Cerulean Stars - Chapter 105

Chapter 105

Stardate 48429.5 - June 6, 2371 - 18:25:12

One of the big reasons that most people in Starfleet tended to jump at the chance for planetary investigation duty was that after a certain point there was just very little else to do on a starship. Security in particular tended to get the shortest end of the stick there because so far as things weren't going horribly wrong, they didn't exactly have a lot of duties to perform.

Raine had finished the next weeks security schedule seven hours ago, her small backlog of unfinished paperwork four hours ago, and since then had been recalibrating the port pulse phaser to try and eliminate a minor harmonic imbalance that had cropped up after the last livefire test.

Which was why she was currently laying on a maintenance sled with a phase matrix calibrator in hand going over every last centimeter of the capacitor housings undercarriage.

“They’re not a cult!” Jadzia suddenly exclaimed, the surprise enough to send Raine bolting up only to smack her crest on the duranium housing a few inches over her head.

“Why?” Raine whined, rubbing her head in pain as she slid herself out from under the housing to glare at the Trill woman's shins.

“You deserve it.” Jadzia returned in an almost petulant tone, glaring down at Raine with her hands on her hips. “I just had to spend the last day probing Deral about his life on Meridian. And I've never been so mortified.”

That sounded like Sisko had at least taken Raine's warning to heart, which was nice to hear given it was always statistically hit or miss with command officers listening to security warnings.

“If they're not a cult, then what are they?” She asked, pushing herself to her fleet, frowning slightly since that still left her looking up at the taller woman. “Because their story of being the descendants of a crashed ship doesn't add up any way you look at it.”

“Deral showed me the crash site.” Jadzia said, sounding more than a little put out about the fact. “He also explained that the real reason they won't leave is that those born on the planet since the destabilization of its normal cycle began, can't.”

Well now Raine felt like an absolute heel, some part of which must have shown on her face given the smug look now on Jadzia's own.

“The colony began evacuating when the destabilization was discovered.” Jadzia continued. “However they didn't have the ships to get everyone off before the planet phased out. And then when Meridian returned decades later, those who didn't evacuate discovered that the recently born children who had been in those waves had phased out at the same moment Meridian itself did, and never returned.”

Following the logic of that event, Raine's stomach did a flip flop at the realization that not returning at all was probably the best case scenario for those children given the other option would have likely been them reappearing in the empty vacuum of space far from any hope of split second rescue.

“Then Deral?” Raine inquired.

“Stayed behind because his wife was terminally ill and it let them have an extra couple hundred years together before her death.” Jadzia answered, looking every bit the cat that ate the canary.

“Any chance we can figure out a way to break the link?” Raine asked hopefully, not liking the thought of leaving anyone on this planet if they could help it.

Jadzia's look turned sour. “Maybe if I had a Galaxy or Nebula class's science labs to work with I could figure something out. But the Defiant's just not set up for that sort of thing.”

Experience had taught Raine the Defiant wasn't set up for most things, which was why they really shouldn't have been doing planetary surveys in the first place. But the point really hadn't been the survey itself, so much as making a statement to the Dominion that Starfleet couldn't be intimidated into staying out of an entire quadrant of space.

“I guess we'll just have to put it on the future followup list for Starfleet to deal with sixty years from now and hope the Dominion doesn't advance to take over this area of space in the meantime.” 

The future followup list was pretty much what the name suggested, a list of things that were set to occur decades or even centuries in the future that Starfleet would try to follow up on. Raine had a somewhat similar list of her own, though at this point it was mostly just things she'd labeled Discovery Bullshit.

“I'm hoping it won't come to that.” Jadzia confessed. “If Deral and I can figure out and fix whatever's causing the destabilization before Meridian shifts back they'll have another thirty years here.”

What little Raine recalled about the episode suggested that wasn't particularly likely, but Jadzia had turned into something of an odd friend over the years so the Asari wasn't going to dash the Trill's hopes by disparaging the attempt.

“Well, if you need any help I should be free whenever I finish with this.” The last was said with a motion to the capacitor housing as an overly amused look flashed across Jadzia's face.

“Am I missing something?” She asked, narrowing her eyes in sudden suspicion at the other woman.

Shaking her head in bemusement, Jadzia broke out into full blown giggles. “Your duty shift was over nearly three hours ago.” 

Raine felt her eye ridge twitch.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Stardate 48443.4 - June 11, 2371 - 20:11:02

Laying on her bunk and staring up at Jadzia as the Trill stood next to the bed, Raine couldn't help but wonder if she had heard the other woman right.

“You want my help to convince Commander Sisko to let you stay on the planet?” She repeated just to be absolutely sure.

“Would you?” Jadzia asked hopefully, fidgeting with her hands in a way that felt very out of character for the normally put together woman.

Setting her padd down, Rain pushed herself up into a sitting position. “I thought you had convinced Deral to come back to the Alpha Quadrant with us?”

Letting out a sigh Jadzia clasped her hands behind her back and began pacing. “I had. But then we figured out a way to stabilize the quantum cascade reaction in the sun's core and save the colony.”

She stopped to gaze wistfully at the door for a moment. “He was still willing to come with me… Come with us.” She quickly corrected with an embarrassed blush.

“Mhm.” Raine hummed as she stared knowingly at Jadzia.

“I could tell his heart wasn't in it however.” The Trill continued, not deigning to acknowledge Raine's sass. “So I offered to stay with him instead.”

Raine frowned at that, because she'd been skimming the various science reports as they came in, and everything she'd seen said the current state of the planet's dimensional shift was far too unstable to allow the transition of foreign matter. 

“You figured out a way to keep your molecular structure intact through the transition?”

“I'm hoping to use the transporter to match my quantum signatures to his.” Jadzia informed her, something about the solution enough to dredge up a partially forgotten memory that combined with the information the Asari had read about the subject to paint a very unfortunate picture.

“If your quantum signature is off by even the smallest amount, isn't there a chance that you'd basically become an anchor and tear the planet apart?”

“No?” Jadzia began, though Raine could clearly see the Trill's fingers twitching the way they sometimes did when she was working out some particularly difficult mental math. 

“Okay.” She corrected after nearly a minute of silence had passed. “There might be a small chance that something like that could happen. But as long as I can properly match our signatures it shouldn't be a problem.”

As much as Raine desperately wanted to point out that was too much of a reliance on ifs and shoulds, she knew that would just get Jadzia to dig in.

“Even with the Defiant's transporters?” She asked instead, the deficiencies of the scaled down system and electrophorus armor plating covering the external emitters having caused her security teams a number of difficulties during tactical drills.

Jadzia winced before giving an uncertain nod. “I think so?”

Which might as well have been a tact admission that she hadn't really stopped to consider that. Something Raine was going to chalk up to the normally thorough woman being firmly in the rush ahead portion of her romance.

“And if you put percentages on those various things and presented them to Commander Sisko what do you think he'd say?”

Letting out a sigh and shaking her head, Raine pulled herself off the bed and took a moment to stretch out the kinks that had formed. “Well, that’ll be up to you and him to work out. Because I can only give my opinion as a friend and tell him that there aren’t any security concerns.”

Pursing her lips together Jadzia stared at Raine before letting out a sigh of her own. “And your opinion as a friend would be?”

“I’ll try to be on the ship to pick you both up when the time comes.” She returned with a somewhat sad smile that quickly morphed into a playful smirk. “Looking even more fabulous than I do now since red is much more my color then yellow.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Stardate 48445.1 - June 12, 2371 - 11:04:33

“I can’t believe he said no!” Jadzia groused, throwing up her hands angrily as she paced across the floor of the starboard weapons bay. “It was a three percent chance at best!’

Continuing her work of degaussing the starboard torpedo launcher while nodding along, Raine was tempted to point out that three percent chance was only if everything went perfectly. That particular number had been a good deal higher however when you took into account the Defiant’s lackluster secondary systems.

“There’s always Stasis.” She put forward, knowing that wasn’t much of an argument but hoping to distract the other woman at least a little from her practically teenage heartbreak. “A sixty year nap and you’ll wake up looking just as good as the day you went in.”

“Joined Trill’s can’t handle stasis outside of the extraordinarily short term.” Jadzia said, her tone turning melancholy towards the end. “But that doesn’t even matter, because the point was that we were going to spend the next sixty years together.”

Which Raine knew probably would have resulted in the two hating each other given Jadzia Dax wasn’t the type to be happy spending sixty years stuck in a mental realm with only a couple dozen others to interact with.

Setting down the magneton scanner on the nearby equipment cart, she walked over to the other woman with open arms. “Need a hug?”

“Yes…” Jadzia muttered, leaning in and accepting the hug before all but collapsing as she began sobbing into Raine’s shoulder.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Author's Notes: Raine, you of all people should know just because there's a crashed ship that doesn't mean it's also not a cult. But you get a pass this time because you're focusing on other issues instead of that.

Poor Jadzia, there really was no good end for this.