Forwarded by the ASC-VSO Posted: Mon, 05 Apr 2004 04:25:57 GMT In: alt.startrek.creative From: "Jay P Hailey" Title: Star Trek: Outwardly Mobile Author: Jay P Hailey (JayPHailey@hotmail.com) Series: MISC - TNG OCs Codes: None Part: 53/342(?) Rating:[PG] Archive: Fine with me, just tell me where. Disclaimer: Paramount owns all things Star Trek. I claim Original Characters and Situations for me. Webpage HTTP://jayphailey.8m.com The Rossette: Episode 53 by Jay P. Hailey And Dennnis Washburn (Stardate 46760) In my dream, I was standing next to a stream. There was a pretty, soft red grass under my feet and a tree nearby that looked like it had a lot of green hair. I was on a small rise and I could see a city off in the distance. It looked like someone had put a lot of thought into the design of the city. It was a single large tower. Inside the tower I could see breeze ways and pass-throughs. The upper surfaces were covered with a riot of foliage. It had an organic look, as though it had been grown rather than built. The sky was blue, with a hint of green. A soft breeze blew past me and carried the smell of the life forms of the planet. It felt and smelled wonderful. It had been a little while since I had been off the USS Harrier and on the surface of a planet. I marveled at the clarity of my dream. A couple of young people came out of the trees and approached the rise I was standing on. They held hands and their body language told me that they were out for a romantic stroll. The basket that the young man carried and the blanket that the young lady carried told me that they were going to have a picnic. I couldn't imagine a better place to have one. I waited patiently for them to see me. I didn't want to startle them. They did not see me. They looked right through me. I didn't think that I was visible to them. I had the feeling that I was watching a past event, although I couldn't really say why. They were speaking softly and happily to each other in a language that I didn't know. It seemed to be the language of the world that we had just visited, but I didn't want to take anything for granted. I had the feeling that the two people were young, although it was hard to tell. They were humanoid, but not human. They had a distinctly simian appearance. They looked like beefed up chimpanzees or slim gorillas. They seemed to be somewhere between seventeen and eighteen years old if judged by human standards, but I really couldn't be sure why I thought so. They set up their picnic and had a romantic lunch, ignoring me the entire time. It was nice to see, but I felt like I was intruding. After a while, I turned and looked at the vegetation or the city in the distance. Up in the sky, although it was broad daylight, I could see one of the sister planets to the one I was on. Five planets shared the same orbit in this system. They held each other together and yet stable in a complicated gravitational formation called a rosette. Flying machines came and went from the tower. I knew that it was just one of several on the planet, and each of the five earth-like world had many such cities of their own. All full of the happy, simian people. I had seen the wreckage of them. -*- When I woke up, my eyes felt like they had sand in them. I blinked several times. My head felt like it was stuffed full of cotton. I laid in my bunk and tried to sort out what I was feeling. I wasn't sleepy, but I was tired. It was hard to concentrate. Eventually I remembered my own standing orders about the dreams. I rolled over and dictated a report describing the dream. Out of idle curiosity, I accessed and read a couple of other reports about the dreams. They all seemed to be prosaic scenes of life on the Rosette -*- The Rosette was the home of an advanced civilization, a million years ago. They had never developed faster-than-light travel. They didn't need to. They had new worlds to settle right in their own backyards. In time the Rosette civilization had come to fill the five worlds of the Rosette. They had wars over territory and resources. They did terrible damage to their planets by using them carelessly. Then they worked out a better way to run the situation. The Rosette People spent the next couple of hundred years restoring their five planets, and learning to live in harmony with them. The big city that I had seen was an arcology. A self contained system. It was essentially a space station built on the ground. All the same technology used to recycle air, food and wastes from a space station were adapted to minimize the impact of the city on its planet. Best of all, if the recycling systems got a little behind with the atmosphere, getting fresh air was as simple as opening the windows. Arcologies were excellent solutions to walking lightly upon the Earth, or any inhabited planet. They had two drawbacks. They were very expensive, and they required a fairly strict set of behaviors on the part of their inhabitants to function adequately. Ion-impeller drives were used to make flying vehicles stay up with a minimum of fuss in the air, The people tapped the cores of their planets to get clean, relatively benign energy. The beacons they implanted in the crusts of their planets to guide flying machines and spaceship were what had drawn the Harrier to the system to begin with. They were still functioning after a million years. Eventually the people realized that five earth-like planets in a rosette formation was a highly improbable occurrence. They came to realize that their worlds had been moved into position and then terraformed by an unknown hand. While the people were trying to puzzle this basic question out, the star that had warmed and nourished the five planets of the Rosette died of old age. Suddenly it began to bloat into a red giant in its death throes. It would bake the Rosette worlds thoroughly. The people knew that within a few years their worlds were doomed. They sadly built giant life boats to carry some of their people away. They hoped to find other inhabitable worlds. The ones who remained tried to make certain that their civilization would be remembered, when the ruins were discovered. -*- We followed the radio signals into the system. The signals themselves were simple navigational markers. From coded identification and time markers in the signals, we estimated that less than one in five was still working. The system orbited a white dwarf star. The dead corpse of its sun. We orbited first one and then another dead cinder. The ruins on the surface told us a little about the Rosette People. The ruins had been baked by low powered plasma for a hundred years. The whole crust of the planet was a broken sheet of thick glass. We eventually hit the jack pot in the crypt. The crypt of the Rosette People was an amazing substance. It was nearly indestructible. The metal was similar to that used by a race called the Kalandans, a thousand years ago. The plasma could not hurt it. Our main phaser banks couldn't have penetrated the crypt. However, a simple mathematical puzzle opened it right up. Inside we found complete computer records of everything the Rosette People thought was fit to be saved. We spent a week there, taking copies of the complete archives and records of the Rosette Civilization. Bill the Probe flew around the system, with an extra fuel tank strapped on. He found wreckage in orbit around the star, and even the baked remains of a spaceship, but nothing living. We even took complete scans of every artifact in the crypt. The Rosette People tried to leave examples of what they considered important art and one of each type of object that they could jam into the crypt. We left the artifacts themselves, there. There was no telling who might be along later. If the space arks of the Rosette People had survived, and then their descendants deserved to find the crypts as well preserved as we could manage. We also left information about the UFP, and the logs of the USS Harrier in the crypt, along with readers for our data. If we didn't make it back to the Federation, then someday a Federation starship might be out this way. I hoped that they would find our records alongside those of the Rosette People. After learning everything that we could about the Rosette People and their records, we closed up the crypts, and resumed our course towards Starbase Twenty-Four. A couple of days outside the system, the dreams started. They only affected a few people at first. They reported extremely detailed and clear dreams depicting life on the Rosette worlds. They also began to grow sleepy and impaired. As the next day passed, more and more people in the crew became affected. --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.648 / Virus Database: 415 - Release Date: 3/31/2004 -- Stephen Ratliff ASC Awards Tech Support http://www.trekiverse.us/ASCAwards/commenting/ No Tribbles were harmed in the running of these Awards ASCL is a stories-only list, no discussion. Comments and feedback should be directed to alt.startrek .creative or directly to the author. Yahoo! Groups Links To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ASCL/ To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: ASCL-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ From ???@??? 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