Writer’s Note: This is the sixth story in a six-part series that kicks off the new “The Quest” story arc and launches new important characters, new starships, and a new writing location.
Season 01 — Episode 07
Written by Alan Tripp
Tae’latas — Part VI
— 2413 —
(( One Month Before Launch ))
Horizon’s Reach / Skye Belt Orbit
Tae’latas age: 34
The The first month of 2413 came to Horizon’s Reach with cold light, crowded docks, and a list of unfinished work long enough to make Awnya threaten three departments, two contractors, and one ceremonial banner-maker before breakfast.
One month remained before the official launch of the I.K.S. jungQu’.
One month, according to the schedule.
Three months, according to Vrokh.
Nine days, according to one young pilot who had made the mistake of saying the ship “looked ready” within earshot of anyone who had actually worked on her.
Tae’latas Khevrak Hurvek had stopped correcting them all.
The name still felt new.
Not uncomfortable. Not false. Only large.
It followed him through the Yard Stone corridors now. Workers used it without hesitation. Traffic control used it. The Crossing Stone merchants used it with the casual ownership of people who had decided they had known him long enough to participate in history. Even Vrokh used it, though only when annoyed, which meant more often than ceremony required.
Tae’latas had not ceased being Khevrak Hurvek.
That mattered.
The earned name had not replaced the birth name. It had given the road a shape. He was still of chuD Hurvek, still the young man who had once crawled beneath the dead belly of the Hovmey Daq in a misty field near Nýr Nordhavn, still the fool who had claimed a dead asteroid base before he possessed the money to move it, still the shipwright who had brought home a wounded K’Vort because some part of him had believed dead futures might yet have work to do.
But now, when people said Tae’latas, they were not only naming him.
They were reminding him that others had followed the path.
That made every unfinished system on the jungQu’ feel heavier.
He stood in the sensor cathedral with both sleeves rolled to the forearm, his hair tied back, and a diagnostic wand balanced between his teeth while he adjusted a phase-shift lattice with one hand and scrolled through U.S.S. Mythos calibration data with the other.
The jungQu’s projection field filled the upper chamber with layered stars.
The Mythos data hovered beside it in a separate frame: Starfleet-standard, elegant, powerful, and too polite.
Tae’latas disliked polite sensors.
Polite sensors lied by omission.
A sensor system needed discipline, yes. Without discipline, the universe became noise. But out here, at the edge of maps and good sense, too much discipline became blindness. Standard arrays wanted to categorize, filter, prioritize, discard. They wanted the unknown to behave like the known long enough to be filed correctly.
The frontier rarely obliged.
He reached up and nudged the jungQu’s lattice by a fraction.
The starfield shivered.
The Mythos data model responded with a cascade of warning flags.
Tae’latas took the wand from his mouth.
“That,” he said to the empty chamber, “is fear wearing Starfleet formatting.”
Behind him, someone laughed.
Not Awnya.
Not Vrokh.
The laugh was low, controlled, and edged with enough Klingon warmth to suggest the person had found the insult fair.
Tae’latas turned.
Admiral T’Korvaq “Kor” Hawke stood just inside the sensor cathedral, dressed in Starfleet command black and red, with the calm posture of a man who had learned to let rooms reveal themselves before entering fully. He was broad-shouldered, ridged and sharp-featured in the way of Klingon blood refined by Vulcan restraint, his eyes carrying that difficult balance of discipline and storm.
Awnya stood beside him with a satisfied look that immediately told Tae’latas she had arranged this without warning him.
“You were supposed to be in the operations core,” she said.
“I was working.”
“Yes. I told Admiral Hawke that would be your excuse.”
Hawke’s eyes moved upward through the layered projections.
“This seemed more interesting than the operations core.”
Awnya looked at Tae’latas.
“I am choosing to be offended later.”
Tae’latas inclined his head toward the visitor.
“Admiral Hawke.”
“Captain Hurvek.”
The use of the old form was careful. Polite. Testing.
Tae’latas noticed.
Awnya noticed Tae’latas notice.
“My formal name is Tae’latas Khevrak Hurvek,” he said. “Khevrak remains proper.”
Hawke nodded once.
“Then Tae’latas, if I may.”
“You may.”
“Hauk said I would find you inside a sensor problem.”
“Hauk is often correct in inconvenient ways.”
“That has been my experience.”
Awnya looked between them.
“Oh good. You both speak admiral.”
“I am not an admiral,” Tae’latas said.
“No,” she replied. “You only argue with systems like one.”
Hawke smiled faintly.
Tae’latas gestured toward the Mythos data frame.
“I was reviewing your ship’s sensor upgrade package.”
“And insulting it.”
“I was insulting the formatting.”
“Only the formatting?”
“For now.”
Hawke stepped farther into the chamber.
He did not touch anything. Tae’latas appreciated that immediately.
Too many visiting officers touched consoles as if rank conveyed immunity from disrupting work.
Hawke simply looked.
The sensor cathedral responded to his presence with quiet hums and shifting light. The jungQu’s own models remained dominant in the upper projection field, broad and layered, while the Mythos schematics glowed in disciplined Starfleet lines beside them. Two very different philosophies of perception shared the same air.
Hawke studied the comparison.
“Mythos is a command explorer,” he said. “She needs broad-spectrum reliability, fleet integration, diplomatic transparency, and tactical discrimination.”
“Yes.”
“You think the package fails?”
“No.”
Hawke looked at him.
Tae’latas expanded the data with a movement of his fingers.
“I think it succeeds too obediently.”
Awnya muttered, “Here we go.”
Tae’latas ignored her.
“The upgrade package improves range, resolution, and anomaly tolerance. It is good work. Excellent work in normal frontier conditions. But the Mythos is not being sent into normal frontier conditions.”
Hawke’s expression did not change, but his attention sharpened.
“And where is she being sent?”
Tae’latas paused.
Awnya’s eyes narrowed.
“You did not tell him?”
Hawke’s gaze remained on the projection.
“Not yet.”
Awnya looked upward, as if asking whatever gods managed scheduling to explain why men with secrets always arrived before lunch.
Tae’latas waited.
Hawke moved to the center of the chamber and looked up at the jungQu’s starfield.
“Before that,” he said, “tell me what you would change.”
Tae’latas considered him.
Then he turned back to the Mythos data and stripped away three layers of interface smoothing.
The projection became uglier.
Better.
“This,” Tae’latas said, “is the raw return before the diplomatic filter and command prioritization smoothing.”
Hawke’s eyebrow lifted.
“Diplomatic filter?”
“Starfleet does not call it that.”
“What does Starfleet call it?”
“Adaptive threat-context normalization.”
Awnya took one step back.
“I am not involved in this conversation.”
Hawke actually smiled.
“And you call it diplomatic filtering because?”
“Because it attempts to prevent captains from mistaking every strange return for a threat, every biological resonance for a distress signal, and every unidentified energy bloom for a weapon.”
“That sounds useful.”
“It is. Until the strange return is a threat, the biological resonance is a distress signal, or the unidentified energy bloom is a door.”
Hawke was silent for a moment.
Then he said, “Hauk told me you were dangerous.”
Awnya folded her arms.
“He usually hides it better.”
“I do not hide it,” Tae’latas said.
“No,” she replied. “You bury it in sensor theory until people stop being afraid.”
Hawke looked at the raw returns again.
“What would you give Mythos?”
“Less certainty.”
“That is an unusual sales pitch.”
“It is not a sales pitch.”
Awnya made a small sound.
Tae’latas glanced at her.
She pointed at herself.
“Managing partner. I am begging you to occasionally remember sales exist.”
He looked back to Hawke.
“It needs a permission layer.”
“For what?”
“For doubt.”
That quieted the chamber.
Tae’latas expanded the comparison between Mythos and jungQu’. The jungQu’s system did not erase contradictory data quickly. It held possibilities longer, then routed path-changing uncertainties to crew judgment. Science. Helm. Tactical. Flight control. Command.
No ship saw alone.
He had learned that too late to pretend it was simple.
“Mythos does not need jungQu’s sensor philosophy,” he said. “She is not this ship. But if you are going where I think you are going, she needs the ability to preserve culturally significant uncertainty.”
Hawke studied him.
“That is a phrase I have not heard in a refit proposal.”
“It means when a first-contact civilization says the stars are singing, the ship should not automatically classify the statement as metaphor while filtering the harmonic pattern as local distortion.”
Awnya stopped pretending not to listen.
Hawke turned fully toward him.
“Who told you about the songs?”
“No one.”
“Then why mention them?”
“Because you came to Horizon’s Reach one month before my launch to inspect sensor upgrades that could have been reviewed at Hell’s Keep, and you have not once asked about weapons, shields, or command integration. You are thinking about perception. Not tactical perception. Cultural perception.”
Awnya looked at Hawke.
“He does this.”
Hawke’s eyes remained on Tae’latas.
“And from that?”
“From that, I assume Mythos is going somewhere the distinction between myth and data may become inconvenient.”
For several seconds, no one spoke.
Then Hawke said, “The Neffen Cluster.”
Awnya’s expression changed.
Tae’latas felt the name settle into the chamber like gravity.
The Neffen Cluster lay eastward along the Gjallar Arm, a region of black suns and impossible navigation, old routes, folded light, sensor ghosts, and stories no sensible captain trusted without checking twice. It was not a place one entered casually. It was a place maps went to become arguments.
Tae’latas turned back to the projection.
“That explains the calibration request.”
“It explains part of it.”
Hawke touched nothing, but his gaze moved through the jungQu’s models with new purpose.
“Mythos has been assigned to establish contact with a people known locally as the Vealari.”
Awnya frowned.
“Feline?”
“Yes.”
Tae’latas looked over.
“Breakaway Zahgari lineage?”
Hawke’s eyes narrowed slightly.
“You know them?”
“I know of the possibility. Old migration fragments. Tempest reports. Typhon comparisons. Stories of eastern lineages that did not follow the western ancestral pattern.”
Hawke nodded.
“The Vealari are descended from ancient Zahgari migration lines, but they diverged generations ago. Eastern Gjallar Arm civilization. Low-impact settlements. Environmental coexistence. Strong avoidance of heavy industrial intrusion.”
Awnya looked interested despite herself.
“Practical or philosophical?”
“Both,” Hawke said. “And biological, now. They have adapted to unstable frontier conditions in ways Starfleet medical is still trying to describe without sounding as though it believes in spirits.”
Tae’latas’s attention sharpened.
“What kind of adaptation?”
“Hightened sensitivity to bioelectrical fields, gravitational shifts, emotional resonance, environmental instability patterns.”
Awnya’s brows rose.
“That sounds supernatural.”
“It is not,” Tae’latas said.
Hawke looked at him.
Tae’latas began moving through possible models in his head.
“Bioelectrical sensitivity exists in many lifeforms. Gravitational sensitivity is less common but not impossible in a population shaped by unstable routes, tidal stress, and generations of environmental pressure. Emotional resonance may be biochemical, electromagnetic, pheromonal, neuroelectric, or some combination they culturally interpret through relationship with environment.”
Hawke watched him with growing approval.
“Tempest personnel describe them as navigators who feel the frontier rather than merely calculate it.”
“That is probably more accurate than the personnel realize.”
Awnya pointed at Tae’latas.
“No.”
He looked at her.
“What?”
“I know that expression.”
“I have no expression.”
“You have the expression you get when someone hands you a dangerous puzzle and calls it a civilization.”
Hawke said, “They are a civilization. The puzzle is whether we can understand them before we insult them.”
That earned him Awnya’s attention.
“Good answer.”
Hawke continued, “The Vealari are associated with corridor attunement, harmonic coexistence, environmental resonance, living-system philosophy. They do not separate route, body, settlement, and mood as cleanly as most Federation cultures do. Their elders speak of corridors as if they are alive.”
Tae’latas said, “Perhaps they are speaking from experience.”
Awnya looked at him.
“Careful.”
“I did not say the corridors are alive. I said their experience may be describing real environmental systems through relational language.”
Hawke’s expression warmed slightly.
“That distinction is why I came.”
Now Tae’latas understood.
Not all of it.
Enough.
“Mythos is going for first contact.”
“Yes.”
“And you need sensors that will not flatten Vealari perception into superstition.”
“Yes.”
“Then the upgrade package is insufficient.”
Awnya exhaled.
“There goes the delivery schedule.”
Hawke looked amused.
“I was hoping for slightly more diplomatic phrasing.”
Tae’latas shook his head.
“Diplomatic phrasing can come after the array stops lying politely.”
Awnya looked at Hawke.
“You see what I work with.”
“I am beginning to.”
Hawke turned back toward the jungQu’s projection.
“There is another matter.”
“Centerpoint,” Tae’latas said.
This time Hawke did not hide his surprise.
Awnya stared at Tae’latas.
“You knew that too?”
“I suspected.”
“Based on what?”
“The Mythos package includes gravitational-lensing tolerance requests that do not match first-contact requirements alone. The Neffen Cluster reports include unresolved references to a central gravitational anomaly, black-hole routing distortions, glass-like sensor reflections, and historical rumors of hidden infrastructure.”
Hawke’s eyes sharpened.
“You have read the reports.”
“I have read reports about reports. The real ones are likely classified.”
“Some are.”
“U.S.S. Sparhawk recorded something.”
That stopped Hawke completely.
Awnya saw it.
So did Tae’latas.
Hawke’s voice lowered.
“What do you know about Sparhawk data?”
Tae’latas touched the control surface. An old fragmentary sensor return appeared in the air, incomplete and marked with archival flags.
“Not enough. This was embedded in an old anomaly comparison package used in a sensor theory exchange. Most of the source was stripped. But the signature geometry was wrong for normal lensing. It showed delayed reflective returns across a black-hole field, recurring at intervals too structured to be random.”
He enlarged the image.
The projection became a broken thread of light bent around darkness.
“Someone called it ghosting.”
“It was filed that way,” Hawke said.
“It was not ghosting.”
“No?”
“No. Ghosting repeats error. This repeated relationship.”
Hawke looked at him for a long time.
Outside the cathedral, the Yard Stone hummed with work. Somewhere beyond the hull, the Crossing Stone moved passengers and cargo between worlds. The jungQu’ waited around them, one month from launch, her new eyes still open, still learning how to see.
Hawke said, “There are rumors in the Neffen Cluster. A hidden ancient starbase. Secret routes through the black holes. Ships encased in glass. Some call them wrecks. Some call them memorials. Some say they move.”
Awnya said nothing.
Tae’latas looked at the Sparhawk fragment.
“And the Vealari?”
“They have songs.”
“Of the glass ships?”
“Of dragons.”
The word entered the chamber and changed the air.
Tae’latas looked up.
Hawke held his gaze.
“Old stories,” Hawke said. “Possibly metaphor. Possibly migration memory. Possibly nothing more than myth surviving in a people who learned to listen too closely to dangerous skies.”
“But you do not believe that.”
“No.”
“Because of the Elder Dragon.”
Hawke’s face became still.
Awnya looked between them carefully.
Tae’latas had not said the words as accusation. He had said them as recognition.
Hawke’s connection to living myth was not a secret among those who cared to listen, but there were different ways of knowing a thing. Some knew it as story. Some as rumor. Some as classified footnote. Tae’latas knew it the way he knew damaged metal could still remember stress.
As evidence of something larger than explanation had yet permitted.
Hawke said, “Dragons are rarely only dragons in the stories people keep.”
Tae’latas nodded slowly.
“No. Sometimes they are warnings. Sometimes protectors. Sometimes weapons. Sometimes ancestors. Sometimes weather given memory.”
“And sometimes?”
Tae’latas looked toward the jungQu’s layered starfield.
“Sometimes they are exactly what someone survived seeing.”
Awnya’s voice was soft.
“That is the kind of sentence that starts expensive journeys.”
Hawke turned slightly toward her.
“This one may already be starting.”
She studied him.
“With whose money?”
Hawke smiled faintly.
“Starfleet’s first. Probably ours after the paperwork discovers ambition.”
Awnya sighed.
“I knew I liked you too quickly.”
Tae’latas continued to stare at the Sparhawk fragment.
The old data bent around darkness in broken arcs. Not a map. Not yet. But something.
A delayed return.
A relationship.
A path refusing to be read by systems designed to discard uncertainty too soon.
He could feel the jungQu around him.
Not ready.
Ready enough.
No ship saw alone.
No pathfinder walked alone.
The Neffen Cluster was the kind of place that would test every lesson Horizon’s Reach had carved into the ship’s bones. Black holes. Gravitational lies. Secret routes. Glass ships. Centerpoint. A civilization that felt corridors in their blood and sang of dragons in their oldest stories.
Hawke watched him.
“You are thinking about sending the jungQu’.”
Tae’latas did not answer immediately.
Awnya did.
“He is.”
Tae’latas looked at her.
She folded her arms.
“Do not look surprised. I know the weather before it breaks.”
Hawke said, “The mission window is not immediate. Mythos will proceed first-contact protocols with the Vealari. We need cultural trust, consent, and context before any deeper push through routes they may consider sacred or dangerous.”
“Good,” Tae’latas said.
“You approve?”
“I would distrust you if you did otherwise.”
Hawke accepted that without offense.
“But,” Tae’latas continued, “if the Sparhawk data is related to Centerpoint, and if Centerpoint lies behind gravitational conditions the Vealari understand differently than Starfleet does, then Mythos will need more than standard escort or survey support.”
Awnya murmured, “Here it comes.”
Tae’latas looked up into the projection.
“She will need a pathfinder.”
Hawke’s eyes warmed.
“There it is.”
“The jungQu’ is not launched.”
“Not officially.”
“She has not completed full escort-constellation trials.”
“That may be what Neffen gives you.”
Awnya stared at Hawke.
“You are encouraging him.”
“I am recognizing momentum.”
“That is worse in an admiral.”
Hawke looked at her.
“You disagree?”
Awnya was silent for a moment.
Then she looked toward the projection of the Sparhawk return, the faint thread of something structured bending through blackness.
“No,” she said. “I hate that I do not.”
Tae’latas glanced at her.
Her expression softened by a fraction.
“She needs a first road,” Awnya said. “Not a parade.”
The words struck him harder than ceremony would have.
A first road.
Not a launch display. Not a dockside triumph. Not a safe trial loop between Horizon’s Reach and Hell’s Keep while officials applauded the courage of a ship that had not yet risked herself.
A road.
Worthy of the name.
Hawke stepped closer to the Sparhawk fragment.
“The Quest,” he said.
Tae’latas looked at him.
Hawke continued, “That is what some of my people are already calling the projected operation, though no one has been foolish enough to put it in official dispatches.”
Awnya frowned.
“Too simple.”
“Most old things are.”
Tae’latas looked at the black arcs of the Neffen data.
The hidden routes.
The glass ships.
The Vealari songs.
Dragons.
The word no longer felt like myth alone.
It felt like a door.
“The Quest,” he said quietly.
The name did not explain enough.
That was why it worked.
Awnya watched him, then looked at Hawke.
“If this becomes an official mission, Horizon’s Reach bills for all Mythos sensor work before anyone adds dragons to the scope.”
Hawke inclined his head.
“Reasonable.”
“And if jungQu’ is attached after launch, she does not become some spare asset to be thrown at a black hole because the word ‘experimental’ makes admirals stupid.”
“I am an admiral.”
“I know.”
Hawke’s mouth curved.
“She would be attached because she is suited to the task.”
Awnya held his gaze.
“Good. I like clarity before danger.”
Tae’latas said, “You like contracts before danger.”
“I contain multitudes.”
For the first time that day, Tae’latas laughed.
Not much.
Enough.
Hawke looked at him, and something passed between them then. Not friendship yet. Not trust, not fully. Those things required time, shared risk, proof.
But recognition.
Two men standing beneath the unfinished eyes of a ship born from salvage and stubbornness, speaking of dragons without apology.
Hawke had come to inspect sensors for Mythos.
He had found the jungQu’s captain teaching a ship to doubt certainty.
Tae’latas had expected a fleet officer.
He had found a man who understood that myths were often records written by those who lacked safer language.
Outside, Horizon’s Reach continued its restless life. The Crossing Stone opened routes to the First Lands and beyond. The Yard Stone held ships in various stages of repair, rebirth, and argument. The Hovmey Daq waited in her talon berth. The Temptress, already returned from Straits work, gleamed under maintenance lights while Awnya’s people tuned systems she insisted had behaved perfectly.
And around them all, the jungQu listened.
Hawke looked at the ship’s projection one last time.
“Can Mythos be ready for Vealari contact?”
“Yes,” Tae’latas said.
“How long?”
“Two weeks for the permission layer. Three if Starfleet insists on keeping all of its polite lies.”
Awnya said, “He means four, billed as three.”
Tae’latas ignored her.
Hawke nodded.
“And jungQu?”
Tae’latas looked up into the fractured starlight, at the old Sparhawk ghost bending through black suns toward something hidden.
“One month,” he said.
Awnya closed her eyes.
Hawke’s smile was almost invisible.
“One month to launch,” he said.
Tae’latas looked from Hawke to Awnya, then to the ship around them.
“One month to the first road.”
For a while, no one spoke.
Then Awnya picked up the nearest padd, opened a new project file, and began typing with the grim focus of a woman watching destiny become paperwork.
“What are you naming that?” Tae’latas asked.
She did not look up.
“The Quest.”
Hawke looked amused.
Tae’latas looked pained.
Awnya continued typing.
“Do not argue. Simple names invoice cleanly.”
Above them, the stars bent around black suns.
Somewhere in old Sparhawk data, a path waited to be read.
Somewhere in the Neffen Cluster, a people sang of dragons.
And at Horizon’s Reach, one month before launch, the Great Adventure found its first horizon.