Project Mystery Train

'Project Mystery Train' is one of the dark projects once investigated by then-Captain Zachary Falthgood. It is best described as either a Gateway to Hell, or a Portable Event Horizon. It's generally used as a method of travel (Think Stargate Here), and has been made functional again by Admiral Doenitz. In responce, Falthgood has resurrected three of his own devices, see: The Falthgood Devices

All posts are credited to their writers. They were primarily written by J Trout & Melinda Martin

(More Coming)

Project Mystery Train

Zach Remembers Mystery Train

Zach Finds Out it Still Exists

Stardate: 2406.10.27

(USS Nimitz - Science Lab - Lt(jg) 'Shades' Falthgood - 0800)

"Sir?" Zach said, running the Captain's words through his mind that he had just heard, and not quite believing it. He had talked to the head of Strategic Operations for the fleet many times about the darker side of Starfleet, there were few things that were taboo with them.

The face on the screen didn't so much as twitch. "We ran into evidence of something called 'Project Mystery Train', there was quite a big hullabaloo about it, in fact. It's nothing I've ever run into; I was wondering if you had."

Zach sat back in his chair, his eyes wide open and his jaw hinged as far as it would go. It was a rarity, but he was in shock.

"Oh Lord," he muttered after several moments that lasted an eternity. "No oh no... this isn't good, it's got to be a coincidence, nothing more."

Yet, he knew it wasn't. The Captain on the screen frowned at him, but Zach wasn't paying attention anymore.

"Mystery Train," he muttered. "D*mned Project Mystery Train."

The Scientist rubbed at his mustache, no longer paying any attention to what went on around him. He hadn't heard the term 'Mystery Train' in more then a dozen years, not since he had coined the Project Name himself. His eyes closed and he considered...

Zach Remembers the Past

(Milthra IV - Project Headquarters, 'Artifact Room' - Commander Falthgood - 1500)

-^-It's been two months Zach,-^- the figure on his screen said. -^-I want results, not more analysis, Commander.-^-

"Admiral, if we operate it now, we will be operating half blind and..."

-^-And I don't care, do it, use the data you accumulate to further your experiments. Doenitz out.-^-

The Commander closed his eyes and sighed. He was already missing the days when he had just been a lowly scientist, this was his first project in command and it was already giving him an ulcer. He sat back as a hand wrapped itself around his neck. "Zach," the voice said, "You don't have much of a choice here."

"I know love," the Scientist said. He stood and turned, looking down at his five and a half foot wife. He bent down briefly and touch foreheads with her, then strode out of the door of his office and onto the main floor of the research facility. It was an old temple, as best as the archaeologists could determine. It wasn't the facility that had interested Doenitz, nor Zach... but the wonderful things it held.

Standing in the middle of the room was a giant portal. As best as they could determine, it was the gateway to a stable wormhole, a wormhole that could be directed. That was the theory anyway, they hadn't been able to prove it one way or the other. They had been at it for two months, ever since the sucker had been found to be active even after nearly 40,000 years.

Zach crossed his arms and looked at it, there were so many possibilities. There were a couple people, Zach included, who thought the technology could be evolved into a portable unit. There were even a few theoretical equations that stated it might even be possible to load the thing onto a station and make a gate large enough for a ship to transfer through.

Assuming, of course, that this thing proved to be a gate of some sort and not an over-sized nightlight.

"Alright, boys and girls!" he bellowed into the room. "Warm up the machinery, prep the teams, it's time to ride this Mystery Train!" His grin was infectious, even if it wasn't entirely heart-felt. He wanted to send people through that Artifact, but there were too many unknown variables, it would be decidedly dangerous for whoever went through.

None of the probes they had sent through had done any good, the one thing they had noticed about the gate was it required some sort of biological entity to pass through. They had sent animals through, but none had ever come back... it was hard to make any lower life form walk back through a giant red gate. That meant human testing, unless they could come up with a convincing enough Android to fool the makers of technology so advanced that hardly any of the underlying theory was understood.

Zach found that possibility... unlikely.

Project Mystery Train was a perfect example of why he dealt with the paranoid security and blacklisting of this particular Reverse Engineering department, the technology was absolutely stunning. It's implications rocked Zach to the core.

After several minutes, three men in full gear walked up to the gate. Zach took a seat at one of the terminals, "Activate the artifact."

That was one of the things that he insisted upon until they knew exactly what the thing did, calling it 'The Artifact'. That was the only official name it had ever had. He put on a headset and closed his eyes for a couple seconds to steady his nerves. "Team one, begin when ready." he finally said. He smiled wanly, "Send a postcard if you find Atlantis."

He didn't bother looking up; rather he watched a sensor reading of the Artifact. The team members wasted no time, and with phasers up, they all stepped through after a very short hesitation at the Event Horizon. Zach folded his hands together as data scrolled on his screen. They had immediately lost track of the members.

Zach was about to stand up when everything around him began shaking. He grabbed the console by instinct as the temple literally rolled around him, stones fell from the ceiling and consoles began sparking. "What the hell?!" he bellowed.

His hands flew over the console as people began yelling data out.

"There is a subspace power surge coming from the gate!" someone with a feminine voice yelled from behind him. Zach confirmed that, there were waves of energy coming off the portal, and they were getting stronger. He thought quickly, "Hit it with tetryons, counteract the waves!" he yelled, "Before the da*n thing brings the temple down on our heads!"

It was all controlled chaos, men and women ran back and forth. Several more blocks fell from the temple, and many of the supports his men had placed groaned ominously. Zach kept a good hold of the console as the earth under him did another jump. Without any warning, the visible Event Horizon of the gate flared a malignant red, and something was spit out.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the gate calmed and the subspace waves subsided. Well before they had finished, however, Zach was out of his seat and running to the gate. What had been spit out was a single body, from the clothing, one of the three people that had walked in not more then a couple minutes ago.

The officer was lying on his stomach, there was much visible blood and his uniform was shredded. The weapon was still strapped across his neck, it laid to the side of him. His arms were sprawled, and his skin had a very strange hue to it.

Zach flipped the officer over, intend on giving aid. What he saw caused his eyes to widen in horror however; he fell back and scrambled away as quickly as he could on nothing more then instinct.

The man's face was a ruin; he looked like he had aged a hundred years, on top of the ruin it had received. Not only did he look old, but he looked like someone had taken a bat to his head. And that wasn't the worst of it.

Worms, or wormlike creatures, began slithering out of every hole in the mans head. His eyes, his nostrils, his mouth and ears. As if that were a cue, his whole body began wiggling, as if there were hundreds of alien worms under his skin, just itching to get out. Zach continued backpedaling, getting away from the body and portal as he bellowed, "Security, decontamination measures, destroy that body!"

He finally managed to get to his feet and get away just as a Security team came up and vaporized the body. He turned and leaned against one of the walls to catch his breath, and his aplomb. He shuddered several times, the ruined face and the mental image of worms pushing the dead-mans eyelids open to crawl out filled his mind and wouldn't leave.

"Sir, do you still want to hit the thing with tetryons?"

"Hell yes!" he said without hesitation. "There are still two other men in there, we can't risk them coming back. Shut that wench down!"

It was only a theory, but it was generally thought that overloading the gate would shut it down. Whatever hell it lead too, Zach didn't want to know, and at this point he didn't care how spitting mad Doenitz would be if it suddenly stopped working.

Zach Briefs Richard Ian Lee

(USS Nimitz - Science Lab - Lt(jg) Zach 'Shades' Falthgood - 0804)

"The b*stard continued the project," Zach finally said. Thoughts that hadn't filled his mind in years came filtering back, some of the more optimistic of the possibilities for the gate. If Doenitz had finally figured out what had gone wrong, and what it would take to get it working, then they could all be in a lot of trouble.

He closed his eyes for several seconds, and then looked at the screen again. "Get that probe over here immediately, if you would. I need to run some tests on it... and quickly."

The Captain nodded, "I will want a full report on what you remember Lieutenant. I'll make sure that probe comes within your reach sometime within the next month."

"No," Zach barked, as if he was still a Captain himself. "Rearrange the entire fleet if you have to, I need to look at it far sooner then that."

Rich quirked his head and said nothing. "Ill do what I can, Night's Watch out."

Zach reached out and cut the channel, then leaned back in his chair again and held his head in one of his massive hands. "Oh God, let not everything unravel before our very eyes." he all but whispered.

(reply: none, yet) (posted by Trout)

Talking with Falthgood

Stardate: 2406.10.28

(USS Mystique- Bridge- CO- Captain Vanyssa Winters, Lt(jg) Zach Falthgood - 1120)

After a nice, relaxing couple of hours with Sash, and some indulgence of his alfredo, which he still wouldn't give her the recipe to, Vanyssa headed down to Falthgood's research lab. She poked her head in, and smiled to see him working. Shades and all. "Zach?" She said, smiling as he turned around. "I need some...advice." And the smile dropped away and the worry replaced it. "And I need something that you might have." She finished. "Can we talk...privately?"

Zach raised his head, and mused at the voice for a few moments. He Looked back down again and almost mourned at the loss of his cover, the crazy-scientist had given him pleasure for so many years. But it was so hard to do anything of the sort when people came to him with such a serious tone, well... He tapped a button on his console which shut and locked the doors, very useful to a scientist in the middle of delicate experiments.

He touched a small device on his desk and picked it up. And the, slowly, he pulled the shades off his face and placed them on the deck. As he turned in his chair, he flicked the trigger on the sphere-oid device and gently placed it back on the desk. "I expected you," he finally said.

"I can't say I'm surprised." She said, taking the offered seat. "First I need one of those thingy's. You wouldn't happen to have one laying around that was in need of a good home? The Myste has... unwanted ears it seems. The other I'm sure you've heard about. He's going to come after me again and if I don't know why I can't fight him. I've lost too many people last time to continue blindly. Has Lee passed along the probe?"

"Yes," Zach said as he sat back in the chair, "He has. And from the look I've had at it..." He broke off. Finally, after long seconds, he crossed his arms and shook his head, "I closed Mystery Train, not long after I coined the phrase. The b*stard reopened it."

"He is certainly that." Vanyssa said, thinking about Lee and not Doenitz. The words she would use to describe Doenitz were much harsher, meaner. "I take it you have not gleaned any information from it?"

Zach smiled lopsidedly, "You're going to wish you hadn't asked that question. Lee certainly disliked me once I was done explaining." He picked up a PADD and tapped a couple buttons on it, followed by a couple more. "It was old, refurbished, pressed into service. It was a targeting device. A gateway..." He looked up and handed the PADD over, "Straight from hell."

"The probe was a gateway?" Vanyssa asked, eyes wide.

"Nope, just a point in space." He leaned back again, "A target point for a gateway, something like a subspace relay station used for long-range transports. At least, that's what I'm thinking... I have quite got it worked out yet. They took the project well beyond what I ever took it." He sighed, "It could end up having a lot of uses, Ill find out soon enough."

He quirked his head to the side, "If... if, this is what I think it is. Then we have problems. Even my most limited equations held awesome potential."

"Somehow I don't like the sound of that. What exactly is a Mystery Train?"

Falthgood sat forward, haunted. "A Dream. A piece of Inchon technology, functional after forty-thousand years. What we supposed was a stable wormhole, something that could move massive amounts of men and material from one place to another nearly instantaneously." He cracked his neck. "No, it was a nightmare."

He sat back again and narrowed his eyes, knowing Vanyssa was a telepath. "Tell you what," he said lightly. "I have something better then words." He leaned forward again, eyes closed, actively thinking of the final moments of Project Mystery Train, letting the telepath soak up the horror in a way that words would never be able to express.

Her eyes widened as she let herself become an observer in Falthgood's memories. After several minutes, she sat there shocked. "And he wants to use this. He killed my family over this, this, horrible thing." She shook herself out of the fugue she was in. "Do you think he has it working? Do you think he's done a test of it yet?"

Falthgood shook his head and didn't answer for long moments, letting his mind clear. "I don't know yet, it's become my top priority. Pray they don't, or we're in the deepest s*it you've ever seen. And not just because our fleet will be decimated. If even half my calculations come true, then he will hold ultimate power, and the only way to even the odds will be to pull out some of the darkest secrets I had locked away, too terrible for me to turn over to anyone according to my conscience."

He crossed his fingers together, "I put away that life, Captain, for the sake of my soul when it became obvious that the Good of the Federation was not the reason I was digging. It looks like I might loose it anyway."

Vanyssa didn't know what to say. The careful formality that Falthgood had put up prevented her from giving him a hug. "What did your calculations show it doing? What would be the side effects of using this? Ultimate power doesn't come without a horrible price, in my experience. And why did the Inchon leave the Mystery Train portal there? What happened to them?"

He shook his head, "This PADD has some select information on my equations and the information I've acquired on the probe." He picked it up from his lap and handed it over. "As for the Inchon, that's one of the questions we've never been able to answer. Much like the Iconians, and a half dozen other races, they simply up and disappeared. Unlike the Iconians, these guys had no known enemies that could destroy them."

Zach leaned forward and quirked one of his fingers, to bring Vanyssa in closer. Once she was close, he spoke quietly. "Power, Captain, is not all that it seems. Power is very real, tangible in many cases. It has been said that power corrupts, and from a philosophical standpoint that might be correct. But if history has shown anything, it's that a mad-man can push the price off on others long enough to destroy all we hold dear. And in the end, Captain, in the end... when the leader is finally called to account..." he sat back again. "Then the price has already been paid with the blood of the innocent."

She wanted very much to just grab Zach by the arm and take him with her to the Mystique. She needed him much more than Devan did. Much more.

"Zach, come to the Mystique with me, please." She said quietly, his words in her head.

Falthgood steepled his fingers, "If I go anywhere, it will be alone. And if this is true," he waved in the direction of the labs, "Then it won't matter were we are, where we run. There will be no-where left to hide."

She sighed softly. "I don't want to hide, Zach. My intuition says I'm going to be facing the results of this. And it scares, me, Zach. He scares me badly." She stood up to leave. "I hope I see you again." Her eyes were sad as she said it. She hoped that she would still be alive in a couple of months to even have the opportunity to see him. "Thanks for the toy...and your advice." She tucked the small PADD into the top of her uniform jacket, into the small pouch she had modified it to have. There were some things that had to be kept close.

Zach unlocked the door and watched her leave, sitting silent for many long minutes after she had finally disappeared. "Not as scared as I am, dear lady, not with as much as I've seen." He finally said to thin air.

The research and locations of some counter-pieces of technology he had hidden for various reasons came to mind, the results of their use would be catastrophic, and the implications of their very existence filled him with dread. Falthgood had been content to let his life end in the quiet manner he had lived it for the last several years, a quiet and crazy Lieutenant who would be forgotten once retirement came. If he was right though, his name would not only be remembered after this little rebellion, but whispered to children for generations to come as the boogey-man who would come to take them away in the darkest of night.

"This is only one toy, there are so many others; an entire career filled with mistakes... my legacy will only be that of darkness."

(reply: none) (posted by Melinda Martin & Trout)