Guests at the Hall [✱25]

Posted on Tue Aug 11th, 2026 @ 12:55pm by Grandmaster M'Hum & Lieutenant Commander N'Tgni Creon & Cadet Senior Grade Bellis & SubCommander Saa & Polyphron & Crewman Thomas Callaghan
Edited on on Tue Aug 11th, 2026 @ 1:00pm

3,744 words; about a 19 minute read

Mission: UnderMind [4]
Location: Dreizhen III Hive
Timeline: MD04, after 'The Depths'

Saa hadn’t exactly blacked out. But when her acoustic and visual world had become nothing more than a tangle of screeching, tearing chitin, a river of chitin in which she was simply born along in its rapids, all sense of direction having fled, her mind had narrowed into a tight frequency of awareness within a rolling frenzy of instinct, until the moment she was slammed painfully down on her stomach, on some hard, unyielding surface, and pinned there. Gradually, time and cognition returned.

One of her wetsuit’s robotic legs was missing. Twice she tried to stand, but the pile of insectoid bodies in which she was buried only bore her down heavier, driving her down into the floor. Eventually, she got the message and submitted entirely to the treatment, going limp. After what felt far too long—but the chronometer tucked away in a corner of her HUD told her was only minutes—she felt the weight start to lessen. Her captors began to peel away from her one by one. At last, the curtain of imprisoning chitin lifted entirely, letting her see her surroundings.

The chamber would’ve been pitch black to her naked eyes, but her suit’s infrared and optical sonar painted it as a rough-hewn cavern, maybe ten meters across. It wasn’t easy to tell exactly, because every square meter was packed with hissing, spitting arachnoids like the ones that had attacked the away team. Saa hadn’t had a good look at them until now. They were clearly a predatory species, all swordlike limbs and giant pincer mandibles, striped in tiger-like warning patterns. Their behavior was altogether unnerving, alternately rearing up at her as if to attack, then stepping back with almost nervous fidgets, as if some natural impulse to kill was being restrained, but only barely. Saa fought down a rising tide of panic, then saw that she wasn’t alone.

Bellis, the Tyrakhean cadet, and Callaghan, the human securiity trooper, were lying a short distance away, in pools of blood. At first, she thought the creatures were feeding on them, but then, with a lurch of her stomach, she saw that each of the humanoids had been impaled by a spear-like forelimb, staking them to the floor, and were simply being held there. Her mind made a mad, fleeting connection to a vision of insects pinned in an etymologist’s collection before she wrestled it back into place. Her wetsuit’s embedded tricorder was still functioning. She aimed it at her fellow captives and initiated a medical scan, but the chirping of the tiny instrument provoked a hiss from her keeper, and the tool was promptly ripped from its housing and thrown aside, sparking as it shattered on the cavern wall. Saa had an instant to regret her foolishness before she felt herself slammed down again, the air driven from her lungs, and then a shriek of plasteel and an incredible pain as her own side was pierced, harpooning her to the floor.

“God damn it!!” she squealed, helpless anger taking over at last.

Callaghan tried not to move. He was awake and clear-headed, enough to feel the pain of the limb spearing through his thigh. That was good he thought, all things considered. He wasn’t bleeding too badly. He tried not to move as he looked around for his phaser, he saw it eventually in pieces. He looked at the bug that held him. It was watching.

“Everyone stay quiet. Don’t do anything to startle them.” Creon instructed from a position behind Saa. She was shivering slightly from shock and blood loss, a bug leg punctured her shoulder, holding her against the ground. She could see Saa, Bellis and Callaghan, but she could only see scattered pieces of Polyphron’s suit. She feared the worst.

Saa nodded and controlled herself with difficulty, focusing on restricting her blood flow. The creature’s talon seemed to have missed anything vital. The analytical part of her brain, working on autopilot, bombarded her with pointless questions: did these creatures have some way of scanning internal physiology? And could they in fact even hear her high-frequency Atlantic ejaculations? Insects usually had such poor hearing...

Bellis nodded. She was not calm and she knew she was hurt, but it did not seem like it was badly. She focused on her breathing. She did not move.

For a little while, stillness was the only thing that kept the cave from exploding into violence.

The warrior bugs quivered around them in a ring of hooked limbs and saw-edged forearms, every body taut with that same terrible, interrupted urge to kill. The group could hear them scraping against the stone, feel the heat of them through the limbs that pierced them. Their vocalising orifices clicked in complex, arrhythmic bursts that did not sound like animal agitation anymore. It sounded like signalling. Like a whole crowd trying to agree on what not to do.

Then, as the inscrutable discussion seemed to crescendo and tempers seemed about to flare, all were suddenly overcome by consensus. The bugs came together, not to finish their kill as the sudden fear would no doubt have filled the minds of their captives, but to transport them. They used the speared areas of the team as a basis, and lifted them with little regard for the pain it would cause. But to the surprise of all, they used the nook of their non-stabbing arms to provide support, and at least one other bug took each of them in its jaws, holding them with the tender care of a lioness with a cub. Four worked together to carry Saa, another grabbed the loose tangle of remaining leg components so they wouldn’t drag.

Creon wondered if she was imagining this. She could’ve sworn that they were trying to apply pressure to the wound they caused as they carried her. “If this is indecorous, feel free to chalk it up to the blood loss, or good old fashioned Romulan racism, but is this clicking making any sort of sense to you, Subcommander?” Creon asked Saa with enough volume to be heard, but not enough inflection to risk startling the bugs.

“It’s—not Atlantic–!” the engineer replied through the din, a dangerous trace of hysteria entering into her own emissions. In truth, she’d been trying to block out the acoustic overload. A little blood and a lot of water rained from her broken suit as she was carried.

As the feet of warrior bugs cleared where they’d caught their prey, it was obvious that no single piece of the medusan encounter suit Polyphron had occupied remained intact. The life sustaining nutrient slurry had spilled across the floor. There was no sign of her.

Callaghan grunted with pain as he was lifted and moved, the bug attempt at care did little to ease his suffering.

Their bodies smelled of hot dust, bitter acid, and the copper tang of dried blood. One wrong movement and those careful holds would become dismemberment. Despite the relative care they showed for people they had already impaled, the impression was unmistakable that the bugs themselves would rather be turning their captives into confetti, but still they obeyed.

What had seemed like a natural cavern proved, a few hundred metres farther on, to be only the mouth of something much larger and much stranger. The tunnel narrowed, then straightened with unmistakable artificial intent. Bare rock gave way to old metallic surfaces ribbed with age and corrosion, half hidden beneath layers of resinous secretion and latticed chitin. Guidance lights glowed faintly with the last vestiges of warp fusion power not yet run dry. The insects had built over the place, not in it. They had sheathed it. Great amber-brown buttresses of dried spittle and compacted mineral clung to bulkheads whose underlying lines still showed through: severe arches, slanted control recesses, the elegant brutalism of Romulan engineering.

The place seemed to be a bunker, or had been once. Deep shelter. Command post. Listening station. Something made to survive bombardment and indiscretion alike. Then the insects had found it and done what insects always did with useful ruins: occupied every empty angle, reinforced every seam, made the dead architecture serve a living purpose it had never been designed for.

Callaghan did his best to make note of their route, as he’d been trained to do. The strange familiarity of the architecture was not lost on him.

Bellis clenched her jaw as the creatures bore her. Their way was brutal but not careless. “They are deliberately keeping us alive,” she said, forcing the words out evenly through pain. “I do not know whether that is better.”

They were taken down a sloping corridor whose deck tilted at an angle too steep to climb without the certainty of insect legs, though much of it had buckled. Resin had been laid over gaps in the flooring. In one chamber to the left, they caught a glimpse of vertical combs of dark material, each cell just large enough to hold something the size of a humanoid body. In another, they saw stacked debris arranged with the eerie regularity of instinctive engineering: shattered consoles, stripped conduits, bones, and polished stones mortared together into buttresses.

Finally, at the bottom of the ramp they were carried then through a doorway into a broader room that had once been hexagonal. The illumination was strange and unnatural, modified by the amber that covered so many of the surfaces. The old bunker geometry still defined it, but almost every surface had been altered. The tall, vaulted ceiling was hung with layered ribs of insect-work. Half the walls had been sealed behind a glossy lattice that turned the chamber into a sort of open pen. The only exit other than the ramp they’d just been brought down was a large sealed bulkhead double-door. The crest on it left no mystery about its builders, the Imperial Romulan hawk, with two worlds in its talons, established both the Romulan ownership and the period in which it was most recently decorated. Despite using a symbol that entered and left prominence in the last two centuries, the place seemed abandoned for many times that period.

The bugs dropped the foursome in the centre of the room with the last of what seemed to be the care demanded of them by something unseen, and departed without further fuss, back up the steep ramp.

Creon let out a cry as the bladed limb was removed. She was trained better than that, but she hadn’t been carried by something impaling her before.

Saa gasped, slammed down in a splash beside her. The mechanic was little more than a tangle of smashed machinery herself now, leaking water onto the floor around her. Callaghan also let out another pained grunt as he was left on the floor.

Bellis kept herself quiet through the pain. She put her hand to the wound in her abdomen once the bugs had released her, she was surprised that it was such a clean wound. Their blades were sharp.

The silence of the deep earth reigned for a moment, before Saa mustered the courage to speak. “We’re missing one,” she reported gloomily to Creon. “And, I’ve lost all telemetry with Faraday.”

“I don’t think she made it.” Creon said matter-of-factly. “I’m not surprised we’re out of touch, we must be at least a kilometre underground by now.”

“We need first aid, now.” Callaghan said. “We’ve gotta start shredding uniforms.” He was amazed none of them had bled themselves unconscious. He tried to stand but the pain was too much.

Without apparent cause, the faint hum of something hovering down the ramp entered their awareness. Unexpectedly, four autonomous medical ‘auto-doc’ units appeared, hovering gently into the room. They weren’t a Starfleet design, but they were popular among private owners. Those who had explored them had seen a few within the Order’s stores in Shitau.

One of the units moved to each of the captives, working tenderly to treat their wounds, and stymie the worst of the damage, giving simple instructions in a confident voice when something was needed from the patient.

Creon watched the auto-doc float towards her, once again she had to wonder if she wasn’t losing touch with reality, but the sudden pain of treatment against her wounds quickly assured her it was real. She had questions, but the sensations of the machine tending to her physical damage were enough to make her even more light-headed. “This doesn’t make any sense.” She muttered to the others as the machine injected her with something to encourage blood cell production as the wound was sealed on either side with adaptive medical gel.

“Maybe but, you know what they say about gift horses, ma’am.” Callaghan grumbled, too aware of the damage to himself to consider fighting the machine, even as it probed his wounds.

Bellis wanted to say something about the difference between bugs and horses and healing devices but she did not. Human idioms were overwhelming sometimes and she had enough to think about as the mysterious device treated her.

“Commander,” Saa said, recovering a little and beginning to register the unmistakable Romulan manufacture of their surroundings, “Excuse me if it sounds a little undecorous, but where the heck are we?”

“Modified mid-24th century deep sub-surface self-sustaining utility bunker. If I had to guess. Modular, spacious, able to last indefinitely if installed - “ Creon winced as the autodoc sutured an internal wound. “- installed correctly. This entire system was declared a Praetorian Sanctuary, it’s why nobody ever settled the worlds even when the living on Romulan DS13 wasn’t easy. Obviously the Romulan Empire knew something interesting about this place that didn’t get passed along to the Free State.”

Callaghan listened to what she said, more relieved by her knowledge than suspicious of how quickly she’d clocked it. He tried to avoid exclaiming as the auto-doc did its work. Maybe there was some of hope of getting out of here as a result, but he wasn’t confident enough to express that.

“Does this help us?” Bellis asked, impressively still while her internal bleeding was treated.

“There should be communications equipment somewhere,” Saa suggested, moving no more than she dared. The robot assigned to her was taking longer, having to cut away a punctured section of plasteel using a microplasma excision tool to expose her injury. A thin white haze and a hot smell of vaporizing polymers began to reach the others. “...if anyone still has a tricorder.”

Bellis put her hand under the desert pockets. Hers was gone. “Not me.”

Creon reached to her belt, everything was gone. The loops in her belt to hold them felt like they’d been slashed. “Mine’s gone. So is everything else, except my combadge.”

Callaghan had forgotten he even had it on him. He lifted the flaps on his desert uniform and found it. There were cracks in the casing. When he opened it up, he noticed the screen had cracks too. It wasn’t 100%, but it was working. “Yeah, here. Working. Mostly. Ma’am.” Callaghan said.

“Toss it over,” Saa said with a glimmer of hope.

Before they could make any use of the newly rediscovered device, the scraping, straining mechanical sound of the door opposite the ramp they’d been brought in down opening filled the space. It was slow and terribly noisy, taking almost a minute to go from closed to open.

At the first sign of activity from elsewhere, Callaghan stuffed the tricorder back in the pocket, and prepared himself for what was to come, standing unsteadily, his treated wounds still painful.

Creon got to her feet, and moved between the opening door and Callaghan, hoping to keep him hidden as he concealed his tricorder.

Behind the door stood unmistakably Vulcan figures, three of them. They were members of the Order. At the head of them was M’Hum. They did not look as though they had been brought here against their will. “Greetings. Please remain calm. You have all been spared for a most glorious purpose.”

Callaghan glared with hatred at the Vulcans. How could they be in on this? He had hours worth of questions, but he left it for the officers to do the talking. He hoped he’d have the opportunity to mess up their stupid bowl cuts.

“What the hell exactly is the meaning of this? What purpose are you talking about? You can’t possibly be stupid enough to be mixed up with these bugs.” Creon asked, obviously irate, taking a few steps towards M’Hum.

“These ‘bugs’ as you call them are creatures aeons beyond our own understanding. They are a perfect form of life. The manifestation of Divine Harmony, as our predecessors prophesied would be found here in the epoch of Surak. I would not expect a Romulan to understand such things.” M’Hum explained.

Creon’s face hardened into something almost elegantly dangerous. “No,” she said flatly. “I don’t imagine I would understand a theology that allows spearing its guests to the floor.”

“I can’t say I’ve heard anything like that on Vulcan either,” Saa spat through her external speaker, still lying in her wrecked state. “Perfect life form? Life has infinite diversity of form, or haven’t you heard that?” Even as she said it, she had a bad feeling that something she’d only vaguely suspected was about to be confirmed.

“Surak may have taught our people to tame their baser urges, but that does not make his philosophical platitudes any less banal.” M’Hum said with even disdain. “He looked on our Order with suspicion and mistrust. His accidental discovery of a biological windfall through contrarian opposition to the old ways made him arrogant. Our ways precede him, but we are not above taking that which is useful from the less informed. As you will all soon appreciate.”

“You’re all off your rockers,” the engineer muttered with equal disdain but less assurance. Privately, she’d already started to concede that there was more to these arachnid creatures that met the eye, but that was nothing compared to the shock and cold horror of having her wildest stray thoughts about this organization verified from the mouth of its leader.

“There was a fifth member of our team.” Callaghan spoke up only because nobody else had asked. “A serpentine being whose encounter suit was destroyed. Have you done something with her?”

“The warriors were instructed to bring the survivors here. If the being was not brought here, it is dead. The warriors are not designed for delicacy. You are all fortunate to have survived.” M’Hum answered coldly.

Bellis did not want to think it was true and tried to make her heart go hard. She did not know Polyphron well but nobody deserved to have died from the bugs.

“That’s enough,” Creon said, turning to the others, “Say nothing further until they let us out of here.” She turned back to M’Hum. “You’ll get nothing useful from us.” Creon said it with venom. As viscerally as she shared the SubCommander’s sentiments, she wanted any ire from their captors focused on her.

“We shall see.” His response to the Romulan was calm. M’Hum seemed to turn his attention away from Creon then, to the immobile Saa. “Despite her misgivings, as the most intelligent among you, the Subcommander’s place is with us. We will be taking her. While we hope you will see the logic of divine harmony’s manifestation here, we do not expect any of the rest of you truly capable of it.” He produced an old-model Vulcan phaser from within his robes, pointing it at the team. “Do not interfere, or there will be no aid provided for the wounds we will inflict on you.”

The other two Vulcans took long devices that looked like truncheons from their belts, pointing one end at Saa on either side of her. Graviton beams emerged, lifting her weightlessly by the damaged mobility frame wrapped around her. They began drawing her back with them through the doorway, whilr she hastily extruded manipulators to snatch up the bits and pieces of her equipment she’d been working on and keep it from tumbling away.

“No!” Bellis cried out before remembering her place. She yielded and turned to Commander Creon, declining her head.

“Release her, and you may yet avoid spending the rest of your life in a cell, M’Hum.” Creon said calmly. “But know that if you continue down this path, I will make sure you never taste free air again.”

“Your Romulan arrogance may pass for competence among the performatives of Starfleet, but we in the Order value results. I can assure you, the result of any action to interfere will be the blast of a phaser into your centre of mass. And you will not receive the mercy of the autodoc.” M’Hum clarified coldly.

“She knows that’s a bluff,” remarked Saa, who, for all her rapidly growing anxiety, was still confident that the Grand Master couldn’t think himself able to take on Starfleet with its heavy units only a few minutes’ warp away. Even at its dumbest, she thought, the Vulcan mind was too smart for that.

“But it’s all right, Commander,” she added. “They just need someone to screw in their lightbulbs for them. I’ll take care of that, and then we can get out of here.”

If looks could kill, M’Hum would die a hundred times before he hit the ground, the way Creon stared at him. She inhaled through her nose, and turned her attention to Saa. “We’re coming for you, Subcommander. Don’t forget that.”

It hurt Bellis to see the Subcommander taken, but she knew all she could do is stay still and quiet.

Privately, the Subcommander was gnashing her teeth in frustration at having been unable to think of a better coded message for what she wanted to say. All of Ineel’s smug jibes about her lack of conversational ability swelled into a maddening cacophony in her acoustic space as she was dragged away. The lout was right. Her language skills were pathetically underdeveloped for a dolphin.

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