Lost. In. Space?

Posted on Mon Feb 3rd, 2025 @ 4:50pm by Captain Malcom Llwyedd & Lieutenant JG Zub Enel & Lieutenant JG Randolf Forst & Ensign Helle Leed & Ensign Winston Hubblestone

2,591 words; about a 13 minute read

Mission: Mission 1: A Long Hard Road Ahead
Location: Elsewhen
Timeline: Return 2 Hours after Predators Aftermath

[ON]

At last, Lieutenant Junior Grade Zub Enel had permission to continue his investigation into reported sightings of cloaked individuals. The towering lizard man sat at the Firebird’s Security console. He stretched his long arms over his crested head with his fingers laced together. Clicks and pops sounded from shoulders to knuckles. The Security Investigations Officer smiled as he settled his clawed fingers on the Security console. He murmured to himself, “Can you really hide from every sensor? We’ll see.”

His fingers glided over the cool surface as he called up the warship’s surveillance controls. He stopped a moment, palms pressed together, claws touching the tip of his nose, as he surveyed the tools available; imagers, sensor arrays, image and sound logs, radiation and other spectral instrumentation readouts. He gave a low whistle. Firebird had it all. A Terellian gnat in sneakers with a cloaking device couldn’t possibly hide forever without giving itself away.

Half an hour later, Zub’s smile had faded. He sagged forward in his seat, one forearm flopped along the console, elbow propping him up. No trace of anything unexpected. No fleeting images. No distortion. No conversations where there weren’t mouths to speak. Nothing in some unwatched photon or radio frequency.

He let loose a loud sigh. He remembered a captain that used to suit up and stand on the hull of his starship to think. He did this when it was docked or adrift in space or the inertia would have smeared him into ions.

“Ions?”

Enel scanned for ionic radiation aboard. None. He tried DS18 where the sightings had been reported. Only ionic radiation from areas damaged and expected to be leaking anyway. He wondered if a cloaked ship could be hovering near the starbase or Firebird; a hidey-hole for spies, perhaps leaking ions. He fired up the external scanner arrays to do a computer-assisted 360 survey for sources of ions and identify each.

A list in green lines filled his console, pushed up by more green lines. He drummed his claws on the console in a rapid staccato. “They’re good, those sneaky bast….”

An alarm beeped on his console. An entry flashed yellow. The computer had found an unidentified source of ionic radiation. He sat forward with a smile. He enhanced the area of space the ions had come from. Nothing. He frowned and squinted at the readout under the yellow marker. A pinpoint source. Powerful. But gone.”

“Computer, full spectrum analysis of detected anomalous radiation.”

“Anomaly duration .04 seconds. 150K joules of energy of which was 91% radio, 6% ferrous iron II ions, 1% gamma radiation, and traces of temporal energy. Source unknown.”

“Radio? Do you mean like an old-fashioned radio communication?”

“Affirmative. Age of radiation source unknown. Many civilizations have used radio in detected frequency range. Anomaly may be the result previous transmission being bent in this direction by stellar lensing.”

Zub sat very straight. Could a cloaked ship be communicating with another on a long-lost frequency? Clever idea, using radio over a short distance. No one actively monitored radio transmission since the advent of subspace communication shrunk the transmission time to near instantaneousness. Even a radio hello from a nearby planet would take minutes to hours to reach a receiver. But two nearby ships in cahoots might be able to whisper to each other.

“Computer, is there a message in the radio emission?”

“Negative.”

He thought about what he knew about radio transmission. It wasn’t that much. He decided that if this was a coded radio message between two clandestine ships, he might trigger another by repeating what the sensor had received. One or the other of the ships might respond.

“Computer, broadcast a duplicate of all radiation received from the anomaly. Send it in the direction it came from.”

After a pause the computer confirmed the task had been completed.

Holding his breath, Zub watched the readouts on his console.

---

[Runabout Little Bird]

Forst was waiting for something although, at this point he wasn't entirely sure what that was. He shook his head and looked back over the console in front of him. Little Bird was still in one piece, and the warp core was cooling. For a moment he couldn't remember why it was cooling. Another shake of the head and a glimpse out the front window brought it all back like a bolt through his brain.

"Status report?" He asked the others, hoping that this would bring them back to the present (if that was in fact where they were.)

Cobb sighed. "Same old same old, Lieutenant," Cobb said and leaned back in his chair. "It's like we're treading water, but in space."

Winston frowned. "Not exactly, sir. It appears that the energy surge from the device was enough to launch us forward. But... I swear, it feels like I've had this conversation before. Many times." He looked at Helle. "Am I going crazy?"

“I wish," she said, shooting him a tired smile. "Look, the quantum resonance readings just before the device activated were a perfect match. Now they're off by 0.003 percent." Helle exhaled sharply, brushing a stray lock of hair from her face. "The dimensional constants don't match those from DS18, but at least Little Bird is holding together."

Forst started a full scan of the area again. How many of these have I run in the last few days? He wasn't sure he wanted to know.

They were definitely somewhere, but the computer was having a hard time figuring out the whenwhere.

"One day I want to compile the strangest terms I've had to add to my vocabulary due to being a Starfleet officer." He said out loud before really realizing that he had.

"Sir, I'd like help to see if device activation generated a localized quantum field distortion that created a phase variance ripple across the zero-point,..." Helle's voice slowed until it trailed off for a few seconds and she looked, almost pleadingly, at Forst. "Øv, I think that melted part of my brain. Simply, did the activation itself shake the quantum substrate enough to scramble our jump." This was a night-idea, as her mother called them, with no basis on data or theory. It was simply a new idea and she really needed any new idea.

Forst had a sudden flash of being at a conference when he was in the academy. He had attended a talk that he would have sworn was in Klingon due to how much he understood.

"Do it." He said to Helle. Then he turned to the other two.

"We need to make sure that we are still all in one piece, and given that we may have done this before, I want you to check for any signs that we have left ourselves notes. A report that I read about one of the first temporal loops recorded said something about trying to send messages forward through the loops."

He was really hoping that they didn't find anything, but his brain felt like he was remembering everything that he was saying like a near constant dejavu.

Cobb sat forward and started to review the work he'd done over the past hour. At least he thought it had been an hour. His fingers plodded heavily over the console, occasionally missing what he was aiming for. This was going to take a while.

Winston considered what the Lieutenant was asking. If he was going to leave himself a message from... whenever, how would he do it? He loved games and stars... Stars? He pulled up the last reading of the star system DS18 had been in. Then he pulled up a similar image of the system from the past they had landed in. He ran a scan to see if there were any differences. Eventually, the computer brought something up.

"Lieutenant? I think I've got something. It's some kind of transmission," Winston said as he struggled to lock onto it and analyze. "Helle, can you help me lock it in and figure out where it is coming from?"

Helle switched from quantum field distortion to picking out Winston's transmission. Her eyes narrowed as she found it, faint amid the stellar background. "If this transmission is out of sync with our current quantum state, it could show up as a frequency anomaly in the subspace band. Let me adjust the phase discriminator to compensate... and now apply a quantum harmonic filter to isolate faint patterns." As the readings became stronger she tapped the screen as though to adjust them to something she liked better. Helle cocked her head to Winston.

"There’s an unexpected interference pattern. It's kind of like the transmission has been scattered across multiple timelines. Some parts of it are here, but others may be bleeding through from where we were—or even where we might have been."

Winston was looking at the transmission as Helle was manipulating it. Something was hovering at the back of his mind. Something about how it looked

"Helle! It looks like an old radio wave transmission! If you cross-match them like this," Winston said and then turned them...." The wave moved, becoming more solid and then suddenly, there was a line of data streaming.

Cobb sat up in his chair. "It's triangulation data! It's telling us how to get home! I think it is coming from... the Firebird!"

Forst tapped at the console, lining up the stream from what currently looked like empty space. There was something there/then. There was definitely a transmission.

"We need to figure out how we can use this transmission to find our way back."

"Helle try feeding that signal through the hull." Presuming that this had elicited a confused reaction he followed, "Memory serves, radio signals can be better picked up the larger the surface that we use."

He kept talking through some of the things that he was considering, "We need to see if there is a message in the signal, or if it is the signal itself that we are supposed to use."

Helle nodded, her mind racing as she considered her options. She was outside her comfort zone and her blood was racing through her veins, so she fell into the habit of talking herself through the idea. “Okay, if I polarize the external hull plating,... reroute the transmission through the deflector array,... Oh!" she said, thumping a hand on the console. "I need to recalibrate it to match the transmission's frequency."

"Sir, I think you're right. The signal has a sublayer to the triangulation data. Could be coordinates, or instructions. It's not clear," she said, smiling, her cheeks flushed pink.

"Cobb, start working on cleaning up that signal. Hubblestone, I want you to start running temporal calculations. We need an anchor, but I want our model to be set so that when we get it we can get back to time."

He started to run a parallel calculation on their current subspace local. Being free floating like this meant that the standard scans of subspace needed to be run .. well technically they would need to do a near-infinite number of scans to deal with all the times they were in.

"Helle, As soon as you have that signal, feed it through Winston's model. Winston same for you with Cobb. I want to make sure that we are going to enter time in the right place this time.

Winston nodded. "On it, sir," he said and for the first time in... who knew how long, it felt new and that was exciting. He hunched over his console and waited for Helle's feed. He was not going to screw this up. They were going to get home.

"Copy that, sir," said Helle around the lump in her throat. Home. The word tasted both familiar and strange. Was it DS18, or just now instead of whenever? She routed the transmission Cobb had cleaned up into a recursive phase inversion to stabilize its waveform and then aligned it with Winston’s evolving model.

"Signal’s is strong and reversing cleanly," she confirmed. The particles showed on her screen as a tight beam of green, carrying a message to somewhere. Somewhen. Adrenaline was pumping. Helle shook her hands to calm them. "C'mon, baby, work."

---

- - Meanwhile at Firebird’s Security console - -

Zub Enel was crunching away on a generous mouthful wriggling Gagh when an alert beeped on the Security console. His golden eyes widened. “Unidentified signal,” he read aloud.

He sat forward and set the black lacquered bowl and red chopsticks next to his workstation. He smiled, sure the one of his suspected cloaked ships had taken the bait, fooled by his rebroadcasting their signal. They’d just given away their location.

“Computer, locate source of unidentified signal.”

“Working.”

Zub scowled. The computer was usually quite prompt about such tasks. He triggered an analysis of the signal. It was stronger than the previous radio one. It contained a higher percentage of temporal energy. Its phasic waveform seemed to be repeating.

“Computer? What is your current analysis of the signal.”

“Working.”

“Anything! First impressions. Working hypothesis.”

“Signal is a modern modulation of negative temporal energy in a repetitive cycle. Contradictory evidence. Linear gravimetric differential indicates extreme age of signal.”

Zub’s felt a stab of disappointment. A signal from smuggler’s ship wouldn’t be old. “Approximate age of signal?”

“227 years, 1 month, 14 days, 22 hours, 5 minutes, 57 seconds.”

Enel stroked his chin a moment. “Computer, what could be the is the source of something so modern being that old?” He prepared himself for another ‘working.’

“Possible source decoded and identified. Transponder identification: USS Firebird Runabout Little Bird”

Zub Enel shot to his full 7-foot height. He tapped his com badge. “Lieutenant Solomon! It appears you missing Away Team has contacted us.”

---

[USS Little Bird]

The return signal from the Firebird completed the temporal path instantly. None of the away team had the time to say anything. Their view smeared in a swath of blue and red, as if a painter had gone mad. Then the imaged snapped and they were floating still in space. The massive shape of DS18 hung in front of them, surrounded by a cloud of smaller ships and craft that buzzed around it like flies. Even to their tired eyes it was clear that much of the damage the station had endured had been repaired, although some was still visible. But all of their eyes strained for, and found, the familiar shape of home. The Firebird was tucked tightly against the station. Its familiar shape and lines brought a deep sense of relief and belonging. They were finally home.

[OFF]

Lieutenant JG Randolf Forst
Assistant Chief Science Officer
USS Firebird NCC-88298

Lieutenant JG Hopkins Cobb (NPC by Harlan)
Science Officer
USS Firebird NCC-88298

Lieutenant JG Zub Enel
Security Investigations Officer
USS Firebird NCC-88298

Ensign Winston Hubblestone (NPC by Llwyedd)
Science Officer
USS Firebird NCC-88298

Ensign Helle Leed (NPC by Leed)
Biologist
USS Firebird NCC-88298

 

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