As the group entered the control room Jenkins halted.

“Wait…that door wasn’t there when we did our initial survey.” He said, pointing at a 3 by 4 metre opening in the right hand wall of the room.

Lotharys nodded, looking worriedly at it and checking her tricorder; no life signs in its range beyond the sextet.  “Yeah…. We’ll check that out later, but first thing’s first; something had to have happened in this room, and we need to find out what.  Spread out, everyone, and let me know if you see anything out of the ordinary.”

The group fanned out around the room, one of the security officers keeping the now-open door covered.  As another of the security officers – Silis, who had been with Lotharys and Jenkins earlier when their group had first discovered this room – walked past a console, she saw a glint of metal reflected in the beam from her flashlight.  “Lieutenant, I found something!” she called out.

“Don’t touch anything.” Jenkins called from the corner of the room.

Lotharys walked over to see what Silis had found; there, bathed in the light of the security officer’s lamp, lay a standard-issue Starfleet tricorder.  The tricorder’s housing was scuffed, evidence perhaps of a fall, but otherwise it appeared to be in good working order.  Lying a few feet away, right on the edge of the light, was another piece of standard-issue Starfleet hardware, a PADD this time, showing similar scuffing to its housing and a crack in one corner of the display from impact with the ground.  “It’s some of our gear,” Lotharys called as she crouched.  “Looks like Xoritsa’s tricorder and PADD, if I’m not mistaken.”

She reached out – hesitating for a moment – then picked up the tricorder.  Her eyes had played no tricks on her; the tricorder was in good order, beyond the damage to its outer housing that truthfully was more cosmetic than functional.  Lotharys called up the last scans the device had taken, hoping they might provide some insights as to what had happened, but it appeared that Xoritsa had been scanning the orb in the center of the room, along with one of the nearby consoles, at the time that whatever had happened here took place; the tricorder offered no insights as to where he had gone or what had happened to him.

Lotharys’s gaze now passed to the PADD; knowing that all of the researchers in the team were required to keep detailed notes of anything they studied, she hoped that perhaps his notes might be able to fill in the gaps.  What she saw gave her pause, not just in fear but also in fascination.  “Hey, Deroy, come and take a look at this,” she called.

“Uh…  Unless I’m seeing things, this shows that console reacted just to a simple tricorder scan.”

Lotharys showed Jenkins the PADD’s display.  It appeared that Xoritsa had been working on a possible translation of the controls on the console he’d been focusing on when he’d realized something.  The notes indicated that Xoritsa believed the console to be the control interface for a subspace field emitter, and that he believed the orb – or perhaps the orb and spire in combination, he wasn’t quite sure – to be the emitter.  He’d even attempted some rough calculations on field size based on potential energy output of the emitter; checking his math, Lotharys agreed that it was in the ballpark of correct.  The math indicated that the emitter should be able to generate a field that could cover a star system, and probably a ways beyond that, but Xoritsa’s notes went further, positing that the emitter seemed to be designed to work in concert with other, similar emitters.  He admitted he did not know how the emitter was calibrated or what type of field it would emit if active – to his eyes, it appeared to be inactive – but that didn’t stop him from speculating that this emitter network, if spread widely enough, could realistically emit a field that covered the entirety of the Expanse, like the recently-collapsed Shroud.

“So, he might have hit some sort of trip wire,” Jenkins mused.

Lotharys kept reading, her eyes now drawn to a number of non sequiturs that seemed almost as scribbles in the margins.  Here, Xoritsa described seeing things that his tricorder said were not there, hearing sounds without sources, and feeling like he was being watched; by his words, Xoritsa seemed to believe that this was all just in his imagination.  But it hadn’t stopped, and in fact had accelerated; his notes bore that out, these asides becoming more fearful.  Then, suddenly, they just stopped, mid-thought; not only the asides, but Xoritsa’s survey log stopped all at once.  Whatever had happened in this room, he did not get a chance to write it down.  Lotharys looked to Jenkins.  “If he’s not in the room, we need to see where he went.  That new door’s as good a bet as any, but let’s see if we can find anything that confirms it.”

Without waiting Jenkins walked over to the door and dark corridor it led to where one of the security officers was standing watch.

“Starfleet issue boot prints leading down this way boss.” Deroy said as he flashed his light down the dark hallway.

Lotharys nodded, straightening up and slipping the PADD and tricorder into the small pack she had grabbed before leaving the base camp.  She then walked over to join Jenkins at the doorway.  “Let’s see where this goes” she said simply, then headed into the hallway.