Starfleet's Lost Daughter

Posted on Sun Jul 1st, 2018 @ 3:17pm by Captain Remas McDonald

944 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: S0:1: What Is Past, Is Prologue
Location: Tertiary Memory Core Back Up Actuator, Deck 8
Timeline: Extragalactic Space, A Week From Messier 4

Silence sings as a bird in the heather,
Alighting the mind with such colours so bright,
But each man will see what magic transforms her,
Starfleet’s lost daughter takes wing in the night.

Found all alone at a berth about Cydonia,
Poor long dead wretch buried under the stars,
They’ve gutted her body and dug down so deeply,
They’ve lain her to rest but no rest she finds there.

See, she rises, like a flare ‘fore the nova,
Still, she comes like the shadow of night,
With each ghostly creaking, the dead girl comes creeping,
The sorrowful spectre avenging her plight.

Remas’s brow furrowed, and he gently tilted the lyre to one side so he could tighten one of the strings. The pitch had been just a wee bit off and it offended his player's ear. He strummed the last cord again, his lips silently speaking the last refrain as the lyre’s strings sang sweetly without quarrel. He nodded in approval and continued.

Soon, this foreman, so sleepless and shaken,
Sent for a Rish man renowned for his skill,
And straight way he’s come with no airs and no graces,
And walked without word to that heart of the ship.

Onto that bridge crammed the dockmen around him,
Through doorways and bulkheads, they hung for the show,
In a circle of chalk, he has knelt down so steady,
And sang with such force water poured down his brow.

All of a sudden, the deck’s took to shaking,
Up, down and upwards, until this man cried out
‘Arise, now arise, I charge and command thee,’
The whole ship went still, and her ghost did appear.

And for a moment Remas went silent and still.

The Traveller’s bowels were littered with little utilised and cramped spaces. And in this case a singular void at the centre of the ship. Usually, such spaces became home to mundane technologies, like relays or computer backups. But a five-metre square cube some how got overlooked during the Traveller’s outfitting, perhaps aided by sneakily being labelled on a diagram as the tertiary memory core back up actuator. Remas had found engineer’s often accepted labels with more than four words in them more readily than not.

In truth, it was a little bit of an adar’Rishal homesteader set into the frame of a Starfleet vessel: a hearth room. If a ship was said to have a heart, it was that singular space. On his father's homesteader The Voids Home the room had been plastered with flexi screens. Upon each was pictured a different world the old starship had visited or passed by, taken by his father’s ageing multispectral camera. The Traveller’s hearth room was sparsely decorated save for the vacuum chalk circle drawn on the deck, cut into wedges by the five cardinal directions of the Rish.

Fore. Aft. Port. Starboard. And Onward.

He waited the moment to see if, like so many older Rish often claimed in their tales, that their ship would appear to them by the offering of some treasure. The old Klingon captain of the Star Jammer claimed he had been visited by a blue-skinned Orion with eyes like stars when he had brought a bottle of homebrew to his hearth one night. Another, one of the Breen Hegemony, had chittered his own ship had given him the idea to use solar sails to skim fuel from a star when he had recited poetry.

Remas, instead, sang in his lilting voice the sad lament of the Traveller. Hoping, he thought at least, to repay the debt he owed this fine ship.

‘Sorry am I now I look down upon you,
So sad are your eyes that it makes my heart numb,
If you will not be gone, you can stay in this starship,
But you must live as a fish in the depths of a sea.’

‘And now for you sinners who gather around me.
I’d have you reminded for causing this woe,
So she’ll rise for this mission, and sail forth so proudly,
She’ll fly as a blackbird, but as white as the snow.’

Silence sings as a bird in the heather,
Alighting the mind with such colours so bright,
But each man will see what magic transforms her,
Starfleet’s lost daughter takes wing in the night.

He let the final string shiver to stillness, the echo of his words and music drifting into the silence of a working starship. No visitation, nor thankful words…except there were words spoken, and a visitation granted. His ship sang with the quiet assurance of activity, the clamour of distant conversations carried on the air, the thrum of high voltage EPS humming in their conduits. Such a stark contrast to the stripped space frame he had found in orbit of Mars five years previously awaiting her turn under the smelters flame.

The Traveller was a ship so full of life it had not one voice to speak, but a thousand. Remas smiled and placed the lyre back into its case in preparation for the long climb back through the maintenance crawl spaces.

“Thank you,” he said, kneeling and tapping two fingers against each of the five chalk lines bisecting the circle. The fifth line, Onward, was set just to the right of ‘Fore: for the path not taken. And with that, he left the Hearth Room. Maybe if he’d stayed a moment longer something might have happened.

Whose to say?

 

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