Someone's Watching Me

Posted on 16 Jun 2026 @ 3:16am by Captain Sabrina Corbin

1,748 words; about a 9 minute read

Mission: Time After Time
Location: USS Arawyn

Corbin had remained on the bridge because returning to her ready room would have been theatre.

There was nothing more useful waiting for her behind the ready room doors than there was in the command well: the same reports, the same impossible sunset, the same passive feeds from a neighborhood that had begun to understand too much and explain too little.

So she stayed.

The bridge had tightened around the problem in the quiet way a trained crew did. No one wasted movement. No one filled the air with unnecessary speculation. Consoles chimed softly, voices stayed low, and every officer seemed aware that the next useful piece of information might be the one that finally forced Corbin’s hand.

That was the part she disliked most.

Waiting.

Not because she was impatient by nature, though she could be when circumstances earned it, but because observation had begun to feel less like restraint and more like standing beside a locked door while someone called for help on the other side.

Commander Batenburg stood to her right, composed and unreadable, her intervention matrix still open on a side display. At Ops, Lieutenant Oliver Jung had civilian communications layered beside the environmental telemetry, his attention fixed on every flicker of signal from Sherman Oaks. Lieutenant Commander Grayson McKinney remained at Tactical, monitoring the passive probe network with the kind of focus that suggested he was already building responses to threats that had not yet decided to exist.

Corbin watched the frozen amber light on the viewer and resisted the urge to ask for another report simply because silence had become irritating.

She already knew the answer.

The sun had not moved.

“Any change in the light state?” she asked.

“None, Captain,” Jung replied. “Solar angle remains fixed inside the affected zone. External stellar references remain stable. Chronometric readings continue to indicate local passage of time within the region, but the visual and thermal conditions over the neighborhood are being maintained.”

“Civilian response?”

“Escalating,” Jung said. “More outdoor gathering, increased voice stress on intercepted calls, several repeated references to the sun, clocks, and the radio broadcast loop.”

Corbin’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.

Recognition, she thought again.

That was the danger now. Not simply that something impossible was happening, but that the people below knew it.
Batenburg’s eyes shifted from the viewer to her matrix. “At this rate, public order may degrade before environmental conditions become a physical threat.”

“Fear is rarely polite enough to wait its turn,” Corbin said dryly.

A tone sounded from Tactical.

It was not an alert yet.

It was the sound that came just before one.

McKinney straightened. “Captain.”

Corbin turned slightly toward him. “Report.”

“Probe Four just registered a subspace shear near the upper edge of the atmosphere, directly above the Sherman Oaks boundary.” His hands moved across the tactical display. “No, correction. Multiple shears. They’re opening inside the distortion envelope.”

The main viewer shifted at his command.

The frozen amber neighborhood dropped into a smaller window. Above it, the upper atmosphere magnified until the edge of the planet filled the screen in bands of blue, gold, and shadow.

Space bent.

Not in the clean, elegant curve of a warp field or the familiar violence of a weapons discharge. This was uglier. A tear that did not know what shape it wanted to be, folding light inward and forcing it back out in broken angles.

Then two contacts appeared.

For one breath, no one spoke.

They were too close to the atmosphere.

Too sudden.

Too old.

Jung’s fingers flew over his console. “Two vessels emerging from the shear. Power signatures unstable. Cross-referencing against historical and tactical databases.”

McKinney was already there. “One Klingon D7-class battlecruiser. Twenty-third century configuration.” A beat. “And a Romulan Bird-of-Prey, also consistent with mid-to-late twenty-third century profiles.”

The words landed heavily across the bridge.

Corbin stared at the viewer.

A Klingon D7 and a Romulan Bird-of-Prey were not unusual as historical entries. They lived in tactical exams, museum holos, Academy cautionary lectures, and the long, complicated memory of the Federation. They did not simply appear above a displaced suburb from 1984, locked in combat near the atmosphere of a planet that should have been empty.

Batenburg’s expression remained controlled, but her gaze sharpened.

“That is chronologically inconsistent with the settlement below,” she said.

“One of several phrases available,” Corbin replied.

On the viewer, the Bird-of-Prey rolled hard, trailing damage along one wing. The D7 came after it, weapons already firing. Bright energy cut across the upper atmosphere, not directed at the planet, not directed at the Arawyn. Their fight was older than this moment, older than this world, and it had simply arrived without permission.

“Red Alert,” Corbin ordered.

The bridge lighting shifted at once, scarlet bars washing over the command deck as the alert sounded through the ship.

“Shields up,” she continued. “Bring weapons to standby. Do not target unless they target us or the population below.”

“Aye, Captain,” McKinney replied.

The Arawyn came alive beneath them, power shifting through decks and systems as the Sovereign-class prepared to answer a threat it had no intention of provoking.

“Are they detecting us?” Corbin asked.

McKinney listened to his board, then to the telemetry feeding in from the probes. “No indication yet. Their active sensors are limited and focused on each other. They appear to have emerged mid-engagement.”

“Of course they did,” Corbin said under her breath.

McKinney continued, his voice controlled as he moved through his assessment. Probe telemetry, weapon signatures, shield integrity, possible damage patterns, probable combat age of the vessels. Corbin listened without interrupting, absorbing the essential shape of it rather than stealing details that belonged to his department. The ships were dangerous because any armed vessel was dangerous. They were not, at the moment, behaving as if the Arawyn or the planet mattered.

That did not make her feel better.

On the viewer, the two old warships exchanged another burst of fire.

The shot went wide.

It vanished near the boundary with a visible distortion that made the stars behind it ripple.

“Science,” Corbin said, “tell me that did not intersect the affected region.”

“Negative direct impact,” the science officer replied quickly. “Energy dissipated at the upper edge of the distortion envelope. But there was a measurable chronometric fluctuation inside the Sherman Oaks boundary at the same instant.”

Jung looked over sharply. “Captain, civilian distress just spiked.”

Corbin did not need to ask why.

Her eyes returned to the smaller inset of the neighborhood below, where sensors translated motion into small markers moving across the cul-de-sac. Clusters broke apart. People ran toward houses. Children scattered. The calm fiction of a blackout had finally shattered.

“They can see it,” Corbin said.

Batenburg’s voice was quiet. “Almost certainly.”

A Klingon battlecruiser and a Romulan Bird-of-Prey fighting above suburban Los Angeles.

Corbin allowed herself one dry, humorless breath.

“Well, Commander,” she said, without looking away from the viewer, “what number on your matrix are we pretending this is?”

Batenburg’s eyebrow lifted slightly. “I believe we have exceeded the elegant portion of the chart.”

“That was my concern.”

Jung’s console chimed again.

He leaned closer, isolating a signal. “Captain, I have a civilian telephone call from within the cul-de-sac. Same caller profile as the earlier intercept. Elderly female, previously identified as Helen. She’s calling someone named Martha a few blocks over.”

Corbin turned. “Put it through.”

Jung routed the audio to the bridge speakers, cleaning what he could without stripping the human tremor from it.
Static came first.

Then an older woman’s voice, high with fear.

“Martha, listen to me. Something is happening over here. No, not the power. Not the phones. I’m telling you, there are things in the sky. Ships, Martha. Not planes. Ships.”

The bridge held silent.

The woman continued, words tumbling now.

“And there’s a boy. I don’t know whose he is. No one knows whose he is. He was just standing there, watching all of us like… like he was waiting to see what we’d do.”

Corbin’s attention sharpened.

Jung glanced back at her, already marking the segment.

“No, I am not being dramatic. He fixed Danny Miller’s knee. The child fell off his bike, scraped it bloody, and that boy made it go away. Just gone. And his jacket changed. I saw it, Martha. I know what I saw.”

Batenburg’s posture changed by a fraction.

Corbin felt the same cold recognition settle at the base of her spine.

The audio crackled, Helen’s voice dropping lower, as if speaking softly might make the statement less impossible.

“He looked up at the sky, and his eyes weren’t right. They looked like… I don’t know. Like there were stars inside them. Like space.”

No one on the bridge moved.

Then Helen’s voice rose again.

“I think he did this. I think that boy did something to the sun, and now there are ships in the sky.”

Jung cut the audio when the line dissolved into shouting and static.

For a moment, the red-lit bridge was silent except for the low pulse of the alert and the distant, disciplined activity of officers holding their stations.

Corbin looked back to the viewer.

Two ancient warships fought above the atmosphere.

Below them, a frightened neighborhood from 1984 had found the first useful word for the impossible.

Boy.

Not anomaly.

Not weather.

Not blackout.

Boy.

Corbin turned to Batenburg.

“Commander, assemble a full away team.”

Batenburg met her eyes. “The cul-de-sac?”

“The cul-de-sac,” Corbin confirmed. “That is where the reports began, where the sun stopped, where the civilians are seeing our best lead, and where this Helen believes the answer is standing in the street.”

She looked toward Tactical. “Coordinate with Commander McKinney for threat updates before transport. If those ships turn their attention downward, I want the away team pulled immediately.”

Then to Jung. “Ops, isolate that call, map Helen’s house, and identify the boy’s last known position from visual and comm indicators. Feed everything to Commander Batenburg’s team.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Corbin’s gaze returned to the old warships burning across the wrong sky.

“Maintain Red Alert. Defensive posture only. We are not joining a century-old fight unless it forces our hand.”

The Arawyn held position above the impossible planet, shields raised, weapons ready, while history, fear, and something far stranger tore at the evening below.

Captain Sabrina Corbin
Commanding Officer

 

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