Triangulate

Posted on Mon Nov 2nd, 2020 @ 5:40am by Lieutenant Bonnie "Bon-Bon" Durnell

Mission: Diplomatic Masquerade
Location: USS Liberty
Timeline: Current

The search was meticulous and thorough. Identifying the aquifer proved the easiest part, well sort of. The dry mountains actually held three distinctive sections where they may lie but her initial scans showed at least two of them had gone dry, possibly many years prior. This meant the third was the likeliest option for her conditions.

Narrowing her search to the third source of water yielded two veins of highly reactive metals. One of which ran along a compact vein of salt or salt like minerals. She focused in on this line in the arid sand and ran every deep scan she could think of that would test her theory. Mostly she was looking for the right conductivity to create an influx of power.

What she found was somewhat of an enigma. Not only was the metal material fused as though a great energy such as lightning had passed through it, but the area held little to no vegetation to speak of. Meaning her trees as an antenna hypothesis was almost benign.

So she took to tracing the surface inch by inch along the metal vein while overlaying the rock beneath. An hour into her search she began to notice a pattern. Every 15 meters she would see another reflective rock formation, possibly crystalline in structure. She would have loved to see what they looked like from the surface as she imagined large crystals protruding from the ground.

The crystals were laid out in such a way they could only have been placed there, or grown there by hand. She had a flat mate who dabbled in growing crystals, but never on a planetary scale. She followed the line in the sand to it's end where it looped around to form a circle. This had to be it. They were a perfect conduit channel for electrical energy.

It was even possible the storm that kicked up the first time the away team went down was started by a kickback of electrical energy. If there was a group of people they would have to store whatever energy the planet threw at them via these channeling crystals. This was her antenna. This was how they sent a signal. But this did not help the ground team find an entrance to the underground world.

She had to find something tangible. Something they could use. A footprint in the sand, something. But she had one. It just took her a moment to realize. The line in the sand, it wasn't just a power grid. It was a natural path pointing towards the underground entrance. She surmised that from the ground they would look like a natural growth, but from the Liberty they were an arrow.

She followed the line to its opposite end, then triangulated a search pattern to encompass 1 square kilometer. The northern tip of her search produced a result. What appeared to be recently collapsed cave openings. Three of them. She had a possible entry point and as luck would have it several members of the away team were closing on that position.

She turned in her chair and addressed Lexington. "Ma'am I believe I may have found a point of entry, or three rather. I'll patch the coordinates through to you and the ground team if you'd like?"

TBC