Nightfall

[IDMR]

Draft one, 15th July, 2003

The spires of shining, sickly purple flickered and dimmed, one by one, as the energy which sustained it was drained away. On the barren landscape where the lonesome spires stood in haphazard clutches, the last sparks of illumination slowly died, bathing the plains in a wine-dark sea. A figure stood alone at the bottom of a spire, its frail form silhouetted by the dim glow. Stiffly, almost painfully, it turned, and walked away. His steps broke the silence of the still plains, echoing of unseen obstacles.

The spires dimmed.

The figure stopped before a strange edifice half again as tall as the figure itself, and held out a misshapen block of stone. Burning its mind into the stone, the figure projected a mirage of thoughts and patterns. With a soft hiss, the edifice opened and a receptacle extended. With uncharacteristic haste, it placed the stone onto the receptacle. The small vessel retracted into the body of the edifice, and the long form of the edifice was once again whole, without any hint of a break in the body. With another hiss, the sharply shaped pool of darkness shot into the heavens. A soft sigh escaping its lips, the last Iconian squatted next to the platform, and slept.

The dark arrow streaked from the plains, and then the planet. It sped past the majestic wreckage which filled the skies of the planet, monuments to a dead people, directly for the star of the system. It plunged past the burning vacuum of the corona into the boiling gases of the photosphere, past the plasma sea into the life-giving heart of the Star. The black pod begun to glow, and then deformed, battered by the awesome pressure and energy at the centre of the star. With mechanical tenacity it sought to shield the stone lying in its womb, but finally, it gave way, boiling away, its constituents scattered and thrown apart.

The stone drifted, floating as though on a sea of mercury, bobbing gently in the gigantic radiation pressure. It was calculated that the stone would stay in the centre of the star for long enough for even it to be destroyed, and the probability that it might be brought even near the convection zones was so vanishingly small that it need not be considered. Of course, by then, there was little else they could afford. And so it was. And yet, the stone drifted, ever away from the heart of the star.

Millennia later, it reached the volatile hydrogen seas. It surged across the boiling seas to freedom on the crests of a stellar prominence, to the great void.

Again the stone drifted across space on a lonely journey, for space is empty, and stars were rare even in the deepest heart of galaxies, and distances between them immense. Yet it did. Its trajectory was an almost perfect one aimed at where a star system would be in twenty five millennia, about the time it would take for the stone, thrown by that particularly violent stellar flare to almost half a percent the speed of light [1] would take to traverse the distance.


Above the desert, a meteor flashed across the skies on its suicidal course to the land below, and shattered the colossal rock it struck [2]. The meteor impacted, all things considered, without significant harm, and rested, curiously cool, on the surface of the planet which will some day be known as Vulcan.

[1]: Solar flares can reach about a thousand kilometres per second.
[2]: Stone, even small ones, impacting at that sort of velocity carries a lot of energy. And there is a reason why it wasn’t vapourised on its way down…


Author's Notes: Some poetic license were taken at the description of the interior of a star. You will, of course, forgive me for any inconsistency and errors in the descriptions.

As some of the older members might know, I am one of the first member and moderator of the board, but is prone to sudden burst of disappearances. I am now back, and I hope, for some time. Here is a small token of compensation I wish to provide for my prolong absence dereliction of duty.[/i]

[Grand Admiral Thrawn]

You're back!

[IDMR]

That I am. And somebody fill me in on what's been going on!

[Dalton]

That I am. And somebody fill me in on what's been going on!

Well, um, as you can tell, we had to decommission you as a moderator...

[IDMR]

That I am. And somebody fill me in on what's been going on!

Well, um, as you can tell, we had to decommission you as a moderator...

To be expected - I have, after all, been away for more than half a year - I was thinking more along the lines of what has been happening on the board itself.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Interesting work as usual, and I shall await to see where it is taken.

[phongn]

A bit short, IDMR. I think you should have fully written a chapter's worth then posted it.

[Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi]

It's a great piece. As for what you missed, there were some people from TrollKingdom that came over, I'd say the biggest invasion in our history. Ted was banned as well. Other than that, nothing big. Occasional flamewars erupt, people debate, sex is discussed, and so on.

[IDMR]

Draft one, 17th July, 2003

Chapter One
…Desire and loathing strangely mixed
On wild or hateful objects fixed
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Pains of Sleep

Tom Turner stride, his posture erect, his face set in painful determination, just as though he hadn’t been plague by night after night of half-remembered dreams, churning and shaking, deep into his sleep, and then the struggle, half-terrified, half-aroused, away from the unseen presence within his mind. He did not glance at his fellow archaeologists as he past them, nor returned their half-hearted greetings. He walked straight past the clutch of star fleet engineers working on the stripped-down warp core, the masses of cable and wires coiling in no apparent order at its base, towards a dull-black structure, rising out of the blasted plains of the old Iconian world. The last Iconian world, as far as Federation archaeology was able to ascertain, abandoned some two hundred thousand years ago, in a cataclysmic event when the entirety of the Iconian Empire simply ceased to exist.

Turner felt a stir rising as he approached the small shed at the base of the structure, but he stopped to survey it for one last time. The structure, a spire for want of a better term, rose some six hundred metres into the orange skies, its surface was covered with irregular patches of patterns, utterly still and yet suggestive of movement. What seemed to be fine etchings covered the entire surface of the spire, which the computers were even then analysing, but no model has yet been suggested, or even a complete mapping. For reason none of the engineers were able to fathom, whilst the data-images stayed constant, so there were no changes, every time they map the etching patterns, something slightly different turned up. For a structure so tall, it was very thin indeed, measuring less than thirty metres across at the base, and tapers quickly to a dizzying height of some six hundred metres. Around its base was a rocky trench some three metres wide and twice as deed, excavated out of the sand and solid basalt under it, and littered with industrial phasers, portable power generators and powered tools, amongst other debris. The spire, however, showed no sign of ending, and, indeed, ground sensors were unable to plot how far the spire went down after some two kilometres. Curiously enough, the phasers and powered tools, despite having performed extensive – and none too gentle – work on the trench, did not seem to have damaged the base of the spire at all, not even a scorch mark. Shaking himself out of the reverie, Tom walked the final few steps towards the shed.

Amelia Simmons, his long time associate and xeno-biologist, looked up at his approach with an uncertain smile.

“Morning, Tom. Slept well?”

Tom walked past her, and then paused, his mouth open as if to reply, and then, finally, stopped and replied, “no. No, I didn’t.”

“You and me both, Tom. And half the team planetside. Something about this place…” she paused, and glanced around, thoughtfully, “It is the spires, you now.”

Turner nodded. “I know. None of the sensors picked up anything – I checked, but Schmidt is running some numbers through the computer. Perhaps we’ll find something. This is not unusual, you know. Ancient sites causing psychosomatic reactions is quite well documented. This doesn’t seem dangerous so far, or would you feel safer if we let the Vulcans have their way here?” He finished with a grin.

“We’d still be taking readings from orbit at this rate.” Amelia answered, smiling, “but still, this…” She turned to the gesture at the excavations surrounding the base of the spire, and yelped as she found Lieutenant Collingwood standing not two feet behind her.

Collingwood wasn’t even looking at her. He brushed past her, not ungently, and saluted Tom Turner. “Sir, the warp core has been fully reconfigured according to your schematics. With the tauroid flux pattern at the bottom, the coupling matrix’s power output has increased by exactly the rate you predicted.” He grinned, a little foolishly, “we are ready to begin.”

Turner looked momentarily confused, and then nodded. “Very well. Wait for my signal, make the coupling on my mark, and power it through pattern alpha-2.”

Collingwood saluted, a little lazily, and left.

“Tom, do you really think we should do this now?”

“We must do this.”

***

In truth it neither slept nor wake, nor think, nor dream. It wound across the infinitesimal, its mind following. It was difficult to say whether it was aware. If it did react, its reactions were difficult to comprehend in our light. It seeped, flowed, throughout its void-realm, and then, suddenly turned, towards a spark of non-void.

“I shan’t open the portal, you know.”

The presence did not seem to notice, but merely encompass the non-void. It stretched, and crossed, and wove, in a way random yet patterned, chaotic yet ordered.

“You have slumbered for millennia. You are unready. Not yet.”

A sudden change, a shift and then all was as before.

“Even so. Now is not the time. The stars are not right.”

Calm in the presence, as it settled from its activity, slowly consuming. It grew, filled out.

Pattern began to shift. Energy, matter, fields, space, time – none of these theoretical constructs of Science sufficed to describe the changes – or even to perceive it. But there can be only one conclusion.

“It will not close forever, no.”

An image flashed. A site, milling with ant-like figures, faceless, uniform figures. And yet there is method to their madness. A wisp of smoke, a hint of haze seemed to rose from their complexions, trailing behind them as they move, weaving a leering pattern of an indeterminate, nameless design, suggesting to the dreaming mind perverse order. In the centre, or that which drew one’s attention immediately, stood a lone figure.

Pivot.

“You!” But there was no time for outrage. Silently, gods clashed in the realm of metaphysics.

***

“Must we?” Amelia asked. She was not happy about this at all, although she knew that Tom was right, and that this was acceptable risk there was a part of her which just wanted to get out of there. Ever since the expedition’s arrival at Epsilon Sigma III [1], they had been plagued by problems. Little things, an unexpected illness here, a sudden bout of temper there, nothing too frightful in and of itself, but when taken together, presented a picture of… lurking malignancy. And sleep. She knew that none of them had had a good night’s sleep since arrival. No drugs or treatment could alleviate that, and they invariably slept badly, and dreamt.

None of them could remember the dreams. Involuntarily, she shivered.

The sleep deprivation had taken a toll on the personnel. They wandered around, every day, listlessly picking at their tasks, and yet Tom… Tom was different. He was a man driven. He directed the engineers, the xeno-archaeologists and the excavators, conducting the project all by sheer force of will. And Amelia could tell from the whispers that he was being most unconventional in his methods, though she could not be sure, as her training was in xeno-biology. It would have made her glad ordinarily, and yet she felt nothing but apprehension. He was certainly driven, but by what? Breaking out of this chain of thought (one symptom for her is the tendency to wander), she shouted after the departing Tom.

“Activating this spire could be dangerous, you know.”

“Why did you say that?” Turner, on his way to the base of the spire, turned, and looked at her.

“I… We know nothing about these spires, what they were for, how they work, how can you just power it up? Anything may happen – or nothing – or you may damage it…”

Tom smiled, strangely, “the schematics analysis is quite clear. The connections at the base of the spire are almost certainly power couplings. As for the power output, we were able to give a reasonable approximation from the original power cables. I am certain that we shall find what we came to find.”

***

The presence sensed the changes. It would not be long now. It coiled around the piece of non-void, swiftly filling with void, and waited.

***

Turner stood at the base of the trench, at the main power coupling. There were eight, set equidistant to each other – a strange piece of order where there was so little. He knew that only one was necessary, howHe inspected the connection once more, and checked the cabling – all leading back to the transformer and then the warp core. All was in place. He tapped his com badge, and signalled the transfer.

Tom gazed, mesmerised, at the spire. Slowly it began to glow a sickly purple.

High above the planet, unknown forces aligned, stretching and straining the void.


[1]: Obviously I just made that up.


Author's notes: A rather bad chapter, I am afraid, and must be revised as soon as practicable. Unfortunately, I am leaving for Blighty on Tuesday, and likely shan't be around for two weeks, so I am posting this rather rough draft now. I apologise for the inordinate amount of background setting here, and I promise things will be moving soon. Honest!