Chapter Text
The Star Beagle Adventures
Episode 5: All Good People
Scene 5: Any Black Square
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Any Black Square
Setting up a system-wide conference was a logistical nightmare - requiring inputs and outputs to away teams in several locations on Serrat Prime as well as coordinating communications among a half-dozen ships and shuttle-craft scattered throughout the Serrat star system, including the U.S.S. Puppy, in orbit of Minor Serrat, the red dwarf at the far edge of the system.
This task was made even more formidable due to the assignment of communications officers to the different teams, leaving only one overworked communication officer onboard the U.S.S. Mako.
Commodore Yui Song gave this monstrous task to her first officer, Commander Jason Bates. Bates, in turn, bargained with the one person he was certain would be able to figure out how to make it happen: the diminutive ferengi businessman, Trader Pel.
And with personnel scattered throughout the system, working at full capacity surveying the two stars and their many planets and moons, the resource Pel needed for this task was available: the U.S.S. Mako’s holodeck.
This unique use of the holodeck allowed an amused Commodore Yui Song to walk from simulations of the bridge of the U.S.S. Beagle, into the cabins of the U.S.S. Bluebird and the U.S.S. Puppy in orbit of, respectively, Serrat and Minor Serrat, into the forest camp with Captain Skip Howard the the tellarites, to the seaside camp of a number of oceanographers along with the Mako’s science officer, Lt. Cmdr. Gregg Clark, to the volcanic island base with Lt. Cmdr. Senek and the denobulan planetary survey.
Commodore Yui's presence in each of these environments was represented locally by ghostly, rather primitive holograms of her emanating from various local tricorders.
Additionally, everyone on conference, and particularly Commodore Yui, could also access the readouts from every probe in the system, as well as a system map, showing the location of each ship, each shuttle, and every probe within the binary system, along with the two stars themselves and each of their planets and moons.
“The evidence is not conclusive, but it is very suggestive.”
Dean Sakura Nakamura Holland was reporting from the U.S.S. Puppy. The very elderly former premier of the Vulcan Science Academy, T’Eln, currently directing the U.S.S. Beagle’s Astrophysics & Stellar Cartography department, was seated next to her.
“Materials analysis indicates a strong correlation between the steels used in construction of the space station out here in orbit of Minor Serrat and the remnants Lieutenant Commander Senek discovered in the volcanic layers on Serrat Prime. We are also now ready to identify the planet Minor Serrat Prime - the first planet in orbit of the red dwarf out here - as the likely home of the builders of this station.”
Director T’Eln spoke up. “The Minor Serrat star entered a very active phase almost 200,000 years ago. Any potentially space-faring species would have been highly motivated to evacuate the first planet, assuming their science was sufficient to predict the devastation the red dwarf was about to unleash on their world. Phillip?”
The young planetologist from Sierra Leone, Phillip Gorman, was seated at another console on the Puppy. “The two planets in this system once had atmospheres that have largely been washed away by gigantic solar flares from the red dwarf. There is evidence of widespread underground structures on the first planet and some on the second planet. It is unlikely that a silicon-based lifeform would have evolved on the surface, but with a combination of pressure deep inside the planet, rivers of liquid methane under very high pressures and significant energy provided by a very active star, there is the potential for such life to have evolved deep inside the planet.”
Sakura Nakamura Holland picked up the story. “We’ve sent our robots fairly deep into those caverns. There definitely was an advanced society that lived down there. They moved closer to the surface and eventually colonized the 2nd planet due to a period of low solar activity - they needed the energy that was available closer to the surface. Then the star entered a period of very high activity. The space station may have been constructed in orbit of one of these planets, but it was eventually moved to an orbit further out to protect it from far more energetic solar activity - energetic enough to sterilize both the planets. As the Minor Serrat star became even more active, they would have been forced to abandon the station - material analysis indicates that happened about 70 thousand years ago.”
Commodore Yui Song mulled this over, then asked. “Okay, so if they could build a space station and they eventually showed up within the Serrat system proper, why haven’t we come across any of their satellites in orbit of any of the planets? Space stations? Derelict space craft? We haven’t encountered the kind of orbital debris that usually accompanies in-system local space travel.”
“That’s assuming they saw value in creating satellites,” said the U.S.S. Beagle’s masked first officer, speaking from the command throne on the Beagle’s bridge. “What if, instead, they build underground bases on various moons throughout the system? Would we have detected them?”
“While our probes are programmed to look for lunar stations, I’m not so certain they are tuned to seek out sublunar stations,” Sakura mused.
“Then they need to be re-targeted,” Commodore Yui said.
“We’re talking about time frames that can be evolutionarily significant,” mused Captain Skip Howard, speaking from a forest camp and surrounded by sylvan tellurites. “They were originally adapted for life deep underground. No longer possible in the red dwarf system, but they could have established subterranean colonies here and on several different planets and moons throughout this system. Their descendants might still be there. And over tens of thousands of years, they might well have speciated. They might have started as a single race living deep underground on Minor Serrat Prime, but they could have become a dozen different species, cut off from each other, surviving in their various caverns on several different worlds in this system. And up until only 230 years ago, someone in this star system was making cultural use of radio…”
“Then all of our assets need to be retargeted and our investigative methods significantly revised to determine where such settlements are likely and go look for them,” Yui Song concluded.
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