6: The Lost Navigator

Posted on Fri Aug 7th, 2020 @ 12:31pm by Commander Rita Paris

Mission: The Bulikaya Particle
Location: USS Constitution, Deck 3, Conference Room 3
Timeline: 2270
Tags: Rita Bulikaya

“Come to order. Let the record show this is the testimony of Spaceman Ignatious Jones, transporter technician USS Constitution. Inspector, you may proceed.”

“Crewman Jones,” the military officer in the gold uniform said to the jumpsuit-clad enlisted spaceman. “Describe your encounter with the intruder on June 16th, 2270, in your own words.”

“Yessir,” the nervous crewman gulped, then he spoke, quietly. “It all started when this officer I’d never seen before came walking into transporter room 3, where I was on duty.”

“How do you know you’d never seen her before?” the inspector asked.

“Ohhh, you’d remember seeing her, sir.” On the viewscreen, a still image of the woman came onscreen, clad in a miniskirted gold commander’s uniform, striding purposefully with a tricorder in her hand. She was strikingly beautiful, with short blonde hair, bright blue eyes and a figure that seemed better suited to burlesque than space exploration.

“She was a commander, and there are only two of those on the ship, sir, and neither of them look like that, believe me. Plus her leggings were too dark, and there were those things on her collar. But I guess what really set me off was that she was talking to the air, sir. I mean,” the enlisted man hastened to add, “ it wasn’t that she didn’t know I was there, it’s that she was talking to somebody who wasn’t there.”

At the silent encouragement of the inspector, the transporter technician continued. “She seemed to be trying to convince whoever she was talking to, for them to get on the pad, and when she came over to the control panel was when I said something. She just started plugging the tricorder in and making adjustments to the controls like I’d never seen before. She turned the gain all the way up, instead of focusing it? Like she was picking up particles from within a wide area. Looked like, when we ran the diagnostics later, she had mapped the entire warp field bubble as the transporter parameters.”

“Well, I mean, she was a Commander. She said her name was Commander Rita Paris, and I asked if the transporter chief was okay with what she was doing here, and it looked kinda complex, might maybe we ought to call science before she pulled the plunger on whatever she was doing there. She explained that there had been an officer, a navigator that had been lost, a decade ago, on that pad. There was a way to save her, but she needed more power. As she was rerouting power, Security burst in and told her to stand away from the panel.”

“The whole time she kept working, trying to finish, until they came and grabbed her. She fought like a wildcat, pushing people away to try to finish what it was she was doing. As they dragged her away, she begged me to energize, to save that lost officer.” The young man took a sip of the glass of water that had been provided for him, then continued.

“When she was gone and it was all over, I went to disconnect the tricorder, but I figured Security or Science or somebody would want to see what she’d been doing. But... there was just...”

“There was something in her voice, sir.” Crewman Jones looked up at the Admiral, his eyes pleading. “She was desperate, SO desperate. I never seen a girl fight like she did, and those security guys are big, and she was like a pin-up model, but... when she begged me, I...” the young serviceman faltered at that, but then he brought his eyes up with resolve.

“I believed her, sir. If it gets me kicked out or demoted or whatever, I believed her, sirs.” Looking at each of the officers on the board of inquiry, the transporter technician defended his choice. “I believed her, and if it could save one of ours, I was willing to take a chance. She didn’t sound like a saboteur or a spy. She sounded... like an officer. An officer who’d do anything to rescue one of ours, sirs. So before I disconnected it or called Science, I reached out, and, like she’d asked, I... I energized.”

“That’s when the same woman... well, pretty much... appeared on transporter pad 3. She looked at her hands, then she looked around the transporter room. Then she looked at me. She asked me if I could see her, and I asked her if she was Commander Paris. But she had a Lieutenant’s stripe, and she started crying. Then her knees kinda gave out, so I went and caught her, and she held onto me and she cried. Security came back to do a follow-up report, and they were kinda surprised to find the same woman they had just hauled off to the brig holding on to me. She wouldn’t... it seemed like she couldn’t stop crying.”

“Turns out, by the time they got the second one carried to sickbay, the first one in the brig had vanished. Her cell was empty, and no trace of her was found. Except for the science officer and the engineer she locked in their quarters. But that was the first one, not the second one.”

“I mean, I heard a rumor that the first one was a time traveler, and the second one was the lost navigator? From 2259? The ghost of the Constitution?”

“Uh, is she okay?”

“I just... she seemed nice, you know? The one who wasn’t crying, from the future. The other one seemed nice too, the one that we saved. Lieutenant Paris. I hope she’s gonna be okay.”