Part Two.

Sanjiv finished winding the rope and attached it to his belt before opening his pack and pulling out a small respirator. The air wasn’t quite bad enough to warrant putting it on, but he used it to take a few properly deep breaths in the still-dusty air and finally felt the adrenaline from the rockfall start to fade. The joys of human physiology.

“Assuming for now that it hasn’t also been blocked by a rock slide, there’s a tunnel that leads back to the main opening about 200 meters ahead,” he said, even as he was still pulling out his map. He’d never been in a situation where both his electronic and paper maps were lost, and hopefully never would be, but he liked to attempt to memorize a cave’s layout the night before an excursion anyway.

Still, he felt relieved to be able to pull out the physical map and confirm what he’d just said. “The second half is a lot of tight squeezes, and after that, the ascent is just as steep as the one we just rappelled down.”

“If that is true…” Ishreth’s antennae twitched gently. “I should be thankful the lights still work.”

“Yeah, better to still have lights than tricorders,” Sanjiv agreed. Humans–and he assumed Andorians, too–had been traversing caves for thousands of years without tricorders. But once the lights went out…

He handed the map over to Ishreth so that the Andorian could get a proper look before they moved on.

Those antennae twitched, flexing forward and backward as he read the map. “The rockslide makes this treacherous, but I believe it is still safely passable.” Carefully spoken, slowly the Andorian was falling back into his formal training.

“But what killed the tricorders?” Sanjiv mused as they picked their way across uneven ground. The path was craggy but walkable, for now. “It was like an EMP. What could have generated one so near the cave system?”

Frowning slightly, Ishreth fell into step with Sanjiv, antennae flexing slowly. “Several mining devices could cause something similar to an EMP under the wrong operating conditions, though I was not aware of any approved mining activities on Casperia Prime. There are other far less common machines which could do that as well.”

But mining equipment would make the most sense for both the rockfall and the electrical effect. But again the problem remained–if there was no recorded, official and permitted mining operations, then who would be doing what with mining equipment in a beautiful protected cave?

“Whatever the case, I hope that was the last of it,” said Sanjiv. As they walked, he noticed some of the same crystals from before descending from the ceiling in large, blocky chunks that refracted the light in entirely new patterns. If part of his mind weren’t stuck on worrying about the extent of the cave-in, perhaps he could have appreciated them properly.

As they came to a narrow fissure, Ishreth put a hand up and took the time to shine his lamp upwards and forward, taking the terrain in. “I see these crystal formations have shifted…”

Sanjiv sighed a deep, weary sigh. “Of all the caves to be trapped in, at least we’ve found ourselves in an aesthetically pleasing one.” His eyes followed the beam from Ishreth’s lamp, and he added in a more sincere tone, “It really is beautiful, though.”

“Beautiful, yes.  But I also wonder if we can observe the fractures in the crystal patterns to determine if this has happened before… and possibly how recently,” Ishreth offered.

Clearly this would be more complicated without tricorders, but still possibly a valuable information source.

“Hmm.” Sanjiv pulled his second lamp from his belt–a narrow-beamed flashlight–and was relieved when he was able to turn it on. He turned his headlamp off and squeezed into the fissure, painting the crystals with the beam of light, and between his lamp and Ishreth’s, he seemed to catch every glittering angle. “None of the fractures I see have any weathering,” he said, his voice strained as his lungs pressed against the sides of the fissure. “They all look sharp. We can probably assume they’re fresh.”

Nodding, Ishreth started to move forward carefully through the fissure. “True. And if this is the first instance, that would be a different situation from a series of consistent fractures.”

Sanjiv watched the approaching Ishreth with a blank stare for a moment as something percolated in the back of his mind. Suddenly, Sanjiv started shifting and shimmying back out of the fissure. Ishreth noticed and began backing out as well. Once they were back out in open space, Sanjiv saw that Ishreth was clearly waiting for an explanation. Sanjiv gestured back into the fissure.

“There’s several forks ahead–” he huffed, winded from the tight squeeze. “–that lead deeper into the cave, away from the exit. We’ll have to be very careful not to make a wrong turn. I figure you should take point, on account of your…” Sanjiv ran out of steam and finished his thought by patting his helmet, where his antennae would be if he were Andorian.

Ishreth gave merely a nod. “Point it is.” He paused for a moment as his antennae twitched. “The air here isn’t completely stagnant. That is one small good sign.”

“I’ll take what I can get,” said Sanjiv.

Checking the map and choosing the most passable fork, the pair started venturing forward again.

“I believe this passage is the consistently widest, but it will require some climbing. Up to two meters to get past obstructions.”

“That’s not too bad,” Sanjiv noted. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he was worried that he’d jinxed it, but their luck held. What little luck they were having, anyway.

Progress was slow, inch-by-inch. Soon, they had to stop to remove their packs and helmets, pushing them through the narrow openings ahead of them as they went. The tight squeezes made the climbing almost seamless as the fight against friction surpassed the fight against gravity.

Eventually, the cave opened up and the final ascent lay before them. 50 meters straight up would not have been quite as daunting if they’d had a top rope, or weren’t so exhausted, but by plugging away–literally and figuratively–inch-by-inch with their cams and nuts, they scaled the cliff without incident.

At the top of the cliff, Sanjiv lay on his back, catching his breath and waiting for his limbs to stop feeling like goo. “Well, if nothing else, it’s mostly horizontal from here,” he said, more in reassurance to himself than his caving partner.

The Andorian former hazard team lead pulled himself up and came to a crouching stance, staying on his knees for a few long seconds as he tested his balance. It would do no good to get dizzy and topple backwards off the cliff, so he carefully shuffled forward until he had plenty of safe space around him before gingerly rising to his feet. Shifting his feet, antennae waving, Ishreth tested the solid ground.

Yep, solid.

Well, thank goodness for small miracles.

That’s when the scent hit him. Something acrid and completely unexpected in the cave system.

“This may sound insane… but I smell something off.” His calm tones were whispery in the still air.

As Sanjiv rolled over and slowly pushed himself off the ground, he noticed it, too: smoke in the air with a metallic tang to it, like a machine had overheated nearby. “It smells like… well, it smells like catastrophic failure, honestly.”

“I can smell it, but cannot hear anything.” Ishreth turned, offering a hand to Sanjiv to help him up.

Sanjiv accepted the hand gratefully, then pulled out his back-up light and began shining it here and there, looking for wisps of smoke.

Ishreth took some tentative steps forward, antennae flaring as he tried to gather in as much sensory data as possible. “Machinery I would guess–but I wonder if it was left unattended?”

“I hope not,” said Sanjiv, “And yet…”

Despite the wide passageways and even terrain, the pair proceeded at a snail’s pace, apprehension growing as the smell got stronger and as curling clouds of smoke appeared in the air. Sanjiv continued to sweep the cavern with his light, but stopped suddenly as he caught the gleam of a reflection. It wasn’t another vein of crystal this time; it was a sheet of metal.

Stopping in place, Ishreth let his nostrils flare and his upper lip curl. The smoke was foul, metallic and acrid. His eyesight adjusted once again as he peered at the machinery. “That is not supposed to be here.”

Speaking in calm, soft tones, nonetheless Ishreth’s voice carried through the cavern. Enough to stir up something else living here…

The tableau of illegal machinery parts was perfectly eerie on its own, but something else sent a chill down Sanjiv’s spine: the sound of another person running through the cavern, their footfalls growing closer.

By the time Sanjiv saw the Ferengi hurtling towards him, it was too late to dodge. The Ferengi collided with him, and they both went toppling to the ground. It didn’t take long, however, for Sanjiv to realize that the tackle had been anything but purposeful.

“Oh, thank the Blessed Exchequer!” cried the Ferengi as he straddled Sanjiv. “You’ve got to get me out of here! Those bastards left me behind! They left me in here to die!”

“Who left you here to die?” One strong blue hand plucked the back of the Ferengi’s jacket and lifted the squirming intruder off Sanjiv.

The Ferengi flailed his limbs in surprise and anger. “Those small-lobed imbecilic excuses for business partners! I–”

The weight of the Andorian’s hand on his jacket seemed to settle on the Ferengi, and as panic subsided, indignation settled in. He crossed his arms. “The tour guide,” he sneered.

Looking calmly at the weedy, anxious Ferengi, Captain Dal waved the hand that wasn’t latched onto the back of the jacket placatingly. “Look, you’re good at deals, right? Let’s make a deal. You offer information on who left you behind and what they were doing and we offer assistance in getting back to the surface.”

He figured that a deal which included ‘rat out the people who betrayed you’ was a win-win situation.

As Sanjiv stood and checked that none of his gear had been broken, he noticed the Ferengi’s lobes twitching in deep thought. Time for a bit of reverse psychology.

“I’m sure you could find your way out on your own if you tried,” said Sanjiv. He handed one of his spare lamps to the Ferengi. “This will certainly help. Just be careful where you shine it. That explosion probably disturbed the local vampire bat nest, to say nothing of the razor-backed cave bears. I can’t image they’ll be too happy about being woken from their hibernation early.”

Neither of those creatures existed anywhere on Casperia, let alone in Salomano-Reistang Cave. But they certainly sounded plausible enough.

The Ferengi’s eyes twitched, and he threw up his hands in exasperation. “Alright, you’ve got a deal! I’ll tell you everything I know about my idiotic ex-mining cohorts. I should have known setting foot in this cave was a terrible idea…”

Sanjiv caught Ishreth’s eye and winked. “Not if you’ve got the right partner.”

“Exactly.” Ishreth nodded, pressing the Ferengi forward. “Now, while my excellent cohort finds an exit, tell us all about your less than stellar cohorts…”

It was a long, not especially treacherous, but maze-like trek to find the surface where the illicit miners had entered, and by the time they reached the Casperian sunshine, Ishreth and Sanjiv knew all about the exploits of the Vega Orion mining company, including some lascivious details that surely would not make it into the official reports. Quite a good haul of intel for two Starfleet Captains–not that their Ferengi companion knew they were Starfleet, nor at what rank.

Local investigators were already on site to look into the explosion, and they were more than happy to take the only remaining suspect into their custody. “Let the record state that he was very cooperative,” said Sanjiv, clapping a hand on the glowering Ferengi’s shoulder.

And when it was settled, the two found themselves on the terrace of the caves with a drink in hand and stories to tell.

“Captain Anand, I will go caving with you again any day,” Ishreth offered, raising his glass.

“Captain Dal,” said Sanjiv, clinking his glass. “I will make certain that you do!’