Come What May... (Part One)

Posted on Sun Jun 21st, 2020 @ 4:32am by Lieutenant Arthur Torres Dr.
Edited on on Wed Jun 24th, 2020 @ 7:59am

Mission: Into the Wild
Location: USS Palatine, en route to USS Pandora
Timeline: One day before present

The USS Palatine was making good time to the Tzenkethi border where the USS Pandora was waiting, and Arthur Torres spent almost every minute of the two-day journey studying. Sitting on the floor of his temporary quarters, maps spread around him, he made notes on his padd, while humming quietly to himself.

The transfer orders had come through only a week ago, after waiting almost six months for a response from Starfleet Operations regarding his request to relocate to Task Force seventy-two. It irked him that he was, now, closer to Stacey than he had been for the last six years, and yet they probably still would not see one another for months yet. Did he regret their agreement? No, never. Stacey was the sort of person who held true to some hidden inner compass when making decisions about her life. If he had been unwilling to accept that her first passion in life was exploration and science the relationship never would have worked. No, there was no regret. But it was hard to go for such stretches without seeing her, holding her in his arms, smelling the cool coconut fragrance of her hair.

This sector of space, too, was quite a far-cry from the relaxed posting he had been led to believe. From what he had heard when he was serving in the Strat-Ops department back on Deep Space Sixty, the region that Task Force Seventy-Two patrolled was relatively calm – or as calm as any sector of the galaxy was, these days. But serving on the USS Pandora meant that he now had access to a whole new host of information streams, and the intelligence community painted a very different picture of the region. For one thing, there was the Tzenkethi problem. The latest report from Pandora suggested that things could be heating up dangerously in the sector, sooner rather than later. The Tzenkethi had wiped out a Tellarian crew and very nearly fired on the Pandora herself. That they were willing to risk a conflict with the Federation was not a good sign. And there was also the Cardassian annexation of several planets in Breen space…

Art sighed, rubbing his eyes. This was a bad time for the Federation, no doubting that. Ever since the Dominion War, life had felt tenser, somehow. There was a shadow standing over the galaxy. Nobody knew when the next major crisis would arrive. Would the Alpha quadrant superpowers finally go to war after decades of tension? Would the Borg return, or the Dominion once again move to expel the Federation from the Gamma quadrant? Or would some new power, like the Tzenkethi, emerge to sow further seeds of discord?

He shifted his legs to a more comfortable position and went back to his work. They were only a day away, and his new position required a lot of catching up.