Chapter Text
The bridge of the Curiosity ran quiet at warp: the low even note of the engines, the soft tick of the helm cycling course corrections. The viewscreen held a long blue smear of stars.
Julian came down from the upper deck with a PADD in each hand and his jacket open at the collar, talking before he reached the bottom step.
JULIAN: Eighty-three percent, Miles. Eighty-three. In the worst part of the disk, right where the ionization was thickest… where standard comms dropped to what, forty? Forty-one? We held a clean channel at eighty-three percent fidelity through interference that should have shredded it, and that's the conservative number, that's before Cat reconciles the buffer logs…
MILES: I was there.
He was at the engineering station, one hand flat on the console, watching a power curve settle. He didn't look up.
JULIAN: You were there.
Julian set both PADDs on the rail of the command chair, then picked one back up.
JULIAN: You were under the relay for two hours, you don't get to be calm about this. Lindqvist stood up in that briefing on 211 and told a room full of people that running comms through the adaptive array was… what was the phrase… "an elegant solution to a problem standard hardware solved forty years ago." To my face. Smiling.
MILES: He's not wrong that standard hardware works.
JULIAN: Standard hardware works in a quiet sky.
Julian turned, and the grin was there ahead of the rest of it.
JULIAN: Put it in a protostar's accretion disk and standard hardware spends the whole time apologizing. We doubled it. Not out in the clean margins where anyone could… in the thickest part, the part we went in specifically to fail in, and we came out with a channel you could have held a conversation on, do you understand what that… Lindqvist is going to read this report and he is going to have to sit there and understand it, and there's nothing he can do, because the numbers don't care how long he's had his pips.
One corner of Miles's mouth tucked in.
MILES: There it is.
JULIAN: …and frankly the man's never met a margin he didn't round up in his own favor…
He stopped, and pressed his lips together.
JULIAN: …That was uncharitable.
MILES: That was you wanting to print the numbers on a card and mail it to him.
JULIAN: I would never.
A beat.
JULIAN: I'd hand-deliver it.
MILES: There he is again.
Miles finally looked over. He tapped the console twice and went back to his curve.
MILES: It's a good result, Julian. It is. Now give the data a minute to be a result before you start a war over it.
JULIAN: I'm not starting a war.
Julian picked the second PADD back up (both of them now, one in each hand) and thumbed to the next page.
JULIAN: I'm documenting a war Lindqvist started and lost. Cat wants to go back through the disk data tonight, did you see… we think the array was characterizing the ionization gradient the whole time, as a side product, just passively, while it was holding the channel, which means we'd come home with a comms validation and a stellar physics dataset nobody asked for, two missions for the price of…
Stewart's console chirped, a different note from the soft tick of course-keeping, rising.
She leaned into it, and sat up straight.
STEWART: Captain. Contact, bearing oh-four-one, holding off our return vector.
A pause while she pulled the read.
STEWART: It wasn't there ten seconds ago.
The PADDs came down. Julian crossed to her station.
JULIAN: Sensor ghost? We're trailing ionization, the wake could…
STEWART: It's got mass, sir. And a hull. No transponder, no configuration match… not Federation, not anyone's, I'm not even getting a language off it, it's just…
She stopped.
STEWART: It's holding station. Like it's waiting.
Miles was already up from engineering, crossing to read over her other shoulder. His jaw set.
MILES: That's not a profile I know.
Quiet.
MILES: And I know most of them.
On the viewscreen the long blue smear held steady, and against it, where there had been nothing, sat a single point of light.
Julian straightened, and went quiet.
JULIAN: …Hello.
To no one.
JULIAN: Where did you come from?