Voices In The Dark - Part I
Posted on Sat Jan 10th, 2026 @ 2:18pm by Captain Thorrin & Commander Marisa Sandoval & Lieutenant C'Mila Juli & Major Hastios Eilfaren
Edited on on Sat Jan 10th, 2026 @ 3:14pm
1,529 words; about a 8 minute read
Mission:
In The Nick Of Time
Location: Deep Within Kroat
Timeline: MD004 2030 hrs
They had been in the caves for a while now and Juli's heart was beating a little faster since she'd nearly slipped on some wet rock that might have caused her to lead her team into a dangerous crevice had it not been for Nagla's strong arm catching her before she slipped. She still wasn't sure why her tricorder hadn't detected the hazard ahead of time, but she'd been trying to rely on her eyes and ears more since. And smell - the different parts of the caves had different odors to them, and Juli had been taking note. None of it had been all that surprising so far - the parts of the caves that smelled wet, also carried a mossy, musky scent. The dryer parts of the caves had a mineral smell to them - salt and a spice almost like the Earth spice cardamom, but not quite.
Other than nearly breaking an ankle - or worse, the caves had been uneventful, with no signs of sentient life, and Juli was walking a few meters ahead of Hastios and Marisa when their path suddenly ended to a narrowing cavern and a wall of rock.
Juli placed her tricorder on the ground and looked at Nagla. "Is this it?" She asked skeptically as she walked ahead.
Marisa stopped behind them. They were going the right direction, so the dead end was unexpected. She closed her eyes so she could concentrate on her other senses, listening to the sounds of water, the feel of the air around them, the scent of wet rock...and the almost imperceptible hum of...something. She opened her eyes and turned to Hastios.
Hastios had tolerated the long walk through the caves, but only just. The terrain shifted from loose gravel to slick stone to uneven shelves, and most of it had been mind-numbingly dull. Hours of trudging with nothing but the drip of water and the occasional low rumble from somewhere deep in the mountain. If the Kroats meant to impress them with grandeur, this wasn’t it.
What he did notice, though, was Nagla.
Not that she’d done anything blatantly wrong; that was the problem. She was too careful. Too ready with an explanation. Too smooth in the way she steered them along the “proper” route. And while she’d saved C’Mila from twisting an ankle, the fact that the tricorder hadn’t flagged the hazard gnawed at him. Coincidence? Maybe. His gut didn’t buy it.
By the time the tunnel narrowed into a dead end, his suspicion wasn’t a sharp alarm — just a steady pressure at the back of his mind, the feeling that something was off and he couldn’t yet see where.
When Juli stepped forward to check the wall, Hastios came up beside Marisa. He didn’t comment, didn’t voice the doubt sitting in his chest; he learned a long time ago that the quickest way to make a liar slip was to let them talk in their own time.
He closed his eyes.
Not dramatically — just long enough to shut out the distraction of lantern glare against stone, Nagla’s breathing behind them, the shuffle of boots on grit. Long enough to let the cave speak for itself.
There: underneath the usual cave sounds — the faintest vibration. Too regular. Too intentional.
When he opened his eyes again, they were sharper.
Something was here. Something that didn’t belong in a dead-end cave.
And he already knew Nagla wasn’t going to like what happened next.
She knew what lay beyond that wall, she had argued to have it dismantled once they had completed their mission. However, the council outvoted her and now it was up to Nagla to steer this team away or kill them. In truth she did not think she would be successful in murdering all three of these officers. She also did not see a way to steer them away from this wall, and the room beyond it. While they scanned, she stood there and looked around, as if she attempted to get her bearings. In that moment she decided that when they opened the wall, she would feign ignorance and would inform all of her people to do the same. It was their only way out of this at this point. Before her silence became too suspicious Nagla spoke. "This must have been a cave in of some sort. As I said no one has been this way in quite some time and there is seismic activity."
Juli walked toward the jagged walls of the cave and ran her hands along the grayish-brown rocks as she examined them up and down, squinting her eyes as she scrutinized the lines of the cave, trying to see if there was a sign of a cave in, boulders that might have moved, or any other way through.
The half-Vulcan moved forward. "Something is...off," she whispered when she was close to Juli.
Hastios stepped in beside them, saying nothing at first. His gaze swept the dead end, slow and deliberate — not at the obvious face of rock, but at the walls framing it.
He frowned.
The left wall curved inward a few degrees too sharply. The right wall drifted out, just slightly, as if the cave had grown around something rather than continued naturally. The angles didn’t reconcile. The textures were close, but not right. It was the kind of mismatch most people wouldn’t notice unless they lived their lives reading terrain the way others read expressions.
“Hold on,” he murmured, stepping forward. He ran a hand across the side wall, then toward the supposed dead end — his fingers stopping a centimeter short, as if expecting the stone to vanish under his touch.
“See that?” He pointed, tracing the subtle, asymmetrical break between the framing rock and the surface ahead. “Natural formations mirror each other more than this. Erosion, pressure, water flow — they leave patterns. This doesn’t match. At all.”
He straightened, jaw tightening just a fraction.
“This isn’t a cave-in, or a dead end. It’s a mask — something sitting in front of where the tunnel should go.”
Only then did he flick a glance at Nagla — brief, unreadable, but loaded with the shift in the air.
“Lieutenant,” he said to Juli, voice low but firm, “run a full-spectrum scan. High-resolution. If that’s a hologram or a projection field, it’s going to crack under the right frequency.”
Juli nodded in understanding. This might be it. What they were looking for and she was to use everything she had at her disposal.
His attention returned to the walls, every sense keyed sharply now.
“This place is trying too hard to look natural.”
That was what felt off. Now that Hastios pointed it out, it made sense to Marisa. The feeling of wrongness. The almost imperceptible vibration. The odd echo. "If the tricorder fails, we can always throw rocks at the wall--as long as it is simply a hologram." Her voice was barely a whisper so that Nagla wouldn't hear her.
She was also aware that there could be a trap waiting for anyone who ventured through the camouflage. Or that Nagla would do something to keep them from seeing what lay beyond.
Pretending to study the rock wall, Marisa moved away from the dead end to give Juli space to scan while putting herself in a position to run interference if needed.
It also left Hastios where he could protect Juli if that became necessary.
Juli had picked up her clunky tricorder, the casing a few years behind the technology it hid inside it. They suspected a hologram, so she would start with that analysis. Initial readings were coming back the same combinations of rocks and minerals as the rest of the caves, but Nagla wouldn't have brought them this way if they had a secret that so could easily be uncovered, and if her narrow mishap with the crevice earlier had taught her anything it was to not fully trust the instruments. At least not at first glance anyway.
Juli struck Nagla a sideways glance and while she seemed to be distracted by the other two she switched her tricorder to begin looking for signs of temporal radiation. Her tricorder indicated the area showed trace signs of chronitons. She fought to keep a straight face as the excitement welled inside of her.
A Joint Post By
Captain Thorrin
Commanding Officer
USS Herodotus DTI-30656
Commander Marisa Sandoval
Executive Officer
USS Herodotus DTI-30656
Major Hastios Eilfaren
Chief Security & Tactical Officer
Second Officer
USS Herodotus DTI-30656
Lieutenant C'amila Juli
Chief Science Officer
USS Herodotus DTI-30656
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