“Nothing?”

W’a’le’ki looked up from her tricorder and offered a slight smile to Commander Camargo to along with the shrug of her shoulders. “Nothing of significance specifically.”

They’d been planetside, no, ringside, now for a few hours and frankly she was much happier to have gotten this assignment than to have gone with Lieutenant Maxwell’s team into the depths of the ring. Here she’d had the joy of working the whole time in the sun, a gentle breeze blowing across the clearing and a mystery before her. And with Simmons and Malenkov both pouring over the records from Friendship 7, she’d had the study of the plinth it was resting on all to herself.

“The outer case of the plinth is indeed obsidian, though the unusually high uniformity suggests manufactured versus natural. There’s a power feed within that leads deep into the ring’s structure that’s been powering Friendship 7 this whole time. But other than that, nothing to help with the writing. There’s just not enough content to start work on.”

Camargo nodded, looking back to the plinth with an unamused look on her face. “Whoever made this plinth covered it in writing and didn’t bother to leave a Rosetta Stone lying around. Talk about frustrating.”

“Especially when they had Friendship 7 right here with an onboard translation matrix.” Inspiration suddenly hit and W’a found herself tapping away on her tricorder. “Rosetta Stone,” she muttered. “Behistun Inscription. The Scrolls of Andor’mesh. They all say the same thing, just in different languages.”

“Yes, I know,” Camargo said. “It’s kind of why I brought it up.”

“I fed all the text into the computer and asked it to start doing analysis, but didn’t give it a starting point, so it’s still working away.” She brought up the input screen and rapidly tapped away a message. “But with a suggestion of what some of the text could be…”

She trailed off, waiting, and was rewarded after only a few seconds by a ding from her tricorder. “Got it!” With a triumphant command, she set her tricorder to display the translation holographically over the plinth. “Now we’re getting somewhere!”

“What was the key?” Camargo asked as she stepped closer to the plinth, starting to read the translated text that seemed to cover the entire structure.

“‘We hope to earn the trust and friendship of other worlds.’ They put your people’s words at the start.”

“Like the Rosetta Stone,” Camargo said. “I won’t tell anyone how long it took us to come up with that if you don’t.”

W’a couldn’t help but laugh as she stepped up beside her commander to better exam their finding. “What are you talking about ma’am? This was our first idea.”

“Man we’re clever,” Camargo said. “Make the translation available to Gérard. Hopefully he’ll hit a computer before much longer and need it.”

Samantha Michaels, Sam to her friends, was glad her day was coming to an end. It had been exhausting and frankly handing everything over and getting away from work was just the order of the day for her right now. So when Lieutenant Rrr’mmm’bal’rrr tapped her on the shoulder fifteen minutes before her shift was over, they were one of the most glorious people she’d ever seen in that moment.

“Thank whatever cosmic entity sent you my way,” she said with a sigh. “When I say I spent all day counting butterflies, I mean it.”

“I know,” Rrr said. “So have I.” By way of proof, the large Gaen held up a padd, an image one of the space-butterflies on its screen. “What’s the total count up to now?”

“One hundred and fifty-eight confirmed unique entities spread across the entire system. But it’s getting harder to spot any new ones out there.”

“Oh?” Rrr asked.

“Yeah. We’re doing something to attract their attention and it appears all the local population groups are heading our way. In about four hours or so you’ll be able to look out a window and see one of the larger pods.”

Rrr’s brow furrowed, the action reminiscent of tectonic activity, just localised to their face and on a timescale one could appreciate. “When did this start?”

“When we started lighting up some of the nearby ones with all our sensors to try and figure out why they’re resistant to our scans. And yes, before you ask, we stopped when we noticed them moving towards us. It hasn’t stopped them, or other groups we didn’t scan, from coming our way.”

“Other groups you say?” Rrr stroked their chin, a new mannerism they’d picked up recently, and it came with the expected sound of rock sliding on rock. “Well, it proves they communicate somehow.”

“Or there is something else we’re doing that’s attracting their attention. Just what, though, is anyone’s guess.”

“A fair point Lieutenant,” Rrr conceded. “Right, I’ll keep monitoring the situation. In the meantime –”

A repeated ‘bleep-bleep’ from the Ops console stopped Rrr mid-sentence and drew their and Sam’s attention back to the console. Sam brought up the alert and read it. Sensors checked to verify the finding and then she looked up at her immediate superior officer. “Long range sensors have detected a starship, and it’s confirmed by Simmons’ collection of probes at the aperture point.”

“Someone else was unlucky enough to get dragged through? How badly damaged are they, and do they need help?”

“I’ll do you one better.” Sam leaned around to look past Rrr and to Gantzmann, seated in the captain’s chair and busy reading a report or another. “Commander Gantzmann, I’ve got the USS Perseus on sensors and she’s heading our way at warp eight.”

That got the desired response Sam was looking for. Gantzmann looked up from the padd, then set it down before rising to her feet with perfect poise. “Signal Captain Garland and inform her we’re welcome for Perseus’ assistance, assuming they left the door open.”

“All of this equipment, all of these murals, not a single computer console.” Gérard Maxwell had led the engineering team deep into the ‘cave’ they’d identified near Friendship 7 and into the guts of what clearly made this artificial ring function. Or at least some of what made it function. Scans hadn’t been able to penetrate far and being inside of it didn’t help much either.

Large power systems, transit tunnels, field generators and all the other accoutrements of high technology civilisations were all around them and all of them were incredibly brilliant at obfuscating what lay past them or inside of them even. They could tell something was a power generator only by looking at its outputs, but no idea on the how it generated power.

“There’s got to be something though, right, sir?” Ensign Jessica Chu wasn’t Gérard’s first pick for an away team, but the young woman deserved a chance and this had seemed relatively low-risk. And her technical knowledge was impressive. It was her hesitancy to make decisions that annoyed Engineering’s senior officers.

“You tell me how you’d control all of these systems without computer systems and I’ll make sure you have a career at whichever design bureau you want,” he answered. He hadn’t meant for it to come out snippy, but he recognised it immediately. “Sorry Ensign, that wasn’t very nice.”

“Well, all of these systems and their materials are blocking most of our scans, so their computers could be anywhere, just shielded.” She made a good point, he had to admit. “Same for communications systems. Though you’d still need interfaces for maintenance, inspections or just curiosity.”

That had been the real sticking point so far in their hours’ long exploration. No interfaces. The cave had started off with a grand hall; the walls covered in murals the team had been woefully ill-prepared to study. They dutifully snapped images and sent them back to the ship, but moved on. But since then there aren’t been anything of worth to inform them on the functionality of systems, who built the ring, why it was empty or never populated in the first place.

“Found something!” one of the other engineers announced and soon enough everyone from the team was at their side, a few trying desperately to look over the man’s shoulder but all losing out when Gérard arrived and forced them aside. So he could look over the man’s shoulder naturally. “Looks like a holographic projector, and I’d reckon it’s on some sort of standby with the faint charge it’s got running through it.”

The projector in question was about fifteen meters off the floor, mounted in the ceiling and positioned to cover a decent portion of this room. And knowing what to look for, a few more were found soon after. Not enough to make the room a holodeck, but certainly enough to projector monitors and interfaces if required.

“Okay, but how do we turn them on?” Gérard asked.

“On! Go! Light!” The random shouting of words started with one of the security team members that had come with Gérard’s team. The Orion woman, Rosa Mackeson, was one of Ch’tkk’va’s Hazard Team people, but hadn’t come down in that capacity this time. No, she was just here as regular old security. “Sorry, thought that might do it.”

“Worth a try,” Gérard said. “Though maybe try shouting it out in Ringbuilderese?”

Rosa laughed at that. “Left my phrase book back on the ship Gérard,” she answered. “Maybe next time.”

“Umm.” Jessica was studying her tricorder again as she stepped over, pointing at a part of the screen. “I’ve seen this material before. Or something like it, at least.” The part she was pointing at was a component of the holoprojector and appeared to be a small crystal.

“Okay Ensign, where?” Gérard asked.

“Uh…I was studying some old records one night, went on a tangent and –”

“The point Ensign.”

“Scrubble psychic mines,” she blurted out. “Psychic mines that read your thoughts. I think these projectors might need someone to…well…think them on.”

“Hey Brek!” Rosa shouted out as she turned, getting the attention of her security off-sider on this engineering excursion. “Can you think loudly?”

“Can I think…loudly?” the Vulcan asked, eyebrow raised. “Can you speak quietly?”

“Alright,” Gérard cut in, stopping anything from developing more than it needed to. “Lieutenant Brek, could you perhaps try turning on the projectors?”

“I shall attempt to think loudly.” Brek took in a deep breath, let it out, then repeated the action once more. “Though I make no promises.”

“At this point Lieutenant, even failure is a data point to help us try and access the ring’s systems.” Gérard looked around at his people. “Right folks, keep looking. Let the man think.”