To Fiddle While Rome Burns (Challenge Post)

Posted on Wed Feb 23rd, 2022 @ 3:52am by Lieutenant Commander Rin

Mission: MISSION 0 - History Speaks
Location: Earth
Timeline: 2366
526 words - 1.1 OF Standard Post Measure

(How Rin’s life might have gone had she never joined Starfleet.)

Nicola’s left hand ached as calloused fingers danced across the strings of her violin, while her right guided the bow from note to frenzied note. She was at the climax of Vivaldi’s Winter, performing center stage while the orchestra accompanied the solo. At that moment, there was only the music. The space she was in, the audience in the darken theatre, none of it mattered. Not at that moment.

With a final flourish, the piece came to a close. Silence descended, and Nicola’s attention returned to the present. One long moment later, cheers and applause erupted. She took her bow, a giant smile across her face.

Behind the curtain, she pulled the pins from her head and let her tousled brown hair hang lightly around her face. There would be a reception afterward, where she would drink champagne and mingle with patrons, until finally she could give her goodbyes and collapse happy but exhausted into a London hotel bed.

Growing up on a Starfleet vessel, the daughter of the XO, there had been a lot of expectation that she would attend Academy. And, to be sure, the mission of Starfleet was dear to her heart. But music remained her main passion. She lived and breathed it. She couldn’t imagine herself thriving under the protocols and procedures that came with Starfleet service.

She took a seat and pulled off her right shoe for a few moments, wiggling her toes. There was no need to do the same for her left leg, as her prosthetic didn’t cramp up from standing too long.

She had lost the left leg two years ago in a repulsor-cycle accident. Certainly, the event had been traumatic, but it wasn’t like she had lost a hand or sustained significant head trauma. One little implant in her brain let her go about life as normal: walking, jogging, standing before an audience. Hell, she had even gotten back on her cycle.

There was a shift in mood then, behind the curtain. People were hurrying back and forth, muttering anxiously.

“What’s going on?” she asked one of the flutists as she passed by.

“I don’t know. They’ve declared a state of emergency. Some kind of hostile force approaching Earth,” the woman explained, clearly shaken.

“What kind of hostile force?” Nicola asked.

“I don’t know!” the flutist snapped.

“Pack up your stuff,” said the conductor. “We’re returning to the hotel. Now.”

And so they did, and for hours they gathered around the holo-screens waiting for news updates. Whatever was coming was big. There were reports of a significant part of the fleet losing an engagement with it.

The full details weren’t released until later: 39 ships lost. 11,000 people. Nicola’s parents were not among them: their ship was on deep space exploration. But they probably knew someone among those 11,000 people, or at least knew someone who knew someone: a friend’s sibling or child or parent, perhaps. And, had Nicola chosen to follow her mother into Starfleet, perhaps she would have lost friends as well.