker and Mercurio had found it necessary to search for the Engine Room. the lift had only let them out on the same deck. After trying a few doors they found the entrance to Engineering in the center of an out-of-the-way corridor. They stepped inside, and Tucker's mouth dropped.

"That's it," He said as he looked around, "now I'm officially stunned."

He'd never seen such a clean, empty engine room before. They were standing on an upper level catwalk, surveying the space with their eyes. There were a few scattered wall panels with a smattering of multicolored controls, along with some more elaborate control stations along the wall below them. That was it, aside from a glassed-off room to their left. There was one thing missing, that was driving both of them nuts. Mercurio asked the question first.

"Where the hell is the Warp Reactor?"

"Let's find it." Tucker said, then descended the ladder that led to the lower level. Mercurio followed as he started to examine the control stations. Again, lots of switches with no clear markings met his gaze. He started to examine one of the screens as Mercurio went off on her own.

"This must be it!" She called out, drawing his attention. He turned and saw her leaning against the glass wall, looking inside. He went over to join her, and she started pointing things out. "I think those are electroplasma conduits over there, those are probably deuterium tanks, and that might be the reaction chamber in the center."

"All below that grated deck," Tucker said, then stepped back. He tapped the glass wall and then examined it. "And apparently out of reach. There's no way in without breaking the glass. I don't get it. Why go to all the trouble to build an Engine Room for an engine you can't reach? And why waste so much space on so few controls?"

"Maybe it's like the way Ulysses is designed." Mercurio said. "Maybe this space is just for routine maintenance and extraordinary situations."

"Then why make it so big? The controls I see here look like they could all be arranged on two big wall panels and laid out along a corridor. This room isn't really necessary at all. The engine is almost completely self-contained. It's like they added this place as an afterthought."

Mercurio was going to say something when Tucker's communicator sounded. "Archer to Tucker and T'Pol."

Tucker took the device out and flipped it open. "Tucker here."

"Any insights to share, 'Trip'?"

"We're still in the dark down here, Cap'n. We found Engineering, but all we've got is no answers and even more questions."

"So far, we have been unable to uncover any useful information, but we have discovered what might be a library." T'Pol said into her communicator. She was holding what she assumed were some kind of information storage devices. They'd been stored in a file and were roughly the same size and shape as the computer disks that Starfleet used, but they were featureless squares, as barren as the exterior of the ship. For some reason, they reminded her vaguely of blocks of wood. Sato had already tried to access one by putting it in a slot in the display table--a table with a three-screen display on top--but couldn't get the controls to work.

"Looks like we're all drawing a blank." Archer said. "Keep looking. Maybe we'll stumble onto something useful. Archer out." He closed his communicator and stared at the blank screen in front of him. "This is getting us nowhere." He said to Will.

"This may be too big for us." Will said. "We may have to call Starfleet or the Vulcans after all. I wonder if we could pull it out of here? Tow it back to a dock and let the Corps of Engineers pull it apart?"

"We'd need more than just our ships. Speaking of which, I better let everyone know how we're doing."

"That's about the size of it." Archer said. "We'll keep looking around here some more but I don't think we'll find anything useful until we can start taking it apart. We'll discuss that when we get back."

Reed was listening from his station on Enterprise's bridge. Though he was in command right now, he didn't feel it necessary to sit in the center chair. He was territorial enough about his Tactical station. "Very well, Captain." He said. "How long will you be?"

"We haven't been here long. Maybe another twenty minutes or so, just so we can cover a fair amount of ground. We'll keep you posted. Archer out."

The channel clicked off and Reed thought for a moment. "If they want to pull it off the surface we'll need at least two more Perseus-class starships plus a gaggle of maintenance tugs."

"Maybe the Vulcans have a tractor beam big enough to haul it up." Mayweather volunteered. "We still have to get it out of the rock."

"True. It's possible that we can adjust the new phase cannons to..." A warning light on his console interrupted his thought. "Proximity alert! There's another ship nearby, but..."

As he watched the forward screen, a small, sleek spacecraft appeared out of nowhere in orbit. It dashed toward the planet, lingered in the upper atmosphere for a few moments, then swung back out, turning onto a course to intercept Enterprise.

The ship rocked as twin energy beams lanced out and struck the outer hull. Reed polarized the hull as soon as he recovered, just seconds before the attacker made a second pass and swung out to a higher orbit.

"Pursue, Mr. Mayweather!" He ordered. "Armory, deploy phase cannons and load torpedoes!"

Then Ulysses hailed. "Ulysses to Enterprise! Do you require assistance?"

"Always glad to have a hand, Mr. Bridling! Try to get ahead of him and cut him off!"

"Acknowledged. Ulysses out!" With that, the other starship broke orbit and joined the pursuit.

"Open a channel to Captain Archer!" Reed said.

Archer and Will went straight to the lift as he gave Reed orders. "Be ready to come back and transport us up! In the meantime keep that ship close! If it has anything to do with this mystery ship I want to know about it! Archer out!" They entered the lift and started it moving to the transporter room. Archer contacted the others from inside. "Archer to T'Pol and Tucker!" When they acknowledged he went on: "Get back to the transporter room, now! Enterprise and Ulysses are under attack! I'll have Reed come back for us when we're all together in one spot!"

Soon the lift stopped and the doors opened. The two captains stepped out and saw two black-clad figures standing halfway down the corridor, energy weapons held ready.

The Starfleet officers were sitting ducks when the figures fired.

TBC...