Uninvited

Posted on Sat Aug 9th, 2025 @ 9:31pm by Lieutenant Commander Harrison Knox

864 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: A Silence of Friends
Location: USS Thunderbird

Seated in the Captain's Ready Room, Rylan's office space had become overtaken by Harrison's presence. As Rylan struggled to cling onto life, everything that was command related fell onto Lieutenant Commander Knox. He looked around the Ready Room and it was becoming uncomfortably more his space. He leaned forward in the chair as he prepared to record.

"Acting Captain’s Log – Stardate..." Knox paused and rubbed his eyes. Days and nights were bleeding into one another. He was walking a dangerous path of exhaustion and was pulling all-nighters with thirty minute naps throughout. All of course against medical advice. Stardate whatever. I'll fill that in later he thought. "Lieutenant Commander Harrison Knox recording" he added.

"It has been days since the Thunderbird’s crew made contact with the Gurani artificial intelligence, Striel on Guran III. What feels like a damned eternity since we uncovered what remains of a once-thriving civilization...remains that, in more ways than one, we now carry with us. The illness that wiped out nearly all Gurani life has taken root aboard this ship and the DNA extracted from the deceased Gurani that Lieutenant Knight examined has been our only hope besides sifting through the data Striel permitted us access to."

Knox thought of his friend and Commanding Officer. "Captain Rylan Gray lies in Sickbay under heavy sedation. The nurses and such are doing their best assuring me his condition is stable, but “stable” feels far too thin a word when your friend's life hangs in the balance. Sadly, He is not alone. Several members of the crew remain quarantined under round-the-clock care. We’ve already lost too many. Their names are carved into our duty roster, their absence as loud as a Klingon drum."

Hope thought Knox. "Lieutenant Stormy Knight, our Chief Science Officer, has taken the lead in countering the disease. She has used the DNA samples from the two Gurani bodies discovered in the Guran III Medical Complex to create a partial biochemical therapy. It is not a cure. Stormy is careful to remind me of that, but it has stopped the rapid decline in most cases. I don't want to rest on false hope, but even a few cases that we’ve seen have shown tentative signs of recovery. Even a fractional victory can feel monumental right now. Crew morale has been at an all time low. So, any good news that can be given needs to be. Otherwise, we lose this battle. I have seen what this illness can do, and the fact that we have slowed it, even marginally, is no small thing."

Knox shifted the narrative towards optimism and commitment. "With the captain confined to Sickbay, command of the Thunderbird has fallen to me. My priority has been twofold: keep us going and to find anything out there that can help us save the sick."

"Using what data we extracted from the Gurani central archive, I’ve been working closely with our stellar cartography department and a small team from Engineering. Together, we’ve cross-referenced star charts, warp navigational patterns, and any potential records to map of potential evacuation routes. We looked for habitable planets, stable moons, and even large asteroids that could support life... any place a fragment of a dying civilization might have chosen as a refuge."

His tone shifted to a somber mood. "We’ve checked most of the candidates on our list. Some were barren worlds, long stripped of atmosphere. Others bore the faint signatures of settlement but were abandoned what could have been centuries ago. At times, the work felt like we were chasing ghosts. The crew’s patience has worn thin. I can see it in their eyes. They work their endures with precision, but without the fire they once carried, but I had to keep stoking the embers. I could not allow them to give up and I could not stop."

"Just when I was about to give up all hope myself, something came into view. Long rang sensors determined it habitable enough to still support Gurani life. One of the last moons on our list, just a small body orbiting the gas giant. At first, it was little more than background noise, easily dismissed as geological activity. But a secondary scan isolated it: a single life sign. At first, I thought it had to be a misreading. The cavern systems beneath the moon’s crust are subject to violent tectonic shifts; any life down there would be constantly threatened by rockfall and toxic gas pockets. But the bioscan held steady. Not only that... it matched several key markers from the Gurani DNA sequence Lieutenant Knight had been analyzing."

Lieutenant Commander Knox took a deep breath. "I need to assemble an away team to head down the the moon. I do not want to ignite false hope, but this is the last shred of it that we have. If there is truly a Gurani life form down there, they very well may be the last of their species and our chance at saving our crew...saving Rylan."

Knox stood from his seat and gave the uniform a tug. "End log" he said firmly.

 

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