All Dressed Up And Nowhere To Go (Wrap-up)

Posted on Sat Feb 20, 2021 @ 6:22pm by Captain Larisna Koralova

Mission: Mission 2 - "Drawing Deeply From The Well"
Location: En-Route to Skyhook Alpha
Timeline: During Mission 2

The crew of the Hornet were hard at work to prepare to tackle this mystery. What awaited them at Skyhook Alpha, the station that was itself a mystery? But the machinations of others, as some would call to be fate, often has a way of interfering with the plans and expectations we all set out. And the Hornet was no different.

Starfleet Corps of Engineers called with a new mission - evacuate Skyhook Alpha and suspend all operations. The crew they had assigned to the station was needed to assist in dismantling the Graviton Catapult, the means that ships without Quantum Slipstream Drive used to get to the Delta Quadrant. Orders from the Federation Council and the President of the United Federation of Planets were clear - the Catapult was to be shut down and dismantled. A caretaker crew would be left by the USS Kepler to further study the station itself while it was inactive and the USS Bunker Hill would remain close by to protect them in the meantime.

The Skyhook crew were disappointed, but for the time they were on the Hornet, they were all too happy to talk about their work, the theories that were abound regarding its origin. Lieutenant Edgeware's study into the dilithium from the gas giant interested several of them who were happy to offer their own insights to further build his theories. Until operations at the Skyhook resumed, there wasn't much they could do to prove or disprove it, but it was worth looking at. The idea of modifying a shuttle to dive into the gas giant was interesting, and several engineers chipped in just to help finish it and not waste the time of the crew who had started the project. Maybe it would see use another time.

It turned out that Captain Patricia Cosalia, the commanding officer of the station, was an old friend of Captain Koralova's, the two had served together on the Savannah during the Dominion War and both had seen its horrors. Cosalia wanted to make her peace with those nightmares but using her skills to build and rebuild, and was a generally pleasant person to deal with, having taken a moment to thank the members of the Hornet crew for taking the time to look at this mystery. She was hopeful that one day they could go back.

The dismantling of the Graviton Catapult was a difficult task for them, not technically but emotionally. To all appearances, the loss of a ship due to a miscalculation prompting the end of Delta Quadrant exploration was yet another case of fear guiding the future. Maybe QSD would become more viable, but now the Delta Quadrant was a place to only be accessible by a few, not the whole fleet.