Countdown
Posted on Sat Jan 17th, 2026 @ 9:59pm by Captain Rhenora Kaylen & Commander Jennifer Baldric & Commander Jenna Ramthorne & Commander Savar cha'Salik hei-Surak Talek-sen-deen & Commander Dean House & Lieutenant Commander Aurora Vali & Ensign Kitiuas Thenis ie-Jia'anKahr & Lieutenant Commander Bonnie "Bon-Bon" Durnell & Lieutenant Alison Haldeman
3,091 words; about a 15 minute read
Mission: Beholder
Captain Kaylen Rhenora strode onto the bridge at the Alpha shift handover, 0600 was never her strong suit but she had arrived a few minutes early to watch the shift change. There was something magical about the handover, a quiet coming and going, updates being given, crew nodding in understanding then taking their seats.
Rhenora took her own seat, the gamma shift officer of the watch announcing they were 6 hours from arrival at Skygowan, and that the planet had sent no further updates. Ronson appeared from nowhere with a cup of coffee and handed it to her quietly before disappearing again. Things were quiet, calm.
Dean glanced over and simply nodded. "Welcome back."
"Thank you Dean" Rhenora smiled and sipped the coffee before her. Baldric's team had uncovered a lot of data in the Enterprise data files, and had sent through the highlights, mainly being Batel's unique physiology, and common language and history found on Skygowan, Vadia 9 and Pretoria, as well as a few other pearls. The most significant was that Vadia 9 was supposedly the old Q homeworld, as pronounced by the son of Q at the Federation's centenary celebrations. The mere mention of Q made her skin crawl.
Jenna slipped onto the bridge with the quiet confidence of someone who already knew the room’s rhythm. Her eyes swept the stations as she crossed behind the command chair, offering the Gamma shift navigator a brief nod that said I’ve got it. The officer rose, murmured a concise handover, and vacated the seat without ceremony.
Jenna settled in, fingers finding the console as if it had been waiting for her specifically. A few quick inputs, a glance at the long-range plot, then she looked up. “Navigation is steady,” she said, voice calm and precise. “Course remains optimal with no anomalies within sensor range. We’re holding speed at cruising warp; current ETA to Skygowan is five hours, fifty-six minutes. No corrections anticipated unless the planet decides to surprise us.”
She allowed herself the faintest hint of a smile as she added, “I’ll let you know if space changes its mind.” Her attention returned to the console, posture relaxed but alert, the look of a pilot who trusted her ship, her math, and herself in exactly that order.
Bonnie woke to the rarest of sensations: calm. No alarms, no sparks, no gravity trying to murder her. Just the low hum of the ship and light filtering in at a civilized hour. She lay there for a moment, suspicious, waiting for the universe to take a swing. It didn’t. The shower behaved. The water temperature stayed consistent. The soap dispenser didn’t explode. By the time she stepped out, hair damp and mood cautiously optimistic, she found herself smiling at the sheer novelty of it all. “Huh,” she murmured to the mirror. “Look at that. A morning that isn’t actively hostile.”
Getting dressed went just as smoothly, or so she thought. Uniform on, boots laced, comm-badge where it belonged. She even made it down the corridor without tripping, bumping into anyone, or dropping her PADD. A banner day. As she crossed onto the turbolift and caught a faint flicker of movement in a reflective panel behind her, she squinted, puzzled, then shrugged it off. Static cling was a menace, after all. Totally normal. Completely uneventful. Bonnie stepped onto the bridge a few minutes later, unaware that a traitorous piece of underwear had hitched a ride squarely between her shoulder blades, flapping faintly with every confident step, proof that the universe, while quiet this morning, was still very much paying attention.
Kit woke to Astraea being fussy and sending psychic waves of hunger. She rolled out of her bed and picked up her daughter, she walked over to her sitting nook and allowed her daughter to feed. Kit reached over and tapped the UV light control to ensure she and her daughter received the energy gained from their epidermal chlorophyll was converted handily into sugars stored in their muscles. Kit had the replicator make her some Orion tea. She then sat back, picked up a PaDD and allowed her daughter to feed to her content. Kit was enjoying the moment, as work would soon call.
Rhenora noticed the garment as Bonnie stepped onto the bridge and quietly stepped forward to remove it before it was noticed, without fuss or fanfare. Bonnie workes so hard and she wasnt about to let something like this slip up her newly emerging confidence. "Your team sent through a great report" she smiled before returning to the centre chair.
Kit heard the soft patter of Kasso, her sister, coming to her bedchamber. There was a polite knock and Kasso enters the room, dressed in a simple Orion robe. "Sorry I overslept." Kit smiles at her "No problem, gave me some alone time with my daughter." Kasso gently takes Astraea from Kit, the young infant murmuring as she nestles close into Kass. Kit smiled, "I already expressed milk for her and it is in the refrigerant cooler. I'll try and see you two at lunch, though not sure it may happen..." Kasso smiles and pats her sisters hand "Go and get ready, we will be fine. Duty calls sis." Kit smiles, kisses Astraea on the forehead and her sister on the cheek. "Thank you Kasso." She then turns and goes to the sonic shower to prepare for duty.
Aurora stepped out of the turbolift alongside her beloved husband, if there was one place besides her office she loved to be it was on the bridge. She smiled politely nodding to those present.
Savar stepped onto the bridge besides Aurora. His eyes swept the bridge and the crew there before settling back on Aurora, his better half. he gave her a slight nod as they headed for their respective seats on the bridge.
Walking across to their respective seats Aurora sat down and made herself comfortable.
Savar briskly walked to his XO seat and sat down. His eyes swept the bridge and the crew manning their stations. He was calm and gave off a quiet, confident air.
The bridge was humming with a quiet but determined energy, they were focused and concentrated on their tasks as the ship drew closer to the planet.
Time passed like a quiet procession, unannounced and without fanfare.
Skygowan appeared like a speck on the long range sensors, almost imperceptably growing larger as the Sunfire warped towards it. There were no further updates from the planet which could mean one of two things - there was nothing to report, or all hell had broken loose and they couldn't send any updates.
"Advise Skygowan our ETA remain unchanged, 3 hours" Rhenora requested, feeling a shift in the energy. "All teams to the briefing room in 1 hour for a strategy meeting"
Kit was just entering the bridge when the command had been issued. She deftly moved over to the science station, relieving the science officer of Gamma shift. A subvocalized conversation and the Gamma shift science officer was away. Kit settled in and began the review of all incoming scientific traffic. She loved her job, and the crew of the Sunfire. She quickly scanned that data. Then switched over to the mission significant data. She wanted to be sure no changes before the strategy meeting.
It was wholesome to see the crew back together, and the Captain was confident they would overcome any obstacles. She pulled up the long range scans on their target - still no change, no swarm of body inhabiting Vezda swarming through the Gateway, no mass hysteria being reported.
Jenna monitored the approach with a steady patience, watching Skygowan’s signature resolve itself one incremental update at a time, the numbers lining up exactly as they should. Silence from the planet wasn’t comforting, but it was familiar, the kind of quiet that demanded attention rather than panic. She logged the Captain’s orders, confirmed the outgoing signal, and adjusted nothing because nothing needed adjusting. Space was behaving, the ship was true, and the path ahead remained clear. For now, that was enough.
Bonnie stood just off her usual console, half-leaning, half-hovering, eyes flicking between layered datasets only she seemed to have bothered stacking this way. Skygowan’s silence gnawed at her, not as dread, but as asymmetry. She keyed in an older comparative model, something she’d pulled from Korby-adjacent ruins research and half-forgotten gateway theory.
She continued, mostly conversing with herself, “If Skygowan’s using a phased signal buffer, intentionally or not, it would dampen outbound transmissions without touching local activity.” She straightened, confidence settling in her shoulders. “Which means whatever’s happening down there wants to stay local.” she grew lighter, almost hopeful: “Either way, it means the planet’s still talking. We just haven’t been listening in the right direction.”
Rhenora's ears tweaked at the murmouring but she said nothing, waiting for Bonnie to bring it to het attention when she felt she had all the data. The Captain checked the chronometre, 10 minutes until the briefing. She rose and headed to the briefing room to get her head around what had been submitted so far.
Kit frowned and muttered to herself and made some minor adjustments. Her muttering increased to cussing in Orion. Something was playing hide and seek with her sensors.
"What is it Kit?" Baldric asked, noting the quiet muttering and general discontent coming from the Orion.
Kit looked up from her station, "Either the sensors are glitching on me or there is something playing hide and seek with them. For the life of me I cannot pin it down. As soon as I detect the anomaly on one bandwidth search it disappears to appear on a different wavelength or bandwidth. It is driving me crazy and throwing the ship's computer into fits. Computer has run..." here Kit looked down at the console then back up "...four hundred and fifty six diagnostics scans on its self and the sensors, all with the same result. All systems working within normal and acceptable parameters, according to the computer core automatic self diagnostic routines. The three I have run manually have the same results." Wafting off her the smell of a combination of cinnamon, roses, and vanilla with the occasional lilac. Kit was also worrying her lower lip, a new habit since Astraea's birth.
Bonnie didn’t even look up at first. She tilted her head, listening to the cadence of Kit’s report the way a physician listens to a heartbeat, then finally snorted softly. “Yeah, no,” she said flatly. “The core isn’t glitching and it’s not panicking. It’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.” She tapped the console once, possessive. “If something’s hopping bandwidths fast enough to trigger four hundred diagnostics without throwing a fault, that’s not a computer issue. That’s something actively avoiding detection.”
She finally looked at Kit. “Which means my system is fine, and whatever this is knows how our sensors think.” A brief, dry smirk.
"We need to tell the Captain, it could be something to do with our new mission" Baldric nodded with determinatiom and motioned for the othrrs to join her in the briefing room where the Captain was waiting.
Kit had already signaled the science department to send someone to main the station, and the young Bolian had appeared as if by magic. Kit gave a whispered report then picked up her PaDD. She turned and smiled at Bonnie and Baldric "Shall we go and be the messengers of bad news? Also which of us is going to ruin the Captains good mood?"
" If we bring coffee she might not throw us out an airlock" Baldric smirked, heading towards the briefing room doors. They slid open before her, whisper quiet and revealing the calm focus beyond. The Captain had a cup of coffee in front of her, Ronson could be seen retreating through another set of doors. Jennifer breathed a sigh of relief.
Bonnie followed a half step behind them, hands folded tighter than usual, her eyes flicking once toward the console she was leaving behind. The CORE felt unfinished in her mind, like a sentence cut off mid-word. She didn’t like walking away when something was touching her systems without permission, especially something clever enough to dance through diagnostics like they were puddles instead of walls. Still, this wasn’t her arena. Briefing rooms and captains’ eyes were different kinds of pressure, and Bonnie knew herself well enough to recognize when her confidence thinned.
As they entered, she steadied her breathing and rehearsed restraint instead of brilliance. Let Kit talk. Let Baldric frame it. Bonnie would supply the facts if asked, clean and technical, no speculation that could drift into fear. Whatever was hiding from the sensors wasn’t just a machine problem, it was a thinking problem, and that made it bigger than her, bigger than her beloved core. The thought unsettled her, but it also sharpened her focus. If something out there understood systems this well, then sooner or later it would make a mistake. And when it did, Bonnie intended to be ready to catch it.
"Captain, we have intelligence that you need to see" she said simply and motioned to Kit and Bonnie.
Kit's pheromones were still wafting off her the smell of a combination of cinnamon, roses, and vanilla with the occasional lilac. She was still worrying her lower lip, clear signs she was agitated. "It seems something is playing hide and seek with our sensors. I am unable to pin it down, the systems are working correctly. My hypothesis, which seems to be backed by Lieutenant Commander Durnell, is that there is an unknown factor actively avoiding detection and is knows how the ships sensors think." Kit handed over the PaDD with the collected data to the captain and took a seat. ~Well here we go, I just dumped a cluster on the meeting.~
The Captain paused and digested this information. They were an hour away from beaming down to the planet to assess the situarion there, the arrivsl of sensor echoes was more than a co-incidence. "So these...things....are just outside sensor range? Or just outside the wavelength?" Rhenora asked, wondering if they were too late and the Vezda had already gotten out.
Kit sighed “That is the million bars of gold-pressed latinum question. The sensors sense something; but when the sensors and computer try to diagnose and quantify what is being detected, it flips out of the current sensor wavelength to a newer wavelength of the sensors. The computer and sensors are unable to ‘fix’ what is being detected long enough to quantify what is being detected.”
"So it's a deliberate deception, or it's something our sensors can't actually detect. Two very different scenarios." Rhenora mused as the senior officers started to file in for the briefing. "We'll go to yellow alert, but unless they attack us I can't risk powering weapons. It could be a new species trying to learn. It could also be the Vezda, we know they are capable to travelling in space...we should be able to detect one of those though"
“Maybe I’ll be able to sense something as we get closer” Aurora offered. “I’m not yet, but that might change.”
"Keep an awareness if you can" Rhenora acknowledged the comment with a nod. She rose and activated the main viewscreen, displaying a pictograph of Skygowan, Vadia 9 and the Beholder statue.
“Is that the Beholder statue?” Callie was curious to say the least, she was curious about it to say the least.
"It is, and although the Skygowan clerics have not mentioned any further degradation, the statue is failing. The Vezda are at risk of escaping" Rhenora explained, highlighting the image of the statue and the cracks present within it.
" I would say the statue is in immediate danger of failing judging by the widening cracks in it." Savar observed from his XO station.
"I agree, hence we need to find a way to secure the Vezda before it does. Remembering that the statue is actually a Starfleet Officer from Captain Pike's time in the early years og the Federation. This mission is multifold." The Captain replied sagely.
The first indication was not an alarm. It was a hesitation.
A fractional drag through space that registered everywhere and nowhere at once, as if the Sunfire had briefly forgotten how forward worked. Inertial dampeners compensated without complaint, engines held true, and the stars did not smear, but something unseen tugged at the ship’s mass, just enough to be felt rather than measured.
Then the sensors caught it.
A ripple spread outward from Skygowan’s orbital plane, subtle and wrong, a curvature in spacetime that behaved less like gravity and more like intention. It wasn’t expanding fast. It wasn’t violent. It simply existed, threading outward in a widening arc that brushed the Sunfire long before proximity should have allowed it.
The viewscreen adjusted automatically, resolving Skygowan in higher fidelity. The Beholder statue stood as it always had, vast, ancient, unmoving, until it didn’t.
The cracks along its surface shifted.
Not widened. Not fractured further. They rearranged, minute segments realigning as though responding to pressure from within rather than decay from without. The change was almost imperceptible, the sort of movement that might be dismissed as sensor interpolation, except the gravitational ripple pulsed again, synchronized, precise.
A resonance followed. Low. Measured. The kind of frequency that bypassed sound and pressed directly against mass, brushing hull plating, tugging at the edges of containment fields, whispering through the ship’s frame like a held breath finally released. Artificial gravity held, but adjusted, quietly, reflexively, correcting for a force that had not existed moments before.
Space around Skygowan was no longer passive. The statue was not collapsing. It was responding.
Another pulse radiated outward, weaker than the first, as if whatever had stirred was now aware it had been noticed. The ripple did not repeat. It settled, leaving behind a distorted calm, space smoothed over too carefully, like water after something large slips beneath the surface.
The distance between ship and planet remained unchanged. Time to arrival remained constant. But the equation had shifted.
Something had reached outward from Skygowan, through the Beholder, across empty space, and touched the Sunfire deliberately, long before contact was expected, long before permission could be given.
The universe had moved first.
TBC
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