Down the Rabbit Hole

[Capt Ayers 0]

Nick stares down the opening into the side of the volcano as he tries to banish his nagging impatience. Everything from the fact that he could feel the ground rumbling and shifting beneath his feet to the fact that he was used to taking the lead on away team missions was gnawing on him. The shift between what was expected out of a Commander and what was expected out of a Captain is not something that he had fully accepted yet and for the time being it was just one more thing he didn't like about his sudden promotion.

 

He waits a few minutes, giving Ethan and Escher more then enough time to reach whatever was at the bottom of the opening and to report back in. He reaches to tap his commbadge but halts the action in mid-move. An internal debate runs though his mind as he continues to stare down the opening into the ground.

 

He steps toward the opening and without a word starts descending down it. It takes him a few minutes to reach the bottom and find his way towards where Ethan and Escher are standing. He shines his light along with theirs and suddenly finds it hard to breathe.

 

Surrounded by the debris of a rock slide and the cooled igneous rock was what appeared to be the bow section of a ship. It seemed to appear out of the rock, much the same as Mount Rushmore or the Crazy Horse Monument back on Earth. The prow of it came to a sort of tapered and curved point. As the lines of it disappeared into the wall it flared out and widened considerably. Under the flashlights the skin of it glistened with a dark blue sheen and were it not for the ship's curved organic design, the skin would have appeared to be made from facetted crystal.

 

Nick stretches out his empathic senses before approaching the ship more closely. He stops a few steps away as he stares up at the ship. Removing one of the gloves he was wearing he reaches out and runs his fingers along the skin, tracing them along some lettering etched into the surface.