24th Century Phone Tag

Posted on 24 Oct 2016 @ 4:17pm by Captain Nathan Cowell MD & Commander Paul Toddman

Mission: Episode One: Back on the Highway to Hell
Location: Captain's Ready Room, Bridge, USS Arizona
Timeline: MD 3: 1400 hours

Captain Nathan Cowell stood in front of his Ready Room window, gazing out into the sea of twinkling lights. The pattern of stars was vaguely familiar to him, given that the Arizona had been there before not all that long ago. The largest difference between the last time he saw those same stars and the present was that his ship was in markedly better conditions and he still had everybody he’d been assigned to command.

The sound of his Ready Room door opening pulled his attention from the musings of the past and brought his mind somewhat back into the present. Nathan glanced behind him to find Commander Toddman strolling in with a PaDD and a grin on his face.

“You either just set the Bridge on fire for the shits and giggles of it, or you found signs of life out here,” Nathan said dryly as he slowly made his way to his desk.

“The latter,” Paul remarked as he handed over the PaDD.

Nathan took the offered device and sank down into his chair to browse it over. There were about twenty separate frequencies listed, neatly categorized by traffic density and source. The number of civilian transmission was unsurprisingly low, accounting for only four of the signals he’d located. The rest were Starfleet in nature and the content of them wasn’t overly urgent. Whatever had gone down was either already over or the rest of the quadrant was still ignorant of its happening. The Old Man had money on it being the first of the two.

Nathan looked up at Toddman, “This ‘Helios Station’ seems to have the largest concentration of traffic. You thinkin’ that’s where the majority of our people pulled back to?”

"Strong and defensible position with enough supplies to hold out for rescue, would seem as good a place as any."

Nathan couldn’t argue the man’s logic, “Have you managed to pinpoint how far away this place is from here?”

"I've triangulated the transmissions to a system about 2 days away at warp 9," Paul reported as he called up the long range sensor data on the star system.

The Old Man drummed his fingers on the desk. Two days was a lot of time to wait for answers, and he wasn’t the most patient of men. If they were using Federation standard communication protocols, they probably had the ability to relay secured messages as well.

“See what you can do about getting a hold of someone on this station. The higher up the better. Avoid answering any questions about how we got here, who sent us, all that jazz. Just tell them you weren’t cleared to talk about it or just play dumb. If you outrank them, tell them it’s above their pay grade and they need to find someone with a higher one to deal with it. If you get some Captain, tell him I told you not to discuss it and you’re not about to piss me off so they can feel better about themselves. Do what you have to do to get me the head honcho and I’ll smooth any wrinkles you make doing it,” Nathan said after a brief pause.

"No worries, Boss. I'll get the information I need," Paul said confidently.

"Good man... get to it," Nathan waved the man out of the room before pushing himself back out of the chair and once again resumed his idle gazing into the stars...