Travel Sick [1/5]

Posted on Sun Sep 6th, 2026 @ 7:41am by Captain Jaro & Lieutenant Elara PsyD

779 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Episode 1: The Fissure
Location: Bridge - Deck 1 - USS Amazônia
Timeline: 1 hour before arrival in the Orellia system

Elara stood with her back to the Captain's ready room; her eyes on the sight of the stars as they streaked pass the window outside. The memory of the station still haunted her each time she closed her eyes. The memories of the screams as aliens were caught and assimilated by the borg, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. While she could never remember faces, their voices in the forms of screams had never left her since she returned to the world she had been born into.

Men, women, babies, children...the Borg had never discriminated based on sex or age; their aim had just been singular; to create perfection with the assimilation of of many as possible and the integration of technology to continue to grow and dominate.

Vanguard Station stood as a reminder of her life before. Thousands of Borg lay in alcoves deactivated since their segregation from the Queen; silence voices who had no awareness of what the world was like outside of being a collective. Voices that nobody would hear anymore from the concerns of what might happen if they were reactivated.

The counsellor wasn't stupid; she knew that she was one of a few lucky ones. An ex-borg who had been successfully integrated back into Starfleet and offered a chance of life away; a chance so many more may never achieve.

Five minutes. To most a five-minute delay was a minor social friction, easily brushed off with a casual wave of the hand. But to a Denobulan, whose biological rhythms offered no nightly reset button—leaving them with twenty-four uninterrupted hours of conscious, active life every single day—time was a beautifully structured canvas. Keeping someone waiting was not merely rude; it was a profound waste of shared existence. Jaro prided himself on a schedule that operated with the seamless synchronicity of a well-tuned warp core. To be late for an appointment felt like a personal failure of the highest order.

The culprit, predictably, was the absolute disregard the universe had for a Denobulan's schedule. Captaincy, Jaro had rapidly learned, possessed a chaotic gravity that took great pleasure in shredding even the most well-laid plans. He had been enjoying a rare, precious hour of personal recreation on Holodeck 1, deep in a historical simulation, when his communicator had chirped. What should have been a routine departmental handoff had instead degenerated into a high-decibel misunderstanding. Jaro had been forced to step directly into the fray, playing mediator and commanding officer all at once to defuse the pride of his stubborn crew and restore harmony before a minor issue became a major bottleneck.

By the time he had brokered a fragile, grumbling peace, his appointment was already beginning. To return to his quarters and change into a standard Starfleet uniform would have cost him another seven minutes. His sense of punctuality simply could not tolerate a twelve-minute offense on his part.

The bridge crew of the Amazônia, to their immense credit, had barely batted an eye as their captain bustled past the dedication plaque and crossed the command well. He was clad not in his Starfleet red, but in the voluminous, deep plum velvet tunic and heavily ruffled lace jabot of an eighteenth-century Venetian merchant, complete with pointed, soft-leather boots.

The doors of the Ready Room slid open, and Jaro stepped inside, the ambient hum of the bridge fading into a soft murmur behind him as he motioned Elara to follow him inside. Smoothing down an upturned ruffle near his left wrist, a casualty of his animated gestures during the mediation, he opened. "Counselor, please accept my most sincere apologies for the delay. I assure you, my punctuality is normally far more... calibrated. But captaincy rarely cares for well-laid schedules, and a minor territorial dispute over power distribution demanded immediate arbitration just as I was in the middle of negotiating a cargo of silk in Venice. To have changed back into uniform would have made me doubly offensive to your schedule."

The frantic, eccentric energy of his entrance softened almost instantly as he took in the quiet, reflective atmosphere of the room. His bright, highly expressive eyes adjusted to the dim lighting of the Ready Room. He did not press, nor did he try to read the heavy silence that seemed to linger near the viewport where she stood. Jaro took a slow, gentle step forward, his soft boots making no sound on the deck.

"Please, sit," he said, gesturing toward the comfortable chairs situated by the viewport. "Can I offer you a beverage? A hot tea, perhaps, or a Cardassian pear nectar?

[TBC]

Captain Jaro
Captain
USS Amazonia

Lieutenant Elara
Chief Counsellor
USS Amazonia

 

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