Station #46: Breaking the First Seal

Posted on Sun Nov 3rd, 2024 @ 10:03pm by Lieutenant Ainkara "Kara"

Mission: FINAL JUDGEMENT
Location: Unre star system
Timeline: Current

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Kara took her time sliding into a temperature control body glove, complete with feet and hands reminiscent to a the pajama style called a onezie. Albeit, a form fitting second skin that was also a dry suit against water and other fluids. Once suited in that she began to attach the webgear for equipment and weapons placement, loading her gear full of what she thought she would need. Aside from her combadge, Kara also took a secondary flip-top communicator, sliding it into a slot and closing the cover over it sealing the velcro. A phase pistol, two divers knives, a tricorder and her palm PADD. Slung over her shoulders was a coiled length of high tension, high weight rope, with adhesion disks and a small grappling hook. Along with the normal rope she had a 'gun' filled with a liqui-cable. When fired the length would shoot out like any cable would, solidifying as it did so to create an instant rope capable of holding hundreds of kilo's of weight. If the cable was not broken or damaged too much then one simply retracted the cable back into the tube, which would re-liquify it and wait for the next use. It could only be used a few times before the liqui-cable could not liquify any further, at which point, the item could be discarded. As set and ready as she ever would be, Kara opened the aft hatch letting fold all the way down to the cavern floor before she descended. Her knee-high, clasp-lock all-terrain boots with matching gauntlets. The gauntlets provided a bracer on each forearm with electronic access to most of her equipment.

Getting to the floor, standing there with her boots, Kara tapped a control on her right bracer and the hatch closed up and she heard it lock. Wearing her spelunking helmet with a headlamp, and nanotech to shape as needed depending on environment, the Voran woman began her trek into the vast tunnel system that lay just beyond where her Delta was landed. As she proceeded, her tricorder in her left hand and her right hand open and kept near to her side for quick access to her holstered phase pistol. Kara had set the weapon the thermal five. Enough to kill if a being was hit in the wrong place, but overall, not deadly. It would and could incapacitate most beings as they suffered a punch through the skin and the heat and radiation damage the energy bolts tended to leave behind. Unlike most of her Starfleet companions, Kara was not opposed to dealing out pain and suffering when she, or those she cared for, were in danger. As Resch had once told her: that is called fuck around and find out. She could not help but grin to herself at the thought of her friend, light years away.

The tricorder began to bleep as it registered something on scans that did not seem normal. Stopping her forward progress Kara stood with feet shoulder width apart as she tapped at the tricorder, reviewing the latest scans. According to the scans there were pressure cracks all around them, through the rock and gravel, due to the tectonic disturbances. Even large quakes had residual minor quakes as everything settled after the initial pressure release. But, what had the tricorder bleeping was the fact that the tunnel she was scanning ahead of herself looked more like an engineered corridor, but with the quakes a section of the facility had broken on the left side, the floor now angled at a thirty degree angle to the left as the uplifted rock and stone had turned the corridor like a soup can on its side. The architecture seemed familiar, somehow.

Internally activating the biosynthetic section of her brain, placed there by the Iconians, Kara's left eye showed the amber-colored reticle within spinning as it focused on the things around her. Even as her gaze went back and forth over the terrain ahead, her vision becoming a night vision of sorts with perfect color and clarity, several times small circles honed in on certain objects and architecture, even as her eyes kept scanning. Her internal Heuristic/CPU brain recognized two distinct designs for the cavernous structure. Iconion and Preserver. The Preservers! Her mind lit up with possibilities. They were those responsible for the created 'humanoid' looking bipedal species other than Humans. They had peppered the galaxy with their created beings, and some say, it reached far into the universe itself, not just the Milky Way galaxy.

Finding a new want to explore further, Kara kept going forward. She used her reticle-vision, her own vision, and the tricorder to navigate through the corridors. The tilted section of floor had had a waist deep amount of water over top of the angled flooring, with the cold temperature of the water being felt slightly through her body glove. Any, and all, side passages scanned were just niches. Calling on her memory Kara was pretty sure these were designed for armed Iconian Thralls to stand guard. Formidable warriors, crystalline in structure, standing seven feet tall. They used a lance-spear as their main weapon, for both melee and piercing, but also for ranged combat as the tip of the spear could fire a large bolt of plasma energy. Deadly to whatever it hit, and to the Thralls themselves if the weapons were ever turned on them.

Coming to a large doorway with a sphincter style enclosure, Kara came in and knelt on one knee to examine it. The reticle was working and showing her a Preserver control panel, the only thing being Iconian on the device being the technology used to get it back up and running. Someone had added a lock mechanism of Iconian design, but the motherboard for the door control would still access the Preserver algorithm to bypass the Iconian attempt to replace the lock mechanism. With the Preservers, they used an audio-syncretic system. You hit the access key and then the board would do a Simon Says, with tones being put forth and certain keys lighting up briefly as the sounds were shown as to what key they came from. It seemed simple enough until one tried it. The tones given were also combined at certain keys, two tones intermingled to sound like two others. Without discerning hearing to pick up that subtle variance, then ever getting the door open would be impossible by using the control panel. Tapping the initial panel key she waited as it ran through its musical notes, watching with her good eye and her enhanced eye all while her ears locked in on any tonal differences. A-ha, two right there, she thought, even as the panel stopped its sing-song programming.

Kara grinned to herself as she reached out and tapped the first two keys according to tones, then with two fingers, one from each hand, she tapped certain keys, then back to a singular. The tone matched and there was a heavy machinery sound and a clunk from within the stonework and permacrete of the Preserver facility. The door opened in its unique twisting fashion. Kara gathered her things and entered the dark chamber, which lit up with soft white illumination the moment her boots touched the inner floor. No light sources of any kind, just an ambient illumination good enough to see well in, yet not garish and bright. At least it isn't the lavender hue of Iconian facilities, Kara thought. Looking around she noted that this chamber had a few consoles placed up against the outside walls. So, as was her due as a science officer, Kara made over to them to see what she could discover.

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