Star Trek: Odyssey: Directives

Part 2

Captain's Log: Stardate: 59001.3: We have come across the derelict body of the USS Thunderchild on an uninhabited planet in the Gamma Quadrant. The last known location of the Thunderchild was near Theta Cygni. And now we find the ship abandoned and unsalvageable. One thing that has been on the forefront of my mind since we discovered the ship is: Where is the crew? Wherever they are, I hope they are safe, if they're still alive.

It was a lifeless husk, its back broken, its mammoth form half buried in the shifting sands of the ground. Engineers from the Alexandria swarmed over the primary hull of the Thunderchild. They took tricorder readings in between shielding their faces from the scouring lash of a sand laced hurricane speed like winds.

A sudden gust of whipped Lieutenant Commander Hoshi Sato Zofchak's long, dark ponytail over her shoulder. When she first came aboard and became a member of the Alexandria's crew, her hair was just past chin length but she had grown it out to a longer length, a length that was about the same as what she had when she was recruited by Captain Jonathan Archer to join the crew of the NX-01 Enterprise. She swatted her hair away from her face as she squinted into the blinding crimson flare of the rising suns. Adding to the brightness was a shimmer of light with a humanoid shape, a few meters away from her. The high pitched drone of the transporter beam was drowned out by a wailing wind in minor chords. As the sound and shine faded away, the silhouette of Jermaine Allensworth strode toward her across the buckled hull plates.

"How are things going, Commander?" He asked.

"Slowly." Hoshi said. "We didn't really expect to find one of our own ships crash landed on a planet in the gamma quadrant." She started walking and nodded for him to follow her. "We're seeing some unusual subatomic damage in the hull. Not sure what it means yet. All we know for sure is the Thunderchild has been here for about two hundred years."

"Two hundred years?"

Hoshi nodded. "Yes, sir. We can't seem to find any reason how that may have happened."

They reached the forward edge of the primary hull, where the force of impact had peeled back the metallic skin of the Akira class starship to reveal its space frame.

As Hoshi and Allensworth descended into the ship, Allensworth asked more questions. "Have you been able to identify any of the crew?"

"We haven't found any bodies." Hoshi said. "No remains of any kind" Her footsteps scraped across grit covered deck plates as she led him toward the ship's core.

A dusty haze in the air was penetrated at irregular angles by narrow beams of sunlight that found their way through the dark wreckage. As they moved farther from the sparse light and deeper into the murky shadows of deck nine, Hoshi thought she saw brief flashes of bluish light, moving behind the bent bulkheads at the edges of her vision. When she turned her head to look for them, she found only darkness and she dismissed the flickers as residual images fooling her retinas, as her eyes adapted to the darkness near the ship's core.

"Is it possible they abandoned ship and settled somewhere on the planet?"

"Maybe, but most of their gear is still on board and this desert goes on for nine hundred kilometers in every direction. I don't think they would've made it very far." She said as they turned the corner toward a dead end, where Hoshi's husband, Lieutenant Commander Dustin Zofchak hunched beneath a low hanging tangle of wires.

"Commander," Allensworth said. "Any luck?"

"Not yet, sir." His short brown hair was matted with sweat and dust. The two officers stepped up behind him as he continued in his eastern North American intonation. "It's a damned museum piece is what it is."

The trio heard footsteps approaching; they turned around to find Lieutenant Julia McKenzie. The security chief had been in charge of the search for the crew's remains. Her uniform was streaked with smears of dirt and grime, and a faint speckling of dust clung to her long blond hair. "We finished our sweep, Captain." She said, her eyes darting nervously back down the corridor. "There's no sign of the crew or anyone else.

"What about combat damage?" Allensworth asked. "Maybe they were boarded and captured."

McKenzie shook her head. "I don't think so, sir. All the damage I saw fits with a crash landing. There are no blast effects on the internal bulkheads, no marks from weapons fire. Whatever happened here, it wasn't a fire fight." Nodding toward the route to the exit, McKenzie spoke anxiously. "Can we get out of here now?"

"What's wrong, Lieutenant?" Allensworth asked, whose attention had sharpened in response to McKenzie's apparent agitation.

The human woman cast another fearful look down the corridor behind her and frowned as she turned back toward her captain and both Zofchaks. "There's something in here. I can't explain it but I can feel it. There's a sgail watching us."

"A ghost?" Allensworth asked almost allowing a smile to slip from his control. From time to time, McKenzie would use words of her Irish heritage to describe something.

"I don't know. But I heard things, and I felt the hairs on my neck stand up, and I keep seeing blinks of light in the dark…"

"Blue flashes?" Hoshi cut in.

"Yes!" McKenzie said sounding excited by Hoshi's confirmation.

Allensworth shook his head, smiling and started walking. He figured the darkness of the ship was getting to his officers. "We'll head back up to the surface. Keep on things, Commander."

"Aye, sir." Zofchak said.

Commander Alex Merriell stood on the bow of the Thunderchild. He wondered what had happened to the crew. The fact that a ship from the 24th century crash landed on a planet is not unheard of, but a ship from the 24th century crash landed on a planet and shows signs of being there for over two hundred years was in fact unheard of. He wanted to get to the bottom of this mystery as soon as possible. He watched Engineers and science specialists of the Alexandria swarm over the derelict ship.

Lieutenant Liz Dowler, one of the Alexandria's senior science officers, approached the first officer. Lieutenant Dowler's expertise was astral anthropology but she offered to assist in any way she could with this investigation.

"Good news, Commander." She said. "The engineering team is powering up the Thunderchild's computer now. I thought you might want to come down and have a look."

"No thanks, Lieutenant." Merriell said. "I'd prefer to stay topside." One of the advantages of being first officer was that he only had to answer to one person and that being the captain. It spared him the potential of embarrassment of admitting that his walk though of the Thunderchild earlier that day had left him profoundly creeped out. While touring deck six, he'd been all but certain that he saw spectral blue flashes that had lurked around the edges of his vision.

To his silent chagrin, multiple sensor sweeps and tricorder checks had detected nothing out of the ordinary on the Thunderchild. Maybe it had been him imagination or a trick of the light, but he'd felt the same galvanic tingle on his skin that other crewmembers had described while being down in the ship, and he'd been overcome by a desire to get out of the wreck's stygian corridors as quickly as possible.

He'd doubled security detail on the planet but had said nothing about thinking the ship might be haunted. One of the drawbacks of being a superior officer was the constant need to maintain semblance of rationality, and seeing ghosts didn't quite fit the bill.

Dowler squinted at the scorched white sky and palmed a layer of sweat from her forehead, up through her brown hair. "Did it actually get hotter out here?"

"Yeah, it did." Merriell said. "Where are you with the metallurgical analysis?"

"Almost done, sir. So far we detected molecular distortion in the space frame consistent with intense subspatial stress."

"What was the cause?" Merriell asked.

"Hard to be sure." Dowler replied.

"In other words, you don't know." Merriell said.

"I'm not prepared to make that admission yet. I don't have enough data to form a hypothesis, but my tests have ruled out several obvious answers."

"Such as?"

"Extreme warp velocities, wormholes, quantum slipstream vortices, Iconian gateways, and the Q. Time travel is an obvious answer to how they appeared two hundred years in the past but that's all we have to go on."

"Keep on it, Lieutenant. Something moved this ship clear across the galaxy and we need to know what it was and we need to know soon."

"Understood, Commander." Dowler turned and headed towards the aft section of the ship, towards a group of engineers who were assembling a bulky assortment of machinery that would conduct a more thorough analysis of the Thunderchild's bizarrely distressed subatomic structures.