Near Light
Posted on Sun Mar 8th, 2026 @ 4:32am by Lieutenant Anthony Cardel
Mission:
MISSION 0 - History Speaks
Location: Starbase 375
Timeline: September 18, 2390
1101 words - 2.2 OF Standard Post Measure
The room was dimly lit, the overhead lights that usually pierced an industrial white now completely dimmed, casting long shadows across the ten empty consoles. The room he occupied was a side office most of the encryption specialists used when working on a major project, or when the main intel department grew too loud and you needed a moment to think without the dull roar of chattering voices.
A wave of colours washed across Anthony’s face as he blinked, switching from console to console, combing through telemetry. His coffee had gone from too hot to taste to a dull, cold room temperature. He took a sip and grimaced, fighting the urge to spit it back into the cup.
He’d been here for four hours reading the same telemetry, trying in vain to come up with a better answer than the useless one the department had given the Commodore of the station.
A stolen Bird-of-Prey had attacked and destroyed a Bolian cargo ship, forcing the local sector into lockdown and sending Starbase 375’s escorts scrambling to track the raider.
It wasn’t that shocking.
The Dominion War had fractured the Klingon Empire in ways honour couldn’t patch over. Entire houses erased when the last male lineage died on some forgotten battlefield. Others survived the war only to discover the loans they had taken out to fuel the war machine had come due.
Payment wasn’t always in latinum. Sometimes it was ships. Sometimes it was loyalty. Sometimes it was both.
In the space between debt and pride, things unravelled. Houses that had stood for centuries began pawning pieces of themselves to survive another season. A cloak here. A transport there. Honour stretched thin enough that even selling a warship could be justified as temporary. Necessary. Just until the next contract cleared.
The Bird-of-Prey had eventually been destroyed after an intense search. Thankfully, the Nausicaans who had purchased it weren’t well trained in handling the cloaking device.
The only issue remaining was the one the Commodore refused to release.
“How the hell did they know our patrols?” The Commodore had yelled in the intel department after several days of painstaking work by the team.
No one had a clue.
Patrols were rotated and coordinated only between captains, without the locals — or hell, even their own crews — knowing what patrol they would be on until the last possible moment. With a starbase this large, information was kept tight to the chest for precisely this reason. Compartments inside compartments. Need-to-know layered over need-to-know.
And yet someone had known.
The Bolian captain had strayed into a grey zone of protection for only three hours before his emergency hails were broadcast throughout the sector. Poor bastard had tried to surrender, but the Nausicaans had been too concentrated on avoiding incoming phaser fire from the Bolian commerce vessel to notice the shields had gone down.
14 Bolian crewmembers had died hauling commercial-grade deuterium.
Shit luck.
Or something else.
He glanced at the time.
It was late. Or early, technically. His shift wasn’t until the afternoon. He could head to the gym, grind out ten minutes of terrible cardio, crash on his bed, and wake up to do it all over again.
Still, for some reason, he stayed planted in the plain chair and stared at the console.
Tracking down a single telemetry trace of a Bird-of-Prey was difficult. Some newer Klingon ships left faint ionized plasma trails during warp that could be followed. Isolating that known telemetry was a pain in the ass, sure, but compared to the traffic around Starbase 375 it felt less like screaming into the void and more like screaming at a rock concert.
Thousands of data points. Telemetry. Ship comms. Civilian traffic. The worst possible scenario. A needle in a haystack. Or worse, a field of haystacks.
His head dipped. His eyes closed for longer than a blink.
The replimat attendant slid into his head. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. That look the guy had given him earlier, the kind that lingered just long enough to feel intentional.
Anthony remembered checking him out when he’d walked away. The tight uniform. The way it fit. Christ, the guy had an ass—
“Burning the midnight fuel, Cardel?”
Anthony snapped upright.
Lt. Commander Daniel Mercer stood across the room, leaning against a console. Arms folded. Watching.
“Uh… yeah. At least trying to,” Anthony muttered, rubbing his eyes and glancing back at the time.
“Any leads?” Mercer asked, his tone more curious than businesslike.
“There’s this weird phase variance that happens every 18 hours and 23 minutes. It’s there for 15 seconds and then it drops.”
Anthony pulled it up onto the console. A simple spike among hundreds of spikes of telemetry background noise, buried in a sea of data. After 15 seconds, it slipped away.
“And it’s gone…”
He tapped the console in defeat.
Anthony reached out to close the console windows.
And then paused.
“You were about to discard it,” Mercer observed quietly.
Anthony hesitated.
“Maybe.”
“Run it again.”
The same timeframe each time. A repetition. A cycle.
“I think I’ve got something here.”
He brought up each appearance of the phase variance and ran it through a demasking algorithm. The program resisted. A minute passed. The progress bar stalled. Panic flickered in his chest as he tried to isolate the pattern.
“Use the first-level demasking program,” Mercer said lightly.
Anthony switched programs.
Mercer stepped closer. Not crowding. Just within reach. One hand rested on the back of Anthony’s chair. The shadow shifted. A subtle warmth settled at his shoulder.
The console light caught Mercer’s eyes, illuminating them in the dark.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then—
The masking fractured.
An encrypted stream snapped into clarity. A probe hidden within an asteroid lit up on the display like a flare.
“And they say Nausicaans are stupid,” Anthony muttered.
Mercer said nothing at first.
He looked at the display.
Then at Anthony.
A beat longer than necessary.
“You’ll stay on this,” Mercer said quietly.
“With me.”
He withdrew a padd from his pocket and downloaded a copy of the data.
It wasn’t fanatical praise. Not the enthusiastic validation Anthony’s previous captain might have given.
But it felt… different.
Or maybe that was just the proximity.
The faint scent of aftershave lingered in the air.
Anthony didn’t realize how much that mattered.
