[Russell] Catch Your Own Train
Lynzie Austin
[ooc: by some kind of demand, i leave this much like a cat would a dead mouse my friends. i don't know when i will get around to writing more of this.]
The bridge was off. Something about the internal regulators that was causing back feed of poor quality air that made the whole place reek of Ensign Rigilia’s “clean linen” perfume. The woman must have bathed in the stuff. Jo's nose twitched as she perched in the Captain’s chair, resisting the urge to hit a button and jettison the whole damned thing into space.
However, that wouldn’t be terribly conducive to her first trek around the stars with the four pips upon her collar.
The intrepid class, USS Steichen, was just a survey vessel that was bound for an oort cloud. “Just take the readings and come back, it’s not hard Russell,” Admiral Wallace had ordered.
She’d been a Captain for three weeks. Three weeks of paperwork, of briefings, of Admirals looking at her like she was a bomb waiting to go off. Three weeks of being handed the galaxy’s most tedious survey mission because no one trusted her with anything more interesting.
As though they didn’t trust me to come back with the ship, she thought sourly.
She hadn’t stolen anything from the shipyards in at least three years. Not that anyone believed that. Her file had a way of following her around like a particularly persistent scent of Ensign Rigilia’s perfume. Every new assignment came with a fresh crop of rumors: Did you hear about Russell? She once pickpocketed an Admiral during a recruitment pitch. She ran a Dabo table into the ground when she was fourteen. I heard she got away with arson. She met Janeway and got away with it.
The last one was true. She’d met Janeway. She’d impressed Janeway. She’d walked out of that cafe with the Admiral’s approval and a chip on her shoulder the size of a shuttlecraft. Now, fast forward how many years Jo was here. On a survey mission. In an oort cloud. Taking readings. She wanted to scream.
Everything about the Steichen was entirely too new for Jo’s liking. Entirely too gray. It was like Starfleet puked on everything. As she read over the fiftieth scan of the oort cloud, she thought she might actually die of boredom. Her newly minted XO, some tall, beefy, incredibly salty to be passed for promotion guy by the name of Belton Carver—who also didn’t like to be asked if his parent hated him to have named him Belton—-paced the bridge like an anxious rabbit, stopping ever so often like he might’ve seen a predator.
“Carver?” Jo tested the waters.
The man practically jumped. His brown eyes wide. “Yes Captain Russell!”
Jo blinked. He looked absolutely shell-shocked to be spoken to, like she’d just asked him to perform a daring spacewalk without a suit. He’s going to give himself a heart attack, she thought. And then I’ll have to find a new XO. And that sounds like so much unnecessary paperwork.
“Why not do a sensor sweep? Perhaps, even, check over the arrays to make sure they are all functioning?” Keeping her voice light, like she wasn’t losing her mind; Jo handed him the padd she was referring to noting that all the past data was all exactly the same. “You’ll note that all the past data is exactly the same. Down to the decimal point. Which is either a remarkable coincidence, or someone’s been asleep at the diagnostics console.”
Carver took the PADD like she was handing him a live grenade. His eyes scanned the data, his brow furrowing. “Captain, I... I don’t see anything wrong with this. The readings are consistent with expected parameters.”
Jo leaned back in her chair. “Expected parameters. Right. And what if the parameters are wrong? What if there's something out there that our sensors aren’t calibrated to see?”
Carver stared at her. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. “I’m not sure what you’re suggesting, Captain. It's a simple sweep.”
She smiled. It was the kind of smile that made people nervous. “I’m suggesting that we stop trusting the sensors and start using our eyes. Our instincts. Our brains.” She stood up and walked to the viewscreen. The oort cloud was a hazy smear of white and gray, beautiful in its monotony. “There’s something out there, Carver. I can feel it.”
“You can... feel it?” Carver’s voice cracked slightly.
Jo took the look of hopefulness that flashed behind his eyes—-the eagerness to swoop in and assume command at the drop of a needle. She smirked. “Call it a hunch, but in my experience, even with the oort cloud not all the readings are identical.” She walked to the science console and pulled up the sensor data. “Excuse me L-T Teegs. Look at this. Every reading is identical. That’s not how nature works. That’s not how anything works. Something’s wrong.”
Carver looked at the screens. Then to her. Then to Teegs. Then back to the screens. He rubbed his chin. “So the sensors are… malfunctioning?”
“Captain, I do not mean to contradict, but... it could just be that the sensors are inactive. A glitch in the calibration. It happens sometimes.” Teegs added.
Jo clasped her hands. “Or there’s something in the oort cloud.” She pointed at the viewscreen. “We could use our eyes and start there.” The oort cloud hung there in all its hazy nothing burgerness. It was beautiful in its monotony. Covering its star with its dull frog coloring like a champ.
Yet. There was something that made her feel like she was being watched back. Perhaps it was just the nerves of being in the seat. Or just boredom afterall. She really was hoping she was right. Jo turned on her heel to face the crew. “Here’s what we do, we do a check of our sensors and do another sweep of the cloud,” she announced. “I want a metaphasic and tachyon sweep as well, not just the long-range scans.”
She could practically feel the incoming sighs. Carver opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “Captain, I don’t—”
“Yes Mister Carver? You don’t what? Think that I’m giving out orders to my crew?” Jo blinked at him. “Because I believe I just did.”
“Yes Captain. Understood.” Carver stood rigid, clearing his throat loud enough to make Ensign Rigilia jump. “You all heard the Captain’s orders. Hop to it!”
The Steichen moved forward, cutting through the void like a blade through silk. The oort cloud loomed ahead, in all its vastness and silence. Jo watched it from the Captain’s chair, her fingers drumming a rhythm on the armrest. The leather was still stiff. Still unbroken. Her brain told her it wouldn’t always be that way, but she really wished it would be sooner rather than later.
She was about to suggest perhaps a break… anything to break the monotony, when Ensign Soth spoke up from the communications console.
“Captain.”
It was a single word, delivered in that particular flat tone that Vulcans used when they were trying very hard to sound unimpressed. However, there was something underneath it. A flicker of... something. Curiosity? Concern? Jo couldn’t quite tell. Some Vulcans were impossible to read at the best of times, and Soth was even more inscrutable than most. He was tall and spindly, with long fingers that seemed to have too many joints and ears that pointed at slightly different angles. He looked like he’d been assembled from spare parts.
“Yes, Ensign?”
“I ran a broadband sweep for comms in the cloud. Low range audio spectrometer readings,” He pointed a long, spindly finger at the display. “There’s an irregularity. A pattern, repeating at regular intervals.”
Jo sprang out of her chair. Trying everything in her power to not look overly eager at the news was beyond difficult. “Show me,” she said over Soth’s shoulder. Soth pulled up the waveform. It was a series of peaks and valleys, repeating at precisely timed intervals. Almost random looking, until she stared at it to see the pattern. “How long has it been happening?”
“According to these readings and my calculations—” Soth folded his hands in that smug way that Vulcans that found something over a cohort tend to do. Jo noted that Lieutenant Teegs seemed to be fuming. “Seventy-Two hours. Although it may have been active for longer, the ship’s sen-sors are not calibrated to detect these wavelengths.”
“Good work, Ensign,” Jo nodded. She rocked back onto her heel for a moment. “Can you pinpoint the source?”
Soth’s fingers moved across the console. “The signal appears to be originating from a fixed point within the cloud. Approximately 4.7 million kilometers from our current position.”
Jo turned to face her crew. Carver was standing at the tactical console, his face a careful mask. Teegs was at the science station, her eyes wide with curiosity. The rest of the bridge crew was watching her, waiting for her to make a decision.
She smiled wide at them all, her gray eyes sparkling.
“Belton,” she said, her voice carrying the particular lightness that meant she was about to do something reckless. “Set a course for that signal. And make it quick.”
Carver’s face went pale. “Captain, I really must protest—-”
“Then, it will be noted in my log,” Jo locked eyes with him once again. “Does anyone else have any thoughts they’d like to share?”
The rest of the bridge crew looked around at each other for a moment. “Well, yes,” Teegs added. She looked at Jo like she was about to go off script and say something incredibly unprofessional, which was sending Jo into the stratosphere. “We’re at an oort cloud looking at space dust Carv, man. Cap’s right. We’re supposed to be investigatin’ the cloud… noise is comin’ from in the cloud. We go check out in the cloud. Not rocket science bud.”
“Thank you Teegs,” Jo wanted to give Teegs a round of applause, but held her composure.
“Apologies Captain,” Carver hung his head. His shoulders slumped. He looked like a man who had just watched his last shred of authority evaporate into the void. “Course laid in.”
Jo leaned back in her chair. The leather creaked beneath her. It was still stiff. Still unbroken. But it felt a little more like hers than it had before. She yawned. At warp one it would only take approximately 16 seconds to get where they were going. After all this.
She leaned forward putting her elbows onto her knees and smiled. “Let her rip.”