Posted by Captain Rende Asam (Commanding Officer) in MAIN SIM: Bridge

Posted by Ensign Chandel (Science) in MAIN SIM: Bridge

Posted by Lieutenant Junior Grade Zaril Dovek (Communications Officer) in MAIN SIM: Bridge
Posted by… suppressed (44) by the Post Ghost! 👻

<snip>

Chandel studied the information coming back to her before straightening to report the Captain.

“Captain, the multi-phasic spectral array has completed its full sweep, and I can now provide a clearer picture of the veil’s structure.

First, hydrogen plasma levels remain steady, but we’re detecting ionization spikes rippling outward along the tendrils. These occur in slow, wave-like patterns — almost like a pulse traveling through the haze. At the same time, the spectral readings are showing a faint redshift across the entire structure. That shift suggests refractive interference — meaning the veil isn’t just gas and plasma, but is bending light itself through subspace distortions.

The subspace harmonic resonance mapping confirms this. The faint pulse we’ve been tracking is still there, but it’s grown slightly stronger — about a 0.3% increase in amplitude. More concerning, its rhythm is no longer constant. The intervals between pulses are stretching to align with the Sentinel’s own warp field oscillations, as though the veil is responding to us.

Quantum coherence interferometry is showing further instability. Decoherence times — the measure of how long quantum states remain stable — have dropped another 3.4% since our last measurement. This points to those ‘layered boundaries’ we recorded earlier drifting inward, slowly closing around our position.

Finally, the bio-neutrino sweep has revealed something unexpected. We’re detecting low-level emissions across the veil’s periphery. These emissions form arcs and looping traces that mirror the visible filaments we can see on the viewscreen. More than that, the patterns are reorienting themselves, gradually curving toward the Sentinel’s present location.

In summary: the veil is not static. Its structure is shifting, its harmonics are resonating with our warp field, and its bio-neutrino emissions suggest an almost deliberate reorientation toward us. The evidence indicates the veil is not just reacting to our presence — it may be interacting with us directly.”

Ensign Chandel Sci

“Helm back us off,” Rende barked. Let’s see if you follow she thought.

The conn console acknowledged the captain’s order with a soft tone and flashed PENDING INPUT. Station-keeping remained engaged; the Sentinel held her position relative to the veil.

Navigation plotted an automatic back-off vector on the helm display—recommended retreat: 1,500 km on current bearing—awaiting manual confirmation.

On the viewer, the nearest filaments continued their slow curl. No surge. No impact. Just a measured orientation toward the ship.

Sensors logged a minor change: the background harmonic ticked up by a hair—+0.2% amplitude—then leveled.

The bridge waited. The order stood. The vector blinked, awaiting a helmsman’s hand.

The last syllable of Chandel’s report had barely faded when the sound struck.

The subtle string she had endured for days — always just beneath the range of comfort — suddenly snapped forward into a shrill, piercing screech. It was no longer background, no longer ignorable; it tore through her ears with a precision that was almost cruel, a single violin string drawn too tight, bow scraping mercilessly across it.

Chandel clasped her hands to her ears and fell to the deck, eyes clamped tightly shut as she moaned in pain.

Ensign Chandel Sci

At the same instant, the discordant note that had lingered in the Captain’s awareness surged. Not a sound carried by the air, but a throng that resonated through the marrow, reverberating deep within her being. It was not volume but presence, invasive and undeniable, as if the nebula itself had leaned close to whisper in a frequency no one else could hear.

Pressure built, pressing in from her ears, blocking out all other sound. There was no ignoring it, no pushing through. That sense of dread and fear was suddenly sharp and the pressure excruciating. Her crew, her ship, was in danger. “RA’TI FIRE ALL PHASERS! EVASIVE MANUEVERS!” Asam’s fists curled, the tension locking tendon and sinew into place. She pressed them against her ears as if it might dampen the sound.

Cpt. Asam, CO

At Tactical, the phaser banks spooled hot, targeting sensors flashing ready across the board. The ship’s defense grid thrummed faintly in response, systems aligning in anticipation of a fire command. But no discharge came. The arrays remained armed, waiting for a hand on the trigger.

Ra’Ti ‘s hand went to the firing button… but he stopped. He looked at the view screen and, with a trust in a gut instinct that had kept alive in his previous life more than once, he cycles the arrays down. He quickly said “Power spike in secondary relay array. Discharge too dangerous. Powering down.”

“Then fire torpedoes!” She barked. “And get someone down to fix the phaser array!”

Ra’Ti looked at her for a moment and then simply remained silent. Something wasn’t right, and he knew her well enough to know that order came from some place Rende Asam am didn’t have…

Fear.

Outside, the veil rippled. Not a lunge, not an attack—just the slow, curling drift of filaments, each one moving as if drawn by an unseen current toward the Sentinel’s hull. Their pace was almost languid. Almost.

Across the bridge, the displays stuttered once, a synchronized ripple of static distortion. Panels flickered, status lights dimmed then steadied, as though brushed by an unseen current.

And then—silence. The pressure of sound and resonance collapsed in an instant, like a wave breaking and drawing back into the sea. What remained was only the steady pulse of instruments, the soft hum of the ship’s life.

Rende shook her head, and rubbed her temples gingerly like a healing wound that ached. She scanned the bridge and then stared out at the nebula before them. Dread churned her gut.

A heartbeat later, a sharp electronic tone broke the quiet.

The communications board chimed with an incoming signal — faint, decayed, fragments of a transmission clawing their way through layers of interference.

An incoming distress call.

-OZ

“Anyone know what that static pulse was?” Marcus asked, genuinely curious.

-Lieutenant Junior Grade Marcus Anders: Chief of Security-

“Anders, get engineering up here to check the systems,” Asam ordered.

Before anyone could frame an answer to Marcus’s question, the bridge shuddered with a second burst of static distortion. The displays rippled again — once, then twice more, like aftershocks echoing through the circuitry.

This time the pulses came closer together, the gaps between them narrowing, almost rhythmic. Each lasted less than a heartbeat, but they left the air heavy, like the charged stillness after lightning.

The consoles stabilized, lights returning to their steady glow, but the hum of the ship felt… off. As though something unseen had tapped the hull, listening for a response.

NE Hanson at the communication station was desperately trying to isolate the sound, but she was failing miserably. She was no wear near skilled enough to deal with it. “Sir I, I can’t isolate the sound it’s” she hesitated. “Well I don’t know ” she said very loudly.

Lieutenant Junior Grade Zaril Dovek
Communication Officer U.S.S Sentinel

Hanson’s console sputtered again, bursts of static climbing and collapsing in jagged peaks. Beneath the distortion, the distress call clawed through — syllables fractured, elongated, as though pulled apart by the veil itself.

For the barest instant, the distortion shifted tonal register. It was no longer just static: a high, wavering note threaded through, fragile, rising and falling like a child’s voice caught on the carrier wave. One voice, or many, impossible to be sure. A word, almost — perhaps even a name — and gone again before anyone could seize it.

The computer’s triangulation routines struggled but finally converged, anchoring the signal somewhere deep within the veil. Coordinates resolved only in broad strokes: a sector of turbulent resonance where sensor returns bent back upon themselves, like echoes in a chamber designed to confuse.

For all intents and purposes, what they had was this: a faint but active distress call coming from within the veil, degraded by the same phenomenon now pressing on their sensors and systems.

-OZ

NE Hanson was a bit frantic she had never dealt with anything this complex before. “I think there is a distress call deep in the nebula, mayb, I” he paused. “Voice, vocies ,I can’t clean it up, it’s changing.” she stopped. “Captain I don’t know how to get more” she noted.

Lieutenant Junior Grade Zaril Dovek
Communication Officer U.S.S Sentinel

OOC: Someone may want to wake up Dovek.

Rende tapped the comm button. [O]Asam to sickbay. We need Dovek up here right now.[C] Her tone left no room for argument.

Chandel finally got a hold of herself and clawed herself back up to her console, hands visibly shaking as she read the scans. She tried to clean up the static and distortions to see if she could get exact coordinates of the distress call.

Ensign Chandel Sci

Ra’Ti said “Moving probes towards source of the distress call.” and he began guiding the probes further into the veil.

Ra’Ti, Chief Tactical Officer

IC: The probes slipped into the veil, their telemetry feeds fighting to cut through the interference. For several moments, the returns were nothing but jagged noise — echoes folding back on themselves, false readings stacking into chaos. Then, the filters began to resolve a clearer picture.

A mass emerged. Not natural. Artificial geometry. Cross-sections hinted at vast structures—rings, girders, and fragmented hull plates—though every image stuttered and blurred, as though the veil itself resisted their scrutiny. The shape was enormous, easily several kilometers across.

And well within transporter range.

Rende watched the images appear from the scans. “Lt. Anders, prepare your teams. Full armament.”

Sensor overlays showed the same bio-neutrino traces carried on the distress signal. The origin point matched the structure’s interior, though exact coordinates were lost in distortion.

The communications panel erupted in another burst of static. Amid the noise, a high, wavering tone threaded through—almost a child’s voice, too faint to name, syllables dissolving before they could be grasped. Then the tone collapsed, leaving only raw interference.

Another pulse rippled through the ship’s systems. Displays dimmed, recovered, dimmed again—synchronized with the veil’s unseen resonance.

For all intents and purposes, this was what they had:

A faint but active distress call.

A massive, artificial structure hidden within the veil.

Signal and structure locked together, both degraded by the same disruptive phenomenon now pressing against their sensors.

-OZ

The veil rippled across the science console, its shimmer washing out half the display in waves of interference. Ensign Chandel adjusted the multi-phasic array, fingers moving quickly over the controls as the readings stabilized just long enough to register a mass—immense, unmistakably artificial.

The object resolved in fragments: cross-sections that revealed rings, latticed girders, and scattered hull plating. Every overlay juddered, blurred, then reformed as if the veil itself resisted scrutiny. Despite the distortion, one fact held: the structure was vast—kilometers in diameter—and easily within transporter range.

Chandel initiated a deeper scan. Bio-neutrino traces pulsed across the object, faint but persistent, identical to those carried in the distress signal the Merrimack had intercepted. The match was nearly perfect. The origin point lay somewhere within the structure’s interior, but precise coordinates dissolved in the haze of subspace distortion. A signal—alive, beckoning—was buried in there.

“Computer,” she ordered evenly, “cross-reference this configuration against all known entries in Starfleet databanks. Query—artificial megastructures, derelict spaceborne constructs, or documented debris of equivalent scale.”

Chandel hesitated only briefly before initiating another sweep. “Computer, conduct a full bioscan—baryon, bio-neutrino, and lifeform spectrum.”

Her gaze lingered on the silhouette, the vast outline sliding in and out of resolution. The readings suggested something was alive within, though whether it was humanoid, mechanical, or altogether alien was impossible to determine.

Ensign Chandel Sci

The science console cycled through the requested cross-reference. Results came back near-instantaneous:

[Starfleet Database Query]

No direct matches found.
0% correlation with known megastructures or spaceborne constructs on record.
Comparative analysis: superficial similarities noted with Xanthean orbital rings (SD 2217.5) and the debris fields of the Ghar’zul Platforms (SD 2289.3), but structural geometry, scale, and subspace profile deviate beyond accepted parameters.

The databanks had nothing.

The bioscan, however, resolved something:

Baryon Sweep: baseline consistent with aged, inert material. Energy signatures negligible. Hull composition appears exotic—composite alloys unlisted in Federation records, though readings suggest heavy neutron-bonding.

Bio-Neutrino Sweep: faint traces persistent across multiple internal sections. Not steady like an active life-sign, but flickering, fragmented, intermittent—as though something once alive had been stretched or scattered across time itself.

Lifeform Spectrum: No standard humanoid or xenobiological signatures. Instead, fragmented resonance peaks spiking at irregular intervals, each one decaying almost instantly. Several return patterns overlapped with the distress call’s carrier wave, suggesting that whatever is transmitting is tied directly into these anomalous traces.

The silhouette of the structure pulsed once across Chandel’s display—its outline shivering as interference swept through—before the readings flattened again.

-OZ

That’s where it was, that was enemy she was hunting. It was time to take the offensive. [O]Asam to Johansson. What can you do to the deflector and shields? We’re going into the nebula.[c]

Cpt. Asam, CO

[O]Captain, Hart Here. We can technically do that and it’s your call, but I can’t guarantee the affect on Lieutenant Dovek. Or everyone else around him. But I can give him a suppressant and hope it works.[o]

~Leah Hart, NP

[O] Get him awake and get him up here, Lt.[C] It wasn’t like the captain to be so short.

Cpt. Asam, CO

The probe telemetry stabilized just long enough for the structure’s outline to hang in the air—massive, artificial, fractured but whole enough to be unmistakable. Transporter calculations scrolled across the display: the object was squarely within range.

Then, a ripple. Not in the nebula this time—but in the ship. The lights dimmed, flickered, recovered. A second later, the impulse drive status lights along the helm sputtered amber, then red.

Impulse Engines: Offline.
Cause: EPS distribution fault.
Status: Automatic restart attempt failed.

The Sentinel hung on station-keeping thrusters alone, her impulse array unresponsive.

[O]Engineering, what happened to the engines?![C] She wasn’t waiting for answer. It was clear she expected them back on before they ever went out.

On the comms board, the distress signal surged again, threaded through with the same childlike cadence—higher this time, as though straining to be heard. Beneath the distortion, sensor overlays pulsed in unison, their sync unmistakable with the signal’s origin point deep inside the structure.

The bridge had confirmation of two things:

The source of the call was inside the station.

The Sentinel now sat dead in the water, impulse drives dark, with only maneuvering thrusters to hold her steady.

-OZ

Anders remained at the tactical station and wiped his hands over many command buttons - directing as much of his attention as he could to what was going on on the Bridge around him.

-Lieutenant Junior Grade Marcus Anders: Chief of Security-

Chandel leaned over her board excitedly as she studied the probe’s information.
“Captain, there is definitely a structure in there though no life sign readings. The dissonance and signals are definitely coming from there though.”

Ensign Chandel Sci

The bioscanners updated in jagged bursts, columns of data appearing and then collapsing into noise.

For a moment, the readout was flat — no life detected. Then the displays spiked. Hundreds of bio-sign returns flared across the silhouette of the station, clustered in compartments and corridors. Strong, undeniable.

Seconds later, they collapsed. Barely twenty remained. The next sweep brought fifty. Then one. Each flicker came with different strength — some sharp and bright, others faint as whispers. Then they were gone again, the entire board empty.

Another cycle. The numbers surged back, vanished, returned in erratic rhythms. Never the same twice.

The sensors held no consistency to classify: no steady signatures, no definable pattern of respiration or movement. Just a stuttering of presence, appearing and disappearing in waves, like echoes of lives caught between here and somewhere else.

And then silence again. The latest pass recorded zero life signs.

The structure loomed on the viewer, vast and implacable, its interior quiet — at least for now.

-OZ

“Ensign are there life signs or not?” She leaned forward in her chair staring at the massive structure. “Alden, where is the energy coming from? Ra’Ti, arm the torpedos. Whatever is making the disturbance I want it gone. Now!”

Cpt. Asam, CO

Chandel huffed in exasperation, “Captain, I had flickering of life signs now, variable numbers and then none. I would say something is messing with our scans. I will keep trying to fine tune the sensors.”

OOC: I apologize in advance. Rende is really not this mean. But she’s under the influence of psychic manipulation and going mental.

Rende heard the ping of exasperation in her voice. She spun in her chair, “Then do the scans Ensign. Don’t report until you know not just guessing. Or give the sensors to someone else.”

Cpt. Asam, CO

Chandel blinked, took a deep breath and responded evenly, “Aye, Captain.”

Ensign Chandel Sci

Ra’Ti took a breath. “I had a… um… acquaintance some time back.He always told stories about a ship he was on having sensors go screwy like that when they came up on a derelict in deep space.” He looked at the Ensign and gave a kind of shrug. “He said it was a ghost ship.”

The lights of the science console shimmered in restless pulses, jagged lines stuttering across the display as though the sensors themselves had forgotten how to breathe. Ensign Chandel leaned in, her fingers gliding over the controls, narrowing band filters, expanding others. Each adjustment brought clarity for the span of a heartbeat before the data fractured again into silence.

She initiated a multi-phasic bio-neutrino sweep, watching the overlays ripple across the screen in concentric waves. Bursts of return flared suddenly—sharp, undeniable life signs—but just as quickly dissolved into static. Her jaw tightened as she captured each spike, isolating fragments of the signal, archiving them before they collapsed.

Switching seamlessly, she layered in quantum coherence interferometry. The readout hesitated, like a candle in a draft, then produced a scattering of peaks where decoherence times dropped. She tracked the variance across the pattern, eyes narrowing at the uneven rhythm, her hand jotting notes onto the LCARS margin before another sweep erased them.

A subspace harmonic resonance map unfurled next. Filament lines threaded themselves across the station’s silhouette, faint arcs pulsing in irregular intervals. They shifted with each recalibration, sometimes drawing inward, sometimes flaring outward, never the same twice. Chandel adjusted phase variance controls by fractional degrees, murmuring under her breath as the harmonics refused to settle.

Engaging bio-spectral pattern analysis, she overlaid waveform fingerprints onto the chaotic spikes, comparing one burst to the next. Patterns emerged for an instant—shapes she almost recognized—before slipping apart again, dissolving into waves of interference.

Finally, she tuned the array to a phase-differential scan, feathering the controls down to the third decimal place. A new lattice of faint returns flickered into being, scattered across compartments, before they too flickered away.

Chandel exhaled slowly, her reflection ghosting in the darkened console glass. Every sweep offered proof and denial in the same breath—lives glimpsed and lost, presence flickering on the edge of reality. Her hands lingered above the console, waiting for the next cycle, the next jagged burst of data to flare and vanish again

Ensign Chandel Sci

Zaril entered the bridge, his arm still around Leah’s neck and shoulders. Once she had led him to the coms con he forced a smile. “Thank you Nurse Heart, I’ll be ok” he said sitting down at the station. “How can I assist captain, he asked still a little foggy.”

Lieutenant Junior Grade Zaril Dovek
Communication Officer U.S.S Sentinel

She looked over her shoulder. Finally, someone who did what she asked. “There is some kind of signal coming from that structure. I want to know what it says.” Dovek could feel her agitation, the fear and terror beating at her, that only made her agitation worse.

Cpt. Asam, CO

“Aye sir” he said giving her a strange look, he was on full suppressants not that it would mater for her, she was immune to him.

The comms panel wavered, its readouts jagged with interference. Static washed across the audio feed in long, scraping bursts, collapsing into silence before surging again.

He adjusted the signal, enhancing it and started a subroutine that would isolate the static into consistent and inconsistent noise, isolating any patterns in the static.

Beneath it—faint, almost buried—threads of sound struggled to break through. Not words, not yet, but tones. High-pitched, wavering, fragile. The cadence was irregular, like syllables stretched thin and pulled apart by distance.

he leaned into the sound even though it was not needed. He began issolating the primary frequencies of each sound, and it’s harmonics and then split out any noise or secondaries into their own audio layer and started switching between the two. each time slowing down or speeding up, first time in large amount five times speed then five times slow, working his way back to speed to see if anything immerged.

For a fleeting instant, it coalesced: a voice. Small. Childlike. A rising note that might have been a name, or might have been nothing more than the distortion shaping itself into something familiar.

He preplayed back his recording trying to Isolate the rising note.

Then the channel fractured again, collapsing back into static. The signal held—alive, repeating—but every attempt to lock it clean dissolved into the same fragile fragments.

The source remained steady, somewhere inside the structure. The message—whatever it was—was still trying to get out.

-OZ
He squinted, “There’s a voice I’m trying to isolate but it” he did no continue. He pulled apart the original static looking for a digital layer something comprised of binary or tri bit (quantum) signals.

Lieutenant Junior Grade Zaril Dovek
Communication Officer U.S.S Sentinel

“Let me know if I can be of assistance Lieutenant,” Marcus called from the Security station.

-Lieutenant Junior Grade Marcus Anders: Chief of Security-

“Anders prepare you teams to board the structure. With full Tactical gear load out,” Asam snapped out. “I want then assembled in 10 at the transporter room,” she barked with the intensity of a drill sargent on a battle field.

Cpt. Asam, CO

Leah was still there, keeping out of the way, but keeping an eye on Zaril. She wasn’t about to walk away when the situation was so unpredictable. They still didn’t know what was affecting him. But she was also listening to the happenings around her, looking for anything that might be a clue that helped them back in Sickbay.

~Leah Hart, NP

Chandel was a bit worried about the Captain’s order for an Away Team when they hadn’t been able to get accurate data. Not even with probes. She chewed her lip as she continued to try and get the probes and sensors to provide more clear data.

Ensign Chandel Sci

As always Rand was standing at the back of the bridge, always ready. One thing about social anxiety was it made one extremely observant in the changes of how people acted. Captain Asam was not acting right. She seemed… violent, on edge, short tempered, a hair trigger.

She made her way over to Hart. “Lt,” she said very softly. “I believe we may need Dr. Kreed up here. Something is not right with,” she nodded her head toward Asam. Rand hated to say it, it felt like she was betraying her captain, but it would be a bigger betrayal to ignore it.

Yeoman Rand

Leah nodded subtly, having been observing everything on the bridge while she kept an eye on Zaril. Exactly what they should do really depended on a few variables, but Kreed had the authority she did not.

Rende heard the discordant notes of betrayal, shame, and unease. Her ears naturally focused on the sound, picking up the voice. She spun, eyes flashing, her hand reaching for something at her belt. “Et tu, Rand?” She snarled. “Get off my bridge! Anders! Put her in the brig, Now!”

Cpt. Asam, CO

Rand’s eyes went wide and she froze in place. The captain was having her arrested? Oddly enough she wasn’t panicking. She knew she had to speak up, she’d done the right thing, but she was scared.

Ra’Ti set a hand on Anders’ arm and squeezed. “Just… wait a sec, Lieutenant. Something’s off here…” he said very softly.

Chandel hunched more over station after hearing the Captain lash out at Rand. What was going on? The Captain had always seemed reasonable, she seemed like a totally different woman now. But she was only a lowly Ensign. Despite her actual years, she had no pull to try to effect the situation. She didn’t she wanted to anyway, better to do her job.

Ensign Chandel Sci

Eyes widening, Leah instinctively took a step forward, as if protecting Rand. “The Yeoman was just expressing concerns and I have been dealing with some unusual things on the ship today. I really need to discuss them with you in private, Captain,” she said simply. But there was a fierceness in her eyes, and she radiated both concern and worry.

~Leah Hart, NP

Rende’s gaze flicked briefly with dismissal. “That would be something to discuss with Dr. Kreed, Lt. Unless you are trying to usurp his job? Go report to him. You have no business on my bridge.” The knife flipped and flickered in the light on the bridge, her gaze turning back toward the view screen.

Leah almost made a comment that might have snapped the woman out of whatever this was. Leah has witnessed all sorts of hallucinations and psychoses. This was something different. But the knife in the woman’s hand made her reconsider. She also wasn’t leaving this bridge, especially since the patient she came up here with was still here.

“Everybody just stop!” Ra’Ti said. He looked at the Captain and then at Nurse Hart. “Nurse, get the Doc up here asap. Something’s wrong with the Skipper.” He tapped the comms and said [O] XO to the bridge immediately. [C] He then looked at Rende. “Captain, you have given orders that go against regulation and just sheer common sense. I am going to ask that you go to Sickbay with Nurse Hart.” He moved a few steps closer to her, but kept out of arms reach. “Listen to me, Rende… you know something is fu<✓ing with you. It started in the conference room. Just… take a breath. Think. I know you can fight it.”

Ra’Ti, Chief Tactical Officer

Rende’s posture shifted subtly, something Ra’Ti would notice - she was prepared for a fight, a nasty one made of fists and steel. But out of everyone on this ship, Ra’Ti was the one she trusted with herself. She could see it, she could hear it. Xam was wary and on alert because of her. Her gaze slid from him to the rest of the bridge, registering the shocked and tense postures.

The noise increased, pushing at her ears, at her mind, at her emotions. Fear, an emotion she wasn’t familiar with, harassed her like a herding dog, driving her insane. Her fists, one holding a knife, clenched over her ears.

In a short moment, Roman arrived on the bridge. There was thick tension, and a quick look around the bridge gave him an idea what was going on. He stood by a terrified looking Rand. “Captain?”

~ Cmdr Alden, XO/CSO

Rand didn’t dare look at Alden. She just stood very still wondering if Anders was going to listen to Ra’Ti or if he was going to listen to the captain and arrest her. Not that charges would stick, she didn’t think…

Yeoman Rand

Captain but it wasn’t Ra’Ti. Her eyes snapped up. Alden. Her XO. A good man, standing between her and the rest of the crew. Xam was right, something was very wrong here. Wrong with her. She lowered her hands, a flicker of surprise ran through her at the knife in her hand. She always carried one, but concealed and never so… recklessly. Rende carefully turned the knife, blade towards her, handle held on her open palm towards Ra’Ti. Her gaze asking him to take it before she hurt someone.

Xam slowly reached forward and took the blade from her. It vanished as soon as it had cleared her hand. He set a hand on her shoulder and said “Welcome back, Skipper.” softly.

She felt the relief in Xam’s voice, but it was premature, she felt it as the hidden sounds pounded against her, relentless. An enemy she couldn’t see and fight - yet.

“Commander Alden, I’m compromised. You are to take command of the ship.” Her gaze landed on Rand. Sweet, loyal, quiet, shy Rand. “I’m sorry Yeoman.” She moved slowly, carefully, measured toward the lift. She had never been concerned that she would hurt someone by accident, she was now as she approached the small confines of the turbolift with Lt. Hart as an escort.

Cpt. Asam, CO

Anders cocked an eyebrow, then quickly looking to Alden said, “Commander, should I escort?”

-Lieutenant Junior Grade Marcus Anders: Chief of Security-

Chandel sat in shock as the Captain was escorted off the bridge. What had happened to the woman? Was it to do with those strange, piercing noises?

Ensign Chandel Sci

Alden nodded. “Escort her, please.” He smiled regretfully at Rende. “I hope you’ll feel better, Captain. The ship is in good hands until then.”

~ Cmdr Alden, XO/CSO

Rende paused once in front of Alden. “Of that I have no doubt, Commander. The Sentinel is yours.” She also knew it always had been. The crew was loyal to Alden. He was gruff and formal, but they trusted him. She didn’t say another word as she stepped into the lift. When Anders had stepped in to escort her, she grabbed the handle, twisted, “Deck 9.”

Cpt. Asam, CO

Ra’Ti watched her go, and for a brief second he was going to go with her; but it wasn’t his place… and she’d beat his ass if he left the bridge in a situation like this. Instead, as the lift doors closed, he looked at Alden and said “Okay, boss… here’s where we stand.” and he gave him a full briefing then and there on the bridge; starting from the oddities in the conference room to Captain’s departure.

Ra’Ti, Chief Tactical Officer

Chandel took a deep breath and turned back to her station. She had a job to do. She checked the sensors and probe data for any changes in the last few minutes.

Ensign Chandel Sci

Leah turned to Rand. “You okay?” she said softy. She’d take Rand aside for a few minutes if everything was calm and she needed it.

Hart turned and addressed Alden. “There’s definitely something going on. We’ve been trying to figure out an odd manifestation in a patient down in Sickbay. Based on what I’ve just witnessed, it seems quite possible they are related.”

~Leah Hart, NP

“Whatever signal that phenomenon is putting out it is affecting a lot of us in some way. To me it was audio in my head. Like a frequency only I could hear. It was debilitating though it seems to have eased off right now.” Chandel said as she turned her chair so she could see the XO and Leah.

Ensign Chandel Sci

Zaril focused more on what he was hearing trying to isolate the patterned noise from that which was random both could reveal more but not when they were all garbled together. He felt helpless on the suppressants but there was nothing he could do. He gave the doctor a quick look that said he would need to talk later.

Lieutenant Junior Grade Zaril Dovek
Communication Officer U.S.S Sentinel

The science console flared again — a scatter of returns like sparks in a dark room. For a moment the silhouette of the structure sharpened, its rings and girders forming a clear lattice against the haze. Then the veil rippled across it, dragging the image back into distortion, as if resenting the scrutiny.

Chandel hunched forward over her board, hoping more information would be incoming, but to her frustration, the sensors just recorded the same phenomenon as before. It was there on sensors, then it wasn’t, like it was playing chicken.

The distress call rose in unison with the flicker, no longer just static. The childlike tone that had threaded the carrier wave now lengthened into a wavering phrase — fragile syllables stretched too thin, collapsing before they could resolve into words. One note cracked into three, like a voice calling from far below the surface of water. Then gone.

All at once, the lighting on the bridge dipped. Not a power loss — not exactly. More like a shift in hue. The ambient panels dimmed toward amber, shadows running long across the deck. Consoles remained stable, but their glow seemed weaker, as if a veil of color had settled over the room.

Station-keeping thrusters fired a minor correction, a soft vibration through the deck. Navigation readouts flashed: drift vector 0.03° toward the structure. The Sentinel was being pulled, slowly, by something not accounted for in gravimetric charts.

“We are being pulled in!” Chandel said sharply, her voice trembled with a tension she normally did not show. Her ebony features mirrored that tension and concern.

Ensign Chandel Sci

The ship shuddered — faintly, but enough that every loose object on the bridge vibrated.

At Science, Chandel’s board pulsed with overlapping alerts. Gravitic telemetry scrolled in jagged red: Vector acceleration increasing — .05 G and climbing. The structure wasn’t radiating mass; it was bending the surrounding space, subtle folds opening like petals toward the Sentinel. The multi-phasic spectral array caught micro-fluctuations rippling through the local subspace envelope — distortions so fine they slipped through standard graviton sensors until they overlapped with the ship’s own warp signature.

Chandel held onto her console as she reported to whoever was commanding the bridge.”Gravitic telemetry indicates rising vector acceleration—currently at 0.05 G and increasing. The structure is not emitting detectable mass but it does appear to be bending local spacetime, forming petal-like subspace folds oriented toward the Sentinel. Multi-Phasic Spectral Array data confirms micro-fluctuations within the surrounding subspace envelope, subtle enough to evade standard graviton sensors until intersecting with the ship’s warp field signature. I recommend we maintain minimum warp signature while I continue subspace mapping.” Desparately she tried to do so one handedly.

Every attempt to compensate only made the readings worse. The veil wasn’t pulling them in through gravity. It was tuning to them.

And then — a whisper through the comms board. Not an incoming hail, not distortion. Just a faint hiss, the suggestion of a word caught in breath. Those standing closest to Zaril’s console might swear they heard their own names in it.

On the main viewer, the filaments continued their slow curl toward the ship. Deliberate. Patient.

The veil was no longer waiting. It was reaching.

EvilJen, DDoSFEO
OOC: My god, Jen! If you are not a GM yet, why are you not?!!? You are soo talented.:))

Zaril’s eyes narrowed as he listened to the the various coms. Something was very wrong it’s like it was more than one, he recorded each as they came in then segmented them trying to clean up the coms so he could make out what was being said.

Lieutenant Junior Grade Zaril Dovek
Communication Officer U.S.S Sentinel

At Communications, Zaril’s filters caught something new: three distinct frequencies woven through the distress call. Not echoes — simultaneous voices. Each one shared identical modulation roots, as if they were iterations of the same source across slightly offset time signatures. When he isolated one, another rose to fill its place, the three shifting in sequence like overlapping breaths. And in that brief clarity, a word nearly resolved.
“…inside…”
Then the harmonics inverted, the message fracturing again into white noise.

Roman would bet on some entity with psychic abilities. Or if not, then some kind of electromagnetic field. Or a field of some sort. No, Roman decided, as it pulled them in. Certainly an entity. “Run every kind of scan you can think of. I want this thing identified.”

~ Cmdr Alden, XO/CSO

The composite of all data formed a picture that was worse than any single reading:

The pull was non-linear and increasing.

The signal was expanding in harmonic range, spreading through the ship’s subspace channels.

And the bio-neutrino traces—those faint, flickering arcs Chandel had mapped—were now registering inside the Sentinel’s own hull, localized to power junctions and sensor relays.

The veil wasn’t just reaching for them anymore.
It had begun to touch.

Outside, the visible haze rippled with a soundless pulse that only instruments could feel. The structure within shimmered faintly, its outline bending, as though something unseen behind it had taken a slow, deliberate breath.

EvilJen, DDoSFEO

“Sir! I think it’s trying to touch us!” Chandel said as she spotted the bio-neuro traces within the ship’s hull.

Ensign Chandel Sci

Zaril worked quickly his ears almost mechanical in their efficiency. “Sir, there’s something , I’m working on Isolating the noise so I can hear what’s being said” he noted, He moved the recording slowly identifying the frequencies that were just noise removing out large bands at first then narrowing until the clean sound could be heard but the noise was going. He worked the computer tagging and marking each one then listening gain for speech or patterned data stream.

Lieutenant Junior Grade Zaril Dovek
Communication Officer U.S.S Sentinel

There were three bands of frequencies. The first seemed to be an echo of another signal or itself. The voice was high pitched like a young child. It seemed to repeat every 4.7 seconds. The playback inverstion showed a palindromic waveform. It seemed to be transmitted forward and backward at the same time.

What Dovek heard: “…iiiii…sa…iiin…inside…” (last fragment intelligible across all three layers)

1. Secondary Band (19.04 THz – 19.18 THz) – “Mirror Channel”

The voice was a whispered undertone layered beneath the previous band. It was only detectable after harmonic subtraction.

It seemed to come in 1.2-second microbursts in sync with the ship’s own comm carrier refresh cycle — it suggested whatever it was was reactive in its modulation to Sentinel’s systems. The band also contained low-frequency oscillations matching recorded bio-neutrino flux. Dovek’s excellent hearing suggested that the “voice” was not vocal at all — it was the resonance of decaying biological energy patterns being translated through subspace noise.

Zaril heard: “help…hear…we…are…”

What was strange was that each word fragment overlaps with internal sensor harmonics, implying part of the message originates within the ship.

The third band had a deep harmonic rumble beneath the audible range. More of a vibration in his console. This wave seemed to repeat every 28 minutes. It had a 0.0036 seconds quantum phase differential across three captured samples — indicates multi-temporal emission (three distinct moments transmitting simultaneously).

Interpretation: The voice is not only repeating across space, but across time loops.

Dovek heard: “…wait…door…open…hungry…”
The last word displays harmonic amplitude matching the childlike tone in Band 1, implying shared origin or mimicry.

Cpt. Asam, CO

“Attempt to evade,” Roman said, nodding to their helmsman. “I don’t want to find out the hard way whether it wants something bad for us or not.”

~ Cmdr Alden, XO/CSO

“Sir” Zaril said. “It appears to be Temperal in nature, the audio and harmonic are all wrong. It shifting through subspace, its chaotic sir” he said. “Like part of the message is coming from us, I recommend we warp out before it sucks us inside and we get stuck in the time loop. ” he noted

Lieutenant Junior Grade Zaril Dovek
Communication Officer U.S.S Sentinel

Chandel split her attention between her console and the discussion going on around her. She was not adverse to getting out of there either. Though she must admit, in all her long life as an El Aurian, she had never seen anything like this.

Ensign Chandel Sci

“Aye, sir.” The helmsman’s fingers flew across the console, plotting an immediate course to evade and boosting auxiliary power to the thrusters. The view outside tilted as the Sentinel began to turn slowly and deliberately away from the vast, shrouded nebula.

Everything was fine for the first two seconds. Inertial dampeners, lateral thrusters, impulse engines all operated normally. The ship responded to the helmsman’s control like a content kitten. For two seconds they were moving away from the nebula.

Then the nav console pulsed scarlet.

“Sir!” the helmsman called out. “Our course has been corrected—by something else!”

On the main viewer, the nebula’s tendrils unfurled toward the Sentinel, the nearest one brushing the forward shields like a ghostly fingertip. The contact sent a bright flare across the console.

On the tactical station Ra’Ti could see the impact on the forward shields. There was no kinetic force detected but his sensors showed whatever it was was pushing though their shields.

Cpt. Asam, CO

[O]Karl to Bridge, my engine is talking to me” His voice was even but monotonous, which was odd for the usually eternally cheerful Engineer “It gave a warning: Don’t Let Them Wake It. I’m not certain if we are the them, nor what It is but I’m hearing things “He tried to give the best information without succumbing to the panic that was creeping up “I’m not certain if I’m suffering from auditory or visual hallucinations, it might be best to have Medical send someone down here[O]

Master Chief Karl - CE