The Rise of Iconia

Chapter 13

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Chapter 13

The senior officers of all four ships sat in the conference room of Nathan Stark. Also present were the Twins, Jack and Sam O'Neill, Daniel Jackson, Hermiod and Wesley Crusher.

Picard was seated at the head of the table. He was staring at Sam O'Neill, incredulously. "Explain, 'encased in ice'," he demanded.

"Certainly, Sir," she responded. "We have found Avalon's correct position, but it is inside the comet."

A few hours before, the convoy had arrived at their present location, expecting to find a drifting station. Instead, they had found a comet, lazily spinning in its orbit around the system's star. Hermiod had scanned the comet and found it to be entirely too dense to be ice. There was obviously something to it that they could not see.

"Actually," Eli said, "I think it would be safer to say that the comet is Avalon."

"I don't remember Avalon being made of ice," Jack commented. "Seems to me, it was made out of metal and had big honkin' space guns all over it."

Sam looked at her husband and nodded, smiling fondly. "Yeah, Jack, over the years, however, I think it probably collided with one or two comets, and the ice has built up on its surface."

"Avalon has an AI, Lassie. There's a chance that th' girl knew she might be discovered out here, n' simply camouflaged herself… Or rather himself," Scotty observed.

"That's very true," Eli commented. "It's what I would have done."

Worf looked strangely at Eli, and Sam clarified. "Eli's mind was at one time stuck in Atlantis' computer core. When he was downloaded to his present body, a copy of his mind stayed in the computer, and then duplicated throughout several of our ships. A computer version of Eli volunteered to be the primary AI on board Avalon when we were ready to upgrade the computers."

"So when you say it's what you would have done…" Riker's voice trailed off.

"We can safely guess that Avalon would do the same," Eli completed.

"Can a human mind last for three hundred thousand years without company?" Picard asked.

"Yes, but probably not without going insane," Eli answered. "There are a few other minds in there as well, including a copy of Ginn."

At Riker's confused look, Jack explained, "Ginn is Eli's girlfriend."

"How do we get Avalon out of the ice?" Daniel wanted to know.

"That's actually not a real problem," Scotty told him. "Avalon has a phasing cloak. Assumin' the computer is runnin', all we gotta do is turn it on excludin' ice. She'll come right out of the comet, as easy as ye please."

"And if the computer is offline?" Worf asked.

"The only way the computer would be offline is if there was no power," Geordie explained. "and we'd need to get power to it somehow. But, if that's the case, we might have more problems. If the ice has encroached into the interior, we could use the transporter to clear some of it out."

"If the ice has progressed that far," Riker stated.

Inside Avalon…

There was no sound at all. Frost had long ago condensed on every surface, and the ship had been essentially dead for almost three hundred millennia. It's crew had abandoned ship when they were flung far out into what the Federation referred to as the Gamma Quadrant. A few planets in the galaxy had survived the Doci's death relatively unscathed, and on one of these planets, the crew had managed to settle down. It was irony itself that the planet was also home to the remains of the Aschen civilization and the NPCs who had tried to take over the town of Eureka.