Chapter Text
This is the starship Enterprise, launched in less auspicious times, turned over to an untried captain and a crew fresh out of Starfleet Academy. The flagship of the fleet, she is bigger and faster than her sister ships and cuts a sleek line as she orbits a moon. She is out on a training exercise now; the crew has not had much experience with one another outside of a crisis situation, and her captain – James Kirk, already warming to his new station in life – has decided to flex their collective muscles. They have done well so far, moving into and out of warp, establishing an orbit, sending down an away team and retrieving them. He is ready to give the order that will return them to Earth when the officer at the comm, Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, speaks.
"Receiving a distress signal, Captain," she says. She looks towards him, a frown furrowing her brow. Momentary discord as her gaze slips across the second officer – lips thinning and turning down, eyes narrowing very slightly – then she swivels at her station and bends towards the console, concentrating. "There's a Federation outpost not far from here. That's where the call is originating."
There is a hesitation in her voice. They are out on the very edge of Federation space, where attacks from the Klingon Empire are not unheard of. "Play it," the captain orders. Her fingers hesitate, but only for a moment, and the message booms across the bridge. It does not mention Klingons. It doesn't mention an attack at all. It's mostly gibberish, in fact, distorted by static and a dull roaring that sounds like a massive volume of water pouring into a confined space.
The crew is silent as the cacophony booms across the bridge, and when the message dies out more than one face is blanched in confusion and fear. Her fingertips rest lightly on her console and she betrays no twitch of expression when the captain gives the order.
"Plot a course," he says. The bridge bursts into activity, everyone bending to their work, all except for her. She shifts her fingers and plays the message again, over and over, and the skin on the back of her neck crawls.
***
This is Federation Outpost 35-19780. It is nominally a mining facility, providing unprocessed ore to the Federation and selling off the overage to independent companies and manufacturing plants. There is also a scientific installation; at least, the scientists stationed there use it as jumping off point, though they are rarely found at the actual base. And who can blame them? It is a singularly unimpressive place, composed of long metallic hallways and podlike rooms devoid of decoration. Most of the men and women who reside here do so out of desperation. It is a place of final chances, a place to hide from the mistakes of the past.
The moon that houses Outpost 35-19780 is unnamed, catalogued and labeled on maps as merely an enumerated addendum to the world that it orbits – a world which, incidentally, is also not strategically important enough to merit a proper name. It is listed on maps as Epsilon Iod II, just another rock orbiting a star on the edge of its galaxy. The world, like its moon, is little more than a rock, though unlike the moon, it hides no essential mineral deposits. It is, on the whole, unremarkable. The people who live there call it Wasteland.
There is, interestingly, a token military presence at Outpost 35-19780. Ostensibly, this is because it is on the fringes of Federation space and the threat of Klingon raids is ever present. But to the people who have been there – to the people who live there – the excuse is rendered immediately flimsy. What could the Klingon Empire possibly hope to accomplish by destroying a facility that houses, at best, twenty-five people? The Starfleet presence is negligible. The output from the mine is hardly worth the effort. Hundreds of larger installations mining much more precious metals exist, and Outpost 35-19780 may be on the fringe, but it is still firmly in Federation space. The peace these days is uneasy at best, but it is still peace.
It is, all in all, a dull existence, the daily grind and monotonous scenery broken up by only two things. One of those things – an endless cycle of pairing up and breaking it off, jealousy and recrimination, among the miners and scientists – is nothing new in the book of human experience and grows tiring for all involved. The other, however, is more awe-inspiring; a nebula, spreading like wings, occupies most of the sky visible from the moon's surface, diffuse and strange and beautiful.
It hangs there now, beautiful, sinister in light of what sprawls below it. It gives no light, only reflects, but beneath the haze of the atmospheric bubble that encloses the outpost, the bodies sprawled on the rocky ground seem to glow its colors, gold and violet, with the spilled pools and drips of their blood mirroring the black of space. And inside the building, oblivious, the lights shine and the atmosphere recycles and the replicators whir and hum quietly to themselves, waiting for orders that will never be given. The only sign that the installation has even noted the absence of the humans who inhabit it is a small red light that blinks on and off, on and off, beaming that last, desperate transmission into the stars.