Long Way Down

Posted on Sat Feb 27th, 2021 @ 9:48pm by Lieutenant Praxalin Chromis

Mission: Beacon
Location: Gamma Command
Timeline: Mission Day 1 at 1230

“Ahh, there it is.”

Praxalin knelt down on his double-jointed legs, folding them under him as he did so, and opened the lid of the crate. He carefully played his fingertips over the soft padding that the equipment within was nestled into. The vestigial claw tips of his fingers click against the smooth glass surface of the devices, a compact multi phasic spectrometer. He tilted his head sideways and looked at the label.

‘100xAnti Fungal Cream: USS Altai Sickbay’

“I found it!” He called out, standing up to his full height and raising a spindly hand. Even in the transfer cargo bay, with its high vaulted ceiling tracked with robotic moving equipment, he loomed over the crates. The other Starfleet personal nodded and went back to their work. Prax gave a happy little clack of his beak as he returned his attention to the box, which was not in fact anti-fungal in nature.

It was the work of moments to change the label tag to read the material within as belonging to the science department of the USS Altai. And from the look of the rest of the manifest, it seemed the entire science department was being installed along with it. Planetary survey gear, radiation detectors, optical sensors, tunnelling quark based micro imagers.

And one chief science officer, as well as a few mild-mannered underlings to fill in the roster.

As he finished with the label, the box let out a musical tone and was whisked away in a shower of exotic particle discharge from the transporter beam. Around him, other boxes were making the jump from Gamma Command’s transfer cargo bay to the ship that would soon be home.

“It only seems a long way down,” Prax said quietly to himself. A fledglings saying, but true enough. Just because it’s not a long way down, doesn’t mean it looks a long way down from where you are standing. Kenki, with its many moons and singing winds, was a very long way away. From where he stood, if he looked in the right corner of the sky, he would see the light of Kenki’s single white star.

But he would not see the light he had been born under. Instead, at this distance far across the galaxy, he would see the light of a time before complex multicellular life. The time of boiling oceans formed by comet impacts, sublimating in the vacuum and beginning the process of thickening a tenuous atmosphere into something life could grab onto.

It only seems long ago from where you are standing now.

“Lieutenant Chromis to Altai, one to beam aboard," he said, perking up his feathered crest to make a good showing of himself. First impressions and all.