Search Parties [✱11]
Posted on Mon Mar 9th, 2026 @ 10:50am by Grandmaster M'Hum & Lieutenant Commander Intharia T'Zor & Lieutenant Commander Yy & Lieutenant Rune Thul & SubCommander Saa Ni-Eng & Lieutenant Commander N'Tgni Creon & Master Chief Petty Officer Gaz
898 words; about a 4 minute read
Mission:
UnderMind [4]
Location: Shitau Colony Central Square
Timeline: MD03 - 1400 (After [✱9])
With the census concluded and more than two dozen members of the order identified as missing, Creon decided that they would use the last few hours of the day to search. The three Danube-class runabouts they'd received were all teamed already, allowing a leader from the surface to immediately take over. Each had been outfitted with a sensor module on the upper rollbar. They waited in the ersatz landing spaces they'd found in the central square outside the Hall of Focus.
"Subcommander, with me. We'll be going north. The rest of you, one runabout each. Commander T'Zor, go south. Commander Yy, the east, and Chief Gaz, the west. Lieutenant Thul, Commander T'Zor's team will benefit greatly from your telepathy." Creon told the engineer and security chief. "We'll catch the next ride."
"Security teams, you have your assignments, let's go," Rune told his Security team leaders, each of them nodded before gathering their team members and split up between the three runabouts. He didn't put himself in charge of a Security team. He wanted to test the leaders on their performance. Rune nodded to Creon a moment later, "apologies Commander, understood," he replied and headed over to T'Zor.
Gaz nodded. "Yes ma'am." The Chief turned back to his runabout, he hoped they'd brought him a telepath too.
Yy smiled warmly to the team aboard her shuttle, she'd met most of them before. One of them was a counselor of hers, but Yy was confident the issues they'd discussed wouldn't affect her work.
"Shall we, Commander T'Zor?" Rune gestured to their runabout and smiled.
"Indeed we shall." Thari told him, stepping forward into the entrance to the shuttle, greeting the staff aboard as she entered.
Creon held her hand up to shade her eyes as she checked the sky. The fighters had passed by not too long ago, they were probably far away by now.
"Let's take it out one at a time, from here on out we're North team, go with departures clockwise until west. Human clockwise." Creon told the crews through her comm badge.
"East team going up. If you'd please." Yy said, first to Creon, then to her shuttle's helm officer. Soon they were as high as intended.
"Keep your eyes peeled for signs of Vulcan life, but also for anything else that might have made a meal of these people. We'll keep looking until we find them or nightfall here at the colony. We'll start again in the morning if we have to." Creon told the assembled crews as Yy's shuttle kicked gently off the ground, throwing up a small amount of dust as it ascended to around 75 meters off the ground and moved gently forward. "Alright east team, you're good to go."
The runabout carrying T'Zor and Rune among others rose and rotated to face south, it zoomed off.
Soon, it was just Saa and Creon left waiting in the square. From the sun high above, something silhouetted broke through the sunlight to shade the pair and send the sand skittering around their feet with a distant thrum of graviton fields. Of her original spaceframe, only the USS Faraday's saucer section had emerged from the rebuild relatively unmodified, though modernized. The rest, though it incorporated as much original material as possible, now looked from below like nothing so much as a Terran manta ray, the primary hull now enfolded in the winglike focusing arrays of a warp vortex drive, or what Terran engineers at 40 Eridani had nicknamed a "jellyfish" since the first models had rolled off the assembly line some twenty years ago.
"Subcommander, you're confident in the state of this ring-beaming system from E5, I hope?" Creon asked expectantly as a hatch opened on the Faraday's ventral hull.
Buried in her bulky dry suit, which made her resemble a robotic lobster more than a dolphin, the engineer, always anxious, had been watching the ship's glide path with the tension of a parent at their child's first solo concert performance. Mentally checking the telemetry coming in through her dataport against the predicted values, she hadn't even noticed the instrument bay opening, and the question shocked her back into her own body on the ground.
"No?" She blurted, her attention shifting between the Romulan and the opening instrument bay with growing horror. "It has no confinement beam. It's technically—"
Her objection cut off as her body and Creon's were both vaporized into glowing plasma and spat upward along a graviton stream into the waiting receptacle of the goa'uld's crazed idea of a transporter.
As the last of the Federation vessels left, M'Hum instructed the order to be about their duties, and went to his private quarters within the Hall of Focus.
By the time the sun went down in Shitau the first day of the search, there was only a single Vulcan recovered. The Faraday had found him about an hour after launch, he was on his way back to the colony anyway. He didn’t thank them for the lift.
The rest of the search involved stopping at every cave they found and looking around, which was quickly replaced by stopping at the caves and sending a probe. With sensors impeded by the soil composites, grid-by-grid enhanced visual inspections and capture were the best available option, which while tedious, were necessary to seek out signs of possible inhabitation.
The next morning, they started again.
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