Actions

Work Header

The Writing on the Wall

Summary:

January 2382: The Titan is exploring the abandoned surface of a ruined world, its sentient population long ago destroyed by war. While on the surface, Captain William Riker gets tossed through a time portal to the planet's ancient medieval past, with seemingly no hope of rescue by Titan's crew, unless he finds a way to leave a message that can survive the centuries and tell his crewmates when and where he is...

Notes:

Minor plot spoiler from the TNG novels A Time to Kill and a Time to Heal (Riker on Tezwa) and major plot spoilers from the TNG novel Doors Into Chaos and the TNG part of the Star Trek novel What Lay Beyond (Picard and the Iconian gateways).

Chapter Text

Riker swore loudly as he tripped over a loose stone. “What idiot designed a courtyard with stairs in the middle?”

“There used to be some sort of statue in the center,” said Commander Vale. She smirked. “Besides, you didn’t have to come. This is the first officer’s domain, not the captain’s.”

“Like I was going to miss out on a perfectly good away mission.” Riker rolled his eyes, then he noticed Lieutenant Commander Pazlar coming from around the corner. “What have you got, Commander?”

“I finally figured out why there seem to be two radically different styles of architecture on this world,” said Pazlar. “Because it was once inhabited by two radically different sentient races— a humanoid race, the Nocri, and a plant-based race, the Dhuldrods. As near as I can figure, they were at war since pretty much the beginning of their recorded history. The most recent records I’ve found speak of some kind of ‘doomsday weapon’ the Dhuldrods claimed was invented by the Nocri, and vice versa, and then suddenly everyone seemed to disappear.” She consulted a padd in her hand. “I don’t know exactly what the weapon was, but I have been able to rule out several possibilities. There’s no evidence of the kind of damage that would have been left behind by a nuclear weapon or an antimatter warhead. The buildings don’t show any signs of damage other than the wear and tear you would expect from millennia of disuse and neglect. However, there is one unusual fact that can’t be easily explained: the organic life here is at an unusually early stage of evolutionary development considering the age of the planet. That coupled with some schematics I found in a Nocri database would seem to suggest…”

“Suggest what?” asked Riker.

Pazlar shuddered. “That the weapon in question was thalaron-based.”

Riker shivered involuntarily, recalling the thalaron weapon Shinzon had nearly deployed against the Enterprise. “So instead of just targeting their enemies, they ended up exterminating all organic life on their world.”

“Looks like it,” said Pazlar.

“Captain,” he heard Deanna’s voice calling. He turned to see her and Keru approaching from the far side of the courtyard.

Riker smiled at his Imzadi, glad for the chance to think more pleasant thoughts. “Did you two find anything interesting?”

“You might say that,” said Deanna. “Come look at this…”

She led the away team to a small outpost on the edge of the former city. Inside was what appeared to be an enormous, sleek silver doorway to nowhere, carved with intricate, elaborate patterns. All around it were numerous control panels, dark and silent. Decorating the buttons scattered among the inactive screens was a series of intricate alien runes.

“I thought these looked familiar,” Troi said, gesturing to the runes. “So I ran a comparison against the computer’s language database, and it’s very closely related to several Iconian languages.”

“Iconian!” Riker’s eyebrows shot up. “So this is another one of their gateways? What’s it doing here?”

“From what we were able to translate, this looks like it was some sort of research station, and it’s several centuries younger than the surrounding ruins,” said Keru. “We think the Iconians discovered these ruins too and found them worthy of study, and then they abandoned the site along with the rest of their settlements.”

“They must have left through the gateway,” said Pazlar. “Was this gateway active like the others during the gateways crisis six years ago?”

“Presumably,” said Deanna, “but we have no way of telling now. Besides, it looks like it’s currently dormant, so Captain Picard’s mission to shut down the gateways was obviously a success.”

Riker paced slowly in a wide circle around the gateway. He reached out a hand and traced one of the carvings on the doorway. “I’ve always been a little jealous that Jean-Luc actually got to meet the Iconians, and even to use their gateways… It’s a shame that we had to shut down the network. These gateways could have been enormously useful for scientific research and public transportation, among other things.”

“We can still learn from what the Iconians left behind,” said Vale. “Maybe we’ll even be able to reverse-engineer them someday and build our own gateways.”

Riker grinned as he walked under the derelict portal’s archway. “Now that would be—.”

It was like the flipping of an old-fashioned light switch. One minute he was standing right in front of them, the next he was gone, just blinked out of existence like he was never there. The away team stared at the space where their captain had been, flabbergasted.

Vale recovered first. “All right, people, I want answers. Pazlar, get a science team to comb every inch of this place. If this gateway was somehow reactivated, I want to know when, how, and by whom. Keru, take a security team and sweep the ruins. Vale to Titan,” she said, striking her combadge, “begin a full sensor sweep of the planet for the captain. If we don’t find him here, we’ll search the other M-class worlds in this system.” She tapped her combadge again without waiting for Tuvok’s reply, then turned to Deanna, who alone out of all the members of the away team did not spring into action as soon as Vale started barking out orders, but continued to silently stare at the gateway. “Deanna, do you sense him anywhere nearby?”

Troi closed her eyes, reaching out with her empathic senses. When Riker had disappeared, part of her mind had seemed to simply go dark, as if a curtain had descended abruptly between her mind and Riker’s. When she extended her senses now, she could feel the beginning of that connection, like a ray of light in her mind, but it seemed to abruptly drop off into a black, starless void. She shivered, although it was actually rather hot on that nameless desert world, even indoors.

“I can’t tell if he’s nearby,” she said. “But I think he’s all right. At least he’s not seriously hurt or injured or—.” She stopped. “He’s fine,” she insisted.

Vale nodded slowly. “Okay. Let me know the minute you sense anything.” She tapped her combadge again. “Vale to Titan. Two to beam up.”

*******************************

Eight hours later there was still no sign of the captain. Not long after his disappearance, it was discovered that Pazlar’s tricorder, which had been set to passive mode, recorded a momentary energy surge when Riker touched the gateway, and again at the moment he passed through it. “Picard thought that the gateways operated partly on a psionic component, that the user could affect his choice of destinations by the power of thought” Pazlar said. “So most likely Captain Riker was sent to— well, wherever he was thinking of at the time. Deanna, do you remember what he was thinking right before he disappeared?”

“I’m not a telepath, Melora,” Deanna said through gritted teeth. “Besides, you know what he was thinking. He was saying it aloud, about using the gateways for research and travel.”

Vale groaned. “So you’re saying he could literally be anywhere?”

“I do not understand how this is even possible,” said Tuvok. “Even if the gateways could be revived— for lack of a better word— from a dormant state by thought alone, which itself has dire security implications for the other gateways, it was my understanding that Captain Picard’s action shut down the gateways permanently. So how could this one still be active?”

“Maybe it wasn’t connected to the network,” suggested Xin Ra-Havreii. “They had to have built some prototype models before they erected all the main gateways. Maybe this was one of them.”

Vale was about to respond when the sound of her combadge buzzing interrupted their meeting. “Keru to Commander Vale. I think I’ve detected the captain’s combadge beneath one of the ruins.

Vale sat up straight. “Any life signs?”

No, but it’s pretty far below the surface. I can barely make out the combadge, never mind any life signs. I recommend getting more people down here to sweep the lower levels.

“Acknowledged,” said Vale. “Take as many people as you need.”

“Commander,” Deanna said suddenly, “I would like to request permission to join Keru’s search party.”

“Deanna,” said Vale gently, “are you—?”

“I can’t just sit here and do nothing, Chris.”

After a moment, Vale nodded. “All right. I’ll go down too. It’ll be better to have more hands on the job anyway.”

*******************************

They were in what appeared to be an ancient medieval dungeon. The iron bars that separated each cell from the corridor they were currently traversing were rusted to the point of disintegrating upon contact. Several of the cells contained humanoid remains, relics of the long-ago war between the Dhuldrods and the Nocri. Evidently this had once been a facility for the detention of Nocri captives.

“This place is downright creepy,” said Keru.

“Hardly a professional observation, Commander Keru,” Tuvok replied.

“No, but it’s an accurate one.”

They resumed their cell-by-cell sweep. Keru had been able to narrow down the location of Captain Riker’s combadge to the floor which they were currently searching, and he was sure they would come upon it any—

“It’s in here!” an ensign called from up ahead. Keru and Tuvok rushed forward and entered the cell which the ensign had indicated. It was without a doubt the dreariest, most decrepit-looking hole in the wall Keru had ever seen. It reeked of decay, dust, and God knew what else. At the far end of the cell was a humanoid skeleton, its ankles bound together and chained to the wall.

Keru slowly walked forward and plucked a silver-and-gold Starfleet insignia from the floor beside the skeleton. He straightened just as slowly and turned to face Tuvok. “This can’t be the captain… right?”

“At first glace that would seem highly implausible,” said Tuvok. He raised an eyebrow and indicated the combadge in Keru’s hand. “However, it would appear to be somewhat logical, given the circumstantial evidence.”

“I refuse to believe the captain is dead,” said Keru firmly. “There has to be another explanation for—.”

He stopped as he heard footsteps down the corridor, afraid that it was Troi and she would overhear their speculations. It turned out instead to be Commander Vale. “You found something?” she asked.

Keru nodded. “The captain’s combadge. But—.”

He stopped again as he heard another set of footsteps. This time it was in fact Commander Troi. She had her tricorder out, and her gaze immediately went to the combadge in Keru’s hand. She let out a breath which she had apparently been holding. “Did you find—?”

Then she noticed what was behind Keru, and her breath caught in her throat again.

“We don’t know yet if that’s the captain,” Keru said hastily. “There’s no reason to believe that—.”

He stopped talking as he realized that Troi was no longer looking at the skeleton. She was now fixated on something which had been carved into the wall behind it. In actuality, it was many, many somethings that spread radially out from the skeleton up to an arm’s length away from it in all directions, which had appeared to Keru to be nothing more than an irregular pattern of cracks in the wall, which was to be expected in a building of such extreme age. But Troi had apparently noticed something of interest. Her fingers traced one of the cracks as they started to shake uncontrollably.

“Deanna,” Vale asked slowly, “what is it?”

Deanna turned to face Vale, the trembling quickly spreading to the rest of her body. Her breath came in short, ragged gasps, and her eyes were frozen wide with horror.

“Deanna!” Vale seized her by the shoulders and shook her slightly. “What the hell is it? What did you see?”

Slowly Deanna regained some measure of self control. She stepped away from Vale and pointed at a spot on the wall. Her voice sounded hoarse. “Look…”

Vale looked. At first she didn’t understand what she was supposed to be looking at. But as Deanna’s finger traced what had been written there, she began to realize the situation was more dire than she had anticipated.

Carved into the stone was a single word, over and over, repeatedly doubling back on itself until the end of the word became its own beginning. It was not a Dhuldrodian, Nocrian, or even an Iconian word. It was a word with a singular, unique meaning, and Vale knew of only one other person on this planet besides Deanna, past or present, who could have put it there. The evidence stared her right in the face, silent and accusatory:

IMZADI.