The Time For Notes
Posted on Wed Feb 18th, 2026 @ 1:59pm by Captain Thorrin & Lieutenant Commander Tarian Aloria & Lieutenant Sivek & Lieutenant C'Mila Juli & Lieutenant Addison Talbert & Lieutenant Junior Grade M'Ressa & Lieutenant Junior Grade Wyatt Spencer & Major Hastios Eilfaren
Edited on on Wed Feb 18th, 2026 @ 2:03pm
3,147 words; about a 16 minute read
Mission:
In The Nick Of Time
Location: Conference Room - Deck 1 - USS Herodotus
Timeline: MD004 2330 hrs
There were now a lot more questions than there were answers. However, that was not something that irked Thorrin. That was the kind of situation he was accustomed to while commanding the Federation's first timeship. However, they needed to get to the bottom of things and soon. To that end he summoned the senior staff. It was time for the right side of the brain to talk to the left.
Tarian appeared to be one of the first ones to arrive to the meeting and smiled as he saw the Captain sitting. Tairan offered up a quiet smile to the Captain as he took a seat and waited for the others to come along.
The doors slid open and Hastios stepped into the conference room, the bulk of him seeming to make the space feel a touch smaller. He took in the room in a quick, practiced sweep — the Captain already seated, Tarian waiting — before moving toward the table without ceremony.
As he lowered himself into an empty chair, it let out a low, complaining creak under his weight. Hastios paused for half a heartbeat, then settled anyway, resting his forearms on the tabletop as if daring the furniture to object further. It didn’t.
He gave a brief nod in the Captain’s direction, respectful and understated, then leaned back just enough to be comfortable. His posture was composed, professional, but there was a tightness about him that hadn’t been there before the away mission — a quiet vigilance that hadn’t yet switched off.
Marisa was in Sickbay. Stable. He knew that.
Still, his eyes flicked once, unconsciously, toward the door before returning to the table. He remained silent after that, waiting for the rest of the senior staff to arrive, the room filling slowly around him as the weight of what had happened lingered just beneath the surface.
Juli entered the room quietly, the usual spring in her step noticeably muted. She smiled at the others, but even her expression lacked it's usual warmth and energy. She had showered and put on a clean uniform, but she was still shaken up from the events from earlier. She also hadn't eaten a proper meal since they'd been back, but was only just now starting to get her appetite back.
Things weren't quite in crisis mode on board the Herodotus, but they were becoming chaotic. Not unlike the other ships that Wyatt had served aboard, though perhaps the situations he'd dealt with before were not quite as intense. But he was good at thinking on his feet, staying calm under pressure, and keeping things in perspective.
Those thoughts were passing through his mind as he stepped onto the bridge, tugging down the right corner of his uniform jacket as he crossed the distance to his station.
Sivek stepped through the doors of the conference room, hands folded behind his back. His movement was measured in that quiet, Vulcan-like cadence almost as if he were gliding. His face remained impassive as he scanned the faces already assembled. He noted a slight tension in Hastios' posture and a weariness to Tarian's.
Finally, he moved to the table and took a seat. He said nothing, comfortable with the naked silence. Sivek was more than comfortable to wait to be addressed--especially in such a formal setting.
Addison had taken Marisa's vitals once more, yes she was hovering over the XO like a mother hen over a chick. Everything looked fine, and Marisa was going to recover. Addison had received a notification of the mandatory meeting, she couldn't ignore it. Besides she would be notified by her nurse if something changed.One more glance towards Marisa, she left medical and made her way to the conference room.
Once inside Addison noted who was already there, her eyes lingering on Hastios for a moment, before she took her seat. Addison even glanced over towards Juli, she will need to get an update on her.
Her eyes panned over to where Sivek, Wyatt and Tarian. The final stop was on Thorrin.
M'Ressa finally entered the conference room, her uniform stained and wrinkled from preforming a maintenance run on one the ship's shuttlecraft. During times when the ship felt tense, she found that keeping her hands busy helped her pass the time. Quickly finding an empty seat, she sat down and wrapped her tail around the chair's leg to keep it from twitching.
Once everyone had arrived Thorrin sipped his ever present wine. "Well now, we seemed to have learned everything and yet nothing at the same time. However, before we get into that. Doctor Talbert. How is the Commander?" He wanted to get the niceties as it were out of the way before they proceeded with the heart of the matter.
Addison pulled out her PADD, checking once more on the sleeping Marisa's readings. There was a steady pulse, indicating her heart was beating properly, oxygen levels were where they should be.
Lifting her eyes from the PADD, Addison gave her report.
"Commander Sandoval will recover. She should be waking up in a little while. Her vitals are steady, she suffers from some dehydration but that is being taken care of."
"Excellent, most excellent." Thorrin's honeyed accent oozed from his mouth. He sipped his wine again. "It would be shame to lose our First Officer right out of the gate. Now let us move on to the task at hand shall we? Lieutenant Juli, Major Eilfaren. Would you be so kind as to enlighten us on what you and the Away Team have discovered on the planet's surface?"
Hastios didn’t answer right away. He leaned forward instead, forearms resting on the table, hands loosely clasped. When he spoke, his voice was steady, professional, but there was an edge beneath it that hadn’t been there before the away mission.
“Nagla was never just an escort,” he began. “From the moment we left the Premier’s presence, she was shaping our movement. Subtle course changes. Suggestions framed as concern for safety. Every time we were close to something of interest, there was a reason to turn aside.” He shook his head once. “Nothing overt enough to call out on its own. Taken together, though, it formed a pattern.”
His gaze moved briefly to Thorrin, then back to the table. “She presented as calm, cooperative, even helpful. But there was a persistent mismatch between what she said and how she behaved. Elevated tension when scans narrowed. Relief when we redirected. When we reached the cave system, that tension spiked. She was running out of ways to steer us.”
He paused, jaw tightening slightly. “The Kroats showed similar signs. The Premier especially. Controlled language, generous assurances, but a constant effort to manage our footprint and our access. They wanted oversight, not cooperation. They wanted us guided, not informed.”
Hastios shifted in his chair, the faint creak returning. “When Commander Sandoval identified the anomaly in the cave wall, Nagla knew the game was up. She didn’t hesitate. She attacked immediately, targeted the Commander first. Lieutenant Juli was injured in the exchange.” His eyes flicked briefly to Juli, not lingering. “I engaged and neutralised the threat. Nagla did not survive.”
He let that settle before continuing. “The attack confirmed what we were already sensing. This wasn’t panic. It was containment. Whatever was hidden in those caves mattered enough to justify killing Starfleet officers to keep it buried.”
He sat back slightly, composure returning, though the tension never fully left his shoulders. “That’s the security assessment. The device itself, its function and implications, Lieutenant Juli is better suited to brief you on.”
Juli had been listening to the Major's analysis, her eyes focused intently on him as he spoke. Her red hair was pulled back tightly from her face which added to the seriousness of her expression. She was particularly fascinated with the way he characterized Nagla's behavior leading up to the caves. Something had felt off to her, but she wouldn't have been able to describe it as much more than a feeling until Nagla started to attack. When the Major asked her to take over in the briefing she took a short moment to shift her thoughts.
"Sure, of course," Juli nodded to the Major and then looked briefly at the Captain before beginning.
"So, right before the attack, Nagla had led us to what she hoped we would see as a dead end in the cave system. But, when we picked up tachyon particles in the area, Commander Sandoval and I thought we might be on to something and started to run more scans," she explained. "Before we really even got started, that's when Nagla attacked. Thankfully, Major Eilfaren held her off long enough for us to bring back enough data to work with."
"The distress signal that brought us out here definitely came from within that cave system. We weren't at a dead end at all, but had reached a holographic wall meant to keep us from proceeding deeper into the caves," she explained.
"The data though..." Juli looked around the table, taking special note of Tarian and Sivek. "The tachyon particles could mean a number of things. They definitely should not have been in the cave system, and can be a sign of temporal - let's say activity - in the area. While there can be other reasons to see tachyon particles, I'm suspicious here not just because of what we know from the DTI database, but also because it appears as though this message - the distress signal - has been transmitting for over a millennia now. It certainly begs the question as to why the Hawking seems to be the first Starfleet vessel to have received it, and only just in the last few weeks."
Thorrin sipped the wine again and nodded at Juli as he spoke. "Thank you Lieutenant. Most informative. I believe our good friends Lieutenant Sivek and Commander Aloria can answer those questions for you. Gentlemen if you would be so kind as to share what you have learned."
"That actually helps to tie into what Sivek and I found out. We were looking over the distress call that the original starship picked up down in Astrometrics. Sivek and I isolated a waveform from that transmission that appeared to have the residue of a chronition explosion from about a hundred years ago," Tarian explained as he pulled up the waveform that he was mentioning and showed it on the screen in the conference room.
"I think, if I remember correctly, there was an explosion on this world approximately a hundred years ago that destroyed a race called the Vwaarti. But, it appeared to have come from a technology from the future and was causing the issue with the distress call and weird waveform patterns that I was looking at. I think Mr. Sivek could probably explain it a little bit better on the engineering and technical side for what he saw," Tarian said, not wanting to steal all of the spotlight.
Sivek didn't rise. He folded his hands together on the table instead, his long fingers falling into place one over the other like helical gears in some analog machine.
"Mister Aloria is correct," he said, almost soft as if raising his voice might disturb something delicate. "The signal is ancient. By all ordinary measures, it should have passed, diminished, ended. Signals obey entropy. They disperse. They die."
His fingers adjusted minutely against one another, a small motion.
"But this one did not. In Astrometrics, Commander Aloria and I observed a distortion embedded within the transmission. Chroniton residue, consistent with a detonation approximately one century ago." He tilted his head ever so slightly before continuing. "And yet the signal predates that event by nearly nine hundred years."
Sivek left that contradiction some room to breathe.
"Time, as we commonly experience it, is treated as a sequence. Cause preceding effect. A stone is thrown into water, ripples are created. But when temporal forces are introduced, the sequence collapses. The ripples may arrive before the stone. The water remembers what has not yet occurred."
He pushed himself out of the chair and stood, feeling the need to move.
"The presence of tachyons in the cave system, combined with the longevity of the distress signal, suggests that the detonation was not merely destructive. It was wholly intrusive as though something entered that moment from a point further along the timeline. The explosion was not an accident of that era--it was introduced."
The Vulcan engineer came to stand behind Addison for a moment.
"The natural progression of the Vwaarti civilization ended but the evidence indicates that the cause did not originate there. It arrived from ahead--a future event imposed upon the past."
For the moment Thorrin that perhaps the Vulcan took the long way around to get to the point. But then again it could simply be the way of Vulcans. "And now my dear friends to quote the best of detectives Sherlock Holmes. The game is afoot. We know that a Kroat left their time and travelled back along the timeline to destroy the Vwaarti. However, we do not know from when they travelled back. Commander Sandoval, and Lieutenant Juli were astute enough to provide us with a list of possible events that would affect the timeline. All that is left for us to do is travel back and wait to see who shows up. Put a stop to them and return. What say you all?" The way Thorrin spoke he made the whole thing seem like a summer stroll on a beach.
Addison listened to the reports, about the away team's mission the one with Juli, Hastios, and Marisa. Various emotions were visible as each part was presented. Eyes widening as to the intensity of the situation, then her eyes flared hot at the fact that they had dealt with someone's betrayal.
Then there was the findings of Sivek and Aloria, her ire cooled down as she listened to each report. She didn't turn to look up at Sivek when he paused behind her seat, Addison just listened. They were going to be going to be going into the timestream, and that would mean having a watchful eye upon the crew.
It amazed Addison as well the nonchalant way that Thorrin stated, as to them going on a hunt.
"Well, it looks like we will be on the hunt." she simply said.
Sivek had returned to his seat while Thorrin was speaking and after hearing Addison, was now fixing her with a raised eyebrow and a questioning look.
"Doctor," he said, his tone matter-of-fact. "The metaphor is entirely imprecise. A hunt requires tracking an active quarry across variable terrain. In this case, the individual will come to a fixed temporal coordinate. We will be the stationary element."
"Just means that we get to have a little bit of fun with time and space....within reason, of course. Totally do not want the director coming and asking hard questions later," Tarian said as he got up and stretched his legs a little bit before taking one more good look out of the window of the conference room.
Hastios had remained quiet while the science and engineering pieces fell into place, arms folded, listening as the contradictions lined up.
“When Commander Sandoval and Lieutenant Juli built the divergence list,” he began evenly, “we identified several pressure points in the timeline. Political disputes. Technological shifts. Competing factions.”
He leaned forward slightly, not dramatic — just deliberate.
“But only one of those events had the power to alter the balance of that world in a single stroke.”
A beat.
“The marriage alliance.”
His gaze moved briefly around the table, measuring the room.
“If that union unified the factions in one timeline and failed in another, that’s not a social footnote — it’s a structural pivot. Remove it, distort it, or sabotage it, and the fallout echoes forward. Power realigns. Resentments harden. A century later, you get exactly what we’ve just uncovered.”
He settled back in his chair, the wood giving a faint creak under his weight.
“So if someone travelled back to change the natural progression of that world… that’s where I’d place the interference.”
He let the silence sit a moment before finishing, calm and certain.
“That’s our anchor point.”
Thorrin smiled and took the dregs of his Calvados. "That is the tactical mind at work. Commander Aloria begin your computations for an incursion use the marriage alliance as the focal point. Be ready for black alert by 0600 hrs. My thanks to you all."
Hastios gave a single, measured nod.
“Aye, Captain.”
There was no flourish to it, no further commentary. The plan was set. The variables would be what they would be.
He pushed his chair back, the faint scrape against the deck sounding louder in the quiet that followed Thorrin’s order. Rising to his full height, he adjusted the cuff of his uniform jacket out of habit rather than necessity.
His eyes flicked briefly toward Juli — steady, checking — then toward the empty seat that would normally have been Marisa’s. A fraction of a pause. Nothing more.
“0600,” he said, more to himself than anyone else.
With that, he inclined his head once toward the Captain and stepped out of the conference room, already shifting his mind from analysis to preparation.
A Joint Post By
Lieutenant Addison Talbert
Chief Medical Officer
USS Herodotus DTI-30656
Lieutenant Commander Tarian Aloria
Chief Temporal Operations Officer
USS Herodotus DTI-30656
Commander Marisa Sandoval
Executive Officer
USS Herodotus DTI-30656
Lieutenant Sivek
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Herodotus DTI-30656
Lieutenant C'Mila Juli
Chief Science Officer
USS Herodotus DTI-30656
Captain Thorrin
Commanding Officer
USS Herodotus DTI-30656
Major Hastios Eilfaren
Chief Security & Tactical Officer
Second Officer
USS Herodotus DTI-30656
Lieutenant Junior Grade M'Ressa
Chief Flight Control Officer
USS Herodotus DTI-30656
Lieutenant Junior Grade Wyatt Spencer
Chief Operations Officer
Communications Officer
USS Herodotus DTI-30656
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