Hidden Message

Posted on 13 Mar 2018 @ 10:16am by Commodore Harvey Geisler

742 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Crossing Over
Location: Ready Room
Timeline: MD35 || 1000 hours

Having dismissed the senior staff, Harvey stepped into his Ready Room. When he last saw it, the place had been torn asunder by some unknown force and had looked incredibly eery in the dark. Now, the room was exactly the same, just illuminated.

Except this time he also knew his name. Knowing his picture and other items with his name were in this room, he could only conclude that it was his. He’d retreated to here only to do some digging. He had less than thirty minutes to find anything of value in this room. Information, pictures, clues to his identity or memories.

The PADDs that had been strewn about the floor before had all been set on his desk. The arrangement wasn’t neat in the slightest, and as he went through them one by one, he didn’t learn anything new. One PADD was a reminder from Commander Walsh that he had promised to take some simulator time down with the squadron. Another was a power consumption report from a Lieutenant Adan that highlighted some interesting facts about the navigational deflector. Another was a collection of proposed security procedures from Lieutenant Di Pasquale. And another revealed some crew shift recommendations and evaluations from Commander Teixeira.

But none of it was revealing in the slightest. If anything, he could tell that this ship was on some sort of routine operation. Yet, the Aketi said that they’d never been seen or heard from before. Were that true, then why did the computer know about the Aketi, and not the other lifeforms. Was there something more involved here? Nothing added up, but if one didn’t know the rules of the game, how could he perform the math in the first place.

Harvey planted himself in the chair behind the desk and sighed. Nothing. Not even the picture of him and Joelle brought any clarity to his fuzzy mind. Looking up, he spotted something in the corner that he hadn’t seen before. It appeared to have once been a chair, almost like the one that was in the center of the bridge that he’d just come from. Plenty of small, teal-colored rocks adorned the bottom of it, along with a castle of sorts, and a moss-covered frog. Well, the moss appeared to be fake, but how would he know the difference? Four clownfish also swam around inside of it, though none of them appeared to have any sort of clue what had happened.

He leaned forward, spotting something somewhat unusual inside the tank. A glimmer of… silver? Harvey rose from his chair and approached the tank. He studied it more closely and determined that the rocks and the decor inside had shifted earlier today, a fact confirmed by pools of water around the custom fish tank. The silver didn’t belong to anything that appeared to be natural inside the tank. Curious as to what it was, Harvey rolled up his sleeve and reached inside. The clownfish dashed away as Harvey lifted a long thin rectangular object encased in a plastic bag out of the tank.

The object, to Harvey’s surprise, was yet another PADD. Harvey withdrew the PADD from the bag, which had been kept free from moisture of any sort. He activated it and a short message appeared on the screen.

= = = = =

From: CAPT Harvey Geisler
To Harvey

Trust no one. The Federation depends on it.

= = = = =

Harvey had to read the message three times. He left himself a message? Why hide it in the fish tank?

But what did it mean?

The name Federation matched with the plaque they found earlier on the bridge. The message presented some urgency, which also matched their visitors’ desire to evacuate the ship and take them to a secure location. The computer hadn’t recognized these visitors… perhaps they weren’t visitors at all.

But why leave the message? Did he think that this was a possibility at some point, that his mind would have been wiped? Were these aliens disguising their own threat under their actions?

Only one thing was certain. Harvey couldn’t take any chances. This ship, this crew… he was responsible for them. And they were all in certain danger. If they had any chance of surviving this, he had to act quickly, and warn the entire senior staff. Harvey dashed out of the ready room, bound to find anyone to rally to the cause.

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