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Cptn Corizon

Earthshake

With the Dominion busy trying to keep our right rebellion down and the Scorpiads withdrawing from the territory they seized during the war, local patrols in Camelot's space were limited almost exclusively to Alpha Quadrant vessels. That suited Captain Jai Harom-Kell of the Saladin just fine, in his opinion, having forces from either side would only cause problems.

 

The Excelsior-class vessel was in her third tour of the Gamma Quadrant, and in that time she'd seen some strange, miraculous things. She'd also seen the entire quadrant plunged into war over what, nearest her Captain could tell, was a grudge about as old as Earth's written history.

 

Lately things had calmed down. The only problem he seemed to have was the occasional pirate, and they were dispatched pretty easily when a Federation starship showed up on the scene. For the Captain and crew, it had been a welcome change of pace.

 

Today, the Saladin was on the fourth leg of her standard patrol. The whole route took them almost five weeks to complete, and the fourth leg was one of the longer stretches of space on their path. Encompassing seven inhabited systems, four uninhabited systems, two nebulae and a class-VIII protostar there was a lot of ground to cover as the region was fairly well 'spaced.' That meant long downtimes between systems. Which meant general mischief among the crew.

 

Harom-Kell's first officer, Heidi Swanson, had already complained to the Captain about the conduct of the crew. Though he thought she was being a bit uptight, he'd told her to do what she thought appropriate. As such, the crew now found itself plenty busy—cleaning the decks.

 

Sitting on the bridge, while a passel of enlisted and junior officers scrubbed and polished, Harom-Kell leaned back into his chair with a thin smile. At least some good came out of his first officers overeagerness.

 

The Excelsior-class ship suddenly reared, leveled and bucked, tossing the idyll crew in various directions. On the bridge, the once sedate Captain Harom-Kell found himself barking orders.

 

“Report!”

 

He clawed himself back into his seat, bracing as the ship began rolling over violently.

 

“Attempting...” the helmsman was fighting just to stay in his seat as the inertial dampeners struggled to keep up. “Attempting to compensate...”

 

Finally the Saladin leveled out.

 

“What the hell was that?”

 

Behind the command chair, Lt. Gael Berna worked his fingers over the science stations' consoles. “Sensors are still shaky, but it looked... almost like a... well...”

 

Harom-Kell turned in his seat, looking directly at the human science officer. “Looked like what?”

 

“An...earthquake...”

 

Skeptically, “An earthquake.”

 

Nodding his head, Berna looked at the readings once more. “Only in subspace.”

 

At that moment the doors to the turbolift opened and Hedi Swanson along with a half-dozen other senior crew emerged onto the bridge. “Captain...”

 

“Commander I was just about to call for you...”

 

“What the hell was that?”

 

Harom-Kell pointed to Berna, deferring to the scientist.

 

“Like I told the Captain,” Berna said, motioning the commander over to his station. “It almost looks like a earthquake, but in subspace.”

 

Swanson flipped her curly red hair out of her face and pulled a chair next to the science station. “It certainly looks like it.”

 

A geologist by training, she could help but recognize the tail-tail wave signature in the readings she had before her.. but it didn't make any sense for energy waves to travel through subspace like they did through solid rock. “Well if you're correct,” she said finally. “Then there will be an epicenter... let's see if we can trace it... this might be an entirely new phenomena.”

 

Content to let the scientists do their work, Harom-Kell turned his attention to more pressing issues. “Damage report?”

 

The Operations officer was well ahead of him. “Shields down to 50 percent, weapons off-line, structural integrity fields holding, warp and impulse coming back on-line now... we have minor causalities all-over, but medical reports only a few serious injuries...”

 

“Have we gotten any reports from anyone else in the region of the same phenomena?”

 

“Subspace communications arrays still off-line, looks like the subspace-antenna took some damage, no word from engineering on how long it might take to fix...”

 

“Very well,” Harom-Kell said with a slight sigh. “Keep me informed.”

 

“Captain,” Swanson said. “I think we've located the epicenter...”

 

“Okay.”

 

“Looks like it's about a five light years from here...”

 

“Salin-system?” Harom-Kell said, with lifted brows.

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

Salin was not technically on their patrol route, but none the less they'd been keeping tabs on the system. A former Dominion world, it had been claimed by the advance of the Scorpiads and turned into an Al-Ucard base. Under the terms of the Avalon Treaty, the base was kept, but under Al-Ucard control. Near as they could tell, the base was fairly unimportant, and the system itself scientifically insignificant, apparently not.

 

“What are you seeing on long-range scanners?”

 

“That's just it...”

 

“What?”

 

“At first we thought it was our sensors, but they're not damaged...”

 

“Eh?”

 

“Captain... there's nothing there... just some large asteroids...”

 

“Come again?”

 

“It's like... the whole planet... the whole star system... was simply erased from the map.”

 

“Is it safe for us to...”

 

“Already plotting a course, Captain...”

 

“Good... shoot off a message buoy to Camelot Station...”

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I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

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