“Well, put it on screen!”

Gabrielle jingled slightly as she launched herself to her feet from the captain’s chair, the keys to Atlantis half-stuffed into a pocket. One, two steps and she was right there at the point where the helm and ops met, a hand on either console and leaning forward slightly as the viewscreen snapped from a mundane seen-it-before star scape everyone in Starfleet could see just looking out a window, to a planet never before seen by Starfleet.

But which anyone could see by looking out a window.

In a few hours at any rate.

Sensors were able to resolve features of the planet Leytan III, but visually not terribly much. The image was an indistinct disk, mostly brown with the odd splash of dried green or sandy yellow thrown over it, and perhaps just a few small blobs of life-bearing blue for effect. Two smaller disks hung in the image as well, one bone white, the other a dark grey. Their size hinted at moons, neither of them particularly large, but proximity likely made them far more impressive from the surface.

“Marginally M-class,” Samantha Michaels said, studying her readouts. “Very slight hydrosphere. Could make for an interesting terraforming candidate, if not for the star.”

“Hmm?” Gabs intoned.

“K1 red giant,” Sam answered. “Dim and big.”

“On the time scale of life as we know it, we could terraform a world and have an entire civilisation rise and fall before that star did anything else.” Gabs pushed herself back upright. “T’Val, take us in. I want to get better eyes on this world.”

The Vulcan helmsman sighed slightly as she complied, taking Atlantis further into the system, bypassing the outer planets for the one unremarkable rock that had a chance of hosting life.

“That’s,” Captain Kennedy paused, considering his words as he looked at the viewscreen two hours later, “certainly a planet alright.”

What had been a blob had resolved itself into something the human mind could comprehend. Worn mountain ranges, or canyons large enough for Atlantis to fly down without difficulty, broke vast plains, some thousands of kilometres across. Bodies of water were few and far between, barely large enough to even be considered a lake, let alone a small sea, and all concentrated at high latitudes and anchoring the planet’s marginal water cycle.

“Looks like someone dried it out,” Nathan continued, stepping up beside Gabs who was standing in the middle of the bridge, eyes fixed on the viewscreen and arms crossed. When she dangled the keys from one hand, offering them, he waved a polite ‘no’.

“Less than six percent surface coverage,” Gabs answered without turning away. “But there’s a lot more interesting things to find.” She was smiling now. “Sam, zoom in on the night side, will you?”

The viewscreen zoomed in three steps, isolating a section of the planet below Atlantis that was presently sheltered from the system’s sun. It was dark, nearly pitch black, like so many other worlds. But then faint pinpricks of light could be made out. A long, gently curving line of dim lights against the dark, stretching what must have been hundreds of kilometres, interspersed with that encompassing blackness.

“Campfires,” Nathan stated.

“Sensors show what looks like a green belt, sitting atop a truly impressive aquifer system. All the fires are along it,” Gabs confirmed.

“If you can call it a green belt,” Sam protested. “It’s a marginally more hospitable stretch of land at most, ma’am.”

“I think I’ll let the boys and girls in planetary sciences sort it out,” Gabs conceded, then turned to face her captain. “Want to see something truly interesting though?”

“When you say interesting, do you mean study it from orbit interesting, or potentially violate the Prime Directive with a ground survey interesting?”

“Yeah, not going to lie, definitely the latter. Sam?”

The request didn’t need clarification, Samantha knew what was being asked. The viewscreen skewed fast, sliding away from the night and back to the day. Arid plains, broken up by clouds, gave way to gentle rolling dunes of sand. Then that too gave way to the impression of a grid system, as buildings large and small, at least the ruins of them, stuck out of the sand.

And then it slipped into view finally. An avenue had led up to a massive plaza, multiple avenues pouring into it as well from each cardinal direction, each was wider than Atlantis itself. And in the centre of the plaza, though calling it that wasn’t quite right, stood a single blackened pillar.

It pierced up out of the desert, defiant against the forces of nature that had laid low the former city around it. Where everything else was ruin, this stood unblemished. Where the city was a carcass, this was a blackened dagger thrusting upward into the sky.

But the perspective granted by the viewscreen was skewing true understanding of its size.

“It’s taller than you think,” Gabs said.

“Two hundred metres,” Nathan said.

“Taller.” When the captain glared at her, she smiled. “About a kilometre.”

He looked at her, then the viewscreen, then back to her. “A kilometre? On what seems like a pre-industrial world?”

“Yup,” Gabs answered.

The captain stared at the viewscreen for a few seconds. “I think I can see why you would want to go down there and inspect it.” He slowly turned to Gabs. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Something down there is putting up a scattering field around that obelisk, column, needle, what-have-you. From what we can tell, it’s about twenty kilometres out. And is pretty intense. T’Val, your assessment?”

The Vulcan turned in her seat to look at both senior officers. “Until we know more, I would recommend limiting the use of shuttlecraft inside the scattering field initially.” Her head tilted to one side ever so slightly. “It would appear then that Commander Rrr’mmm’bal’rrr’s decision to embark a couple of extra rovers was indeed a…lucky break.”

“Please don’t tell them that,” the captain said, raising a hand. “They’d be even more unbearable.” As he shook his head, he looked at Gabs, who was fit to bursting. “You want to lead an expedition, don’t you?”

“I’m not just your chief science officer, but I’m also your first officer. Of course, I want to lead the team. But with a trek in and out of the field like that, we should bring down who and what we can to try and limit-”

Nathan’s raised hand cut her off, and he waited a half-second. “Take all the rovers. That’s six in total?” He waited for her affirmation. “But take a hazard team with you.”

Gabs barely resisted the urge to bounce on the balls of her feet in excitement. “Thank you, Captain!” She then presented him with the keys once more, which he accepted. “Sam, congratulations, you’re with me,” Gabs announced as she headed for the turbolift, holding herself from a run.

“What? Why me?” the junior ops officer asked as she got to her feet anyway.

“Time stuff!” Gabs declared from inside the turbolift. “Just in case!”