Missing Time - Part I

Posted on Mon May 29th, 2023 @ 3:24am by Lieutenant Sofia Gonzalez

1,758 words; about a 9 minute read

Mission: EPISODE 1: SHAKEDOWN
Location: Canopeia Draco VII
Timeline: Four Months before launch

::ON::

Sofia leaned back in her chair and sighed. It was near enough 2200 hours local time, and she was still working on the day’s reports. Not that much’s happened, she reflected as she leaned in to read the bulky data slate she had been handed a few hours before. More pot sherds, midden waste and barter items.

The exciting stuff had long been excavated when she had arrived.

Canopeia Draco VII, or Earth-14 as it was known to Starfleet didn’t officially appear on any star chart they could find. Starfleet Intelligence had made sure of that fact. Shortly after her discovery by the USS Stobart a decade and a half ago, directives agreed upon almost a quarter century before that had swung into effect.

Earth-14 joined that mysterious fraternity of twenty or so planets that were the mirror image of their originals. Well. What we assume are the originals, Sofia thought. Scattered throughout the explored Alpha and Beta Quadrants were duplicates of Earth, Vulcan, Tellar and Andor. From the data she was privy too, Earth-duplicates outnumbered the other planets by two-to-one. Andor had the fewest duplicate. Must be difficult to find or create a system with such a specific configuration .

Over the past seven years, a sprawling excavation had developed across Earth-14. Most of the dig sites were concentrated in a ten-mile radius near the planet’s equator. Given its similarities to Earth, most of the human scientific staff had taken to naming the general area Yucatan-Two. The Vulcans persisted in calling it Dig Site Twelve.

What had astonished the Intelligence Officer was the willingness with which the science staff were content to work on a project that would not see the light of day for decades, if ever.

Stretching, Sofia got to her feet, and pulled her hair into a ponytail before tugging her Starfleet trucker’s cap down snuggly on her head. Palming her communicator, she slipped it into a holder on her belt, and hefted a tricorder.
Time for a walk.

Stepping from the climate-controlled Intelligence Hub, little more than a grandly named room really, into the moist, muggy air of Yucatan-Two was something Sofia hadn’t gotten used to in the past year. A hot, dry heat was what she preferred.
Trudging down the trail from where the Intelligence Hub stood on a hillock, Sofia pulled a face at the squelching sound her boots made in the mud. Soon her hair was plastered to her head, an uncomfortable hot dampness wrapped her skin. I need to get out of here, she thought to herself suddenly.

It wasn’t just the weather. When the scientist had joined Intelligence from the Templeton, she had thought she would make a difference. Instead, she was here, babysitting a classified dig, filing reports on avian bone fragments, ancient stool samples and fossilised pollen.

Nothing that would perk up her superiors at sector command, she thought glumly.

The cloying, muffling air offered her no comfort as she rounded a copse of tropical trees. Spread out to either side of the path ahead of her were neatly ordered patches delineated by twine string. Wrapped around pegs driven into the ground, it was the age-old method to define a dig area. Why change it if it still functioned?

Not that their methods had been whole primitive. The Stobart’s sensor scans had shown the underlying structures when they had first observed the planet. LIDAR drone flights had done the rest when the initial team landed seven years ago to begin the dig.
Sofia stalked across the clearing, using her tricorder as much as the light from Draco’s satellite to navigate the terrain. It was easy going. The path, thought muddy, was now well established, and in the muddiest of places there were wooden boards to allow the team to better traverse the terrain.

Seeing the latest dig site, she moved off the path, making her way through the undergrowth. Here, away from the trees, the grasses that were oh-so-similar, yet ever so subtly different from their Earth cousins, grew tall. Sofia felt, as much as heard, the insects and small animals move away from her blundering, giant frame.

The square dug out of the ground and delineated by twine wasn’t particularly large. Reports she had read indicated it, and a fair few other of the local dig sites, were houses for the indigenous South American population transported here. Some obsidian mirrors had been found, amongst other things.

She stared at the pit for what seemed like an age, contemplating the thought that a civilisation that existed within recorded human history – roughly between 400 Before the Common Era to 100 Common Era – had been transplanted across the vast gulf of space to a replica of Earth that was near-identical.

And to what end? They all died out anyway, despite the effort at preservation, Sofia thought as she ran her hand down her face. Leaving nothing but imperfect memory.

She shook herself out of her reverie, looked up at the alien stars before turning away, heading back to the path.
Somewhere in the distance an owl hooted.

Her walk took on a dreamlike-quality as she made her way down the overgrown path to the next clearing. The dig team’s support team had diligently maintained it since its discovery, but even they struggled to keep the fecund wildlife from overgrowing it. Sofia flattened flowers and trampled tree-saplings as she wended her way through the night. She registered no night-time sounds from her surroundings. All was still. All sound was filtered through heavy wadding.

The second dig clearing was delineated by two stone obelisks at its entrance. From her site reports, Sofia knew they were roughly pre-classical Maya, evidenced by their Olmec-like head carvings. At the centre of the clearing stood another, entirely alien, obelisk.
Obelisk is not quite the correct term, Sofia recalled from her briefings. The sides of the structure are concave and the top doesn’t taper to a point, rather it is flat. Whatever material the obelisks are made of have resisted scanning attempts for nearly three decades at this point.

She stared up at the structure in front of her for a long while. Spock of Vulcan had deciphered the glyphs the Preservers used on their obelisks years ago. Sofia was still entranced by their typography. That has been the compulsion to take up this assignment. To look upon the writings of a people that had manipulated the destiny of hers for so long.

Sofia shook herself. What a silly notion, she thought as she advanced towards the obelisk, careful to avoid triggering the entrance to the control room below. They could protect these people from the dangers of the stars, but not from themselves . She began sinking into her dreamlike reverie once more.

She adjusted her trucker’s cap by the beak, and crouched in front of the inscriptions. They were the standard instructions in the Preservers’ music-like script on how to activate the obelisk. Catching movement from the corner of her eye she noticed a Búho Barrado Albinegro owl staring down at her from a tree nearby. The yellow eyes in the black-masked face observed her intently as she returned her attention to the writing in front of her.

As she crouched there, Sofia felt the most intense compulsion to reach out and touch the glyphs. Her hand shot out across the gap of its own volition, and she soon found herself caressing the glyphs immediately in front of her. The silence intensified, and a feeling of great pressure grew around her. The edges of her vision began whitening, the blank fog of nothingness solidifying as she keeled on to the floor.

Not again.

Shaking herself out of her reverie, Sofia frowned. She couldn’t recall what she had been thinking about, or why she had been staring so intently at the glyphs in front of her. She noticed the ache in her back and knees, and the dampness of the ground beneath her seeping into her uniform trousers.

Best get back to base.

Wiping her hands down her backside, the Intelligence Officer looked about the still clearing. Sofia could hear no sounds of nature, nor see any movement other than the trees. And the owl. Its large, luminous eyes regarded her as she glanced in its direction.
Nodding, she turned on her heel, and made her way back the way she came.

Cutting through the stillness came the monstrous flap of the owl’s wings as it beat the air around it to gain the sky.
Afterwards there was only the sound of her footsteps and breathing for the trek back through the woods. As Sofia neared the ruins, the world seemed to release itself, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, the sounds of nature reasserted themselves.

She stretched as she waited for the door to her office to open once more. That little jaunt did me good, she concluded as she took her seat. Sofia felt refreshed, somehow, as she often had after one of her night jaunts.

‘That’s … weird.’ Logging back in to her terminal, she noticed the chronometer on her terminal. Zero-Four-Eighteen. I can’t have been gone that long!. Sofia frowned, all notions of being refreshed from her excursion being pushed to the far corners of her mind. Shifting an errant strand of hair behind her ear, she quickly input her credentials.

Her entry/exit log for her station showed her logging off at twenty-two-hundred and not returning until zero-four-fifteen. Sofia let loose a string of expletives. Not again. She mentally checked her remembered missing time events, fifteen or so, all stretching back to childhood. Sofia hadn’t had one in a few years.

Not since Arkroria Four.

The creases of her frown deepened. Spacing out on duty wasn’t generally considered good form, after all. For a moment, Sofia considered reporting the incident, but demurred. They’ll just assign me one of those new counsellors and I’ll spend hours of my days talking nonsense with them. She sighed again, then began entering a minor incident report explaining her absence.

Can’t make it too dramatic, now.

[To Be Continued ...]

::OFF::

Lieutenant Sofia Gomez
Intelligence Officer
Canopeia Draco VII Scientific Base

 

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