Into the Drift
Posted on Tue Aug 18th, 2026 @ 6:25pm by Captain Saelira Venn & Commander Vren'desh Son of Rukas & Lieutenant Lorek & Lieutenant JG Tavian Rhos & Lieutenant JG Daniella Fox & Lieutenant JG Melody Piper
2,767 words; about a 14 minute read
Mission:
Mission 1: Through the Janus Gate
Location: Main Bridge | Deck 1 | USS Resolute
Timeline: MD004 0617 hours
The bridge had begun to wake around Saelira.
Alpha shift officers were taking their stations, quiet handovers passing between consoles while the Resolute held warp nine. The stars stretched across the forward viewer in clean, unwavering lines. Somewhere beyond them lay the Archanis Drift, still outside visual range but already beginning to crowd the sensor plots along the bridge displays.
Saelira sat in the centre chair with the latest approach data open on the arm console. The Pakled contact remained marked in amber, its projected position shifting by small, irritating amounts whenever the computer tried to reconcile its last known velocity with what the vessel had apparently become capable of.
Her tea sat untouched beside her.
She had arrived before the shift change and had not offered an explanation. None had been requested. Captains appearing early on the morning of an intercept were hardly unusual, even if this particular captain had already read every overnight report twice.
The bridge lighting caught faintly against the ring on her right hand as she moved through the newest telemetry. Intermittent subspace distortion. Localised power fluctuations. A movement profile that still refused to match the Pakled ship carrying it.
The Janus Core had not become any less dangerous while the crew slept.
Assuming anyone had.
Saelira closed the telemetry and looked towards the forward viewer. The Drift would appear unremarkable at first. A sparse region of stars, a little sensor noise, perhaps the faint suggestion of charged particulate matter where local conditions became less cooperative. Nothing visible would warn them that navigation could become unreliable or that something ahead was already pressing against subspace in ways it should not.
The deck shifted beneath her.
It was slight enough that someone standing might have mistaken it for a correction from Flight Control. Saelira felt it through the base of the chair, a shallow sideways tremor followed by a second vibration that travelled forward through the bridge.
The stars on the viewer bent.
Only for an instant. Their long lines pinched towards the centre, then snapped back into place as though nothing had happened.
Saelira’s hand settled against the armrest.
That had not felt like a course correction.
Her gaze moved towards Operations.
“Lieutenant Fox?”
"There was a...ripple...of some sort. Sensors can't identify it, but it came from the device, ma'am," Dani replied. "No damage detected. Recalibrating for another scan."
Saelira listened, eyes returning to the main viewer as the distance to the Drift continued to fall.
Whatever had touched the ship had reached them before they reached it.
“All right.”
She leaned forward slightly.
“Mr Rhos, take us out of warp. Bring us down to half impulse before we cross the boundary, then ease us in. No sudden changes unless the Drift gives you a reason.”
A beat passed as she studied the stars ahead.
“Let’s find out what’s waiting for us.”
"Aye, Captain, dropping out of warp," Tav was bright-eyed and focused up front at the helm, despite the fact he'd started his shift a bit early today too, though after the captain had settled in. Those two raktajinos early this morning helped. His fingers were moving even before Saelira had finished speaking the order, or before he'd acknowledged it.
The steady background hum of the warp drive faded away, the vibrations lowered in pitch and range, and on screen the streaming lights of the warp bubble solidified into the backdrop of distant stars and planets against a field of black. Over 3.2 million metric tons of starship slid back into normal space-time with a wash of baryonic radiation and subspace noise.
"Confirming half-impulse. Navigational sensors aren't having any joy either; I'm reading planetary bodies but nothing smaller than a large moon. Will try to keep this smooth. One day, I'm sure we'll install seatbelts." That was his way of saying he'd keep an eye on all of it, wired and intent to react as fast as he could if needed -- and if the inertial dampeners didn't keep up quite as well as they should, oh well.
Lieutenant Lorek was standing at Tactical performing long range scans not only looking for the Pakled vessel but also making sure no outside forces would appear interfering with their mission. Already there were two security teams on standby each would use separate transporter rooms. One would escort an away team for the core retrieval and the other in case the Pakled bridge had to be breached. Focused on his screens he noticed a split second interference to his readings but chalked it up to space distortions.
Vren'Desh was immediately on his feet. He crossed over to the Science station. "Lieutenant. What was that?" He had some ideas as there were only a certain amount of special phenomena that can have this effect on the Resolute.
Melody didn't answer at first, she had noticed something
She felt a faint vibration from her console through her finger tips and the screen seemed to ripple.
Then the world went blank, as if someone had unplugged her brain for a moment.
Her mind came back into focus when Melody heard Vren'Desh's voice near her.
At first Melody looked up at the XO, blinking.
"Sorry, sir?" then her mind kicked into focus.
Her fingers danced over the terminal to trace just what had happened.
"It seems we have encountered a chroniton ripple," Melody began.
Her eyes narrowed as another reading appeared on the screen. "That's strange."
She pulled up the sensor record from the moment the ripple had passed through the ship and compared it against the Resolute's current readings.
"I'm getting a second return from the ship. It's faint, almost like an echo." Melody paused, studying the two sets of data. "Same signature, but the timing is off."
She looked back towards Vren'Desh.
The Klingon did not like the sound of an echo of them all. He had encountered various ship's logs of similar instances. But, where it came from, and what caused it was more important to him. "Can you trace its trajectory? Find out where it originated from."
Saelira remained in the command chair as Vren’desh crossed towards Science.
Ahead of them, the Archanis Drift was beginning to reveal itself.
Not dramatically. That almost made it worse.
There was no wall of fire waiting for them, no great storm front hanging across space. The stars simply seemed thinner here, their light occasionally disappearing behind faint veils of charged dust before returning somewhere slightly different. Sensor information crawled along the edge of the viewscreen, half of it confidence estimates rather than certainty.
Then something passed through the Resolute.
The deck gave a short, ugly shudder.
Not enough to throw anyone from a chair, but enough to set a loose PADD rattling against the lip of a console and send Saelira’s untouched tea trembling in its cup.
For her, it did not stop there.
The bridge seemed to hesitate.
Rhos’s hand crossed the helm.
Then crossed it again.
A console sounded behind her, and Saelira heard the alert an instant before the panel actually lit.
Her stomach turned.
The sensation vanished almost immediately, leaving the bridge exactly as it had been before, officers at their stations, stars ahead, warp gone and the Resolute carrying herself towards the Drift at half impulse.
Saelira stared at the forward viewer.
A familiar pressure had started behind her eyes.
Very faint.
That was enough.
“Hold what you have.”
Her voice was quiet, but it carried across the bridge.
She rose from the command chair.
“Dani, freeze the sensor record from the last five seconds. Don’t let the computer clean any of it up.”
Her gaze moved towards Operations.
“If those readings disagree with each other, I want the disagreement.”
The ops officer immediately froze the sensor data, then copied it to a data chip she always kept on her for just such uses. Then she made a separate copy of the last minute, then the last five. "Got it." She slipped the chip back in her pocket. That was her backup. When she checked the sensors again, the data had changed, just as the captain suspected.
Saelira stepped down from the command level as another curtain of particulate haze moved across the stars ahead. The Resolute seemed almost stationary against it, despite the tremendous mass of the ship still driving forward.
Her attention moved towards Science.
“Melody, take the raw data from Fox. Chronitons, phase variance, subspace distortion, anything even slightly out of place.”
She hesitated, feeling for the pressure behind her eyes.
It remained.
“Especially timing.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly.
“Something about that pulse arrived wrong.”
Dani shared the data with science, then went back to watching.
The data that Dani had sent to her, Melody tracked it, comparing to the echo she had found just moments before. The ripple that she had noticed, well it was what she could compare it too, like a rock having been plunked into a pond .
Saelira turned towards the helm.
“Mr Rhos, keep us where we are. Half impulse.”
She rested a hand briefly on the rail separating the command level from the forward stations, grounding herself against the steady vibration beneath it.
“Stop trusting any one navigational source. Stellar fixes, inertial guidance, gravimetric reference points. Keep them separate.”
A faint curl touched one corner of her mouth.
“If they start arguing with one another, you tell me which one sounds drunk.”
Wide-eyed, Tav was focused intently on his board, didn't even turn around to see the almost-smile, but he could pick up the mood behind it without looking.
What was that?! His own perception of the strange effect had nearly been overwhelmed by the sheer weight of confusion and even fear he couldn't help but pick up from the whole crew as that -- wave? -- had passed them.
"Aye, Captain," he said, left hand on the flight controls as he reduced speed and adjusted their flight path. Tav's voice was shaken. The other hand moved and fingers tapped rapidly to split his sensor readouts into multiple split-displays: the feed from the navigational sensors, the most up-to-date starcharts from astrometrics, gravimetric readings beneath that, along with radiation sources.
"Half-impulse."
Black eyes didn't even need to look at what his left hand was doing as he studied the readouts. Space wasn't... right. Space-time more precisely by those chroniton distortions and gravimetric sheer. "I think I can get us through, but it's going to be a choppy ride."
The humour lasted only as long as the line.
Saelira looked towards Tactical.
“Lorek, forget the clean contact for now.”
The Pakled vessel was still somewhere ahead of them, but the Drift had already made a mockery of ordinary long-range detection.
“Look for what a ship that size can’t hide. Engine residue. Displaced particles. Gravimetric wake. Anything disturbed recently enough that the Drift hasn’t swallowed it yet.”
Her eyes flicked towards the transporter readiness indicators.
“And keep your teams ready, but nobody transports until we know what these pulses are doing.”
"Understood Captain" tapping his comm "Security teams one and two standby.....await my order" then Lorek proceeded to switch his tactical screens to another function. Scanning ahead he watched the readouts intently for several minutes....and there it was "Captain, I am seeing a Gravimetric wake approximately five hundred kilometers ahead......it is increasing intensity " Lorek informed command.
Another faint shimmer crossed the viewer.
This time the stars did not bend.
Saelira almost wished they had.
She looked towards Vren’desh.
“Pull it together.”
There was no need to explain more than that to him.
“Science finds the fingerprint. Operations gives us a direction. Tactical finds what passed through it. Flight tells us whether space itself is lying to us.”
Melody was riveted to the screen tracking, looking for the ripples that were contractive where the ship is concerned.
Her fingers pressed once against the rail.
The pressure behind her eyes sharpened, then eased again.
The Janus Core was active.
Somewhere ahead, aboard a Pakled ship, something built by the Dominion from technology nobody had ever properly understood was pushing at the rules around it.
And the Resolute had just felt the first consequence.
Saelira looked back towards the forward viewer.
“We don’t need to see them yet.”
A beat.
“We just need them to make another mistake.”
"Blind firing." Vren'desh said with no preamble. "We could simply fire a few torpedoes into the drift. It could possible scare the Pakleds into making a mistake."
The Resolute continued deeper into the Archanis Drift.
Behind her, consoles murmured and officers worked the problem from five different directions.
Ahead, the stars faded behind another thin wash of charged dust.
And somewhere beyond it, unseen, the Janus Core continued to pulse.
Saelira turned her head towards Vren’desh.
“Blind firing.”
There was no immediate rejection in her voice, only the faint edge that said she was already taking the idea apart and putting it back together into something she could live with. Ahead of them, the Drift remained stubbornly opaque, its thin veils of charged dust sliding across the stars while Lorek’s gravimetric wake continued to build on Tactical.
“Not quite,” she said after a moment. “But close enough.”
She rose from the command chair and moved a few steps towards Tactical, studying the wake on Lorek’s display rather than the empty space beyond the viewer. Somewhere ahead, the Pakled ship had disturbed the region simply by passing through it. If Vren’desh was right, they did not need to find the vessel yet. They only needed to give it a reason to move.
“Lorek, load two photon torpedoes. Minimum practical yield, wide separation. I want them detonating ahead of the wake, not inside it.”
Her eyes remained on the tactical plot.
“We’re not trying to hit them. We’re going to disturb the space around them and see what answers.”
Saelira glanced across towards Operations.
“Dani, watch everything when they go off. If something changes out there, however small, grab it before the Drift buries it again.”
Dani nodded, her eyes going between her console and the viewscreen.
The pressure behind Saelira’s eyes gave another faint pulse. She resisted the urge to touch her temple, keeping her attention instead on the darkened stretch of space ahead.
Then she looked back to Lorek.
“Fire when ready.”
A small, knowing glance passed towards Vren’desh.
“Let’s see how easily they scare.”
Lorek immediately switched screens to combat mode and keyed in the parameters "Two photon torpedos locked and loaded....minimum yield......wide separation.....firing" he recited back to command while switching screens once again. Minutes later the torpedos detonated causing the Pakled ship move away from the explosion "Captain the torpedos detonated ahead of the Pakled ship.....unless they move again they are fifty thousand kilometers ahead bearing two four mark seven."
The torpedos that were fired, Melody could catch what appeared to be the mysterious Pakled ship, the torpedos in her mind were like the pinging of a sonar to find a hidden submarine well for that matter, a hidden Pakled ship.
Saelira’s attention snapped towards Tactical as Lorek’s report came across the bridge. After the uncertainty of the last several minutes, the changing sensor returns and the uncomfortable pressure still lingering behind her eyes, a bearing was something wonderfully uncomplicated.
“Good work, Lieutenant.”
She stepped back towards the command level, her gaze moving to the forward viewer even though the Pakled vessel was still hidden somewhere within the haze of the Drift. They had spent long enough chasing disturbances, echoes and the scars left behind by the Janus Core. Now, at last, there was a ship at the end of them.
“Keep them tracked, Lorek. No weapons lock unless they give us a reason.”
Saelira lowered herself into the centre chair and looked towards Flight Control, the earlier discomfort pushed aside by the familiar clarity that came with having something tangible to act upon.
“Mr Rhos, lay in an intercept course. Bring us in carefully.”
Her eyes settled on the thin, shifting haze ahead.
“Let’s go meet our Pakleds.”
Captain Saelira Venn
Commanding Officer
USS Resolute
Lieutenant Lorek
Chief Security/Tactical Officer
USS Resolute
Lieutenant JG Daniella Fox
Chief Operations Officer
USS Resolute
Commander Vren'desh
Executive Officer
USS Resolute
Lieutenant (j.g.) Tavian Rhos
Chief Flight Control Officer
USS Resolute
Lieutenant JG Melody Piper
Chief Science Officer
USS Resolute
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