It is dark. That is my first sensory impression, and it is not a particularly useful one.
I look down. There is a dim glow... I am on a transport pad, as I expected, and there is a control board beside it, as normal. But the light from the Solanae control panels is usually brighter than this - and there are normally other lights, besides, set high on the curving walls.
There are no sounds. The air is cool, but there is a faint smell of something - burning, perhaps? My footsteps break the silence as I step off the pad. I go around to the side of the transporter, and study the console.
Half the board is blank, dead. There are a few icons visible on the other half, but they are dim, and even as I watch, they flicker. I check. The system seems to be in an emergency standby mode. There is no way to activate the communications system, and - though it is clearly viable as a destination point - the transporter pad lacks capacity, at present, to transport anyone out. And the board is still flickering. This is not normal for Solanae technology. It suggests, to me, serious damage, somewhere.
I pull out my tricorder, and set it to display a blank test screen, then turn up the image brightness as high as it will go. As an improvised flashlight, it is... acceptable. I shine my light around the walls, trying to work out what sort of a place this is.
I am in a small hemispherical chamber, not unlike the one where I first found myself, though this one lacks windows. There is one doorway - I frown at the sight. It has a standard Solanae round door, but the panels are retracted part-way into the frame. The door is jammed, about two-thirds open.
There are lighting elements in the walls, but they are dark and dead. The corridor beyond the doorway, too, appears to be dark.
I have no choice but to explore the corridor. There is no other exit, and I cannot remain here indefinitely. I could wish for more information.... I risk an active scan with the tricorder. If I am reading its data correctly, I am still within the main body of the spire, somewhat lower down than the chamber with the windows, and - unfortunately - well within the interfering energy screens. There is no way I can contact my crew through my combadge, and the transporter pad's communications are out. I must, therefore, explore further.
The tricorder tells me the corridor opens onto another, larger, chamber in a hundred metres or so. I clamber over the frozen segments of the door, and set off.
The corridor slopes down gently. Again, the lighting elements are dead. As an experiment, I shut off the tricorder, and wait for a while, until my eyes have had time to grow accustomed to the dark. But there is nothing. No light at all - I am too far along the curve of the corridor to see the weak glow of the control panel, and there is no other light source. There are only the vague, amorphous forms of phosphenes slowly surging across my vision. It is disturbing. I snap the tricorder open again; in the darkness, its screen seems dazzling.
There is another doorway at the end of the corridor. As with the first, the door is partly open. There is a vast empty space beyond, but I can make out no details. I climb past the segments of the door. The smell of burning is quite strong, now. Dimly, I hear a gentle surging sound, and air currents move on my face. This empty space may be large enough to support its own air circulation.
I shine the tricorder around me. I am on a walkway, apparently running around the wall of a large spherical chamber. From the curvature of the walls, I estimate its diameter somewhere in the neighbourhood of three hundred and twenty metres. There are vague shapes out towards the centre, but I catch only glimpses of them in the light of my tricorder; I can make out no details.
But there is another shape nearby, on the walkway: the semi-ovoid form of one of the sphere's free-floating information terminals. Except this one is not floating freely, but lying, inert, on the walkway. I make my way over to it, treading cautiously. This area has clearly sustained damage, somehow, and though the walkway seems secure enough, my imagination is painting pictures of a vast yawning gulf beneath me.
The information terminal appears dead, but I can see no external signs of damage. I touch the hard white outer shell; it is cold, nothing more. I turn the device over, so that I can see where its control panel and holographic display globe should be -
My fingers brush against the glassy surface of the control panel, and suddenly the terminal shivers. There is a series of clicks and a low hum, shockingly loud in the quietness. Lights glimmer and flash on the panel, and the terminal stirs beneath my hands. I stand up, and step back. The control panel flashes and pulses with light, and the terminal rises off the walkway, and turns itself upright in mid-air. Evidently, I have triggered some sort of hard reset. But what disabled the device in the first place?
We have some experience of the Solanae data projectors, by now. I step up to the terminal, tap out a sequence on the panel. The holographic display globe forms in the air above it. There are few icons available on it, but I decipher a sequence I have seen before. I tap in another set of commands, whose functions can be summarized as engage local backup systems.
For a few seconds, nothing happens; then, the light comes.
It is dim; only a few of the lighting elements inside the spherical chamber come alive. But they are sufficient. The walkway goes all around the waist of the vast sphere, and from three points radial catwalks extend out to the centre. And, running vertically from round floor to domed ceiling, there are cables. Dozens of them, some the thickness of my arm, some the thickness of my body, twining about each other - and all of them charred and blackened, as if subjected to intense heat.
I pace slowly around the wall of the chamber until I reach a catwalk, then step cautiously onto it. It bears my weight... though, now I look closely, there is scoring and oxidation on the bare metal of its floor plates and guard rails, as if it too has been in a fire. I make my way along until I reach the nearest of the thick cables.
The charring on it is deep and extensive; the outer layers are black and flaking away. I scan with my tricorder, and frown at the results. The outer layer, as one might expect, is - or was - an insulator; it has denatured and oxidised under the influence of an intense energy release. The inner core of the cable -
I sit cross-legged on the walkway, and try to interpret the results I am seeing, using the tricorder's data libraries for comparisons and cross-checks. A picture emerges - a picture that I do not like.
The core of the cable is a fused conglomerate of rare-earth isotopes, and the data libraries have tentative matches for what it might have been like before it fused. A rare thing, in fact - a high-temperature superconductor. High-temperature being a relative term, naturally; this substance should have retained superconducting properties up to some three hundred Kelvin.
But it has not. Somehow, even this material has been subjected to a power surge which destabilized its molecular structure... or, to put it simply, it has been burned out.
A cursory scan confirms that the others are the same.
Superconducting cables, burned out. The one before me now could channel the full output of a starship's warp core without overloading - and it is by no means the largest one here. The forces at work in this chamber have been... indescribable. Too much, even, for Solanae materials and engineering.
Was it from the energy pulse that wrecked the Tapiola? Or, earlier, when the energies of the ion stream were diverted away? I have no way to tell. But a more important question now engages my mind. Whatever happened, it was arranged either by the Voth or the directing intelligence within the spire.
What will happen, now, if they try the same thing again?
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