Gamma - The Nebula

Posted on Sun Nov 8th, 2026 @ 7:40am by Captain Rhenora Kaylen & Lieutenant Sarah Wilson & Commander Savar cha'Salik hei-Surak Talek-sen-deen & Commander Jenna Ramthorne & Commander Dean House & Lieutenant Commander Aurora Vali & Lieutenant JG Jacob Rosen & Lieutenant JG T'Lar

2,271 words; about a 11 minute read

Mission: The Haunting of Deck 12
Location: Near the Nebula

Sickbay

Dr Sarah Wilson, still rattled from her own waking nightmare looked up as Lt's T'Lar and Rosen entered sickbay. She rose and headed towards them, plastering what she hoped was a kind and empathetic look on her face to conceal the insecurity of nearly shooting Jennifer point blank not an hour ago.

"How can I help you?" She asked.

"Hey Doc." Jacob said, standing beside T'Lar for support. "T'Lar just experienced something odd. Do you have any room to see her?"

"Indeed, I did. One might even call it seeing an apparition. It was quite unsettling." T'Lar volunteered.

"Waking nightmares? Seeing things, ugly things that aren't there? You're the 4th person today" Sarah's concern was growing. She patted one of the biobeds and indicated for T'Lar to sit on it.

Bridge

"Take us to yellow alert, I want every sensor on that ship - and the space around it. Something tells me it's not just drifting cos if feels like it" Rhenora ordered, sitting comfortably in her command chair and sipping a hot coffee that Ronson had recently brought out. Sarah had advised that those experiencing waking nightmares had all appeared completely healthy - bar the usual markers for heightened stress post episode. It was an unusual situation indeed.

"Aye Captain. Going to yellow alert, Sensors targeting both ship and neighboring space." Savar's unruffled voice answered from his XO chair.

Aurora was keeping her senses alert for anything unusual. “Something here gives me the creeps, but I can’t put my finger on what exactly it is.” She said as she looked towards Rhenora and Savar.

" Continue to monitor and hopefully gain more information if you can Aurora. All information is important." Savar stressed.

“I will” Aurora nodded. “I want to make sure we don’t get any nasty surprises.”

Jenna adjusted their approach, keeping a watchful eye on the navigational display as the derelict vessel grew larger on the viewscreen. "Approach vector holding steady, Captain. ETA to transporter range, three minutes. Nebula boundary is approximately ten minutes out at our current speed."

She made a minor course correction, allowing herself a faint smile. "Keeping us at a respectful distance from both, for now. I'd rather avoid any unpleasant surprises before we've even had a chance to say hello."

Aurora rubbed the bridge of her nose, closing her eyes for a mere second she opened them to find herself somewhere else. She was stood mid bridge, bodies everywhere. Everyone dead at their stations, all skeletons where they’d died. Back on the bridge her eyes snapped open to find herself standing in front of her seat. “Dead…they’re all long dead.”

"Aurora?" Rhenora questioned, seeing the vacant look in the counsellor's eyes - she was somewhere else, very much not in the current situation.

"Commander Savar- escort Aurora to sickbay, keep a close eye on her. Someone could be trying to incapacitate her to take away our advantage with these waking nightmares" Rhenora cautioned.

Savar rose gracefully and fluidly to move to Aurora's side. "Come Aurora, let us get you to Sickbay and have Dr. Wilson examine you." He stated as he escorted her to the turbolift which would take them to Sickbay and hopefully answers.

Aurora paused. “I wasn’t here, I was somewhere else. They were all dead at their stations, just skeletons everywhere.” With that she looked to Savar ready to depart the bridge.

Rhenora overheard the comment and looked towards the ship cautiously on the viewscreen. Something most definately wasn't right about it. So far there had been no other vessels on the sensors, and the J class nebula seemed benign although sensors couldn't penetrate the entire depth of it. Something was off - she just couldn't put her finger on it.

"Any lifesigns on that ship? Breathable atmosphere? Gravity? Signs of battle?" She shot rapid fire questions around the bridge, hoping for some clarity.

T’Lilbit refined the sensor sweep at the science console. “Negative lifesigns, Captain. Internal atmospheric systems appear to be operating in a reduced-power conservation mode, with oxygen concentrations below acceptable safety parameters. Environmental suits are recommended. Artificial gravity remains stable, and exterior hull analysis reveals no significant weapons scoring or structural damage consistent with combat.”

She adjusted the scan parameters once more. “I am attempting to access the vessel's internal visual monitoring system to verify conditions aboard. While our sensors detect no living organisms, that alone is insufficient to confirm Commander Aurora's observations.”

"So it's a barely functioning ship in the middle of nowhere, parked right next to a cranky nebula" Rhenora mused, sitting back in her command chair after walking to T'Lilbit's station to observe. "What's the missing piece?"

An acknowledgment appeared on T'lilbit's display. “Captain, I have established a connection with the Nile's internal monitoring system. Transferring the feed to the main viewer.” The image shifted to a darkened corridor, remarkably clean and undisturbed. She cycled through the available feeds, examining sickbay, engineering, crew quarters, and several corridors. Each revealed the same unsettling emptiness. No bodies, no destruction, and no apparent signs of struggle.

Every few seconds, the image flickered, a momentary distortion T’Lilbit attributed to signal degradation. Had the transmission been slowed, those fleeting interruptions might have revealed something far more disturbing, the faint impression of someone looking directly back through the camera. “Curious,” she remarked, continuing through the remaining decks. “The vessel appears remarkably well maintained, considering its prolonged absence.”

As she selected one of the final feeds, a shadowed figure appeared at the far end of a darkened corridor. For a fraction of a second, it seemed to turn toward the camera before the image abruptly dissolved into static. T’Lilbit paused, her fingers hovering above the console. “Captain, we appear to have encountered an anomaly. The transmission has been terminated at its source.”

"Curiouser and curiouser, the bait has been set and now the visuals are disabled. Can we tractor it away from the nebula and into some clear air so to speak?" Rhenora was reluctant to send teams to what appeared to be a trojan horse.

The plan was simple, get close enough to tractor the Nile, and haul her ass away from the nebula and whatever nasties were lurking. Once they were at a safe distance they could safetly board her and investigate.

Turbolift

Aurora stood in the turbolift she was still perplexed by her latest vision. “I don’t think whatever is doing this is trying to hurt me Savar, if it wanted to do that I would be in a coma by now. I think something is trying to warn us.”

Savar turned to face his wife. "There is logic to what you say that this a warning perhaps a possible future of what might happen unless a change is made. The question would then be what are we to change?"

Aurora shook her head. “I don’t know, just now I wasn’t on the Sunfire, I was somewhere else. The crew were just…skeletons, they’d died at their posts.”

As the lift came to a halt and the doors opened she stepped out and started walking towards Sickbay. “The only other explanation is that something wants to frighten us away.”

Savar fell into step beside her as they headed for Sickbay. "That is a definite possibility and one that must be taken seriously."

Aurora nodded as they reached Sickbay, walking inside she had no doubt the test results would be the same again.

" Aurora, has it happened again?" Sarah looked up from running scans on T'Lar, sickbay beginning to fill with those experiencing the waking nightmares.

Aurora nodded. “One minute I was on the bridge, the next I was on another ship…I think. Everyone was dead, just skeletons where they lay.” She shook her head. “We can’t decide if it’s a warning, or something more sinister.”

"A question for you Sarah, is there any pattern to the nightmares that are affecting the crew?" Savar asked.

"No pattern, apart from death, lots of death. It seems to be getting more common but I can't put a finger on what could be causing it." Sarah admitted, finishing up T'Lar's scan and finding her completely healthy other than the usual stress markers. "So far no-one's acted on the nightmares, except... me" She admitted.

Aurora gasped as she was gripped by yet another vision, she was back where she’d been before only this time in sickbay. Patients lying on beds were nothing but skeletons, cobwebs hung everywhere shown up by years of dust. “Hello? Is there someone there? What are you trying to tell me?” She snapped back to reality griping hold of Savar as she went weak in the knees.

Sarah recorded the encounter in real time, there was no doubt Aurora believed what she was seeing.


T'Lar watched with fascination as her superior was subjected to yet another vision. Suddenly, she became aware of another presence at the foot of her bio bed. T'Lar gasped in surprised recognition at the battered and vacuum and plasma ravaged form of Lieutenant Sorak, killed in the battle of the badlands, appeared out of thin air, staring at her. Instinctively she recoiled on the bed.
"Is anyone else seeing the corpse of Lieutenant Sorak at the foot of my bio bed?" T'Lar asked shakily.

Aurora looked across shaking her head. “I’m sorry, no but that doesn’t mean you didn’t see it.”

"Ahhh this is getting worse" Sarah admittee, wondering if a neural blocker would help prevent these visions.


Sorak seemed to be mouthing something T'Lar could not hear, but reading his lips she deciphered to be "Stay away..." before vanishing again into the ether.

"The apparition of Sorak appears to be trying to warn us to stay away. From what I do not know; the nebula perhaps? I don't understand. My earlier experience carried no warnings, it was merely frightening. Perhaps whatever is trying to communicate with Counselor Vali sought to merely frighten us away, but now is attempting direct communication?" T'Lar conjectured.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to say. I think something, or someone, is trying to either warn us or frighten us away.” Aurora added.

"So there's eithet something dangerous, or they want something from us" Sarah mused, prepping a hypospray. "This is a neural inhibiter, it may block the effects of whatever is trying to scare us"

Aurora nodded. “As much as I hate inhibitors I’ll agree this time. I’m not sure how many more invasions of my mind I can take.”

Sarah pressed the hypo into Aurora's neck, watching the readouts on the biobed carefully to watch for any changes. She turned them to T'Lar, pffering the same thing.

T'Lar offered her neck without hesitation.
"Hopefully this inhibitor will shield us from any more psychically induced hallucinations, if that is indeed what we are facing." T'Lar said.

“I hope so, I hate my senses being shut off.” Aurora added staying firmly at Savar’s side.

"I'm sure the Captain will appreciate having a few of you on the bridge who can no longer be affected by whatever it is that is happening to us" Sarah replied, giving herself a shot in the neck as well as Savar. " I can't innoculate the whole ship - but the 4 of us are a start"



Back on the bridge the Sunfire move closer to the drifting Nile, the blue tractor beam unfurling from the Sunfire's sleek hull towards the stricken vessel. Rhenora held her breath, willing this relatively simple procedure to go without a hitch so they could get out of here. More and more of the crew were succumbing to waking nightmares, causing temporary loss of conscious thought and cognitive ability.

Deep in the nebula, the hunter lurked, its dark hull blending with the gases around it. The bait was being taken, soon fresh energy would be it's for the taking.

Jenna watched the navigational display as the tractor beam established its hold on the Nile. Almost immediately, something caught her attention. The relative distance between the two vessels was decreasing, but the movement indicators were pointing in entirely the wrong direction. She checked the helm's thruster output, then the inertial readings, her expression tightening as the implications became clear.

"Captain, tractor beam is locked, but we've got a problem." Jenna glanced toward Rhenora before returning her attention to the console. "Instead of pulling the Niletoward us, it would appear we're being pulled toward her." She attempted to compensate for the unexpected movement.

T’Lilbit examined the science console, cross-referencing the tractor beam telemetry with the ship's inertial sensors. “Commander Ramthorne's assessment is correct, Captain. Our relative velocity indicates that the Sunfire is accelerating toward the Nile.”

She adjusted the sensor resolution, studying the unexpected readings. “The Nile's mass and gravitational profile remain unchanged. The discrepancy appears to originate within the tractor beam's interaction with the target. I am attempting to disengage the beam before our decreasing separation becomes problematic.”

Rhenora fell silent - her eyes vacant and distant as the threat built around them. Somewhere else entirely.

T'Lar being situated at an auxiliary science console to the left of the helm position so that she could observe the crew for any signs of distress noted the Captain's change in demeanor.

"Captain, are you alright?" She asked.

The Captain failed to respond, trapped in her own nightmare and completely unaware of what wad happening around them. The Hunter lurked, salivating. This latest prize was nearly within it's grasp.

TBC

 

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