Leaving Proxima Behind

[Annabelle O'Halloran 0]

Forty-five minutes since the mining. Lateral sensors recorded no detonation. So far.

 

The mines were a risk to this area of space, empty as it was. Nothing nearby but the Villandro Nebula, its beautiful swirling of reds and golds behind them now. No M Class planets nearby. That had been a factor when the Captain had ordered crew to abandon ship. The closest possibility was an L Class planet 8.24 light years away. Not really a possibility at all when you got right down to it—and they had. But then, Excalibur. From out of nowhere. Well, not really. She had simply been following her own course, been about her own business and it had intersected with Reaent's. And six Warbirds. Serendipity? A very happy accident. Cinniúint as her grandmother would say in the clan tongue. Fate or Destiny. Call it what you will but now the two ships were inextricably linked as far as Anna was concerned. They owed a debt to Excalibur. Akira class but also Avenging Angel to her way of thinking. She hoped they would one day pay their debt.

 

She watched the lateral sensors, almost willing them to show no detonation. Fifty-three minutes since deployment. Still quiet. She continued drinking her tea.

 

The mines were a risk to more than this area of space; the wormhole terminus opened into the Chaltok system in the Beta Quadrant—Romulan space. It was hoped that the mines would be a deterrent that would keep the Romulans from using the wormhole as a backdoor into the Gamma Quadrant. A deterrent that would last long enough for Federation forces to reach the area and seal the wormhole so that no obscurely created and modified drone could activate it. They would have to be careful. The weakened fabric of subspace in this area would be, could be very tricky. If the Romulans were clever, and the Romulans were always clever, they might find a way around the mines but she hoped not. They were set for resonancy detonation—if a ship powered by a forced quantum singularity came anywhere near them, the mines would go off and probably take the ship with it. The explosion of a quantum singularity drive with its micro black hole in a weakened area of subspace held the possibility of ripping a great big hole in the fabric of subspace. Romulan sensors would be able to read the mines—they weren't cloaked. They were meant to be seen. She hoped the Federation would hurry.

 

Shifting in her seat, Anna leaned back and closed her eyes for a moment. An entire hour had now passed with the wormhole and its lethal doormat further behind with every passing second. You couldn't live every moment waiting for the other shoe to drop; she wasn't built that way. Easier to look forward than to look back. Except in this case...Proxima still lay behind them. USS Proxima NCC-61952, Nebula Class, lost almost twenty years ago in the Gamma Quadrant, the seven-hundred and fifty which called her home presumed to have died at that time. There was no evidence that they survived whatever happened to Proxima which had somehow ended up buried inside an asteroid and in the Beta Quadrant. The scans taken before entering the wormhole showed her warp core gone and her life pods...also gone. Probably launched on the Gamma side of things in an area where the nearest planet their sensors would have homed in on was an L Class, 8.24 light years away. No Excalibur or any other friend to come to the rescue. No chance at all.

 

The lonely end of the Proximians would remain conjecture; whatever logs still existed were probably aboard the ill-fated ship whose transponder signal had called them across the Neutral Zone, the Beta Quadrant and through a wormhole into the Gamma Quadrant. Where they were now limping their way to someplace to make repairs, to the ship and to the crew. So many fatalities and so many injured. Anna rechecked the lateral sensors and supposed this mission would be termed a success. They had found Proxima, but not destroyed her. They had discovered the wormhole before the Romulans could truly utilize it, at least from what they could tell, but they hadn't been able to definitively seal it. How did you measure success? They would hold a memorial service for their dead and the living outnumbered them. That was a grim yardstick, she thought and pulled up Ha'Vorante in the Fleet database. Home of the Vorta, the Captain had said it was their next stop. She wondered how he and Commander Ridire were doing down in Sickbay. She wondered how Commander Swan was. She wondered if Jon Shamor would walk again. This was the end of her first mission on Reaent. She wondered when the first adjective that came to mind to describe it would cease to be 'bloodbath'.

Edited February 24, 2009 by Annabelle O'Halloran