Adelphous Station, Part I: Arrival

Posted on Sun Jun 29th, 2025 @ 11:56am by Commander Karl Rogers & Captain Mitsu Sato & Commander Eva Grey & Lieutenant Kev Walker & Lieutenant Jaina Zalla & Lieutenant JG Alicia Santos & Ensign Eric Banner & Ensign Erin Andala & Lieutenant Commander T'Mara & Lieutenant Vesper Wolfe & Ensign Noa Oku

1,089 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Adelphous Station

Mitsu stood at the center of the bridge with her arms tucked behind her back and her eyes fixed on the screen as the Eclipse dropped out of warp. The Federation science station Adelphous Station sat in deep orbit at the edge of the Adelphous System, barely inside the system's Oort Cloud. The station itself was a simple mid range station, the type that housed small crews and had to receive regular supply shipments. Mitsu had checked the records that had been available. The station had recently been supplied and was good to go for another year. But there was one problem with the station. It was silent.

"Report," she said calmly.

"Subspace is clear. According to my readings, there's no sign of any outgoing transmissions in the last twenty-four hours," Vesper reported from the helm, her fingers tapping swiftly across her console. “No automated docking beacon detected. Approach vector is stable. We’ll reach synchronous orbit in two minutes.” She glanced back at the captain. "This place seems dead in the water, ma’am."

Karl leaned forward from his seat beside the captain, a frown etched into his features. "That station should be broadcasting a status ping at minimum. Are we reading any power signatures at all?"

Kev piped up from the operations station, his eyes narrowing at his display. “According to the sensors, main power on the station is offline. Emergency batteries are trickling out minimal support. It's just enough to keep internal containment and environmental seals intact. But everything else is completely dead.” He shook his head after a moment. “The main computer’s dark also. Not even a handshake on long range telemetry. That shouldn’t be possible unless someone shut it all down on purpose.”

Alicia had been watching from the main station console located in main engineering via remote from the bridge. It wasn't unusual, since she had all of the ship's engineering systems to oversee, but the situation also called for an experienced engineer to be present just in case. She frowned as she studied the data that was being fed to her station readouts, mostly because none of it made much sense. "If it was shut down intentionally, someone did it clean. I'm not seeing any sign of overloads, system damage, or cascading failures. Just silence. Like the whole station went to sleep and forgot to wake up."

"That station had a full complement of thirty-two science personnel," Eva said from the bridge science console. Her tone was calm, but clipped. "Biologists, physicists, and xenobotanists. They weren’t running anything high risk, at least nothing official. This was supposed to be a long term observational and research post.” She glanced at Ensigns Andala and Oku, both nearby at the secondary bridge science station. Eva had thought that this would be a good opportunity for the two ensigns to gain some hours on the bridge. “Erin, Noa, start a sweep of local space for any anomalies. Radiation, quantum drift, debris, anything,” she said.

“Aye, Commander,” Erin said, already inputting commands into her console. “Engaging full sensor sweeps now. I'm also running a passive scan for exotic particles and radiation anomalies underway.”

Noa looked up briefly from her station. “I’m also running a spectrographic analysis of the closest planets in the system. If something forced an evacuation, we may find environmental changes or energy traces in the upper atmosphere of those planets, or the communications signal from a transmitter.”

At tactical, Jaina’s posture was textbook solid, her voice crisp. “There's no signs of defense signatures. No signs of weapons fire or hull breaches. Phaser arrays on the station are dormant. Whatever happened, it wasn’t an external attack. Not a violent one that we can detect, anyway.” After a moment, she turned towards the captain. "We should conduct a cross reference on all regional traffic logs to see if any ships entered or exited this system in the last week. Specially anything unregistered.”

Vesper nodded at the helm station as she was already looking at the sensor logs. “Got it. Pulling flight telemetry now. I’ll flag any unknown warp signatures or irregular flight paths.”

T’Mara’s voice came through from sickbay, piped through the ship's inter-comm system to the bridge. “T’Mara to Bridge. Medical scan data shows no biological signatures on the station. I'm seeing no life signs, no bio-signs, not even residual DNA fragments.” She paused. “Captain, it’s as if they were never there at all.”

Eric Banner glanced toward the Captain and Lieutenant Walker, hesitation on his face. As this was his first mission, and he had spent most of it training, he wasn't sure just what he should do. He was on the bridge only because Lieutenant Walker had him training in operations today, and thankfully not engineering. Being the low man on the list, he sat at his secondary station and kept quiet, waiting for any orders he might be given.

“If the computer’s fully offline, we’ll need to dock and establish a hard line. No way to remote in without core power,” Kev said from operations after he had had time to think. “We’ll need a full engineering team. And backups.”

"I hate to raise the point, but if there's something over there that caused the station crew to shut down the entire station then we may not want to risk putting the entire ship in danger of being exposed to it as well," Eva said, hoping that she wasn't overstepping her bounds. "I'd recommend using a shuttlecraft and EVA suits until we know more."

Mitsu was quiet for a long moment. The hum of the ship filled the silence. The entire situation was new to her, and she was hesitant to give any orders without at least thinking over the possibilities of what might happen. She finally nodded. "Very well. Prepare an away team. Commander Rogers, Lieutenant Zalla, you’ll lead. Take a shuttlecraft, and I want full EVA clearance and a portable core tap in case we need to restart the station manually. Sickbay, ready a field medical unit for possible exposure cases. We don’t know what we’re walking into.”

Karl nodded as he stood. "Very well. I need Zalla, Connor, Santos, Banner, and Oku to meet me in the shuttlebay. We'll take the Adhara over and hard dock to the station's outer docking ring," he said. With a nod to the captain, he turned and started towards the turbolift, the selected officers following.

tbc

 

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