Arrival
Posted on Tue Jan 27th, 2026 @ 9:31pm by Commander Jenna Ramthorne & Lieutenant Commander Bonnie "Bon-Bon" Durnell & Captain Rhenora Kaylen & Commander Savar cha'Salik hei-Surak Talek-sen-deen & Lieutenant Commander Aurora Vali & Lieutenant JG Rowan Hale & Ensign Kitiuas Thenis ie-Jia'anKahr & Commander Jennifer Baldric
3,336 words; about a 17 minute read
Mission:
Beholder
Location: Skygowan
The ship shifted as the gravimetric waves washed over the ship, a subtle movement. It was no longer imperceptible but still not significant.
"Where are those gravimetric waves originating from?" The Captain asked as the Sunfire slid into orbit, her warp engines restine whilst the ship maintained a synchronous rotation with the planet below.
Kit frowned "If the sensors are correct, through the Beholder." Just as she finished giving her comment her console pinged; the data she had requested on Krulmuth-B portal as well as the Time Ziggurat. She was working on a possible solution to their problem.
Bonnie glanced up from her station, fingers already moving as the data aligned. “Correct, Captain. The gravimetric wave traces back to Vadia 9, to the Beholder statue, routed through the subspace corridor to Skygowan. It wasn’t random drift,” she added, eyes narrowing slightly. “The waveform’s coherence suggests intent, almost like the ship was being pinged.”
"Being pinged means it....she....knows we are here and possibly needs help. This may sound crazy but can those waves be decoded into a message? Morse code or the like?" Rhenora mused as she settled into the command chair. "Could we send a message back on the same wavelength if so?'
Bonnies face went all screwy for a second, "Um... maybe... perhaps... I'd not thought along those lines, but..." Her fingers lagged behind her mind as the pattern began to take shape, reluctant and undeniable, pulling her thinking down a path she hadn’t meant to walk yet.
"Before we make assumptions, we need data. Let me know if the computer can decode any sort of message." The Captain looked at Aurora. "Are you sensing anything?"
Aurora was sitting concentrating on something. “To be honest Captain, I’m not sure what I’m sensing. There’s something but…” she shook her head. “It could be blocking me from getting a sense, or I’m picking up on something else. I honestly don’t know.”
"It's ok, you can only feel what you feel and if it doesn't make sense then it's ok." Rhenora replied warmly, turning her attention back to the sensors. The Sunfire was in orbit and the Captain was preparing her away team to beam down and assess the situation.
"Commander Savar, take Commanders Baldric, House, Durnell, Vali and Ensign Thenis down to Skygowan with you. Locate the cleric and provide an update before we proceed on to Vadia 9 and assessing the situation there."
“Captain, we’re in standard orbit over Skygowen. Position is locked and stable directly above Plinth. All systems are holding within normal parameters. Transporter windows are clear, no atmospheric interference, and we’re well inside safety margins. You’ve got a solid green light for transports whenever you’re ready.”
"Send the team down as soon as they're ready, I'll inform the government of their arrival" Kaylen returned to her seat and watched as those assigned to the away team left to prepare and headed down to the planet.
""Open a channel to the Skygowan government chambers, northern hemisphere, cube 1 I believe" she waited for the comms officer to open the channel, a moment later an aide answered the hail.
"You are the Federation ship? Like the one before many rotations ago? You have another Beholder for us?"
"My name is Captain Kaylen of the USS Sunfire. The Federation received your request for help, I have a team beaming down shortly to your central square. We hope to assist in your situation." The Captain replied, wondering where the idea of a new Beholder had come from. She could see the fear in the aide's eyes.
Savar nodded crisply, "Aye Captain. We will beam down now." he looked to the others Rhenora had mentioned, "To the transporter and prepare to beam down but stop by the Quartermaster and outfit yourselves with suitable equipment and phasers."
Kitiuas was already signaling her relief to the bridge as she was simultaneously downloading her data to her tricorder and PaDD. She was sure the answer to the problem was in the Möbius loop: that was tied to temporal phasing that is tied to interspatial teleportation. The math was there, the science was there; the irony was it was ancient Orion and Nausicaan technology and the knowledge of the atavachron and its functions and the knowledge of the Golana temporal field generators. She was working on trying to create a Möbius loop that would be trapped in an Infinity loop. She almost had the mathematics down to create such a device and program. The energy source would be the ley lines that connected to Skygowan. Kit wanted to consult with Bonnie and get her thoughts.
Bonnie hesitated at the threshold of the transporter room, eyes flicking once to the weapons locker before deliberately turning away. Phasers made problems quieter, not better... and she’d learned long ago that her hands were safer when they were building instead of breaking. She snagged an engineering kit from the rack, clipped her tricorder to her belt, and did a quick weight check like a ritual. Tools. Data. Answers. That was her armor. With a steadying breath, she stepped onto the pad, already half-lost in the equations she hoped the planet below would let her understand.
Baldric strode in a moment later, tricorder on one hip, phaser on the other and a symbiote sized complex batting around her brain. She couldn't wait to get down to the planet and get her teeth into this mystery. If the Beholder statue was shifting and adjusting, sending out pulse waves, it was a serious scientific moment.
Aurora arrived prepared, as much as she hated having to use a phaser it made sense to have one with her just incase. She nodded politely to those already present.
Savar stood patiently as members of the away team trickled into the transporter room. Once they were all here they would beam down.
A few moments later the team materialized near the main clerical building, the towering temples seemingly floating above them in their massive geometric forms.
"This place is nuts" Baldric breathed as they took in their surroundings.
Kit gave a small laugh, “Come now Commander surely you have been to many strange and exotic planets. This one is no different.” She then nudged Lieutenant Commander Durnell, in a subvocal whisper “I need you to review this data. Let me know if we can pull it off if need be.” She then hands her the PaDD she brought with her theory and design of a Möbius loop: that was tied to temporal phasing that is tied to interspatial teleportation. Kit then adjusted her Dancerblade and Phaser before opening her Tricorder.
Bonnie took the PaDD with questioning eyes and commented to Baldric absently about the structures. "Bipyramids or rather elongated octahedrons. The Construction of which was no small feet of engineering, combining antigravitational unilateral planes to construct them in-place. It would have been a sight to behold." She then turned her eyes back to the data PaDD in an effort to understand what Kit was trying to convey.
Baldric smirked at Kit's comment before replying. "The moment we lose our wonder and excitement of the universe, both on a planet or in space, is the moment we stop being explorers" she said simply, before spying the building they were supposed ro be going to. "This way"
Kit walked next to Bonnie, subvocalized to Bonnie “I need you to go over the science and math. If it is correct I believe we have a solution to the problem at hand. Would trap the Vezda in an artificial Möbius loop. It would tie their current prison into temporal phasing that is tied to interspatial teleportation.” She paused as they continued their toward the building. “We would use the planets ties to ‘Ley Lines’ to power the generation of the Möbius loop. This new ‘prison’ would continually loop in interspatial teleportation that would continually be in temporal phasing. In short the Vezda would be forever looping about in their ‘prison’ never able to effect an escape as the ‘prison’ is bouncing between interspatial corridors that are always shifting from time points of the known universe. Tricky part is going to be convincing everyone of the plan, it does touch and enter various ‘alternate’ universes and even fluidic space.” Kit allowed Bonnie to contemplate what she had just said. As they walked she sighed internally; she had just revealed closely gaurded historical knowledge of ancient Orions and Nausicaan societies, the knowledge that also brought down the respective species to what they were now.
Aurora looked around their surroundings. “This place is fascinating, to coin a well used Vulcan phrase.
One of the clerics descended the large stairs towards the away team, robes slithering along behind as though never quite able to keep up.
"You must be the Starfleet crew. It has been many rotations since your kind has set foot on our sacred planet" he said simply.
Savar quirked an eyebrow at Aurora at her use of the word fascinating. "Indeed it is Aurora." He replied before turning as a cleric approached and addressed them. "You are correct. We are Starfleet from the USS Sunfire, I am Commander Savar, may I present Commander Baldric, Commander House, Lieutenant Vali, Ensign Thenis and Lieutenant Commander Durnell."
The cleric nodded and turned without speaking, motioning for the team to follow up the stairs. He entered the building, standing on a platform that took them many floors higher, revealing an open layer of one of the floating towers. Before them stood the gateway. Closed but not locked. A number of guards with weapons raised were preventing anything unwanted from emerging through the gateway.
Bonnie walked and counted without meaning to. Steps folded into ratios, ratios into curves. The Möbius math kept trying to finish itself in her head, looping back with that smug inevitability she both loved and distrusted. One surface, one edge, no inside or outside, except that was a lie when you added time. Time always cheated. Ley lines as a power source made an ugly kind of sense. Ancient sense. The sort of solution that predated safety interlocks and ethics committees, where the universe was treated like a lever instead of a patient. She could feel the equations wanting to close, wanting to snap into something stable and horrifyingly elegant. Trap the Vezda in motion, not walls. A prison made of never arriving. Her stomach tightened. Clever solutions were dangerous. The cleverest ones most of all.
She forced part of her attention outward. Stone beneath her boots, worn smooth by centuries of ritual feet. Air that smelled faintly metallic, like charged dust before a storm. Floating architecture that made her inner engineer itch and her inner child stare. Bonnie reminded herself to blink, to notice the cleric’s robes whispering against the stairs, the guards’ grips too tight on their weapons. Reality mattered. You missed it at your peril.
Fluidic space was the sticking point. Always was. You could model it, approximate it, beg it politely with math, but it never behaved. It resented being mapped. Bonnie’s thoughts snagged there, worrying the problem like a loose thread. If the loop drifted even a fraction out of phase, it wouldn’t be a prison. It would be a door. Possibly into somewhere very loud and very hungry.
She swallowed and adjusted her grip on the tricorder. No phaser weight at her side. Good. Tools over threats. Always. If this worked, it would be because the universe agreed with them, not because they forced it. As the gateway came into view, closed, waiting, heavy with potential, Bonnie felt the math quiet slightly, as if listening too. The equations weren’t done with her. Neither, apparently, was the universe.
Baldric watched as the cleric nodded tersely to the guards then stepped forward to open the gateway, the guards charging their weapons in case something came through. No words were spoken, as though this place was sacred. A few moments later the gateway retracted like a doorway, revealing the grey prison of Vadia 9 beyond. The Commander sucked in a deep breath, and mentally prepared herself.
Bonnie stepped forward and immediately hated the math of the place. The floor accepted her weight, but only as a suggestion, like it was double-checking with another universe before agreeing to hold her up. Light slid sideways instead of down, washing the space in a pallid glow that felt borrowed rather than generated, and her depth perception quietly resigned. Then she saw the Beholder. It stood on its dais not like a statue placed there, but like a conclusion the room had reached long before she arrived. The proportions were wrong in a way her brain kept trying, and failing, to correct. Too large when she looked directly at it, subtly smaller when she glanced away, as if it resented being measured. The surface wasn’t stone so much as the idea of stone, veined with phase noise, edges softening and sharpening depending on her angle of approach. Bonnie’s instincts, honed by explosions, bad wiring, and worse plans, all agreed on one thing at once: this thing was not decoration, and it was not passive.
As she took another step, the environment rearranged itself just enough to make her doubt she’d moved at all. The Beholder didn’t watch her in any conventional sense, no obvious eyes tracking, no threatening motion, but the pressure of attention settled in her chest anyway, the way it does when a system starts logging errors before you’ve touched a single control. The dais anchored the space around it, reality behaving better in its immediate vicinity, which only made the rest of Vadia IX feel more dishonest by comparison. Bonnie felt the familiar itch behind her eyes, the one that meant patterns were forming faster than her fingers could chase them down. This was a demonstration. Proof that the universe could be persuaded, very politely, to say no... and mean it.
Kit had been discreetly using her science tricorder, the numbers were falling into place. The environment was ripe, and similar to very ancient technology, resembling technology long forgotten by two very distinct cultures, Orion and Nausicaan. The very technology that led to their height and glory and also led to their downfall. She wondered if Bonnie had the mathematics figured, it all came down to Fluidic space and how it interacted with the time stream. She had read the works of Niyciz, a famous Orion scientist and expert on Time, Space, and Fluidic Space interactions, and the works of the ancient Nausicaan scientist Shirceek, and his work on time portals and their use as prisons. She shuddered at that, the Nausicaans were brilliant and brutal, worse back in their height of power and influence, then they were in modern times. They were the origin of her thoughts on the Time Möbius loop prison. Kit took comfort in the thought that at least they wouldn’t do to the Vezda what the Nausicaan’s had done to their prisoners, a fatal gut wound then trapped in a Time Möbius loop prison, never dying and constantly bleeding and pain. Kit shuddered and came to at the beep from her tricorder.
Jennifer sucked in a breath, awestruck at the diamensions of thisnplace and how space seemed to intetgrate into a stone prison as though it happened every day of the week. Slowly she releases the air as she came before the statue, identifying the cracks that were ever so subtly moving, shifting and readjusting, as though constantly compensating for a known weakness against an unrelenting enemy. She felt sorrow for this poor woman, having been selected by the uniform to go throug horrible events and wind up being a guardian for a foul tempered galactic demon.
Kit looked at why the tricorder was beeping. ~Crap, heavy tachyon particles are being emitted.~ she thought. “Folks we may have a problem.” Kit states in an anxious voice. “There are heavy tachyon parti….” Kit suddenly seems to vanish before everyone’s eyes.
Jenna’s fingers paused over the board, the hum of the gateway bleeding into the sensors in a way she didn’t like. She checked the readouts once, then again, sharper this time, before lifting her eyes toward the command chair. “Captain… I’ve lost all ground contact with the away team,” she reported evenly, voice calm but no longer casual. “No telemetry, no bio signs, no residual carrier wave. Whatever that gateway is doing on the other side, it’s no longer letting us see through it.”
Rhenora glanced up from the PADD she was reading on the history of Vadia 9. "Hrmmm " the two options werr clear - remain at Skygowan, or relocate to Vadia 9 in case the away team needed aid. There was a third option...
"Hail the planet, request the gateway be left open and we'll drop a communications relay on the dais to boost the signal. If they're concerned we can target the gateway and destroy it at the first sign of the Vezda" she ordered, knowing that action would strand her team on a prison planet with said Vezda.
“Aye, Captain.” The nav board chimed softly as she routed power and began plotting. “Skygowan’s control lattice is responding. Opening a priority channel now.” She tilted her head slightly, listening as the hail went out, then continued without breaking rhythm.
“I can position a micro-relay on the dais with a tight-beam carrier tied directly into Sunfire’s sensor suite. It’ll give us a clearer picture of whatever the gateway is doing in real time.” A brief pause, fingers dancing as targeting brackets settled into place. “Weapons solutions on the gateway can be held at standby, pre-aligned and cold. If the Vezda show their hand, we won’t waste a second.” Her gaze flicked back to Rhenora, steady and ready. “Standing by for authorization.”
The first indication reached Sickbay as absence.
Not a flatline. Not an alarm cascade. Just the sudden withdrawal of data that had been present a moment before.
Rowan looked up from the console as the medical systems attempted to reconcile the gap. Away team biosigns had not degraded or terminated. They had simply stopped reporting, as if the space between signal and receiver no longer agreed on how connection worked.
He brought the medical sensors up manually, bypassing summary filters. No delayed echoes. No residual carrier trace. No sign of physiological distress bleeding through as background noise.
That was not reassuring.
He tapped his comm badge. “Sickbay to Bridge.”
“Go ahead, Doctor,” Captain Kaylen replied.
“I have complete loss of away team biometric telemetry,” Rowan said evenly. “No indication of injury or system failure. Readings did not decay or spike before termination. They were present, then absent.”
A pause, brief but intentional.
“That suggests interference at the transmission level rather than a biological event. If this were hostile or lethal I would expect noise. There is none.”
He shifted his stance slightly, grounding himself against the console. “Recommend against assuming casualties. At present this looks more like displacement or occlusion than harm.”
Another pause, this one smaller.
“If the environment they entered is altering local physics, medical monitoring may simply not be meaningful until contact is reestablished.”
Rowan left the channel open a second longer than necessary, then closed it without waiting for reply. He turned back to Sickbay, fingers moving faster now as he pulled up contingency protocols he hoped would remain academic.
Mass casualty response if they returned injured.
Exotic exposure parameters.
Temporal displacement differentials.
He stopped at the last one, stared at it, then left the file open.
Whatever had reached out through the Beholder had done so without violence. Without warning. Without explanation.
That made it harder to treat.
Rowan adjusted the biobeds, set them to standby, and waited.
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