“No, no! The adventure’s first. Explanations take such a dreadful time.”

Lewis Carol – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass. (1871)

 “Gripping the wheel, his knuckles went white with desire!  The wheels of his Mustang exploding on the highway like a slug from a .45.  True Death, 400 horsepower of maximum performance piercing the night.  This is Black Sunshine!”

The sheer, unrepentant fury of a twenty-first century 5.0 liter Coyote combustion engine raged throatily through a modified exhaust system.  It clawed for dominance to be heard over speakers that blasted its lyrics amid a cacophony of overdriven guitar sounds and drumming, a primal noise that would give Klingon opera a run for its latinum.  Two hands clutched at a steering wheel that boasted the emblem of a cobra, poised to strike.  The words ‘Shelby Super Snake’ were stamped below it.

“Yeah, move me in the silence of Baltic motorway.  Hang me on the edge before I fall away!
Apocalypse is dawnin’ action on the mile.  A can-do revolution, earth to the river Nile!”

 The blast of Ozzy Osbourne’s deranged 20th Century classical balladry continued to erupt from the vehicle’s sound system like the wrath of a forgotten god.  One boot crushed the clutch pedal.  The other boot refused to commit to just one pedal, opting instead to both rev the engine into a screaming fit with its toe while simultaneously smashing its heel down on the brake pedal.  The sounds of Ozzy were instantly drowned out.  The clutch was slowly released.

Outside, amid a small pool of water two tires spun into a frenzy.  The words “Michelin Pilot Super Sport” stamped on their rubber became a blur just milliseconds before the entire scene was enveloped in white, acrid smoke.

The black 2015 Ford Mustang Super Snake sat in one place, a defiant titan that spun its wheels for a good thirty seconds.  At last, exhausted and vindicated, it surged forward from all the smoke and rubber in the air for just a few feet before quieting and settling down.  Its tires were properly warmed up now, to ensure they provided their best traction.

“Sweeten the ride, Black Sunshine!  Sweeten the ride, yeah!  Sweeten the ride Black Sunshine!  Sweeten the ride, yeah!” the chorus over the speakers wailed on.

Captain Michael Dart made no effort to suppress the shit-eating grin on his face as he nudged the ancient vehicle towards the starting line.  He eyed the row of lights ahead of him as he nosed the car forward and got into position.  Mounted on a pole in front of him, a series of orange colored lights ticked off in a downward direction as they lit up one by one.  The combustion engine roared to life once more, flexing its prehistoric muscle.

On the instrument cluster, a needle sitting above the label ‘RPM’ jumped forward to peg itself just under a red line.  As the final light lit up green, he dumped the clutch.  The vintage vehicle tore off down the track, its wheels briefly bouncing and scrabbling to find purchase amid another cloud of smoke and splattering bits of rubber against the wheel well before clawing at the pavement like a starving beast chasing down an overdue meal.  It felt like his stomach dropped out from under him and was left behind at the starting line.  His right foot remained crushed down on the gas.  His left foot operated the clutch and seemed to tap out a lunatic’s morse code as he rowed through the sequence of gears in conjunction.

As he shot down the approximate 402 meter track, or quarter mile as it was colloquially referred to in its era, a prehistoric looking digital readout on a sign at the end of the stretch indicated that this had all gone down in 11.2 seconds.  The run had lasted only mere moments, but the sheer animal high of it detonated in his skull only now, leaving his heart pounding, hands trembling.  Adrenaline chewed at the edge of his nerves.

He supposed he wasn’t all that different from his executive officer after all.  She chased her thrills through daring acts of physical exertion, needing bruises and exhaustion to feel alive.  This was his outlet, representing a side of him that he couldn’t be out there.  Three hundred souls were depending on his need to stay rational.  But in the carefully contained illusion that was the holodeck, he could let loose where the risks were little more than lines of code and converted photons.

Michael realized with a start that somewhere in all that endorphin fueled rush of madness, his commbadge had been chirping.  He pushed in the clutch again, resting the shifter in the loose neutral position.  The old classic vehicle coasted to a stop.  He looked over at the leather service jacket he’d casually tossed on the passenger seat next to him and reached over to press the commbadge.  “Dart, here.”

Commander Thalissa Zheen spoke on the other end.  It was as if his thoughts of comparing himself to her had been an incantation, summoning her from the void.  “Captain, I just wanted to let you know.  We’re about 15 minutes out from our pickup.”

“Understood.  I’ll be right up.”  Michael reached down to a lever just next to the shifter and pulled up the ‘parking brake’ before stabbing at a button that would shut the engine off.  He reached for his jacket and then opened the vehicle’s door, climbing out of the low sitting leather seat.  Calling for the holodeck’s arch, he slung on the red shouldered leather service jacket with the ease of a man donning familiar armor.

He made his way out into the corridors where the demands of the universe had been carrying on all along without regard to what fleeting distractions went on behind these walls.

Stardate: 2401.12.26 / 04:31hrs

Location – Former DMZ / USS Fresno Bridge

With a hydraulic sigh, the doors to the turbolift opened up and surrendered its passenger.  Still coming down off of the thrill of his holodeck exploits, Michael strode onto the bridge with the air of a gunslinger stepping out of the saloon just before high noon.  His high was quickly strangled when he noticed the consternated look painted on Commander Zheen’s face.  The casual smirk wiped itself off of his own in an instant.  “Status report, Commander.”  His words had sharpened to a professional edge.  He could read the room and it felt coiled, ready to strike.  Something was off, and he didn’t like the way that feeling slithered beneath his skin.

“We’re approaching the site of Hull – 3185, Captain.” Thalissa replied in clipped tones.  “It’s just under 40,000 AU off, and we’re picking up no sign of either it or the Valley Forge.”

“What!?”  His eyes shifted to gawk at the helm, his expression that of a man who’d just been handed a phaser set to overload.  “I don’t mean to make any slight against your navigational skills, Miss Rix.  But have we double-checked our coordinates?”

Lieutenant JG Lenara Rix’s dark complexion flushed like a warp core running too hot, looking as nervous as a Ferengi caught short-changing a Klingon.  But she held her composure as she gestured to her console, as if pleading with reality to absolve her.  “Course locked in for sector fifty-one ninety-eight, mark two-five-oh.  ETA is one minute, five seconds.”

Michael’s look softened for a brief moment, in what he hoped would convey that he hadn’t intended to put the young woman under fire.  “Understood, Lieutenant.”  He strode over to the center seat as Thalissa stood to relinquish it.  Michael remained standing in front of the command chair; eyes locked onto the Tellarite standing behind it at Tactical as if begging for some kind of divine intervention.  “Are we close enough to get any readings of the area?”

“Aye, sir.” came the thick Scottish accent that was definitely not a normal characteristic of Lieutenant Commander Vorak’s species.  “But all I can tell ye is that I’m registering a whole lot of interference now that we’re closer.  From as far out as we initially were, that could explain why it simply looked like an empty area on the sensors.  The two vessels could still be there and are simply masked behind all that noise, or they could be gone.  We’d be buggered to tell for sure till we get there and see for ourselves.”

“But it definitely indicates that something has gone down.” Michael finished uneasily.

“Oh, aye.  And something big.  That’s a bloody safe bet, alright.” The Tellarite affirmed.

“Red alert, then.  I want us ready for anything.”  The level of lighting on the bridge dropped as strips of red LEDs running along the walls pulsed with activity and bathed them all in an intermittent red glow that ebbed and flowed.

Michael turned and dropped into his seat like a man who expected it to suddenly vanish beneath him.  His muscles were coiled, gut twisted with a sense of dread as forty-three long seconds counted down their arrival.  The tension in the room was palpable.  His mind became a pressure cooker of paranoia, bubbling with worst-case scenarios.  The Fresno was not a ship that could put up much of a fight if it was about to come to that.  Visions of disaster flooded his head like a broken dam.

His thoughts drifted towards the nature of Hull – 3185.  He knew next to nothing about what they had been sent to pick up.  Any information regarding the vessel had been smothered in lockouts labeled as top secret.  Being the Captain of just a simple ship of mechanics, his security clearance was about as low as it could get for a man of his rank.  But any officer worth the threads that made up his uniform would recognize that a ship with merely a Hull designation was so early in its experimental stage that it didn’t even get an NX designation.

The engineer in him knew this likely meant that the purpose of Hull – 3185 was to test some sort of component rather than to serve as a prototype to a particular class of vessel.  But that component could be anything.  How dangerous was Hull – 3185?  Dangerous enough for someone else to want to steal it out from under their noses?  The uncertainty of Hull – 3185’s nature only served to crank his anxiety up to a fever pitch.

After what felt like an agonizing eternity, the universe decided to make sense again as the blurred chaos of warp travel collapsed into something recognizable.  But all that awaited them on the viewscreen was a deep, hungry nothing aside from the stars that had finally snapped into place as frozen pinpricks.  They sat cold and apathetic, as though daring them all to explain just where in the hell their rendezvous had gone.  For Michael, it was two parts a sense of relief that they weren’t going to be met with a physical confrontation, and despair that both Hull – 3185 and the Valley Forge did indeed seem to have abandoned them.

He looked around at all the grim, tight lipped faces that surrounded him.  The room reeked of failure; tired eyes, slumped shoulders, the collective stink of a botched job hanging in the air like cheap cigar smoke.  Everyone present in this room had been a part of a recently failed covert mission not long ago that to be fair, had put them well out of their element.  They were engineers, not operatives.

It was the kind of defeat that left a permanent stain, the kind that wouldn’t wash off no matter how many reassurances or stiff drinks they threw at it.  It was an assignment gone awry that had segued from their very first mission, and morale aboard the ship had taken a grievous wound for it.  Down to every man and woman, they all exchanged looks with one another that seemed crestfallen with accusations ringing in the air that now that they were given the next assignment, they couldn’t even execute a simple pick-up and delivery.

It was Commander Thalissa Zheen who stood up and interjected into the general malaise shared amongst the bridge.  She rested a reassuring hand on her Captain’s shoulder.  “Stand down to yellow alert!”  The bridge lighting surged back to life, cold and clinical, flushing out the last of the red glow of emergency lighting.

“Comms, talk to me!” she barked crisply.  Is there any logs or communiques out there indicating that Valley Forge had been forced to leave the area?  Anything from the rest of Taskforce 72 that might suggest that a chase had resumed?”  While the Fresno had not taken part in the pursuit of the errant entity that had turned out to be Hull – 3185, the coordination that had taken place among many other vessels of the taskforce in casting a wide net had occurred over open channels.  It was open knowledge that the Valley Forge had finally caught up to it and neutralized it.  Or so they all had thought, anyways.

“No, ma’am.” The Denobulan ensign who sat at the rear of the bridge spoke up.  Ensign Revek turned from his panels that lined the back wall to offer an apologetic look.  “Everything indicates to me that all was well, and the Valley Forge was standing by and waiting to hand Hull – 3185 off to us.  Whatever happened here, it must have happened in a hurry.  Or else all this residual energy in the area interfered with their comms and they weren’t able to get anything out.”

Michael straightened up, giving his executive officer a curt, grateful nod.  The kind that said, ‘thanks for keeping us from circling the drain’.  Himself, included.  He couldn’t afford to be seen as he had just been, drowning in the same miserable swamp of failure as the rest of them.  He and Thalissa had to choke it down, force their spines straight, and set the tone before the whole damn crew spiraled further into their low morale.  Leadership wasn’t always about feeling good.  Sometimes it was about faking it well enough to keep the ship afloat until it could be turned around.

“Tactical!” he called out.  “Now that we’re here, can you lock down just what kind of residual readings are flooding the area?  Any signs of battle, weapons fire, pieces of hull, warp trails, that kind of thing?”

The Tellarite behind tactical shook his head.  “Nay, I’m reading none of that.”  His face scrunched up with an even more dour expression, if such were even possible for him, as he seemed to examine some bit of information on his console in more detail.

“Strike that, sir.  There is a faint warp trail.  Two, in fact.  Although one of them appears to fade in and out at very unnatural intervals.”  He raised a hand to stroke his beard in a confounded manner.  “The trail looks like if you were to draw out some kind of morse code, I have no explanation for it.  Both suddenly disappear, right where all of the interference we were picking up on the scanners is the most concentrated.”

A mutton-chopped Trill seated at the back wall consoles with Revek interjected.  “Sir, if I may!”  Lieutenant Commander Dren Lor, Fresno’s science officer, spoke up confidently.  “All of this interference is demonstrating a heavy amount of activity on the quantum level.  It indicates some sort of anomaly that both trails disappear into.”

“What, like they went through something?” Michael asked, a sense of relief washing over him as his pulse kicked up a notch.  Maybe, just maybe, they weren’t walking away from this assignment with their hands completely empty.  Starbase 72 wanted Hull – 3185, but if he couldn’t deliver the thing then he damn well needed to deliver something.  Anything.  And right now, providing answers were starting to look like the only thing standing between him and Command thinking they weren’t just a ship full of completely inept idiots.

“Not necessarily, sir.” Dren Lor explained.  “It just means that an absolute fuck-ton of a burst of quantum activity took place, to put it in layman’s terms.”

A ‘fuck-ton’ certainly wasn’t the scientific – term.

“It might have simply obliterated the warp trails in the spot it went off, making it appear like they disappeared.  That could also provide an explanation for why Vorak is getting such confounding readings regarding one of those trails seeming to skip along.  If bits of it were obliterated in small, repeating intervals along the way before they meet the largest concentration of residual quantum activity, it could imply that whichever ship was responsible for its final outburst is the one that left behind the oddly interrupted warp trail as all that built up to some sort of crescendo.”

“So, we’re looking at what, exactly?”  Thalissa asked.  “We either stick around and take readings of this quantum activity, or else we go out further to try and search for where two warp trails might pick back up?”

“Seems to be the gist of it to me, ma’am.” Dren agreed.

Michael contemplated his options for a moment before finally coming to a decision.

He turned to Revek at the comms station.  “Open up a channel to Starbase 72 and send it to my ready room.  Get ahold of Starbase 72’s Commanding Officer.  His name is Trevenan Williams.  If he can’t be raised, I’ll settle for his XO.  Zarroc Thakrass.  This should be reported directly to one of them.”

As he made his way hurriedly to the ready room that would be adjacent directly off of the bridge, he paused.  “And as to either of our options, we’re not the fastest vessel in the fleet.  I don’t think we’ll be catching up to anything, even if we could pick their trails back up.  Our best bet is to stick around and take as many readings of this anomalous activity as possible.  Unless Command tells us otherwise, we’ll stay and gather what we can until they send a vessel that has a more capable sensor package than our own.”

He nodded to Thalissa.  “You have the conn, while I go give them the bad news.”