The Depths [✱18]

Posted on Fri May 15th, 2026 @ 8:58am by Lieutenant JG O'Raan & Lieutenant Commander N'Tgni Creon & Cadet Senior Grade Bellis & SubCommander Saa & Polyphron & Crewman Thomas Callaghan

2,749 words; about a 14 minute read

Mission: UnderMind [4]
Location: Dreizhen III, Insect Cave
Timeline: 1445 - MD04 (After [✱14])

The little machines fanned out ahead of them in a loose cloud, their marker lights blinking red and green in the dim organic passage. Polyphron moved among them with surprising grace for a being enclosed in a plastoid shell, stooping every few steps to slap a coin-sized signal booster onto the wall. Each one adhered with a click and a brief blue blink as it joined the chain back to the surface.

Watching the tiny Tok’ra skitter ahead of her like a baby Cordian cave-skink, Saa felt more conscious of her own lumbering presence in comparison, encased as she was in a quarter ton of hexapodal robotic walker. Despite the best efforts of Starfleet engineers, these drysuits were never comfortable, when deployed in natural gravity. After half a day suited up, her entire body felt as if it had been sandblasted from dermal abrasion. But it was a trade-off she’d make every time. Gravitic drysuits were just not as reliable as walkers.

Saa still couldn’t figure out why she’d been asked to join this away team in the first place. She was a starship mechanic, not a security officer! Her technical rank of Subcommander was just an administrative formality, required by the number of personnel involved in DS13’s shipyard operations division. She viewed herself as fundamentally an administrator, and was acutely aware that all of her non-simulated combat experiences, prior to this assignment, could be counted on one fin.

Her place was on the ship, which they’d brought to Dreizhen III for the sole purpose of testing the atmospheric flight systems her team had just finished rebuilding. And with her son, who must be going crazy with worry by now. The echo of that thought washed over her in a wave of guilt: even now, she’d thought of her work before she’d thought of him.

This was proving to be a late reminder of a couple of lessons Saa had already learned: that when working for Starfleet, mission parameters tended to mutate far more unpredictably than on Vulcan; and that she was not much a mother.

Bellis walked just behind Callaghan with her rifle shouldered, her eyes fixed on the darkness between the probes’ swinging lights. She was trying very hard not to think about how many legs the builders of this place must have had. Her breathing was steady only because she was making it so.

“Signal integrity at eighty two percent.” Ulloriaq’s voice crackled over the combadge link. “Audio and basic telemetry holding.”

“Good.” Creon said. “Keep the Faraday ready to go.”

The order brought a visible relaxation to Saa, a salve for her bubbling anxieties, temporary though she expected it to be.

The tunnel sloped gently downward. The walls were not quite stone and not quite chitin, but some composite of the two; dark material polished smooth by countless passing limbs, with load-bearing ridges at regular intervals. The air smelled of hot dust, formic acid and something faintly metallic beneath it all.

Saa’s scanner, mounted next to her backpack power supply, swept independently over the buttressed supports as they moved. “The structure’s surprisingly sound,” she reported. “Silicates, organic resins... if you wanted to build pressure-bearing tunnels out of this substrate, we could hardly have done better.” Her tone suggested cautious reassurance.

“Don’t get too fond of it.” Creon said. “We’re not staying any longer than we have to. Anyone got anything?” Creon asked the team.

Polyphron remained quiet, focusing on the deployment of boosters, and keeping the link attuned.

“I’ve got biomatter.” O’Raan announced quietly, checking his tricorder. “Old blood. Vulcan. Ant. At least one other unknown protein signature.”

“Unknown as in unclassified?” Creon asked.

“Doesn’t match anything we’ve got on record, ma’am. But if I had to guess, I’d assume it was a lifeform.” O’Raan clarified.

That was enough to make Saa pause. Even Polyphron glance over. Anything that could kill a creature the size of that was not something she wanted to be around.

The first chamber opened around them abruptly, a bulbous cavity tall enough that the tops of their lights vanished into darkness. Their footfalls changed on the floor from dull compacted earth to something more resonant and brittle.

Bones.

Not heaps of them, not yet, but enough.

“This must be where they eat. Or where they throw their garbage.” Bellis suggested.

“So either a Klingon restaurant, or...” Saa trailed off, her attempt to conceal her unease dying as they cast their lights further along the chamber. The pale beams glinted off segmented limbs from insects the size of dogs and larger, split carapaces, sheddings and shattered mandibles. Mixed among them nearby were scraps of robe cloth, a shattered tricorder casing.

“The wounds on these ants are not conspecific. Something else has killed them.” Polyphron said as she reviewed her readings.

Ahead the floor was littered with cracked egg casings the size of ration crates, splintered lengths of chitin, and fragments of things that had once been part of the giant ants. Here and there were more signs of the missing Order members: a snapped survey wand, a tricorder crushed nearly flat, another patch of robe cloth, and what Bellis realised with a lurch was a desiccated Vulcan hand still wearing a ring set with a small crystal seal.

“Look. This is Vulcan.” Bellis said, shining her torch on the hand. The crystal caught the light.

Saa felt a rising nausea that compelled her back a step, but Creon kept her expression flat. “Bag it. Let’s keep moving.”

“I don’t mean to rush your decision making Commander, but at what point will you consider this mission complete?” Polyphron asked Creon, motivated entirely by a desire to go no further than this boneyard and also to leave the boneyard.

“It does seem that we’ve located our missing people,” Saa agreed.

“Commander,” Callaghan interrupted before Creon could respond, observing the limb ahead of encapsulating it in an expanding stasis blister, “This hand was cut cleanly at the radius and ulna. Not torn off.” He looked up. “The owner did not die in an ant attack.”

Creon paused. She looked forward, then back, at the team around her. “Alright, we’ve seen enough. I think it’s safe to assume any Vulcans still down here are no longer alive. Call back the probes that are still in range.”

As if in answer, one of the forward probes winked out.

Every weapon on the team came up.

“Telemetry lost?” Creon asked sharply.

“No,” O’Raan said, staring at the feed. “They flicker before we lose them. This one was destroyed.”

The second probe vanished a heartbeat later, not to static but with a burst of fragmented image and a shriek of feedback. In the instant before it died, the camera caught a shape rushing low across the tunnel floor, a rushing assembly of jaws and bladed limbs, too fast to resolve.

The sound came a heartbeat later: a dry, clattering shriek from somewhere above them, followed by the rapid skitter of many limbs over resin.

“Back in formation.” Creon ordered, stepping to the front. “Shields forward.”

Bellis took her position just behind Callaghan with her rifle forward, her eyes fixed on the darkness between the probes’ swinging lights. She was trying very hard not to think about how many legs the builders of this place must have had. Her breathing was steady only because she was making it so.

From the darkness, a single creature emerged into the light cast by the probes, a slow but unmistakably predatory gait. The bulk of its mass seemed was a massive pair of jaws atop four sharply spiked legs, two bladed limbs were set on either side of the mandibles. It stepped carefully forwards, letting out a sharp shriek.

“What the hell even is that?” Callaghan asked, edging slowly backwards.

Polyphron thought of sharing that to her it looked like a larger more savage version of the Reetou, but the reference would be of little meaning to them.

“Quiet.” Creon ordered. “Keep backing up. It’s probably more scared of us than we are of it. We’re not here to shoot the local wildlife.” She remained at the head of their pack.

As she said it, the creature charged at her grabbing with its jaws, which were stopped by the shield and fizzed loudly as it shocked the creature. Creon held her weapon up, hoping it would learn its lesson and she wouldn’t have to fire. It shrieked loudly and lunged again, knocking impacting the shield hard enough to knock her backwards, though she remained unharmed.

As Creon fell she fired a shot from her rifle into the creature. The stun setting seemed to bother it but didn’t slow it down, it charged at her again and began slashing with its scythe-arms, hammering on her shield despite the shocks that travelled back through it, which only seemed to make it angrier.

Creon fired another few shots that seemed ineffective. “Set to kill!” Creon ordered reluctantly, and adjusted her weapon, firing a shot that took a chunk out the creature, but didn’t seem to dissuade it from attacking.

“Jesus!” Callaghan shouted as the frenzied bug went for Creon, he happily emptied a volley of kill shots into the thing.

Polyphron held her fire, she could sense there were more waiting, she set the type-II phaser she held to kill and got ready to strike anything else that loomed out of the darkness. She watched as they fired at the lead bug, hoping that some area or another would prove particularly fatal.

Bellis held a single shot and aimed for the center of the bug’s jaw. When it didn’t fall after that, she fired again. Saa, aware of her limited combat experience, switched her dorsal-mounted phaser array to independent targeting and backed away as it unleashed a strobing volley into the horror.

The bug succumbed to the barrage of deadly phaser fire and fell back away from Creon, letting out an echoing screech that filled the space as it collapsed, its central nervous system pulverized by the deadly phaser fire that tore through it.

The screeching was echoed from deeper within the cave by a horrifyingly large number of sources. There was a clattering in the distance accompanied by a gentle thumping. Something was coming. Suddenly, all the probed blared warnings. Massive numbers of the same entity approaching from a tunnel at the far end of the space. They had maybe a minute before the bugs were on them.

Bellis felt nervous. She wanted to flee.

“Alright, go. Everyone get out of here, back the way we came. Don’t let those things get on top of you. The rest of you, run. Callaghan, Bellis, we’ll keep moving backwards until we’re confident we can turn around. I’m authorising you all to go up to level 10 on your phasers. Don’t kill them unless you have to, but I’m satisfied that them coming at you means you have to.” Creon ordered. “Move.” She instructed, turning back the way the other bug had come and beginning her own backwards step. She had her phaser at level eight. If it took more than a single shot to bring any others down, she was going up to nine.

“Aye, ma’am.” Callaghan said, watching the empty darkness with unusual vigilance as he upped the setting on his rifle. “Any more o’ these bugs try to get up in our business, they won’t live long enough to regret it.” He said as much to psych himself up as anything as he progressed backwards as steadily as he could alongside the other defenders, while the rest moved as swiftly as they could away.

“Moving, aye.” Bellis said while taking careful backwards steps.

Polyphron didn’t need to be told twice. She gestured for the others to keep moving and set the plasteel body that conveyed her to maximum speed towards the exit. She set the headlights in her suit to high-beam, she didn’t want to run into any surprises in the dark. Her phaser was set high and would go wide at another button’s touch, she had no qualms about evaporating these creatures, native or not. “Polyphron to Faraday, we are evacuating the cave. Prepare for urgent extraction. Hostiles encountered.”

“Understood. We’ll have transporters primed, but you’ll need to get past the mouth of the cave.” Ulloriaq’s voice told them.

“Can’t they navigate??” Saa demanded to Polyphron, if for no other reason than her mind seeking refuge in a technical problem. She’d left her dorsal phaser on independent targeting, and it was intermittently lighting up the tunnel ahead of them in bright, strobing red.

"Ring transporters can only reach underground if they have a platform to connect to. Without one, it wouldn't matter where they are in relation to us unless they have line of sight." Polyphron explained as she ran. The cat-like scientist had managed to pass her. He was fast.

Saa's brain had a moment to chew on that problem before more danger-red warnings alerted her that their zone of relative safety had suddenly narrowed. The solution seemed obvious, though. It had to have been tried sometime.

In the darkness, the scopes of the team’s weapons and the probes surrounding them as they backed away detected bugs approaching. A tide of the red yellow and black creatures emerged from the shadows, without hesitation, and without mercy. They charged at the defenders, screeching as they came.

“Fire at will!” Creon ordered, loosing a single shot. When the bug she hit kept coming, she switched her rifle up to level nine and fired again. This time it fell, and Creon continued firing with the same setting, satisfied that atomic disruption was appropriate for the circumstance. Even as she felled a half-dozen bugs, more seemed to emerge from the darkness, shoving past their dead comrades with indifference.

“Gladly, ma’am!” Callaghan said as he switched his weapon to full auto, spraying the approaching horrors with red killshots that tore through them like a blowtorch through snow.

“Firing!” Bellis confirmed while she fired her weapon.

A few minutes later, with dozens of the massive bugs dead in rows and heaps, there seemed to be a brief reprieve in the assault. The few remaining probes detected movement approaching, but they had time yet.

"Suggest we use this opportunity to haul arse, ma'am!" Callaghan said, checking that the way they came was clear.

"Suggestion accepted, move!" Creon ordered, looking carefully into the darkness, waiting for the other two to get moving before she would follow.

Bellis did not hesitate when she got permission to do what she had wanted to do. She ran back the way they came.

Callaghan did the same. He didn't want to leave Creon as last woman standing, but that's what officers were for.

Creon made a quick change to her weapon's settings, then fired a long coherent beam in the direction the last probe told her the bugs were coming before it shorted out. Satisfied by the sounds of screeching and scorched chitin, she finally turned and ran, following behind the others.

By the time the team got back towards the light, they had huddled back together, checking backwards regularly to let off phaser discharges. O'Raan was the first to clear the entrance, and the Faraday's transporters quickly beamed him back as he ran. When the next nearest of the crew got twenty metres from the exit however, the floor under them suddenly gave way, collapsing into a sudden void below that swallowed them all suddenly.

They fell amidst rubble and darkness, bouncing over jagged surfaces as they seemed to fall back in the direction they had just come. After colliding against each other and the seemingly endless decline, they landed after a longer fall than they knew they would have survived unshielded. With a fizzle their shields collapsed, a last surge of the devices, which hummed weakly as their power cells depleted, in need of recharge.

With only the faintest light flowing in from the way they came, it was still possible to see the horde of bugs that swarmed on them from above and below, stabbing and slashing as they came, drowning the team in a screaming chitinous mass of murderous limbs.

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