Silence is Golden

Posted on Thu May 28th, 2026 @ 3:03pm by Captain Jaro

763 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Episode 1: The Fissure
Location: Captain's Ready Room | USS Amazônia

Captain’s Log. Stardate 57437.1.

There is a Denobulan proverb: "The path to the neighbor’s house is never long, unless the road is built covered in pheshrem."

For the last seventy-two hours, I would have gladly traded places with a peshrem shoveler. Riding in the wake of the SS Charon is technically accurate, but it utterly fails to capture the experience. During transit, our controls were entirely slaved to the Charon’s maneuvering computer—a terrifying exercise in surrender. We had to remain perfectly nested within the narrow corridor of real-space her salvaged transwarp coil carved out. A fraction of a millimeter of drift, and we would have been cast off into the transwarp void, unravelling somewhere between the stars or ejected into the empty nothingness beyond our galaxy.

In transwarp, the Amazônia vibrates at a frequency that turns hot tea to foam, and our newly installed plasma manifolds did everything in their power to reject their new home. Nobody slept. We watched the automated interlock like hawks, ready for the helm to take over without warning. But the manifolds held, as did all other systems—secured by the sheer, stubborn refusal of the crew to fail.

Our reward for this agonizing leap was a fleeting glimpse of Vanguard Station. Emerging from the corridor, we stared directly into the "Maw" of that dormant Borg Logistics Hub. A silent, matte-black scar against the stars, it is a staggering monument to the Federation's hubris.

The Charon, being the irreplaceable asset she is, did not linger. She immediately hooked up with the return convoy—carrying the broken machinery and bruised pride of the first wave—and jumped back to the Alpha Quadrant. She was gone before we had even cleared our docking thrusters, leaving us entirely on our own.

We had hoped for a civilized twelve hours to let the crew sleep, scrub the scent of scorched copper from the Jefferies tubes, and let Engineering fix our sensors without their teeth rattling.

Instead, Captain Trelen, Commandant of Vanguard Station, had other plans.

I have always respected Trelen. She possesses that formidable Benzite sharpness—an intellect that operates like a cold, calibrated chronometer. To me, she represents the absolute best of Starfleet’s analytical rigor. But looking at her on our viewer, illuminated by the clinical glare of the cargo module she used as a temporary command center, she looked like she was holding a crumbling mountain together with wet string. Behind her, the sweltering haze of Vanguard's unreconfigured Borg environmental systems hung like a heavy fog of wet copper and synthetic rot. Trelen offered no pleasantries; when you are squatting in a single hangar bay trying to keep ten thousand hibernating drones from waking up, pleasantries are an inefficient use of oxygen.

"I would love to invite you inside, Jaro. Truly. But we are near max capacity for life support and it is not very hospitable. We’ve picked up odd sub-quantum readings in the Orellia system. You are the only asset available for tasking. Divert to Orellia immediately. Don't slow down."

So, we flew straight past the Maw, left Vanguard Station behind, and homed in on the signal.

Which brings us to now.

We have identified the source to be Orellia IV—a massive, swirling canvas of pale gold and deep amber. It is beautiful, but treacherous. The thermal currents of this gas giant will slam our hull with the force of a tidal wave, and the dense ionosphere will muffle our sensors like a thick blanket.

To keep from alerting whatever—or whoever—is responsible for that whisper, I have ordered that the moment we drop out of warp, the ship will go to Silent Running. We will reduce all emissions as far as possible, which also means a reduced output from the warp core, limited energy budgets, and observing what we can without being spotted. The steady thrum of our warp core will dial down to a cautious pulse.

There is a profound difference between the frantic chaos of a shipyard and the heavy, expectant silence of a ship running dark. On Denobula, we rarely seek the quiet; we thrive in the hum of overlapping lives and constant motion. But as the bridge lights dim to auxiliary amber and our engines power down, I find a strange comfort in this hushed solidarity.

The dock is five thousand lightyears behind us, our sensors are crippled, and we are about to hunt a ghost in the golden clouds.

Let us see what we can find in the dark.

[END]

Captain Jaro
Captain
USS Amazonia

 

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