Back on QoB

[rosetto 0]

QoB was quiet. He assumed that Troy had retired as he climbed the gangway up to the main galley. In his hand was a Q-pad on which he had downloaded the Phantos documents as well as the data that he had collected on his own back on Tranquility. The galley awoke with light as he entered and he noticed that dishes had been left from the last meal that the crew had shared. Sal sighed. He was not in the mood to play man-servant. Instead he walked straight to the food replicator and requested a Romulan Ale which appeared shortly after his command in a frosty mug. He smiled to himself as he reached in and grabbed the handle.

 

 

 

There was a small group of sofas on one side of the room and he plopped down on one near a table, setting the mug down and activating the Q-pad. It sprang to life and displayed the first map of Zoalus that Dr. Phantos had provided. Sal was not unfamiliar with planetary evaluations. He had led teams many times back in the day and he knew the pitfalls. The biggest dangers were always the unknowns and this mission was replete with unknowns.

 

 

 

The older sites interested him and he imagined that from a “collection of data” point of view, these would be the most beneficial choices. They would most likely find artifacts that span the Zoalus’ history, giving them a clearer picture of who these people were. Still, his boss was a man who seemed to have his own agenda and he was the boss. Sal knew that any plans that he would present to the group would remain fluid unless the captain had agreed with them. Right now Sal had no idea what Joe had in mind.

 

 

 

Tapping on the pad the display advanced through the other maps. He continued to tap and then paused on one of the images that his deciphering program had analyzed. It contained several groupings of the alien glyphs and he stared at them as he lifted his mug of ale with his left hand. ‘THIS was the key to exploring the planet safely’, he thought. The analysis had determined that these groupings were instructions; to exactly what he had no idea at the moment. There had to be more at the site that would help them understand.

 

 

 

The language, according to Dr. West, was extremely formal and it was difficult to determine the role that these nuances played; these ‘helper symbols’ that accompanied the high order life characters. There was no point of reference provided by any documents as to how these modifiers acted upon these base terms. In one of the groupings, the harmony symbol appeared frequently with the symbol for hard work and the companion. Sal saw ‘beauty’ and ‘flair’ in the text but it was right next to ‘trust’, ‘harmony’ and ‘hard work’.

 

 

 

He sipped his ale again and looked up when he heard a noise that he didn’t recognized right away. It was simply one of the fabrication processors routinely cycling in the other room. QoB, unlike the Federation vessels, provided little sound insulation between the decks. If he listened closely he could actually hear deuterium pumps that kept pressure stable on the impulse engines. When the ship was alive; the crew active, these subtle noises were easily ignored. Now, however, they were a cause of distraction to Sal. He shook his head, annoyed and took another swallow of ale in a feeble attempt to refocus his attention.

 

 

‘That’s what was missing!’ he thought almost uttering a sound himself in his epiphany. In all of the images and documents that Sal had seen thus far there were no pictures, no captured images of the Zoalus race. It had been determined from the architecture that they were bipedal humanoids but he had seen absolutely no actual images of specific individuals. This was very unusual for a culture that appeared to be as advanced as this one did. Perhaps he had missed them, skimmed over the data unknowingly dismissing them. He wasn’t sure and now it began to bother him. He tapped on the Q scanning image after image and still no pictures, no family portraits, no vacation photos of the kids playing in the water. He and Harry had literally thousands of pictures of Joia while she grew. He had a portrait of her displayed on his desk in his quarters downstairs.

 

 

 

Sal opened a new document and verbally dictated these points quietly so that he could bring them up later to Troy. He was thinking that there had to be a reason why something as commonplace as photos was overlooked. Maybe there were photos but they simply had not been provided to him. There could be any number of viable reasons but the facts remained. There were absolutely none in the documents he had on hand.