Chapter Text
Shore leave is hard to come by. But on this day, star date 5910.6, the Enterprise is close in orbit around the Federation Planet SSP-7 in a quiet, empty corner of the galaxy, surrounded by colonies and homes. The ship has come to stock up, get some more in-depth maintenance done, and let the officers that are due to leave go home. And, most importantly and most likely, this'll be the last time they ever do this in the Enterprise's five-year mission to seek out new life and strange new civilizations.
They'll be staying for a Terran week. The stocking and taking inventory takes only a few days, but a week is customary, and they're in no rush. A week is how long they'll stay. Almost everyone is given permission to take the time off, go planet-side and have their first dates with people they met on their journey, or go to pubs with their friends. It's the first time in a long time a lot of people are going to get to be people again, rather than crewmen. There's an air of relief around. Even as the crew is helping get the ship in order, and the transporter runs for hours at a time, they're talking to one another, laughing in-between hauling supplies, taking brave bets on each others' iron stomachs — as they know they'll all be allowed to stay long enough to get drunk, and dance, and be together, and breathe in an organic atmosphere under a proper blue sky. Planet-side, it's early evening in the city. The lights are coming on, and the air is chilly the way it is on early summer nights. There's a feeling of freedom, and camaraderie, as darkness falls.
Really, he should be proud of that.
Being the captain of course, James Kirk doesn't have time to go off-duty. He has a ship to run and he would rather not leave it, especially not for a whole week. He hangs around. He keeps in contact with his superiors on the planet's surface, all of whom annoy him endlessly. He waits for the maintenance people to contact them, which'll no doubt be some time tomorrow morning. He leans one arm on the left armrest of his captain's chair, and tries not to mind that practically all his first officers, bless them, are hovering around him like ghosts.
They seem to be... What is it. Quietly refusing to go have fun. Touching this and that of their machinery, taking so much time packing up that it's starting to look like people are stalling.
He knows some of them don't really want to leave, much like him. Scotty, for example, is nowhere to be found, and that's probably because he's in the engine room, fussing over the lady Enterprise now that there's almost nobody around to take care of her. The others, well....
It's like they're waiting for him to slap his knees and tell them, welp, time to relax! Let's all go to the pub.
Like they won't go until he tells them to. Then again, he has told them to. And they still aren't gone.
He glances up, and waves.
"Spock..."
His first officer and second in command appears next to him, silently, and he sits up and leans in to talk to him.
"None of them seem to be very good at relaxing," he notes, "I couldn't tell you what I'm doing wrong."
Spock locks his hands together behind his back, primly. It takes him a moment longer than usual to find an answer.
"On this matter, captain, I believe it wrong of me to keep my opinion to myself. You are not exactly setting a good example."
Kirk scoffs.
"If they did as I asked I wouldn't need to set an example for anything."
"...incorrect again, captain." Spock looks around, subtly, eyes going from one man on the bridge to the next. Kirk watches him watch them, leaning his right hand on the right armrest this time, to get a better look at him as some subtle trace of emotion plays across his face.
"You are the captain," Spock continues. "You've said it yourself. You will be an example to them, I fear, no matter what you do."
His smile deepens, but he feels a twinge at those words, too.There's that... Heavy feeling in his chest again.
"Yeah I..." He hesitates. "I suppose you're right."
"Captain."
He turns around in his chair, Spock mirroring his motion. Uhura had spoken up, and her tone was one Kirk immediately recognised as serious.
"What?"
"I..." She turns back to her computer, hands hovering just over the controls for a moment. "I don't... Know," she says, and sounds genuinely lost for words. "I can't say I know. There's a signal coming in, but-"
And at this point Kirk is already out of his seat and standing next to her, almost tripping on the step up to make it.
"-but it's coming from none of the channels we use. It's not coming from any one channel I know, captain. It's not coming from anywhere."
Kirk stares at the blinking lights in the display for a moment, eyes darting from place to place. He has to admit he doesn't quite read the communications console. It's a massive computer hailing basically every frequency anyone's ever used at all automatically, and with controls to be able to fine tune any message or signal to pin point it's location, it's source, it's frequency, even it's language... But he's never seen it act like this, lights blinking on and off rapidly like it's stressed.
He puts a hand to the console.
"Well, can you respond?" He says. "Open communications, let them talk to us?"
"No sir, they won't respond." Hands finally on the keyboard again, she flicks through channel after channel, chasing the ghost in the machine. "It was just one message, nothing more. There's nobody there to receive a reply. I could try to decode it, but-"
"Decode- would you need to decode it?"
"Yes. It wasn't in any language I know! It wasn't in any language I even recognise..." She leans in. The light from the monitors reflects subtly in her eyes. "I don't know," she admits openly. "This isn't how people who know how to use a device like this would hail us. It's like something... Grabbed ahold of the whole computer, and started forcing together a message of some kind with no regard for how anything is actually supposed to work. If we do manage to establish mutual contact I'm not sure that whatever just hailed us will understand how to respond."
He stares at her. Then at the computer, for even longer than that.
He can feel his pilots' eyes digging into the back of his skull from across the room.
"Spock?"
"Unclear, captain. My only offer is that we were contacted either by a person or society with underdeveloped or primitive technology, or that whatever we've encountered wasn't traditional technology as we know it at all."
"What else could it be?"
Spock gestures subtly at nothing. "Energy-based life forms with the power to manipulate frequencies, a purely technological presence, a being with the capacity to enter directly into our channels..."
"Are there beings like that?" Kirk leans over the computer.
"None that we know of."
He stares. First at the computer, and then at nothing as he tries to think for even longer. The room goes perfectly silent, save for the barely-perceptible sound of Uhura's hands against the controls as she works.
The others are watching him. He knows without having to look.
"A completely unknown method of communication," he says to himself. "And- almost haphazard, like whatever it was didn't fully understand what it was doing when it contacted..."
He looks to Uhura for confirmation. She nods, grimly.
"I think I am going to be able to decode it," she confirms. "In fact... The nature of the contact itself makes me believe that it might..."
She hesitates.
For a second too long.
"What?"
She breathes in.
"I can't know for sure," she begins, "but think it's a mayday call. An S.O.S."