Red Eye Flight [5/6]

Posted on Fri Apr 17th, 2026 @ 5:25am by Captain Jaro & Lieutenant Harinarayani Khatri

1,032 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Episode 0: 48 Hours and Counting
Location: Cockpit / USS Muko
Timeline: T -42 hours (04:25)

The tiniest flicker of irritation worried Khatri's brow. She would hand it to Jaro; of all the stunts to test her capacity, this was up there amongst the most creative but as much as it wasn't exactly surprising to face scrutiny from the onset, it was harder to be gracious about it after several days' worth of upheaval. Without immediate response, she pulled up the retrieved sensor logs and took a moment to analyse them through a furrow of mild disapproval.

“We don’t have to prove her in isolation. The first gas giant’s got a compact helium-rich composition; tight gravity well, clean and predictable. We can use it as a launch point. Slingshot off its stable layers, carry that momentum clean across the system and ride it straight toward the central giant. That colder hydrogen dominance should give us a broader, looser well to stretch the trajectory. By the time we hit the third planet’s high-pressure cell, we won’t be fighting the volatile mix; we’ll be punching through it on accumulated velocity."

Looking across to her co-pilot, Khatri lifted a single eyebrow. It was a mastery of muscle control that she tended to rely on quite heavily.

"Unless your heart is set on hovering, sir."

Jaro’s brow furrowed initially, his eyes darting to the tactical overlays as he seemingly considered her suggestion. For a heartbeat, he appeared every bit the Captain who worried too much to trust his crew. But as he looked from the sensor display back to Raya, the ridges on his forehead deepened with a silent "well, then," and the concern dissolved into a genuine spark of scientific delight. As a xeno-anthropologist, he usually spent his time deciphering the intricate social hierarchies of distant civilizations by reviewing manuscripts or their version of reality TV, but he had a deep appreciation for people who could make the practical application complex scientific principles seem trivial.

When he spoke, his voice was devoid of playful flippancy "Lieutenant, I asked for your opinion as Chief Flight Officer because I do not need a puppet for my own limited astronautical imagination at the helm, but because I wanted to hear your opinion. If you say we slingshot, then we slingshot."

He adjusted a secondary sensor array to track her proposed course, projecting the proposed arc on the main viewscreen. "I will note, however, that your personnel file seems to have strangely downplayed your education in astrophysics. Most pilots would have just aimed for the 'big green ball' and hoped the computers would sort out the rest. To intuit the gravitational currents of a system as opportunities rather than a series of obstacles to be avoided... It suggest that the person initially slated to pilot the Amazônia getting cold feet may have been a blessing in disguise after all."

He turned his chair slightly to face her, though his hands remained well clear of her primary controls. "Your input on your field of expertise is not just welcome, Lt. Khatri—it is very much expected. I may have the fancy title and a comfortable chair back on the Amazônia, but I can only make decisions when I know the available options. Even if I occasionally decide to forego future proposals, I want to hear them."

"Speaking of which, what made you pick this assignment at the last minute anyways? I thought I’d have to bribe some shuttle pilot to take the helm before I learned that you had decided to join our little expedition."

It was, on a scale of needless risk vs probable benefit, not the most practical of sequences. Raya had met plenty of people in her life who would have accused her of showing off, and plenty of others who would have doubted her ability to even pull it off, but those voices had become part of the background noise now and were far easier to turn off than they had been when she was younger. Right now, Jaro's response was her primary interest because the act of testing the waters could run in both directions and she was, she wasn't ashamed to admit it, a little surprised that he'd agreed. Easing them beyond the station's protective zone, Raya set the craft to a static drift and started working with the computer to calculate the first approach.

"I had assumed, sir, when you reached out, it was because you'd noted what I'd listed in my preferences." They weren't always worth the effort to even include, especially these days where Starfleet deployed based on necessity rather than career aspiration, but it had always been drilled into her that future commanders at least valued their crew's motivations even if they weren't able to do much about enacting them. In her case, Raya had struck a moment of rare boldness when she'd included opportunities to assist in the charting of under-documented regions to her record but it at least appeared that it might have been a worthwhile risk after all. "Those haven't changed."

Risking a glance across at the man, Raya hesitated for a split second before returning to the task of manually adjusting the adaptive parameters that would determine how much the autopilot was allowed to auto-correct her flight path. "The Delta Quadrant is quite a draw-card, as is the mass of unprocessed data Starfleet is still sitting on." It wasn't exactly classified information but it was perhaps uncommon for the average officer to know too much about the situation with the Borg technology now in the Fleet's possession. "This feels like somewhere I might be useful."

What she didn't say was how dissatisfied she'd been with her last posting, or how her Commanding Officer had routinely dismissed her input because she deemed it 'outside the purview of Flight Control' despite the fact they had no specialised Astrophysicist on board and Raya's graduation certificate very clearly detailed her joint accreditation. She'd overworked herself into a three-month illness to earn a double-major, Jaro was already earning points for understanding that one didn't need to cancel out the other.

[TBC]

Captain Jaro
Captain
USS Amazonia

Lieutenant Harinarayani Khatri
Chief Flight Control Officer
USS Amazônia

 

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