Patterns In The Dark
Posted on 06 Dec 2025 @ 9:08pm by Captain Sabrina Corbin
844 words; about a 4 minute read
Mission:
The Displaced
Location: Eirian Vessel - Bridge
// Eirian Vessel – Bridge //
The moment LtJG Oliver Jung stepped onto the Eirian bridge beside Commander Batenburg, he felt it, a kind of hush beneath the hush, as if the room were listening back.
The Eirian woman, Elaera, moved like someone carrying far more weight than her frame suggested. Her bioluminescent markings dimmed to a wary shimmer as she approached Jung, head tilting in a way he was beginning to identify as inquisitive caution.
Jung offered a small nod. Not too much movement, he had learned they did not appreciate abrupt gestures.
“Elaera,” he said softly, tapping his tricorder and linking it to the Arawyn. “You and I are going to look at your starfield again. Together this time.”
She watched his fingers, then his eyes.
“Oliver Jung,” she repeated carefully. “You… show. I… guide.”
“Exactly.”
He lowered the tricorder’s projection onto a nearby console, a star chart blossoming upward in shimmering blue.
Elaera flinched at first, then steadied. She stepped closer until her light reflected off the holo, her hand hovering above the projection as if expecting it to sing.
Jung adjusted a harmonic.
“You told Captain Corbin your people did not know these stars. I’d like to understand why.”
Elaera’s markings brightened faintly.
“These lights… wrong. Bent. Moved.” Her gaze swept the canopy above them. “All wrong.”
“Show me,” he said gently.
Elaera drew her hand in a slow diagonal sweep across the hologram. The projection responded imperfectly, the stars smearing into elongated arcs.
“Computer, increase parallax tolerance, apply warp shear—”
Elaera stopped him with two glowing fingertips pressed to her sternum.
“Not warp.” She pushed her hand outward in a fractured motion. “Broken. Split. Space… tear.”
A subspace rupture. Jung felt the realization settle with a quiet weight.
He rerouted the star chart filters with quick precision. “If your people crossed a rupture, your origin stars would be displaced, compressed, stretched, maybe even inverted.”
He pinched and rotated the projection, dragging several distant points into rough alignment.
“A region-wide distortion would shift apparent stellar positions by—”
His breath caught.
“Commander Batenburg, you’ll want to see this.”
Batenburg stepped in, silent and intent.
Jung tapped his badge. “Jung to Astrometrics. Sending live feed from the Eirian vessel. Bring up extended-range Federation mapping. Extragalactic frame only, and give me all known anchor points beyond the galactic rim.”
A soft chime acknowledged. Sparse, faint guide stars and a single curvature line marking the Milky Way’s outer boundary appeared in the projection.
Jung turned back to Elaera.
“You mentioned your region once before. What did you call it?”
Elaera reached toward the starfield, touching two points far apart with careful reverence.
“Keloran Reach,” she said softly, tapping one cluster. She moved her hand three fingers-width away. “Lorn Expanse. Three… steps. Three parsecs. Close. Together.”
Jung checked his tricorder.
“There’s nothing by those names in our database.”
Not surprising. Their whole civilization may have lived outside anything Starfleet even charted.
Elaera’s voice softened almost to a whisper.
“Home-sky names. Ours only.”
“Then we’ll map them manually.”
He began dragging the hologram outward, aligning her indicated points with what few extragalactic markers Starfleet did have: faint quasars, distant halo clusters, and the near-empty void beyond the galaxy’s edge.
He worked carefully, breath sharpening as the distortion corrections settled.
“Computer, translate her indicated distance between the Keloran Reach and the Lorn Expanse into a Federation reference frame. Maintain her proportional spacing. Project that onto the extragalactic anchor grid.”
The projection shifted. Elaera’s two chosen points slid outward, crossing the galactic rim boundary and landing in the dark, quiet expanse beyond.
Astrometrics sent back the computed result in a stark, clinical readout:
Absolute distance from Milky Way center: approximately 70,000 light-years beyond galactic rim.
Elaera brightened in a soft, rippling wave, hope cutting through exhaustion.
“There. There. Where we… were.”
Jung swallowed.
“You weren’t just displaced in space.”
He ran the inversion a second time. A third. The result didn’t change.
Beyond the galaxy. That’s where they come from.
“You were displaced through dimensionally folded space. And the Keloran Reach, your home, is far outside our mapped galaxy.”
Elaera tilted her head.
“We… fell. Not meant. Not want.”
“I know,” Jung said gently. “But now we can find your origin vector.”
He turned to Commander Batenburg, voice steady with conviction.
“Ma’am, we have a direction. It’s distorted, but it’s there. Based on Elaera’s cultural star names and proportional distances, their region sits roughly seventy thousand light-years beyond the galactic rim. If we can map the rupture they came through, we can reconstruct the path back.”
Elaera touched two fingers to her chest, a gesture of gratitude.
“Oliver Jung… you… see us.”
Jung shook his head softly.
“No. You showed me where to look.”
He turned back to Batenburg.
“Commander, we can bring this to the Captain. I think we just found the first real lead on their home.”
LtJG Oliver Jung
Operations Officer
apb Sabrina Corbin
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