ChEng a in peculiar room within the ship

The rotating depiction of the alien galaxy started to expand as the view drew closer. Million’s of points marking the myriad stars drew nearer and larger and within seconds the view had focused in past fantastic nebulae and multitudinous star clusters to eventually slow toward one stellar member, a class K like star. The light movie slowly approached through an outer asteroid belt and past two outer gas giants toward the fourth planet of the six-member system.

Now the scene dove into this planets greenish atmosphere to reveal multiple landmasses with sparse sea’s. The night side of the planet was alight with a continuous layout of what could only be described as a continental sized megopolis. Crossing to the dayside, David’s view was drawn toward a vast, open clearing within a continental city. Thousands of shiny ships adorned the park, identical to the one Rogers currently occupied. Then, just as quickly as the approach, the view withdrew out of the atmosphere and back to the system again, in time to see the star start to nova. Thousands of tiny silvery ships rose off the planet and scattered in thousands of trajectories but the scene David was watching stayed focused on one mirror-like ark. Obviously, the population was abandoning its system, and sure enough, as the scene followed this one ship, the star behind it disappeared in a blinding explosion marking the star’s death. As the system around it was methodically destroyed, the tiny ship slipped away. Like the thousand other ships that gradually were left from view, this one vessel jumped into what David surmised was a hyper-velocity type of drive, because suddenly the ship was millions of light years out from the bright shining nova behind it. Soon, the complete galactic view was behind the ship and the view swung around to follow it toward an obvious depiction of the Milky Way galaxy.

As the ship entered this galaxy and drew in to the Orion spur of the Sagittarius arm, the alien life boat approached and then landed within this very planetoid. Its journey concluded, the overhead light movie shut down and David found himself again within the confines of the thirty six spires, their rapid pulses of laser-like lights flashing around him in a symphony of silent music.

As if awakening, Rogers turned about and took a step toward the entrance. However, it was not there. During his sojourn among the galaxies, the door had silently closed. The featureless mirror-like enclosure surrounded him and there was no indication as to which direction he had entered the room. Looking to left and right Rogers saw only the many rotating dodecahedron’s silently communicating amongst themselves, the tri-colored beams flashing rapidly in a dazzling incomprehensible display.

David proceeded toward the nearest exterior point on the wall and in so stepping off the central icon on the floor, tripped across a hidden sensor of some kind. Suddenly the rotations ceased and the entire regiment of spires dropped half a meter toward the floor. The faceted orbs atop the spires shrank to about one third their original size and morphed into small, silhouetted outlines of myriad alien shapes, each similar in appearance. Large eye’s from thirty six directions stared directly at David from atop truncated bi-pedal bodies, wide shouldered and thin hipped, the two leg’s of each being jointed backwards from the humanoid norm. Neither nose, mouth nor ears were discernible upon the bone-crested heads, and their two long slender arms terminated in four digits of noticeable length.

Curious as to the method of depiction of the tiny organisms, David cautiously reached out his right hand and hesitantly passed it through the nearest small alien. Meeting no resistance, his gloved fingers passed amid the projection without encountering any resistance whatever.

‘Projected display,’ David thought, surmising a holographic method of transmission.

Slowly he made a circle of the shortened spire, trying to ascertain the aperture or aperture’s of the projection. As he passed between the spire and its neighbors, subtle variations occurred in the depicted creature, indicating that his body was interrupting the projection source. Thus, David determined that every semi-flat polygon light source was projecting toward all the nearby spires, creating the multitude tiny life forms atop each neighbor.

Returning to the center of the assembly, David stepped purposely upon the floor design, deeming it a trigger of some sort. It had sensed his presence before to start the history display, so David hoped that there would be more information forthcoming if he triggered it again. Foolish perhaps, but his curiosity outweighed his caution.

As suspected, his weight or presence set again in motion the multitude polygons under the tiny alien figures, and the light display proceeded again. This time however, all the small figures turned to face him. Slightly alarmed at their large eyed scrutiny, as if they were in fact real life forms and not projections, Rogers attempted to step off the trigger, but the thought no sooner entered his mind when the outer ring of spires’ light emitting facets all instantaneously focused on his head. Twelve crimson lights entered his mind and held him steadfast. He no longer had the thought or will to move.

Mysteriously held, David’s field of view perceived that the innerinformation bearing  polygenic projectors had stopped revolving and now pale, soft yellowish-orange light reached slowly forward toward him from the three within his view. He surmised that the other three behind him were doing likewise. As the beams caressed his head, he felt a sensation akin to a masseuse rubbing his scalp. The gentle tingle of soft manipulation.

The six information-bearing lights probed within Rogers’ mind, searching for the learning centers of his brain. Having located the centers within seconds, David’s view became darkened and the transfer of information began. Held motionless and without mercy, Rogers’ body remained outwardly placental and relaxed looking. However, his mind was ablaze with language and history and medicine and physics. A corner of David’s consciousness rebelled at the invasion, howling silently in agony. Time stopped and the ordeal swept on within his screaming mind. 

*             *             *

Syntron contacted his executive officer as he began to backtrack through the alien vessel.

"Commander Riker, I have lost contact with our chief engineer. Proceed back to the last point which you saw him and we will retrace our steps. I will attempt to register him on my tricorder."

Tapping his com Riker responded.

"Aye Sir I will meet you back at the entrance"

Looking around at the ship Riker paused for a moment hoping the alien vessel did not have any more dangerous secrets to reveal.  With that pause Riker took a breath and hurried quickly towards the entrance where the other officers had separated.

This time when he had arrived back to the planetoid's surface, Syntron brought the tricorder he had used when his was the chief science officer aboard the Artemis. Even though it was banged and scuffed up as a result of all of their harrowing escapes dealing with the Azimuth Horizon Anomaly, it was still a very trustworthy device in the perception of the captain.

He engaged the tricorder and attempted to hone in on the mixed Human and Romulan biosign. At first nothing registered, but as he began traveling further into the corridors of the vessel, a very faint signal began to emerge.  He then focused on the signal as he navigated his way through the ship toward the source.

After traversing through the corridors of the alien ship, the captain found himself within meters of the signal, but blocked by an apparent wall.  As he walked around the wall looking for a way to access into the room, Syntron suddenly felt a wave of pain emanating from the chief engineer inside. His Vulcan senses began to filter out the pain aspect in an attempt to hone-in on any useful thoughts emanating from commander Rogers.

In flickering fragments of thoughts deciphered from the troubled engineer, the Vulcan could begin to sense how access was gained into the room. He repositioned himself along the corridor, as he glimpsed within the mind of Rogers, when the wall itself before him suddenly began to turn opaque. Immediately, a series of alien glyphs scrolled horizontally followed by a light flashing green across the hallway. As the opaque wall began to dissolve, Syntron espied the chief engineer across the cavernous room and without delay headed toward him.

Syntron ignored the spectacle of lights and colors radiating around him as he leaned over the engineer.

"Commander Rogers, can you hear me?"

There was no response, but the pain being endured within the officer was palpable. Syntron continued to move around his chief engineer trying to determine what was causing the stress to this engineer. In a moment of desperation, Syntron reached his hands toward Rogers and placed the tips of his fingers on the helmet just above key locations in which he would normally use to place pressure on key nerves and blood vessels of his chief engineer.

It was an extremely rare occurrence for this Vulcan to initiate a telepathic link. He avoided the extremely personal nature of this contact except in the most urgent of circumstances, which this situation seemed to be.

As the psionic connection was established despite a minor separation caused by the helmet, Syntron's mind was immediately flooded with an invasion of alien information; so much so that the Vulcan began to lose the link to David's thoughts. Yet the Vulcan  fought the onslaught with mental barriers and fought he way through to reach the chief engineer.

"My mind to your mind, my thoughts to your thoughts" Syntron began in obvious distress.   "Our thoughts are becoming one..."

Riker caught up to the captain just in time to see him arch forward in obvious pain.  As he approached Captain Syntron Riker noticed the bulkhead he was standing in front of began to flicker and fade.  It reminded Riker of an electrical problem on the holodeck.

"Captain are...."

Riker's sentence was cut off as the alien glyphs on the bulkhead began to swirl and move and Syntron began to shake.  This was a mental lock, Riker knew it right away he had seen enough telepathic members in his years in the Maquis camps as a child.  Hoping for a moment the Captain was doing something to look for Commander Rogers Riker stepped up behind him, drew his phaser pistol and assumed a defensive position.

"You probably can't hear me in there Captain, but keep looking I have got your back."

A veritable catalog of glyphs penetrated David’s subconscious mind, collating under various headings matching to his own language. Once established as an anchor point for communication, the glyphs seemed to transform within his mind’s eye into his own standard language. Then the onslaught continued.

Everything about these aliens was based on the heximal base system. The Senary base-6 numeral system was economical relative to higher base systems, and based on the semi-prime of the first two prime numbers. All prime numbers after the first two have a one or five as the final digit when expressed in base six forms as well as all even perfect numbers, after six, have the numeral’s forty-four as the final two digits. The ease of use and conversion was phenomenal.

Rogers now knew, or felt, that this room was a central computer hub, but not directly related to the running of the ark. More of an encyclopedia type of archive, the thirty-six spires were nodes for information storage and retrieval. However, the alien physiology, which had no aural or verbal communication, was psionic based and transmitted through a field of sub-space unknown to this galaxy. David surmised that this field was part of what the Vulcan and Betazoid species used in their mind communications.

Under the painful download of information, Rogers now understood that this central computer was under duress as well. The nanite’s it had gathered from surrounding space, under its sweep for material, had compromised the long term restructuring of this planetoids biology to support them. Now, their timeline had been shortened and this part of the system, this repository, was fighting the other sub-sets of the ship under a conflict of interest. The nanite’s had been exclude form access to this repository and now, this main computer was trying to regain control over what it perceived as an internal threat.

Upon detection of the humans within the ship, the computer had mentally reached out, via the medium of manipulated light waves like the six now reading and writing into Rogers’ mind, to try to save the nest it watched over. Invisible and multi-spectrum light communications had sought, read and rejected many of the minds encountered, and some minds that could not be read, until the wayward wanderings of Commander Rogers had brought his accessible mind into closer proximity to itself. Seizing his subconscious, the ship had guided David to the very spot he was on in order to communicate and perhaps reinstate the core program of the ark. Terraform and colonize.

Under the influx of painful data, David thought he detected a calming presence. Although his body was held fast by this computers manipulation of his musculature system, Rogers could detect a faint presence not related to this room or ship. Something intruded upon his connection to the ship. It disturbed the connection that the six invisible light beams balanced upon his mind. Another psionic intrusion began to permeate into David’s consciousness. But this one, albeit akin to the computers, didn’t intrude, but compliment. As though permission was being sought, not intrusion.

Feeling the new presence was benign, David’s mind sought it out, as an escape route from the painful intrusion flooding in from the ship.

‘Our thoughts’, David mentally repeated the echo in his mind. “Become as one …’

Syntron labored to keep his telepathic connection active while constricting the flood of information penetrating the engineer's mind and thus his own high capacity Vulcan intellect occurring at an incredible rate.

Off in the distance, the captain could also perceive the brief message conveyed from his executive officer, Commander Riker. Although he did not process the words verbatim, Syntron understood the intention of the message: his first officer was there at his side to assist in any way possible.

As he began to decipher the information being relayed from the alien vessel into the engineer, the captain also began to siphon off a degree of the deluge associated as a consequence of alien enlightenment from Rogers, much like a tributary may reduce the flow of water in a raging river. Syntron coupled this with Vulcan meditation in a mental process to cultivate calm and insight into both he and Commander Rogers to help suppress the negative effects of this intense transfer of information.

Once this was all set in place, Syntron then began to reach for Rogers subconscious mind once again.

"Follow the path of my thoughts Commander Rogers" the Vulcan began to convey telepathically. "You may feel a strange euphoria, but I can lead you to an area of safety, away from the intensity of information currently flooding your thoughts."

Syntron repositioned his gloved fingers slightly on the engineer's visor as he pressed forward.

"Open your mind to my thoughts... you must continue to move toward this path Commander.. away from the concentration and ubiquitous nature of this alien communication." 

‘Move toward this path’,crept into David’s mind.

‘Yes, the path of least resistance,’he thought to himself. The flow of picturesque telemetry began to ebb, along with some of the pain. It seemed … logical … to follow this new line of thought. Logical and …

‘Too Easy!’

The revelation thundered into David’s back consciousness as it became clear to him. The machine, this computer part of it, had found a new avenue of progress in its primary mission. The Vulcan mind melded to his own was more powerful, but if subverted, would allow for control of not only its owner, but of its transportation. Control this captain, and control the Phoenix. The tremendous resources of the federation starship, as read in the chief engineer’s memories, could complete the mission and defeat the nanite control of the ark’s other computational parts.

Within the room, the next ring of six spires sprang to life. Barely perceptible line’s of the same pale orange light that had entrapped Rogers’ mind reached toward Captain Syntron in an effort to overcome the mental barriers surrounding his mind. The ark needed more resources, and although an engineer had reliable capacity toward getting them, this Vulcan captain had the resources and the authority. Command codes and captain’s level security which lay beyond the knowledge contained within the engineer entity.

The nanite infestation had finally broken into this last bastion of the alien ark computer systems. Like the rest of the ship, now the entire resources of it would be to gather the needed resources to complete the terraforming and start anew the alien life stored within it. The next ring of twelve spires sprang into action. Bright yellowish green light sprang up in a ring surrounding the two inner rings and the human’s encapsulated within. Crackling with suppressed energy, the barrier boded ill for anything that may cross it’s protective lines.

As Syntron continued to reach out telepathically toward the thoughts of his chief engineer, he suddenly became aware of the encroachment of a powerful force from within the room. He could sense from his connection with David Rogers what this alien system intended: to use them to complete the objective of terraforming this planetoid expeditiously. The nanites had disrupted the encoded timed sequence of events built into this alien system which had in turn increased its level of activity and intensity almost a thousand-fold.

Ironically the captain realized, this entire situation was a result of their own happenstance of events far away from this planetoid when several of these nanites were expelled from the overheated compartments of the Phoenix within the nebula.  They unknowingly set into motion the chain of events leading to their current predicament and therefore were responsible for coming up with a way to resolve this. But at this moment, the captain was more than preoccupied as he fought hard to resist the intrusion of this powerful alien psionic force as it struggled furiously to break through the layer of mental barriers that the captain had erected.  He was becoming mentally exhausted.

In a desperate attempt to break this stalemate, Syntron reached out on a different neural pathway, to directly communicate with the alien central processing unit. This was a very risky proposition, but he had learned that occasionally, desperate situations call for unorthodox approaches.

With all of the concentration and focus he could muster, the Vulcan sent out his telepathic message.

"I am Syntron. The commanding officer of the starship Phoenix. We are now aware of the intrusion of the nanites into your systems."

He could feel the force of the psionic current shift toward this new channel and with additional perseverance and responded immediately.

"We can help to rectify this intrusion, but do not try to achieve a resolution by forcing your will upon us. You may permanently damage us and loss any opportunity to achieve your goal of extracting these nanites."

Syntron felt the psionic force working against him ease up a slight bit. It was not gone, but it was enough to allow him to concentrate on his message rather than building additional mental barriers for protection.

"Aboard my vessel, I have the architect of these nanites. She, along with my crew specialists, can devise a plan to eradicate these invaders from your systems. But in return, you must free my crew member from this psionic control that you have imposed."

For the moment, all remained quiet and calm as the proposal was possibly being processed.

 Unable to penetrate the Captain entity’s mind barrier, the alien computer then intensified its search within the commander entity’s mind. If what this Captain entity said were true then certain memories within the first would need to be searched for verification. This ark was not the only project in this galaxy, but its core program must succeed. If not for the arks, the race would cease.

 Outwardly, the pale lines of light played over and through the helmeted figures, to the minds within. Searching deeper into Rogers’ memories, among billions of synaptic paths, the entity discovered basic academy lessons.

“”‘Starfleet.””

“”Deep space exploratory and defense service.””

‘’”Starfleet officers … official representatives … first contact.””

David writhed under the intensified search. It seemed that his body had betrayed him, and the sharp rise in the intrusive lights probing his mind stood out in stark contrast to his motionless physic. Still the alien computer searched.

""Starfleet Uniform Code … Starfleet Rules of Conduct …””

““Starfleet Regulations … a Starfleet captain is authorized to preserve the lives of his crew by any justifiable means.””

And deeper still.

“”Starfleet Protocols … Medical; Privacy; Safety; Security … In the event of hostile alien takeover the EMH is to deactivate and wait for rescue.””

“”Starfleet Directives … Before engaging alien species in battle, any and all attempts to make first contact and achieve nonmilitary resolution must be made.””

The computer saw that it was getting closer to the truth behind this Vulcan captain’s thoughts. So it continued deeper.

“Starfleet General Orders.””

“”General Order Six … If all life aboard a Federation starship has perished ….””

“”General Order One … No starship may interfere with the normal development of any life or society.””

The computer ran a simulation over a two-second span and deduced that, from the Commander entity’s memories, the Captain entity could be trusted to a ninety-six point seven percent success probability. Response was forthcoming. It re-intensified the psionic connection with the captain entity.

“Agreed.”

With the one psionic statement into the captain entity’s mind, the alien computer ceased the probe. Every line of light from every spire blinked out and Rogers, freed and mentally exhausted, collapsed from out of Syntron’s fingers and slumped to the floor unconscious. 

Captain Syntron instantly felt the invasive presence of the psionic force released upon the one communicated thought. In reaction, this caused him to lunge forward a bit just as the engineer slipped from his fingers onto the floor of the ship.

Syntron bent down next to the unconscious engineer just as Riker came leaping by his side.

"Commander Riker, we will need to carry our chief engineer to the nearest transporter position. I will beam up to the Phoenix with him while you gather the other away team members and return with them back to the ship."

Leaning down Commander Riker lifted the unconscious officer up and draped him over his shoulders.  Nodding to the Captain Riker responded.

"Agreed Sir.  As soon as we are out of this room I will make comms with the team and make sure everyone is accounted for."

Despite being strong the sandbagged officer was a bit much and Riker struggled slightly before Captain Syntron leaned in and grabbed Commander Rogers' other arm.  Looking for the Captain to set the pace Commander Riker acknowledged the task at hand.

"Lets get out of here"

((XO response))

Taking a position on either side of the unconscious officer, the captain and his first officer positioned the arms of the engineer over each of their shoulders and traversed back through the ship until they reach the entryway. They then took a direct path to the nearest pattern enhancers. Riker then backed away from the triangulation perimeter as the captain engaged his com.

"Syntron to Phoenix. Two to transport directly to sickbay."

 Within a few seconds a voice came through his headset.

"Acknowledged Captain. Prepare for transport."

Within twenty seconds, the two officers shimmered off of the planetoid and arrived into sickbay to an awaiting medical team.

Seeing the Captain and Engineer transport away Riker activated his commspad.

"This is Commander Riker to all away team personnel.  Gather up all materials, supplies and equipment and head to the nearest transport location.  We are evacuating the area immediately"

As his comm shut off Riker headed back towards the main area to coordinate the away team withdraw.