Things go wrong

Posted on Thu Jul 24th, 2025 @ 1:04am by Lieutenant JG Astrja Kyan

Mission: Aeon's End
Location: Ops central
Timeline: MD 1 concurrent with From Pandora
622 words - 1.2 OF Standard Post Measure

Astrja fidgeted with a neoglass oval worn as a talisman on a tritanium chain. Starfleet material lab could spare three molecules of neutronium, which is what was contained in the talisman, the density even in small amounts warped the glass slightly leading to fascinating refraction patterns. She was very pleased with it and intended to study it more in the future, it might even have some useful applications.

She sighed and returned to working on the quartermaster’s report and requests, they had used up quite a significant amount of non-replicatable supplies on the mission and they would all have to be restocked as soon as they returned to Starbase. Best to have all the requests in place well before they arrived to ensure that they would be properly restocked. As the Andorian saying went, “Sharpen your knife before it is time to skin the kheft.” Not that she had ever skinned a kheft, nor did she want to, but she did keep her knife sharp.

So, she keyed in another requisition form 7/A/Restock of Non-Replicatable Supplies Request, and had just sent it when . . .

She found herself on the floor, the hologram floating above her desk were all scrambled and distorted. “System, look back up from . . . before whatever happened and clear displays.”

Afor’s voice said, “Done. Access to main computer currently limited. Cascade failures throughout the system.”

“What happened?” Astrja asked climbing to her feet.

“Unknown,” said Afor.

“Any work from the bridge?”

“Not yet,” said Afor “We have lost main power, long range communications, primary sensors, but all of it seems to be a temporary disruption rather than permanent damage.”

Astrja was suddenly overwhelmingly grateful that she had followed Jalia’s advice and installed a system mirror and battery backup in the Ops office. She could hear Jalia, “You should never need it, but if you do, you will be glad you took the time to set it up.” She was so correct in that.

“Route the sensor grid through to me,” said Astrja, sitting heavily in her chair. “Well, comms are working.at short range,” she said noting the incoming signal from . . . the USS Athena? She ran a system check, the Athena was engaged in a conversation with the Athena.

“Kaj! We have some sort of temporal mess going on,” she said to Afor. “As computing resources come available, run integrity checks on our data. We do not want anything getting overwritten or lost if we can prevent it.”

“Affirmative,” said Afor. “So far, no data loss has been detected in the system mirror. I will move on to the main system as it becomes possible.”

“That you,” said Astaja distractedly. “Let us see what passive scans can tell us about our mirror ship out there,” she added to herself. “Do we have have internal sensor active that can detect chronitons or other forms of temporal radiation?”

“In the science labs, yes, but they are currently off the system,” replied Afor. “Once the internal network is restored, I will run full analytics. Other interior sensors may have detected something but they too are offline.”

“It is challenging to work without data,” said Astrja scanning the report on the main sensors, which was mostly red and most of the rest were was amber. “So, step one. Get sensors up and running so we can gather data. Luckily, the secondary and tertiary grids and most operational, so we will have warning before a comet smacks into us.”

“I will see what I can do with internal sensors,” said Afor.

“No, get internal coms up first. And as soon as interior coms are restored, start assigning tasks to Operations personnel,” said Astrja distractedly. “Many hands make work light.”

Slow dissolve to . . .