This story was originally published for the USS Maximillian.

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Chapter Four: Calm

Despite the fact that a starship must be manned at all hours since there is no real sense of time in space, considering every planet and race has their own standard time they go by, the Maximillian did have a night shift. While the ship was still fully staffed and operated, the senior-most command staff tended to not work this particular series of hours. The ship itself had now been at Warp 7, the usual speed when there wasn't a dire emergency, for twelve hours now, and it would be another full day and a half before the quickly-put-together task force was assembled in full. There were still late negotiations ongoing with other races, and at this point it was a little unclear who exactly would be attending this meeting in the first place. Admiral T'Kill remarked that there was a small chance they'd be the only one there. Blobbin just shrugged, with quickly formed shoulders, saying that it wouldn't be the first time he showed up to a party that nobody else came to. T'Kill had to choke down a snide remark at that.

Because of the shift, the only senior command staff member on duty was in fact the lowest ranking of them all: Lieutenant Amy Armstrong Thomas, working diligently in engineering. It was not the first time she worked late; in fact she had made quite a habit of it. She felt she had a lot to prove, and also preferred the peace and quiet of the night, as the 'night-shift' tended to do things a bit quieter, despite there being just as many of them as the other shifts. At this particular point in time, she was going over a fresh padd, handed to her by Commander Tamak on his way to his brief rest period. The padd listed strange specifications that were to be configured by the Engineering staff. Nothing too out of the ordinary, but it didn't make any sense. It appeared they were supporting some kind of massive power fluctuation, and had to offset the power somewhere else, as these specifications seemed, at least on screen, prone to overloading.

The last thing she needed was an overload situation. Strangely enough, overloads were the cause of most of the destruction and chaos on a ship even if it never saw an open battle. There were massive amounts of energy flowing through a starship at any given time, and if given free range suddenly without dampeners it could easily burn someone's face right off, even killing them just as easy as a phaser set to 'kill'. It was customarily unavoidable in tense situations for an overload to occur, but on the Maximillian, one hadn't happened in years, not since before even Tamak was chief engineer, and that had been before they had entered the Menkare Expanse. While Thomas knew there was a battle coming up, at least from the rumblings around the bay, she hoped this was one streak she could keep going. But these specifications, supposedly coming direct from one of the Admirals themselves, certainly weren't going to help matters at all. She sighed, as she wasn't one to question orders, and instead began formulating ways to lessen the chance of something going wrong as much as possible. Plans formed in her mind, were disregarded and were reformed as fast as she could think. She called over the second-in-command on duty and received his opinions, and reformulated bypass strategies and new configurations.

While she thought, she stared at the warp core, its unending cycle of lights moving up and down calming her restless brain. She would think it through. Her knack for solutions had made her chief, after all, when most thought she was too young for the position. Of course, the fact that she was the latest member in a famous line of Armstrongs, stretching back to the man that walked on the moon, certainly hadn't hurt her upward momentum as she went through Starfleet Academy, but it was the results that had got her where she was, she hoped, and she was ready at a moment's notice to prove this was the case. This was just another opportunity to do that.

Lieutenant Thomas moved away from the core to an engineering console and began rerouting power, just in the systems dedicated to this particular console at first, and then satisfied that nothing would go wrong, or the console would suddenly refuse to work, she expanded the programming. She smiled as she did so, losing herself in her work. This would be easier than she thought, though she didn't think she'd be able to get it done by the end of her shift. Fortunately, it had been made quite clear that this was a side project, and nothing that needed to be trumpeted around. Thomas knew about that too. One of the best examples of a person bound for great things in Starfleet was someone who knew when to keep their mouth shut.

All over the ship, most of the senior command was sleeping, but in the sole android's quarters, there was a sort-of action classical mix playing in the background as Lieutenant Commander Critch Starblade and Admiral Robert Lyon engaged their formidable wits in that most deadly game of chance and skill. Their eyes met, staring each other down. A bead of perspiration on Starblade's forehead.

"Roll the dice, commander." Lyon stated plainly, not giving away any hint of the plans working behind his eyes.

"Yes, sir." Starblade said just as plainly, shaking his hand a few times, and then launching two square white dotted objects onto the flat board. "Five."

Lyon nodded as the small silver object moved towards its destination: a box marked with a pointing man in a blue outfit. "Go directly to jail. Go directly to jail…"

Starblade sighed, barely holding in a curse. "Yeah, heard it before." The small car was placed in the lower left corner.

Lyon stretched suddenly, aware of the late hour. "Why do we always end up playing this for so long? It takes too long with only us."

"We played chess when it was your turn, remember? My turn, my game. Besides, if you want a short game, chess isn't exactly it."

"It is when I play it." Lyon winked, and the two shared a laugh. Lyon rolled, and the game continued. Starblade thought, not for the first time tonight, that he should bring up the ship, the journey, anything that they were currently involved with. After thinking it through he decided to leave it be for now. They would have plenty of time in the next several days to deal with the invader, and he knew from experience that it was important to take the quiet moments when they came, for the next life-or-death situation may only be seconds away. 'Seize the day', and all that jazz. Starblade's turn came up, and he rolled, and lost himself in the game.

The night continued, but on every starship throughout the fleet, there is always at least one crewmember that was always on duty, no matter what the roster and schedule said. The Captain. Captain Septaric was not in her room or the ready room, nor the bridge, however. Instead she stood deep in the bowels of the Maximillian, in the center of Stellar Cartography. Its owner, Lieutenant Meowran, was asleep in her bed, as was all but a skeleton crew working behind the scenes. It did not matter to Septaric, who knew her away around the stations needed to display what she wanted. Right now it was focusing on the object, its past movements and its trajectory. As had been said and detailed in every classified report she had received, the object was heading straight for sector 001, and perhaps points past if they were lucky enough. But hoping for the best was not the Federation's strong suit, nor should it be considering the several incursions that had taken place over the past years.

Septaric was amazed at the straight path that the ship was taking, as it didn't seem to intersect any planets or other heavenly bodies. Instead it appeared to have already chosen a course, and nothing would dissuade it from its path. It was simple…and Septaric suddenly wondered if the craft was aiming to make things even simpler for itself than anyone had guessed thus far. She raised her head and spoke.

"Computer, is there any solar winds or phoneme in the current path of the vessel? Or in a surrounding area that would affect the path?"

"Checking." The computer's firmly feminine voice sounded out, and Septaric was left alone with her thoughts. After a beat, the computer spoke again. "There is no stellar happening within the predicted path of the unknown vessel. However, there are solar winds emanating from the sun in sector 425."

"Recompute the path taking that into account."

"Processing." Septaric could feel the anxiousness building up inside her. She could tell she was about to unlock something important, though she could never guess what the results would be.

"Results displaying now." The computer sounded out, and the object's path was displayed as a bright yellow line beginning at the approximate current location and moved as before into Earth space, crossing directly past Earth's moon, but getting no closer to the third planet. As it moved past, it continued until it reached what could only be its destination. Septaric's breath caught.

It was Sol. Earth's sun and the center point of Sector 001. She let her breath out and growled, her Klingon heritage not hidden deep enough. Now that she knew where they were going, a new question had arisen.

Why?