“We’ll never find it!” he finally exclaimed, standing in the center of a five‑way intersection that shouldn’t have existed.

Bobbie Ray stuck a large fried insect in his mouth and briskly began crunching. The guy had a bottomless pit where his stomach should be.

“Close your mouth!” Jayme snapped, obviously disgusted by the sight of legs and feelers being randomly mashed around in the Rex’s mouth.

“Want one?” Bobbie Ray asked, offering her a plasteen container that was piled with the desiccated bodies of Terran grasshoppers.

“You know,” Jayme told him with a wicked glint in her eye, “you shouldn’t wear that color. Orange on orange makes you look like a big Zarcadian squash.”

“Will both of you pay attention?” Titus demanded. “We’re going to have to pick another access port. We’ll never find the one in here.”

“Oh, give me that!” Jayme snatched the padd from his hand, muttering under her breath about “tourists.”

With a few flicks of the screen, she overlaid a current map and zoomed in on their targeted access port.

“Here it is,” she said. “Right behind the Ho Ching Acupuncture and Telekinetic Healing Clinic.”

“Oh, what a relief,” Titus said sarcastically, taking back his padd.

“What would you do without us?” Bobbie Ray commented, grinning around the spindly legs of the grasshoppers.

*   *   *

Jayme was right–no one paid any attention to three orange‑clad workers opening the access port in the alleyway. Kids were running past, people were hanging clothes out overhead, and antigrav carts trundled by on both sides laden with warehouse goods or fresh produce.

Closing the access portal overhead, they stood in a rounded dirt‑floored chamber similar to the one shown on the media broadcasts where Data’s head was found. Titus felt a sinking feeling, wondering if all the caverns had been reconditioned by the workforces over the years.

“This way,” he ordered, keeping his worries to himself. At the rear of the chamber was a long ladder, leading down. Here the walls were rougher and the black pit was too deep to be illuminated by their handlights. Titus began to feel a little better. “Down we go!”

“Wait,” Jayme said, unslinging her pack. “We have to put these on.”

She held out the white jet‑boots issued by Starfleet.

Titus took one look and groaned. “We don’t need those!”

“I’m not going down without safety gear,” Jayme insisted. “And I’m not going to let you two go, either. This is supposed to be fun, not life‑threatening.” She glanced down into the shaft. “And those rungs look slimy.”

Bobbie Ray checked the two pairs she set out for them. “You brought my size!”

Jayme slipped her white boots on and tightened the straps. With a little puff of dust, she activated the jets and lifted a few inches off the ground. “Good for thirty hours use.”

Bobbie Ray buckled his boots on and was soon lifting himself up to the ceiling. “Maybe we should skip the ladder and go down this way.”

“Maybe you want to give up now and go back to the Quad!” Titus retorted. “What’s the use of exploring if you might as well be in a holodeck?”

Both of them hovered silently, staring down at him. After a few moments, Titus flung up his hands. “Have it your way, then! But we only use the boots in an emergency or I’m quitting right now.”

Jayme sank back down to the ground. “That’s why I brought them. For emergencies.”

Titus waited until Bobbie Ray also slowly floated down before jerking on his jet‑boots and tightening them in place. “Ithink if you can’t manage to hang on to a ladder, then you get what you deserve.”

Bobbie Ray laughed. “Then you go first, fearless leader.”

Titus had the satisfaction of hearing the Rex’s laughter abruptly end as they started down the ladder. For most humanoids, any sort of vertical drop offered a test of nerves. Especially when you couldn’t see the bottom.

The light at the opening at the top dwindled as they descended. He skipped several side tunnels that went in the direction of the Presidio and Starfleet Academy, choosing to go as deep as he could. The fracture widened at the bottom, becoming more rugged and raw. They climbed through a steeply inclined crack, into an underground canyon that stretched as far across as the Academy Assembly Hall. A stream had eroded the bottom into a gorge, and they had to edge along the wall, brushing their hands against the slippery, calcified coating on the rocks. Titus could imagine the tremendous force of earthquakes breaking open the crust around the San Andreas Fault, leaving behind this network of caverns and crushed rock.

They passed cave flowers slowly extruding from holes in the rock, growing from the base and curling back like squeezed toothpaste. Titus checked one of the largest, nearly twenty‑five centimeters across, and found that the delicate formation was pure gypsum. There were also shields or palettes forming from water seepage through cracks. The ridges of calcite were deposited on both sides, growing radially into parallel plates or disks, separated only by a thin opening through which drops of water continued to fall. Jayme stopped behind two large circular shields, her light outlining her body through the translucent calcite.

Titus was more than pleased with their awe and wonder at the underground world. But he wasn’t satisfied yet. Bobbie Ray refused to acknowledge the effort it took to climb down so far, and he even scaled the wall bare‑handed to get the tip of a crystal‑clear stalactite for Jayme. Her glance at Titus clearly said who she thought was winning this little contest of skills.

Titus took them up a high talus mound and into the next cavern, where flowstone coated the cave fill, narrowing the volume of the void. This cavern was filled with fallen ceiling blocks and most of the stalagmites had been broken off near the base by earth tremors. Additional seepage gave them an unusually fat, short appearance.

They retreated back to the shaft. Though the ladder left off, the fractured hole continued down. Titus uncoiled the rope he had brought and hooked it onto his belt. The other two followed him without a word of complaint.

A couple of dozen meters down the shaft narrowed, too small for them to go any further, but another fracture led east, fairly horizontal, following the path of the caverns far above them. Water coated the walls and floor, and here Bobbie Ray had even more of an advantage with his surefooted agility. Titus and Jayme kept slipping, and once Titus would have fallen badly except for Bobbie Ray’s obliging hand.

After clambering carefully some distance through the tunnel, Titus noticed a fissure overhead only because he was looking for it. With the help of Bobbie Ray’s height and reach, they muscled their way up the fissure into another large cavern, in line with the other two they had already explored.

“It was cut off from the last cavern by the talus mound,” Titus explained nonchalantly as first Jayme, then Bobbie Ray, emerged through the jog in the fissure that led into this small cavern. They were slightly elevated above the floor.

Titus was pleased that he had guessed correctly. Jumping down, he felt the loose rock shift and slip under his feet. Jayme actually went down on her hands and knees, unable to keep her balance, while Bobbie Ray hung on to the stone lip they had just jumped over, staring up open mouthed at the dramatic low‑hanging ceiling that dripped continually. The fat drops sparkled like rainbow stars under their handlights.

Titus knelt and picked up some of the rocky debris on the floor. “Hey, these are cave pearls.”

“Real pearls?” Jayme asked, picking up a handful of the shiny white spheres. “They’re huge!”

“It’s calcified gravel and bits of stuff,” Titus clarified. “You don’t find them very often, usually only in unexplored caves. I wonder if we’re the first ones to find this place.”