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Episode 02: Cosmic Imperative / Re: Epilogue: They That Shed Their Blood [Day 03 | 1800 ]
Last post by Dumedion -
[Ens. Talia “Shadow” Al-Ibrahim | Arboretum | Deck 22 | Vector 3| USS Theurgy] Attn: All
[Show/Hide]
The names were read, now etched in stone.

The faces of the lost flickered in cones of holoprojected photons, grainy but visible to all.

Across the cavernous chamber, all fell silent as a lone trumpet drew its first mournful notes – followed almost imperceptibly by a hundred subtle shifts of fabric and the faintest chorus of heels clicking together as those assembled moved to attention.

Talia swallowed her emotions and moved with them involuntarily, through several blinks; anger faded in the face of propriety. There would be a time and a place to ask questions, to dwell, to replay every memory and conversation, to rage and to grieve. At the end of the day, she knew herself well enough to know that all of it would simply become another stone for her to lift; just another burden added to the weight she carried around every second of every day.

She’d never admit it out loud, but Talia drew a twisted, misplaced sense of pride from it. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, the saying went, after all...but lately, Shadow couldn't help but notice the flaws in that philosophy: the chip on her shoulder, the way she judged herself, the way she judged others...

Who would want to know someone like that?

Some people were gifted with an aura of charm; they had a way of talking, a welcoming demeanor  that attracted everyone with ease. More than a few examples came to her mind.

Yet there she stood, just one person in a crowd; lost in a sea of strangers.

Utterly alone.

As the bugle played, dark chocolate eyes tracked several shifts in posture in the vicinity; hands were held, shoulders leaned together, and more than a few broke their bearing altogether – as the air wracked with muffled sobs.

The tears flowed, then; unbidden, uncontrolled, but silent. Talia let them roll down her flushed cheeks while she held firm, because the dead deserved respect, and reverence. This wasn’t about her and it didn’t matter how she felt – not there, not then.

When the final note faded with the memorials conclusion, Talia released the breath she’d been holding in a sigh that shook her entire body. There was no desire to linger, no reason to go up to the wall; she knew the names writ upon the stone.

The pilot wiped the tear streaks from her face deftly, then turned and strode to the nearest exit, weaving through the throng in purposeful strides. She had promises to keep, and people to check in with.

[LT Arven Leux | Med Lab 01 | Main Sickbay | USS Theurgy]
[Show/Hide]
The theoretical showed promise; that in and of itself told Arven he was on the right path to a working practical. Everything seemed to hinge on the patients ability to “trigger” the shift at the cellular level, a mystery locked away within the body, or the mind?

Or both, he wondered, analyzing the screeds of data that scrolled across the screens while his mind ran through the checklist of absolute non-viable options already discarded.

It was a short list, but longer than the potential remedies.
 
“I need more data,” Leux sighed, hands lifted from the ceaseless choreography of command inputs to palm his aching eyes. What he really needed was sleep; at least a few hours while the simulations ran, and the first batch of compounds replicated.
 
Testing would be required. Failure was likely. Pain was assured – a lot of it.

He’d explain it to her in a few hours.
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Episode 02: Cosmic Imperative / Re: Epi S: [Day 03 | 0320] The Lab Assessment
Last post by Eirual -
[Ens Mia Dunne | Archaeology & Geology Lab | Deck 07 | Vector 02 | USS Theurgy ]
ATTN:  @Nesota Kynnovan

Mia frowned as she looked at the smoldering debris she had yet to dispose of, “We do not have another to run the tests  we would like.” Taking a breath she looked back at Nathan, “it was already dead, or at least we got no sign of life from it. And they are considered to be too dangerous to have around, even if they might be dead, since we don’t even know where they came from.” 

She stepped out a little more staring down at the fried parasite, “Oh well, I wasn’t having much success anyway.” She began to turn back to the storage units when the other officer offered to assist, “I just have to get these samples back in their storage units. I hate that they have been contaminated, but I still need them.” The scientist passed over a few of the rock samples and pointed to their storage locations. “I am Mia, Mia Dunne.  I still have a lot to do, I’ve been helping in sickbay all day. I just needed a change of scenery.”
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Episode 02: Cosmic Imperative / Re: Epilogue: They That Shed Their Blood [Day 03 | 1800 ]
Last post by Eirual -
[Ens Mia Dunne | Arboretum | Deck 22 | Vector 03 | USS Theurgy ]
Attn: @RyeTanker   @Brutus    @Nolan  @Ellen Fitz   @chXinya    @Dumedion  @Griff  @rae  @Stegro88  @tongieboi  @Pierce  @Tae  @Nesota Kynnovan  @Hans Applegate   @joshs1000  @Krajin  @Eden  @TWilkins  @ob2lander961   @P.C. Haring  

Mia stood just inside the doorway of the Arboretum. It wasn’t where she wanted to be at all. She still hurt, both physically and emotionally, from their missions and the loss of so many of the crew. She had barely gotten to know some of them before this insidious parasite had caused their deaths. She felt as if whatever she had done, it just wasn’t enough. She wasn’t able to do what was needed fast enough. Because of that, people were killed. She barely recalled their escape from the Hobus Facility, being one of the wounded that was just running for their lives. And to return to a battered ship and even more dead and wounded. Despite her own injuries, she had tried to assist medical. Doing menial tasks so the medical crew was free to treat the injured. Seeing Zark there had brought her up short. It felt like an impossibility that her friend could have been hurt bad, but there she was, unconscious and unaware of her surroundings. 

She forced her attention back to the Acting or new captain, feeling the loss of Ives among them. Ives, who had welcomed her back from her cryo-sleep not that long ago was now the one in stasis. She wasn’t sure if he was one of the lucky ones or not.
For the second time ever her eyes looked at the names carved on the memorial wall. She could feel the tears fill her eyes and the lump form in her throat when she saw Tyreke’s name. She felt an overwhelming need to get out of the crowded room. Even before the President began speaking, she turned and quickly made her way to the exit. She didn’t get too far down the corridor, weaving past others gathered there, before she couldn’t breathe  or see clearly through the tears. It was too much. She didn’t even realize when she all but ran into someone at the end of the corridor. She just sort of bounced off of them and fell against the wall, and slid to the floor in her grief.

[Kelistina (Kel) Kavot Droga | Deck 10 |Vector 02 | USS Theurgy ]

Kelistina did not know many of the crew. She was still more of an outsider that happened to be in the wrong place at the right time. She had found those two that had died, and had tried to protect the vessel that had taken her in.  There was still much to be done in the way of repairs. So here she was, welding bulkheads and repairing wiring while those who had served on the Theurgy for a long time were at what they called a memorial. She would remember the ones lost in her own way. When the Arboretum was empty and she could honor them in the way of her people.

It was ironic that they had taken her in, just before the maddness came on board. And now she was part of the crew, even if it was accidental. While she felt saddened by the number of deaths, but many had also survived, unlike her own home world. Kel was also relieved to have some sort of a home and others around her once again. Even if she would never have a mate, or a child. Sometimes, even in the throes of pain, if one looked they could find a semblance of peace within. With that thought in mind she went back to repairing the home she had found on the Theurgy.

4
Episode 02: Cosmic Imperative / Re: Epi S: [Day 03 | 0800] Meeting of the Minds
Last post by Eirual -
[Ens Mia Dunne | Deck 01 |  Vector 01 | Conference Lounge | USS Theurgy]
[ATTN: @Brutus, @Pierce, @chXinya, @Nesota Kynnovan, @Ellen Fitz]

Mia had availed herself of the replicator earlier, getting a very large cup of hot tea that she had sipped in as the others gave their reports. She was still sore from her mission to the Hobus station, but she was hiding it well. At least she thought she was, even if she did wince and stifle a groan as she retook her seat.

 When the new Cybernetics officer introduced herself, Mia found it hard not to think of Tyreke. It still hurt so much. She forced herself not to let her sorrow for his loss become evident, although she had to blink back a few tears. She was also not happy that this man, this interloper Frost was now their acting chief. It should have been one of the crew already on board. This man didn’t even know they had their own conference room, for fuck’s sake.

Mia had to hide the smirk behind her tea when Sarresh practically told him to keep his ass out of his labs. She had already met the Canadian earlier, however he had failed to tell her of his position on board. A fact she found slightly disrespectful to her. She sighed and followed her fellow officers’ example and pushed out of her seat to stand, once again fighting to keep her pain from her face. “Well,” she began, “You already know my name, and have seen the lad I usually work in. Since we didn’t really have a geologist. I am a Xenoarchaeology as well as a Xenoanthropologist. Other than waiting on engineering to make some repairs to some of the equipment, I can take care of the lab. Sir.“ She sat back down letting her body sink into the chair.

5
Episode 02: Cosmic Imperative / Re: Epi: S [Day 03 | 0145] By these wounds...
Last post by Ellen Fitz -
[ Ehfva Feynri | Deck 11 | Vector 02 | USS Theurgy ]  @Eden  @Dumedion  @Krajin   @RyeTanker

The corridor outside Sickbay was only marginally quieter than the ward itself. The distant rhythm of biobeds, shouted orders, and the low hum of surgical fields bled through the open doors behind her as Ehfva moved toward the cryogenics section.

She had made it only a few steps before a familiar voice drifted from one of the surgical suites.

"…misjudged a threesome with an Andorian and a Risan on Risa…" Ehfva stopped. The story continued in a strained, half-groaned cadence that carried just enough clarity to be understood through the doorway. Sedatives had softened the edges of the words, but not the personality behind them.

She turned her head slightly, ears angling toward the sound without conscious instruction. An old habit. Her grandparents had called it the first gift — the body listening before the mind agreed to.

"…instead returned to Ardana with an amusing story and a citation for excessive consumption of Romulan ale."

For a moment she simply stood there. Then, despite everything — the deep ache that had settled into the long muscles of her legs after the battle, the lingering copper taste of recycled emergency air still coating the back of her throat, the particular exhaustion that came not from injury but from the ongoing tax of keeping herself from trying to shift and causing more pain for herself when every instinct underneath said shift, drop, go to ground — a small, involuntary smile tugged at the corner of her muzzle.

Cute. Drug-fogged, half-disassembled by surgery, and the pilot was still trying to flirt with a medical android. Good.

That meant his mind was still reaching outward instead of folding inward on itself. She had seen both. Knew the difference between the two kinds of quiet. She had shared a bunk with soldiers the night before their deployment who told jokes until their voices went hoarse, and she had held soldiers in the dirt of Kyodai Obi who stared at nothing and made no sound at all. The ones who kept talking lived longer — not always in body, but in the parts that mattered most. No spiraling self-pity. No quiet resignation. Just humor and questionable judgment.

He would recover.

Keokuk would have laughed at that story. The thought arrived without warning, the way his memory sometimes did — not with grief's usual weight but with something more like the impression of warmth left on a surface after a hand had been withdrawn. He'd had a gift for finding the absurd in the most ill-timed places. He would have stored the pilot's Risan misadventure and reproduced it later, embellished, at the worst possible moment.

Ehfva allowed herself that small conclusion before turning away again. The moment passed as quickly as it had come. She was learning not to chase them.

She continued on towards cryo and noted how the air changed as she entered the cryo section. Colder. Sharper. The sterile bite of it registered first on the inside of her nose — different from the cold of Okashii Atama's asteroid mornings, different from the pressurized chill of battle-damaged corridors she'd moved through in her feral form during the civil war, belly low, breath controlled. This cold was manufactured. Maintained. It had no weather in it.

Emergency indicators blinked along one of the rows of pods, pale light reflecting off drifting vapor that curled slowly across the deck like something trying to decide which direction was down. And there. A Ferasan male had already forced his pod partially open, frost clinging to dark fur and bare skin alike. One arm gripped the edge of the chamber while his body fought the sluggish betrayal of muscles only beginning to remember warmth. Ehfva had watched a kit from her grandparents' colony fall through ice once on a frozen run — that same thrashing quality, that same body-wide confusion that predated coherent thought.

She closed the distance quickly.

"Easy."

She reached him just as his balance faltered, both hands coming up to steady him before gravity could finish the job. Her claws curled inward automatically, gripping fabric and the solid ridge of his shoulder rather than flesh — a precision that had taken years to develop. She guided him back against the rim of the cryo unit, taking the weight without comment.

Up close, she could feel the cold radiating off him in waves. Not just the ambient chill of the cryo pod but the deep cold carried in his skin itself, in the slow tissue of a body that had been suspended and was not yet certain it wanted to be otherwise.

"Don't fight it," she said, voice rough but steady. "Slow breaths."

Her grip shifted, firming as his body trembled with the violent shivers of reawakening metabolism. She had felt this before — not stasis-reawakening but a different version of the same betrayal, the body recalling itself after the mind had already moved on. It was not comfortable. It was not meant to be comfortable. But it ended.

"In — through your nose." She demonstrated, drawing a slow breath herself, filling her lungs with deliberate patience. "Out through the mouth. Again."

The fog of his breath thickened in the cold air. She kept one hand braced behind his shoulder blades, preventing him from collapsing forward, her other hand steady at his arm. She didn't speak to fill the silence. She had learned silence early, raised among elders who considered noise a form of waste, and she had relearned it later in the field, where silence was survival. She used it now as a tool — letting him hear his own breathing over her voice, letting his nervous system find its own rhythm rather than chase hers.

"You're safe," she continued, when the first sharp peak of disorientation seemed to crest. She lowered her voice into something calmer — something meant to anchor rather than command. "USS Theurgy. Cryogenics bay."

Her ears angled back briefly as a distant alarm chirped somewhere deeper in the medical deck, reflexive and involuntary, tracking the sound and categorizing it as non-immediate before her expression registered anything at all.

"We've recently come through a battle," she added evenly. "Which means things are loud at the moment." A pause — not uncertainty, but the deliberate spacing of information, the way her grandparents had once parceled out instruction to the kits: one thing at a time, until the thing was held. "But you're among professionals. You're not alone."

She did not know him. He did not know her. That was fine. She had sat with strangers in worse states than this on the dirt floors of captured outposts in Kyodai Obi. She had learned, through those years and the ones that followed, that it was not kinship that a person needed in those first disoriented moments after something terrible. It was simply presence. A body that was not a threat. A voice that was not asking anything.

"Your body just came out of stasis. It will feel wrong for a few minutes. That is normal. Take your time."

She held him steady through another shuddering breath cycle, watching his pupils — dilation, tracking, the slow return of voluntary focus — watching the posture of his shoulders, the changing quality of the tremors as they moved from the deep involuntary shaking of cold reawakening toward the finer, more manageable trembling of a body finding its edges again.

"Good," she murmured, when the breathing began to stabilize. "Just like that."
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Main OOC Board / Re: Main OOC Thread
Last post by Pierce -
FYI I will be on vacation and out of town between 3/16-3/24 for any threads. I'll try to catch up quickly on my return. I plan to catch up before I leave too ;)
7
Episode 02: Cosmic Imperative / Re: Epilogue: They That Shed Their Blood [Day 03 | 1800 ]
Last post by Ellen Fitz -
[ Rear Admiral Elena Al-Tulan |Flag Bridge | USS Thaxan ]
ATTN: @Brutus @Nolan  @ob2lander961  @chXinya  @Dumedion  @Griff  @rae  @Stegro88  @Eirual  @RyeTanker  @tongieboi  @Pierce  @Tae  @Nesota Kynnovan  @Hans Applegate  @joshs1000  @P.C. Haring  @Krajin  @Eden  @TWilkins 

Rear Admiral Elena Al-Tulan had a carefully cultivated non-expression as she watched the main viewscreen inside the Thaxan's flag bridge. Around her, the quiet urgency of a working command center continued uninterrupted. Staff officers bent over consoles, analysts compared incoming telemetry, and the low murmur of clipped status reports filled the compartment.

Just because the President of the Federation was in the neighborhood didn't mean work stopped. If anything, it meant the opposite. Especially when that Head of State appeared determined to enter a volatile operational theater with minimal escort and a penchant for making historic announcements in the middle of it.

"Admiral," one of the yeomen called out.

Al-Tulan turned. "Report."

"Captain Chan is on station and transmitting updates. We're close enough for real-time."

She nodded once and faced the viewscreen again. "Good. Put up visual and position information, then patch in."

The display shifted. A tactical grid resolved across the screen, icons marking fleet positions across the region surrounding the battered but still resolute silhouette of the USS Theurgy. She had reviewed the ship's specifications before arrival — the Theurgy-class prototype, experimental multivector dreadnought, built jointly at Antares Shipyards and Utopia Planitia, commissioned in 2378 and gone rogue within two years. On paper it was an asset that should never have been allowed to operate independently this long. In practice it had, somehow, managed to be the thing standing between the Federation and an infiltration that had reached all the way to the Commander-in-Chief's office.

Sensor overlays rolled in layers — Starfleet vessels, Klingon allies, Romulan signatures flagged as friendly for the moment. Repair traffic. Medical transfers. The lingering aftermath of a war that had nearly gone entirely unseen. Then the tactical overlay minimized and the broadcast feed expanded to full frame.

Commander Natalie Stark stood at the railing of the Arboretum terrace, voice raw with conviction as she addressed the gathered crew. Al-Tulan watched without speaking, arms folded behind her back in a parade-rest stance she had held for so many years it had become instinct. Around her, a few officers slowed in their work just enough to glance up. No one spoke.

They listened as Stark spoke of sacrifice. Of exile. Of a ship that had been hunted across Federation space by its own fleet — by Task Force Archeron, led by Admiral Sankolov, a name that sat in Al-Tulan's recent memory like a splinter she hadn't yet found the edge of. She had received the same simulcast the rest of the fleet had, the real one that Captain Ives had forced out through Starbase 84's Romulan defense signaling system before Sankolov's ships had driven them into the Azure Nebula. She had read the intelligence summaries that followed. She had looked at the list of confirmed Infested within Starfleet Command — Admiral Victor Bordson, Fleet Admiral D'Com, Admiral Herthum — and then at Sankolov's name sitting alongside theirs.

She had commanded long enough to recognize the cost of holding a line no one else knew existed.

Her eyes flicked to the casualty summary still open on a secondary display. The numbers from the Battle of the Apertures alone were stark enough. Half of Task Force Archeron lost to a Borg tactical cube — a battle Sankolov had knowingly sent them into by suppressing the USS Ark Royal's warning. He had deleted the message. Let his own ships die rather than reveal that the Infested had already known the Borg were coming. Al-Tulan had read that particular detail twice, with the same expression she gave subspace anomalies that didn't resolve into anything she could classify.

Some things could not be processed efficiently. They could only be filed and returned to later.

When Stark's voice finished rising over the roar of her crew, the bridge of the Thaxan remained quiet for a long moment. Then the broadcast shifted. President Nanietta Bacco stepped forward. Al-Tulan's expression did not change, but a faint tightening at the corner of her eyes betrayed her attention sharpening. The President spoke clearly. Firmly. Without hedging.

Pardon. Vindication. Reforms. An acknowledgment, spoken publicly and on record, that Starfleet Command had been compromised at its highest levels. That the crew of the Theurgy had been right. The Admiral listened to every word.

Behind her, Commander Se-Vijura  — her chief of staff— quietly exhaled. "Well," he murmured, "that's going to cause a storm."

Al-Tulan didn't take her eyes off the screen. "Yes," she said calmly.

The Federation stands with you.

A ripple of applause rose from the memorial crowd. On the Thaxan, the bridge remained disciplined and silent.

After a few seconds, Al-Tulan spoke again. "Signal Captain Chan. Maintain observation posture. No changes to patrol assignments."

"Yes, Admiral."

She watched the screen a moment longer before turning away. The pardon would ignite half the Council chambers on Earth before the hour was out. The Vulcan delegates would call it procedurally unconstitutional. The Tellarites would demand a formal review. And somewhere out there — his flagship's position unknown, some of the remains of Task Force Archeron unaccounted for since their retreat from the Azure Nebula at maximum warp — Sankolov was still out there. Still Infested. Still calculating.

That was the detail the memorial broadcast couldn't touch. The President had drawn a line under one chapter. The chapter involving an admiralty that had deleted distress calls, suppressed Borg invasion intelligence, and spent months hunting the one ship trying to stop them. But lines drawn under chapters didn't erase the people who had written them.

She had fought long enough to know something else. Sometimes command required choosing the least stable ground because it was the only ground left to stand on.

"Flag staff," she said evenly. "Prepare a strategic brief for Starfleet Command. Full analysis of regional stability following the broadcast." A pause. "Include the political projections. And flag the Sankolov situation separately. I want a dedicated section on Task Force Archeron's last known position and estimated dispersal vectors."

Her yeoman hesitated. "Admiral — do you believe he'll move against the Theurgy again?"

Al-Tulan considered this with the economy of expression that thirty years of command had refined to near-art.

"I believe," she said, "that an Infested admiral commanding an Odyssey-class dreadnought does not simply stop. He adapts." She turned back toward the viewport. "Which means we need to be further ahead of him than we currently are." She clasped her hands behind her back and watched the stars. "Get me that brief."

[ Admiral Sankolov | Undisclosed Command Vessel | Strategic Operations Chamber | Federation Space ]

The broadcast played across the wall display. Admiral Mikhail Sankolov stood alone in the dimly lit chamber, hands clasped behind his back, and listened to the final words of President Nanietta Bacco.

The Federation stands with you.

The memorial crowd applauded. Sankolov smiled. It was not a pleasant expression.

"Magnificent," he murmured.

The recording ended. The screen dimmed. For several seconds, he simply stood there, turning the moment over with the particular quality of attention his kind gave to new data — complete, unhurried, processing at a level the host body's original architecture could not have managed.

The President had done it herself. No covert maneuvering required. No subtle manipulation. With one sweeping declaration, she had pardoned the most operationally disruptive crew in Starfleet history — without Council approval — in front of the entire Federation. She had named the compromised admirals. She had said the words parasitic infiltration in public, in front of cameras, on the record. She had made the conspiracy visible.

He found this exquisite.

There was a specific pleasure in watching the Federation's openness operate as the mechanism of its own destabilization. The simulcast had been a problem — he still felt the particular cold quality he associated with the Theurgy's seemingly inexhaustible capacity to find technical solutions to impossible situations. Captain Ives had forced the broadcast through Starbase 84's Romulan defense signaling array. Unprecedented. Resourceful. Deeply inconvenient.

And yet.

He had worked in this particular darkness long enough to understand that disruption was not defeat. The Infested did not operate on the Federation's timeline. They did not require a single clean victory. They required pressure, fracture, the slow accumulation of institutional damage that no memorial service and no presidential address could repair. He had watched the Federation argue about the Theurgy for over a year. He had watched it question its own admiralty, its own command structure, its own founding principles. That argument did not stop because Bacco had drawn a line under it. It metastasized.

Behind him, a secondary display scrolled intelligence updates in steady columns. Political reactions. Council communications already fragmenting across subspace. The Andorian delegates calling the pardon procedurally unconstitutional. Tellarite representatives demanding a full Council review of executive authority. The Breen sending cautious diplomatic queries about Federation stability. The Klingon High Council watching.

Sankolov chuckled under his breath. Let them watch.

He walked toward the panoramic viewport and considered the specific shape of what had just occurred. Task Force Archeron was, for the moment, scattered. He had made the correct tactical assessment at the Battle of the Apertures — a detonating Omega Molecule device was not a negotiable threat, and the Theurgy's crew had demonstrated more than sufficient willingness to use one. Retreat had been the logical choice. The host body had experienced something akin to reluctance at the order, and he had noted it as data on what remained of the man called Sankolov, without finding it particularly relevant.

What remained relevant was the Archeron herself. Odyssey-class. The most capable tactical platform in the current Starfleet inventory — built, with characteristic Federation optimism, as both dreadnought and explorer. She was intact. Her crew was intact. The half of Task Force Archeron that had not been lost to the Borg tactical cube in the Azure Nebula remained operational, though seemingly dispersed at the word of the president. She only thought she’d had the last word there.

He thought briefly about the Ark Royal. About the message he had deleted. About three hundred and forty-seven officers who had died because he had made a precise calculation about what information could be allowed to reach the surviving half of the task force and what could not. The host body had filed this in a compartment that was still present but no longer operational in any meaningful sense. The Infested did not mourn their tools. They repurposed them, or they did not.

The Ark Royal had been a tool. Its crew had been variables. The Borg's arrival had been a known factor he had used to reduce Task Force Archeron to a size and composition that was more manageable for his actual purposes. The mathematics were clean. The mathematics were always clean, when you removed the parts of the equation that the host body's residual architecture insisted on calling people.

"Admiral." An aide's voice through the intercom, cautious in the specific way that people who served him had learned to be cautious. "The Council channels are erupting. Vulcan delegates demanding a procedural hearing. Tellarite representatives calling it unconstitutional."

"Of course they are." He did not turn from the viewport. "Log the reactions. Cross-reference with our assessments of which delegates are most susceptible to sustained procedural pressure."

"And the Theurgy, sir? Shall I begin compiling intercepts from the region?"

Sankolov considered this. The Theurgy was, at present, surrounded by allies. Klingon vessels. The remains of whatever Romulan forces had aligned with the new faction. A Federation president with a penchant for historic gestures and the security apparatus that accompanied her. A direct move against the ship in this operational environment would be, as his host body might once have assessed it, tactically inadvisable.

What the situation called for was patience. And the particular kind of patience that looked, from the outside, like absence.

"No," he said. "Not yet."

He had watched the Theurgy disrupt operation after operation. Task Force Archeron disabled by Trent's program and two defectors in a runabout. The Battle of Starbase 84, where they had forced the simulcast through before he could prevent it. The Azure Nebula, where they had destroyed three Borg cubes, closed the Apertures, and detonated an Omega Molecule rather than allow capture. They had gone to Qo'noS and interfered in the Klingon succession crisis. They had uncovered the Savi Scions' Hobus operation. They had, somehow, accumulated a crew of people who had every reason to be broken and had instead become something considerably more durable than broken.

He respected this in the cold way that the Infested respected obstacles. Every defeat had refined the Theurgy. Every operation disrupted had forced adaptations. The ship had not gotten weaker. It had gotten harder to predict.

This was, in its way, useful data. You learned more about a system from its resistance than from its compliance.

"Every loss teaches us," he said, more to himself than to the empty chamber. "Every defeat forces evolution."

He turned from the viewport, and the darkness of the chamber caught the pale reflection of the stars in his eyes — bright, cold, utterly without warmth. His eyes moved to the last known position marker for the USS Theurgy on his tactical display. Still there. Still moving. Still, against every reasonable projection, intact.

"Enjoy your memorial."

And somewhere in the recycled dark of an undisclosed vessel holding position at the edge of sensor range, the USS Archeron waited, patient as the nameless thing that looked out through Sankolov's eyes.

Two steps ahead. As they had always been.

[Senator Vkruvux and Senator Belas | Romulan Senate | Private Anteroom | Romulus]

Between the morning and afternoon sessions of what had so far been a thoroughly exhausting day, Senator Vkruvux had retreated with Senator Belas i'Mirek tr'Rehu to one of the smaller antechambers that lined the Senate's outer ring — rooms designed for exactly this kind of conversation, which was to say the kind that could not be had in the chamber itself without thirteen competing agendas inserting themselves into every pause.

The Senate building was, as it had always been, a masterpiece of controlled intimidation. High ceilings. Cold stone. Lighting calibrated to make everyone present feel simultaneously significant and observed. Vkruvux had spent enough years in these rooms to have stopped noticing the architecture, which he considered one of the more useful things his career had given him.

The wall display was tuned to the Federation broadcast. The memorial played in the crisp, slightly artificial quality of a long-range transmission, the arboretum's living green rendered in flattened light, Commander Stark's voice arriving with the fractional delay of subspace relay.

Belas stood with his arms folded within the flowing sleeves of his robes, his sharp eyes studying the human crew gathered around the memorial wall. Outside the anteroom, the sounds of the Senate reassembling carried faintly through the stone — the murmur of aides, the measured footsteps of colleagues who had not yet noticed that everything had changed this morning or were still deciding how to respond to the fact that it had.

The room remained quiet until President Bacco began speaking.

Vkruvux finally broke the silence. "She is bold," he said.

Belas inclined his head. "Or reckless."

"Both."

They watched as Bacco spoke openly of infiltration within Starfleet Command. Of the long road the Theurgy had traveled. Of rebuilding.

Belas' lip twitched faintly. "The Federation does not normally admit weakness so publicly."

"No," Vkruvux agreed. "But humans have always possessed a strange relationship with vulnerability. They sometimes mistake it for strength."

Belas gave a soft, skeptical sound.

He had read the intelligence summaries on the Theurgy's crew with more interest than most of his colleagues had found warranted. Survivors of the Endeavour, destroyed at the Azure Nebula. Officers drawn together through channels that ran through a Starfleet Intelligence director who operated under the codename King.

The broadcast ended. The applause from the gathered crew carried through the anteroom's speakers, faintly incongruous against the cold stone of the Senate building. Neither Romulan spoke for several seconds.

Then Belas turned from the screen. "Our talks this morning did not carry the same enthusiasm," he said. "And Colonel Xiomek reported much the same from his talks with the President and Theurgy diplomats."

Vkruvux allowed himself the faintest smile. "No."

The Federation's response to their proposals had been cautious in the way Federation responses were cautious when they were attempting to appear open-minded while running a simultaneous risk assessment. Trade corridors. Scientific exchanges. Joint reconstruction efforts along the Neutral Zone's inner edge. For the first time in recorded history, a Romulan political faction had brought these proposals to the table in good faith, and the Federation had responded with the diplomatic equivalent of careful consideration.

"Suspicion is understandable," Vkruvux said evenly. "For millennia we cultivated it."

Belas paced toward the narrow viewport that overlooked one of the Senate's inner courtyards. The light was the flat grey of a Ch'Rihan afternoon. "Still. We expected more curiosity."

"The Federation sees chaos in our house," Vkruvux replied. "Rival claimants. Broken fleets. Intelligence services that, within recent memory, attempted to trigger the Hobus Star through Savi Scion cooperation. They are not wrong to be cautious." He spread one hand slightly. "The question is whether caution calcifies into policy before we have had time to demonstrate otherwise."

Belas nodded. "Stability must come first."

"Yes." His gaze drifted back to the frozen final image of the memorial on the display — the crowd, the living wall, the President stepping back from the railing. He thought of the Continuing Committee, now a memory. Of the Tal'Shiar's fractured infrastructure, dozens of operations still running on institutional inertia with no one left to rescind the targeting orders. Of the Senate chamber, thirty meters away, currently occupied by colleagues who had spent their careers under a system that was gone and had not yet decided what they were building in its place.

"The humans mourn openly," he said thoughtfully. "They show the galaxy their wounds. It is effective."

Belas gave him a sidelong glance. "You are considering political theater."

"I am considering perception." He straightened. "We are the first Romulan leadership in centuries to seek cooperation rather than dominance. When we return to the negotiating table — and we will return — we will do so not as supplicants. But as partners whose stability cannot be questioned." His voice hardened in the way a blade hardens when it finishes cooling. "Which means we rebuild first. We bring the warlords into alignment. We address the Reman question as a governance issue rather than a security issue. And we give the Federation time to finish arguing about today's broadcast before we remind them that we are still here."

Belas watched him for a long moment before nodding. Through the stone wall, the Senate was reassembling. The afternoon session would begin shortly. There were votes to be taken, positions to be navigated, and a new Romulan world to be argued into existence one procedural motion at a time.

Outside the narrow viewport, Ch'Rihan's sky held its familiar grey.

[ Ambassador Elim Garak | Arboretum Terrace | USS Theurgy ]

Ambassador Elim Garak stood at the edge of the gathered crowd and watched the applause.

He was very good at watching. It was, after tailoring, the skill he had cultivated longest and most carefully, and he had always found — somewhat to his own amusement — that the two were not as different as people assumed. Tailoring required the same quality of attention: the precise reading of how a person carried themselves, what they were compensating for, what they wished to project and what they could not quite conceal. The crowd before him was, in this respect, a particularly rich piece of work.

He observed it with the warm, slightly distracted expression he had long ago perfected for rooms where he wished to appear engaged without appearing to be cataloguing anything.

He was cataloguing everything.

Commander Stark had spoken well. Better than well — she had spoken with the raw quality of someone for whom this was not performance, and that quality was, in Garak's experience, the most persuasive kind precisely because it was the hardest to manufacture convincingly. He had known excellent liars in his career. He had been one of them. But there was a register of truth that even the most accomplished dissembler could not quite replicate, and Stark had found it. The crew had responded to it the way people responded when they recognized something they had been carrying without being able to name it.

President Bacco had then done what she did, which was to make a decision in public that should have been made in private, and make it with such conviction that the distinction between the two temporarily ceased to matter.

The Federation stands with you.

Garak had allowed himself a small, private breath at that. Not of relief, exactly. Something more complicated than relief.

He was, by the President's own admission, here as a witness. As a representative of the Cardassian Union's current administration and as someone who had received the real simulcast — had been trapped on the USS Venture when it arrived, unable to act, unable to verify, filing it with the particular frustration of a man who had spent thirty years understanding exactly what was needed and finding himself, through circumstances both explicable and inconvenient, in positions where he could not immediately do it. He had plans set in motion. He had affiliations with Director Anderson that went back further than most people knew, and which he intended to maintain with the same quiet deniability that had served him in all his previous professional arrangements.

He watched the crowd applaud and thought, not for the first time today, that he was perhaps the only person in this arboretum whose first response to the President's words had been a concern that they had moved too fast. He had said as much to no one, because there was no one present to whom saying it would have been useful rather than alarming. But he thought it, with the clarity of a man who had spent decades learning the difference between a victory and a liability dressed in victory's clothes. He knew his hesitancy made him a bit of a hypocrit after encouraging the president to look after her own as well.

But the Infested were not gone. This was the fact that the applause was cheerfully declining to grapple with. The Infested were exposed — at Starfleet Command's highest tier, yes, publicly, on the record — but exposure and elimination were not the same thing, and Garak had spent enough of his career in spaces where that distinction was the only distinction that mattered to feel its absence here with some acuity. They did not yet have a broad-spectrum method of identifying compromised individuals. They were addressing each case as it emerged, which was the intelligence equivalent of bailing a flooding vessel with a cup while congratulating yourself on finding the leak. Sankolov was unaccounted for. The Archeron was unaccounted for. The Infested were adaptive — the Theurgy's own record demonstrated this with almost tiresome regularity — and the one thing Garak knew about adaptive threats was that they found the exposure useful.

He had watched Castellan Ghemor be open. He had watched Ghemor build bridges, extend good faith, allow his alignment with the Federation to be visible enough that the people who wanted him gone had a clear target to aim at. He had been, Garak reflected, a genuinely good man in the specific and ultimately costly sense of that phrase. And in 2379, someone had put a knife in him for it. The official story had been political rivals. The actual story was considerably less clean, as actual stories tended to be.

The Federation's instinct was always toward the light. Announce it. Acknowledge it. Stand in front of cameras and say the true thing loudly enough that it became a fact the record could not revise. Garak understood the logic. He even admired it, in the way that you could admire a philosophy while recognizing that it was going to get specific people killed.

His philosophy was different. His philosophy had always been different, which was why he had spent the better part of a decade running a tailor shop on a space station and telling anyone who asked that he was just a simple tailor with a smile that somehow never quite convinced anyone. The things worth protecting were best protected in the dark, by people whose hands were already dirty, who had already made the calculations that the good and innocent were not equipped to make. Let the Federation Council argue about executive authority. Let the memorial stand and the names be carved into living wood and stone. All of that was necessary. All of that served a function. The crew of the Theurgy had earned every moment of it.

But the real work — the identification of the remaining Infested, the quiet mapping of which assets had been compromised, the patient architecture of countermeasures that could not be deployed in the open because deploying them in the open would tell the Infested precisely where to look — that work did not belong in an arboretum with cameras and applause.

That work belonged in the spaces between things. In the anteroom conversations and the encrypted subspace relays and the carefully maintained fictions that allowed the people doing the necessary work to continue doing it without becoming targets.

He was good at that work. He had always been good at it. It was, in fact, the only work he had ever truly been good at, the tailoring notwithstanding.
He watched a young officer near the front of the crowd wipe their eyes, quietly, with the back of one hand. The gesture had the specificity of something real — not performed, not self-conscious, just the body doing what it did when it was moved past the point where composure required maintenance. Garak observed it with the quality of attention he gave to all genuine things: complete, non-judgmental, and faintly sorrowful.

He did not begrudge them this. He genuinely did not. These people had survived something that should not have been survivable, and they had done it by holding to each other and to a conviction that the Federation's values were worth the cost of defending them, even against the Federation's own command structure. There was something in that which Garak, who had spent considerable portions of his adult life doing things that were necessary and not good, found genuinely moving.

It was simply that moving and safe were not the same thing.

The naive and innocent deserved their moments in the light. They deserved their memorial and their vindication and their President standing at a railing saying the true thing out loud. Garak had spent enough of his career providing cover for exactly this kind of moment — or something adjacent to it, if you squinted — to understand its value.

But the condemned and the damnable had their own function. And theirs was not performed in the light.

He straightened his collar with a small, precise adjustment — the habit of a man for whom clothing had always been both craft and armor — and returned his attention to the crowd.

Around him, the applause continued its warm and uncomplicated work before, gradually, the official ceremony concluded and everyone was left to their own devices, such as they were. He let it wash over him with the expression he kept for rooms where he wished to appear moved without appearing to be thinking, and thought about encrypted subspace relays, and the specific quality of patience that had kept him alive across circumstances that had killed considerably more straightforward people, and about the particular darkness of the work that remained.

The crew of the Theurgy had earned their moment. He would ensure, quietly and from an angle they would not necessarily be aware of until after the fact, that they survived long enough to have more of them.

It was, in the end, the least he could do for people who had never asked him to do anything at all. He had always found that the most interesting kind of debt.

 
Thanks to @RyeTanker for helping with the first section.

This is 2/2 of the memorial; writers have exactly two weeks to respond before the memorial is closed, thereby concluding the Epilogue and launching us into the Interregnum.
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Episode 02: Cosmic Imperative / Re: EPI S: [Day 03 | 0415] Bubble-suit Bitchassness
Last post by Dumedion -
[Ens. Talia “Shadow” Al-Ibrahim | Sickbay | “Temporary Iso Ward” – Storage Closet | Deck 11 | Vector 02 | USS Theurgy] Attn: @ob2lander961
[Show/Hide]

Unable to keep herself from snorting at Wellington’s bubble-suit encased hand, Talia managed a nod then tried to maneuver herself into position to check out the crate. Unfortunately, the two of them were so animated (and much larger now that they both had those ridiculous suits on), Shadow soon found herself sandwiched between them while both carried on their back-and-forth bickering.

Every time she tried to twist or move one of them out of the way, the sound of skin sliding across rubber filled the closet, while her skin itched and hair tingled from the build-up of static discharge. This went on while the pair talked over each other, until Talia’s relatively short patience finally snapped, mostly due to lack of air and space: her arms shot out from her sides, stiff arming both in a shove that was deliberately aimed to grant her space and get their attention.

Talia took a deep breath in the silence that followed. “Be. Quiet,” she sighed, then jerked her head to the side in a prompt for Charles to move. He did so, squeaking with every movement like an inflated balloon. Once he was out of the way, Talia crouched in front of the crate to take a look. “This is a standard supply crate. Shouldn’t have to hack anything,” she shrugged and tapped in the standard code she was assigned.

It bleeped negatively.

“Hm,” Shadow frowned at it. “Okay, maybe I’ll have to hack it,” she admitted, then arched a brow up over her shoulder at Wix. “You’ll have to walk me through it, because I’ve never hacked anything in my life.”

A static-laced chuckle filled the room suddenly, followed by the return of Nurse Bitchass’ voice. “You three are certainly entertaining, I’ll give you that. I’ve checked in with Vi-Nine and I’m happy to report that your isolation period is nearing an end. However, there’s still the small detail of an apology I believe is owed to myself and the medical staff as a whole; sooner I hear it, the sooner I let you out.”

Talia groaned and rolled her eyes.

“Oh, and all three of you are overdue for a dental exam, by the way.”

"Just let me know when your done so we can hack the damn crate," Shadow covered her ears in preparation for the yelling to come.
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Episode 02: Cosmic Imperative / Epi S [Day 3 | 06:30] Wolves in the Den
Last post by Krajin -
[ Dominic Winters | Wolvs Den | Vector 2 | Deck 16 | ATTN: @Stegro88 Any Wolves

Sleep had never come easily for Dominic after a long or intense battle, from adrenaline to the occasional nightmare, or his brain just not shutting off. He'd gotten something of a nap in though, and was up early in the morning. Rather than dine in his quarters, Atlas chose to head to the Den to have breakfast and maybe interact with any of the Wolves who had returned and maybe surfaced from their own rooms. Breakfast was two serves of Eggs Benedict with Bacon, a serve of toast, fruit juice and a protein shake. He always started the morning with a high calorie breakfast to get the engines firing on all cylinders. Plus, Dom's a big boy and just eats more than most. That's probably why the emergency rations in his fighter were far larger than the ones found in the others.

Allot of work needed to be done still in the FAB, but Lok and the crew had gotten the fighters mostly ready, it seemed, and the bay itself was well on its way to getting repaired. At least they weren't like Voyager, stuck in the Delta Quadrant for seven years and needing to scrounge from unknowns to rebuild and repair the ship. His ears twitched as the doorway to the Den hissed open and another member of the crew came in. Dom himself was in his casual uniform rather than the official uniform, still showing himself as a Wolf in case anyone had questions.
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Episode 02: Cosmic Imperative / Re: Epilogue: They That Shed Their Blood [Day 03 | 1800 ]
Last post by Pierce -
[ Lt. Commander Alana Pierce | Arboretum Terrace | Deck 21 | Vector 3| USS Theurgy]
[Show/Hide]
ATTN: @Brutus @Nolan @ob2lander961 @Ellen Fitz @chXinya @Dumedion @Griff @rae @Stegro88 @Eirual @tongieboi @RyeTanker  @Tae @Nesota Kynnovan @Hans Applegate @joshs1000 @P.C. Haring @Krajin @Eden @TWilkins

Alana sat in the arboretum following the ceremony, looking at the various names. Some she knew from her short time aboard. Others she’d never had the privilege to meet. It was a sobering moment that the passage of time had, especially in this century. Lives didn’t stick around much, sadly, with the war-torn era. Even the USS Eagle faced her ultimate demise, albeit bravely, and breathed new life into Pierce for the first time since arriving in this century.

Valyn Amarik, Jonathan Byrne, Scruffy LeBlanc, and quite possibly others she’d forgotten in the days prior.

She exhaled and continued to think internally, the methodical multitabbed mind of her feminine brain was on overdrive as she contemplated what was ahead of them and likely unexpected. All the while, thinking she was glad that she lived in the previous skirmish despite the uncertainty of the capture and rescue.

The task ahead would be selecting a new deputy Intelligence Officer to help co-lead in her absences or in the event the unexpected happened, as it had with Fisher not that long ago. Even the captain was expendable, although thankfully, he was placed in stasis.

Her dress uniform was crisp. Much better than the previous uniform she wore during the fight, but the pain still resided from the torture and the mental scars. For all of them. The only thing she wanted more than anything now was normalcy. And exploration.

But that was an unlikely outcome given the facade that played out. They were “safe” for now, but she couldn’t help but feel that changes and not for the better were coming.

Alana thought of the president’s words and the camaraderie of the situation. She felt that no matter what the Federation faced, the infiltration would always happen. We had multitudes of it in the past, and likely to see it again in the future.

A twinkle of promise and a future at the president’s words, however, stuck with her about, “Let history record that when the Federation’s voice was stolen, the crew of the USS Theurgy carried it—through fire, through exile, and back into the light.” She stepped back from the railing. “The Federation stands with you.”

Time would tell, but for now, she needed a drink before duty called once again. She got up from the ceremony and headed out after one last look at the wall of the lost before entering the corridors once again as she contemplated their continuing mission.
She figured she might as well get some work done, look into the intel network, and see what she could dig up in the meantime. THankfully her office in the intelligence department had a replicator. Pierce knew this was going to be a long day.


[ Lt. JG Ashley Kerina [Show/Hide]
| Kerina's Quarters | Junior Officer’s Quarters | Deck 8 | Vector 2 | USS Theurgy]

Sitting in her quarters, Ashley Kerina was tired from the events of the day and knew she would be reporting for actual duty soon enough as her transfer took place. There was a lot of mystery surrounding the Theurgy that she was unaware of. It was a new ship and certainly the largest she’d been assigned to.

Although her mission didn’t really bear much fruit in the search for her parents, she knew that it was a mystery she’d likely have to continue into the future. For now, she was needed here with the multitude lost in the fights, skirmishes, and just crazy nature of their clandestine adventures. Glancing around her quarters, she had very little to decorate them with since most of her belongings were back on Earth in her permanent locker, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t get them at some point. For now, she lay on her bed thinking about how she was going to help in their fight and make a difference.


[ Ensign Lauren Pierce | Arboretum | Deck 22 | Vector 03 | USS Theurgy ] [Show/Hide]

Standing at the wall, she saw the list of names. Some she knew and others she didn’t. She could see Alana in the other area of the room, looking from a distance and likely soaking the data in. For her, it was more of a personal nature. Specifically with regards to Scruffy. She’d had a rather interesting…opportunity…with him and Tessa one late night a few weeks ago. It was lovely, sad as he perished on board the derelict Constitution Refit, the USS Eagle.

The very ship she knew Alana served on, and she’d visited on the holodeck recently. Placing her hand on the wall, she saw so many other names as well that she’d never known. It was sad to say the least. She could only imagine how Tessa felt, or would feel if she were in the room right now.

Lauren took the opportunity to talk to Alana; however, she was already gone. As she finished her moment of silence for the lost crewmates, she headed back to her quarters as she waited for the next duty cycle on the bridge.


Lt. JG Tessa May Lance | Flight Deck | Fighter Assault Bay | Deck 16 | Vector 03 | USS Theurgy]  [Show/Hide]

Tessa sat in the cockpit of her fighter in deep thought. Honestly, she was trying to get some much needed sleep after the recent battle that they were still feeling the ravages of. She’d spent some short time at the wall and heard the report that Scruffy was gone now, too. It seemed she was destined to be a survivor. One who also had terrible luck with lovers. Each one of her last several had died during a mass battle. Something that didn’t sit well with her.

She punched her cockpit wall while still seated. Lance was the misfortune they were dealt. Despite trying to fly recklessly in the past several fights and take herself out with the others, she was still here. Still living on in their sacrifices. The loss of too many friends was slowly taking its toll on her psyche, and it wasn’t good. Fractures in the mindmeld were forming that helped stabilize her mental state. Not uncontrollable but not helpful either.

Gritting her teeth, she fought back and lost the battle with the tears in her face and blubbered like an idiot. Each person she got to know since coming aboard or got really close to was now dead. Where did that leave her? Was that why she flew fast, violently, and recklessly? Was that why she trained newbies on the Borg battle and other major losses to show them that it was not a game and that each decision counted?

GoldenEye decided to lock herself in her cockpit and take a much-needed nap as she contemplated what was going to happen to her future.
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