Chapter Text
The bridge of Curiosity was quieter than usual. Not silent. There was the steady whisper of life support, the soft cascading tones of the new long-range sensor array cycling through its calibration sweep, the occasional click of someone shifting in their chair. But quieter than usual. Outside the viewscreen, the anomaly sat at the edge of visible distortion, a faint pucker in the starfield that wasn't quite a shape and wasn't quite a color. Julian's eyes drifted off it after a beat. He brought them back.
Julian was in the center seat, one leg crossed over the other, a PADD balanced on his knee. He hadn't touched it in several minutes.
MILES: Position is holding.
He didn't look up from the engineering station. Three displays in front of him; his eyes moved across them without his head moving.
MILES: Hull's clean. No subspace bleed-through. We're sitting exactly where the projections said we should sit, and we're not getting any of the readings the Pellucid got before she lost contact.
JULIAN: How far inside the safe margin?
MILES: Twelve percent.
He glanced up briefly.
MILES: I'd like more, but the array needs the proximity.
JULIAN: Understood. Ezri?
Ezri was at the auxiliary console behind the command chair, where she'd set up a tertiary display for what she'd asked Kieran to send up: baseline neurological readouts for every member of the senior staff, scrolling slowly. She'd been watching them for forty minutes.
EZRI: Everyone reads normal. No deviation from pre-mission baseline.
A pause.
EZRI: Including yours.
JULIAN: You sound surprised.
EZRI: I sound thorough.
The corner of Julian's mouth moved. He didn't quite smile.
JULIAN: Noted.
At the science station, Cat was working with both hands. She was humming something under her breath, a low, tuneless three-note pattern that repeated every few seconds. The data feed in front of her was a wall of cascading values. She'd been the one to design the array's input filtering. She tracked the leftmost column, scrolled the middle one back ten lines, and made a small approving sound.
JULIAN: Cat. Status.
CAT: Pulling clean.
She didn't turn around.
CAT: Subspace harmonics on three bands, gravimetric distortion on two... wait, two and a half, there's something weird happening at the boundary of the third band but it's not stable enough to call it a signal yet... particle flux is consistent with the Pellucid's last logs, which is good because that means we're seeing the same phenomenon and not, you know, a different one... anyway, the array is happy.
JULIAN: The array is happy.
CAT: That's a technical term.
JULIAN: It is now.
She finally swiveled the chair halfway around, one foot tucked under her, the other braced on the deck. Her hair had escaped its tie.
CAT: Here's the thing, though. We're going to be sitting here for a while. The array is collecting at the rate it's collecting, and the data has to integrate across multiple bands before any of it starts meaning anything. I can already tell you it's not nothing. There's structure in there, real structure, not just noise. I just can't tell you what kind of structure for hours. Minimum.
JULIAN: Define minimum.
CAT: Six. Probably eight. Could be twelve if the gravimetric band keeps doing that thing it's doing at the boundary of the third band, which I'd like to investigate but it'd cost us coverage on the harmonics, so I'm leaving it alone for now and just flagging it.
Julian nodded slowly.
JULIAN: Eight hours of holding station.
CAT: Eight hours of holding station while a very expensive sensor array does its job. Which is what we came here for.
JULIAN: Fair.
He tapped the PADD on his knee, once, absent.
JULIAN: Miles, anything from the Pellucid's logs that's worth a second pass while we wait?
MILES: I've already done three passes.
Miles answered without looking up.
MILES: There's nothing in there that explains what happened to them that isn't also in the summary you read on the way out. They got too close, they started seeing things on their instruments that weren't on anyone else's instruments, they reported it, they tried to back off, and then they stopped reporting. That's the whole.
JULIAN: The seeing-things-on-instruments part.
MILES: Aye.
JULIAN: That's what we'd see first.
MILES: If we saw anything at all.
He glanced at his readouts.
MILES: Which, currently, we don't. Hull's clean. Systems are nominal. Power curve is flat. If something starts happening, I'll know before anyone else does.
JULIAN: Including Ezri?
MILES: Different system.
Miles allowed himself a small, dry smile.
MILES: She'll know before me on the people side. I'll know before her on the ship side. Between us, we should catch it.
EZRI: Should.
She said it evenly.
MILES: Should. I'm not promising anything. I'm just saying that's the arrangement.
Julian let his eyes drift back to the viewscreen. The anomaly sat there, doing nothing visible. The starfield around it was perfectly ordinary except for the small region where it wasn't. He looked away. He looked back.
JULIAN: Lannia.
LANNIA: Sir.
She straightened slightly at communications.
JULIAN: Open a low-priority log channel to DS9. Routine check-in. Tell them we're on station, the array is collecting, and we'll have a preliminary report in twelve hours. Don't make it sound interesting.
LANNIA: Don't make it sound interesting, aye.
JULIAN: Torren.
TORREN: Sir.
From the helm. Alert.
JULIAN: Hold us where we are. If anything in the readings changes, anything, you tell Miles, then me, in that order. Don't wait to be sure.
TORREN: Aye, sir.
Julian uncrossed his legs again, set the PADD on the arm of the chair, and stood.
JULIAN: I'm going to walk the ship. Cat, log anything that looks like it's wandering off the expected curve, even if it stabilizes. Ezri...
He half-turned.
JULIAN: ...join me in twenty minutes?
EZRI: For?
JULIAN: A walk.
She studied him for a moment.
EZRI: All right.
He moved toward the turbolift, paused at Miles's station, and rested one hand briefly on the back of the chair without looking at him.
JULIAN: Tell me if the hull starts thinking about it.
MILES: It won't think about anything I don't tell it to think about.
JULIAN: That's why I asked you.
The lift doors closed behind him. The bridge resumed its quiet. Cat went back to her wall of values, picking up the tuneless three-note hum where she'd left off. Miles watched his displays. Ezri watched the baseline scrolls.
Outside the viewscreen, the anomaly continued not quite being a shape.