An echo in the void

Posted on 24 Nov 2025 @ 6:06am by Lieutenant Commander Adrian Sorvak & Ensign Balen Oran
Edited on on 24 Nov 2025 @ 6:07am

1,051 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: The Displaced
Timeline: Prior to senior officer's briefing

=/\= Ensign Balen Oran — Narrative Log =/\=

The soft amber glow of the meditation lamp cast warm, steady light across Balen Oran’s quarters. Shadows clung to the curved bulkheads, swaying gently with the subtle vibrations of the starship. Under normal circumstances, those vibrations were comforting — the heartbeat of the Arawyn. A rhythm he knew well.

Tonight they felt… off.
Not dangerous. Just unsettled.
As if the ship was still absorbing the shock of what had happened.

He sat cross-legged on the floor, palms resting lightly on his knees, trying to center his breathing. Usually, a few moments of stillness would clear his mind. But the events of the last hour kept intruding — the alarm across the internal comm, the sensor spike, the unexpected rupture opening right in their path.

A tear in space.
A ship emerging from it.
No warning.
No known signature.
No explanation.

He exhaled, long and slow, and opened his eyes.

There was no quieting his thoughts after something like that. The Arawyn had gone from routine operations to emergency posture in seconds. Lives might be at stake. A vessel had been torn into their space — violently, unnaturally — and the Principals now had to treat the situation as a potential first contact, rescue, containment, and hazard response all wrapped into one.

Meditation would not help here.

He reached out, extinguished the lamp, stood, and tightened his uniform jacket. The corridors outside his quarters carried a different energy than usual — hurried footsteps, clipped conversations, the subtle atmosphere of a ship realizing it carried someone else’s disaster onboard.

He stepped out.

=/\= Science Labs =/\=

The Science Labs were already active, humming with a coordinated, quiet urgency. The overhead lights had shifted to a slightly cooler hue — the mode used during priority analysis periods. Officers were already at their stations, running correlation sweeps, stabilizing sensor channels, assembling environmental readouts.

A holo-display projected the timeline of the incident:
• sudden subspace rupture
• alien vessel emergence
• immediate collapse of the anomaly
• no residual signature
• no energy trace
• hull damage consistent with internal stress
• unknown number of occupants
• sealed midsection possibly intact

Fragments of Sorvak’s bridge analysis scrolled across the secondary panel: no match to any catalogued subspace event, harmonic signature inconsistent with known propulsion failures, sensor refocusing required for rift moment.

Balen moved into the flow without needing direction.
This was where he belonged — in the chain of response.

He coordinated with two other science officers to clean up the structural telemetry. The rupture had disrupted several sensor bands, and his task was straightforward: stabilize the data blocks so Engineering and Medical could rely on them.

Medical, as expected, had already requested support.
Doctor Amberlyn was preparing an isolation chamber on Deck Six.
Environmental tolerances, atmospheric possibilities, pressure variances — all needed clean readings. He forwarded the refined packets immediately.

Security pinged for sealed-compartment mapping — he pushed that to their channel too.

The chatter around him built the picture:

“Multiple interior sections unresponsive.”
“Mid-hull bulkhead shows no breach — that’s where survivors would be.”
“We still can’t get any signal return from the core void.”
“Deflector array cycling for deeper scan.”
“Sorvak wants priority analysis on internal distortion pattern.”

He stood in front of one of the large wall displays that showed a rotating cross-section of the alien ship. The hull arcs bent in strange, almost unnatural curves. The center was a hollow absence — a region that defied categorization, not because it was shielded, but because it returned nothing that made sense.

This wasn’t just an anomaly.
This was the aftermath of something catastrophic.

A ship ripped open from the inside.
Possible survivors trapped in sealed compartments.
A void at the center that shouldn’t exist.

He gathered the latest telemetry — the cleanest structural scans, the refined interior mapping, and the processed core region data — and transferred it all onto his PADD. Engineering’s deflector grid had higher spatial resolution and deeper harmonic capability. That was where the next step would happen.

He turned and headed for Deck 16.

=/\= Engineering =/\=

Engineering buzzed with controlled intensity. The deep hum of the deflector array vibrated through the deck plates as recalibrations cycled across multiple stations. The smell of ionized air hung faintly in the background — the usual scent when high-fidelity scans ran at full power.

Balen scanned the room. Mira Quinn stood at a console to the left, her focus absolute. The rotating wireframe of the alien vessel’s interior hovered above her workstation — the bent structural arcs, the hollow void, the strange geometry. Arlen worked beside her, sliding between deflector diagnostics and structural mapping.

He approached, waiting until Mira finished a sequence of commands before stepping forward.

“Ensign Oran, Science.”

Mira acknowledged him with a brief, steady nod. Arlen shifted slightly to make room.

Balen lifted his PADD and spoke in a measured tone.
“I reviewed the initial telemetry in Science. There was something in the data I couldn’t isolate there. Engineering should have the resolution to confirm it.”

Mira adjusted the console slightly toward him — an efficient, wordless invitation to contribute. Balen transmitted the dataset.

The waveform appeared on the Engineering display: a faint, repeating ripple, barely visible at first.

Arlen ran a diagnostic. “That’s subharmonic,” he said, eyebrows tightening. “Not interference.”

Mira magnified the signal. The harmonic curve sharpened, stabilizing into a precise, repeating pattern.

Balen leaned in just slightly.
“It shouldn’t exist in a region with no measurable spatial return,” he said quietly. “But it’s there. Very faint. Very stable.”

Arlen’s console chimed in confirmation. “Telemetry agrees.”

Mira overlaid the resonance onto the map of the void region. The harmonic sat exactly in the zone where every other sensor reading failed.

Balen studied the alignment — the signal nestled cleanly within the impossible absence.

“If something produced a resonance inside that void,” he said, voice steady, “then whatever happened inside that ship didn’t terminate instantly. Something persisted long enough to leave an echo behind.”

Mira began a new analysis sweep, integrating the resonance into the broader distortion model. Her hands moved with controlled precision — already adapting the new data into her framework without a word.

Balen stayed beside the console, ready to continue the investigation.

The void was not silent.
Something had spoken through it —
and now they could hear the echo.

=/\=

Ens Balen Oran
Science Officer

 

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