The Road to Velorum Reach

Posted on Fri Mar 6th, 2026 @ 11:55pm by Captain Cassandra Hawk & Lieutenant Elsen Rava

1,900 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Episode 1: A New Sheriff in Town
Location: Starbase Mojave
Timeline: MD - 6

Before the alarm event went off, Cassandra was awake and ready to go. Some amount of Elsen's curiosity and excitement had clearly rubbed off on her because she found herself almost nervous at the chance. An archaeological mission to the ruins of some long forgotten outpost, hovering at the edge of two extreme climates. The fact that she'd volunteered herself to pilot the runabout also had her excited. Flight hours had been increasingly sparse since she'd taken command of a space station. It'd been a known eventuality, but it didn't mean she couldn't work some piloting in when she got the chance.

Persephone stirred from the warm little spiral she'd curled herself into on the edge of the bed, looking over at Cassandra with curiosity as the Captain braided her hair. "Sorry, Perse. Going to need you to man the station for me while I'm gone," she teased.

The cat, seemingly content with the idea of remaining stationary, returned to her little indent on the blanket.

"Raktajino, hot," she called out, hearing the replicator pad on her counter whir to life as a the Klingon coffee materialized. Scooping it up in her left hand, padd in her right, with a small duffle packed with essentials for the the trip across her back, she exited her quarters.

She nudged her combadge with the back of her hand, letting it chirp to life. "Hawk to Rava. Rise and shine, Lieutenant. Time for our little field trip to those ruins," the Captain announced, cheerfully. Despite her comment in jest, she actually had little doubt that the Lieutenant was not only more awake and ready than her, but probably had been for some time.

--

Elsen had meant to stop an hour ago.

Her field kit was packed. Boots by the door. Hair tied back properly for once instead of falling into her eyes. The runabout checklist had been reviewed twice. She’d even forced herself to eat something.

But the probe’s last telemetry packet was still suspended mid-air in her quarters, slowly rotating above the low table like it was trying to tempt her back in.

She stood barefoot on the cool deck plating, arms folded, studying it.

The angles were still wrong.

Not dramatically wrong. Just… deliberate. Too consistent across multiple scans to be coincidence. She had run three modelling passes overnight, just to see if the geometry collapsed under different erosion simulations.

It hadn’t.

Her tea sat untouched on the counter behind her, long since gone cold.

“Just one more look,” she muttered to herself.

Rava was quiet, but present. Not pushing. Just aware.

A corner of the projection shifted as she adjusted the overlay, pulling up a mineral density cross-section. If the structure was as old as it looked, the gravitational pocket around Velorum Reach should have distorted it more than—

Her combadge chirped to life.

Elsen’s smile came fast and uninvited.

“Already up,” she said, and there was a tiny bit of breathless excitement she didn’t bother hiding. Her hand swept through the air and the hovering overlays snapped away, the room suddenly pretending it hadn’t looked like a research nest thirty seconds ago. “Just… give me ten seconds to become presentable.”

She stepped into her boots one at a time, hopping slightly to pull the second one on, then tugged her kit up by the strap.

“Probe data held steady overnight,” she added, voice warming as she moved. “No new gravimetric spikes, no drift in the pocket. If anything, the resonance pattern looks cleaner this morning.” A beat. “Which means it’s either nothing… or it’s something that knows exactly what it’s doing.”

She palmed the door control and it slid open.

“I’m on my way,” she finished, already walking. “And I will be the picture of calm, responsible science.”

Half a beat later, as if she couldn’t help herself:

“No promises once we land.”

The combadge replied with the voice of the Captain. "Oh, I imagine once we land, it'd be hard to hold it together."

--

Cassandra input her security code into the terminal. It took only a brief moment before the telltale hiss of pressurization was audible through the airlock. A few seconds later, the door rolled away into its socket, revealing the docking pad for the Runabout Denali. The sleek little ship was in standby mode, but one by one, the automated systems brought it to life.

Her boots clacked against the landing pads surface as she approached the ship and keyed its own entry door. Within the hour, the little ship would be exiting through the doors above their head and whisking them off toward a new adventure. But at this particular moment, Hawk enjoyed the quiet and the sounds of the ship coming to life. It was a bit of an intimate preflight moment that she rarely got these days.

She tossed her duffle into one of the lockers in the large central shared space of the ship before making her way down the short corridor to the vehicles cockpit. Her fingers ran across the touchscreens of the vessel, bringing it out of standby and into its prelaunch checklist. Within a moment or two, she was sure some of the others would arrive.

Footsteps echoed across the pad a few minutes later, measured rather than rushed.

Lieutenant Thalen Meris arrived first, PADD tucked under one arm, environmental scanner case slung neatly across his back. He paused just inside the runabout hatch, taking in the Denali with the faintly appreciative look of someone who respected machinery that did exactly what it was told.

“Captain,” he greeted, inclining his head before stepping further inside. His voice carried the calm cadence of someone more accustomed to laboratories than flight decks. “Environmental sampling kits are prepped for both temperature bands. I’ve calibrated for rapid atmospheric fluctuation in case the boundary between climates is less stable than expected.”

Behind him came Ensign Lyra Venn, slightly more wind-swept in energy if not appearance, dark hair tied back and a compact geological case in hand. She offered Cassandra a quick, bright smile.

“Ground-penetrating scans are configured for shallow and mid-depth sweeps,” she said, shifting the case onto one of the side benches. “If there’s structural integrity left beneath the surface, we’ll see it before we step on it.”

They moved with the quiet efficiency of people who had read the brief three times and were determined not to be the reason anyone fell into an ancient ventilation shaft.

For a few seconds, the runabout settled into a low mechanical hum, systems warming, displays brightening. Thalen slid into one of the aft stations, already syncing his scanner feed to the Denali’s sensor suite. Lyra secured her kit and took a seat opposite, fingers moving across a console as she double-checked the probe telemetry Elsen had forwarded earlier.

Then came faster footsteps.

Elsen appeared at the hatch with the unmistakable air of someone who had absolutely not lost track of time, even though she might have been running the last stretch of corridor.

She paused just long enough to smooth a hand back over her tied hair and catch her breath in a way that almost passed for composed.

“Good morning,” she said, stepping aboard with a brightness that didn’t bother pretending to be restrained. “Tell me I’m not the last one.”

Her kit slid easily into a locker beside Cassandra’s duffle, and she moved toward the cockpit threshold, eyes already flicking to the readouts as if checking on an old friend.

She glanced at Cassandra then, grin quick and unguarded.

“Please tell me you’ve already had coffee.”

Cassandra indulged herself in a laugh as she raised the travel mug in response. "Hot, half-finished, and ready to go. Went the Klingon variety today," she said setting it back down before continuing. "If everyone is settled in, I just completed our pre-launch checks. I'm good to single Ops whenever we're ready."

Elsen leaned lightly against the cockpit bulkhead for a second as Cassandra lifted the mug, the answer clearly meeting with approval.

“Good,” she said, relieved in a way that was only half joking. “I always trust decisions made after coffee more than the ones made before.”

She glanced past the Captain to the forward displays, the Denali’s systems quietly cycling through the last stages of readiness. It was hard not to get pulled into the flow of information scrolling across the screens, even when she tried to stay out of the pilot’s way.

“Everything on the probe side still looks stable,” she added, tone settling into something a little more focused. “The gravimetric pocket hasn’t shifted since the overnight pass. If the site’s doing anything strange, it’s doing it consistently.”

Behind her, Thalen looked up briefly from his console. “Atmospheric modelling agrees with that assessment. The climate boundary should remain predictable for at least the next several hours.”

Lyra gave a small nod from the opposite station. “And the geology reads as solid from orbit. If the ruins are anchored to bedrock the way the probe suggests, we’re not landing on anything that’s about to collapse under us.”

Elsen let out a quiet breath at that.

“Music to an archaeologist’s ears,” she said lightly, then pushed herself away from the bulkhead and slid into one of the aft science stations. Her fingers moved across the console as she brought the probe telemetry onto the local display, more out of habit than necessity.

“Whenever you’re ready, Captain.”

The runabout hummed a little louder as the final systems synchronized, waiting only for the signal that would open the station’s outer doors and release them into the deep, quiet stretch of space beyond Mojave.

Elsen couldn’t quite hide the smile that lingered as she watched the sensor feed settle into place.

“Velorum Reach,” she murmured to herself, almost under her breath. “Let’s see what you’ve been hiding.”

Cassandra reached forward, keying the command to seal the Denali’s airlock. The hatch answered with a quick mechanical hiss as it locked into place. A moment later the docking pad vented atmosphere. The whine of air rushing away faded into silence as the bay reached vacuum. Above their heads, the docking pad doors split apart and the pad beneath the Denali rose gently as it lifted to the surface of Mojave’s docking ring.

"Denali to Ops, heading out," Cassandra said to the comm panel, as she moved her fingers comfortable across the controls. It was still second nature.

"Affirmative, Denali. Safe travels. Ops out."

Hawk watched the display as the designated egress path populated onto the navigation screen. The docking pad reached its external position as the station structure's interior slid away and the vastness of space filled the cockpit's canopy.

“Alright, everyone. Let's do some exploring,” she said more to the Denali than anyone else, keying the engine. The runabout lifted cleanly from the platform with a gentle burst of the maneuvering thrusters, rising just enough for Hawk to angle the runabout toward its departure vector. With an instinctive flare, she lined them up with the egress corridor and plotted in the warp path toward Velorum Reach. The stars outside stretched into streaking lines a moment later as the Denali leapt away into warp.

 

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