Commander Jo Marshall - Once Upon a Time...

[Jo Marshall]

((Ready Room, Deck 1, USS Gorkon))

Her head shaking free from the glut of emotions taking place, Jo looked off out of the large window of the Ready Room, to a small light in the distance. It didn't look quite like a star, and it certainly wasn't steady enough to be a star. Her brows pulled together in a frown. 

Marshall: You see that?

Reynolds: It's a little early for hallucinations, too. ::She shot Jo with a small, tepid smile.:: But anything we can see with our eyes would have been picked up by the sensors a long time ago, and the bridge hasn’t come knocking. I don’t think it’s a threat.

Marshall: Yeah… Yeah, you're right. ::She shook her head, blinking her eyes open and shut.:: I'm seeing things already and we've been here for five minutes.

Reynolds: As gloomy as the thought is, it might be a ship graveyard. ::It was her turn to frown.:: The Borg don’t assimilate everything; we know they leave behind ship wreckage if there’s no new technology in it.

Marshall: They're not the greatest of the galactic recyclers. 

As depressing a thought as it was, they'd been there before. Ship graveyards from the battles fought and lost by the Federation during the Dominion takeover Over There had provided an ample source of equipment when they ran low. The first fluttering feelings of Jo's crush on one Erin Reynolds, whoever that was, had started during a journey to a Galaxy-class starship that had a massive hole in its side, resembling the size of a space whale.

The Dominion had booby-trapped most of those though, making each journey a perilous one, tempting fate into potentially losing a limb in the search for a replacement coil spool, only to find bits of broken pressure cooker lodged in your torso. 

Reynolds: Do you want to head out and check on Nkai now?

Roused from her wander down memory lane, Jo returned to the Ready Room in mind, body, and spirit. They had time. That was the main thing. They had time to find Johnson and time to find out where the mother loving son of a daugu1 was. More pressing on her mind was the discovery of where they were, exactly what time they were in, and who, if anyone, had survived the catastrophe intact.

But that would come later. After a brief interlude, to check on her best friend. 

Jo downed the rest of her coffee from the regular coffee mug and stood from her perch on the desk. One crick of the neck to the side elicited an audible crunch of muscle and bone. She chucked the mug into the replicator's recycler pad and turned back to Quinn. 

Marshall: We're going to get through this, Q-Ball. We have to. We haven't got another choice.

Reynolds: Response

Marshall: Tell that to your face. ::She ribbed her friend, good-naturedly and literally.:: Once we find Johnson, we'll get answers. He won't have stranded himself here.

Once the words were free from her mouth, Jo knew it was quite possible Johnson had done exactly that. He didn't seem like the kind of man who would set his bridges alight with deuterium slush mix, then return, expecting to collect his pension and live out a peaceful retirement on a Risan sunlounger. She huffed a breath before taking a step backwards towards the door. 

Marshall: You coming with?

Reynolds: Response

1 Bajoran: A daugu is a phosphorescent reptile indigenous to Bajor, whose tongue flicks with the determination of someone trying to eat spaghetti with a single chopstick.

-- 

Commander Jo Marshall

Chief of Operations

USS Gorkon, NCC-82293

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