Smooth as Silk

Posted on 22 Dec 2025 @ 11:54pm by Captain Bane Plase & Lieutenant T'Lara Ahmad & Lieutenant JG Dezran Taalen

892 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Shakedown
Timeline: Prior to Arriving

ON

The USS Cygnus had just gone to warp, and already there were problems. Not a soul on board wasnt being jostled around. Anything not attached to the ship rattled and shook, the cacophony almost enough to stop conversation.

Dez emerged from the alcove tucked behind the Intermix Chamber status terminals. The deck was vibrating beneath his feet at an incredible rate. So much so that he had to concentrate to keep his balance. Several junior officers skirted by him in a rush, narrowly avoiding a collision with him on the way by. The energy around the room was chaotic—the staff now incredibly attentive to their assigned terminals. He scanned the room. Having been on many starships—some far less space-worthy than others—he knew without a doubt that something had gone awry. What, he couldn't say.

"What gives?" Dez asked, approaching the Diagnostic Terminal.

Ensign Grakk shook his head. "No idea, sir." Grakk tapped a few commands at the propulsion maintenance station. "Warp power is good. I wonder if it has anything to do with the power distribution to the nacelles?" He was already tapping away as he spoke.

The doors to Main Engineering snapped open.

Lieutenant T’Lara stepped through the threshold with the steadiness of someone who refused to lose balance, even as the deck plating shivered hard enough to blur her silhouette for a heartbeat. She had clearly come from elsewhere—the briefest sheen of wind-tunnel turbulence clung to her uniform as though she’d been moving at full speed down the corridor.

Her hair, usually bound in a flawless Vulcan knot, bore a rare imperfection:
one single dark strand had escaped, swaying faintly with every violent vibration. Her eyes swept the room once, taking in the frantic tap of fingers at consoles, the hiss of coolant regulators fighting themselves, the visible tension of every crewman.

Then those eyes found Dez.

She crossed to him with purposeful strides, knees bending slightly with each tremor to counterbalance. Controlled. Efficient. Unshakable.

“Lieutenant Dez, Ensign Grakk...” she said, the deck shuddering beneath them hard enough that a diagnostic pad rattled off a nearby table. “Report.”

Dez looked back at the Chief. The deck shook abruptly. He stabilized himself, placing his hands on the control panel in front of him. "Don't know," he said harshly. "Whole deck's tryin' to fly us part." He knew that it likely felt worse than it was. He also knew they needed to learn something useful and fast. "Checking the plasma flow rate. Could be flutter in the distribution sequence. Or about a hundred other things. Didn't those Corps teams run diagnostics?" he mused with apathy.

Grakk responded first. "Yes sir, they did. I was there on the shift when they did. Something has to be out of alignment. What if we..." the comm system came to life cutting off the Ensign.

=/\= Bridge to Engineering,=/\= came the familiar voice of the Captain. =/\=We are getting some wicked vibration up here. Conn is telling me everything is working as it should, but I beg to differ. =/\=

T’Lara’s gaze flicked upward at the Captain’s voice as if she were puzzling where the phantom voice had come from, but only for a fraction of a second. “Understood, Captain,” she replied crisply, already moving.

She crossed the vibrating deck in three precise strides and planted herself at the Auxiliary Field Dynamics station. Her fingers flew across the console—efficient and fast, though never frantic. The escaped lock of hair drifted across her cheek again with another deep tremor as she pulled up tri-layer diagnostics on the warp field integrity.

“Lieutenant Dez,” she ordered without turning, “verify inertial dampener response curves. If they have deviated more than four percent from standard."

T’Lara’s fingers froze on the console for a moment—calculating, prioritizing, mentally sorting the data streams slamming through Engineering like a second kind of turbulence. Then she turned sharply; her eyes fixed on Ensign Grakk.

“Ensign,” she said, voice calm but carrying the unmistakable edge of command, “initiate a full-diagnostic sweep of the warp field boundary. If the bubble is fluctuating unevenly, it could account for the turbulence.”

Another tremor rolled through the deck, making a tool cabinet rattle violently against the bulkhead. T’Lara absorbed it without flinching.

Ensign Grakk looked back at her, standing there like Trabink, the legendary General of antiquity on his world, standing there like a mountain. With her strength and command, he felt he could do anything right now. Without responding, he nodded once at her and crossed from port to starboard in Main Engineering, beginning to input commands into the bulkhead-mounted computer system.

Dez switched to the aft console, punching it harder than it needed with his fingers. There wasn't time for a full diagnostic on the dampeners, but he could tell that they were significantly out of alignment.

"Lieutenant—We're technically within normal parameters, but not by much."

All around them, the ship slowly stopped vibrating, and smoothed out. In moments, it felt like they were on solid ground. The ship was at warp, stable, and smooth. Grakk looked over to his Chief, then to his Assistant Chief. "Outstanding job, sir!"


OFF

A JP by

Lieutenant T'Lara Ahmad
Chief Engineer

and

Lieutenant jg Dezran Taalen
Assistant Chief Engineer

and

Ensign Grakk
Engineering Officer

 

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