Ansolon Season 02 / Episode 06
by Alan Tripp
2412
U.S.S. Crazy Horse
Another console blew out to one side of the bridge, punctuating the dark thoughts her crew were feeling in this moment.
How did she know their dark thoughts? … Because they were her own.
Capt. Shallana Ironwolf projected calm, cool even if inside she was screaming.
Every so often sounds of the increasing pressures against the ship’s hull would become more audible in a sound that seemed to echo through the whole of the ship.
She also would swear her ears would pop in those moments.
With a sigh, she rose from the command chair and made a circuit of the bridge, reassuring the various members of her crew manning the various stations.
Each had tasks to do, even if some of those tasks were designed simply to keep their minds off what was happening to the Crazy Horse and them with it.
Shallana placed a hand on the shoulder of the communications officer.
“Anything yet?” she asked softly.
“Nothing yet, Captain,” the Romulan Starfleet officer noted, an intense look on her face with accents of stress marking the lines of her features here and their.
Of all the duties being carried out at present, the lieutenant’s was possibly one of the most important.
It was she who came up with a way to … maybe … get a message out to Starfleet and … maybe, maybe … deploy a backup message should that one fail.
Krishyyn was one of the best in the fleet.
Problems with all of it all was not her skill the lieutenant’s skill but the mounting gravimetric pressures and currents swirling around out there.
And THAT was excluding the maelstrom that had caught Crazy Horse and was slowly drawing them closer to their …
But let’s not go through. Not yet and if Shallana had her way … Not ever.
Squeezing Krishyyn’s shoulder, the Captain moved on in her circuit.
Reassuring her crew, did something to reassure her own spirit as it was her faith in them that gave her hope they might yet survive this … crushing development.
30 more minutes til her senior officers met again to offer updates and any fresh ideas on how possibly to survive whatever it was that was holding them.
Next stop, the science station where Koraq was doing his best cut through the murk and paint a better picture of their surroundings.
I.K.S. Temptress
It wasn’t an alert or anything like that, so much as a flicker of a reading.
If the Orion tactical officer had not been restless, it was the kind of thing that might have gone completely unnoticed.
‘Most likely background noise,’ Sheryu thought.
An artifact of sound generated by some stellar phenomenon somewhere in the neighborhood, as yet undiscovered.
And if she had not been recalibrating the communication arrays at that exact moment, said background noise likely would have been filtered out automatically.
As it was, whatever it was snagged the Orion’s attention enough that she paused the recalibration and waited a few moments to see if it might appear again.
And then it did.
Again, barely a blip and not something that could be deciphered … at least not yet.
One leg cocked over one arm of the command chair, Capt. Awnya in command of the small but powerful Orion interceptor recognized the change in pheromones coming from her chief tactical officer enough to know something had caught the woman’s interest.
“Sheryu … What cha found?” she asked.
They’d spent three weeks surveying this region of what the Malstrom Expanse — a region the Federation called “Hell’s Gate.”
“Not sure.”
Sheryu’s fingers danced over the tactical console trying unsuccessfully amplify the signal.
“But it’s something,” she continued. “Just not sure what.”
Respectfully,
Capt. Shallana Ironwolf
CO, U.S.S. Crazy Horse
and
Capt. Awnya
CO, I.K.S. Temptress