Stardate 55612.3 (August 12th, 2378)
Donald Sandhurst started awake, torn from troubled dreams and an overwhelming sensation of… wrongness. He stared at the ceiling for a few moments, his mind racing with discordant thoughts.
“Computer, what’s the time?” he murmured as he sat up.
‘The time is oh-three-forty-seven hours,’ the computer replied.
He grunted in irritation, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and placing his feet on the floor. The solidity of the carpeted deck-plates helped to ground him, pushing back the unsettling sense of impermanence that seemed to infuse him. He rubbed his eyes, feeling profoundly tired and disoriented and unable to explain why. He wondered briefly if he’d taken a sleep-aid before bed and was still under its influence, but he couldn’t remember doing so.
“Sandhurst to bridge. Sitrep, please.”
After a moment, the voice of the ship’s second officer, Lt. Commander Pell replied, “Situation normal, Captain. We’re still on course to the rendezvous point at warp six, all systems read nominal. The only thing on sensors other than routine merchant traffic is the Bunati refugee fleet that Dublin’s task force is escorting to the Beta-Trianguli settlement complex.”
“Acknowledged, Commander. Thank you.”
Sandhurst decided that for the moment, at least, he was awake. He stood and pulled on a robe over his pajamas, moving to the replicator to order a tall glass of water that he downed in a few long swallows. He sat at his desk and called up status reports for the ship and the sector they were currently transiting. Nothing seemed amiss or out of the ordinary.
Gibraltar remained on course to meet up with the remnants of Intercept Group Four as the ill-fated task force limped back from their disastrous First Contact with the Kothlis’Ka Armada. As all of Starfleet’s hospital ships in the area were already tasked to refugee relief operations, Gibraltar with its oversized sickbay had been dispatched to serve as a makeshift mobile hospital.
Sandhurst and his ship’s chief engineer, Lieutenant Ashok, would also assist in ongoing repairs to IG-4’s vessels. Some of them had barely made it to the rendezvous point under tow from their damaged brethren. Without further assistance, few of the ships would be able to make it to the nearest starbase under their own power.
He sat back in his chair, trying to give voice to the gnawing sense of disassociation that plagued him still. Usually, emotional turmoil from his nightmares abated quickly, but not so tonight.
His cabin door’s annunciator chimed, and Sandhurst eyed the portal warily before calling out, “Enter.”
A very disheveled looking Pava Lar’agos stood in the doorway in his nightclothes, his expression equal parts confusion and agitation. “Something’s very wrong,” he said. With that, he pitched forward onto the deck in a heap.
“Medical emergency, captain’s quarters!” Sandhurst called.
Five starships sat motionless in interstellar space. The vessels were damaged, their crews dispirited. They had hoped to make First Contact with an oncoming fleet of alien vessels, each of the craft dozens of kilometers long and impervious to sensors. They’d sought to convince those aboard the giant ships to change course before reaching the territorial confines of the Romulan Star Empire.
The alien ships had ignored all attempts at communication. The only reason anyone knew what to call the Kothlis’Ka was due to the efforts of the former Nyberrite Alliance. That entire coalition of ancient worlds had been laid waste by the depredations of the Kothlis’Ka and their mighty ships. Each of the titanic vessels had disgorged a host of massive robotic landing craft that had stripped the Class-M worlds in their path of atmosphere, water, minerals and biological material. The operating system of one these craft had been hacked by a Nyberrite strike team, who had downloaded a scant few hundred gigs of data before the lander self-destructed in an explosion that sundered a third of a continent.
When Intercept Group Four had moved into position to force the Kothlis’Ka to change course by laying a minefield in their path, they had been attacked. The intruders had fired on them with hyper-dense slugs of neutronium accelerated to warp speeds by a gravimetric cannon more powerful than anything Starfleet had ever encountered. The starship Narcissus had been destroyed outright, while the others had been damaged by near-misses from these hyper-relativistic missiles.
The survivors had slowly made their way back to Federation space, a journey that had taken them over four months with two of their number towing another two. It was the first of Task Force Vanguard’s failures, but not the last.
Gibraltar’s away team materialized into a dimly lit corridor intersection. The corridor bulkheads were warped inward, the ship’s superstructure distorted by the subspace shockwave that had propelled a neutronium bullet the size of a shuttlecraft past at warp nine-point-nine-seven. Severed optical cabling hung from shattered ceiling panels like limp translucent spaghetti and lighting fixtures flickered randomly, victims of a traumatized EPS grid.
Sandhurst experienced a brief flashback of his service during the Dominion War and the catastrophic damage inflicted upon so many ships during that conflict that he had helped to repair. He recalled starkly that although such mechanical wounds could be fixed by skilled engineers, the humanoids that had occupied the stricken vessels were infinitely more delicate.
He was clad in yellow engineering coveralls rather than his duty uniform, the red undershirt collar with its four rank pips making an incongruous counterpoint to his ensemble.
He nodded to Ashok and the rest of the towering man’s engineering team. “Go find their acting chief engineer and report in. I’ll come join you after I’ve talked with their captain. I call dibs on the impulse manifolds.”
This actually generated a rare smile from the taciturn Bolian. “Aye, sir.”
They parted company and Sandhurst made his way through Mumbai’s battered corridors in search of the ship’s sickbay. The sense of turmoil that had gripped him so tightly earlier was beginning to fade as the necessities of his duties occupied him. He was worried about Lar’ragos, who had always proven highly susceptible to spatial and temporal oddities, doubtless due to his exotic El Aurian physiology. Prior to Sandhurst’s departure for Mumbai, Lar’ragos was still unconscious and under the care of Lieutenant Taiee in their own sickbay.
He found Captain Daughtry atop a bio-bed in the recovery ward. She had been critically injured during the Kothlis’Ka encounter, and due to the severity of her injuries and the damage to their sickbay facilities, Daughtry had been placed in a medically-induced coma until she had stabilized sufficiently to survive surgical intervention. Daughtry had only been judged strong enough to undergo surgery a few days prior and was still catching up on their circumstances herself as she recovered from the procedure.
She looked up at him as he approached, her expression questioning.
“Donald Sandhurst, Gibraltar. How are you feeling, Captain?”
It took Daughtry a moment to divine that the engineer standing in front of her was a fellow starship commander.
“Well enough, thank you.” She extended a hand. “Alva Daughtry, Captain. A pleasure, though I’d wish for different circumstances.”
“Likewise,” Sandhurst agreed, shaking the proffered hand.
“How’s my ship?” she asked.
“Well, we’ve only just arrived, but my chief engineer and I looked over your damage reports on route. I think with our team’s help we can get you to where you can make it to Starbase 422 under your own power. With the work your people have already done, it should only take a day or two.”
She nodded. “They’re also sending a repair-tender, aren’t they?”
“Yes. The Aberdeen. She’ll be here in about seven hours. She’s slated to begin work on K’mpec and Reprise. Hopefully, once you arrive, the starbase can prioritize repairs to your ships as soon as possible. We need every hull we can get out here.”
“It’s that bad?” she asked.
“I’m afraid so,” he replied, glancing around self-consciously at other crew within earshot.
Daughtry called out to a med-tech and ordered the man to activate a privacy field around the bed.
“Thank you, that makes things easier,” Sandhurst admitted. “After IG-4 withdrew, the Romulans sent successive waves of ships against the Kothlis’Ka. We’re not entirely sure how many they lost, but it must have been in the hundreds. Their armada cut a swath of destruction right through the star empire's frontier a light-year across. The Romulans finally stopped the armada at Beta Hutzel about ten light-years into their territory, by generating a massive artificial singularity. It gobbled up the Kothlis’Ka and three entire populated Romulan star systems before it collapsed. Conservative estimates are in the tens of millions of casualties, probably more.”
“Dear God,” she whispered, appalled.
“We haven’t fared much better,” Sandhurst explained. “Only four of the seven species in the initial wave on course for Federation territory have so far proven willing to change course or settle on an available planet we’ve offered up. We’ve been fighting running skirmishes with the En-Il-Que from fifty light-years out from our space, and we’re building up to repel an incursion from a species called the Voranti that will reach the border in a little less than a month. Our resources are spread unbelievably thin, and that was before they sent a second wave of ships out to backfill losses to Vanguard’s first wave.”
“Wow,” Daughtry lay her head back onto her pillow. “That’s a lot to take in, Captain.”
“I’m sorry to dump it all on you at once, but it’s important that you understand what we’re up against,” Sandhurst replied somberly.
She nodded again, feigning strength through her exhaustion and pain.
“With your permission, Captain, I’ll join my engineering team. I know your people have taken serious losses, but they’ve done amazing work despite the odds. You should be proud.”
“I am,” she confirmed. “And thank you, Captain Sandhurst.”
He left her to rest and entered the corridor, heading for the ship’s engineering section. A large part of him eagerly anticipated diving into repair work and the intense focus that it necessitated. It would keep his mind busy from the dark tidings of the past six months, from Pava’s mysterious ailment, and from whatever wrongs continued to tug insistently at the edge of his consciousness.
Donald Sandhurst started awake, torn from troubled dreams and an overwhelming sensation of… wrongness. He stared at the ceiling for a few moments, his mind racing with discordant thoughts.
“Computer, what’s the time?” he murmured as he sat up.
‘The time is oh-three-forty-seven hours,’ the computer replied.
He grunted in irritation, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and placing his feet on the floor. The solidity of the carpeted deck-plates helped to ground him, pushing back the unsettling sense of impermanence that seemed to infuse him. He rubbed his eyes, feeling profoundly tired and disoriented and unable to explain why. He wondered briefly if he’d taken a sleep-aid before bed and was still under its influence, but he couldn’t remember doing so.
“Sandhurst to bridge. Sitrep, please.”
After a moment, the voice of the ship’s second officer, Lt. Commander Pell replied, “Situation normal, Captain. We’re still on course to the rendezvous point at warp six, all systems read nominal. The only thing on sensors other than routine merchant traffic is the Bunati refugee fleet that Dublin’s task force is escorting to the Beta-Trianguli settlement complex.”
“Acknowledged, Commander. Thank you.”
Sandhurst decided that for the moment, at least, he was awake. He stood and pulled on a robe over his pajamas, moving to the replicator to order a tall glass of water that he downed in a few long swallows. He sat at his desk and called up status reports for the ship and the sector they were currently transiting. Nothing seemed amiss or out of the ordinary.
Gibraltar remained on course to meet up with the remnants of Intercept Group Four as the ill-fated task force limped back from their disastrous First Contact with the Kothlis’Ka Armada. As all of Starfleet’s hospital ships in the area were already tasked to refugee relief operations, Gibraltar with its oversized sickbay had been dispatched to serve as a makeshift mobile hospital.
Sandhurst and his ship’s chief engineer, Lieutenant Ashok, would also assist in ongoing repairs to IG-4’s vessels. Some of them had barely made it to the rendezvous point under tow from their damaged brethren. Without further assistance, few of the ships would be able to make it to the nearest starbase under their own power.
He sat back in his chair, trying to give voice to the gnawing sense of disassociation that plagued him still. Usually, emotional turmoil from his nightmares abated quickly, but not so tonight.
His cabin door’s annunciator chimed, and Sandhurst eyed the portal warily before calling out, “Enter.”
A very disheveled looking Pava Lar’agos stood in the doorway in his nightclothes, his expression equal parts confusion and agitation. “Something’s very wrong,” he said. With that, he pitched forward onto the deck in a heap.
“Medical emergency, captain’s quarters!” Sandhurst called.
* * *
Five starships sat motionless in interstellar space. The vessels were damaged, their crews dispirited. They had hoped to make First Contact with an oncoming fleet of alien vessels, each of the craft dozens of kilometers long and impervious to sensors. They’d sought to convince those aboard the giant ships to change course before reaching the territorial confines of the Romulan Star Empire.
The alien ships had ignored all attempts at communication. The only reason anyone knew what to call the Kothlis’Ka was due to the efforts of the former Nyberrite Alliance. That entire coalition of ancient worlds had been laid waste by the depredations of the Kothlis’Ka and their mighty ships. Each of the titanic vessels had disgorged a host of massive robotic landing craft that had stripped the Class-M worlds in their path of atmosphere, water, minerals and biological material. The operating system of one these craft had been hacked by a Nyberrite strike team, who had downloaded a scant few hundred gigs of data before the lander self-destructed in an explosion that sundered a third of a continent.
When Intercept Group Four had moved into position to force the Kothlis’Ka to change course by laying a minefield in their path, they had been attacked. The intruders had fired on them with hyper-dense slugs of neutronium accelerated to warp speeds by a gravimetric cannon more powerful than anything Starfleet had ever encountered. The starship Narcissus had been destroyed outright, while the others had been damaged by near-misses from these hyper-relativistic missiles.
The survivors had slowly made their way back to Federation space, a journey that had taken them over four months with two of their number towing another two. It was the first of Task Force Vanguard’s failures, but not the last.
* * *
Gibraltar’s away team materialized into a dimly lit corridor intersection. The corridor bulkheads were warped inward, the ship’s superstructure distorted by the subspace shockwave that had propelled a neutronium bullet the size of a shuttlecraft past at warp nine-point-nine-seven. Severed optical cabling hung from shattered ceiling panels like limp translucent spaghetti and lighting fixtures flickered randomly, victims of a traumatized EPS grid.
Sandhurst experienced a brief flashback of his service during the Dominion War and the catastrophic damage inflicted upon so many ships during that conflict that he had helped to repair. He recalled starkly that although such mechanical wounds could be fixed by skilled engineers, the humanoids that had occupied the stricken vessels were infinitely more delicate.
He was clad in yellow engineering coveralls rather than his duty uniform, the red undershirt collar with its four rank pips making an incongruous counterpoint to his ensemble.
He nodded to Ashok and the rest of the towering man’s engineering team. “Go find their acting chief engineer and report in. I’ll come join you after I’ve talked with their captain. I call dibs on the impulse manifolds.”
This actually generated a rare smile from the taciturn Bolian. “Aye, sir.”
They parted company and Sandhurst made his way through Mumbai’s battered corridors in search of the ship’s sickbay. The sense of turmoil that had gripped him so tightly earlier was beginning to fade as the necessities of his duties occupied him. He was worried about Lar’ragos, who had always proven highly susceptible to spatial and temporal oddities, doubtless due to his exotic El Aurian physiology. Prior to Sandhurst’s departure for Mumbai, Lar’ragos was still unconscious and under the care of Lieutenant Taiee in their own sickbay.
He found Captain Daughtry atop a bio-bed in the recovery ward. She had been critically injured during the Kothlis’Ka encounter, and due to the severity of her injuries and the damage to their sickbay facilities, Daughtry had been placed in a medically-induced coma until she had stabilized sufficiently to survive surgical intervention. Daughtry had only been judged strong enough to undergo surgery a few days prior and was still catching up on their circumstances herself as she recovered from the procedure.
She looked up at him as he approached, her expression questioning.
“Donald Sandhurst, Gibraltar. How are you feeling, Captain?”
It took Daughtry a moment to divine that the engineer standing in front of her was a fellow starship commander.
“Well enough, thank you.” She extended a hand. “Alva Daughtry, Captain. A pleasure, though I’d wish for different circumstances.”
“Likewise,” Sandhurst agreed, shaking the proffered hand.
“How’s my ship?” she asked.
“Well, we’ve only just arrived, but my chief engineer and I looked over your damage reports on route. I think with our team’s help we can get you to where you can make it to Starbase 422 under your own power. With the work your people have already done, it should only take a day or two.”
She nodded. “They’re also sending a repair-tender, aren’t they?”
“Yes. The Aberdeen. She’ll be here in about seven hours. She’s slated to begin work on K’mpec and Reprise. Hopefully, once you arrive, the starbase can prioritize repairs to your ships as soon as possible. We need every hull we can get out here.”
“It’s that bad?” she asked.
“I’m afraid so,” he replied, glancing around self-consciously at other crew within earshot.
Daughtry called out to a med-tech and ordered the man to activate a privacy field around the bed.
“Thank you, that makes things easier,” Sandhurst admitted. “After IG-4 withdrew, the Romulans sent successive waves of ships against the Kothlis’Ka. We’re not entirely sure how many they lost, but it must have been in the hundreds. Their armada cut a swath of destruction right through the star empire's frontier a light-year across. The Romulans finally stopped the armada at Beta Hutzel about ten light-years into their territory, by generating a massive artificial singularity. It gobbled up the Kothlis’Ka and three entire populated Romulan star systems before it collapsed. Conservative estimates are in the tens of millions of casualties, probably more.”
“Dear God,” she whispered, appalled.
“We haven’t fared much better,” Sandhurst explained. “Only four of the seven species in the initial wave on course for Federation territory have so far proven willing to change course or settle on an available planet we’ve offered up. We’ve been fighting running skirmishes with the En-Il-Que from fifty light-years out from our space, and we’re building up to repel an incursion from a species called the Voranti that will reach the border in a little less than a month. Our resources are spread unbelievably thin, and that was before they sent a second wave of ships out to backfill losses to Vanguard’s first wave.”
“Wow,” Daughtry lay her head back onto her pillow. “That’s a lot to take in, Captain.”
“I’m sorry to dump it all on you at once, but it’s important that you understand what we’re up against,” Sandhurst replied somberly.
She nodded again, feigning strength through her exhaustion and pain.
“With your permission, Captain, I’ll join my engineering team. I know your people have taken serious losses, but they’ve done amazing work despite the odds. You should be proud.”
“I am,” she confirmed. “And thank you, Captain Sandhurst.”
He left her to rest and entered the corridor, heading for the ship’s engineering section. A large part of him eagerly anticipated diving into repair work and the intense focus that it necessitated. It would keep his mind busy from the dark tidings of the past six months, from Pava’s mysterious ailment, and from whatever wrongs continued to tug insistently at the edge of his consciousness.
* * *
