Joint Post: by Lieutenant Elli-Navine & Captain Toron Pax & Lieutenant Commander Ezekiel “Zeke” Pride & Lieutenant Scott McIntyre & Lieutenant Alexander Artopolis

Timeline/Location: After TBR#014, Aboard the Potemkin

2257 words – 4.5 OF Standard Post Measure

Captain Toron Pax stood facing the aft lounge. Once he had gotten word that the away team had discovered and then rescued eight Romulan officers he had directed them to bring their commander to him. He wanted to speak with her, but he also wanted his senior staff with him when he did. Pax had cleared the lounge out so they could talk without interruption, and he didn’t want it to happen in a more formal manner. There were sensitive subjects that needed to be broached.

Elli came in, looking around the oddly quiet crew lounge and regarding the classically serious-faced Romulan commander. She couldn’t help feeling some compassion for the woman. She’d been stranded for decades without word about the war she’d been posted to or the severe tragedy of her homeworld. Elli couldn’t help but to cast herself in the woman’s service boots, imagining herself stranded, eager to return home, only when finally rescued to learn her homeworld had been lost. As Elli awkwardly tried to settle on a chair out of the many available, the sympathy was already written over the Grazerite’s face, and the Commander had to know something was terribly amiss.

The uniform was sterile but lived in. Scuffs and slightly frayed edges told the tale of a busy doctor who cared little for presentation during his day-to-day. In utter contrast with his uniform, however, was his body, a perfectly clean and maintained five o’clock shadow and coiffed, curly hair, cuticles of crescent moon and clear, soft skin.

Alexander popped through the doors and stopped to look. Across the lounge, he could see the others gathering, and he swallowed visibly with anticipation. He began walking his way toward the group and smiled meekly in the direction of his captain.

The doctor was somewhat of a contradiction. The man was the embodiment of professionalism. He was a brilliant young man who excelled at his job. He managed the medical department aboard the Potemkin with apparent ease. He was loved by his staff, and even those with a medical phobia of any kind were at ease in his presence. He kept his hair and facial hair perfect. And then there was his uniform.

Pax just shook his head a little and rolled his eyes. He had long ago learnt to let his officers have their idiosyncratic ways; they did their best work when they could be an individual.

The Romulan commander was sitting alone. He had engaged her when her escort had brought her into the room. They had spoken just a few moments, but he had explained much of what had happened since her ship and crew had left. The destruction of the Romulus system wasn’t one of them. They had been interrupted by a call from her loyal crew. Their scout ship was nearly ready to leave. With a few upgrades from the Potemkin’s, their warp drive will get them home in just a few weeks.

Ezekiel Pride strode in with an easy, languid gait that would have been appropriate in a cowboy if he had been born on Earth. His five o’clock shadow was a little more like seven o’clock, a bit more rough and grizzled and starting to hint at a bit of grey, though Pride would never admit it. He carried a bottle of half full Romulan ale of a good vintage, along with a tall glass.

“I figured you might need it, and likely hadn’t had any for a couple decades,” Pride said as he put the bottle and glass down in front of the Romulan commander.

Pride went to the replicator and returned to the table with a mug of steaming coffee and put a glass of mulled cider in front of the Grazerite. Elli immediately laced her fingers through the handle and took one big, comforting sniff.

“Want anything, Doc? Captain?” Zeke offered, back at the replicator again. He ordered a tray with a pitcher of ice water and several glasses, just in case.

The doctor shook his head politely at the offer.

Elli looked up from the comforting steam of her mug when the doors parted again and Scott came in. Usually he had the sort of hawk eyed look that was judging the situation around him, but it seemed doubly so now. Elli wanted to jump up and tell him how much he was missed on their away mission. They had only expected to do a little science, but things had, of course, not stacked up that way. Basin had done what he could, but really, it had been the misfortune of the mutineers’ own weapons misfiring that had saved the away team in the end. Probably the disruptions were just that long in storage. The mutineers had been a decade in stasis after all, only to awake to a fight they insisted on having and ultimately their own faulty firearm finishing three quarters of them off. What a pitiful lot those mutineers had been, Elli thought to herself as she watched Scott settle slightly apart from the rest of the officers assembled, his arms crossed as he waited for the captain to begin.

Pride settled down in his seat and sipped his coffee as he waited for the meeting to start.

“Let’s get started,” Toron said, retreating from bay windows and towards the others as he took his seat and took a deep breath. “Commander Ael,” he said, speaking to the Romulan commander. “We have told you about how the war ended, and the time since, but we have held back something.”

He saw her tense and knew she was thinking we were hiding something, maybe even planning on not sending her home.

“Please, “he held up a hand, “we’re not going to attack you. But you do need to know this.” He took a deep breath. “Ten years ago the Hobus star went supernova. The explosion propagated through subspace and destroyed the Romulus system. The star itself survived, as did a number of the system’s outer worlds. The inner planets, including Romulus and Remus, were destroyed.” There was silence in the room. No one was speaking. The shock of hearing it laid out like that was something that even Pax had problems saying. Billions had died at that time, with no way to save even a small number. The worst part was even ten years on they still didn’t know what had made an otherwise healthy start explode.

Zeke shifted just slightly to pop the cork on the bottle of Romulan ale and fill a hefty glass with the blue liquid before pushing it gently in front of Commander Ael. He gave her a sympathetic look, giving the Romulan time to process everything.

The Romulan captain just sat staring at Pax. It was as though he had given her a death sentence. Her family was from the homeworld and she had no idea if they had made it off, or if they had even been there at the time. She might be alone now. She reached forward and took the glass, giving the Starfleet officer a weak smile. It was a good year at least. As she sat there it felt like hours, but she knew it must be little more than seconds.

At length she took a deep calming breath, feeling herself on the edge of a panic attack. She managed to ask, “Do you know if my family survived? How is the Empire?”

Pax tilted his head a little. “I am sorry to say that we have no records of your family. At the time things were… were a mess.” he said at last. “The Federation attempted a rescue operation, but the fleet was destroyed before we could render aid, and fleet command refused to gather a new one.” He almost growled those last words. He had damn near lost his command and commission, berating every admiral who would take his call. In the end he and a dozen other ships had breached orders and gone anyway. “And since then we have been on increasingly worsening terms with the Republic.”

“I’m really sorry,” Elli said lamely as she looked pitifully into her mug after a long, sad pause. She’d been worried about Grazer so much since seeing it in Tenzi Carter’s Protectorate scrying eye. Losing her homeworld was a nightmare beyond anything that could even be made any sense of. To her mind, there would be no coming back from that dark tragedy. She pushed away a tear of her own in sympathy. “I can’t imagine surviving all these years only to get this terrible news. I hope you find someone, somewhere, survived who you can mourn with.”

“In the meantime, we can get you to the border so you can make your way…somewhere in the empire,” Zeke said.

“Can I ask…” Elli ventured, as if looking for a more comfortable, manageable change in subject, to shift from the fresh pain back to the more fathomable and now resolved decade of solitude and survival, “how your scout ship got to be in this system, and how you ended up on that lunar station?”

Alexander had waited in silence, watching the conversation unfold. At Eli’s question, he leaned forward a bit, fully curious what answer the Romulan might give.

The petite Romulan commander smiled a little. “We had been scouting an old route I remembered from my early days in the fleet,” she started. “We were hoping that it would allow safe travel though Dominion held space and give us a way to strike out and retreat. We were detected, even through the cloak. We ran, but our sensors were blinded and we ran into a Dominion fleet.” She paused, seeming to consider those gathered, trying to make a choice.

She half shrugged. “We had an experimental weapon aboard, one we had managed to… how shall I say it, uh, borrowed from the Son’a. We used it and it did not go as planned. We were pulled into the resulting rift, and I thought we were all dead. Then we ended up in this system, or close by at any rate. The ship had lost its warp drive. We had no way to rebuild it, so we were stuck.”

At the mention of a Son’a weapon, Elli looked back and forth, exchanging glances first with Scott and then with Captain Pax, knowing they should probably see if that potential weapon could be collected, studied, and possibly deconstructed. But she didn’t say anything in present company.

Zeke gave a low whistle. “That threw you clear across two quadrants then,” he said. “Some weapon…”

Pax nodded. He had heard of the incident that the Enterprise had gone through. It had been during the Dominion war, and now he wondered if the Enterprise being sent on that mission was deeper than they had realized.

“Commander, we didn’t find any weapons outside what we would expect. Where is it?”

Commander Ael smiled, maybe the first true smile she had shown them. “I ordered it destroyed when I understood that we had only fired it at ten percent of its potential and it had thrown us hundreds of light years. Our sensors also showed that just before we were ripped away the moonlet we had been scouting was also destroyed. A rock two thousand kilometers across was vaporized. I took a disruptor to it and slagged it. I couldn’t allow anyone, even my own superiors, to have such a weapon.”

“Was that why some of the crew mutinied?” Elli wasn’t sure that would be enough to make her mutiny. It had to be some other explanation. She couldn’t fathom a reason she’d ever want to turn on her captain, though. It seemed incomprehensible.

Commander Ael nodded solemnly. “My chief of Engineering believed that it could be used to create a rift that would get us home. Without warp drive it was our only real way of getting home.” She smiled sadly “You see, when I used it the reason we were thrown out here instead of destroyed was the destruction of the moon, the mass of the moon altered the rift, so for us to use the weapon again, to get home, I would have to destroy yet another moon. I wasn’t ready to do that, or to take the knowledge of how destructive the weapons was back to my people.

Elli bit her lip in thought and focused back down on her mug of cider. She thought about how many desolate moonrocks there were littered around in so many solar systems, and she thought for a moment about how she felt in the Great Attractor, when it seemed getting home might be an impossibility. In their place, she thought she would have held on to the Son’a weapon in the hope of devising a way back too. Now, she felt she could commiserate with both of the Romulan Scout ship’s factions. What she didn’t think was that Toron would ever let that kind of decision divide them. Would he? Doubt rose. What would happen, for instance, if she had wanted to keep such a thing and Scott wanted it destroyed?

She looked back to the Captain about the same time a note beeped on the communicator.

“Captain Pax,” the officer on watch said, “You’re needed on the bridge, Sir. It’s Fleet Command.”

Toron stood, the call from the bridge had to be taken. He had only just spoken to Fleet Command so another call from them could be nothing good.