The Door On The Wall Pt. I
Posted on Sat Jun 27th, 2026 @ 3:00pm by Captain Saelira Venn & Commander Vren'desh Son of Rukas & Lieutenant Commander Nathan Lake & Lieutenant Lorek & Lieutenant Wynning Pi & Lieutenant JG Daniella Fox & Lieutenant JG Melody Piper
2,388 words; about a 12 minute read
Mission:
Mission 1: Through the Janus Gate
Location: Observation Lounge - USS Resolute
Timeline: MD001 - 0830 hours
The observation lounge was still empty when Saelira entered.
Her voice had only just carried through the shipwide comm, calling the senior staff to report. Somewhere beyond the closed doors, officers would be leaving stations, handing off duties, crossing decks, asking quick questions in corridors and turbolifts. The ship was already at warp beneath their feet, a low, constant thrum running through the deckplates like a held breath.
Vren’desh came in with her.
Saelira moved to the head of the table without sitting. The viewport no longer held Starbase 421, only stars stretched thin by speed, blue-white lines pulled across the dark as the Resolute carried them towards whatever waited at the end of Starfleet’s warning.
The mission packet was already queued.
She brought it up on the wall display, keeping the deeper files locked behind command access for now. The first screen appeared without fanfare.
JANUS CORE
Two clean words, too neat for what they were trying to contain.
Saelira looked at them for a moment, then rested her hand lightly on the back of the nearest chair. In a few minutes the room would have voices in it: questions, objections, professional instincts cutting at the problem from every angle. Good. She wanted that. She wanted Science uncomfortable, Engineering suspicious, Security already imagining the worst possible boarding action, Operations counting power before anyone asked for it, Medical preparing for injuries no one had properly named yet.
For now, there was only the hum of the ship at warp, the empty chairs, and the thing on the wall waiting to become real to everyone else.
Saelira glanced once towards the doors.
“They’ll be here soon,” she said quietly.
Handing off tactical duties to one of his Lieutenants Lorek gave a gentle reminder "Please continue with scans; we do not want any surprises." With a nod of the head from his subordinate Lorek made his way to the Observation Lounge.
Seeing the door open he walked in as he greeted command "Good morning Captain, Commander. Logically with the calling of the senior staff, we must have a mission on the horizon." as Lorek found a seat close to the entrance for security purposes; this had become a habit over the years aboard a starship.
Wyn had simply shut down his work station and exited engineering. His meeting was on the board and his team knew he had the meeting. He was of a mind that he didn't really need to tell them everything. One of his mountains was to treat them like adults. The ship was self-contained and he wasn't likely to get far if something bad happened.
So, with a final look around the mains, he exited and made his way to the briefing room. He brushed at a few specs on his uniform. His PADD, a new model, was curled around his left forearm which made it much handier.
He'd memorized the layout and within five minutes, entered the briefing room and nodded to those already present as he made his way to a seat near the far end. Taking his PADD, he smoothed it straight and set it on the table in front of him and stood behind the selected chair. "Captain. Commander."
Daniella arrived two minutes later. Even with the advance notice, she wasn't quite finished with helping one of the junior officers figure out how to repair a junction without replacing all the parts. "Hello, everyone," she said cheerfully as she walked in and took a seat.
Saelira looked up as Lorek entered, then Wyn, then Daniella a few minutes later. She acknowledged each of them with a small nod, letting the room gather its own rhythm rather than forcing it too quickly.
“There is a mission, Lieutenant,” she said to Lorek, with a faint trace of warmth. “Though I’d rather not make you all listen to the same unpleasant sentence twice.”
Her gaze moved briefly to the empty chairs still waiting at the table.
“We’ll begin properly when Doctor Lake and Lieutenant Piper arrive. Until then, take a seat. What’s on the wall is all anyone needs to stare at for the moment.”
The door opened once more, Melody stepped in greeting those there with a soft. "Hello, good morning."
While her uniform was neat and tidy, of which Melody took great care to be presentable for a meeting there was a slight deviation of her normal neatness. Unknown to her, there was a small twig caught in her hair, it nestling in her braid. She had been teaching one of the science members, the finer points of pruning a plant. And apparently hadn't noticed it there.
The doors to the observation lounge parted once more.
Dr. Nathan Lake stepped through carrying a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and a dataPADD in the other.
He immediately knew he was late.
It was not enough to be rude, but just enough that everyone would notice.
His eyes swept across the room as he found a seat. The senior staff had already assembled.
Nathan offered a small apologetic smile.
“My apologies. I lost an argument with a nurse.”
He then sat down and, without further explanation, settled in.
Vren'Desh had taken his seat and greeted the newcomers in kind with a nod of the head. He had spoken with the Captain about this mission earlier. He was not happy about what was to come. However, this news would show him how this crew that they had put together would band together to get the work done. He believed that they would serve with honor.
Saelira’s mouth softened at Nathan’s apology.
“I’ll accept losing an argument with a nurse as a valid medical delay,” she said. “This time.”
She waited until he had taken his seat. The small warmth remained for a moment, then settled into something quieter as she looked around the table.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s start with what’s on the wall.”
Her hand moved to the panel. The words JANUS CORE stayed where they were, but the display opened beneath them into the first layer of the mission packet. The image was part scan, part reconstruction: a compact Dominion-built core assembly, dark and uneven, its outer casing wrapped around a central chamber the computer could not render without a faint, persistent distortion.
“Janus Core is Starfleet’s designation,” Saelira said. “The technology itself is Dominion. We don’t have a full analysis, and I don’t want anyone treating the gaps in this file as if they’re harmless. The current assessment suggests temporal and subspace instability, with possible transdimensional application.”
She glanced briefly at the distorted centre of the model.
“In plain terms, it appears to be a device designed to open a controlled aperture between quantum realities.”
She let that sit. Not long. Long enough.
“We don’t know whether it ever worked as designed. We don’t know how stable it is. We don’t know what condition this unit is in now, or how much of the original control architecture is still intact.”
Another touch of the panel brought up the limited technical notes: power behaviour, chroniton bleed, subspace shear markers, sensor distortion around the core chamber.
“What we do know is that it reacts badly to conventional scans, it appears to draw and fold power in ways our analysts haven’t fully mapped, and Command believes mishandling it could produce anything from a localised containment failure to a much larger subspace event.”
Her gaze moved around the table.
“So before we talk about the vessel carrying it, I want us focused on the device itself.”
She rested one hand lightly on the back of her chair.
“Questions first. Science, Engineering, Security, Medical, Operations. What do you need to know about the Janus Core before we go anywhere near it?”
After looking at the limited data stream and the object, Wyn said, "Power is everything. Does it seem to be working off of it's own power or drawing power from some source....so, yeah uh ma'am. All of the raw power readings, That energy will effect how close the ship can get as well without things getting messy. Uh. Ma'am."
"I want what we probably can't have," Dani said next. "I want to know what controls it and what it controls. How does it function and what triggers it."
Saelira nodded to Wyn first.
“Power is where I’d start as well,” she said. “The packet doesn’t show a dedicated reactor. It shows something closer to a regulator or storage matrix, but the larger energy events appear to come from outside the device.”
She touched the panel, bringing up the rawer telemetry beside the schematic. It was incomplete, uneven in places, with more than one warning marker from Starfleet’s analysts.
“So we assume it can draw from whatever system it’s connected to. Maybe deliberately, maybe because someone has bypassed something they shouldn’t have. I’ll have the raw readings sent to Engineering, not just the summary. I want your first pass on safe distance, shield posture, and what kind of power behaviour tells us to stop closing.”
Then she looked to Daniella.
“And controls are the part I like least,” she said. “We don’t have a clean answer. Dominion architecture, but not standard Dominion architecture. No confirmed interface, no reliable command pathway, and no certainty on whether it is controlled directly or through conditions around it.”
Her gaze moved briefly back to the distorted centre of the model.
“What I can say is that devices like this usually need three things: power, alignment, and a control state. Something has to feed it, something has to tell it where to act, and something has to decide when it begins or stops.”
She paused, then added more quietly, “That’s not in the Starfleet summary. That’s from what little I know of technology built to touch temporal or dimensional boundaries. It’s enough to make me cautious. Not enough to make me comfortable.”
Her eyes returned to Daniella.
“So yes, I want what you want. Find the control paths. Anything that looks like an interface, remote trigger, feedback loop, command lock, safety cut-off, or a system pretending to be one of those things.”
Saelira let her hand fall from the panel.
“For now, assume the Core may respond to more than one trigger: power fluctuation, field alignment, external signal, physical interference, or a failed shutdown attempt. Engineering and Operations should work this together from the start.”
Daniella nodded as the captain spoke. She was in total agreement. At the same time, she tok careful notes so she wouldn’t miss anything. Later, she’d go over them to see if anything came to mind that might help.
She then looked out at the others to see if they had any other questions or if Vren'desh wanted to chime in.
Vren'Desh had sat with his arms folded across his chest. He listened intently to the conversation as it progressed. In his mind there was only one application for this device, it was clearly a weapon. "If I had lost, or was losing a war and created this technology. It would have only one use. To change the outcome of the war. To make sure that my side won at all costs. A sound tactic, even if it is without honor."
Nathan had studied the information carefully and listened to the others speak from their area of expertise.
But it was the words ‘temporal instability’ and ‘quantum realities’ that held his attention. Neither belonged anywhere near a medical report.
Eventually, Nathan lowered his coffee cup and looked at the group.
“From a medical perspective, exposure to this ‘Janus Core’ is my main concern. Federation medical archives does have good information on exposure to chronoton radiation or even temporal instabilities. But…” Nathan cleared his throat and was genuinely curious, “before I go further in that, does Starfleet intelligence have anything on what exposure looks like to this particular device?”
Saelira looked to Nathan. There was no better answer waiting in the packet.
“No. Not in any useful way.”
She touched the panel, bringing the hazard notes into a smaller column beside the schematic. There wasn’t much there, and what there was had been written with the cautious language of analysts who knew they were guessing.
“Starfleet Intelligence has no confirmed exposure data from this specific device. Most of what they have is inference drawn from the readings around it and from similar temporal phenomena. Enough to suggest there are risks, but not enough to tell us exactly what those risks look like.”
Her eyes stayed on Nathan.
“So we treat it as a temporal hazard until we know otherwise,” Saelira said. “Anyone going near it gets a baseline scan first, and Medical keeps eyes on them the entire time. Until we understand what this thing does to a living body, we assume exposure matters—even if we can’t yet measure how.”
She looked around the table.
“No direct handling. No unnecessary proximity. If and when we gain access to the device, anyone approaching it goes suited and monitored, with Medical tied into the recovery plan from the start.”
Then she looked back to Nathan.
“It’s not the answer you need, Doctor, but it’s the one we have. We prepare wide, then narrow it when Science and Engineering can tell us more.”
So far everything Lorek was hearing was all from a technical perspective but he still needed to inquire "We now have some understanding of the device; my inquiry is the location of said device. Depending on the device's location I can have several security teams ready and at your disposal if need be" he commented hoping for some direction for his part in the mission.
Captain Saelira Venn
Commanding Officer
USS Resolute
Lieutenant Lorek
Chief Security/Tactical Officer
USS Resolute
Commander Vren'desh Son of Rukas
Executive Officer
USS Resolute
Lt. Commander Nathan Lake
Chief Medical Officer
USS Resolute
Lieutenant Wynning Pi
Chief Engineer
USS Resolute
Lieutenant JG Melody Piper
Chief Science Officer
USS Resolute
Lieutenant JG Daniella Fox
Chief Operations Officer
USS Resolute
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