Unstoppable Forces - Part One

Posted on Tue Sep 24th, 2024 @ 10:26am by Captain Nycolas Temple & Unknown

Mission: The Only Thing Left Was Hope
Location: Unknown
Timeline: Unknown

ON:

Nyx felt the cold, vibrating metal against his forehead as he began to come to again. He became aware of the noise of warp engines close on both sides of his ears. It was a small vessel - a shuttle or a runabout. There was something different about the engines though, a higher pitch with a stronger resonating afterburn. He felt they were definitely at warp speed - maybe 7 or 8 given the strength of the artificial gravity he could sense. Opening his eyes, Nyx saw a dark grey metal wall. Smooth and rounded lines, no obvious joints. Federation made - Starfleet construction, but still different somehow. Newer. He looked around and found he was in a square metal room, no furniture or consoles just a plain, cold space.

It was a cell.

Sitting upright he started to feel across the metal panels that lined the walls, pushing them in their corners, trying to see if there was any give or release. But one by one there was nothing. They were fixed panels. There was a dim yellowish light in the ceiling, hidden behind a metal grating. He stood up and with his arms stretched out, up on his toes, he could feel around the grating. He traced his fingers gingerly around the grate and found that it was welded to the ceiling panel. He pushed against the metal grate, seeing how flexible it could be. There was no give in the metal either. Someone had made this room purposely secured.

"They trained you well." Came a voice, seemingly from nowhere and everywhere at once. It was the disguised, modulated voice of their mystery visitor in the black suit, Nyx recognized it immediately. "You know what to look for."

"Tell me now if there's no point that I keep looking for a way out." Nyx grumbled, as he continued to feel around the room - this time pushing on the ceiling panels. "Save me the time. The longer I look, the slower I'm going to kill you."

He laughed a little. "You know, there might be. It's not my ship." The voice replied earnestly, not at all bothered by the threat to his life. "But I hope we can talk instead."

Nyx could hear the man was operating a LCARS panel as he spoke; in the background there was the familiar chirp of buttons sounding occasionally, meaning he was likely at the helm of the vessel. Nyx calculated given the potential size of the craft due to the proximity and sound of the engines - the kidnapper was probably only 6 to 8 meters away from him. Close enough. And if they were at warp, the mystery man wouldn't be able to transport away like he has done in their previous meetings.

Nyx just needed to get to him.

"Talk?" Nyx scoffed. He leant against the one wall, seeing if he could hear from which direction the cockpit might be. The engines were definitely on the left and right side from where he woke up, so that meant there was only the front or back walls to investigate. "You need to give me some answers."

"Go ahead." The voice returned plainly. "I do owe you that."

"Why?" Nyx asked directly, as he moved to the opposite wall and pressed his ear against it. "Why set me up to gather everyone together on Risa, tell them about our mission - YOUR mission, actually - only to snatch me away before we could begin?"

"Your role was to gather them and give them the information they needed to look for the Pandora. It is up to them to find the Pandora." He responded simply. "I know you feel that is your job as Captain and - let's face it - your indulgent sense of self-importance, but you have a different journey now."

Nyx stopped for a moment. "Asshole." He muttered loud enough to be heard, looking up at the light in disdain.

The man laughed once more. "I apologize." There was a humanity to his word choice, his tone - even through the disguise of the voice modulator. Nyx couldn't quite place an age; though there was a timber to his laugh that indicated he was well past puberty, but there was not enough age or drag to his words to suggest that he was too old either. A male human between twenty and forty? Nyx could only assume.

Returning to his work, Nyx decided the first wall had produced a closer sound and so he moved back towards it. He started feeling around again, pressing on the metal panels. If this was the doorway into the cell, it must have a latch or track somewhere. "What if they don't find the ship?" Nyx asked out loud.

"They will." The man replied. The craft began to slow down a little, dropping to maybe a Warp 5 by Nyx's estimate.

"What if they decide to look for me instead." Nyx huffed. He was slowly sliding the back of his hand across the bottom of the wall. In the right-hand corner there was a slight flow of air coming from underneath the wall, indicating an opening. "You may have thrown them completely off course or delayed their investigation. Even prevented them from looking because they decided it was too dangerous. They might decide to abandon looking for the Pandora, wherever it is."

"I have the Pandora." The man said plainly. "It is hidden in a mostly stable dimensional fold in the orbit of the Sol system's sun."

Nyx stopped again and looked up to the ceiling. He blinked as he took in the news. "You have the Pandora?"

"I do."

"And it's... in a what?"

"I guess you would call it a bubble." The voice returned casually. "I got the idea from your journey into the Indigo Sky. But, I made it work."

"How?!" Nyx cried out, "That defies all known practical science and technology. We can't just go around creating bubbles in space!" The anger had taken over his mind and he stopped his search. Of course, he wondered if this was the mystery kidnapper's plan to distract him.

"Correct. You cannot. But I can." He said firmly, "Though, to be honest, it isn't permanent. The bubble eventually deteriorates, and I must retrieve the Pandora, create another bubble and hide it again. It takes a lot of precise calculations and is really quite difficult to replicate."

"And if you have miscalculated?" Nyx asked angrily, "Does that mean my ship is lost forever in some bubble of space, or possibly destroyed completely? What gives you the right to play around with such dangerous forces at a whim?!" He hissed out angrily thinking he had made his point, but then he got a second wind and kept going, "OH! And you are using OUR sun, potentially endangering billions of lives in the Sol system! Have you no Federation ethics?"

There was silence for some time. It was so long a silence that Nyx got fed up waiting and cried out, "WELL?! What do you have to say for yourself?"

"I know what I am doing." Came the terse response. "I have given myself a clear margin of error and the deterioration takes months to even come close to impacting the ship. The Pandora won't need to be rescued again for another three months, to be precise. That means your friends will have plenty of time to find her and she is no danger of being lost or destroyed. The bubble itself is a security protocol and requires my input code at regular intervals. Should something happen to me, the Pandora is returned to normal space and a beacon is sent to you and the crew by order of rank. I have kept her safe... for her crew."

Nyx had returned to the wall, and he began trying to see if he could wedge his fingers underneath the paneling. He felt a small gap in between - no more than five centimeters. He crouched down and tried to see underneath the wall.

"I still question your ethics." Nyx replied.

"I knew you would." The man said, returning to his casual cool, "But the universe does not revolve around your individual opinion. Ethics have always been justifiable in the context of the greater good. Even the Federation has been known to revise their own rules to fit changing circumstances."

"I can't disagree there." Nyx retorted from his spot on the floor, "But what greater good can come from playing hide and seek with the Pandora? We're a science vessel that was mothballed years ago!"

Another laugh came from his kidnapper, "Is that some kind of a joke, Captain? The Pandora, just a science vessel?"

Nyx looked perplexed up at the light, "We were... It is!" He protested indignantly.

"Your ship fought the Ravagers and killed their most heinous leader, navigated through the dark matter storms and made first contact with the Mendazians, survived the rebirth of the Indigo Sky, discovered and removed the Breen presence on Paradise Outpost, rescued the Hesians at the brink of their planet's collapse, uncovered a Section 31 plot and exposed some of their senior operatives, turned the Talarians against the Alrakis Pact, and started a revolution in the Inconnu Expanse that saw multiple species and systems take up arms against the Pact's oppressive control of the system."

"The Pandora was not just a science vessel." The voice declared. "It was an unstoppable force."

Nyx once again paused in his search, moved by his kidnapper's strong words. He remembered all of it of course - everything this man had recalled about the Pandora was true. It hadn't been that easy, those were some of the toughest times he had ever faced as a Captain and a Starfleet officer. There were many times he thought they were not going to make it through alive. But one could not doubt the impact the Pandora has had in their missions. The knowledge of these events meant that the mystery man had either done his research well or was already quite close to the ship himself.

Nyx decided to go out on a whim with his response. "So, do you miss serving on the Pandora?" Nyx pointedly asked.

"Nice try, Captain." He replied quickly, "It isn't time for that just yet. You'll learn about me when it's the right moment."

Nyx rolled his eyes and focused on the wall again. He was trying to see if there was any movement that would indicate how the door opened - left to right, back and forth. But it was stiff in its position. That was until he pushed his fingers hard against the metal and pulled upwards, which resulted in the door lifting slightly. Immediately he sprung to his feet and on his tippy toes again, Nyx began to feel around at the top of the wall, trying to find a latch.

"You know there's just going to be a forcefield after the door, don't you?" The voice called out over the speaker flatly.

"Just one more obstacle to overcome." Nyx shrugged, "I spent three months searching meticulously in the sewers of Gaspar in order to figure out the perfect pathway to assassinate a rogue Cardassian commander. I've only been awake five minutes, and I've already found the doorway. Imagine what I can do in another five minutes."

"And then what, you kill me?" The voice asked softly.

"Yes." Nyx replied simply. "You told me yourself. If you don't enter your input code to the security field around the Pandora, she gets released back to normal space and I get a beacon to go retrieve her. You've made your continued participation in this situation entirely redundant."

"So because of that, you believe I deserve the classic Temple judicial homicide?" He asked sarcastically, a bitterness breaking through the vocoder.

"No, that's just for wasting my time with your shadow games and for taking me from my crew." Nyx shot back immediately. "I am done having my strings pulled."

After a moment, the voice replied, "See? An unstoppable force."

Nyx tried to ignore the attempt at a compliment as he continued to work on lifting the door. He had no idea how long he would have while the mystery kidnapper allowed him to keep trying to escape. But he wasn't about to sit around waiting to find out how long he had left either.

OFF

 

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