Pothole (backpost)
Posted on Fri May 22nd, 2026 @ 4:36am by Lieutenant Rala & Captain Calypso Skyie & Lieutenant Commander Alexander Espersen & Lieutenant Jeanine Jeffries
Edited on on Fri May 22nd, 2026 @ 4:59am
Mission:
A Princess Of Tial
Location: Conference Room
Timeline: About 4.5 days after "An Interesting Sideways Direction"
Rala sat at her desk in the Ops office, a seldom-used earpiece in one ear, eyes alternating between being fixed on her computer terminal and focusing on nothing as she made minor adjustments. She wore a scowl on her face, so engrossed in her task that she didn’t notice the initial tremors that ran through the ship.
Come on, give me just a bit more, she thought as she let the audio play again, her former classmate’s voice playing into her ear once more.
“—e warn.....o not appro.......high warp.”
Rala’s eyes widened. That was the clearest she’d gotten the second half of the message all week. Róisín’s voice was unmistakable, even when she was trying to suppress her Irish accent, and it had been particularly urgent in that sentence, before returning to a slightly softer tone as she tried to both convey her information quickly and enunciate clearly.
“...re’s so....ind of ...space ano..ly in...e area; that’s........ecked our warp drive.”
Another shudder ran through the ship. The message kept playing, but Rala had stopped listening as facts started clicking together in her mind.
‘Do not approach at high warp’; ‘spatial anomaly’? Wrecked warp drive. Becca saw something odd at extreme range on the pod sensors...
Another, sharper judder rattled one of the PADDs on her desk as she slapped her combadge. “Rala to Bridge; Helm, all stop, now!” she nearly shouted, before quickly adding, “I’ll explain in a minute.”
She made one last tweak to the controls on her terminal, and felt the ship dropping out of warp as she stood up, only to have to grab her desk to steady herself as a more violent jolt went through the ship. She heard distant popping and fizzling that told her the ship had taken some kind of systems damage.
Shit, she thought, before speaking to her still-open comm line, “I’m on my way up.”
Calypso was in her Ready Room when the ship shuddered and then dropped out of warp. The PADD she'd propped up on the desk and was watching an old movie on had fallen over and she was annoyed at that. The rush of voices she could hear even through the door concerned her even more. She was on her feet in moments and through the door before she even realized it. "Report!"
"Captain, we're out of warp, we hit some turbulence before Lieutenant Rala ordered us to drop out, we've got warning lights on the engineering panel and we're actually locked out of the warp drive." The junior officer sitting at the Ops station shook his head, "There's a diagnostic running now, ma'am."
"Jellsih is going to be fine, she's just got a couple minor burns." The security officer tending the science officer said in a hurry, "Superficial only, her console is going to need some work."
The bowl of parts rattled again. The studs and pins skittering to and fro. JJ raised an eyebrow as she sat, cross-legged, trying to understand the instruction book. It 'looked' simple. But then what she had thus far built didn't look like what it was supposed to.
The ship shuddered again, and the bowl vibrated itself off the coffee table, cascading parts across the floor. She could feel it then—or rather, not feel it. They had dropped out of warp. For the second time in a matter of days, something was wrong with the ship. Something was wrong with the Warp Drive—her Warp Drive.
She reached for the comm-badge that was still on the table, and held it in one hand, tapping it with a thumb. "Jeffries to Bridge. Wanna clue me in?"
“Nothing important enough to worry about, yet.” Cally’s voice came over the comm, though it was clear she wasn’t even sure of that, “We’re running diagnostics now, it’ll be…” There was some incoherent words from someone else, “Fifteen minutes until they’re in and Rala has some sort of reason, she says, so… No need to worry, right?”
Fifteen minutes for results. JJ checked the time, and made a mental note to head up in ten.
The young Ensign on Ops duty during Gamma Shift glanced over his shoulder as he heard the turbolift doors swish open to admit Rala. He started to get up, but the Draakri waved him down. “Sensor sweep, priority on subspace bands,” she ordered, heading instead to one of the auxiliary stations along the back wall. “Hook into the mission pod, too.”
She nodded at the Captain and XO, simply saying, “You’ll want to hear this.”
Before even pulling out the chair, Rala accessed the work she’d been doing in her office, pulling up the message from the Eureka Maru. The algorithm she’d started processing as she’d left the office had managed to clean it up a bit more, leaving it, if not completely clear, at least intelligible.
She pressed ‘play’, and turned around to gauge the responses of those present.
“Mayday, mayday, mayday;” the voice filled the bridge, slightly staticky but much cleaner than before, “this is the Eureka Maru. Our warp drive is damaged and unusable, and we cannot repair it ourselves. We’re safe for now, but main power is offline, and even with rationing, reserve power will only last a fortnight. Requesting assistance from any ship within range. Be warned, do not approach at high warp. There’s some kind of subspace anomaly in the area; that’s what wrecked our warp drive. I’m attaching both our current coordinates and roughly where we think we first hit the anomaly, but we don’t know how far it reaches.”
"Do you have the two positions she references?" Alex asked. "Where are we relative to those?"
Rala turned back to the auxiliary console and checked the data attached to the message. “Yes, Sir,” she said, sending the starmap of the region to the main viewscreen, along with the ‘bubble’ Starfleet’s rough triangulation had managed. She zoomed in until the bubble occupied most of the screen, then updated the image with the Chimera’s current location, represented by a Starfleet Delta, slightly inside the near edge of the bubble. Lastly, she imported the attached nav data from the message. “Here’s where they think they first encountered the anomaly,” she said, overlaying a red marker on the map, slightly past the bubble’s center from their current position; “and here’s where they were when the message was sent.” A green marker appeared, significantly to the left of, and slightly below, the Chimera’s course, near the edge of the bubble. “There’s a chance they’ve drifted some since then, but based on what I remember of Róisín, she’d have at least tried to bring them to a relative stop using thrusters, or to convince the person in charge to do so.”
"Also, what type of ship is the Eureka Maru? Maybe we can get through where they can't. Sounds like they're a civilian, but what the hell are they even doing out here?" Cally shook her head slightly.
Rala accessed the records once more, splitting the main viewscreen between the map and the info on the Eureka Maru, showing its upgraded mineral, magnetic, and gravitic sensors; and last contact with a Federation comms relay some fifteen months prior. “Aerie-class surveyor,” Rala said, “privately owned; likely prospecting.”
“Sensor sweep complete, Ma’am,” the junior Ops officer piped up. “And I looped in the mission pod like you asked.”
“Good,” Rala replied. “Overlay it on the map, please.” As he did that, she accessed the raw data from her aux console.
The main viewscreen’s split shifted to keep the information on the Maru in one corner while focusing on the map. The bubble vanished, no longer needed, and a region of orange blobs appeared. The region as a whole was oblate, almost disc-shaped, covering over a dozen lightyears and enveloping all three markers—the red marker was indeed near one edge; the delta representing the Chimera was near another, but farther in, apparently having just flown through the edge of one of the orange blobs; and the green marker was deeper in, almost to the center.
“Sure looks like a subspace anomaly to me,” said the junior Ops officer.
“Yeah, I bet Rebecca’s going to have a field day with this,” Rala said, still studying the raw data on the aux console. “It...reminds me a little of the Hekaras Rift,” she mumbled, thinking out loud, “but...no, this is different. No tetryon radiation to speak of, for one.” She paused, lost in thought for a second or two, then spoke up again. “Short version, it makes warp travel a pain in the neck. The bigger, stronger, and faster a warp field is that enters one of those blobs, the nastier the results, and some blobs are worse than others. And, of course, they shift over time.”
"Can we plot a course around it?" Cally asked as she stood to take a better look at the map, pointing at what looked to be a valley that wove around like a serpentine, "How fast do they shift? I think we could manage a mid-warp slalom through that."
“Assuming the jolt that almost knocked me off my feet and the pops and sizzling I heard through the bulkheads don’t mean what I’ve got a feeling they mean? Maybe. Ensign?” Rala raised her voice slightly, projecting across the room to the young man sitting in her usual spot, “keep scanning. I want a better picture of how this stuff is changing over time.”
“Aye, Ma’am,” came the reply.
Rala returned her attention to the Captain. “Even if the Chimera can get through it, a shuttle might be a better idea. Smaller ship, smaller warp field, theoretically less vulnerable, even at relatively higher warp factors.”
"Right... All right, time to call the professionals in." Cally tapped her comm, "Cally to JJ, could you come to the bridge as soon as possible? We've got a problem that's right up your alley."
"I was already on my way." JJ stepped out of the tubolift as the Captain finished her summons. "What we got?"
The Captain jumped at the voice right behind her, "Oh! Um, that was fast!" She took a step back away from JJ to cover how startled she was, "I gotta put bells on people..." She muttered to herself.
JJ could not suppress a grin. "Cuffs too?" She switched to business mode. "Please tell me I don't need to go crawling in the catwalk... again."
“No, not catwalks, not even anything that should be dangerous at all.” Cally gave JJ a mild look, “And don’t forget you have people besides yourself to send into dangerous situations as well. It’s the curse of being in charge of a department, remind me to tell you why later, maybe run you through some exercises. Otherwise I’ll have to use those handcuffs for reasons other than what you’re hoping.”
“Lieutenant Jeffries,” Rala said, greeting her fellow newly-minted department head. “I loathe needing to pull you back into the grind so soon after your adventure in the nacelle, but the need has arisen nonetheless.”
"Well, I don't." Cally said towards JJ, "Let's take this to the conference room. We can get a better map of what all's going on in there."
Cally moved around the table towards the big screen and transferred the map that was on the main viewscreen on the bridge over to this one, "Think of this as a gravitational topographical map of local space. We're here at the very edge of this um... Sump, I guess it'd be called?"
JJ picked a corner of the table to lean on, rather than taking a chair. This wasn't the most formal of briefings, and she wanted the chance to stand for a bit.
Rather than sitting down, Rala moved to the LCARS screen on the wall, tapping at it to retrieve the files she’d been working on. She turned to the room’s other two occupants. “Jeffries, I’m guessing you’ve heard the first part of this message by now,” she said, and played back a few seconds of audio from the beginning Eureka Maru’s distress call, then paused it. “This is why we left Tial early, and why we’ve been maintaining high warp since, aside from the problem with the coil.” She nodded to Jeffries, ears flicking back in a quick sign of respectful acknowledgement. “Unfortunately, the possibly-more-important second half of the message was much more difficult to reconstruct. I got this just before we hit the turbulence earlier,” she said, playing the message’s warning for Jeffries. “That’s when I called up to the Bridge and ordered the all-stop.
“Essentially, based on the data we’ve gathered so far, the more energy a warp field is enclosing, the worse the effect is,” Rala said. “The bigger you are, the faster you’re going, the rougher the ride gets.”
"Are you saying Chimera has a big ass?" Cally asked Rala, with a hint of laughter in her voice, "I mean, she kinda does, but it would be treasonous to say it outright."
"She's not exactly light up top, either." JJ couldn't help the smirk. "So. Long story medium. We got ourselves a hauler somewhere in..." She gestured to the mess of gravitational sinkholes. "That. Chimera can't enter, cause her warp bubble is too big." There really was only one solution.
JJ held Rala's gaze for a half second. "Shuttle trip?"
“More scout than hauler; and Chimera could, but not quickly enough, especially given the repairs I suspect she needs.” Rala gave Jeffries a nod. “Shuttle trip. I’ve got ideas for a couple of modifications we should be able to make to one of the Type Elevens within an hour or so to let it handle this better.”
“As for the team...” Rala said, thinking out loud as much as communicating to the others, “...myself, for starters. Someone from Medical, in case anyone on the Maru is hurt; I’ll see who Kally thinks might be up for an away mission. Lieutenant McMillen; she’ll probably jump at the chance to get a look at something like this up close, and she might come in handy.” She glanced back at JJ. “And someone from your department. I don’t want to be the only engineer on this one.”
"You, me, Rebecca, and recommend Tessa - pretty much handy in most things." JJ had a thought and looked at Cally. "Captain, do we have a Delta Flyer on board? They were originally specced out for intense conditions." The origin story wasn't one she'd studied, but the broad strokes had been thrown around the Academy's Engineering building.
"We... Don't at this time." Cally said regretfully, "We're supposed to have one on board, but it never arrived before we left and we weren't able to um..." She coughed the word 'acquire' "one before we left Federation space. Once we get back for our refit, we'll pick it up, that's a given."
“I’m less familiar with the Delta-class shuttles than I am the Type Elevens anyway,” Rala mused. “With your ‘go’, Captain, I’ll start getting the team together, and then meet you, Jeffries, in the shuttlebay so we can start working on the shuttle. Sound good?”
"Then I say 'Go.'" Cally nodded in confirmation, "Grab whoever you think you need and go rescue some civilians. It's good to be a Starfleet officer." The Captain smiled broadly.
