‘I mislike this.’

Brok’tan stayed facing the equipment locker so his sigh would go unseen. ‘It is the right step forward, my lord. They can hardly hide secrets from us when we stand beside them, in this strange facility, witnessing all that we do.’

Torkath’s scoff held bluster and insecurity, and he clattered louder than he needed to as he pulled on his EV suit. ‘You underestimate the secrecy of Starfleet. They will have readings on their tricorders they pipe directly to their ship, and in front of us and in later reports, they will share only what they choose. All we have done with this gesture of collaboration is give them a defence.’

‘It is the only way to see for ourselves. They do have more readings of the fissure and this facility than we do.’

‘We should have stayed hidden,’ grumbled Torkath, strapping on equipment with such gusto he had probably tied something too tight. ‘Monitored their movements, intercepted their transmissions later -’

‘Behaved as Romulans?’ Brok’tan turned at this, and Torkath looked sheepish at last. Torkath was his social superior, a son of Lord K’Var, perhaps the foremost leader of their House’s field forces. But Brok’tan was an old war dog, and the young warriors he had trained decades ago were still cowed by his judgement. It was a tactic he could not use freely now that he had lost his rank, ship, and standing. But in private, it still worked.

His voice softened as the taller, younger, socially superior Torkath deflated. ‘We are here for answers to maintain the safety of the Empire. If you treat someone as an enemy, they will be an enemy.’

Now, Torkath’s lip curled, albeit weakly. ‘This ship killed my brother. Those were the actions of an enemy.’

‘Matthew Rourke killed your brother. Karana Valance did not. She is a woman of honour, a warrior like us. Besides…’ Brok’tan sighed and closed his locker. The equipment room by the transporters was large, a chamber where warriors could make ready for boarding action or battle. Alone in here, the echoes of anticipation of combat rang thick in the air, a metallic tension he could taste, but knew he should not heed today. ‘Your brother broke accords and bonds to seek glory. He attacked those under Starfleet’s protection. He died for it. You know this.’

Torkath hissed, turning away. ‘Matthew owed him better -’

‘And what about what Dakor owed Matthew? Your House? You?’ Brok’tan took sharp steps closer and grasped his shoulder. ‘Other men inflicted this wound. Starfleet, yes, but your kin, also. You do not need to let it fester.’

In the silence, they could hear the rumble of the Qor’otan’s impulse engines as she manoeuvred carefully through the narrow passages between dead rocks and debris. At length, Torkath drew a slow breath. ‘None of this changes Starfleet’s secrecy,’ he said. ‘Those who caused that fissure stand at the threshold of Klingon space, and they have told us nothing. Valance is hiding something.’

‘We have not given them much reason to trust -’

‘And why should we?’ Torkath snapped. ‘They call themselves our allies, but they made more common cause with the Cardassians when the Vaadwaur came. You battled beside me, Brok’tan; you saw the sacrifices we made. Those decisions on what lines to let fall, what worlds to let fall. And not a whisper from Starfleet that they were about to end it all. Whatever our misdeeds at Agarath, at Boreth, you are wrong to trust them, old man.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Brok’tan, knowing he could only make so much headway pushing this point. ‘But you are wrong to hate them. Not for your heart, though I fear for that, too. But you risk it blinding you.’

Torkath shrugged the hand off and hefted his EV helmet. ‘My eyes are clear,’ he said, voice solemn, and he turned away. ‘I see what the Empire needs. That is all I have ever seen.’

The transporter beam faded, and cold darkness met Kharth. Her suit’s headlamp caught the rough, uneven floor and walls of an asteroid hollowed out into corridors and reinforced with plating. Seams and welds glinted where metal bulkheads and beams met stone, and the air shimmered in her visor display, dense with the noxious gases that had flooded the walkways.

There was a beat as they stood there, Starfleet and KDF, taking stock of each other as much as the gloom and mystery.

‘Readings match what we saw from orbit.’ Airex’s voice over comms was soft, but clipped. ‘Atmosphere contaminated with nitrogen oxides and chlorinated gases.’

‘Power grid’s stable, at least,’ said Cortez, sounding bright even through the sound systems and grime. ‘There’s a fusion reactor in this rock and looks like it’s still running at minimum efficiency.’

Kharth swung her rifle light down a corridor where the tricorders pointed them: towards that faint hum of the reactor. The technology was simple, rough-edged, reminding her of old industrial mining facilities – pure function over form.

They passed the first bodies at the junction.

‘Humanoids.’ Logan’s suit picked out two corpses slumped against a bulkhead, their features desiccated and pale, with smooth grey skin and high ridges running across their foreheads.

Torkath stepped forward to join him, light of his helmet shining down. ‘I see no sign of injury. No sign of struggle. They look as if they died where they fell.’

‘Not in any species in the database,’ said Airex without surprise. ‘Readings consistent with class-M biology, or close to it. They died from respiratory failure – the toxins in the air.’

Cortez had advanced on a wall panel, consulting it thoughtfully. ‘I think they were headed for this: life support controls. Looks like they were halfway through a full air recycle purge, but collapsed.’

Kharth turned to her. ‘Can you fix that? Give us breathing air?’

‘If the power systems hold…’ Cortez began to gingerly tap at the controls.

‘Is that,’ grunted Torkath, ‘our best use of time? Our best first foray into their systems?’

‘Starfleet away team SOP is to minimise reliance on EV suits as much as possible…’ But Cortez sounded disinterested as she worked, her words strung out with distraction, and after a beat, she shrugged. ‘Anyway, I got it now, Captain. See?’

The air began to hum, and Kharth watched as her suit’s HUD began to show decreases in the toxins around them. Torkath’s scowl was visible, but he said no more.

‘It’s difficult to be sure without closer examination of the bodies,’ said Airex, knelt over one of the corpses, ‘and we should send some back to Doctor Starik for autopsy once we’re done. But I think they died about two years ago.’

‘Two years ago is broad,’ said Kharth pointedly.

He looked up, eyes pale under the internal lights of his helmet. ‘I mean, I think they died around the same time as the fissure.’

There was a bleep from the wall panel, and Cortez’s sound of satisfaction over comms was audible. ‘All sorted. We can breathe.’ She clipped off her helmet first, and gave the Klingons a ginger grin. ‘Look. Isn’t that better?’

Torkath wore a level expression as he followed suit. ‘I would prefer,’ he said, voice low, ‘for you to consult before tinkering with unknown systems.’

Cortez looked taken aback. ‘It’s simple life support protocols, Captain – it wasn’t difficult to -’

‘We are talking of a facility which may have launched a super-weapon, and this is a joint mission -’

‘It’s fine,’ said Kharth, lifting hands as she advanced between them. ‘Commander Cortez knows what she’s doing, Torkath. Better than you or me. I find it best in these situations to let the geniuses run the show.’

His brow furrowed. ‘Of course you do. They’re your officers.’

‘Are we to stand all day?’ That was Brok’tan, stood at the fore with Logan. ‘We can move freely now, and there are questions still to answer.’

‘And,’ said Logan, who seemed to have made common cause with the older Klingon in blunt practicality, ‘power readings not far ahead.’

They advanced through winding corridors, metal grates echoing under their boots. Now and then, a wall display flickered as they passed, the ghosts of activities long dead. Here and there, welding patterns spoke of simple pragmatism, desperate improvisation, industrial make-do.

After several junctions, the corridor opened into a wide chamber with banks of terminals built into the walls, all with the same brutish, industrial construction. A transparent dome overhead revealed the curve of the asteroid beyond, the black rock glinting with frost, the distant, weak sun unable to offer more than a gleam akin to pale moonlight.

‘Command centre,’ said Cortez with satisfaction, crossing the threshold. Kharth and Logan moved without thinking to take watch positions as Airex joined her heading directly for the consoles. Their lights spilled across banks of display coated in dust and frost.

It took some work to bring them to life. Cortez hauled out an emergency power supply, and had to modify her connector several times to plug it in. But from there, she could access more power of the main systems, and control banks gleamed anew in pale blue, scrolling with alien glyphs. Airex leaned close, and as he muttered, the tricorder began to overlay a holographic projection as the universal translator kicked in.

‘The facilities here are… simple,’ Airex said as they studied. ‘Equivalent to early Federation technology, perhaps even less sophisticated. But if these logs are correct, the power readings spiked in approximately January 2401, then cut off. Matching the fissure’s date.’

‘So this is it,’ Kharth said softly. ‘Where it started.’

Torkath was walking the line of consoles, expression inscrutable. ‘And how did people with this limited technological sophistication do that? From here?’

‘I reckon,’ said Cortez, lifting a hand-held torch to shine it on a far wall shrouded in shadow, ‘it had something to do with this.’

Embedded into the rock there were tall racks of slender conduits, each glowing faintly, like glass veins running through stone. They shimmered under her torchlight with the same pale blue of the consoles, but both weaker and steadier.

‘There’s a system built into the rock, separate to the main facility itself. These are power conduits feeding into some sort of external array,’ she explained.

Airex ran a gloved finger along a display, eyes narrowing as the translated schematics scrolled across his visor. ‘These conduits were made with the same materials and fabrication tools as the rest of the facility, but to an entirely different standard. The metallurgy’s cleaner, the tolerances exact to within microns, the field symmetry’s generations ahead…’

Cortez crossed to another console and tapped in a diagnostic patch, muttering as data crawled down her wrist display. ‘Yeah. The power grid for the fusion core’s a mess – exactly what I’d expect on a mining rock at this tech level, lots of patchwork repairs and over-compensations for inefficiency. These conduits, though? Perfect resonance flow.’

Torkath advanced on them and planted his hands on the controls. ‘Someone else built the array that launched the pulse?’ His voice rang with an impatience Kharth couldn’t help but share, but she’d learnt over the years to listen and wait.

Airex looked up, undaunted by Klingon frustration. ‘I believe the same people – likely the corpses we found – constructed the facility and the array. This facility was likely built first, the array then installed later.’

‘But this facility’s what you’d expect. The array?’ Cortez shook her head. ‘It’s a precision interdimensional focusing lattice, way ahead of what Starfleet could easily made, using materials the folks who made this shouldn’t have even been able to refine.’

‘So they had help,’ grunted Torkath.

Airex and Cortez exchanged looks. ‘Or they had plans they didn’t understand, but that’s full blue-prints from metallurgic refinement processes right through to -’

Torkath cut him off. ‘They had help.’

Cortez hesitated. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘You’re right. So I’m going to take as many scans as I can, pipe them back to Endeavour, and get Thawn and Beckett to start running all of this technology through our databanks. See if it matches up with anything we know…’

‘You will send it to the Qor’otan also,’ Torkath snapped.

Kharth advanced at this. ‘Captain, we’re still at the data collection stage of this process,’ she said as soothingly as she could muster, which wasn’t very. ‘Let my people work, and you’ll get answers.’

‘Let your people work, and you’ll share what you deign to share,’ came his grumbling reply, but he did step back, arms folding across his chest.

Cortez flashed Kharth a look of gratitude as she returned to work. ‘Whatever power they needed to fuel this array, it didn’t come from the rusty old fusion reactor in the basement,’ she said, voice a pitch lighter from nerves. ‘There’s another power source here.’

Logan piped up, voice breaking across the gloom. ‘Something that powerful should be easy to find, right?’

‘Easy is relative, Commander,’ said Airex in a slightly tart tone, but minutes later, his tricorder was chirruping. ‘I’m reading a sealed containment chamber two sections down. It’s still faintly active – whatever they used to power the array still has a residual charge.’

Kharth looked at him. ‘Left running for two years?’

He made a face. ‘The containment protocols mean my tricorder isn’t giving me better than that, and I haven’t yet found the system here to access it.’

‘And once you do,’ sneered Torkath, ‘you will transmit those findings directly to Endeavour so you can analyse the heart of this matter far from Imperial eyes?’

‘Captain -’

‘How about we take a look?’ Logan had sauntered up, his Borg implants casting shadows across his brow in the gloom of the control room. ‘You two keep running your scans. The four of us head down there, wave our tricorders around, check in. See for ourselves.’

Kharth’s chest loosened with begrudging gratitude at the suggestion. ‘Good idea, Commander. What do you think, Torkath?’

He unfolded his arms. ‘Very well. I still expect your people’s findings to be transmitted to my ship.’

‘Be careful down there, Commander.’ Cortez’s gaze was wary as Brok’tan joined the three of them. ‘Something went wrong here when this thing fired that tri-quantum pulse. Overloaded the systems, vented the air with enough toxins to kill the crew. I still don’t have a clear picture of what got messed up, though.’

‘Then keep us posted,’ said Kharth, forcing her voice to sound lighter, ‘and we’ll try to not mess anything else up.’