Find me. Free me.

Beckett hadn’t realised the rattling of the Excalibur bursting through the atmosphere had lulled him to distraction until the words broke through his drifting attention. He jerked upright in the cockpit chair, and at the glances from the others, realised he’d made an unwitting noise. ‘Uh. Anyone else hear that?’

‘You’ve got to be more precise than that, Lieutenant,’ said Kharth, seated across from him. Lindgren was at the front, flying, with Thawn beside her as co-pilot, while they, Airex, and Logan sat at the stations behind them. Through the canopy, clouds were beginning to make way for frozen peaks before and below.

‘I’m picking up power signatures clustered near the life-signs,’ Airex read from his scans. ‘This must be it.’

‘By “it” you mean the only sign of life on a planet a scavenger sent us to?’ called Logan over the faint rattling of the ship around them. ‘We still don’t know what we’re looking for.’

At that, Thawn twisted in her chair and looked at Beckett. ‘What did you hear?’

He swallowed, mouth dry. ‘The voice, again. The call for help.’

‘Is there any chance this is your imagination?’ said Kharth sceptically.

‘You didn’t see the Vorkasi tech on Drapice.’ It was hard to keep a bite out of his voice at her doubt. ‘It was real. It was powerful. The captain saw it, she gets it. She believes.’

Thawn, more deferential in the face of command, looked at their XO. ‘I could sense it. It’s real.’ Rather than press the point, though, she turned back to the front, back to her duties helping Lindgren guide the runabout down.

Airex glanced at Kharth. ‘This is no weirder than blood dilithium.’

‘That was plenty weird enough for me,’ came the grumbling response, but nothing more.

‘We’ve got our destination,’ said Lindgren a couple of minutes later. By now they could make out individual mountain peaks poking up, and the Excalibur was headed for a valley between them. ‘There’s a cluster of structures halfway up one of these mountains. The only thing for thousands of klicks.’

Soon enough, they had descended below the peaks of the mountains, Lindgren winding them carefully between rock faces. They were not very far from the top when snow-capped stone buildings built into both a narrow ledge and the side of the cliff itself came into sight. The architecture, at least, was familiar to Beckett.

‘That’s Romulan design,’ he said.

‘To match the Romulan life-signs,’ pointed out Logan, leaning forward. ‘More importantly, can we even set this thing down?’

‘There’s a platform,’ said Thawn, nodding to a stone circle jutting out from the cliff face. Nothing but thin air dangled below it. ‘Don’t be fooled, sir; scans show that beneath the masonry is a reinforcement of tritanium.’

‘I think this is a monastery,’ said Beckett. ‘Like the Fae Diwan’s place. Old-fashioned construction methods but modern amenities. Considering these were all built by a spacefaring civilisation.’

Airex made a small, annoyed sound. ‘If the scavenger just stole something from a monastery museum, this could have all been an enormous waste of time.’

‘No,’ said Thawn. Her gaze had gone distant, locked on the canopy as Lindgren guided the Excalibur down to land. ‘No, there’s something here.’

Kharth looked at her. ‘Lieutenant?’

She shook her head. ‘A presence. I can’t say more. There’s something.’

Beckett gave a relieved smile. ‘Maybe I’m not just going crazy.’

Logan leaned over the tactical console. ‘Dozens of life-signs,’ he conceded. ‘Not sure where anyone is, though.’

There was still no sign of movement when the Excalibur set down on the landing platform. In deference to their anxiety, Lindgren kept the thrusters running an extra thirty seconds after setting down – not enough to keep the weight off the masonry, but enough to fire back into action if the platform gave way under them.

‘These sorts of people usually work with the rest of the galaxy,’ said Beckett, unbuckling his safety harness and standing. ‘People visit them. People with ships.’

‘Then where,’ said Kharth cautiously, ‘are their ships? We’re not going unarmed.’

A biting wind howled through the hatch the moment they popped it, and Beckett was glad of his cold-weather gear. It kept the slicing chill off his body, but it still stung his cheeks. Logan didn’t seem to feel it, descending the hatch first, phaser in hand, lowered but ready, and as one they followed.

Stone buildings rose before them in imposing, impassive grey, frost-tipped and unmoving against the wind and snow. Though the wind whistled as it swept down between the mountain peaks, and strong gusts were enough to make one mindful of the edge of the platforms and the long drop down, all was cold and still, frozen and unmoving.

Airex slid up beside Beckett. ‘Any guesses on this monastic order, Lieutenant?’

He opened his mouth to admit to ignorance, before his eyes swept towards the buildings and settled on a crest carved in stone above the lone door. ‘Oh,’ he said, breath catching. ‘That’s the Order of Ste’kor. You know, like Narien, back at Gateway.’

‘The Romulan monks who strove to maintain understanding of and connection to their people’s telepathy.’ Airex frowned and nodded. ‘That scans.’

They advanced with caution, Logan stepping ahead and denying anyone – not Kharth, not one of the curious scientists – to take the lead in unknown territory. The wind stole the sound of their footsteps as they approached the buildings, though it had at least swept most of the snow off the surface, and underfoot was dry, not icy.

Nobody was outside. It was only a narrow platform nestled against the side of the cliff and the buildings, and access inside was blocked by the single large, dark wooden doorway. Once Logan looked like he wasn’t going to body-check anyone approaching, Airex did, tricorder in hand, running scans.

Beckett popped up beside him. ‘Life signs? Power signatures?’

‘Yes to both,’ said Airex. ‘None near the door.’

‘Commander!’ Lindgren was a way off had to shout to be heard over the wind. It was unclear which commander she was addressing, but she caught everyone’s attention.

She’d been checking the rest of the walls, and found a small nook. In it was a body, Romulan, in hard-wearing clothes, frozen solid. She was already running scans. ‘It’s hard to tell in this climate. But I think he died weeks ago. Looks like exposure.’

‘The scavenger did warn us,’ muttered Kharth. ‘Why would be thrown out? Why wouldn’t they let him back in?’

‘The only way to know,’ said Airex, ‘is to ask. Let’s get those doors open.’

They were stuck fast, then Logan put his shoulder to them and they creaked open to show nothing but a stone corridor advancing into darkness. Walls were bare, surfaces were dusty, and there was no sign of movement or life.

Kharth looked at Lindgren. ‘Wait at the runabout. I don’t like this.’ The pilot looked like she might complain, but nodded and about-faced. The last thing they needed was to be cut off from their ride, and the sensors on the Excalibur could likely offer a lot of support on their investigation.

Beckett peered into the darkness. Something brushed against his senses, like a cold breath on his brain, and he shivered and stepped back. Help me. Free me. ‘This isn’t right.’

‘Thawn?’ said Kharth.

‘I need everyone to understand I don’t have telepathic sensors,’ said the Betazoid through gritted teeth. ‘I can read minds and sometimes communicate telepathically. The fact that I can feel anything as a presence out here means something very powerful is going on. But it could be Vorkasi technology.’

‘The library,’ said Airex brightly.

‘Or the prison,’ muttered Beckett.

‘There’s still,’ said Logan, grip on his phaser tight, ‘life-signs we detected but haven’t found. We gotta be careful.’

They shuffled inside and it stopped, at least, the howling of the wind and its chilling bite. Cold weather gear was still necessary, but Beckett’s cheeks stopped stinging as they stepped into the monastery and looked around.

People had lived here once. More than that, it was a better place to live than it initially looked, with control panels set into stone walls to control light and temperature, though the systems they commanded seemed dead. Thawn reported that everything had likely been functional until several months ago, perhaps a year, leading to dusty, uninhabited rooms where monks had clearly worked, lived, and slept.

‘A year ago,’ mused Logan, looking around, ‘the Star Empire collapses. What do you reckon these monks were reliant on someone else to get supplies or whatever, and then political turmoil screws all of that up? No more food or power sources or something, and this place gets run-down?’

‘If there’s no ship,’ said Beckett, nodding, ‘maybe a bunch of the monks left on it.’

‘But not all,’ said Kharth. ‘Not our frozen friend out there. Not the life-signs we still haven’t found.’

‘The Fae Diwan monastery had surface buildings that were very old, then an underground section with far more sophisticated living conditions. I wonder -’ Then there was the shuffle of footsteps from the next room, and they all spun around, phasers ready, words abandoned.

A shadow in the doorway. A dragging step. Then into the dim light of their torches, a figure shambled – Romulan, in similar garb to the frozen man outside, cheeks sunken and deep-set eyes blank, unseeing. ‘…we didn’t know.’

His voice echoed in the tension, but it sounded like he hadn’t used it in a while. Beckett wasn’t sure he was even directly addressing them.

Logan kept his grip on his phaser tight, but Kharth stepped up beside him, twisting her grip to hold hers loosely and in the monk’s sight, and spoke to him. ‘I’m Saeihr Kharth. We’re with Starfleet. This is a monastery of the Order of Ste’kor, right?’

‘A thousand years… we didn’t know…’

Beckett slid forward. ‘Something’s trapped here, isn’t it?’ he said, ignoring Kharth’s accusing look. ‘You found something the Vorkasi trapped.’

‘He can’t hear you,’ said Logan, shaking his head. ‘He’s got no idea what’s going on. Look at him.’

Beckett grimaced, the vacant look in the Romulan’s eyes supporting Logan’s point, but still he took a step forward. ‘Did you not know that it was an entity, a mind?’

‘Nate -’

‘We didn’t know what we had.’

The new voice wasn’t the shambling monk, but came from behind him, emerging from the darkness. This Romulan looked very similar – as pale and drawn, in the same garb, but sharper-eyed, straight-backed, tired but alert, conscious, alive. He raised his hands quickly at the startled look.

‘My apologies,’ said the alert monk. ‘Are you here to rescue us?’

‘Maybe,’ said Kharth, frowning. Again she introduced herself, then said, ‘What is this place? What happened here?’

The monk let out a slow breath, then glanced uncomfortably at his vacant colleague. ‘My name is Ibius. We are, yes, the Order of Ste’kor. We’ve been here since not long after the founding. A monastery centuries old, and then it all came undone in… a matter of months.’ He nodded at the other. ‘We were alive, well, conducting our research, responsible for this facility. Then the supplies stopped a year ago. Some of us left. Some of us stayed committed. We maintained some trade links to keep ourselves alive, keep the facility operating, though it got harder and harder. And then the others… became like this.’

Beckett looked between the two. ‘What happened to him?’

But it was Thawn who answered, her voice coiled like a snake that had spotted a threat. ‘Something’s affected his mind. This isn’t just malnutrition and stress. Something did this to him.’

The monk Ibius grimaced and nodded. ‘It’s a long story. There is… equipment here. We have maintained and controlled it, but something’s gone wrong. It did this to him. Him, and all the others.’

Airex’s brow furrowed. ‘Vorkasi technology.’

Ibius straightened. ‘You know of them.’

‘A little. Enough to know it’s powerful telepathic technology.’

‘It is. We found a facility here – ancient, powerful. Our sect dedicated ourselves to studying it and making sure something so dangerous and powerful was not misused. We thought we had an ancient civilisation’s archive of knowledge at our fingertips, but over the centuries we still barely scratched the surface of understanding it. Then in the last year, it’s… begun to break down. Perhaps this is a safety mechanism lashing out, perhaps something this powerful becomes dangerous when it doesn’t operate properly. Perfectly. My fellows were fine – tired, without resources, but fine. Then… they lost themselves.’

Beckett tilted his chin up. ‘This isn’t a library,’ he said, more confident the more he spoke. ‘This is a prison. The Vorkasi trapped something here. Their technology kept something locked up, and now it’s damaged the minds of all of you.’

Ibius’s eyebrows raised. ‘A prison?’ But he didn’t seem too shocked, too surprised. Beckett fancied he hadn’t known, but the idea was perhaps a notion he’d entertained. Ibius glanced about, back deeper into the depths of the monastery. He sighed, and said, ‘Perhaps you had best see for yourself.’