"Silence"

[FredM 0]

"Silence is (an) argument carried out by other means."

- Ernesto 'Che' Guevara

 

 

 

 

He was alone. It was actually an odd sensation, something that rarely occurred on the bridge of a Federation starship. Normally there would be at least four or five people manning stations, running routine tasks and keeping the vessel running smoothly. The sound of numerous computer consoles, displays and even the routine hum of the forward viewer as it gathered data from the sensor arrays always existed. This, mixed with routine chatter or the sound of commands being typed into computers could always been found on the bridge.

 

Yet, for all these norms, none of them applied. Captain Fred Michaels found himself sitting alone, on the bridge of a Federation starship, seeing only what the dim emergency lights could show and hearing a signal he simply couldn't understand.

 

It had been close to thirty minutes since he had sent his officers off, attempting to stabilize the Reaent and hopefully start developing a solution to their current problem. It had been just the latest in a series of problems over the past week. Their trip back to Deep Space Six seemed like it had started decades ago. They had traveled twenty-five thousand light-years in a matter of seconds. This had followed the discovery of something that looked like an object no one had seen for almost a century. Then, they'd been tossed out of the galaxy and back again...all within a matter of thirty or forty minutes. In the end, the crew of the Reaent were sitting back where the journey had begun. They were again twenty-five thousand light-years from home, but now sitting in a star system that supposedly didn't exist.

 

Here, the mystery grew deeper. Here, evidence of a massive conflict or war on a Class N world centuries ago could be found. Here, the Reaent had met another ship...another vessel...indeed no one within the Federation had seen in close to a hundred years. It was here they had heard the songs of an object known only in databanks as "the Probe." It was here the Reaent had fallen to the effects of the device as easily as those twenty-third century starships had so many days ago.

 

Unlike the time before, there would be no Admiral James T. Kirk to save them. No miracle rescue from a band of legends. The Reaent was on it's own, powerless and disabled. The ship Michaels had always saw as having the heart of a lion had fallen to it's knees in fear. It was as if a father had shown up, starting an argument with his five year old son. The child would cower in fear, afraid and terrified of what wrath the parent might bring. This was what Fred saw as happening. His lion....his ship....she had fallen to the ground like those Starfleet vessels almost a century ago. Like those Captains, Michaels was also starting to run out of time.

 

While many improvements had been made during the last one hundred or so years, some of the largest had been in regard to power systems. The Reaent had more secondary and emergency power backups than most ships within the fleet. In fact, the Sovereign Class designers had used some of the Ambassador Class's emergency system layouts during this latest class' conception. This meant that unlike those ships so many years ago who found themselves having to use battery power which drained so quickly it was exhausted in a matter of an hour, the Reaent could potentially survive for several days under ideal conditions.

 

Regretfully, the ship was not under ideal conditions. While the power stored within the batteries was not immediately neutralized by the Probe's carrier wave, it was having in effect. As the Captain leaned back in his chair listening to the call from an object no one seemed to be able to understand, he wondered if they would win this battle against time.