By Richard Woodcock
Last Time on Star Trek: Fortitude
USS Fortitude: All over the Ship
On Deck 6, Tarris felt it again. That same absence. That same wrongness.
In Engineering, Penny White frowned at a system that refused to fail.
In auxiliary operations, Zulu Team watched a pattern that watched them back.
And on the bridge, the currents parted. Just enough.
As if waiting.
And Now the Continuation…
USS Fortitude: Main Bridge
The order did not come loudly.
It did not need to.
“Prepare to match the current.”
On the bridge, every station seemed to go still around Admiral Miles Llewellyn’s words. Not frozen. Focused. The kind of stillness that came when a crew stopped thinking about possibilities and started thinking about procedure.
Sieneth Th’rel’s pale fingers rested lightly on the helm. Her antennae angled forward, listening to something no one else could hear in full.
“Reading the flow,” she said softly. “There is a pattern forming. It is not fixed.”
“Nothing about this region has ever struck me as fixed,” Commander Rose Harrington said from Operations. “Unhelpfully.”
That drew the smallest shift of expression from Commander Teshla Phyhr.
For anyone else, it might not have registered at all.
Miles noticed.
He always did.
“Recommendations,” he said.
Lieutenant Commander Neku Langi brought a new set of overlays onto the main viewer. The red and amber sensor glyphs gave way to something more fluid. The probes they had seeded into the boundary now described the Straits less like a wall and more like a moving lattice. Lines appeared, faded, then returned fractionally to port. One channel widened. Another folded in on itself.
“Current phase window is emerging every nineteen seconds,” Langi said. “It is not perfectly regular, but it is close enough for predictive modelling.”
“Close enough,” Penny White’s voice came over the comm from Engineering, “is the sort of phrase that makes engineers take up prayer.”
Commander Akadia Nilona folded her hands behind her back at Tactical. “Do engineers pray?”
“Only when scientists say something is probably fine,” Penny replied.
A faint ripple of amusement moved across the bridge.
Miles let it settle for exactly the right amount of time.
“Helm?”
Sieneth did not look up. “I can follow it.”
“Can,” Phyhr repeated. “Or should?”
Sieneth paused, and for a moment the bridge listened to the quiet confidence in her voice.
“We should,” she said. “If we try to force a course, the Straits will reject us. If we move with it, it may permit passage.”
“Permit,” Harrington echoed. “That is not a comforting navigational term.”
“No,” Phyhr said. “But it is the one we have.”
Miles rose from the command chair and stepped down toward the centre of the bridge, watching the currents shift across the viewer. Behind him, Phyhr remained standing at his right shoulder, close enough to advise, distant enough to let him lead. That had always been their balance. It was one of the reasons Fortitude still worked as well as she did.
“You disagree,” he said quietly, not looking at her.
It was not a question. It never had to be.
Phyhr’s antennae shifted a fraction. “I do not disagree with the theory.”
“But.”
“But I dislike placing the ship’s survival in the hands of something that appears to have moods.”
Miles almost smiled. “Space has always had moods.”
“Yes,” Phyhr said dryly. “But it is rarely this theatrical.”
That got a low chuckle from Harrington and a visible eye roll from Langi, who pretended she had heard nothing.
Miles let his gaze stay on the shifting channel.
“If we wait longer,” he said, “we learn more.”
“And if we wait too long,” Phyhr replied, “we learn less from second-hand reports and more from casualty notifications.”
He turned slightly then, just enough to meet her eyes. There was no challenge in her tone. No attempt to undermine him. Only the steadiness he had depended on for years.
And something else.
Concern, yes. But not fear.
She was already where a captain had to be, he thought. Calculating the cost, accepting that someone still had to pay it.
For one fleeting moment, that thought sat more heavily with him than it should have.
“Very well,” he said. “We proceed.”
Phyhr gave a single nod. “Understood.”
No fuss. No dramatic acceptance.
Just execution.
That, more than anything, was why he trusted her.
“Yellow Alert remains in effect,” she said crisply. “All departments to transition to controlled entry protocol. Commander Harrington, maintain probe telemetry and relative position lock. Tactical, defensive posture only. No active targeting unless something introduces itself rudely. Engineering, I want warp systems isolated from any autonomous response. Helm will have primary authority on motion control.”
“Acknowledged,” came the responses around the bridge.
Then Phyhr touched her combadge.
“Zulu Team, report to Auxiliary Operations. Stand by for rapid deployment but remain off the transporter pads unless ordered.”
Reeve’s voice came back almost at once. “Zulu Team standing by.”
USS Fortitude: Deck 6
On Deck 6, Crewman Tarris felt the shift before the deck plates told him anything had changed.
It was not vibration.
Not acceleration.
It was the sensation of the ship deciding something.
He looked up from the maintenance junction he had been pretending to understand and glanced at Crewman Vel, who was already looking back at him.
“They’re going in,” she said.
Tarris frowned. “How do you know?”
Vel considered that for a beat. “Because everyone suddenly looks like they’ve remembered an exam they didn’t revise for.”
That was fair.
Around them, people moved with purpose that was just a little too controlled. Not panic. Fortitude did not panic easily. But the ship had a way of transmitting intent down through her decks. Senior staff made a decision, and somehow even the replicators seemed to notice.
Tarris set the panel back into place. “You think this is a terrible idea?”
Vel started walking. “I think terrible ideas usually arrive with more confidence.”
USS Fortitude: Auxiliary Operations
In Auxiliary Operations, Zulu Team stood around the tactical display as the current model rotated in slow amber light.
Reeve listened without interrupting while Velra T’Laan explained the latest phase projections. Beside her, Ch’korrak had already produced two devices no one had asked him to build and one no one had yet identified.
“That one explodes,” Drevik said, pointing.
Ch’korrak looked offended. “No, that one discourages.”
Nalora zh’Khev checked the edge on one of her blades with serene concentration. “Your distinction remains unconvincing.”
Ssa’kith stood with his hands clasped behind him, massive and still. The Gorn’s expression never changed much, but his stillness had gradations. This one suggested readiness rather than calm.
Reeve folded his arms. “Mission parameters.”
Velra enlarged the projected path. “Fortitude will attempt a controlled boundary crossing. We are not boarding anything unless ordered. We are not launching unless specifically instructed. Our role is contingency response.”
Drevik brightened. “That sounds almost reassuring.”
“It should not,” Reeve said.
“Ah,” Drevik replied. “There it is.”
Reeve pointed to the second display, where the Stardrifter’s successful path and the Yakushima’s failed transition were overlaid.
“If the ship loses synchronisation during the crossing, teams may be needed for compartment response, casualty retrieval, or internal systems isolation. If something crosses with us, we deal with that too.”
Ch’korrak grunted. “You say that like ‘if something crosses with us’ is a normal sentence.”
“On this ship,” Nalora said, “it increasingly is.”
Drevik leaned in toward the display. “I still think the encouraging news is that the Stardrifter came through mostly in one piece.”
“Mostly?” Ch’korrak repeated.
“Yes.”
“That is not an encouraging adjective.”
“It is compared to ‘theoretically’,” Drevik said.
Reeve rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I would like five uninterrupted minutes in which no one says anything comforting.”
No one spoke.
He gave them a flat look.
Ch’korrak shrugged. “There. We did it.”
USS Fortitude: Main Engineering
In Engineering, Penny White paced one half-circle around the warp core, stopped, then paced it again. The great blue column rose through the deck in flawless mechanical grace, humming as though the universe had not become fundamentally offensive.
A lieutenant at the nearest console cleared his throat. “Commander?”
Penny didn’t stop looking at the readouts. “If you are about to tell me everything is nominal again, I will have you transferred to botany.”
The lieutenant blinked. “I was actually going to say all intermix ratios remain inside expected tolerance.”
Penny nodded slowly. “Very good. You found a longer way to make the same mistake.”
Around her, engineers tried not to smile.
She planted both hands on the edge of a console and studied the field harmonics. “Listen carefully. The Straits is doing something. The ship is doing nothing. That means one of two things. Either Fortitude is resisting it beautifully…”
She tapped a line of readouts.
“…or we are not reading the interaction at the correct depth.”
The lieutenant frowned. “Depth?”
Penny glanced at him. “I know. Space should not have those. Yet here we are.”
Another engineer looked up from a secondary station. “Commander, structural integrity field buffers are ready to compensate on your command.”
“Good. Keep them ready and do not let the computer get creative. I want every response deliberate. If the ship starts improvising, I reserve the right to become spiritual.”
On the bridge, the current widened.
Then narrowed.
Then returned, not quite where it had been before.
Sieneth inhaled slowly.
“There,” she said. “Again.”
Langi looked up sharply. “I see it.”
Harrington’s hands flew over her console. “Probe lattice confirming. Phase window stabilising.”
Miles resumed his seat. “Take us in.”
The moment hung.
Then Sieneth moved.
Fortitude advanced not with the aggressive certainty of impulse thrust, but with minute adjustments that made the ship seem less like a vessel and more like a leaf setting itself onto a stream. The stars ahead did not distort. No boundary line flared. No cinematic wall of energy announced itself.
Instead, the viewer showed the impossible in the least dramatic way imaginable.
Space simply stopped agreeing with itself.
The stars shifted by fractions. Distances looked wrong. A region that should have taken three seconds to cross took one and then four. The probes ahead of them stretched into threads of telemetry, vanished, and then returned exactly where prediction said they should.
“Entering phase contact,” Harrington said.
No one on the bridge missed the careful choice of words.
Not crossing.
Contact.
The deck gave a gentle shiver beneath their feet.
“Structural integrity holding,” Nilona reported.
“Shields?” Miles asked.
“Unchanged.”
Penny’s voice cut in. “Engineering here. Warp core remains steady, which I would now like entered formally into the record as suspicious behaviour.”
“Duly noted,” Phyhr said.
For the first few seconds, the Straits did nothing.
Then it noticed them.
Lights on the bridge dimmed and brightened in a sequence too smooth to be a fluctuation. The main viewer lagged by half a heartbeat. Sieneth’s hands moved left, then right, then eased back to centre.
“It is adjusting,” she said.
Langi stiffened. “To us?”
“No,” Sieneth murmured. “With us.”
That answer landed on the bridge with all the comfort of a door unlocking by itself.
Miles leaned forward. “Status.”
Harrington checked three displays at once. “Probe signal attenuation within predicted thresholds. Internal sensors are… odd.”
“That narrows it down,” Phyhr observed.
“They are reading the ship in two slightly different positions.”
Nilona looked up. “Can that happen?”
Langi answered before Harrington could. “It is happening.”
On Deck 6, Tarris braced a hand against the bulkhead as the corridor lights seemed to ripple rather than flicker.
Vel stopped dead beside him. “Did you just see the deck move?”
“The deck should not move,” Tarris said.
“Yes, thank you, I also attended orientation.”
Two ensigns farther down the corridor were staring at a wall monitor that insisted for one deeply irritating second that they were on Deck 5.
Then it changed back.
One of them said, “I am beginning to take this personally.”
USS Fortitude: Sickbay
In sickbay, Lieutenant Commander Twimek Vodokon moved calmly between biobeds as medical staff checked for the sort of physiological anomalies no one had wanted to define in advance.
“Elevated stress responses on decks three through eight,” a nurse reported.
“Expected,” Vodokon said gently.
Another medic looked over from a scanner. “A few crew report sensations of motion without acceleration. Mild disorientation. No injuries.”
“Good. Continue observation and reassure where appropriate.”
The medic hesitated. “Do you want us to tell them this is normal?”
Vodokon considered that. “No. I want you to tell them it is survivable. People often find that more believable.”
Back on the bridge, the first real complication arrived quietly.
“Captain,” Harrington said, her voice sharper now. “Probe three has gone dark.”
Langi checked the overlay. “No debris. No surge. It simply ceased transmitting.”
Nilona’s fingers hovered above her tactical console. “Hostile action?”
“No signature,” Langi said.
“Then what?” Nilona asked.
No one answered.
A second later, probe three reappeared three thousand kilometres off its expected path.
Ch’korrak’s voice came over the internal channel from Auxiliary Operations, where he had apparently found a way to insert himself into telemetry analysis. “Ah.”
Miles did not need to ask who it was. “Go on, Chief.”
“That was not a loss,” Ch’korrak said. “That was the probe being politely informed it was somewhere else.”
On the bridge, Harrington closed her eyes briefly. “I hate how often your nonsense contains useful data.”
“Years of commitment,” Ch’korrak replied.
Phyhr stepped closer to Miles’s chair, one hand resting lightly on the rail behind it. She did not crowd him. She never did. But her presence there was as constant as Fortitude’s hull.
“Your theories were correct,” she said quietly.
“Partially,” Miles replied.
“That is as close to a triumph as we usually receive out here.”
He almost smiled at that, but his attention stayed on the viewer.
The current ahead widened again. Smooth. Measured. Beckoning.
If he had been a different sort of captain, he might have said it aloud.
As it was, he knew Phyhr was thinking the same thing.
The Straits was opening for them.
And neither of them trusted gifts.
“You think it wants us deeper,” she said.
There it was.
“No,” Miles answered. “I think it expects us to follow the logic.”
“Which is somehow less comforting.”
“For engineers, yes.”
“That was not an engineering statement.”
“No,” he said. “It was a command one.”
That made her look at him.
For a heartbeat, the bridge disappeared around them. Not physically. Only in the way long service created private spaces in public rooms.
She had stood beside him through battles, evacuations, political disasters, impossible briefings and at least three situations Starfleet had officially described as contained while they were very much still happening. She knew when he was tired. Knew when he was buying time. Knew when he had already decided something and was waiting for the right moment to make it sound inevitable.
And, though she did not know it yet, she was already learning the weight of the chair she would one day inherit.
“If we continue,” she said, “the ship commits.”
Miles nodded once. “Yes.”
“And if something happens to you in there?”
“Then you have the bridge.”
She did not react outwardly.
That was the discipline in her. The years. The Andorian control wound around a core of steel.
But Miles saw the fractional shift in her stance.
This was not the first time command succession had been implied between them. Only the first time it felt less hypothetical.
“With respect,” she said, voice low enough for only him to hear, “I always have the bridge when required.”
He turned his head slightly. “You do.”
It was not reassurance.
It was recognition.
And it unsettled her more than reassurance would have.
Before she could answer, Harrington looked up. “Captain, the current is peaking.”
Sieneth’s expression tightened with concentration. “If we do not match now, the phase window will collapse.”
Miles settled back into the chair.
“Helm,” he said. “Take us deeper.”
“Aye.”
Fortitude moved.
This time the sensation was unmistakable.
Not acceleration.
Transference.
The stars ahead seemed to flatten and then lengthen. The nebular red beyond the viewer rippled through amber and violet. The ship was no longer passing through a region of space. It was being translated by one that had its own ideas about sequence and distance.
Warning tones chirped across two consoles and died before they could become alarming.
“Report,” Miles said.
“Navigation drift inside tolerance,” Sieneth said, though her tone suggested tolerance itself was now more philosophical than numerical.
“Internal gravimetrics fluctuating but stable,” Harrington reported.
“Stable,” Langi muttered. “Another word losing all meaning today.”
“Shields remain coherent,” Nilona said. “No external contact.”
Then: “Correction. External contact unknown.”
The viewer flashed.
For a brief instant something immense moved parallel to them, just beyond the sensor threshold. Not a ship. Not a storm front. A shape implied by absence and reflected stars. It was gone before the mind could properly frame it.
No one on the bridge spoke.
From Auxiliary Operations came Drevik’s voice over the channel: “…well.”
Reeve’s followed at once. “Zulu Team to status one.”
No panic. No dramatics.
But the edge was there now.
Miles keyed the channel open. “Report.”
Reeve answered. “Transient contact outside the hull. No boarders. No breaches. Team repositioning to rapid response nodes.”
“Understood.”
Ch’korrak’s voice broke in. “For the record, if the outside of the ship starts looking at us, I would prefer not to be told in stages.”
“That preference is denied,” Reeve said.
“Cruel but fair.”
On Deck 10, a replicator produced tea, reconsidered existence, and gave Crewman Jex a polished metal spoon instead.
Jex stared at it. “I did not order this.”
The replicator remained neutral on the subject.
Across from her, another crewman looked at the spoon, then at the trembling surface of his coffee.
“I think the ship is trying to be funny.”
Jex stood up. “If Fortitude develops a sense of humour this deep into service, I am resigning.”
In Engineering, Penny White saw the first thing she actually disliked more than nominal readings.
A perfect response.
“Commander,” the lieutenant said, “field buffers compensated before the surge registered.”
Penny stepped closer. “Impossible.”
“Yes, Commander.”
“That was not agreement. That was despair.”
She ran the diagnostic herself.
The result was the same.
The ship had answered the Straits half a heartbeat before Engineering had fully perceived the question.
Penny stared at the screen. “No.”
The lieutenant looked up nervously. “No, Commander?”
“No,” she repeated. “Fortitude does not get ahead of me in my own engine room.”
She slapped her combadge. “Bridge, Engineering.”
Miles answered at once. “Go ahead.”
“For reasons I would prefer to classify as offensive, the ship is anticipating external field pressure before my team is seeing it. I need Science and Ops to tell me whether we are reading the same event late… or whether Fortitude has started listening to the Straits directly.”
A beat passed.
Then Langi said, with immense reluctance, “That may be the correct question.”
Penny closed her eyes. “I hate it when Science does that.”
On the bridge, the current shifted harder to starboard.
Sieneth caught it at once. Fortitude banked almost gracefully, her great frame moving with a delicacy that should not have been possible for something of her size.
Phyhr watched the correction, then looked at Miles. “She has it.”
“Yes,” he said.
Sieneth was hearing the path. Harrington was tracking it. Langi was beginning, however unwillingly, to understand it. Penny was fighting the ship herself if necessary. Nilona had every sensor edge sharpened to a knife point. Zulu Team stood ready below. Lower decks were unsettled, but holding. Sickbay was calm. Fortitude was afraid, perhaps, but functioning.
It occurred to Miles then that this was what command actually meant at its best. Not heroics. Not speeches. A hundred competent people doing the impossible because they trusted one another enough to try.
And right beside him stood the officer who could keep that alive after him.
He did not like the thought.
Which, he suspected, meant it was true.
“Admiral,” Phyhr said quietly, pulling him back. “Ahead.”
The viewer changed.
The current no longer resembled a lane.
It resembled a chamber.
A widening in the Straits where the flow doubled back on itself like the eddy of some impossible tide. Probe returns flickered at its edges. In the centre, space darkened not into shadow but into depth.
Langi inhaled sharply. “That is not natural.”
“No,” Miles said. “It is organised.”
Nilona asked the practical question. “Do we avoid it?”
Sieneth’s voice came low and certain. “We cannot. The current is taking us through.”
Silence.
Then Drevik, somehow patched through from Auxiliary Operations, said, “On the bright side, at least the terrifying hole is apparently part of the route.”
“Remove him from this channel,” Reeve said.
“Rude,” Drevik replied.
Miles stood.
“All hands,” he said, his voice carrying across the bridge and through the ship. “Maintain station discipline. We knew from the beginning that observation would eventually become participation. This is that moment. We proceed as trained. No sudden heroics, no improvisation without cause, and if the universe presents you with anything inexplicable, kindly report it before touching it.”
That got a few strained smiles, even now.
He let them have that much.
Then: “Helm. Take us through.”
Sieneth nodded once. “Aye, Admiral.”
Fortitude entered the chamber.
For one impossible second, everything stopped.
The hum of the bridge.
The pulse of the displays.
The motion of the ship.
Not failed.
Paused.
Then the universe resumed with one additional heartbeat inside it.
Across multiple decks, crew gasped, staggered, swore, or gripped the nearest surface.
In Auxiliary Operations, Nalora bared her teeth and called it “interesting” in a tone that suggested severe Andorian dissatisfaction with language itself.
In Engineering, Penny’s console briefly displayed a field harmonic in colours she would later insist did not exist.
On the bridge, every screen filled with data.
Flow.
Pattern.
Endless.
And in the centre of the viewer, the path ahead opened wider still.
Miles felt it then, not as a voice but as certainty pressing just behind thought.
A direction.
An invitation.
A question.
Beside him, Phyhr steadied herself with one hand on the rail, then let go before anyone could notice she had needed to. He noticed, of course.
“Status,” he said.
Harrington swallowed once. “We are through the first crossing.”
Langi checked and rechecked the readings. “Sensors degraded but coherent.”
Nilona said, “No hostile contacts.”
Penny came over comm, breathless but composed. “Engineering remains both functional and deeply offended.”
That finally got the bridge to laugh.
Even Miles.
Especially Miles.
He sat again, eyes fixed on the unfolding current.
“Very good,” he said quietly.
Then, softer, almost to himself:
“Now let’s see where it thinks we belong.”
NRPG:
Alan, the games a foot, I am leaving this with plenty of room to both dive in!