Being summoned to the captain’s presence was for lowly ensigns a harrowing experience. It meant that the next best thing to the keeper of all fates had taken notice of you in some capacity and unless appraised beforehand, the reasons why would only be revealed upon arrival. Would it be a good or bad encounter was a quantum decision awaiting the collapse of the waveform upon observation.

Which is why Kelly Tabaaha found herself gulping once, the whole bridge at her back, before tapping the call button beside the ready room door. She had to remark, since Atlantis’ near-disaster at the battle of Leonis, repairs had been completed quickly and you’d never know the bridge had been half destroyed. Though from what she’d heard from her engineering friends, the bridge she’d just walked across hadn’t been the one she nearly died on. Merely a space bridge module that was swapped as part of Atlantis’ hasty repairs before being dispatched back to the Thomar Expanse.

She’d not been privy to the other repairs yet, but Atlantis’ weapons were back online, her shields were fully operational and more importantly to her the engines and manoeuvring systems had been fully restored. She’d thought the ship would have been laid up for months, but they’d barely stayed in the hands of the yards for a week. It had been more expedient to get as many ships back out in operation as possible than to tend to the most damaged first and have ships with minor damage circling the Avalon Yards for weeks awaiting their turn at the slip.

“Enter,” came the captain’s voice from the other side of the door, interrupting her reverie and causing the door to part and let her step over that threshold into the mystic confines of the ready room.

She knew it wasn’t some special font of wisdom, some mystic retreat which granted the captain or commander insight beyond mortal understanding, but couldn’t help but feel a little disappointment at how normal the space was. It was just an office, admittedly as big as her quarters, but still just an office. But then an element of concern settled on her, not just the captain being present, seated behind a desk, but the presence of Lieutenant T’Val, standing to the captain’s left.

“Ensign Tabaaha, front and centre please,” Captain Theodoras said, slowly rising from her seat.

Three large steps into the office, the door closing behind her, retreat no longer an option, she brought herself to attention before her superior officer and the ship’s master. “Ma’am,” she said, trying to sound as confident as she could.

“First off Ensign, relax,” the captain said, offering a smile and just by her tone of voice Kelly could feel her back muscles relaxing. So, this wasn’t some sort of grilling for actions unknown to her. Then why? “I wanted to thank you Ensign for your actions in the Battle of Leonis. Your steady hand at the helm saw Atlantis through what I can reassure you was the worst fighting this ship has ever seen.”

“Just doing my job ma’am,” she said in an attempt to downplay her actions. In truth, she had been frightened out of her mind and could barely recall anything after the shouted order for evasive manoeuvres. She’d apparently had to be pried away from the helm when the bridge had been evacuated. Instinct and training had kicked in and shock had done a good job of blanking out what truly happened. She remembered the order, the frantic commands to the helm, then walking up in sickbay and immediately throwing up.

“I said the same thing to my captain once, after being so inconsiderate as to bleed all over the bridge,” the captain said. “Lieutenant T’Val, would you please?”

Lieutenant T’Val revealed the padd she’d been holding behind her back and held it up to read from. “Ensign Kelly Tabaaha, for actions becoming of a Starfleet officer, for your valiant efforts during the First Battle of Leonis and your innovative suggestions that allowed the starship Atlantis to attend the Battle of Deneb in a timely fashion, I have recommended you for a promotion to the rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade, effective immediately.”

The Vulcan helmswoman then passed the padd to the captain, who looked it over, held her thumb to a part of the screen for a moment, and then set the padd down. “Lieutenant T’Val, your recommendation is noted and accepted. Please attend to the Lieutenant’s uniform before someone writes her up for being out of uniform.” The captain’s smile took over her face and was punctuated with a wink of her right eye. “Congratulations Lieutenant Junior Grade Tabaaha.”

“Indeed,” Lieutenant T’Val said as she was pinning the hollow pip to Kelly’s collar. “Your performance has been most satisfactory Lieutenant and I look forward to training you for the Valkyrie-class fighter.”

“Ma’am?” she asked T’Val, confusion fogging her brain for only a moment. Then the implication hit her. “You want me as a Harpy?”

“Are you saying you don’t want to join Harpy Flight?” the captain challenged.

“No ma’am! I mean, I do! It’d be an honour.”

“Good! Now, take the rest of the shift off,” the captain said, which caused T’Val’s left eyebrow to raise slightly, she noticed. “I remember being lower decks and how much showing off a new rank pip meant.”

“No frigging way,” Matt said quietly as he sat himself down on the couch next to Kelly in Port Royal, eyes on the new pip on her collar. “When did this happen?” he asked, a happy tone to his voice.

“About three hours ago,” Kelly answered, tilting her head slightly to show off. “But you were on duty, so thought I’d wait. Been here having a few drinks. Already met up with Nerys who was furious and overjoyed at the same time.”

“That’s amazing,” he said, then leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “Can I ask why?”

“The captain and Lieutenant T’Val both said it was for seeing the ship through Leonis.” She couldn’t help the vague discomfort that came with saying that name. The sense of dread and panic. She’d been talking with one of the counsellors about it; they promised it would ease. One day.

“Well, they’re right you know. You did a damn fine job,” he reassured her.

“If I’d been better those three on the bridge wouldn’t have –“

“You saved everyone else,” Matt interrupted her. “You kept the ship flying and you got us out of trouble.”

“I guess,” she admitted.

“You then did work with Lieutenant Michaels to fly us into danger at Deneb,” he teased. “But think of it this way – without your idea, Atlantis and all our allies would have been late to the party. You saved a lot of people’s lives with that idea.”

“Wouldn’t have worked as well as it did without that Fleet Formation hardware letting us slipstream behind Papakura as close as we did,” she added. “But I’m not going to talk you out of heaping praise on me, am I?”

“Nope, don’t think you will, Lieutenant Junior Grade Tabaaha,” he answered.

“Well then, how about I promise to send a thank you note to whatever boffin on Earth came up with that system, we consider me to be blanketed in praise and adoration from my boyfriend and we get a drink before we try to figure out who’s quarters are safe for a bit of private celebrations?” She watched Matt’s expression change as he nodded in agreement with her, and then his eyes took on a mischievous gleam at the end.

She watched him rocket away towards the bar and had to admit to herself she really did enjoy sending him to get the drinks all the time. It gave her something to look at. And she did enjoy watching his confident demeanour as he conversed with the bar staff while they made the drinks, then his not-swagger as he returned. All of that and a caring gentleman to boot.

“For you, Lieutenant,” he said, a flourish on his delivery as he set her drink down, giving the glass a slight tap and causing a storm of colour to briefly appear, the chemical reaction fluorescing momentarily.

“Thank you, Ensign,” she answered. “Maybe, just maybe, I won’t write you up on report.”

“Or maybe you can?” he suggested with a waggle of his eyebrows she couldn’t help but recoil from, cringe at the expression. “Okay, don’t do that again,” he conceded.

“Yeah, don’t.” She leaned into him as he sat back down. “I love you Matt, truly I do, but don’t ever waggle your eyebrows again. You like so stupid when you do.”

He laughed in good humour. “No worries there Kells. So, if you’ve been off duty for a few hours, then you hadn’t heard about the distress call we picked up.” He sipped experimentally at his drink – something peach-coloured and still mostly frozen. The look on his face suggested it needed to warm up first.

“No, what was it?” she asked.

“Some Cardassian ship, a Gul Malek asking for any and all assistance. Though from what I heard it’s more a case of them repeating someone else’s distress call.” He shrugged. “But alas, I’m just a junior officer.”

“So am I mister,” she said. “So don’t expect me to have some miraculous insight you don’t have.”

“Of course, Kelly,” he said, a bit more seriously. Or at least less jokingly. “Just having a bit of – oh, look at that.” His attention had gone from her to the windows facing into space, along the top of Atlantis’ saucer.

She turned herself and was greeted instantly by the purple and peach disk of a gas giant, large in the windows and dominating their view. Atlantis had dropped out of warp exceedingly close to the planet, a testament to the skill of Lieutenant T’Val. It was only that proximity that allowed the masses in Port Royal, getting to their feet at the view, to see some of what had called their ship here.

Just on the terminator between night and day hung a Galor-class starship, not in a standard orbit, but low enough to be buffeted by the gasses of the planet itself. Its tail was pointed straight down as if she was trying to climb out of the gravity well, or at least arrest any further descent into the depths.

“Well, that’s not good,” Kelly said as she and Matt approached the windows with a few others. “Not good at all.”

Captain’s log, April 10, 2401.

Atlantis is responding to a dual distress call from a pair of Cardassian starships just outside claimed Union space in the Expanse. The CUS Ta’del is apparently stuck within the upper layers of a gas giant, unable to break free, having found itself in such a situation while attempting to rescue a science vessel.

We’ve been informed the science vessel is in no immediate danger at present, so we’re focusing on the Ta’del and I’m hoping to learn more upon meeting with Gul Malek once his ship is out of danger. From there we’ll then begin operations to rescue the science vessel.

Ships in peril is honestly a welcome distraction from the pageantry of Frontier Day, which while Atlantis isn’t involved in any of the celebrations, there are events planned aboard ship to coincide with celebrations elsewhere. The crew have been distracted for a week now with all the preceding multimedia we’re receiving. Hopefully, an honest rescue mission will help people refocus around here.

Honestly, after the last few years, the Federation and Starfleet need a feel-good moment like Frontier Day, but for Starfleet, it just feels like a bunch of admirals getting together to pat each on the back for jobs well done, which rings hollow in the aftermath of Deneb.

“Welcome to Atlantis, Gul Malek,” Tikva said as the Cardassian officer was shown into the conference room. He’d come aboard with two of his own officers in tow, which she’d already been informed were his chief engineer and science officer.

“Indeed so,” Gul Malek said as he looked her over once, then turned to Mac at her side and appraised him as well. From the emotions she could feel from him, he considered Mac in a better light than her. Some sense of superiority, an equivalating height to competency.

Which when she looked over his officers, both roughly the same height as Malek, she was reasonably certain was some bias that Malek held. Now if he was aware of it or not, she couldn’t tell. Curse her mixed genetics and only being an empath.

Let’s get Lin in here!

We are not calling Lin in here just because she’s marginally taller than he is.

Then what about just so we can look at her?

Seriously, when are we going to grow up?

Never?

Never!

“Please, have a seat. Now that we’ve towed Ta’del out of the upper atmosphere and back to a stable orbit, I’m sure you’ve got a number of engineers who will be wanting to catch up on some sleep, yes?” she asked, a wave of her hand to the empty seats around the table, dutifully stocked with light refreshments by the third and final Starfleet officer in the room – Lieutenant Fightmaster.

“Once we’ve made a full engineering assessment of Ta’del, hopefully so,” the chief engineer said, whose name she’d already forgotten from when the transporter chief had called through such details to her. “We spent two days fighting to keep the ship at altitude, so your assistance in towing us out of the gravity well was much appreciated, Captain Theodoras.”

“It was timely,” Malek said sharply, a quick glare at his engineer. She could tell he didn’t like the use of the word ‘appreciated’. “My crew were making progress in raising our altitude before your arrival. Your assistance merely expedited the situation.”

It was Mac’s turn to get involved, a large smile on his face. “Well, we’re just glad we can help,” he said. “It’s what we’re out here for after all.” Mac didn’t let it show that he’d picked up on Malek’s slight, that Atlantis ‘wasn’t needed’ here. Just rolled over it, and acted like the happy and naïve Starfleet officer.

In other words, let the Cardassian think he’s better than you – it just makes things go quicker.

“And while we’re here,” she followed on before Malek could get any wind into him for more vaguely insulting commentary, “we might as well help out with this science vessel of yours that’s needing help.”

“That would be…helpful,” the woman who came over with Malek replied. She, much like the engineer, looked exhausted, unlike their commanding officer. “We’ve only had very limited communication with the Rubic for the last two days, but it has been regular and they have confirmed they are still in reasonably good condition. Aside from slowly sinking into a gas giant.”

“Were they conducting a survey of the gas giant?” Mac asked.

“They were conducting a survey of the system before an attack by a Breen raider forced them to take shelter within the gas giant’s upper layers,” the science officer continued. “The composition of the gasses does a reasonable job of scrambling sensors so the captain, Tormen Krel of the Gratul Institute of Planetary Sciences, opted to send a distress call and then hide. Unfortunately, they had sustained engine damage, compounded by a storm, and lost a considerable amount of altitude.”

“How long do we have?” Mac continued.

“Seven days remaining by our count, so about six days Federation standard,” the science officer continued. “Communications with the Rubic has been extremely limited. They slipped below a layer containing dilithium-chromate which has proven incredibly problematic for subspace communications. We had resorted to using our full comm systems to merely broadcast energised bursts and resorted to a pre-warp communications methodology to communication.”

“Morse code,” Tikva found herself uttering, then continued when the Cardassians all looked at her at once. “Ancient communication method from Earth using short and long pulses to represent letters for transmission before audio communication was invented. Could be used over wires, primitive radio, light or even just sound like tapping or horns.”

“Yes, exactly that,” the science officer said with a slight smile. “But again, that dilithium-chromate disperses the pulses, so getting a position fix on the Rubic has proven impossible so far.”

Malek cleared his throat, bringing his officer’s explanation to a halt. A power move to refocus on him. “Which is why I had ordered the Ta’del into the gas giant’s atmosphere. We were to descend to a lower altitude and attempt to triangulate the Rubic’s position from there. Unfortunately, it would seem that Ta’del is past his prime and unsuited for such endeavours.”

The engineer weathered the glare sent his way. “Ta’del was old before the Dominion War, but he’s still a serviceable vessel and more than a match for pirates and Breen raiders.” His defence of the ship was admirable, but likely because his fate was tied to it and Malek’s displeasure couldn’t be brought fully on one or the other. “Our impulse engines weren’t designed to work inside an atmosphere and modifications that my team and I made failed to live up to our expectations. We were able to start our climb out and were merely awaiting another ship from the Twelfth Order to arrive to assist.”

“Well, Commander MacIntyre?” Tikva asked, turning to face her executive officer. “Think we can lend a hand till the Twelfth Order get here?”

“Narrow down where the Rubic isn’t at least until someone else arrives who can help out,” he answered, again playing to the ‘bubbling’ masquerade for Malek’s sake. “Can even lend some engineers to Gul Malek here to help with the Ta’del, if you want that is?” he asked, turning to the Gul.

“No, thank you,” Malek said, with all the dripping sarcasm he could muster on such short notice. “But your assistance with the Rubic would be…appreciated.”

“Don’t mention it,” she said, watching Malek for any eye rolls, but failed to catch any. She doubted he would have mentioned their help without her telling him not to anyway. “I do have a favour to ask though.”

“You may ask,” Malek replied, his chin lifting at being placed in such a position as to do someone a favour. Never mind his rescue mission had needed rescuing and his ship was barely able to move under its own power right now. The man’s superiority complex knew no limits.

“Well if we’re going to go looking for the Rubic, we’re likely to slip into or below this dilithium-chromate layer.” She watched, seeing the nods in affirmation from the Cardassian science officer, then from Malek as he processed the fact. “The Federation is about to be celebrating Frontier Day in a few days and there’s going to be numerous parades and speeches broadcast throughout the quadrant, including out here in the Thomar Expanse for the Starfleet ships out here to enjoy. Could you perhaps record such transmissions for us so we can get them off of you when we can?”

“You want me to task my crew with recording Starfleet transmissions?” Malek asked.

“Oh no, just the public Federation broadcasts,” she answered. “They’re being sent in the clear for all to watch. We’ll provide the comm channel details and which segments to record. Mostly from the admirals at Earth wanting to give out a series of self-congratulatory speeches.”

There was a brief flash of emotion from Malek when she described the speeches as ‘self-congratulatory’. Like he had actually liked her saying that. A commonality in feeling regarding superior officers.

“I shall talk with my communications team and see what we can arrange to handle for you,” Malek finally said. “But our focus will be on the Rubic. If we can make repairs and modifications to join you in the search, we will do so.”

“Fair enough,” she answered. “If there’s nothing else, Gul Malek, I should go and consult with my science and engineering officers to make preparations for atmospheric flight. Hopefully with Atlantis being a toucher younger than venerable Ta’del, we will have a bit more luck.”

A touch? This ship isn’t even a year old. We can kick a gas giant’s ass!

Still, Atlantis is a spaceship, not a submarine.

Pah!

“We shall see,” Malek said, pushing his chair back and rising to his feet, his officers following promptly following him. “We shall see.”

It was Fightmaster’s excellent timing that had him stepping forward just perfectly, a slight wave of his arm towards the door that led down a deck with the promise to escort their visitors to the transporter room. And as they filed out, the door closing behind them, she and Mac both let out a sigh.

“That man is the stereotype. Arrogant prick,” Mac uttered.

“You’re not wrong there,” she confirmed for him. “I got the distinct impression he didn’t want to deal with me, but you.” She cut him off with a raised hand. “Height is power and competence in his mind.”

“So, we’re going to dive into that mess,” Mac said, a thumb over a shoulder in the general direction of the planet they were orbiting, “and start looking around for a science ship that was chased there by the Breen?”

“We’re not leaving that’s for certain,” she confirmed. “Why?”

“We’re going to be descending into who knows what.” He looked at her and she could feel the expectation from him. He was waiting for her to put something together and she just wasn’t. “You’re Greek, you should get this. We’re taking this ship, and descending –“

“Oh!” she snapped out. “Atlantis!”

“Finally,” Mac said with a slap to the tabletop.

“We’ve got one thing a mythical city didn’t have though.”

“What’s that?” Mac asked.

“We haven’t pissed off any gods.”

“The day’s still young,” Mac quipped.

“Tanaka, Handley, with me,” Lieutenant Maxwell ordered as he stepped out of the Chief Engineer’s office in the lead of a pack of officers who were similarly issuing orders for those gathered around in Main Engineering to accompany them.

“Aye sir,” Hito answered for himself and Chuck as they quickly closed out what work they had been doing and fell in behind Commander Velan’s right-hand man. “This related to that Cardassian ship sir?” Hito asked.

“In a way,” Maxwell said as he led both petty officers out of Engineering and one of the equipment storage rooms in the department. “You’re both fully qualified impulse engine techs and I’ve got a hell of an interesting job for you.” He stopped by one of the racks with its properly secured tool case – a large rolling unit half as tall as any of the three of them and twice as heavy. “Bring that and a couple of standard tool sets to the starboard impulse engine room.”

“Can I ask what we’re doing sir?” Chuck asked, confusion evident on his face. “Because Hito and I just did a level four check on everything there three days ago.”

Maxwell let out a single laugh as he left the two men and headed for the door. “Overclocking the subspace driver coil because we need to make Atlantis neutrally buoyant.” He stopped at the door and looked back at them. “Fifteen minutes, then we get started.”

“Neutrally buoyant?” Chuck asked Hito as they both turned to the heavy tool case and started to remove its restraints. “Why does a starship need to be neutrally buoyant?”

Having used up a good portion of their fifteen minutes moving the specialist tool chest through the ship, both men were met by Lieutenant Maxwell and the unexpected addition of Ensign Jess Sumner. “I’m screwed,” Chuck muttered as they approached, the chest a not insubstantial challenge to move. It had been designed to roll, or more precisely barely roll as it were. And the contents inside, supporting the tools and equipment on the equipment trays, did not agree with portable anti-gravity generators, hence they were not an option.

“What do you oh,” Hito started to ask, before looking up and answering his own question. “Um, uh…”

“Screwed,” Chuck repeated.

“Ah, excellent,” Maxwell said as he finally noticed the two of them. “Few folks from Ops are bringing additional parts from cargo bay three for us so we can brief while we wait.” He led them into the impulse engine room, waving over the three others already there, manning their duty stations. No officers, just non-coms, but all of them senior to Hito and Chuck.

“All right folks, we’ve got a bit of a fun one,” Maxwell started, sarcasm dripping from his words. “We’re going to be pumping a fair bit more power into the subspace driver coils to make the ship even lighter than it normally is at full impulse.” A hand went up and Maxwell waved it down. “Let me finish, then I’ll answer questions.” That settled the issue for now. “We’re looking at adding about five hours of use to the clock per every hour of operation. And we have to keep that up for a maximum of seven days with no downtime.”

Everyone present looked around at that, checking with each other that this wasn’t some elaborate joke. Maxwell’s expression put that to rest.

“There’s a Cardassian science vessel stuck in a gas giant and Atlantis is going to find them,” Maxwell continued after a moment. “We’re going to find them, rescue them and if possible even save their ship. And ideally, before any other Cardassian ships arrive to help out. And yes, Sutter-Meyer, I know you were about to tell me we’d overheat the coil. This is why we’re going to jury-rig a cooling loop around the existing one.”

“Cool the coolant?” Sutter-Meyer asked. She was a large woman, a veteran of decades of service and an expert on Sovereign-class impulse engines from when the class was the next best thing to brand new. This was why Velan had recruited her for the crew when so many new faces joined them after the old Atlantis was retired. “We’re still going to be limited by our hookups to the ship-wide coolant loops here. And it’s really just buying time.”

“Uh, not really,” Ensign Sumner spoke up, though she didn’t look up from the padd she had in her hand. Chuck could hear Hito swooning and a quick check told him what he feared – Hito was hanging off her every word as his brain melted out his ears. “There’s a few extra network hookups just under the deck plates.” She turned the padd around to show Sutter-Meyer, pointing at the deck plans. “Right here.”

Sutter-Meyer, easily the oldest person in the room, accepted the padd, looked it over briefly, turned herself around to look the engine space over, and then hummed for a moment. “Complain enough and they finally build one of these beasts with the spare hookups I’ve been wanting for a decade.” She handed the padd back to Sumner. “Nice find Ensign.”

“Uh, thanks Chief,” Sumner responded.

“As for buying time, simulations show we should be able to run them at the desired levels for four days before the heat would be an issue, but luckily, we’re not trying to radiate heat in a vacuum,” Maxwell continued. “We’ll be in an atmosphere, which will pull heat from the cooling loop. How much, we couldn’t nail down in the simulations. We just don’t know enough about the atmospheric composition.”

“T’Plen over in Port isn’t going to be happy about this,” Sutter-Meyer warned. “We’ll both want to be able to tell Commander Velan when he’ll have to tell the Old Lady to pull out.”

“Merktin and I were both told to tell you and T’Plen you have every right to yell at him if you see something you don’t like with your engines.” Maxwell smiled as Sutter-Meyer offered him a nod in acknowledgement. “Now, Ops should be bringing us gear from spares shortly and Tanaka and Handley here both brought up the chemical torch for cutting through those deck plates and some of the other more interesting parts. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us before we even start Frankensteining a new loop.”

“You heard the Lieutenant, move it,” Sutter-Meyer said, her two others nodding quickly and then moving to do something. Her attention then swivelled to Hito and Chuck. “You two,” she said, glaring at them, before a single snort. “Glad I got you two and not those halfwits Blim and Tavlort. Check with Ensign Sumner and go cut me a hole in the floor.” Commands issued, she then stepped up to Maxwell, conversing with him quietly, hand gestures and padd hinting at their discussion of the plan to come.

Of course, the two men never had to go and ask Jess Sumer where to start cutting up the floor as she approached them first. “Hey Chuck, hey Hito,” she greeted them, as always so bubbly and positive, a stray lock of blond hair tucked behind her ear as she spoke.

“Ensign,” Chuck answered.

“Uh, hi,” Hito managed to get out.

“Follow me, just over here.” And as she walked away from them, Chuck could hear the gears in Hito’s brain jamming, others grinding as his brain attempted to do anything.

“Yup, I’m screwed,” Chuck lamented as he started to push the tool chest across the impulse engine bay. “So screwed.”

“So, how bad is it going to be?” Stirling Fightmaster asked over the small table as he picked at his dinner.

“I was speaking with Ensign Trel,” W’a’le’ki started to answer. “He was asked by Commander Camargo to go over what the Cardassians sent us. It’s a wonder they were even able to communicate with the Rubic at all. We’re going to be completely cut off. The dilithium-chromate isn’t just confined to a single layer, but is actually throughout the entire atmosphere.”

“Well unless we’re lucky, we’re going to miss the Frontier Day celebrations,” Stirling said, looking around Port Royal with its tasteful decorations that had gone up the last few days. “And I doubt we’re going to be allowed to have a party at the right time while we’re searching for a missing ship.”

“Surely the captain will let us celebrate afterwards,” W’a’le’ki said. “Celebrate with the crew of the Ta’del and Rubic afterwards, yes?”

“I shall make a recommendation,” he answered with a smile. “Anyone thought about the effect on the ship, outside of no subspace comms, that all of this dilithium-chromate is going to have?”

“Trel and Malenkov were talking about how it’s going to be in such abundance that the ship is likely going to end up with a dusting of it all over the ship. Static and some such,” W’a’a’le’ki answered, waving her fork in the air gently to indicate the ephemeral nature of such things. “I’m an anthropologist, not a chemist or physicist. I wasn’t paying too much attention. But they did say the ship might get a ruby red gleam out of it.”

“Ruby red?” Stirling asked, answered with a nod of W’a’le’ki’s head. “That’ll certainly be a spectacular sight.”

“Like your blush,” W’a’le’ki teased. “So red you were.”

“That is not fair,” he challenged. “You trapped me on that stage. ‘Say yes or I walk off the stage’ I believe was your ultimatum after asking me out.”

“Only because you wouldn’t ask me out,” she responded. “But all’s well that ends well, yes?” she asked with a slight turn of her head, the light catching on the scales around her eyes just for a moment.

“I won’t contest the supposition,” Stirling conceded. “Assuming Frontier Day celebrations are cancelled for now, that does leave a gap in our schedules in two days. Dinner date in the arboretum perhaps?”

“I was thinking my quarters,” W’a’le’ki stated. “Some privacy hmm?”

And then she giggled as she watched Stirling’s face redden.

Captain’s log, April 11th, 2401.

Overnight preparations are complete and Atlantis should be good to begin our search for the missing Cardassian science vessel Rubic. Hopefully, we’ll have a fair bit more luck than the Ta’del did. I’m cautious and concerned about taking Atlantis into the depths of a gas giant, but if any ship in the fleet can pull this off, it’s mine.

On an unrelated note, received a communique from Betazed overnight. Apparently, a cousin wants to get in contact with me at some point. I skimmed it over breakfast and need to sit down and read it properly. I’ve never been to Betazed, never met my mother’s family and now I have a message from one of them.

Think I need to talk to my mother before I respond. I do not, repeat do not, want to get involved in Betazed politics. I’d rather go back and mediate Romulan parliamentary sessions. Or at least small-world parliamentary sessions. Honestly, could do with revisiting Daloon IV.

“Said you wanted to show me something Gabs?” Tikva asked as she emerged from her ready room, a mug of tea nestled in her hands.

“Morning Captain,” Gabrielle Camargo started, but just a little off from her normal chipper self. The exhaustion was present on her face, but enthusiasm for the science before her was propelling her along at this point. “We’ve made a bit more progress with figuring out the atmosphere of Dormak VI. Including below the dilithium-chromate layer we were worried about.”

“Do tell,” Tikva said.

“Was bouncing around the idea last night with a few of the atmospheric scientists and one came up with the idea of dropping probes into the atmosphere and using them to relay each one’s findings.” Gabrielle turned back to the science station and brought up a diagram to illustrate. “The atmosphere is a mess and so laser and radio communications are right out. Subspace is distorted by all that dilithium-chromate so comms and limited, going from light-years to kilometres.”

“Unless you dump a lot of energy into pulsing something like a navigation deflector,” Tikva added, earning a series of quick nods from Gabrielle.

“Yup! But, if you keep the transmission power down, bandwidth widens up, but only to a certain distance. Basically, the louder you are, the further you can shout but the less you can say. Keep it quiet and you can say a lot, but not terribly far.”

“Wait, are we inducing the interference simply by transmitting?” Tikva asked.

“Yes and no. The crystals are energised by the planet’s magnetosphere already, but transmitting does excite them further along their multi-dimensional axis, which sets off a harmonic. They all start singing, so on and so forth, communications become a mess.” Gabrielle had started to gesticulate as she spoke, stopping herself abruptly. “Sorry ma’am, I can be more technical if you want.”

“No need, it all makes sense. The chromate has a peak power, so if you shout loud enough, you can get over it, but only by using all your bandwidth for a single note. Conversely, be quiet, say a lot, but background noise washes you out.” Tikva sipped at her tea to buy herself a moment and let what she just said sink in with Gabrielle. “I keep up with my physics,” she added. “And you gave me all the details I needed Gabs. You’re better than you think at communicating the science.”

“Uh, thank you, ma’am.” The young woman took a moment, then turned back to the display and moved the display along, showing a series of six probes in a chain at various altitudes. Three of them were bunched up in the dilithium-chromate layer, with one below and two above. “We started dropping probes at the start of gamma shift and have been adding a new one whenever we can. Each probe was set to descend then fire up its anti-gravs and ascend slowly when it lost contact with the last probe in the chain and reestablish communications. That d-c layer is about five kilometres thick and we’ve got a probe just above it, in it and just under it. The layers below are lousy with dilithium particulates as well.”

“Still don’t have a bead on the Rubic though?” Tikva asked, answered with a shake of Gabrielle’s head. “What about comms with them?”

“That’s a different matter,” Gabrielle said with a smile. “The last probe is powerful enough to transmit such that the Rubic has heard it and responded, kinda. They merely repeated the pattern we sent, but then haven’t answered when we tried any complex messages using the Cardassian equivalent of Morse code we were sent. I spoke with Commander Velan and we called Ta’del’s engineer. We’re all thinking Rubic is limited in what they can and can’t do. They can do the simple call and response loud enough to be heard, or complex but incredibly short ranged.”

“How short?”

“Thirty, maybe forty kilometres,” Gabrielle answered.

“So right on top of them.” Tikva sipped at her tea again as she thought, studying the admittedly not to scale diagram before her. “Actually, you do have a bead on Rubic. What’s the expected range on that last probe’s subspace comms? In, let’s call it, dumb mode?”

“Dumb mode versus smart mode?” Gabrielle said out loud, then shrugged while nodding her head. “Works for me.” Fingers flew over her console for a moment, bringing up figures for the probe and atmosphere composition as reported back by the very same probe. “From the probe, a sphere measuring two thousand kilometres, terminating early at the d-c layer above it naturally.”

“Naturally,” Tikva agreed.

“I should have seen that,” Gabrielle then said, shaking her head. “That was a rookie mistake.”

“No, that was a sleep-deprived mistake,” Tikva cut in. “Which a fresh set of eyes, a well-rested mind and a cup of tea spotted.”

“Still I –“

“No,” Tikva interrupted. “No self-blaming. You and your team have done an impressive job overnight just getting us this. Call up your relief, then go get some sleep. It’s going to take quite a few hours to sink Atlantis down that far safely anyway and searching a sphere that big with sensors barely better than ordering everyone to look out the windows is going to take time as well.”

Gabrielle looked like she was about to argue, then thought better of it, nodding in agreement after a new heartbeat. “Aye, captain.”

“Again, good job Commander,” Tikva said, then scanned the bridge, eyes settling on the engineering station and Lieutenant Eric Jamieson, who she admittedly hadn’t had much to do with so far. She paced her approach, then cleared her throat to get the young man’s attention. “How we looking, Jamieson?”

“Oh captain, morning,” he answered promptly. “Impulse engines check out; driver coils are ready. We’re just making final preparations with the warp drive before giving the all-clear.”

“Ah, yes, dumping all the drive plasma. That should have been done already though, yes?” the captain asked.

“Yes ma’am, but Commander Velan ordered visual confirmation all the vents are closed. No one wants to be sucking up all those volatiles and have to clean them all out before we can reengage the warp drive.” Jamieson flicked his display over to show the confirmation status of the nacelles. All the vents showed closed, but the last two on either nacelle were outlined in red, indicating that they hadn’t been visually confirmed just yet. “Should be about ten minutes. We’ll beam the crews back inside and we’ll be good to go ma’am.”

“Very good Mr Jamieson, keep me appraised.”

There was nothing to do but wait. Pacing would just put everyone on edge, expecting their captain to be looking over their shoulder at any moment. And so, she settled herself into the centre seat, a padd procured to handle paperwork. Anything to keep her busy and let her people work uninterrupted.

“All done,” Jamieson finally announced, an eternity and only one situational update from task force command later.

“Fantastic!” Tikva announced, launching herself to her feet with a spring in her step. “Lieutenant T’Val, break orbit and begin our descent. Lieutenant Kurtwell,” she turned to face the man at tactical instead of Adelinde, “shields up and configured for atmospheric flight please.”

“Aye ma’am,” came the responses as Atlantis started her dive.

“How long are we going to take to get below that chromate layer and start searching properly?” Tikva asked as the purple and peach clouds of Dormak VI filled the viewscreen, gone was the black of space.

“We could do it in an hour,” T’Val answered immediately. “But Commander Velan’s recommended descent profile takes ten hours. He is still concerned about the repairs made after Deneb.”

“Well let’s not stress our baby girl then Lieutenant,” Tikva said as she sat back down. “Take her down nice and easy.”

Just how much pressure can the hull take?

Well, it’s a spaceship, not a submarine.

But it’s also designed to be shot at. Unfortunately

Yarrr! We be fine!

No. No no no no no.

“Anything new I need to know about before taking over?” Mac asked as he sat himself down in his seat.

He was ahead of anyone from Beta shift, even the early starters. It was all to either give the captain a chance to really load him up with information, let her slip away early, or more realistically buy himself a chance to swing by all the duty stations for the turbolift briefing. It was a pretty good idea to at least be aware of what everyone else was going to be doing.

“We’re about ten minutes from exiting the chromate layer,” Tikva said without looking up from the padd she was reading from. “Then we can truly start searching for the Rubic. Been told the atmospheric pressure under the layer is pretty constant for about five hundred kilometres due to temperature gradients and convection so we can move up and down with little concern once we get there.”

“That’s ahead of schedule. What about our girl?” he followed up.

“She’s holding up pretty damn good actually. Velan is pleasantly surprised, hence why he was confident enough to let me command my ship to sink faster,” Tikva said, a heft dollop of sarcasm over her words. “These Sovvies are built tough. And repair pretty damn quick too.”

“Amen to that.” He leaned over the armrest, closer to Tikva. “What about comms to orbit? The probes still holding altitude?”

“They are, but comms are shit. Ta’del reported three vessels dropping out of warp about thirty minutes ago and we’ve had no follow-up since then. But we’ve had to reconfigure the probes to repeat messages a few times to ensure everything is getting through, so one-way communications is taking way too long.” Tikva set the padd down on her lap and turned to face him. “If Ta’del is in trouble, they’ll just have to deal with it on their own. Rubic needs us and we’ve already come this far.”

“No argument here,” he said in agreement. “Besides, Gul Malek seems the sort to cut and run if it suited him. Either we succeed because of his initial work, or we’re stupid Starfleet doing stupid things and dying because we didn’t wait for superior Cardassian technology to come along.”

“Cynical much?” Tikva asked with a smirk.

“I think it’s justified with Malek,” he replied. “Anything else?”

“One of the newbies we picked up at Avalon called a security patrol on a cleaner bot on deck twelve,” she said, completely straight-faced. “Said it was chasing him menacingly. That one,” Tikva glared at the back of Rrr’s head, “and Velan are both being very tight-lipped about just what is going on.”

“Want me to look into the matter?” he asked.

“Oh, go right ahead,” Tikva answered. “But I tell you there is a conspiracy aboard my ship.” Her tone of voice wasn’t serious but hinted that the joke was wearing thin. “Get a serious answer out of them, would you? I’m going to finish my day by popping down to planetary sciences and nosing around,” she said as she stood, then tossed him the keys to the ship. “You have the conn commander.”

“I have the conn,” he answered after getting to his feet and giving the captain a nod.

Waiting till she had departed the bridge he stepped up behind Rrr at Ops, a hand on the Gaen’s shoulder as he leaned down to whisper to them. “Get Stubby under control or I’ll space him myself.”

“Are you assuming Stubby’s gender?” Rrr asked mockingly.

“Rrr,” he stressed.

“I shall send envoys to Lord Stubby and request he submit himself to Engineering for another reset and inspection.”

“I mean it Rrr. You and Velan sort out that bot or scrap it.” With that sorted, he could now start his rounds before the rest of Beta shift arrived.

“Mr Simmons,” he said, approaching Science, “how are the sensor modification plans coming along? Save the specifics for Camargo, just give me the cliff notes.”

“Lieutenant Kurtwell,” Mac announced as he emerged from the conference room, holding a padd up. “This accurate?”

“Best information we got before probe one went dark sir,” the young man at the tactical station answered without missing a beat. “Three contacts entering the atmosphere at high speed and they’re armed with disruptors.”

It had been nearly two hours since Beta shift had taken over the bridge. Nearly an hour and a half since the CUS Ta’del had reported unidentified ships dropping out of warp around Dormak VI. And now they knew why they never got a response – their visitors were hostile. At least to probes he reminded himself.

“Right, so let’s hope that Ta’del got away and is bringing help. In the meantime and down in this gas giant, we’re on our own.” Mac stepped up beside Kurtwell, not staring at the tactical console but somewhere in the imaginary middle distance. “Start thinking of ways to fight multiple opponents with our sensors so heavily reduced, shields barely operational and helm very sluggish folks.”

“Torpedoes aren’t a bad choice,” Kurtwell jumped in immediately. “Have their own seeker heads, manoeuvrable can be set to contact or proximity detonation. Wouldn’t want to use anything more powerful than –“

“Contacts!” shouted Lieutenant JG Samantha Michaels from Ops where her focus had been intent on her instruments. “Multiple contacts bearing zero two six mark three four seven. Ten kilometres and closing.”

“On screen,” Mac found himself saying without thinking, chucking the padd over the tactical rail into the empty captain’s chair and planting both hands on the rail’s upper edge as he brought his focus fully onto the viewscreen.

At first, all he was greeted by was the same soup of gasses that Atlantis had been swimming in for over half a day now. Sensors could make something out, but visually there was nothing there. “Little help Sam,” he muttered just loud enough to be heard and was treated to an overlay appearing on the viewscreen, highlighting the obscured shapes.

It wasn’t much help at all.

But over the course of a minute, the shapes became more defined as they neared, the gasses giving way to a multitude of large bulbous shapes drifting along on the currents. Each bore three fins along the sides and top, while the ventral aspect was the source of a veritable forest of tentacles dropping lazily down. Each of the creature’s main bodies was easily the size of Atlantis’ primary hull, with the tentacles the length of the entire ship.

“Well, that’s different,” Mac uttered as he relaxed. “Ensign Tabaahah, let’s move around these things, shall we?”

“Aye sir, adjusting course,” came the response from the young woman at the helm. She’d grown more confident of late – the magic of the first hollow pip doing its thing.

“How many are out there?” Mac asked as he started down the ramps to the centre seats. “And is this going to cause a problem with finding the Rubic?”

“Looks like twenty-six of them,” Samantha answered. “Various sizes too. Kinda reminds me of a jellyfish.”

“And as for will this slow us down,” Gabrielle Carmargo spoke up finally, the next most senior officer after Mac on the bridge, “it certainly will.”

“Oh?”

He could see her shaking her head from side to side while reading her displays, taking her time to put everything together before turning around to present her initial findings. “Evolution or environmental contamination has worked dilithium into their biology. Not surprising with so much of it in the gasses here. But those creatures are way more concentrated than the gas clouds.”

“And that means?” he asked.

“Dilithium is subspace responsive. It’s one of the reasons it can survive contact with antimatter and is used in warp drives. But in this density, literally flying around in it, comms are short and sensors are blind. Those creatures’ biology is picking up our sensor scans, refracting the signals and bouncing them around before ultimately coming back in our direction. Weakened for sure, but still being bounced back at us. Where those things are currently there’s a large sensor arc that’s just blinded and can’t see anything beyond basic electromagnetic and that’s even worse than the subspace scanners.”

“So, if they show up again, we’re blind in that direction?” he asked, getting a head nod from the ship’s senior science office.

“Which is basically aft of us,” Samantha interrupted before he could speak. “They’ve changed course and are pursuing. Not fast, but definitely following our trail.”

Mac could hear Gabrielle’s chair swivelling as she turned back to the issue. “Can confirm,” she finally added. “I need to get a probe in amongst them and behind them to see why they’re following up.”

He thought for a moment, taking the time to pace back to the centre seat and pick up the padd he’d abandoned. “We’re a big ship, we can do many things. Gabrielle, launch those probes. Michaels and Tabaaha, keep those things to our aft and watch out for more while most importantly keeping an eye out for the Rubic. And as for you Mr Kurtwell, compare what limited data we got from our sentry probe and get me a list of possible visitors we have waiting for us.”

The chirping in the dark was insistent, demanding and worse it was annoying as well.

It had been ignored. It had been grumbled at. Each time it had stopped, but come back. The third time was the charm. But as Tikva went to reach for the communicator on the bedside table she was pulled back with gentle but undeniable strength from her partner. And she could have resisted, or offered resistance, but it was just comforting to be held so firmly.

“If it was important, they’d have just made a call over the public address,” Lin whispered. “Or shouted down the line anyway. Just leave it.”

“Three times is obviously someone trying to gently wake me versus having me rocketing to the bridge,” she replied, her words defeating Lin who turned loose one arm to search for the commbadge. “If it’s not important I’m telling them to go away.”

“Yes ma’am,” Lin said. “Bet it’s Stirling anyway.”

“No bet,” she said with a single chuckle as her hand finally found the chirping little device in the dark, collected it, and tapped it. “Theodoras here,” she finally spoke, not disguising the fact she was barely awake from her voice.

“Sorry to disturb you ma’am,” Gabrielle Camargo apologised straight away, “but we’ve got an interesting situation developing and Commander MacIntyre and myself thought you might want to see it.”

“Define interesting,” she responded after a pause to stifle a yawn.

“Well, umm,” Gabrielle hesitated for a moment. “Perhaps ma’am if you just looked out a window you could judge for yourself?”

She sighed, loud enough and long enough she knew the communicator would have picked it up and carried it along. “One moment,” she finally said before untangling herself from Lin and sitting up so she could look out the windows in her bedroom. “Computer, open the blinds.”

There weren’t any actual blinds to open, just an electrochromic layer to the windows that were blocking the light of the gas giant’s atmosphere. Normally blocking outside light wasn’t a concern, unless a ship was nearby and you wanted privacy, or the ship was orbiting the wrong way around a planet and you kept getting the planet or the star pouring into your room. But as the layer was powering down the purple and peach haze brightened the room, casting everything in a strange hue.

And outside, just within sight of Atlantis and only partially obscured by the gasses, were a number of large jellyfish-like creatures, bobbing along mostly on the currents with their bulbous bodies and long tendrils dangling underneath them. It took way too long for her brain to process their size but when it hit her, she couldn’t stop her eyes opening wide.

Holy shit!

Those things are huge!

Space jellies!

Uh, no seriously, those things are huge. Like being able to threaten Atlantis huge.

Oh shit!

But space jellies!

“That’s certainly interesting,” she heard Lin say as she too sat up, wrapping an arm around Tikva’s shoulders from behind and bringing the duvet with her. And more importantly comfortable soothing warmth. Warmth and comfort that rightly her duties said she needed to break from and at least go and momentarily see what was going on.

“Sorry, didn’t catch that ma’am,” Gabrielle said through the communicator.

“Give me fifteen minutes and I’ll come up to the conference room. You can brief me there,” she said directly into the commbadge. “Theodoras out.” And one tap to close the channel before she tossed the commbadge back onto the bedside table before leaning back into Lin, just watching the creatures outside for a moment. “I best get moving,” she said, barely above a whisper. “But you’re not making it easy.”

A colossal effort of will, a shower and a fresh uniform later and Tikva was stepping out of her quarters as the unlucky one who couldn’t go back to sleep. And on the opposite side of the corridor, standing there like he was an original fixture of the ship from her commissioning, was one Lieutenant Fightmaster, a padd in one hand, a coffee cup in the other which he offered dutifully without a word said before falling in beside her on the very short walk to the nearest turbolift to whisk them the paltry five decks to the bridge.

While it wasn’t ambrosia, as was due to all starship captains but woefully never in supply, it was the next best thing. And after her second sip, she realised it was straight from her favourites list too. She stopped and credit due to Fightmaster he stopped straight away, no discernible misstep past his captain that she noticed. “Mr Fightmaster, are you monitoring my replicator orders?” she demanded, eyeing the coffee, then up to him.

“Yes ma’am,” he responded with no hesitation. She could sense it, or more precisely not sense it – hesitation. He didn’t stop to think about how to respond, he just did. Truthfully. “But only your food and drink preferences from the replicator in your ready room and the conference room. Those are the only two places I can access records as your yeoman.”

“And your reasoning for this particular choice?” she asked as she resumed her path to the turbolift.

“You order it at least once a day, averaging sixty per cent of the time as your first drink of the day once on duty.”

She glared at him once more, over the rim of the cup as she sipped again. Having someone do data science on her coffee choices was a bit much, to be honest. She’d honestly had no idea what to do with a yeoman when he was first assigned to Atlantis, but she’d not only gotten used to him but started to rely on him for so many other smaller details. And there was certainly an advantage to having someone bring her coffee first thing in the morning, even if it was just making the morning report easier to swallow most of the time.

“Stirling, no more analysis of my food choices, please. You must have better things to do with your time.”

“Aye, ma’am.”

“Now, what’s on the padd?” she asked before ordering the turbolift to the bridge as they stepped in.

“It’s personal ma’am,” he answered.

Personal?

Oh poor boy, now we have to know!

No, we don’t. He’s entitled to privacy.

Ahhh…

“Your evening plans with Ms W’a’le’ki weren’t interrupted by all of this were they?” she asked and finally got a reaction from the young man – momentary shock. But he recovered quickly enough.

“We had no plans for this evening,” he answered.

Stirling was saved from further interrogation by the turbolift arriving and doors hissing open to the bridge where Mac was standing nearby, obviously waiting. “Sorry for the hour cap, but we’ve been monitoring the situation and it kept evolving.”

“Who doesn’t want to get woken up after only a few hours of sleep for space jellyfish?” she asked, earning a chuckle from her executive officer before they made their way to the conference room. “As fascinating as jellyfish are, even starship-sized ones, I’m guessing there’s more to this than first impressions Gabrielle, so let’s have it,” he stated as she sat down finally.

“Well they’re not jellyfish,” Gabrielle started, bringing up a scan diagram on the monitor behind her. “They’re more analogous to a siphonophore,” she continued. “Portuguese man o’ war is an example of one. It’s a colonial organism made up of smaller entities all filling a specific role and purpose within the larger entity.”

“Any other time Gabrielle I would love to sit here and listen to the entire science department regale me with what you’ve learned about these creatures,” Tikva said, stopping briefly to suppress a yawn, “but can we perhaps move things along?”

“Oh, sorry, yes,” Gabrielle said, only momentarily faltering in the face of her presentation being interrupted. She’d truly grown since first coming aboard the old Atlantis only a few years ago. “Let’s see, key points,” she muttered aloud as she checked a padd and then rapidly moved her presentation along a few slides. “A number of them are following us, or more precisely they’re following our impulse engine exhaust trail.”

“Hydrogen ions,” Tikva said before sipping at her coffee.

“Yes ma’am. We think they’re consuming them. The atmosphere out there is plentiful in hydrogen, but we’re throwing out free hydrogen ions. No need to break down the chemical cocktail at is the atmosphere to get at hydrogen when someone is giving out a free meal.”

“So, we just move faster than them. What else?” Tikva asked.

“The creatures are attracted to our subspace communications attempts.” Gabrielle let that one sink in for a moment before continuing on. “Since first spotting the creatures we’ve made four attempts to regain communications with the Rubic and every time we send out pulses the creatures move towards Atlantis. I’m just guessing here, but these things could be why Rubic has stopped transmitting. Either they’ve done something to the Rubic or someone onboard has realised what we’ve concluded and stopped transmitting.”

Tikva set her coffee cup down and leaned back in her chair, staring at her science officer for a moment. “Okay, now that’s interesting,” she said. “What about active scanners?”

“As long as we run them there’s a generalised trend towards us, but it’s not the same as the momentary rushes after each comms pulse attempt.” Gabrielle flicked to the diagram of the creatures again. “They’ve incorporated dilithium-chromate into their biology, which is responding to our scans and communication attempts. As well as blocking them too. I’m just guessing without further information, but I’d say they’re responding to our scans as some form of,” Gabrielle shrugged, clearly uncomfortable with needing to supply an answer in this context, “mating call?”

“Mating call?” she asked.

“They’re large gas bags in a gas giant’s atmosphere. They’ll build up an electric charge eventually, then possibly discharge it via the dilithium in their biology, producing low-level subspace signals that others nearby can pick up and react to.” Gabrielle shrugged again. “Ma’am, a science team could spend years studying these creatures. I’ve had a few hours and some multi-purpose probes.”

She waved the young woman down, indicating for her to sit down at the table opposite Mac to her right. “Mating call or ringing the dinner bell, either way, we’re garnering unwelcome attention.” She turned to Mac. “Guess we stop trying to call out and use the active scanners sparingly. Passives only from here on out.”

“About that,” Mac replied. “We might have visitors of a more directly hostile intent before much longer.”

“Oh?”

“Probe one and two have both been destroyed by disruptor fire by ships that couldn’t be positively identified before being destroyed,” Mac continued. “We’ve reduced the possible belligerents to the Breen, Tzenkethi and Romulans.”

She sighed and rubbed at her face momentarily. “It’s the Breen. They started this in the first place.” Mac nodded in agreement. “We’ve got four days to find the Rubic, rescue their crew, avoid the jelly, sorry siphonophores and a Breen raiding party. If the Borg show up, tell them to take a number.”

“Before or after their welcoming speech?” Mac asked, answered with a glare. “Before, gotcha.”

“Fighting in these conditions isn’t something commonly taught in tactics classes,” she continued. “Blind, slow and whatever we do to see just gets us attention.” She thought for a moment. “Don’t suppose we have a twentieth-century submariner aboard ship somewhere we can drag up to the bridge for ideas?”

“Probably a couple of holodeck programs we could mine for ideas too,” Mac answered. “You and Blake have a collection of anachronistic flight programs; someone must have a sailing one.”

“Actually, Dr Pisani does,” Fightmaster interjected from where he’d stationed himself against the wall. “She was talking about it in Port Royal a week ago.

“Probably as bad at it as she is a pilot,” Tikva found herself saying far too quickly. “I’m sorry, that was mean of me.”

“Oh, she is bad,” Mac said. “But I bet a hobbyist is better than whatever the Breen have aboard their ships.”

“Here’s hoping.” She pushed back from the table and stood. “Gabrielle, keep monitoring the creatures. See if you can’t come up with some way to lure them away from us. Mac, get Blake up here and brainstorm some ideas. I’m going back to bed and when I get up I’ll see both of you for a briefing over a meal.”

“Call you if we stumble across the Rubic?” Mac asked.

“Naturally, but just rescue the poor folks straight away.” Then she turned to Stirling. “And as for you young man, go do whatever it was you were doing and you can join us for breakfast as well.”

The situation all caught up on and wheels set in motion, she could now return to her quarters. To her bed. To sleep.

To Lin’s arms.

Across the bulk of Atlantis there were two medical complexes – the primary one on deck 08 that serviced the majority of the ship and crew and the secondary complex in the engineering hull on deck 12. It was well suited for attending to accidents and injuries either in sickbay or the main shuttlebay, but otherwise was a pale comparison to the wards, labs, operating theatres and offices that made up the main complex.

It was also where Doctor Blake Pisani preferred to be, away from the ceaselessly disapproving Doctor Terax.

And, as a number of the medical staff had discovered over the last few months, the walls in this sickbay were somewhat better soundproofed by virtue of being so close to the ship’s heavy machinery. Blessed relief for those working nearby, not so much those working inside as it turned out. Those working in the secondary sickbay had either swapped their duty shifts with colleagues or developed a taste for loud and often chaotic music choices.

As silence fell over Blake’s office, the music cutting off automatically thanks to some judicious additional programming to the door’s sensors, Blake was looking up from her reading with a look of absolute annoyance before it melted away into delight. “Mac! What are you doing here?” she said as she jumped to her feet and rounded her desk.

“Got a job for you,” he started, “but also I don’t visit your workplace very often, thought I’d make an exception.”

“Who’s minding the bridge then?” she asked as she popped up to kiss him lightly on the cheek.

“I just threw the keys into the air and let them sort it out,” he answered.

“Out of the captain I’d expect that, but you, I don’t think so.” She sat herself down on the edge of her desk and directed Mac into one of the chairs to sit. “So, a job for me huh? Terax is kind of territorial about treating senior staff you know.”

“It’s not medical,” he clarified, then continued as she looked at him confused. “What do you know about the situation outside right now?”

“Purple and peach gasses don’t make a colour combination I’m a fan of,” she answered. “Sensors are kind of useless, engines are slow and we have no contact with the outside world at the moment. Which is kind of annoying because I was downloading some things over subspace when we lost comms.”

“That’s about it. And if we were just looking for the Rubic without any problems, I wouldn’t be here. But…I need to pick that ancient warfare hobby brain of yours because we have two problems distracting from our ‘simple rescue mission’.”

“You know the captain is a better air breather pilot than I am,” she responded. Then her eyes squinted slightly at him. “And you don’t need a tank commander.” Her brain was still working through things when she leaned back, planting her hands on the desk behind her as realisation hit. “You want a submariner.”

“Yes, we do.”

“You know I’m absolutely terrible right?”

“Because you insist on ignoring tutorials and setting difficulties to the maximum.”

“Because learning through hard knocks is fun,” she insisted as she sat up straight again. “You want me to advise on how to handle Atlantis if we get attacked in his soup?”

“You are bridge trained.” He watched her nod in agreement. “And you have the most experience fighting a ship in conditions like this.”

“Nuclear-powered attack subs,” she answered. “And I haven’t won a single scenario. Mac, trust me, you and the captain have a far, far better idea at this than I do.”

“I’m not going to insist. But what if I bought you lunch and picked your brain for lessons learned from your various sinkings?”

Blake looked him over, an eyebrow raised, then pushed herself off her desk and offered him a hand to stand. “You know, there’s another reason why I like working down here in the dungeon.”

“Why’s that?” he asked, taking her hand and rising to his own feet.

“Because we have a lounge just around the corner and I’ve bribed a couple of Rrr’s people into making sure the replicators are up to the same standard as those in Port Royal.” She didn’t let go of his hand as she started for the door, forcing him to go along with her and catch up, lest she drag him through the sickbay from her office.

Lunch as it turned out, was interrupted by a summons from the bridge. One of those all-important blast it across the ship-wide summons. Which immediately set Mac on edge and away from his half-eaten lunch. “It can’t be that bad,” Blake insisted as the turbolift whisked them through the ship. “Otherwise Rrr would have sounded yellow alert.”

“If it wasn’t yellow or red alert bad, then why didn’t they just call me directly?”

“Because a ship-wide call then means they can start sorting out the issue right away and actually have something to tell you when you arrive?” Blake nudged him in the arm with her shoulder. “Rrr’s got things under control. If they hadn’t, they’d have escalated it.”

“That’s a fair point.”

Just then the turbolift arrived, doors swishing open to a bridge that wasn’t the calm and collected nerve centre for one of Starfleet’s explorers. It wasn’t also the complete chaos of a bridge in crisis.

“Helm isn’t responding.”

“Tactical keeps locking up on me.”

“Engineering is reporting they’ve gone to local control.”

“Wait, I’ve got helm back…no, never mind.”

Voices were all overlapping, shouting updates as Atlantis was obviously suffering some sort of problem. Various computer consoles were flickering off and on again, the few that weren’t manned by personnel fighting to work the problem out. Officers all over were engrossed and hadn’t even noticed that the executive officer had just arrived.

“Report!” Mac found himself shouting purely on reflex as he stepped out onto the bridge, Blake in his wake. Now people took notice but had the presence of mind to keep working the problem.

“We seem to be having some sort of main computer issue.” Rrr’s statement was plainly obvious. “The ship is dead in the water at the moment.”

“Lieutenant, I think I got it,” a young Andorian officer at Ops said. “It’s the Fleet Formation system.”

Both Mac and Rrr turned to face the young officer, then back to each other, confusion on their faces. “Are you positive about that Ensign Th’chiral?” Rrr asked as they shrugged at Mac and then stepped forward towards the ops station. There was no need to relieve the young Andorian, already pursuing the problem, when one could stand behind them and look over their shoulder.

Mac joined both of them and glanced over the readouts himself. “Fleet Formation is line-of-sight and needs another ship to initiate completely though.”

“Aye sir,” Th’chiral said. “But it still uses subspace comms for initialisation requests.”

“We’re too deep in this gas giant for subspace comms,” Mac continued. “And I know we lost another relay probe.” He reached forward to tap at one of the screens surrounding Th’chiral, this one blinking to try and get the ensign’s attention but having failed. “Just a minute ago according to this. So there is no way anyone of anything is getting a signal to us down here.”

“That’s just it sir,” Th’chiral continued. “We’re not getting the full initialisation signal. It’s garbled and partial, but just enough of a signal to start up Fleet Formation. It uses ultra-long wavelengths to get around most jamming systems at which point laser comms then handle all communications because you can’t jam a direct line-of-sight beam. But down here, the signal loss causes the system to consider what it got as a false alarm and turn off, just in time to start up again.”

“So something is transmitting on that frequency, tripping our system into starting?” Mac asked.

“Which seeks out a partner, fails to find one and shuts down. But gets the start-up and tries again.” Rrr clicked their fingers, a sharp crack of two rocky appendages. “It’s a classic boot loop.” They looked to Mac, face contorting into a smile. “Fleet Formation does tie into weapons, shields and navigation which explains why the systems are faltering. Got to love versions. It shouldn’t try system take over until it’s fully confirmed start-up and brought itself online.”

“I need to know where the signal is coming from,” Mac said as he placed a hand on Th’chiral’s shoulder. “And quicker would be better.”

“Aye sir,” Th’chiral replied.

“And as for you,” Mac said, looking to Rrr. “We can’t do anything like this. Get whoever you need and go lobotomise Fleet Formation or long-range comms, whichever is easier. Turn it off, disconnect it, or shot it with a phaser, I don’t care. Just us back our ship.”

“On it,” Rrr said, departing the bridge in quick order after handing the keys over to Mac.

“So,” Blake asked, having taken the right-hand seat during all of this for herself, “wake up the captain bad or merely interrupt her morning bad?”

“I don’t know just yet,” he admitted. “But the rescue ship needing a rescue doesn’t look good that’s for sure.”

“No, no it doesn’t,” she agreed. “So anyway, as I was saying, the trick with firing on another sub is…”

“Bored,” Tikva announced as she gently tossed the PADD onto her desk, leaned back in her chair and kicked her feet up onto the desk. “I am for the first time since Deneb ahead on reports,” she continued to the only other occupant of her ready room.

“Did you finish reading Commander MacIntyre, Lieutenant Rrr’mmm’bal’rrr and Doctor Pisani’s recommendations?” Lin asked, not even looking up from the PADD she was reading from. She was in full ‘Commander Gantzmann’ mode, being utterly professional while on duty. It had taken, many months ago now, about fifteen minutes of observation by Counsellor Hu before he signed off on letting them both work on the same shift together and it all came down to Lin’s steadfast adherence to professionalism.

And an agreement to maintain their regular couples counselling sessions.

“I have,” she answered. “I’m just not sure how well a request to have Fleet Formation removed from our ship is going to fly. A cut-off for accidental activations like we had last night isn’t beyond the pale though.”

“I would like to add tactically wise as well,” Lin said. “Imagine if an enemy was able to trigger false starts in the system and disable us during a firefight.”

“That’s,” Tikva started, then stopped, then thought for a brief moment, “a damn good point. A bad actor within a starship as well could trigger it and cause all sorts of mayhem until Command overrides came downstream to take back the ships. Cripes, imagine if everyone had it at Deneb and a Founder was on the bridge of any of the Admiralty ships.”

“Which is why it should require no one be at the commands of a ship for it to activate. Ensign Last-man-standing is going to have some issues if someone on another ship decides to hijack her controls and use her ship as a battering ram.” Lin finished with her PADD and set it on the desk as well, pushing it towards her captain. “My formal recommendations regarding Fleet Formation.”

With a stretch, Tikva was able to grab the PADD and pull it close to look it over. “Removal of the system from all front-line explorers, disengagement in all vessels until control issues resolved, return to the drawing board,” Tikva said as she skimmed over the letter, mainly catching the headlines. “This is…going to cause a stir.”

“I am aware.”

“You know this is Fleet Admiral Shelby’s pet project, right?” Tikva asked.

“And you’re one of the heroes of Deneb. Your recommendation would lend considerable weight to Commander MacIntyre’s and my own letters about the system.”

Being called a hero had bit Tikva somewhat oddly. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Her feet slid off the desk and she sat up, the lend forward over her desk slightly, elbows resting just on the edge. “Are people really saying that?” she asked.

“Found allies when no one else could, led an assault on enemy lines to open a new front, had her bridge blown up around her and then raced back to Deneb in one of the greatest cavalry charges in modern history. And apparently Mars, Bringer of War is charting on a few music services.” Lin smiled as she finished. “It slipped who ordered us to go find allies and I’ve heard the phrase Beckett’s Backhander a few times.”

“That is totally not what happened!” Tikva protested. “I mean, sure, we got allies, but we got lucky at Leonis. And we had to be towed to Deneb. Hells, we lost the entire weapons array for ten whole minutes during the battle.”

“Some of the best commanders coast on nothing but luck,” Lin reassured her. “And seems people have forgotten we had to be dragged to the battle. All accounts I heard amongst the fleet at Avalon while we were getting repaired is Atlantis led the charge with all weapons firing as we crashed into the Dominion ranks, only stopping when we burned out the emitters from overuse. Dominion ships crashed against us, their broken hulls pushed aside by our indomitable hull plates. The Klingons may have taken it upon themselves to do our storytelling for us.”

“Fuck me,” Tikva spat out as she threw herself backwards in her chair. Then arched an eyebrow at Lin, whose expression was passive and still professional, if not the thoughts running through her head. “I heard that.”

“No you didn’t,” Lin said.

“Fine, I got the very distinct impression, Commander Gantzmann,” Tikva spat out, unable to stop the smile from spreading on her face. “But if I ever hear the phrase Beckett’s Backhander uttered ever again on my ship, I’m spacing whoever said it and blaming it on Admiral Beckett. I am not his fetch-quest monkey.”

“Fetch quest?” Lin asked.

An answer to that question was interrupted however by the door chime and Tikva’s permission for whoever was on the other side of the door to enter. “We’ve found them,” Samantha Michaels said from the door to the bridge. “But we’ve got a small problem.”

“Jellyfish?” Tikva asked.

“A whole lot of jellyfish,” Sam confirmed.

Stepping onto the bridge, keys returned to Tikva’s possession, the viewscreen gave the situation away. There was no visual present, for outside was just a soup of gases swirling about the ship. Instead, a sensor readout was present, with Atlantis at the heart and concentric rings expanding outward. And just ahead, right on the edge of their sensors, a mass of contacts hovered. “Rubic is right in the middle of a swarm of these creatures,” Sam clarified.

“Positive?” Lin asked.

“As best as can be,” Sam answered. “Sensors are getting a refined dilithium signature in the centre of that mass. Fifteen kilograms of dilithium crystal if the readings are right. About on par with what we know of the Rubic from our Cardassian friends.” The way she said ‘friends’ though hinted at some biases Sam wasn’t hiding as well as she likely thought.

“What danger can those things pose to Rubic?” Tikv asked.

“If they keep their shields up, not much,” Lin answered. “I’d imagine though if they swarm the ship it would make it difficult for them to move, or climb out of the gravity well.”

“That’s about the gist of it,” Sam concurred. “That they aren’t continuing to sink means it’s likely they’ve repaired their engines. But…”

“But what Lieutenant?” Tikva asked.

“It could just as easily be the creatures have swarmed Rubic for one reason or another and are keeping her buoyant.”

Tikva sighed, rubbing at the bridge of her nose. “We don’t want to get caught like them, so we have to scare them off. But if we do, there’s a chance they drop Rubic and we have to play catch.” She shook her head, weighing up options in her head. “Okay, so, what are the options for scaring these things away? Or luring them away?”

“Well they haven’t responded to probes trying to spoof Atlantis’ EM signature, so a lure is unlikely.” Sam shrugged in apology. “So we’re looking at scaring them off.”

“Spatial charges,” Lin said. “Easy enough to fabricate, use them as stand-off weapons. Not as powerful as a photon torpedo but will be loud and flashy.”

“So we go with some sort of predatory display and spook them into leaving their dinner for us?” Tikva nodded her head a few times. “I like it. How long until we could fire a handful?”

“Twenty minutes,” Lin answered, departing the bridge in quick order once given permission to get started.

“And as for you Lieutenant Michaels, wake Ch’tkk’va, tell them to get a team ready just in case we need to board the Rubic as part of our rescue efforts.”

“Aye ma’am,” Sam said. “I’ll also –“ She was interrupted by chirping from Ops and with a few steps was at her console, checking the notification that was demanding attention. “What the?” she said out loud, then looked at the relief officer at the helm. “Hard to port!”

Tikva had to give the young woman credit; she was starting to gain a ‘command voice’. The ensign, likely hoping for a nice easy shift of flying Atlantis in straight search pattern lines, threw the ship into a sharp turn and bank, shaping the ship’s course quicker than a ship their size had any right to do. The sensor displays on the main screen showed a mass appearing, growing and closing on Atlantis. But just before impact, Sam switched the viewscreen to an external feed as the withered remains of one of the jellyfish fell past Atlantis. There were holes throughout the colony’s mass, clear signs of energy weapons fire. Enough of the thing’s gas sacs had been breached and gravity was winning over what was left even as it struggled.

“Disruptor fire,” Sam announced as she sat herself down at her station, pouring over the sensor readings. “Best reads we’ve gotten so far…Breen. Breen disruptors.”

“Well, they were the best contenders,” Tikva said. “Not a fan of their approach I have to say.”

“It’s certainly one way to scare the locals off,” Sam said. “Not that I’m a fan either, just saying, ma’am.”

“It’s fine Lieutenant. Now, wake Ch’tkk’va. If the Breen are shooting down these jellyfish colony creature things, it means they’re down here with us now. Once we fire off those spatial charges they’ll have a damn good idea of where we are. We get to the Rubic and either tow them out or beam everyone off and beat a retreat.”

“Retreat?” Sam asked. “The Deneb Dominator?”

“Oh gods,” Tikva groaned. “How many other nicknames do we have?”

“At least five more I know off ma’am,” Sam said with a smile.

“Why am I not surprised?” Tikva asked as she took the centre seat, a glance to the bridge roof and whatever capricious deity lay beyond. “Why am I not surprised?”

“Lesbos to Waihou, we’ve found the starboard airlock. Making connection now.”

“Roger that Lesbos. We’re about to pop hatch on our side. Remember to keep an eye on the clock. This barge is sinking and we don’t want to slip below our own crush depths,” said Lieutenant JG Carmichael, recently promoted after the events in Deneb.

The spatial charges launched by Atlantis had indeed pulled the gas giant creatures from the stricken Cardassian science ship. And as some had feared they had been keeping the ship buoyant in the atmosphere, releasing it to fall once more. But with no more creatures Atlantis had been able to come alongside and actually make contact with the ship’s crew. Questions could wait, all parties had agreed, survival was the order of the day. And when Atlantis went to test her transporters, it was found out that while they might have been safe for non-organic transport, there was just enough interference to make the prospect of beaming live individuals a dubious proposition at best.

And so the ship’s two Type 14 Shuttles, which had been standing by, got called up. The trip from shuttlebay to the docking hatch on the Rubic had barely taken two minutes. They had strict timelines for how long they could remain before returning to Atlantis, with a thirty per cent safety margin built in. But ideally, it wouldn’t come to that. Scientists and crew were all standing by for evacuation. Their experiments were being lifted out by transporters. It was a nice and simple plan.

With the prospect of the creatures returning, or the Breen finding them, hanging over it of course.

“And…we’re docked,” Carmichael said as indicators on this console flashed green. “You’re good to go, sir.”

“Very good Lieutenant,” Lieutenant Ch’tkk’va replied as they turned to the two other security officers on the shuttle. “Direct evacuees to the rear compartment,” they told the two, who merely nodded their heads in unison before going through the motions of opening the airlock.

Rubic’s crew was barely thirty individuals and most were waiting, ready to board the Starfleet shuttles and abandon their ship as quickly as possible. They, unlike the Cardassian military, weren’t fussy at all about who rescued them. The last man, an elderly Cardassian, pulled one of the security officers aside, having a quick word with him before being directed to Ch’tkk’va.

“A couple of my colleagues are still in a lab. They’re recovering some project work. It’s literally just up the hall, first left, first door on the right.”

“They were told,” Ch’tkk’va spoke, their voice coming across via the universal translator as very disappointed, “to leave samples to the transporters.”

“Well, these are organic samples apparently,” the Cardassian said, then shrugged before leaving to join the others. “But be my guess to abandon them if you wish. They’re both insufferable.”

Watching the man retreat, the Xindi-Insectoid chief of security followed them with their compound eyes before marching towards the airlock. “Hibert, with me.”

“Yes sir,” the young woman said as she fell in behind.

True to the man’s directions they found the lab in question on the small ship within a minute. The corridors were narrow, the ceiling low – the ship was built not for comfort but for cost and functionality. It never strayed far or long, never had crews couped up within for months or years at a time and needing that extra space to avoid snapping at each other. The lab however was a different story. It wasn’t large, or even comparable to the small labs aboard Atlantis, but it was roomier, the equipment new, and the lighting and creature comforts superior. It was built to accommodate people staying within its walls for hours, days, and even weeks while they worked, only leaving when sleep or hunger or other bodily functions compelled them.

By the door, a collection of crates had been stacked upon a grav platform, powered and ready to go. A few carry bags sat next to it on the ground, ready to be grabbed by those leaving and then some. And atop the pile sat a small Cardassian device, happily blinking away as it undertook whatever function it was designed for.

“Oh, excellent, more hands,” a middle-aged Cardassian woman said in greeting as she spotted Ch’tkk’va and Hibert, smiling before stopping in her tracks, double-taking as she registered Ch’tkk’va’s appearance. “Oh a Xindi!” the woman exclaimed before closing on the two officers. “My my, aren’t you a fascinating specimen!”

“Ma’am,” Ch’tkk’va said with the closest to a sigh they ever approximated, “you were supposed to be at the airlock awaiting evacuation. You and your colleague,” eyes searching the lab for the other person they’d been told was here,” need to come with us immediately.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” the Cardassian woman said. “We just had to secure a few of our more precious samples for transport. It’s taken longer than we thought.” She turned, collecting the device off the stack of crates and turning it off. “Those it turns out can be transported, if you could.” And then she was walking away towards the back of the lab and an open door that led into a darkened space. “T’Halla dear, we really do need to go. There are people here to fetch us.”

Ch’tkk’va didn’t need to give orders to Hibert as she contacted Atlantis and had the stack of crates and bags beamed away. They’d worked together long enough, the entire Security team working closer and closer until they were a well-oiled machine. An organised hive of individuals. Just like home before they had departed to join Starfleet.

“Relna,” said another voice from the other room, “this crate is bloody heavy. Send whichever jackbooted thug is out there to help me with it.”

“It’s a Xindi!” the Cardassian woman said as she turned back to Ch’tkk’va, waving them forward and towards the other room.

“There are five Xindi species,” said the other voice in response.

“Oh, right, yes! An Insectoid! An actual Xindi-Insectoid!” Relna wasn’t so much as looking at Ch’tkk’va, as studying their every detail as they passed, peering into the other room at first.

There, amongst a smaller lab which looked like a bomb had gone off, supplies and samples hurriedly packed with no care for not making a mess on a doomed ship, stood an older Andorian woman, hair greying around her temples from the stark white of youth. She had at her feet a large container, self-powered as evidenced by the readouts on the upper surface. She had one end lifted off the ground, both hands on the handle at her end. “Well, are you going to help or not?” the woman asked as she spotted Ch’tkk’va.

With a buzzing sound, the exasperated huffing equivalent for their species, they entered, taking up the other handle and lifting, finding the weight not that much, but the awkward sizing of the crate would have been a bit much. “I was not expecting to find an Andorian aboard a Cardassian science ship,” they said, backing out of the room with their end of the crate.

“And I wasn’t expecting to find a Xindi-Insectoid in a Starfleet uniform rescuing me from a gas giant, so we’re even,” the Andorian woman said. “Doctor T’Halla Shreln.” She offered a quick introduction, then indicated with her chin for Ch’tkk’va to keep moving. “And I’d really like to get off this ship now that you’re here.”

“Sit down Doctor, you’re making me nervous,” Tikva said as she walked down the starboard ramp from behind the Tactical arch and towards the centre seats. Mac was already there, seated in his customary seat, while Blake Pisani was standing before the third seat, usually unoccupied, bouncing lightly on the balls of her feet, nervous energy radiating from her. “And besides, if we’re lucky, we won’t see the Breen until we’re free and clear in space.”

“At which point,” Mac said from the XO’s seat, “we can choose to either introduce them to our phaser arrays or run at full impulse until we build up enough warp plasma to high-tail it out of here.”

“Oh, shoot, yes,” Tikva said as she sat down, snapping her fingers as she did so. “Tivka to Engineering.”

“Velan here,” came the response in quick order. “And if you’re asking if we can go lower, I’m going to say no and then give you five more kilometres anyway and that’s it.”

“We’re holding altitude now and the shuttles are on the way back now. We’re going to start making our ascent shortly. Get your people shovelling coal, we might need the warp engines.” Tikva gave Mac an easy smile as he silently chuckled at her.

“I’d really rather not just now,” came the response. “We’ve been running the impulse driver coils pretty hard keeping the ship buoyant and it’s done a number on our cooling loops. The atmosphere is pretty hot out there and we’re just barely able to radiate the ship’s heat at the moment. Bringing the warp drive online is going to make things uncomfortably warm.”

“How bad?”

“Unbearable within two hours?” Velan answered with a questioning inflexion. “Maybe more as we ascend. But with the impulse engines and atmosphere drag, even a straight upwards course is going to take longer than that.”

“Okay, but as soon as you’re happy, I want you to start up that warp core and start priming the engines. Those Breen interceptors might just have friends waiting above we haven’t seen.”

“Right you are captain. Velan out.” And with that, the line went dead.

“See,” Tikva said as she turned to Blake, “nothing to worry about.”

“Still don’t see why you wanted me on the bridge,” the young doctor stated, still having not sat down as requested. “I’ve already told Charles everything I can think of that would be helpful. And you two have way more tactical experience than I do. Hell, I got my bridge officer certification because I was bored.”

“Did you take the Gas Giant Atmosphere Tactical Course?” Tikva turned to Mac. “I must have missed it on my way through the Academy.”

“No, don’t think I saw it either,” Mac answered, stroking his chin in thought. “Advanced Tactics didn’t cover it. Neither did Strategic Introductions. Might be we found a gap in the Command curriculum.”

“Ha ha,” Blake said, sarcasm dripping off of both syllables. “Fine, you want my advice? We don’t want to just go straight up away from the Rubic, we want to head off on an angle.” She finally sat down, perched on the edge of her seat and turned to better face Atlantis’ command duo. “When Rubic implodes, it’s going to make a heck of a lot of noise. Let’s assume the Breen hear it. So they’ll rush over to investigate.”

“And?” Tikva asked, knowing there was more. Tasting it from Blake as sweetness, like cotton candy. That ‘I know something you don’t know’ she’d tasted from so many others before.

“Let’s assume one of them is clever enough to consider the possibility of some sort of rescue. The quickest way out of this mess is straight up, so they send a single ship in that direction. And if you assume your enemy is always faster, stronger and smarter than you, you’re never surprised.” Blake smiled, something vaguely predatory to it. “So you have to be cleverer.”

“One ship goes straight up, faster than us, never finds anything. But it leaves two ships closer to us still searching,” Mac jumped in. “But two is better than three. And by going sideways for a bit we’re vastly increasing their search area.”

“And it also means if we give them the slip and break out of here, we’re only possibly looking at facing a single ship waiting for us in orbit,” Blake added. “And I think Atlantis can handle one little Breen raider without trying.” She looked upwards, towards the Tactical station where Adelinde was standing.

“Damn right,” Adelinde said confidently.

“What was our hit rate at the Battle of Deneb again?” Mac asked.

“Eighty-seven per cent,” Lin answered. “Jem’hadar fighters are annoyingly agile.”

“Waihou and Lesbos are aboard,” Rrr spoke up from Ops. “Shuttlebay reports doors secure. And sensors show Rubic approaching her crush depth.”

“Damn shame we couldn’t tow her out,” Tikva said.

“Least we got the crew and all of their research that they were concerned about.” Mac shrugged before he turned his attention forward. “T’Val, best possible speed at zero zero zero mark zero two five.”

“Ahead full, twenty degrees up angle,” Blake corrected the order into her understanding of submarine speak, though all three of them seated together held their own levels of doubt as to the accuracy of the phrasing.

“Aye sir,” T’Val answered back, as precisely as one would expect from a Vulcan.

Silence settled over the bridge, outside of perfunctory updates between stations, as Atlantis left the Rubic to her fate and started her climb out of the depths of the Dormak VI’s atmosphere. Slow and steady was their raise, either to avoid taxing the engines at this depth (performance would increase as they rose to ‘cooler’ layers) or leaving atmosphere wakes or noise the Breen might follow. But after nearly ninety minutes it had finally been broken when Blake, who had been walking laps around the bridge, her nervous energy bleeding into a few of the younger officers, planted her hands on the tactical arch and leaned forward so she could look down on Tikva and Mac.

“I just had a thought,” Blake said, continuing without waiting and shattering the business like quiet the bridge had settled into. “Velan said the cooling loops were barely keeping up. So we’re hotter than the atmosphere around us, right?”

“Makes sense,” Tikva answered without looking up from the padd of reports she had in hand. The neverending reports a captain had to either read themselves or trust someone else to read and then sign off on. “If it was the other way around, we’d be taken on heat.”

“And that’s why he didn’t want to bring the warp drive online. After all most of the cooling system is meant to keep the ship cool when that thing is running.” Blake then hurried around, throwing herself into the third seat. “What if the Breen are still running their warp cores though?”

“The Breen are experts in cooling systems. They likely have figured out how to shunt more of their heat build-up out into the atmosphere.” Tikva then stopped her reading and looked to Mac, who was just looking up from his own reports. “Which means they’re radiating heat.”

Mac nodded his head in agreement. “A lot of it too,” he said. “The atmosphere will be diffusing it though.”

“But it’s another avenue for passive sensors,” came a new voice as Gabrielle Camargo injected herself into the conversation. “Won’t be great, but it’s every sensor window is better than none.”

“Nice thinking Blake,” Tikva said, giving the doctor a grin. “Now, seriously, we’re looking at hours more of this slow climb, so either sit down and enjoy the boring parts of bridge duty, or you’re free to head back to sickbay.”

It didn’t take much for Blake to accept the offer, make her excuses and be on her way, delayed momentarily by Mac as he rose to follow her, speaking to her quietly at the open door to the turbolift. Not entirely professional, but discreet enough, and limited to merely asking about dinner plans at the such. Entirely mundane couples talk.

It was however cut off by Camargo turning in her seat to face the bridge proper. “Five thermal contacts aft, range unknown, but outside the five kilometres on our other sensors. Three more above us and I’m guessing descending.”

“Could they be the creatures?” Adelinde asked sharply.

“Not a chance,” Camargo replied.

“Eight ships. Five already following us and waiting for their three friends.” Tikva stood from her seat, watched as Mac passed in front of her for his seat, Blake having returned as well, the bridge a far more interesting place to be all of a sudden. “Almost seems fair.”

“I dislike fair,” Lin grumbled from her station.

“We can go quiet, see if can give them the slip,” Mac offered. But his inflexions alone told everyone what he thought of that plan – unlike in the least.

“Or we can go loud,” Blake spoke up. “Fire up all our sensors, light them up so they know we’ve seen them and send a volley of torpedoes at them while we break for space.”

“Hmm.” Tikva thought about it, walked forward five steps, turned around, five more back to her seat, three more towards the helm and ops again before she turned to face Lin. “Red alert. All hands to battlestations.”

The first that the Breen would have known that Atlantis had seen them would have been when their prey had started to manoeuvre not like she was trying to stay quiet and slowly rise out of the atmosphere, but had opted for rocketing straight up at the ships that were hovering above. In the vacuum of space, without gaseous resistance and without the pull of gravity to slow her, Atlantis could make an appreciable percentage of the speed of light on her impulse engines alone. But here, in the depths of Dormak VI, she was barely making a hundred kilometres an hour.

A journey of a few hours to the surface was cut to just over an hour now.

“Our pursuers are giving chase,” Gabrielle informed. Her sensors were, in this soup at least, the earliest warning they had. They were better at spotting the heat plumes surrounding Atlantis than the tactical sensors were since a subset of them were designed for spotting atmospheric anomalies after all.

“And those lying in ambush?” Tikva asked as she sat back down.

“Looks like they’re diving.” Gabrielle’s tone wasn’t confident about it. “But there’s a sheer layer above us making it hard to tell.”

“I’m getting really bad returns now,” Adelinde chimed in from Tactical. “We’ve been scanned,” she followed up immediately. “If their targeting sensor returns are as bad as mine, they know we’re here, but that’s about it.”

“Time till you can get a torpedo lock?” Mac asked.

“Few more minutes on the ones in front, a bit longer on those chasing us.”

The viewscreen, useless in the atmosphere, had been switched to a series of tactical displays. A sensor readout on the screen with a series of red dots around the periphery was the dominant one. A single red circle around the green dot of Atlantis was the nominal tactical range. It wasn’t at all the range of the ship’s weapons, just the range that Lin was confident she could get a target lock on and actually hit what she was shooting at versus firing wildly into the atmosphere and whatever might be out there.

“T’Val, you’re free to do whatever you need, understood?” Tikva asked her helmswoman.

“Aya ma’am,” came the response.

“This is about the point I would want to be launching decoys,” Blake said quietly from her seat. “Try and pull a few of those bogeys off of us.”

“Drop chaff, pull into the sun for a few seconds and then drop the nose and head for the deck?” Tikva asked with a knowing smile. She knew Blake had been the one to install an old air-breathing flight holoprogram and made it available to the crew. And then Tikva had tortured the crew from time to time by interfering in their scenarios, or joining in and showing people her own skill.

“If I was flying, sure. But submarines also sometimes had decoys they could launch.” Blake pursed her mouth to one side, then switched it from side to side briefly in recollection. “Basically went in the water, made a lot of noise, pretending to be the submarine itself. Make engine noises, sonar sounds and the such. Confuse launched torpedoes into chasing it and draw the attention of enemy submarines.”

“It’s an interesting idea,” Mac said. “Just wish we had thought of it an hour or so ago when we could have had some probes reconfigured to do that.”

“Yeah,” Blake said, disappointedly.

“But we aren’t fighting in an ocean.” Tikva’s words got Blake and Mac’s attention as she leaned back, exuding confidence. A trick never taught in the command course, but one that captains had to come into naturally. “We’re in an atmosphere. A hot, soupy, dilithium-chromate laden atmosphere.”

“Estimate target lock on our front three in two minutes,” Adelinde chimed in.

“What are you thinking?” Mac asked. “And please don’t giggle. It’s disturbing when you giggle.”

“She giggles?” Blake asked, attention shifting from Mac back to Tikva, smiling wickedly. “Do tell.”

“She was giggling the whole time she was telling me the plan for our little performance piece at Deneb,” Mac confirmed.

“We’re tracking the Breen via heat signatures. Likely they are doing the same at long range unless Breen sensors are so far better than ours as to be a total intelligence failure.” Tikva grinned, looking at Mac. “So let’s make some heat signatures.”

It took Mac a moment to hit on the idea himself. “We’ll be blinding ourselves as well.”

“So? We don’t necessarily want to fight the Breen, just confuse the daylights out of them and slip past them and into open space. Once we open the range, we can keep them at bay hopefully long enough for either some nearby Cardassian ships to jump on in, or go to warp ourselves and show them just how fast this ship is.”

Or, and hear me out on this one Other Tikvas, blow them to smithereens so the Breen learn the leave the Federation and her allies alone.

We’re not supposed to be starting wars out there.

Yar, turn the side a-broadside and run out the guns! They want a fight, let’s give it to them.

Not in this gaseous mess. Atlantis would walk all over them in space. Be smart, take the fight where our sensors, shields and weapons all have the advantage over a pack of raiders.

And where we could get the Harpies launched too.

Mac nodded once, then turned just enough to look up at Adelinde. “Photon torpedo spread fore and aft, detonation ten seconds after launch. Repeat every minute.”

“Every minute?” Blake asked.

“Letting the fireballs die down,” Tikva answered. “We’re going to have a wall of plasma ahead and behind us all the way to space.”

“What about the creatures that live in this mess?” Blake asked.

“No Dormakians on sensors,” Gabrielle answered without prompting. “The range is clear.”

Gabrielle’s pronouncement was all that was needed before Adelinde let the first volleys fly free, five torpedoes fore and aft, blossoming into curtains of plasma as matter and antimatter annihilated each other in an orgy of energetic conversion. The energy they were releasing into the atmosphere of Dormak was, on a local scale, catastrophic. But on a planetary scale, for a gas giant this large, barely noticeable. Cometary impacts would generate more upset in the planetwide storm systems and ecology than this creeping barrage of torpedoes.

Atlantis was blind to the threats around her, but in return the Breen were blind as to where, behind that curtain of advancing and retreating hurricanes of destruction, Atlantis really was. The two Breen forces couldn’t see each other either which seemed to have given pause in the ambushers above. They never plunged through the tumult to engage, opting either to move aside or climb ahead of Atlantis.

And as it would turn out, it was the latter as Atlantis finally burst through the clouds of Dormak VI and into free and open space. T’Val was forced to throw the ship through a series of rapid manoeuvres to avoid debris that was raining back down into the planet from above. Broken pieces of Breen raiders were plummeting, trailing atmosphere and plasma as gravity claimed them and they were chased by a few torpedoes from the waiting Cardassian warships that had taken station in orbit. With her ability to move out of the way limited by continued fire, T’Val threaded Atlantis right through the middle of the three-ship formation before swinging the ship around and with precision and evident skill set the ship into a simple and stable orbit.

“We’re being hailed,” Rrr announced from Ops. “Gul Fremek of the Sander would like to speak with you captain.”

“Too much to ask that the Ta’del isn’t present?” Tikva asked as she got to her feet.

“Not seeing it out there,” Rrr continued. “Looks like nothing but ships of the 7th Order out there.”

“Well, let’s get this over with then.” Tikva straightened her back, hands behind her as the viewscreen shifted from the stars ahead to the bridge of a Cardassian vessel.

There was no close-in of this ship’s captain, no imposing face occupying her whole viewscreen. This was far more like hailing another Starfleet vessel, with the bridge on display, the captain at the centre of the action. But Gul Fremek, a handsome enough Cardassian woman, wasn’t smiling. She was hard, eyes squinting in assessment before they eased after just a moment. There was concern, worry, then relief on her face in such short order as to give Tikva pause.

“Oh good,” Fremek finally said, relaxing some. “Captain Theodoras, you need to contact your commanders immediately. There’s been an incident in the Sol system.”

“What sort of incident?” Tikva asked. She could feel the interest, the concern, the need to know that was brewing in all of her bridge crew. And herself.

“There was an attack during the Frontier Day celebrations.” Fremek paused, either for dramatic effect or to sum up the courage to say the last piece. “By the Borg.”

“Sit.”

The one-word order to both MacIntyre and Velan as they entered the ready room and the flat manner in which it was given answered their most immediate question – ‘How bad is it?’

Neither of them spoke as they took a seat opposite the captain. What could they say really in light of Fremek’s declaration of a Borg attack on Earth during the Frontier Day celebration? Fremek had been tight-lipped, insisting on reaching out to Starfleet Command and refusing to say anything further. ‘It’s not my place,’ she’d stated in response. The least she could do was provide priority access to Cardassian subspace relays for Atlantis to reach out to Deep Space 47 and Commodore Aben Ch’Thobar.

And while the captain had immediately gone to her ready room to make the call, it had left MacIntyre to clean up the current mess. And keep Atlantis out of the small bit of fighting that occurred as the rest of the Breen raiders came up in pursuit, right into the waiting guns of three Cardassian Galor-class ships of relatively recent vintage. It had been like shooting fish in a barrel.

“Admiral Shelby is dead.” The captain went straight to the point. “Spacedock is a disaster and Home Fleet is either shot to shit or scattered to limit their damage should something happen again.”

“What the hell happened?” Mac found himself asking without even thinking about it. Just an automatic response to get more context, more information to make things make sense.

“The perfect fucking storm of conspiracies it sounds like,” Tikva said, managing to make every word a curse. “Command is still either putting the picture together or getting it out to the fringes, but it sounds like Changeling infiltrators, some long-con by the Borg and sheer fucking hubris.”

A padd was picked up off Tikva’s desk and tossed lightly to Velan. “Official orders to disconnect and remove all Fleet Formation hardware from my ship.”

Velan looked it over briefly, nodding and then set the padd down on his lap. “It’s mostly disconnected already. This,” he tapped the padd, “does explain why it was firing off and causing us problems.”

“We just had to be a test bed for it, didn’t we?” Tikva quipped.

“To be fair ma’am it got us to Deneb. We couldn’t have coordinated with Papakura as well as we did without it.” Velan saw the look on her face and held up his hands in defence. “Just saying. I’ll have it disconnected by the end of the shift and we’ll have it fully removed by the end of day tomorrow.”

“Dump all the hardware in security containers and seal them up tight when you’re done.” Then the captain turned on Mac. “I see the Cardassians are still hanging around.”

“Gul Fremek said she would wait to see if we needed any assistance. And to recover the crew of the Rubic as well.” He looked the captain over and what he saw wasn’t the woman he was used to seeing. “How bad is it really?”

“Thousands dead at Earth alone. But this attack apparently happened everywhere across the Federation at once.” She waited a moment to let that sink in. “Atlantis was cut off from communications and therefore the Borg activation signal didn’t get to us. Fucking circumstance spared us.”

“A Borg signal caused all the problems?” Velan asked. “How?”

Tikva leaned forward, elbows on her desk. “Somehow the Borg were able to assimilate everyone under a certain age or what have you. Whole crews suddenly found themselves either assimilated or fighting off assimilated crewmates. And either hijacked by the Borg, or by Borg drones activating Fleet Formation and taking ships right out from under ships still in Starfleet control.”

“Great Bird,” Velan cursed. “Screw end of shift ma’am, I’ll have the hardware removed by the end of the hour.” He glanced at a chrono and then offered a slight smile and correction. “Next hour maybe.”

“Sounds good to me,” Tikva said, then turned to Mac. “Our passengers all transferred over to the Cardassians?”

“Yes ma’am, including an Andorian scientist we rescued. Doctor T’Halla Shreln. Apparently working with the university team aboard the Rubic and asked to go along with them. No record of her on our computers and the Cardassian scientists vouched for her. They all beamed or shuttled over to the Galten fifteen minutes ago.”

“Good. One less thing to worry about.” She sat back once more. “We’re heading back for DS47 immediately. I’m going to ask Gul Fremek to escort us as far as she can in case something comes up. If we’re given the all-clear we’ll let her know.”

“That really necessary?” Mac asked.

“Half the bridge crew could suddenly go Borg on us at a moment’s notice. It’s necessary until I’m told it won’t happen again. Commodore Ch’Thobar said he’d pass on any information as soon as he hears it and from the state of how things went down on the station, I don’t doubt he’d tell us just to let our nerves settle.”

“The fucking Borg. Why is it always got to be the Borg?” Mac grumbled.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Tikva responded. “Velan, get that hardware disconnected and uninstalled right now. Mac, get us ready to move. I’ll call Gul Fremek right now and arrange things with her.”

It was hours later, with Atlantis underway once more, not even stretching her legs with her Cardassian escorts, that Mac found Tikva, sitting in a half-dark Captain’s Mess. She’d opted for one of the tables by the windows, parking herself in one of the single seats. Getting himself a drink was the only delay between his entering the Mess and sitting in the seat opposite his captain, only a coffee table between them.

“Your speech to the crew was…a hell of a thing.”

“I had to tell them before we opened up communications again.” Tikva’s drink was sitting on the table in front of her, untouched. Or at least this glass was. Instead, she was playing with a model in a gloomy light, twirling it around and examining it from multiple angles. “I just got off a call with the Commodore. No more chance of the Borg uprising apparently. Turns out a geriatric ship and crew dealt with the problem.” She tossed the model at him, which he caught easily enough.

Looking at it, a small golden Galaxy-class model, he couldn’t help but frown. “What’s the oldest Galaxy-class ship currently in commission?” Then another question hit him. “Wait a minute, a Galaxy-class starship took out a Borg threat? Just one? By itself?”

“For the third time too.” Tikva glared at him, then picked up her drink, ice clinking against glass, then down then liquid in one go. “Not just in history, in its own history.”

He sighed at her, pointedly not enjoying the guessing game. “Third time, in its own history? So twice before?” He looked back at the model, studying it for a moment, trying to summon history lessons from the depths. And then it hit him. This wasn’t a model of a Galaxy-class starship, but a very particular one. “No. No fucking way.”

“Taken straight out of the Starfleet Museum according to the latest report I read. Took on some sort of Borg mega-cube over Jupiter.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. It was just a saucer last I saw it at the museum.”

Tikva scoffed. “USS Syracuse, when she was decommissioned, apparently had her stardrive donated. To make the Enterprise museum quality once more.”

“Something something they don’t make them like they used to?” he offered, a slight toast before sipping at his drink. Synthehol whiskey, fine enough for most occasions but right now was leaving an odd taste in his mouth.

“Honestly, feeling a little useless. We have one of the newest built and advanced Sovereigns in the fleet, one of the best crews as far as I’m concerned and if it had been us there instead, we’d have been fucked over by the Borg and our own starship.” The captain slumped in her seat.

“Well that’s not the Captain Theodoras I’m used to seeing. You’d have come up with something.” He set the drink and model down on the table and leaned forward. “Honestly cap, what’s up?”

“I’m allowed an off day every once and awhile right?” she countered, offering a wane smile. “Ask Lin, or hell any of the Fantastic Four. I can get a little…introspective after a disaster.”

“When you realise you could have, should have died?”

“By my own count, I’m sitting at four times now. Yet here I am.”

“One moment,” Mac said, then stood, collected both drinks and went about getting proper drinks this time. Glasses were set into a replicator for reclamation, fresh ones procured and real alcohol from the precious supplies within the Captain’s Mess used this time. Whiskey from a bottle just old enough to be considered acceptable, he returned and handed a glass over to Tikva. “Fate protects children, fools, ships named Atlantis and apparently those destined to walk her halls.”

The captain gave him a brief glare, then sipped at her drink. “Okay, you bring me real whiskey, you can get away with that tortured phrasing.”

“I’m your first officer. It’s my job to call you out when I see it and bring you a drink when you need it. Plus it gives me an excuse to drink as well.” Sitting himself back down, he put on a serious face. “The crew are going to want to see you on your A game when the news starts settling in.”

“I know,” Tikva answered. “It’s why I’m in here. And yes, I know, they’ll want to see their captain is what you’re getting at.” Another sip of her drink and she perked up a little, but even he could see the effort it took. “Port Royal is still set up for Frontier Day, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Good.” And then he saw the energy he normally associated with his captain return. She had something to do. “I’m not letting some cybernetic zombies steal our damn holiday. We’ve got a few days before we get back to DS47 so we’re going to celebrate. And honour the fallen.”

“Sounds like a plan,” he answered with a smile.

“Damn right it does,” Tikva confirmed. “So, here’s what I’m thinking…”