Avalon: Fact or Fiction
Posted on Mon Aug 24th, 2026 @ 1:56pm by Captain Kathryn Janeway & Reginald Barclay III
Edited on on Mon Aug 24th, 2026 @ 1:56pm
2,333 words; about a 12 minute read
Mission:
Lanterns in the Dark
Location: Astrometrics | USS Voyager
Timeline: 2398
Kathryn paced before the screen in Astrometrics. Reg and her had been at it for hours today as they searched for Avalon. "Anything Reg? It has to be out there somewhere. If they even completed it."
Astrometrics still had the same bones Reg remembered.
The broad central display dominated the room, its curved screen throwing pale starlight across the deck, while the raised control stations faced it in a shallow arc. Twenty years had left their fingerprints everywhere else. Some of the original panels had been replaced with newer assemblies that did not quite match; others carried narrow repair seams or components adapted from systems never intended for an Intrepid-class starship. Additional relay processors had been built into the side walls, their status lights blinking behind mesh covers, and a cluster of portable Lantern equipment occupied what had once been clean, open deck space.
It was less elegant than it had been when Voyager first returned.
It was also far more capable.
Reg stood at one of the auxiliary consoles, shoulders slightly rounded as he worked through another set of long-range sensor records. The main display showed a patchwork of old Starfleet surveys, Maquis navigation data, smuggler routes and Lantern reports gathered over years. Most of it disagreed with the rest.
At Kathryn’s question, he drew in a breath through his nose.
“No. Nothing that I’d call evidence.”
He made a small adjustment, then another, bringing up three separate gravimetric models before dismissing two of them almost immediately.
“There are anomalies, of course, but there are always anomalies. Especially when half the data was recorded by damaged ships, modified civilian sensors or people being pursued at the time.” His fingers paused above the controls. “Which does make accuracy somewhat… aspirational.”
Reg glanced towards her, then back to the display.
“But I don’t think the absence of a record tells us very much. Not with Avalon.”
A few commands stripped the map back to a sparse scattering of systems, old relay points and regions of unreliable sensor coverage.
“The purge protocol was thorough. Locations, construction schedules, personnel assignments, supply manifests. Anything that could lead directly to the station was removed or broken apart.” He shifted his weight. “I remember pieces of it. Engineering requests. Communications tolerances. Relay systems designed to operate through severe interference without producing a conventional subspace footprint.”
His brow tightened as he searched for the right shape of the thought.
“I worked on part of that architecture. I didn’t know where it was going. I don’t think most of us did. At the time it was just another compartmentalised project with too many authorisation layers and not enough explanation, which… well, in retrospect, probably should have told me something.”
He brought up a series of old test specifications beside the map.
“If Avalon was completed, it was never meant to announce itself—no beacon, no traffic pattern, no traceable support chain.” A beat passed. “After twenty years, we’re not searching for the station itself. Only what it left behind.”
Reg enlarged one of the specifications, tracing a line through the data with one finger.
“A relay handshake that appears once and never repeats. Navigation records with the same missing interval. Ships emerging from dangerous regions with repairs they couldn’t have performed themselves. Sensor logs that were corrupted in precisely the same way.” His mouth tightened slightly. “Individually, they’re nothing. Together…”
He let the sentence trail off while the computer layered the reports across one another.
Nothing resolved into a location. Not yet.
Reg watched the incomplete pattern for several seconds, then rubbed his thumb against the side of one finger.
“I think it existed, Captain. I think someone finished it.”
His eyes remained on the scattered points of light.
“I’m just not sure anyone left alive remembers where they put it.”
Kathryn Janeway was a scientist first and a Captain second. This was definitely a science moment. "You mentioned that the relay systems were designed to operate through severe interference. Well, lets start there. What anomalies out there would have the type of interference that those relays were designed for. Further, which ones were around twenty years ago. I can think of three: The Typhon Expanse, The Badlands, and The Briar Patch." She paused to sip her ever present cup of coffee. "At least we know that they have not found it either. If they did we would have heard about it." She refused to speak the word Dominion, Janeway always simply referred to the Dominion as They.
Reg’s head came up from the console.
“Yes. Yes, exactly.”
The answer came quickly enough that he almost spoke over the end of her thought. He stopped himself, fingers tightening briefly against the edge of the panel, then turned back to the display.
“There are two others I’d keep under consideration. The Paulson Nebula, for one. Persistent electromagnetic scattering, subspace attenuation, enough particulate density to confuse conventional sensors. It was certainly there twenty years ago.”
He brought it up beside the three regions Kathryn had named. The nebula appeared as a pale cloud against the dark, surrounded by the faded lines of old Federation survey routes.
“But it was well charted. Too well charted, really. There was regular traffic through that region before the war, and enough archived sensor data that someone would eventually notice a station-sized absence in it.” His mouth pulled slightly to one side. “You could hide a ship there. For a while. Twenty years is… optimistic.”
The image shifted.
“The Denorios Belt also fits. Plasma eddies, tachyon disturbances, unreliable sensor returns. Some of the relay tolerances would make sense there.” Reg hesitated. “But it’s Bajor. They’ve controlled the system too long, and they’ve had every reason to search it thoroughly. If Avalon had been there, I don’t think it would still be a rumour.”
He removed both regions from the centre of the display, leaving Janeway’s three suspended above the console.
“There are smaller ion storms along the old Cardassian border, but they move. The systems I worked on weren’t designed for temporary interference. They were built to maintain a phase lock while the conditions around them kept changing.”
Reg enlarged the old performance specifications, his nervous energy shifting into something brighter as the problem began to take shape.
“The Typhon Expanse and the Briar Patch could both account for that. Dense interference, unreliable navigation, enough natural cover to make routine searches difficult.” His fingers moved again, bringing up the Badlands last. “But the Badlands are different. The interference isn’t only strong. It’s layered. Plasma turbulence, gravimetric shear, subspace distortion, all changing almost continuously.”
He stared at the specifications beside it.
“At the time, I thought the relay design was over-engineered.” A faint, embarrassed smile appeared. “I thought that about quite a few things, actually.”
Kathryn’s last observation caught up with him then.
“And you’re right. They haven’t found it.”
Some of the tension left his shoulders, although his hands continued moving over the controls.
“That’s good. That’s very good.” He glanced towards her. “Not finding-the-station good, obviously, but still…”
His attention returned to the map.
“If they had Avalon, they wouldn’t keep it quiet. They’d make a broadcast out of the wreckage. The station matters because people believe there’s somewhere they can’t reach. They’d want to destroy that belief as much as the station itself.”
Reg drew the three remaining regions into a new comparison model.
“We don’t need to go near any of them yet. We can compare their historical interference profiles against the original relay tolerances from here. Old surveys, Lantern traffic, civilian sensor logs. Anything recorded before the collapse.”
The first columns of data began to populate beneath each region.
“If one of them matches the specifications more closely than the others…” He paused, then gave Kathryn a small, uneasy look. “Well, then we may finally have somewhere sensible to start.”
"Agreed..." She began with her crooked smile. The one that told people there was a lot more going on under her red hair, which had grayed about the temples by this time. "...There is one more location we should add to the list. The Carlson Rift. If memory served a station known as Poseidon Station once served as guardian to this rift of sort. Temporal eddies, and actual tears in space time were present. There are recordings of a number of ships crossing from other universes in that rift. Sounds like a good place to hide a station if you ask me."
Reg stopped working.
Not gradually, either. His hands simply came away from the controls while his eyes shifted back towards the stellar map.
“The Carlson Rift.”
He said it again under his breath, this time to himself, before turning quickly back to the console.
“Yes. Yes, that should be on the list.”
The display changed beneath his fingers, one of the comparison windows dividing to make room for another set of archived coordinates. Reg leaned closer as old survey information began populating around them, his forehead creasing.
“Poseidon Station. Commodore Harrington.” He glanced aside briefly. “I never met him. Or her. I don't think I did. There were reports, though. Engineering reports, mostly. Complaints about sensor calibration, chronometric drift, systems recording events in the wrong order…”
His fingers slowed.
“Which, admittedly, is a fairly memorable maintenance problem.”
More of the old data surfaced. What remained of it, anyway.
Reg drew the Carlson Rift into the same model as the other candidates.
“The temporal component makes it interesting. More than interesting, actually. Those relay systems weren't specifically temporal, but some of the tolerances always seemed excessive for ordinary subspace interference.” His eyes moved rapidly over the figures. “Phase variance, clock desynchronisation, signal reconstruction after discontinuity. At the time I assumed they were safeguards.”
A small movement of his shoulders followed.
“I made quite a few assumptions back then.”
He enlarged the historical readings attributed to the Rift, comparing them against the fragmentary Avalon specifications he still possessed.
“If ships really were crossing between universes there, you’d have almost constant background contamination. Chronitons, subspace shear, transient dimensional signatures. A station buried inside that would be very difficult to distinguish from the Rift itself.”
That pleased him. It was obvious in the way his nervous energy suddenly had somewhere useful to go, fingers moving more confidently as he began feeding the new location through their filters.
Then he hesitated.
“Although Poseidon bothers me.”
Reg tapped one finger against the edge of the console.
“If there was already a Starfleet station guarding the Rift, constructing Avalon nearby without Poseidon knowing would have been…” His mouth twisted. “Well, difficult is probably understating it.”
Another thought arrived almost visibly.
“Unless Poseidon was part of the cover. Or Harrington knew. Or Avalon was placed there after Poseidon was no longer in a position to report it.”
He stopped himself before the possibilities could multiply any further.
“Sorry. That’s speculation.”
Reg looked back at the five candidates now hanging across Astrometrics.
“But it’s good speculation.”
For the first time since they had begun pulling at Avalon’s ghost, there was something close to enthusiasm beneath the nerves.
“I’d put Carlson through the same historical comparison as the others. Maybe give it a slightly higher weighting for the temporal interference.” He considered the display another second. “If nothing else, Captain, it’s exactly the sort of place I would have hated being asked to make a communications relay work.”
A faint smile tugged at him.
“Which probably means someone asked.”
"There is an easy way to learn if Carlson could be considered. Computer when was Poseidon Station taken out of service or destroyed?" Janeway smirked as the computer thought on the question and then without a beat the comforting voice of the Voyager computer spoke. "Poseidon Station was decommissioned and the crew reassigned in 2374. The Aquil system was deemed an acceptable loss during the war. The station was destroyed to prevent it from falling into enemy hands."
A beat passed as Janeway sipped her coffee a tad smugly. "Well then Reg there it is. Avalon could have been built in the rift in secret right under the Dominion's nose.
Reg stared at the entry, then nodded.
“Well. Yes. That changes things.”
He was already pulling Poseidon’s final operational records onto the display.
“If the station was gone by the end of 2374, then there was no permanent Starfleet presence watching the Rift afterwards. No regular sensor sweeps. No traffic control.” A faint, nervous smile touched his face. “That would make hiding construction activity considerably easier.”
He brought up the last navigational surveys taken before Poseidon’s destruction.
“The problem is these charts are twenty-four years old. With that much temporal instability, I wouldn’t trust them beyond giving us a starting point.”
Reg glanced towards Kathryn.
“But there’s only one way to find out.”
His fingers moved across the console again.
“I’ll recover everything I can on Poseidon’s approach corridors and the Rift’s old temporal patterns. If Avalon is there, we may finally have a lead.”
A beat.
“And if it isn’t, we cross Carlson off the list.”
Kathryn smiled her usual crooked smile and actually gave Reg a hug. "As Shelock Holmes used to say the game is afoot." She tapped her comm badge. "Janeway to Bridge."
"Go ahead Captain." The deep, stoic voice of Commander Tuvok Voyager's XO could be heard.
"Commander set a course for the Carlson Rift, warp six. Engage when ready. Summon the senior staff for a briefing." She said and then looked at Reg. "We have a long road ahead of us, but at least we found the road. Let's get to it." She turned and made her way for the Bridge.
Captain Katheryn Janeway
Commanding Officer
USS Voyager
Reginald Barclay
Lantern Operative
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