"Panama"

Posted on 06 Jun 2026 @ 7:50pm by Lieutenant Commander Grayson McKinney

2,180 words; about a 11 minute read

Mission: Time After Time
Location: Bridge, Tactical Station

//// Bridge ////

The tactical station responded to Grayson's touch with a low electric hum he could read like a pulse. He leaned on the console, summoning the deployment template he'd stashed before the briefing, back when this was still theory, not command. The job was simple on paper: lay down a silent perimeter before anything out there realized it was being watched.

Petty Officer First Class Caleb Edmonds watched the file spread across the shared display in silence. Quiet was Edmonds' default setting. He had once outlasted a Vulcan in a staring contest for a case of Andorian ale, a match Grayson still insisted he'd lost on a technicality.

"We deploying, sir," Edmonds said at last, "or just admiring the artwork?"

"Both." Grayson keyed the opening sequence. "Sentinel drones. Passive only. The Captain wants eyes on the whole system, the quiet kind. Anything comes into this neighborhood, we know. If that distortion so much as clears its throat, we know. If anybody out there is watching the same magic trick we are…"

"We know," Edmonds said.

"You're getting the hang of this."

The passive feed crawled down his secondary panel. Operations worked to turn the raw civilian intercept into something fit for a report. For now it was just noise, fragments of a world that no longer existed, snagged on Arawyn's receivers like leaves on a wire.

The speaker popped and resolved into a bright, aggressively cheerful voice riding a synthesizer beat.

"You're listening to KROQ, one-oh-six-point-seven, world-famous in Los Angeles. And hey, if that little tremor a few minutes ago spilled your margarita, just remember, that's Mother Nature's way of telling you to top off the pool. Here's a little Van Halen to settle the nerves."

The track came up under the patter, all synthesizer and swagger.

Grayson barely noticed. To him it was data, background static. Eleven thousand voices adrift, not yet aware of where they were. He needed the perimeter in place before they learned.

He started with geometry. Six drones, barely enough for a volume this size, so each had to earn its keep. He set them in a loose shell, fields overlapping at the seams so nothing could slip through in the dark. He angled coverage toward the distortion boundary and the two approach vectors a careful captain would use to slip in unseen. Passive arrays gave him a wide net and a low profile, at the cost of resolution and a few seconds' lag between event and detection. He could live with that. Quiet eyes didn't blink back. If anything crossed the line, he needed just enough time to call it before it closed the gap.

This was old work, muscle-deep. He'd learned it the hard way, in a dead hull on the Romulan line with no targeting computer, just his eyes and a grease pencil. The Rangers called it dirty math. You learned to feel where the lines belonged. Now the console ran the numbers, but his instincts hadn't changed: cover the doors, then the windows, then wait and listen.

"Drone one, clear of the bay," Edmonds reported. "Diagnostics nominal. She's on station."

"Good girl." Grayson watched the first icon settle into its slot on the tactical plot and go from amber to a steady, patient green. "One down."

Two decks below, a hull panel opened to the void, released a sensor platform the size of a footlocker, then closed again. It was quiet enough that no one on the bridge bothered to look up.

On the feed, a new fragment surfaced. A woman this time, her pitch high and her words clipping together in a fast stream of pure indignation, her voice carrying the tinny compression of an analog phone line.

"I am telling you, the road is just gone. I drove down Moorpark to get to the Ventura Freeway, and it just stops. It doesn't go anywhere. There's nothing. A drop-off. It looks like a quarry, but black. I want to speak to the city planner. This is a hazard."

Grayson's hands kept moving. His face didn't change.

"Edmonds."

"Sir."

"Somebody down there just called the city because the road at the end of her street stopped going anywhere." He fed drone two its station-keeping profile. "She'd like to file a complaint about it."

Edmonds gave it the gravity of a man sizing up a tactical problem. "Can they fix it?"

"Fix the edge of the universe?" Grayson shook his head slowly. "Petty Officer, the Los Angeles Department of Public Works can barely handle potholes; this is well beyond their capabilities."

"Be a hell of a work order."

"Be a hell of a work order," Grayson agreed.

The people down there weren't panicking yet. They were lining up, filing reports, checking on neighbors, clinging to the firm belief that someone with a clipboard would come fix things. Grayson's job was to keep that faith alive just long enough to matter, before the system itself started to break. Calm was a resource. He'd learned that in places where clipboards never came.

Calm bought you time, and time was all the Captain wanted from him. But calm never lasted. This batch would run out the first time the sun did something strange. Until then, his job was to keep the perimeter quiet. If the line broke first, the whole system would lurch from confused to exposed in a heartbeat.

"Drone three, away," Edmonds said. "Drone four spinning up."

"Spread four wide. I want her looking back along the second approach vector, not at the planet. If anybody's coming to admire their handiwork, that's the door they'll use."

"Looking back along the vector, aye."

He set up drone four's profile and checked the boundary readings as the diagnostics ran. The distortion marked his plot as always, a smear of impossible shapes wrapped around a shard of the past, putting out the occasional subspace flutter that Science still couldn't explain. Some called it encoded modulation, some natural harmonics, but it was too broken to tell. Grayson logged the latest flutter, saw it fit the pattern, and left it for Science to puzzle over. Solving the mystery wasn't his job. Containing it was.

The feed turned again. This time it carried the rhythmic bursts of a Citizens' Band channel, two voices riding it with the confidence of prophets.

"Breaker, breaker, this is Desert Fox. You got your ears on, Night Owl? Come back."

A pause, filled with the hiss of cosmic background.

"This is Night Owl. I read you, Fox. You feeling this?"

"I'm feeling it. Whole neighborhood went dark, TV reception's shot to hell, nothing but snow. I'm telling you, it's the Soviets. They finally did it, touched off an underground test out in the Mojave, and the pulse knocked out the grid. You mark my words. I'm loading the shotgun and bringing the cans up from the basement."

Grayson let it run a beat longer than needed.

"They think it's the Soviets," he told Edmonds.

"Is it the Soviets?"

"Caleb." Grayson turned just far enough to give him the full benefit of the look. "If the Soviet Union could fold up a chunk of California, tuck it in a pocket dimension, and parallel-park it next to an M-class planet, do you think they'd have spent it on Sherman Oaks?"

"Maybe they were aiming for the studios," Edmonds said, flat as a deck plate. "Missed by a couple miles."

Grayson laughed, short and real, then went back to the plot.

The strange thing, the part that was actually funny and not just dark, was that Desert Fox was closer to the truth than anyone else on the planet. Something had reached down and folded up his world. He just had the wrong suspect, the wrong scale, and the wrong technology by a margin that would have broken his arithmetic.

"Drone four, on station," Edmonds said. "Field's clean. No gaps on the second vector."

"Bring up five."

The feed coughed up a commercial while five spun her diagnostics, some local huckster talking faster than the laws of breathing should have allowed.

"…no money down, that's right, no money down on every '84 in stock, the boss has gone crazy, prices slashed, come on down to the lot on Van Nuys Boulevard, this weekend only, we will not be undersold…"

"Somebody down there," Grayson said, "is having the best sale of his life and doesn't know the lot no longer connects to anything."

"Customer base is captive," Edmonds offered.

"Most captive audience in the quadrant. Eleven thousand people and nowhere to drive."

"Five's away," Edmonds said. "One to go."

"Last one's the important one." Grayson pulled drone six's profile himself rather than handing it down the line, the small habit of a man who liked to set his own keystone. He walked her out toward the near edge of the distortion boundary, closer than the others, close enough that she'd feel any shift in that envelope before the rest of the shell did. Passive, still. Listening, not knocking. "Easy. Right up to the line, no further. If that edge moves, I want it on this screen first."

"Tucking her in?"

"Tucking her in."

The icon crept across the plot and settled into its slot at the boundary's edge, and the diagnostics came back nominal one by one, until the last flipped to green.

"Perimeter's live," Edmonds said.

Grayson ran the first full sweep. The board came back the way he liked it: empty. Nothing in the system but the Arawyn, the distortion, and eleven thousand souls blaming the Soviets, shopping for a Pontiac, and queuing at the edge of forever. No incoming signatures. No new flutter from the envelope, just the ones already on file. Nobody out there in the dark, watching them watch. The perimeter held.

He checked the alert thresholds twice. Once for the job. The second for the part of him that had spent forty-seven hours in a dead shuttle teaching his own heart to fool a biosensor, the part that never trusted a quiet room until he'd checked the locks himself. If anything crossed the perimeter, the Arawyn would wake. If the boundary shifted, the Arawyn would wake. Any new voice in that subspace whisper, the same. He closed the deployment log, stamped it, and allowed himself exactly one second to savor a plan that had gone off clean.

"Deployment complete," he said. "Watch is set. Log it and push it to the Captain's queue."

"Logging." Edmonds' hands moved across his board. "Anything else, sir?"

"Now we wait."

Edmonds gave a small nod. Waiting was something they both understood, as men in their line always did, completely but without much enthusiasm. The drones would watch. Grayson's job was to be ready when they saw something, which mostly meant holding still while every instinct wanted to move.

He stayed by the rail. On the plot, six green icons held their posts around a tear in the world, and below them that piece of 1984 drifted toward an evening it had been promised and a night Science couldn't swear would come.

The feed gave him one more before he folded it down to alert-only. Not the dispatcher this time. A rotary phone line, thin and barely there, caught by one of the drones as it passed overhead. The computer had flagged it on frequency, not volume.

"Hello? Helen? It's Martha."

A pause, the line trembling, fragile as dry paper.

"Martha, are you all right? The lights are out over here."

"I'm fine, Helen. But the ground shook so hard. The china cabinet went over. I can't see a thing outside, it's so dark. I just wanted to be sure you and Arthur were all right. Arthur and that heart of his."

"Arthur's sleeping through it," Helen said, her voice reaching for a brave, hollow cheer. "We're fine, Martha. You sit tight. The power company will have the lights on before long. We'll come check on you when the sun's up."

The line clicked and went dead.

Grayson read it through to the end. He didn't say anything to Edmonds about this one.

Two old women on a dark street, checking on each other. A husband with a bad heart asleep in the next room, and a wife promising the power company would have the lights on soon, that they'd all come round when the sun came up. The sun was not coming up. The street Martha couldn't see past ran for a few hundred meters and then ended, opening onto a dark, unnamed, roadless place with no power company that would ever come.

Eleven thousand people. Scared, confused, calling for help, blaming the wrong thing, and some of them, in the middle of it all, checking on their neighbors anyway.

Quiet eyes, the Captain had said.

Grayson folded the feed down to a thin band at the corner of his display, where it would sit silent until something out there gave him a reason to look. He settled in against the rail and kept the watch.

End Log

Lt.Cmdr. Grayson McKinney
Chief Tactical Officer
USS Arawyn

 

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