Chapter Text
The Star Beagle Adventures
Episode 8: South Side of the Sky
Scene 1: Gateway
8.1
Gateway
“Gorgeous!”
While Commodore Yui Song had disapproved, she had to admit that a diplomatic mission with the potential of not one, but three first contact situations, merited the presence of a command level officer. And she wasn’t about to go risking her octogenarian neck hanging by rope and piton from miles-high, snow drenched mountains above the cloud line on an alien planet on which the only habitable zone was above roiling lower layers of clouds.
This was a job for a ship’s captain, and Captain Ronald Howard, XIV was the person for this job. Captain Rhonda Carter would have been quite happy clambering about in this mountain range, but she was, by her own admission, more fighter than diplomat. Skip Howard, for all his strangeness, was a smooth hand with new people.
At Howard’s request, his rescue party included the U.S.S. Escort’s second officer, Lt. Cmdr. Vranran zh’Kathar, Ensign Tos th’Taahrit from the U.S.S. Mako’s security detail, 2nd Lt. Emily Li from the U.S.S. Mako’s engine room and one of the denobulan planetologists, Cetris Rye, who was also a mighty singer. These party members had been chosen because they were avid mountaineers.
The party was rounded out by a squad of United States Marines under the command of Captain Osollaa sh’Zhiathis, which meant that all three of the andorians in the task force were on this mountain with him. There was good reason for this: Andorians were not only naturally great mountain climbers, but well adapted to cold weather climates.
The other marines on this mission were 2nd Lt. Iov Pushkin, who, like Captain sh’Zhiathis, had grown up in Alaska and had climbed Mt. McKinley while in high school, as well as Sgt. Tammy Glick, and Privates First Class Tim Cho, Sean Young, and Elven Washington.
PFC L’Kath, the marine unit’s sole vulcan, remained with Beagle Shuttle #2, the shuttle Dr. Uto had equipped with medical diagnostic equipment. This small, regular service shuttle was landed in the only spaceport in these mountains, located miles away from the City, which was only reachable by an uncertain mountain trail. Spacecraft were not welcome anywhere near the City.
“Yes sir, it is,” agreed Pushkin. The young marine officer was the first to join Captain Howard into the pass onto the south face of one of a vast range of mountains.
It was a sight that would make even avid mountain climbers a little depressed. The beginning of a journey deep into a forbidding mountain range. A search and rescue operation too windy and tempestuous for a shuttle. Shuttles could not fly in the area at all, nor could transporters be used due to a large energy dampening field that blanketed this part of the mountains. The presence of this dampening field impacted the equipment choices for Howard’s party.
But it was also a sight of austere beauty. A double sunrise over mile after mile of mountain peaks rising out of a cottony bank of clouds. And the colors were like nothing on Earth. Something either in the color of light from the twin suns or the chemicals in the ice crystals, something created soft halos of color over each mountain top that were barely visible, but gradually changed with parallax.
Somewhere in these mountains was a city with survivors from the climate change that had killed nearly everything below those clouds several thousand years ago. And the people of that city had only achieved faster than light travel after that great cataclysm.
Somewhere else in these mountains was a downed spacecraft with visitors from another world. Visitors whose distress signal had been picked up by the Beagle task force. Visitors who would be welcome if they could make it to the City, but could expect no rescue from there.
And throughout these mountains was rumored (according to the information that had travelled with the distress signal) to live yet another indigenous species - a people who were familiar with space travel but were not themselves space travelers and were of various temperament toward space travelers. A people who had lived in these mountaintops for hundreds of thousands of years.
Frost giants.
And now Captain Skip Howard and his rescue party stood at the gateway to this world.
8.1