An Interesting Sideways Direction
Posted on Mon Jan 19th, 2026 @ 3:36am by Captain Calypso Skyie & Lieutenant Commander Alexander Espersen & Lieutenant Mark Valleroy & Lieutenant JG Raven Windancer & Lieutenant JG Rala & Senior Chief Petty Officer Jadizon Enor
Edited on on Mon Jan 19th, 2026 @ 3:40am
Mission:
A Princess Of Tial
Location: Deck 1, Bridge
Timeline: Day or so after departure
Rala looked across the turbolift at Calypso. “Any idea what this distress call is about?” she asked.
"Ship broke down somewhere pretty closeish to us, but no one else is around, not even a Dashian ship, besides it's a Federation-registered ship, so we're the best to go after it." Cally shrugged
“Federation? Out here? Besides us?” Rala said, more thinking out loud than actually expecting an answer from Calypso. “Wait, Federation-flagged, but not Starfleet-flagged?” She mumbled something in Draakri that didn’t get translated.
"You got it, civilian." Cally sighed, "Most annoying at times.”
The turbolift came to a halt, doors swishing open to reveal the Chimera’s bridge. Rala let Calypso go first, then followed her, making a beeline for the Ops station.
"Captain on deck." A voice at Tactical stated.
"As you were." Cally waved it off, "Ops, put the distress call on speaker please."
Espersen vacated the command chair as Cally and Rala arrived on the bridge. “It’s choppy, Captain.”
The junior officer at the Ops station got the file pulled up before turning over the console to Rala. She triggered playback, and the bridge was filled with distorted, garbled audio. What sounded like a voice, probably female, broke through with a few syllables of intelligible speech.
“—ay..........................ka mar...............ive is da...............................ot repa.........selves. ........afe for no...............er is.....ine, a.........ith ra............erve pow.............last.....rtnight. ............assis............ny sh.......in ra.........wa.............appr.........igh......................ind of .....ace an..............rea; tha...................r wa..................ach................rent coord...........rou................ink...........it......noma........we don.............ar it re......”
“It was sent in the clear, along with a bit of attached...looks like nav data,” Rala said, studying her console, “but the signal is heavily distorted. Looks like Starfleet was able to get a general location by triangulation—a bit over four days away at warp nine, maybe a bit more—but nothing precise.” Clawtips began tapping away at the panel as she summoned a starmap of the region on the main viewscreen, a roughly-spherical blob showing the zone the signal had likely originated from. The tapping continued as she sent coordinates to the helm and began trying to tease more useful info from the corrupted signal. “I’ll try to clean it up.”
"Helm, let's head towards the center of that bubble, Warp 9 if you would Miss Windancer." Cally patted the young woman on the shoulder before moving over to the Ops station.
"Aye, Captain. Bubble Central Warp 9, coming up." Raven chuckled, unable to make it sound right any other way.
She wasn't a nervous pacer, but Cally didn't really wish to wait when they'd been sent this direction specifically by Starfleet Command. In fact, it had been the first direct order shed received from them since Chimera had first crossed the border into unknown space over a year before. Sure, fast shuttles had caught up with them, some sort of somewhat experimental ones. That had brought personnel, taken personnel and were the reason why certain goods had made it out their way.
Behind them in Dashian space, there were apparently a few small starships engaged in follow-up missions, a couple of California-class starships were making follow up missions in their path and a diplomatic mission had been sent to Trarim. Reports were mostly positive, but a couple of incidents involving Dashian and Federation personnel had trickled through as well. She'd made notes and comments and sent THEM back in return, but she may have to go back deeper into Dashian territory once more to try to soothe them with the most familiar face they had. Meanwhile, rescuing this other ship was important too.
These thoughts passed in moments while she turned to the rest, "As you all may be aware, we have been ordered by Starfleet Command to go to the aid of a Federation ship that's issued a distress signal. Hopefully we can get a better render of it, but one way or the other: We're going to go find and rescue whoever is out there, because that's what we do."
Rala had spent nearly thirty minutes glaring at the Ops console, one hand controlling playback, another sorting through various filtering and enhancement algorithms, and the other two adjusting various settings with virtual knobs and sliders. Her frustration wasn’t entirely due to the difficulty of teasing apart the message’s distortion; something about it had been tickling the back of her brain the whole time, and she couldn’t put a claw on why.
As she started to finally make some headway and get more complete words to intelligible levels and the voice became more clear—female, light, slightly hard from stress, and with a bit of an accent—that tickle turned into an itch. She paused for a second, cocking her head, before resuming her work with renewed focus.
After another few seconds, she held up a finger for attention before once more sending playback to the bridge as a whole.
“—day..m...ay, mayd..............e Eureka Maru........arp drive is damaged and unusable, and w...annot repair......rselves.”
Rala’s ears twitched a few times, before pinning themselves slightly downward and back against her skull as the message continued to play. As it went on, it became clear that the woman's accent was Irish, and that she was making an effort to lessen it as she spoke.
“We’re safe for now, but main power is offline, and even with ration........erve power........nly last a fortnight. ...questing assista.....rom any ship...thin range.”
Rala paused playback there. “Cal—” she started as she turned in her seat to look at Calypso, her expression one of mild concern, “Captain...I know her.”
Calypso leaned forward in the command chair and looked over at Rala, "You do? What can you tell me about her?"
“We went to the Academy together,” Rala said. “She dropped out early in her fourth year; something to do with her family, she said.” She turned back to her console, muttering, “What the hell is she doing on a ship way out here?”
Raven was curious as well. Someone who had dropped out shouldn't be ON a starship way out here, much less speaking for the ship!
"That's a good question..." Cally pondered, "Federation-registered ship, that means civilian... Could be a private explorer working to locate a suitable world for a colony for someone? Scientist that wants to go 'into the unknown' to make a discovery that makes their reputation, or even possibly a smuggler?" She was just throwing out options, "Regardless, Starfleet wants us to go in like the cavalry, save them in the nick of time, but I've never been a 'last minute' person.. Raven, let's keep to moderate warp, I don't want to run across whatever nailed them. Rala, keep trying to get in touch with the Eureka Maru, they may be able to give us more details on what brought them down."
"Aye, Captain. No Kobiashi Maru for us...I mean!" Raven's face blanched at her blatant reference to the infamous Captain's test at the Academy...the test that only one man had ever 'passed'.
Rala set the the distress call aside for a moment and entered a query to the computer for information on the ship. “Let’s see...Eureka Maru...Aerie-class surveyor, privately owned...I think you called it, Captain. She’s recorded as being fitted with improved mineral, magnetic, and gravity sensors and stocked up on some non-replicatable supplies about a year and a half ago; last contact before the distress call was when she pinged a comms relay at the edge of Federation space a few months later. Sure sounds like someone treasure hunting to me.”
“Certainly some kind of prospecting,” Alex agreed. “Those ships don’t need many people to run, either. I’ve heard of them working hundreds of light-years from Federation space with a crew of two, and with good automation they might get it down further. They’re built so nothing goes wrong, but when they inevitably do, there’s not much to do but call for help and hope for the best. They’ll have to make do with us.”
“They do have space for a single shuttle,” Rala said, “Type-Six or similar. No data here on whether the Eureka Maru was carrying one or not, though.”
"Small ship..." Calypso remarked, "Let's assume that they aren't, just hedge on the worst-case scenario. Plus, we've got transporters. We're a few days away, let's get a relief party prepped, supplies and the like. I want you on it, Rala, because you have the personal connection, someone from Engineering to check out the issue, then let's get a science officer to check their databanks and one more. We can plan on that last one later."
“Aye, Captain,” Rala said, already starting to put together a rough mental list of who might fill the mentioned positions.
Jadizon had stayed near the tactical rail as the bridge settled into its quiet rhythm, the hum of warp engines smoothing out beneath his boots. His eyes lingered on the projected search region, the hazy sphere of uncertainty hanging on the viewscreen.
“Four days is a long time to sit dead in the water,” he said at last, voice low enough not to break the mood of the bridge. “Especially for a civilian crew that wasn’t planning on needing help.”
He glanced toward Ops, then back to the captain. “Whatever took out their drive, I’d bet it didn’t stop with the first hit. We should assume they’re tired, low on options, and probably not alone out there anymore.”
The Senior Chief straightened, folding his hands behind his back. “Just saying, Captain. When we find them, it won’t be a rescue that starts clean. But it’s one we’ll finish.”
"Not everything is out here to kill us or them, Senior Chief." Cally remarked with a glance over her shoulder, then gave a hand raise of assent, "But you are right, let's be paranoid until we're absolutely certain."
Raven's spine straightened at the thought, not from fear exactly, but her senses went to high alert at the possibility of trouble.
“It doesn’t hurt to be prepared for that eventuality though,” Alex added, nodding to Jadizon.
[open tag; anyone else want to comment before another short timeskip?]
Another half hour passed before Rala frustratedly thumped the heel of one hand on the console. “Dammit,” she grumbled, “what in all the hells scrambled this up so badly,
She glanced over her shoulder at Calypso, who gave her a questioning look. She rubbed at her face with all four hands, then turned slightly in her seat so she could face the Captain more directly and gestured at the console. “I’ve been working on this for about an hour, and aside from what I got earlier, the only thing I’ve managed to pick out is the word ‘anomaly’...I think.” She sighed. “I don’t think I’m going to get anything more out of it from here any time soon, and bluntly, it’s driving me mad. With your permission, I’ll think I’ll set it aside for now. We’ve got days before we’re anywhere near them. I’ll give it a break for now and come back to it after my bridge shift is over, put some personal time into it, get a few more eyes and ears on it.”
"If we've got days before we get there, don't stress about it too horribly.." Cally thought for a moment, "Make sure you get some relaxation in and ask Katie for some help if it comes down to it, she's pretty good with computers and can always use some more time out of the dungeon."
"i can also take a look at it myself, if you'd like," Mark said. "Know a thing or two, mostly from my Academy days, that might be able to help clear things up. No guarantees, but it couldn't hurt."
“Sure,” Rala replied. She rubbed at her eyes. “Later, though; I need to not think about this—she gestured frustratedly at her console, still covered in various elements of signal analysis software, “—for a while.” She turned back to the console, double-checking that her work was saved, and closed the file, returning the interface to her standard Operations settings.
“Good thinking, Lieutenant,” Alex told her. He understood all too well the importance of looking away for a bit, ideally busying oneself with something monotonous, to reset the brain. “Some of the torque sensors are off and need to be realigned.” It was a task that he used to undertake if he needed what he thought Rala needed.
Raven rotated her shoulders, trying to release the tension that had been building for the last hour. It MOSTLY worked, but there was a little spot that was still acting up. An old racing injury that, like the Ancient Earth myths, ached when there was trouble.
Rala glanced over her shoulder at the XO. Her remaining frustration over the distress call nearly made her say something she might have regretted, in a tone of voice she certainly would have regretted; but she stopped herself as she saw his face, getting the impression he was genuinely trying to help her shift her thoughts elsewhere. It wasn’t how she’d normally have done so, but...maybe it would help. She returned her attention to her console, giving a faint sigh and a nod as she pulled up the relevant system info.
As the Chimera raced to the rescue, questions kept bouncing around in Rala’s mind: What has Róisín been up to since she left the Academy? What led her to wind up on a ship this far from home? What did they run into out here? And what are the odds that I’d be on the ship coming to help?
