Fortune Favors the Fastidious (Backpost)

Posted on Sun Aug 31st, 2025 @ 10:14am by Lieutenant Commander Intharia T'Zor & SubCommander Saa
Edited on on Sun Aug 31st, 2025 @ 10:21am

1,478 words; about a 7 minute read

Mission: The Serpent's Tooth [3]
Location: DS13 Multiversal Sciences
Timeline: MD01, 1800

A purposeful slash of Saa’s fluke carried her through the doors of the newly-established Multiversal Sciences Department and into the familiar maelstrom of a construction site. The station’s newest department was still in an embryonic state, some of her own personnel assisting the science boffins in reprogramming consoles and installing new or newly repurposed equipment. It looked like they could use another beak, but she wasn’t here to lend one just now. She was here to find T’Zor.

A Caitian expletive and a puff of burning insulation drew her attention briefly to the ceiling. She understood the cause without needing to inquire: Crewman M’Rierr had overloaded an EPS tap again. These old systems had been reconfigured so many times, it was a wonder anything still worked—but that was no excuse for haste. One of these days, that boy’s going to melt his whiskers off, she predicted.

“Hey, Subcom!”

Saa turned in time to see ch’Eseru waving from under a mass of dangling ODN lines. “Didn’t expect to see you down here,” the Andorian said, reaching for his diagnostic scanner. “Come to get your manipulators dirty with the rest of us?”

Saa hesitated, always ready to overcommit herself. “Later,” she promised, extruding a clawed probe to hand him the scanner. “Right now, I’m looking for T’Zor.”

The engineer grunted. “Figures. She’s in Radiometrics. Want me to call ahead?”

“No need,” Saa buzzed, already kicking off in that direction.

Dr T’Zor had kept herself very busy even as the installation played out, but even now she was only halfway through her background radiation study of the universe they’d designated B-2. The anomaly opened to it in a point they assumed was within intergalactic space. It had revealed very little of interest, all its matter further away than they could reach, and its stars utterly unrecognisable. It was a job so unlikely to turn up results that she felt the only way she could justify it was to do it herself. So far, she was filled with nothing but regret for her idea.

Exasperated, she tore herself away from the terminal for a moment, and span in her chair. On some instinctual level she sensed the approach of a cetacean being before she consciously processed it. Once her mind caught up she smiled and stood to face the approaching engineer. “Subcommander!” She called out, as pleased to see the dolphin floating towards her as she was to have a distraction.

“Doctor,” Saa whistled a polite greeting. “You look busy. I’d have commed, but I wanted to stretch my fins.”

“Eh.” T’Zor said, leaning her hip against one of the terminals, seeming like she was about to say a word starting with a vowel sound she couldn’t quite grasp, and exhaling instead. She looked playfully troubled. “Busy is one way to put it. But my productivity is close to zero. I think a visitor is exactly what I need right now.” She smiled again.

Saa’s gaze passed briefly over the terminal display as she circled past, not without a hunt of curiosity; but beyond where it intersected with the aspects of subspace mechanics involved in warp propulsion, stellar cosmology wasn’t her field, and little of the data shown meant much to her.

“I’m sorry to say that this isn’t a social call,” she said. “I wanted to ask if you’d had a chance to read Ineel’s report yet.”

“Ineel... Ineel... metallurgical analysis, yes.” Thari said it as much to remind herself. “Some of it goes a little beyond my training. I was intending to get some clarification from some of our material specialists, but the conclusions are well-founded. My compliments to Mr Ineel on his work.” She brought it up on the nearest display. “She’s quite an extraordinary being, not least of all at the subatomic scale.” The intricate ‘protodermis’ animation looped on the display.

Beside her, Saa let out a breath in her repressed anxiety. She sometimes hated how easy it was to sound calm and collected to some of her colleagues, through the modern magic of universal translation. Sure, it had been a positive advantage when working on Vulcan, but there were limits. The looping molecular animation on the screen taunted her.

“’Extraordinary’ is one way to put it,” she said, looking up at the Asari. “But, are you as alarmed as I am by the fact that we just dodged another bullet here?”

“I’m certainly grateful that she has proved to be friendly. But you are not alone in your concern that there is much we do not yet know, despite the thorough analyses.” Intharia folded her arms, looking inquisitively at her colleague and letting her expression adopt a level of professional concern. “What is the particular bullet you feel we have dodged?” Thari realised as she asked that because there hadn’t been actual bullets to dodge as in the last instance of a multiversal arrival, that she may have lowered her guard a bit.

By way of answer, Saa focused a beam of sonar on the display and scrolled to the end of the document.

“Ineel’s analysis,” she said, “Confirmed that the subject’s novel subatomic pseudo-particles are a form of programmable matter capable of responding to commands. A kind of matter organization we don’t even have a word for. It hasn’t been a threat to the station, but it seems that’s only because it doesn’t want to.”

She released another exasperated breath. “The fact is that with this anomaly, we’re dealing with potentials that we’ve never even conceived of before. And it’s going to keep happening. We were lucky with Vulsunga. And lucky again with this latest guest. Lucky with you, even. But luck isn’t a procedure. I like procedure.”

Intharia leaned her head from side to side for a moment, as though the information had weight she was adjusting. “You’re right. Although in our defence, we did do what we could with Volsunga, the hazardous materials lab simply proved inadequate. I’m not sure Starfleet has technology below the starship scale that could have contained him without phaser fire under the circumstances. Fortunately the remaining totems seem to be stable.”

It was a subject she had avoided thinking about, it was strange to consider the time spent inside the device, she couldn’t remember anything, but it wasn’t absent from her memories either, she was conscious of the time passing. “And as for Mana’i, she did rather drop out of the sky, to hear Atna tell it. We have exactly zero data on the vector of her arrival, no less.” She unfolded her arms. “Have you a procedure in mind?”

Saa didn’t. She gave a rueful shake of her head. “All I have is a direction, which takes me into your waters.”

She glanced again at the protodermis animation. “Right now, we’re operating on Starfleet’s standard procedures,” she said, mapping the difficulty before her for herself as much as for her colleague, “Which rely on our ability, first to detect anomalous energy signatures, and then classify them in terms we’re used to: biological, chemical, radiation anomalies. Mana’i’s arrival should be a warning to us that we’re going to start running into things we can’t so easily classify. If we rely on improvised solutions, it’s only a matter of time until our improvisational ability runs out. As hard as this is, we’re going to have to rewrite the book on hazard detection altogether. What we need is a set of multiversal hazard detection protocols. That’s going to be my report to the Captain, and I’d like some preliminary recommendations from your department. To be honest, this is a little more outside the box than I’m used to thinking.”

Intharia was quiet for a moment, and looked around Saa rather than at her. "You're right. I don't expect we can possibly account for every arrival we might encounter, looking at what has happened so far. But we absolutely need some standard operating procedures that reflect our situation. I don't have anything off the top of my head, but with a few days I think we can come up with something. I'll coordinate with Commander Atna and keep you apprised. Not to put the responsibility elsewhere, but I think if we could get some time with Lieutenant Alph, things might go a bit quicker." Thari said, thinking out loud as she went.

"I'll see if we can get some time with the XO in the next couple of days. Leave it with me." She said with a smile.

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