“Well, that doesn’t seem right?”

It was in Gabrielle’s recollection the first non-technical related question she’d heard all day since they’d arrived at the monolith. None of their scanners seemed to be working particularly well this close to the structure, and questions abound along the lines of ‘Does anyone know what this means?’ or ‘Do we have a spare to check against?’ being the most common.

The holoprojectors for their duck blind weren’t working either, which left them out in the open should any of the natives be present. The only tech they’d brought that worked flawlessly had been the solar panels for powering everything, the two water reclamators and, surprisingly, the field replicator.

“What doesn’t seem right, Gerald?” Gabrielle asked, looking up from the nonsensical readings from the spectral analyser. The gazebo they’d erected valiantly held the relentless rays of the sun at bay and was now home to three tables, each bearing the weight of unpacked field gear and one Gerald Wilbur-Northcote, perched on the one furthest from Gabrielle.

“This monolith is a kilometre in height,” he answered, not looking up from the drone controls he was operating.

Any and all sensors that utilised any form of subspace technology seemed to be the primary target for the interference field, but the drone they’d brought had an emergency radio transmitter on it. And with tricorders out of the picture, Gerald had opted to utilise it to figure out the exact height of the monolith they were now camped to. Which he’d sold as also getting images of the top and doing a decent surface scan during the ascent and descent.

“We kind of knew that.”

Gerald looked up, delivering a deadpan expression that would make a Vulcan proud. “I mean, the tip of this structure is exactly one kilometre above the flagstones we’re walking on right now.”

Gabrielle felt her eyebrows scrunch up when Gerald had used the word ‘exactly’. The man was careful with his words. If he said something, he meant it. “Exactly?” she challenged.

“Within the error probability of the drone’s sensors, which it’s listing as less than two millimetres. I’ll call it a full centimetre until I can get a few more data points.”

She was at Gerald’s side immediately, looking at the readouts from the drone on the operator’s remote. Ranging lasers, an altimeter, a bit of trigonometry, compensation taking into account the gryos and, sure enough, the math kept spitting out the same height of a kilometre. “Close enough for me,” she muttered.

“Doesn’t seem right, does it?” Gerald tapped a few commands into the remote, tasking the drone with a downward spiral and high-intensity laser scan of the monolith’s surface. “Why is a monolith, thousands of years old on an alien world, built of a Federation standard height?”

They’d already measured the base of the structure at a smidge over fifty-one meters on all four sides. The top pyramid was a bit over twenty-two metres on a side and in height. But then the overall height was close enough to a kilometre to be within the margin of error of what operational tech they had on hand. It didn’t make any sense.

She rubbed at her temples with the palms of her hands, then her eyes, trying to make sense of this new factum. But nothing came to mind.

“Right, well, just another oddity then, isn’t it?” She shook her head, freeing herself of the matter for now. “Once those surface scans are done, transmit them to the ship, let the boys and girls up there make sense of them.”

“Not with the paltry bandwidth of that laser comm unit we have,” Gerald replied. “I’d be better off driving outside of the interference field and back again.”

And as soon as he said it, she knew he was right. The laser comm was letting them stay in touch, but the bandwidth on it wasn’t great. Video communications or light data transmission was one thing, but the drone Gerald was using was taking intensely detailed surface scans. They’d be able to recreate a holographic model with the detail he was collecting. And transmitting that via what they had on hand would take days.

She sighed. At least Gerald wasn’t a smug prick like Simmons would have been. He was just pointing out a problem.

“Take a rover then. And one of the hazard team. And tell them that’s an order from me and they can check if they want.”

With his confirmation he would do so, she left Gerald to finish his scans, leaving the shaded sanctity of the gazebo and heading for one of the teams at the base of the monolith. A team that instead of looking at scanners, or on hands and knees examining something, or even their noses pressed against the monolith, were all standing around a single large flagstone and just quietly pondering it.

“Ladies, gentlemen, what’s up?” she asked.

“Trish here has found something,” Matt Lake announced, nodding towards one of his team. “Care to tell the Commander?”

The young woman, who looked barely old enough for the Academy, let alone the JG pips on her collar, rocked her head side-to-side briefly. Nervous energy that Gabrielle recognised quickly. “I think there’s an entryway to some tunnels here,” Trish finally spat out.

And before Gabrielle could ask how, the young woman stamped her foot twice, took a step forward onto the flagstone everyone was standing around and repeated the action.

And it sounded very, very different.

“Okay,” Gabrielle said slowly, finding herself now staring at the flagstone like everyone else. “How do we get in there?”

“And that is the question,” Matt answered. “Being lazy, we’d either scan and beam straight in, or use a shuttle and tractor beam to lift it, wouldn’t we?”

“Neither of which we can do,” Gabrielle said. Matt just snapped his fingers and pointed straight up in agreement.

“Could just phaser it,” one of the Atlantis team said.

“What if we got a couple of those tractor emitters used in shuttlebays for moving shuttles around?” one of the Republic scientists asked. “Fix them to a rover for power, pick this stone up and move it out of the way.”

“I like that idea,” Matt said.

“I do too,” Gabrielle admitted. “Should be a spare or two that could be sent down.” Then she looked straight up, looking for the drone still descending around the monolith in a lazy spiral. “Matt, call the ships, get us those tractor units. Gerald is going to be heading out in about,” she looked up again, “thirty minutes to transmit his scans. They can beam them down to him and he can bring them back with him.”

“On it,” the Republic officer said cheerfully, heading for the laser comm immediately.

Gabrielle looked to the young Republic officer, Trish, and smiled, which perked the young woman up immediately. “Nice find, Trish.” And that almost caused Trish to start floating away. Oh, to be that young and impressed with praise from her seniors once again.

“As for the rest of you, back to work,” she then said, shooing everyone else away, back to something, anything that wasn’t just standing around.

And then left by herself, in the relative quiet, she tapped her own foot on the stone, listening to the hollow thump compared to the rest of the plinth they’d camped on.

“Just what are you hiding?” she asked of the rock beneath her feet.