Engineering had remained busy throughout the Merrimack’s time at Vey’lan. While much of the attention had naturally fallen upon the away team and the discoveries within the crystalline city, the ship’s engineers had been quietly monitoring an increasingly unusual relationship between the vessel and the harmonic environment surrounding it.

Lieutenant JG Taren Voss, the Engineering Officer of the Watch, stood before the main status board as another series of reports arrived from the bridge. “Okay, people. We’ve got enough new information that everyone needs the same picture.”

Several engineers gathered around while others remained at their stations. Voss brought up the latest harmonic analysis.

The bridge had established that the harmonic phenomenon was not confined to Vey’lan. Reprocessed sensor records revealed weaker but identifiable versions of the same patterns well before the Merrimack reached the crystalline city. Their strength and complexity had increased steadily during the ship’s approach. Rather than behaving like conventional transmissions, the harmonics appeared to propagate as overlapping waves, intersecting one another at predictable intervals.

“Science and Helm have made significant progress modeling them,” Voss explained. “Lieutenant ch’Sorel’s predictive model is identifying relationships MAJEL originally missed. Communications has also developed a masking signal that reduces the Lieutenant’s physical reaction to the harmonics without interfering with our communications or sensors.”

Petty Officer Second Class Mara Keene looked up from an EPS monitoring station. “So this stuff was affecting us before we ever reached the city?”

“That’s what the records indicate.” Voss answered. Another display activated, this one showing telemetry transmitted by the away team.

What they had discovered inside Vey’lan presented Engineering with an entirely different problem. Tricorder readings had found no conventional generators, power conduits, communication arrays, central processors, or identifiable control systems. Every crystalline wall, column, floor section, and support appeared to participate in distributing both energy and information. There was effectively no measurable transmission loss and no obvious central point of control or failure.

Chief Petty Officer Henrik Solberg stared at the schematic for several seconds. “You’re telling me the whole city is one machine?”

Voss shook his head slightly. “Closer to saying the city itself is the technology.”

That silenced the group. Even more significantly, the Shiarians were communicating through the same harmonic medium. What MAJEL had initially detected aboard the Merrimack as faint harmonic echoes now appeared to be only a small part of a much larger network. Current analysis suggested that network extended beyond Vey’lan itself, although neither Science nor Engineering yet understood its full scale or purpose.

Voss switched the display back to the ship’s systems. “Until we understand it, Engineering is treating every unexplained harmonic interaction as potentially significant. Continue monitoring EPS distribution, structural integrity, propulsion, environmental systems, and power-transfer junctions for synchronization with the external harmonics.”

Keene glanced toward him. “Compensate if we find it?”

“Only if it threatens the ship.” Voss folded his arms. “We’ve spent our careers treating unexplained interference as something that needs to be filtered out. Right now there’s a very real possibility some of this ‘interference’ is information. Nobody starts adjusting frequencies or isolating systems without recording what happened first.”

Around Engineering, personnel returned to their stations as the latest harmonic telemetry began flowing into their consoles. The Merrimack remained operational and stable. There was no immediate engineering emergency. But the department now understood something it had not known when the ship first entered this region.

The harmonics were not simply coming from Vey’lan. They had encountered them before reaching the city, they were interacting with the ship now, and evidence increasingly suggested that Vey’lan represented only one part of something considerably larger.

For Engineering, figuring out exactly how that something worked had just become part of the mission.

GM Nosferatu
Your Darkest Nightmare
GM Nosferatu
Your Darkest Nightmare