Signal 4: The Wavelength
In the silence between questions and answers, the crew starts to find their rhythm.
[INTERIOR — CONFERENCE ROOM, USS OPPORTUNITY — HOURS LATER]
Narrator: Several hours later the senior staff assemble in the conference room. Cavanaugh rubs the side of his head — a small bump, stubbornly cheerful. Sambra offers to work his shoulder; Barnett and Kentir look like they’d rather be anywhere but here. Dr. Four stares into the middle distance, worried and calculating. Jorae and Sawyer pause at the door.
Jorae: Captain?
Sawyer: Yes, Commander?
Jorae: This… tell me the Klingons pulled out.
Sawyer: What makes you think that?
Jorae: They’ve baited us before — tried to force us over the line so they could catch us out of bounds.
Sawyer: Not this time. We both have fleets at the border. No one, not even the Klingons, wants to back down now.
Jorae: If they false-start, though, it gives someone an excuse to reignite the war.
Sawyer (dry): Do you think Klingons need an excuse to start a war?
Jorae: So we’re just going to let them in to pillage and call it diplomacy?
Sawyer: They invited us to help. Then we’ll help more than they can pillage.
[Sawyer steps into the room and starts the meeting.]
Sawyer: Cut to the chase. At 09:47 we received a quarantine buoy from Asan Prime. Our point of contact, Inubak, raised a Class-3 medical quarantine across the system. We picked it up from merchant channels. So, spotty data, as usual. Barnett, Sambra — fill us in.
Barnett: It came from a Gorn frigate, Vornok’s Reach. She skimmed the buoy at three light-years out. Report says the agent is probably airborne — photosensitivity, cardiac complications.
Four: Those symptoms alone — photosensitivity and cardiac issues — don’t usually justify a Class-3. Class-3 implies a high transmission rate and severe casualties. If the basic reproduction number is above three, we’re looking at exponential spread. What are we hearing about infection rates?
Barnett: Nothing. The beacon’s payload is four kilobytes, tops. Cadets send letters home bigger than that.
Four: Without a viral sample, we can’t make a vaccine or targeted antiviral. We’re flying blind. If it’s highly contagious, it could outrun our response. We need to prepare containment first, treatment second.
Barnett: Kind of hard to contain from thirty light-years, Doctor.
Sawyer (soft): Not impossible.
Jorae: Why are we only hearing about this now?
Sawyer: That’s a question. The timing is convenient. If anyone wanted to kneecap Project Cornucopia — that’d be perfect.
Four: Captain, epidemics are not politics. They’re biology. They don’t care about treaties.
Sambra: And they’re not honorable, either.
Sawyer: We have friends inside the Waste — and so do the Klingons. There’s no honor in hiring someone else to do your dirty work.
Jorae: We could ask the Fenris Rangers if they’ve noticed anything. If we’re stuck here for three days, friendly eyes on the ground would be useful.
Sambra: Wayfarer’s Haven is nearby. They’ll have contacts.
Kentir: I still don’t trust people who broke the law and risked war for their convictions. We spent fifteen years criminalizing the Rangers to satisfy the Vesta Accords.
Jorae: It was principle. The Federation couldn’t risk official association with them.
Four: Their intentions are far nobler than pretending you don’t see suffering.
Sawyer (beat): Agreed. But someone turned their back weeks ago. We need to know why. Sambra?
Sambra: I double-checked the logs. Dockmaster had no follow-up — the ship in question is still in her berth. No warrant yet. For now, we all we can do is ask nicely.
Barnett: There’s more. The special notice used the term “Romulids” and listed symptoms — temporal dysplasia, short-term memory loss, emotional dysregulation, déjà vu. All sorts of fun stuff.
Sawyer: Temporal dysplasia? (sighs) So, this simple quarantine just got a whole lot more complicated.
Barnett: Or we’ve got spacetime tomfoolery down there.
Cavanaugh (grinning despite his head): So the Romulans built a time machine in the Waste? Sweet.
Kentir (skeptical): Highly unlikely. You’d need exotic materials — a stable field manipulator, time-grade shielding. That doesn’t appear out of nowhere.
Cavanaugh: Depends on how much time you had.
Jorae: The Waste’s been cut off for twenty years. Those materials don’t magically appear.
Four: Let’s not leap to sci-fi conclusions. Trillium-D causes neurological symptoms in Romulids.
Jorae (flat): Trillium-D? That’s been a known contaminant for hundreds of years. Romulans won’t allow that anywhere near their colonies.
Sambra: Romulans wouldn’t — except if someone wanted to make it look like an airborne problem. Tamper with tools and equipment; electroplate surfaces. Contaminate everything, and it looks like airborne spread.
Four: Trillium-D is a solid; airborne reports don’t match. A nurse could rule that out with samples.
Cavanaugh: I vote time machine anyway.
Sawyer (firm): This is an investigation, not a vote. Jorae—
Barnett (cutting in): Two tracks. Medical first: confirm symptoms off Asan Prime. Temporal dysplasia plus photosensitivity? Not normal. Second, I’ll scrub merchant logs for anything resembling a neurotoxin profile.
Jorae (dry): —Right. Exactly what I was about to say.
Sawyer (half-smile): Good. Glad we’re all on the same wavelength. (sighs and smooths his hair) Sambra, help Jorae and run the crime-ring angle. Barnett — what resolution do we need for a spacetime scan on the system?
Barnett: Depends on magnitude. For something that small, we won’t see it until about five light-years out.
Kentir: What resolution are you thinking?
Barnett: Spatial resolution on the order of a thousand pixels per cubic meter for the affected volume; temporal resolution to a tenth of a second.
Kentir: You’ll have it by 08:00.
Sawyer: Can you pull that off between retrofitting the plasma relay for slipstream?
Kentir (winks): I’ll delegate.
Sawyer: And Dr. Four — you’re getting that second sterile field unit, no argument. If this is our first mission, we’ll need it.
[He cracks his knuckles.]
Sawyer: Alright. You have your assignments. Show me what you got.
Mission Clock Update: +0.05 Sols
The ship turns her instruments toward the waste; the first real test approaches.