[snip]

“Aye Sir!” said Kahuna, as the Captain left the Bridge leaving him in charge. All the senior staff were leaving the ship for the planet Unity, half in a Shuttle and half by Transporter. His orders were to maintain a standard orbit of Unity System, just out of the sensor range of the planet’s more primitive devices.

“Hold this position, monitor their comms and continue to scan for anomalies,” Kahuna told the rest of the Bridge crew.

The turbo lift door swooshed open and Cara walked onto the Bridge. “The Captain said that I’d be more use here and to take over at Science?” she made into a question.

Kahuna just shrugged his shoulders and looked towards the empty console.

Cara took her position at Science and monitored the progress of the landing party.

Meanwhile, Comms patched in the feed from the pins which the landing party had, so that it was audible on the Bridge.

A light soft buzzing was followed by =/\= Merrimack to away team, comms check =/\= came an NE’s voice.

=/\= Comms working! We’ve arrived in the correct location. =/\= Glen confirmed.

Astrid monitored the progress of the shuttlecraft. It had already reached the meteorite location and was diving deeper. There had been no word from them yet.

Kahuna sat back in the Captain’s chair. The time he had put in here during his Starfleet Bridge officer tests meant that he was growing quite comfortable in this chair.

After five minutes, or so, Kahuna asked, “Status reports!”

“The landing party has set off walking in the direction of the nearest town,” replied Cara. “The nearest life sign is 3 km from them.”

“Still no word from the shuttlecraft,” replied Astrid. “The shuttle has dived deeper than in Lt. Mullins flightplan, Sir!”

“We are maintaining standard orbit,” replied Dariusz. “All systems are operating within normal parameters!”

A few minutes more, and Cara piped up, “Sir, we are receiving instructions and a video file from the shuttle. It’s an image of a crashed spacecraft at the site of the ‘meteorite’. The security officer is asking to check a file from an old mission several years ago, when the Merrimack was attacked at Starbase 114. MABEL 2.0 is working on it now, Sir!”

“That’s very interesting,” Kahuna replied. “None of us were around way back then, I presume?”

“Not me!” Cara and Astrid both said together, then laughed.

“I was aboard the Merrimack then,” Dariusz said, “but I wasn’t on the Bridge. Most of the crew were given leave on the Starbase at the time. There was only a skeleton crew aboard.”

They all waited for the comparison report to come back.

MABEL 2.0 ran the images uploaded by Guy Fleegman from the underwater ship with those from the records of the visit to Starbase 114. She also cross-referenced them with the Starfleet Catalogue via the Library Computer Access and Retrieval System. She could not and additionally check against the “secret” database files that had come from the NX Memorial ship from the future without authorisation from Captain Glen. “Working… .... ”

After a few minutes, she came back, “Insufficient data to complete analysis! Incomplete data sets to make valid comparisons!”

Cara replied to the shuttle, “The quality of the video feeds and the lack of other evidence means that MABEL 2.0 can’t determine a meaningful answer to the question. In other words, we just don’t know if the the two ships and their occupants are the same, or not. No one has ever seen either of them.”

The Bridge began receiving telemetry from the underwater probes and a security report from the landing party in the village.

=/\= Bridge here. Kahuna speaking. Please bring the rescued miner, Michael Duck, to the Bridge. The teams are sending back odd reports from the planet surface, and I need him to answer some questions. I’m not sure the planet is safe for him to return. =/\=

• Kahuna, Bridge