ARTIFACT

Doppelgänger Orbit
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)
Stardate 2261.24

- 1925 hours -

Ensign Rand was already waiting for them in the transporter room, already in a field jacket, mid way into adjusting the settings on her phaser and the targeting scope on her monocle. She'd taken Spock's advice and brought her issued side arm this time and was feeling especially pleased with herself, to the extreme chagrin of Ensign Dallas and Security Chief McCahil who both arrived only seconds ahead of the Captain and science officer, still bleary eyed from an impromptu cat nap.

Miri arrived last, struggling into a field jacket that had been issued to her by the quarter master literally minutes earlier. She looked as comfortable in a Starfleet uniform as she ever did in the dingy rags she'd been wearing when Enterprise found her. She looked excited, yet explosively nervous. So much like a raw cadet on a first assignment. "Ensign," Kirk said, her voice snapping her immediately to attention, "Are you checked out on the EM-102 combat phaser?"

Miri shook her head, slightly nervous. "No, Sir. Just the hand phaser, but I haven't been issued one yet."

"Now's a good time to learn. So here's the situation," and he addressed this as much to the rest of the landing party as to Miri, "There's a Gorn capsule heading for Southern England, and I want to have a look to see what they're after. I don't want to be there when they arrive, so this is a quick look, in and out. Miri, since you have more experience with this planet than anyone else, you'll come along as our resident expert."

"I... uh... Sir," Miri shrank a little, "I've never actually been to England."

"Neither have I." Kirk strode to the equipment locker and snatched out three tricorders, handing one of each to Spock and Miri. Life support belts came next, again one for each of them, and Kirk said, "You know about these, right?"

Miri nodded, "The life support belt. Makes you invincible."

"Hardly invincible, Ensign. The overshield adheres to the boundary layer of a conductive surface, namely your skin and some of your equipment. It reacts to any sudden change in local energy density, like as a radiation surge or a bullet, and instantly expands to provide protection. The power cells can only sustain the field for a few minutes at a time, and the more strain you put on it faster they drain. When you hear a low-pitched beeping, it means the shield's dead and you're vulnerable."

"Got it. So, what if-" her next question was already being answered as Kirk recovered a phaser rifle from the rack and presented it to Miri with both hands, "Ooh!"

"It handles a lot like the hand phasers," Kirk said, handing it over to her, "There's a bit more recoil, but it can handle a longer duty cycle so you can sweep with the beam if you need to. Default is for the stun setting, but remember that won't render complete unconsciousness unless you get a headshot or a longer contact in the center of mass."

Miri took this all in and then nodded. Since to her it was basically a death ray, all of these things seemed immediately intuitive. Obviously, this weapon could be programmed to do all kinds of different things to her enemies in all kinds of different ways, but the Captain had intentionally locked it onto its easiest-to-use setting because he didn't want her fiddling with the advanced settings she wasn't trained for. Which, more or less, was exactly what Gideon did when he first taught her how to shoot... "Is there a safety switch?" she asked, suddenly remembering her first lesson from way back then.

Kirk smiled, "The phaser knows if an authorized user is holding it. It will not fire - ever - unless you pull the trigger."

"Sounds simple enough," although she suspected it wouldn't be. Miri reflected that unlike her fellow survivors, her Starfleet companions were totally unfamiliar with her home planet and the strange things that had been happening to it over the years (to the extent it was possible to be familiar with them at all). She could always count on the Onlies to know what to do if things went seriously sideways; with Starfleet, she wasn't so sure.

"I want you on the lookout for reavers," he told her, "The tricorder has a range of about five kilometers, but you should use the rifle's scope for visual inspections too."

"Yes, Captain... One question. In the unlikely event I have to change from the stun setting...?"

"The selector on the right side above the trigger guard. Power levels are on back, above the cheek rest."

"Right..." and Miri found the appropriate controls on the side of the rifle and checked herself to make sure it was indeed set to stun, and checked the power level to make sure it was up to maximum.

Kirk grinned, "Don't trust me, is that it?"

Miri shrugged, slightly embarassed, "Gideon told me once, 'Never ever fire a weapon you haven't checked yourself.'"

Spock admired her diligence, but not her tact. "Phasers are not firearms, Ensign, and they operate at such a level of complexity that their maintenance and upkeep are the exclusive responsibility of trained engineers."

"Yes, Sir. I'll try to remember that."

"Chief," Kirk looked to the transporter technicians, now that his team was basically assembled, "do you have a fix on the Gorn capsule's landing site?"

"Just got it from Ensign Chekov, Sir. And get this: if they don't make any course corrections, their landing site is within five kilometers of Stonehenge."

"Really?"

"Always wanted to go there," Ensign Rand said.

"No time like the present." Kirk shot her a big obnoxious toothy grin and instructed the technicians, "Set us down... let's say, fifty meters south of the monument. It's a good concealed location, we'll use it as a beamout site."

"Aye, Sir."

Doctor McCoy came through the hatch now, wearing a medikit on his shoulder and a scowl on his face. "Jim, what the hell kinda-"

"The Gorn are headed for England. We're just gonna pop in and take a look before they get there. Who knows? They might know something we don't."

"Maybe they're just going down to collect centipedes or something?"

Spock said as he stepped onto the transporter pad, "So far we have yet to land an away team on the British islands. At the very least this will allow for a more thorough report."

"Sure beats Gaza, anyway," Rand said, stepping up behind him. Kirk followed next, and the two bleary eyed security officers last of all.

McCoy took in the enthusiasm of the three, then the apparent lethargy of the other two. His hesitation tripled on the spot. "Dallas, McCahil, you two look half asleep."

"We're fine, Doctor. Let's just get this over with."

McCoy sighed and stepped onto the pad with them. Since the transporter only had six pads, he squeezed into a space next to their youngest member and patted her reassuringly on the shoulder, "How you feeling Miri?"

"Nervous, Sir."

"Scared?"

"No, Sir. Just been a long time since I've worked with grups."

McCoy raised a brow.

"Grownups, I mean. Adults."

McCoy growled, "What adults?"

Once the Doctor was finally situated, Kirk ordered, "Energize," and McCoy clenched his teeth, closed his eyes and waited with shrill terror to be dismantled molecule by molecule and fired across space like a human particle beam. He began to feel the tingle of the phase coils buzzing through his skin, crackling behind his eyes, inverting his ear canals and dropping his scalp into his liver...

"There it is," Kirk said just in front of him, and McCoy opened his eyes to discover that he had already materialized on the planet's surface before he had ever felt the first of these sensations. "Wait a minute..."

"Is that it?" Rand asked in complete puzzlement.

Miri looked in that direction and nodded, "I recognize it from the almanacs. That's it alright."

Spock snapped open his tricorder and started scanning intensely. He didn't even need to say it, the word "fascinating" was printed on his face like the registry on Enterprise's hull. "That," Spock said, "is not the stonehenge of Earth."

What it was - as they all saw to their complete disbelief - was an enormous obelisk some ten meters high, mounted on a tall platform like a stage or shrine. Spock's tricorder showed him that it was in the exact latitude and longitude in which the Stonehenge monument should have been, and yet his immediate readings had a spectral pattern that told him the monument was not manmade, nor was it even made of stone.

"What do you make of that, Spock?"

"Unknown, Captain. It corresponds to nothing in the Earth archeological catalog."

"What about alien artifacts?"

Spock adjusted the reference mode on the tricorder and tied it directly into Enterprise' library computer. In a few moments, he had his answer, "No known alien architecture on file."

Miri looked at them puzzled. Her first instinct was to ask whether or not the obelisk had been made by humans... but then she remembered, this entire planet - including her - was actually artificial anyway, which lead to the question, "Could it have been made by my people?"

Kirk started at the question, "Could it?"

"Well, it could have been constructed by whoever made my planet, right? On the other hand, if it's older than the rest of the planet, it could be something indigenous to... well... whatever this planet was before it changed."

"True... and this does seem to be the Gorn's destination," Kirk said, and started walking towards the obelisk. Miri was right. If it wasn't created by the force that duplicated this planet, it could easily be a surviving artifact from whatever this planet was transformed from. That would make it a valuable point of reference to trace the true age of this world; the Gorn wouldn't be interested in it otherwise. "Rand, McCahil, take up positions one hundred meters to the east and west. Dallas, Miri, you're with us."

Rand and McCahil started on an angle, both in opposite directions wide of the obelisk. Kirk, meanwhile, led the rest of the team to the shadow of the object and spread out to all sides of it while Spock squatted at the base. He unpacked the field science kit with one hand and kept his tricorder trained on it with the other. Kirk, meanwhile, flipped open his communicator and checked the timer: the Gorn capsule would make planetfall in another fifty two minutes.

Spock made the best of his time. First thing's first, he set his tricorder to an ultrasound mode and set the device to map the entire surface of the monument down to nanometer resolution. The tricorder could do this on its own, so he set it down facing the obelisk and unpacked the rest of his gear.

"Need a hand, Spock?" McCoy set the medical kit down and squatted next to the science gear. Spock nodded a welcome, and McCoy added two more hands to the process.

Two minutes later the scan cycle was finished. McCoy collected a core drill from the kit while Spock set the tricorder to a EM-scan mode, modulated pulses of ground and metal-penetrating radar. The scan image from the inside of the object came back completely blank, as if only the outermost surface of the monument even existed. After an ultrasound sweep turned back the same blank results, Spock reported, "I am unable to scan the interior of the object."

McCoy started up the core drill and stared down the eyepiece, focussing on a tiny section of the corner of the platform. A narrow force beam snapped out from the end of the drill, sliced into the surface of the material a few nanometers thick and then deposited those samples inside of a sealed plastic slide for examination later. He pulled the slide out of the drill and slipped it into a container in the science kit before starting up the steps to the obelisk itself. Then he looked back at the specimen container and marveled: the thin film of dusty grains on the slide sparkled like a lightning storm in miniature and then vanished. "Whatever it's made of, I can't get a good sample of it. The material just disintegrates into nothing."

"It isn't material at all," Spock said, squinting at his tricorder screen, "Trace analysis is picking up ozone anomalies and ion distribution. Resonance scan reads it as a type of electrically charged phased-matter, similar to the quantum resonators in Suliban cloaking devices."

"Suliban technology?" McCoy shook his head in wonder, "That's a long way off."

"The similarity is noteworthy, but not necessarily meaningful. It also has a superficial similarity to our own defensive force fields, but vastly more coherent."

"Holograms," Kirk said, noticing a trend in this analysis, "Or something like it."

"Far more substantial than what we would call a hologram, Captain. But, again, similar in principle." Spock set the tricorder down and unfolded from the science kit a large telescoping device shaped like a crossbow with a tripod section on the base of it. He arranged it with the arms perpendicular to the obelisk and then set the device active. Everyone - even Rand and McCahil in the distance - felt a slight vibration in the ground as the device emitted a series of powerful gravity waves and measured the reaction from the obelisk. Spock picked up the tricorder again and set it to "node" mode, and the instrument results appeared on its screen, "Fascinating!"

Kirk had known Spock just long enough to be able to tell when his science officer had discovered something valuable. He bounded down from the platform and knelt down next to him, silently awaiting a report.

"The platform here seems to extend deep below the surface, far beyond the range of our sensor equipment. It seems to extend at least as deep as the mantle, possibly all the way to the planet's core."

Kirk looked at the platform now totally awestruck. This was just the tip of one mind-numbingly huge ice berg after all. "Mass reading?"

"Strictly speaking, a phased-matter structure of this type is characterized by a relative lack of mass, although I estimate potential energies equivalent to some two hundred and forty kilograms."

"Can you get an indication of the overall shape?"

Spock frowned, "Gravitational sensors are not that precise. However, based on ground-penetrating radar to a depth of two hundred meters, I estimate the platform is the top of an extremely long isosceles pyramid... judging by the angle, the apex of which is at a depth of some six thousand three hundred and twenty kilometers, give or take twenty kilometers."

All the way to the core, Kirk realized. He suddenly had a premonition of some alien creature manifesting a steering wheel on the side of the obelisk and piloting this planet through the cosmos like a giant yacht.

"This obelisk looks different from the platform. Maybe a real substance to this one," McCoy said from his spot at the top of the platform, "the samples don't disintegrate."

Spock held up his tricorder and scanned it himself, "There is a slight energy reaction... it seems to be metallic, but my scans are not reflecting back."

"So there's no way of knowing what's inside it?" Kirk asked.

"The core drill is able to penetrate the surface, Captain, so it may be possible to cut through it."

Kirk shook his head, "I don't want to resort to that yet. For all we know this could be some kind of... burial ground, or something."

Spock raised a brow, "A force-barrier tomb powered by geothermal energy?"

"Geothermal?"

"I can think of little other reason for the extreme depth of the object, Captain. It is probably drawing energy directly from the action of the planet's core, using either a dilithium matrix or some type of thermocouple. That may also be sustaining its existence, as a forcefield of this coherence and complexity would obviously require a tremendous power source."

Ensign Dallas said, "I didn't know you could use dilithium in a geothermal generator..."

"Dilithium crystals are well valued for their energy conversion properties," Spock cut him off, "in particular, its capacity to regulate the conversion of antiparticles in high-energy conditions. The high temperature and magnetic potentials of the deep mantle may suffice for that."

"You think there could be a warp reactor somewhere inside this thing?" McCoy asked, suddenly very unhappy to find himself still standing on it.

"Perhaps, Doctor. Assuming it does extend as far as the planet's core, this device may be capable of force outputs in the thousands of isotons."

McCoy carefully stepped down from the platform and placed the core drill back in the science kit.

Spock, meanwhile, unpacked a large flat device wit a single-leg stand facing the obelisk and set it to ran scans. A hair thin line of green light swept the structure from base to tip, several times in a row, slowly at first and then a series of rapid sweeps. Spock read the data off his tricorder, then frowned in disappointment, "Microscopic DNA scans show no anomalies, indigenous life only."

"Meaning there's no trace of the aliens who put this thing here."

Spock nodded.

"You know, we might be able to get a good look at the root of this ting, maybe see how deep it g-" Kirk's words were drowned out by a series of high pitched chirps from a phaser rifle a few meters away. He dropped into the grass and looked up to see Miri drawing a bead on something close to the horizon, something at which she was now firing a series of very carefully aimed two-round bursts as if she was trying to carve a sculpture with her phaser. Which was somewhat worrisome, now that Kirk thought about it; Miri was an excellent marksman who normally wouldn't need more than one shot to hit a single target. That she was still firing now suggested... "Reavers?" he asked, coming back to his feet.

"No..." she stopped firing now, but kept one eye glued to the phaser's aim sight, "Maybe. I'm not sure..."

"What does it look like?"

"I don't know. I'm not even sure it was really there. It was just a shadow..."

Spock held up his tricorder and started to scan.

Kirk walked over to her side, where the Ensign-in-training was still drawing a bead on something with her phaser rifle. "Miri, I know you're nervous but..."

"I'm sure I hit one. The others are staying low," she said, panning back and forth with her phaser and closing her other eye. The rifle's targeting sensor was her only view of the world now, whatever it was she was looking at, "I don't think they're reavers. They're moving too slowly."

"What do they look like?"

She squinted through the eyepiece, but shook her head. "It's shaped like a person, but it's... well, transparent. It's like a mirage or something."

Kirk looked over his shoulder at Spock. The Vulcan was scowling at the tricorder readings. "Whatever it is, it does not fully register on my tricorder. But it is there. Moving away from us at a rate of zero point seven meters per second, approximately eight hundred meters away."

Now the Captain looked at her in surprise, "How did you even see it at this distance?"

"I was looking for Reavers, Sir, scanning the horizon. I saw... something in the brush, and I fired at it. I hit one, the others dropped into the grass."

"Indeterminate life form readings. And an anomaly in the ultra-violet range..." Spock put away his tricorder and brooded, "It appears we are being watched, Captain."

"Some Gorn scouts have used optical camouflage. Could this be them?"

"Doubtful, Captain. The Gorn camouflage technique was largely biochemical, similar to Suliban adaptations. This pattern... almost reminds me of-"

Any further speculation was brought to an abrupt end by an explosion overhead, a single monstrous thunderclap of a sonic boom as something passed through the atmosphere at a fantastic rate of speed. Kirk saw the source of it almost before he had time to ponder the implications, falling out of the sky like a fireball from the heavens, so bright it almost outshined the sun. "What in...?"

"The Gorn capsule, Captain. Nearly half an hour ahead of schedule," Spock already had his tricorder out again and aimed directly at it, shielding his eyes with his free hand, "Fascinating... It's using a force field as an aeroshell, vastly increasing its drag coefficient. It will descend to this vicinity within fifteen minutes."

"Pack it up, Spock," Kirk said as he whipped out his communicator, "Rand, McCahil, get over here on the double! We're beaming out!"

"Yes Sir!"

"Aye Sir!"

Spock and McCoy collapsed and re-stowed the science equipment in the kit, not quite as neatly as regulation but enough to close the box and take it with them at least. That accomplished, Kirk waited a handful of seconds for Rand and McCahil to catch up, then keyed up Enterprise's frequency and called to the ship. "Kirk to Enterprise, standby for transport."

His response - somehow unsurprisingly - was a hiss of static through which Uhura's voice barely penetrated, "Standby, away team. That capsule's reentry is putting out alot of radiation, we're having to reposition to get a lock."

"I was afraid of that..." actually, this was the very reason Kirk had wanted to use Stonehenge as a beamout site, hoping that the natural cover of the monument would conceal them if the reentry plume disrupted the ship's line of sight. The non-existence of the henge had caught him so off guard that he'd almost forgotten about the need for cover. "Tall grass nearby," he said, gesturing to the field around them, "we'll move out two hundred meters and lay low. Miri, you keep an eye on that whatever-it-is out there. Move out!" Kirk lead by example, of course, sprinting off due east in the opposite direction of the whatever-it-was that Miri had fired at. The rest of the team followed in his heels, not quite in a sprint but fast enough to keep the Captain in sight so they would at least know when to stop and gather around him.