881: Space Ghosts

vby TC Blane and Zanh Liis*
90521.2300
Concurrent with Another Piece of the Puzzle

-=USS Serendipity=-


TC paced back and forth across the bridge as he waited impatiently for the Alchemy to depart. It seemed to be taking forever and he made a mental note to run drills to cover the emergency evacuation process when this situation was all done with.

His nerves were on edge, there was danger here and you did not have to be a telepath or empathic to sense it.

“Helm, what the status of the Alchemy?” He asked as he approached the console. He question draw Zanh Liis’ attention as she had just asked the question less then five minutes prior after returning from Sickbay.

“They are just waiting for Lieutenant Grace to get aboard then they will be departing.” The helmsman said.

TC resumed his pacing.

“Thomas, you’re going to wear out a grove in my new deck plates.” Liis commented. “Something troubling you?”

TC made his way to stand next to the Captain and folded his arms across his chest. “Yes.”

Liis nodded. “Care to elaborate?”

He glanced at her with his icy blue eyes. “I wish I could.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m just waiting for the shoe to drop.”

Liis simply nodded knowing full well what her second officer meant. What bothered her more was the fact that TC was on edge. She knew the man who stood next to her as well as herself. If TC Blane was edgy then everyone needed to be on their toes.

“That’s odd,” Paxton Briggs voice broke the uncomfortable silence that had descended on the bridge. He had hopped into covering the science station so that Commander Reece could see his pregnant wife safely to the Alchemy.

“Commander?” The Captain asked looking for a more complete description as TC, not able to stand still, made his way over the to stand behind the visiting officer.

“I was syncing with the Alchemy’s flight computer and updating the latest star telemetry to help prep a warp path for then when I got the oddest of readings.” He explained. “I am seeing spikes in electromagnetic radiation. That in itself is not odd, the universe is full of it.”

TC folded his arms across his chest. “So what’s the problem?”

“It’s where this radiation sits the electromagnetic band. This is not what a typical stellar EMR band looks like. Out here it is normally up in the higher ends of the band, this stuff is near the bottom. It is almost pure EM radiation, like straight from the center of a star.”

Zanh Liis now rose up from her new chair and joined the two men at the science console. “So what you are saying is that this particular band of EMR should not be here.” She asked.

Paxton nodded. “From what we know of basic stellar exploration, no it shouldn’t.”

“Okay. So why is it here?” TC asked.

“How did it get here?” Liis added as they both looked at Paxton.

Pax’s eyes grew wide as he shrugged. “Beats me, I’m just a temp. But I’ll see what I can come up with.”

“Captain, the Alchemy is requesting permission to depart.”

“Granted,” Liis replied simply. The sooner that ship was as far away from here as it could get in a transwarp jump, the more relieved she would be. She took a cursory glance at the vessel on the viewscreen and felt a horrible sense of dread that she would be seeing the Alchemy again soon, and not when she expected to. She walked to the fore of the bridge, her cursory glance now turning into a concerned stare.

“Hail them.” Zanh ordered suddenly. She waited for Tenney to raise the ship and a moment later Lair Kellyn’s voice came over the comm.

[Alchemy here.]

"You’re clear on your orders, Commander?” Zanh asked.

[Clear, sir.] Lair replied, her tone clearly indicating her overwhelming joy that the Captain had felt the need to check up on her before she left.

“Safe journey,” Zanh nodded to Tenney, and the channel was closed. She turned her attention back to Paxton Briggs, who was still at the Science station while they waited for Reece to come back up from below. Blane was over Briggs’s shoulder, and the two of them were pointing at the monitor and whispering. She moved to join the two of them to see what they had found.

“So, gentleman, why are we picking up stellar radiation when the nearest star is light-years away?”

Paxton sighed. “Well, we tried to narrow down the possible causes. Mister Blane suggested it might be residual from a star that went supernova or some other event here in the system. I check the archives and while there is little information on this sector of space, there are no recorded events. A starship would not cause it nor would any kind of weapon. Well, one that we know of anyway.”

TC chimed in. “We widened out the scan and set the sensors to look for this particular band of EMR in hopes of tracing it back to its source.”

Pax nodded. “This is what we found.” He hit a button on the console to display a graphic of the scan results. “The red area is the EMR we are looking for, the blue area is normal EMR activity.”

Liis frowned. The red area formed a large circular path in the middle of the blue patch. There was what seemed to be a red streak extending from the red circle that seemed to trace a red pattern through space before returning back to the red circle.

“It is almost a perfect circle.” She pointed to the red random string on the monitor. “But what is that?”

Paxton and TC exchanged glances before Pax spoke up. “We have a theory.”

Liis nodded. “I thought you might.”

“We think that the radiation is residual trace energy from some sort of portal.” Pax continued.

TC nodded. “We think the red string of EMR you see leaving the so called portal is a ship or energy mass of some sort.”

Liis nodded. “And that is its flight path.” Both men nodded.

Paxton continued. “What we think is happening is that whatever they are using as a power source to create this ‘portal’ leaves trace radiation. Our guess is that they must be tapping into a star, or nova, to power whatever device they are using.”

“Are we’re positive this is not a natural event?” Liis was certain of this but she had to make sure all possibilities were considered.

TC bent over the console and hit a button. “I wondered that myself because the path of the radiation string looked so random. So, I compared it to the flight path of the Zenith.” He overlaid the Zenith’s flight path with the map of the EMR string and Liis' eyes widened in shock. With a few minor exceptions they mirrored each other perfectly until one point where the Zenith’s flight path levels out straight and the EMR path turns away and returns to the portal.

“They were stalked and then attacked?” Liis questioned.

TC nodded. “That is what the information we have here suggests.” He tapped the screen at the point where the two paths separate. “This is the point I would say something happened. Exactly what, we don’t know.”

“Pax, can you estimate when exactly the two paths separated? I want to see how close that time is to the timestamp on Nick Lassiter's last message.”

“Just give us another minute,” Briggs requested.

Zanh turned away to allow them a moment to think in peace. She glanced toward the turbolift as she heard the hiss of the doors opening, and saw Vol Tryst step out onto the bridge. His eyes indicated that he was clearly anxious to speak with her. She pointed towards the ready room and mouthed, "Just a second."

She wanted to get some answers from Briggs and Blane, and was due an update in her log before she could take a moment to talk to Vol. She had been making them every fifteen minutes, even if it was just to indicate nothing new was happening. If what happened to the Zenith happened to them, she wanted every moment leading up to it captured in the logs.

"Captain?" Blane said, getting her attention back. "Perfect match."

"How?" Zanh asked.

"I used the decay rate on the radiation to determine how long ago it was emitted, and the moment the Zenith and whatever this was split coincides exactly with the timestamp of Lassiter's message," Briggs said.

"Thomas, I think you need to get this ship ready for a fight. I need to find out what Vol knows, and then we'll continue this. Any other bad news for me? Pile it on." Zanh glanced back and forth between the two men.

TC thought for a moment. “Actually I think there might be good news from this information. The fact that who, or whatever attacked the Zenith did it by stealth suggests that they might not be able to beam through our shields. I suggest that both ships go to yellow alert as a pre-caution. It is just another theory but theories are all we have.” He smirked. “A good plan executed today is better than a perfect plan executed at some indefinite point in the future.”

Pax looked up from the console. “Patton?”

TC nodded affirmation of the correct guess.

********************************************
Commander TC Blane
Second Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012

and

-=/\=- Zanh Liis O’Sullivan
(*As told by Commander Salvek)
Commanding Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012

NRPG: The Captain has been on unavoidable medical leave and the crew has been doing a fine job keeping her in the action. Thank you everyone. ~ZL