Where did this come from?

Report on Item of Indeterminate Origin
September 2203

During an Academy field trip to Duwan’Ktra, a buried structure was uncovered after a minor subsidence incident. While the architecture and construction materials of the structure itself were consistent with existing structures found on the planet, one item found under a debris pile was not.

The underground structure appears to be the buried remains of a stable, or other agricultural building. The surrounding area, a series of mid-altitude flat plains, were minimally populated before the extinction event, and while there have been archaeological, mineralogical and geological analyses done, there have been no comprehensive digs.

The structure in question is found at grid coordinates 549.87, 142.04, and at a depth of 6 meters below the current surface. The anomalous item was found in the north-west corner of the structure, buried 0.56 metres within a pile of debris. The debris was a mixture of soil and building materials, the latter being dated to Cira 10 000 standard years ago.

The item itself is a perfect geometric solid, a stellated dodecahedron. The metal framework is a mixture of durasteel and corunduim. The crystal, while superficially resembling a quartz-type mineral, is a member of the hypersonic series and is, in some ways, similar to dilithium. There are no apparent power sources within the item, and measurements indicate that the crystal is solid with no intrusions. There is one unexplained phenomenon related to the item. It intermittently emits a low-level localised subspace field. The exact mechanisms which lead to that production and the exact physical processes behind it are unknown at this time.

The metal frame is scratched in several places, and there are scorch marks on the tips of most of the pyramids. Where the scratches and scorch marks overlap, the scratches appear to have been made after the scorching.

The item does not match any artistic or structural artifacts previously found on Duwan’Ktra and the technology required to produce the alloys is far beyond anything which the inhabitants are theorised to have reached. As such, it appears likely that the item was placed in the location it as found, perhaps as a prank, or it originated beyond the system and impacted the surface sometime in the last 10 000 standard years.

A trip to the center

Chief Engineer’s Personal Log
Stardate 999.2

A visit to the centre of the expanding bubble revealed nothing at all. There’s no trace left of whatever caused the subspace shockwave. Nothing that might suggest a cause. The only clue is that the centre is approximately half way along line between Brissid and the hypothesised nebula origin point. Could this perhaps be related to the mechanism which, on previous waves, caused the rapid expansion of the nebula?

Despite the importance of investigating the cause of the shockwave and the value of the data that we gathered in the process, during the travel to the centre and back, I couldn’t help but see every minute as potentially wasted. Not that I expect to find anything where the two extrapolated paths cross, perhaps more crystal remnants at best, but I would still have preferred to investigate that immediately.

At least it gave Nikolai and I time to examine the crystalline particles we retrieved from Chanu-Weianu in detail. The crystal shells match exactly to the crystal in the item I found 6 and a quarter years ago and 35 light years away, buried under 10 000 year-old debris.

If the crystal portion does come from Sector 21, then how did it get to Duwan’Ktra and end up under the debris of a collapsed building? Who set the crystal into the metal frame? And what does it have to do with whatever it is that is destroying starships and towns?