Officer’s Blog, Stardate 8762.4
Lieutenant Commander Renna Kai
Starfleet Threat Intelligence Division
USS Ventura – Observation Deck 3A
They told me to take a break.
I said I was fine.
They said I was twitching.
I said it was caffeine.
They knew it was more than that — and they were right.
I haven’t slept properly since we left the Dovari Drift. Not since the Cortez incident.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let’s rewind.
We were sent to investigate abnormal subspace fluctuations near the Dovari system — readings that didn’t match any known stellar activity, but did align with the last known position of the USS Cortez, a science vessel declared missing three weeks ago. Her last log showed no distress, just routine mineral scans in an asteroid field… until she vanished.
The Cortez had 84 crew aboard. One of them was a friend of mine. Ensign Liran Tevos. Quiet, brilliant, a bit awkward. We met at a symposium on AI ethics and stayed in touch ever since. He used to send me encrypted jokes hidden in raw LCARS telemetry. He made me laugh when everything else was spreadsheets and war briefings.
When we dropped out of warp near the Dovari Drift, we found nothing. Just floating debris, low-level radiation, and shadows that didn’t move quite right.
We launched probes. No signal. No life signs. Just a distorted trail — like something had yanked the Cortez into a pocket of subspace, bent the walls of reality around it, and let go. I reviewed the sensor data for hours. There were anomalies, yes. But something else stood out: a faint signature. Breen, modified. Then, something darker — something I can’t type without encrypting this entry six layers deep.
Let's just say: what we found doesn’t belong in this century.
We traced the distortion to a Class-E planetoid on the edge of the field. I volunteered to join the away team. I shouldn’t have. Not because I wasn’t capable — I’m trained, cleared, all that. But because I wasn’t ready for what we saw.
There were fragments of the Cortez buried under ice. Not crashed. Placed. Like toys. The wreckage was stripped with surgical precision. No burn marks. No hull damage. Just opened — scooped out like the ship’s soul had been removed.
And then we found the crew. In stasis pods. Eyes open. Alive. Unaware.
I stared through the frost-glass of one pod and saw Liran’s face. Peaceful. Preserved. Like nothing had happened. But his neural readings were looping in patterns I’d only seen in Borg drone retention units. That shouldn’t be possible.
We had to leave some of them behind. The stasis field was too complex to crack without destabilizing the whole array. We transported four back to the Ventura for analysis. The rest — thirty-seven souls — we marked for emergency extraction. If Starfleet approves.
Back aboard the ship, Command ordered silence. No wide transmission. No beacon. No warning.
That’s what keeps me up.
Whatever did this — it’s still out there. It didn’t kill. It studied. It curated.
And it wants something.
I submitted a risk profile to Fleet Intel. They asked me to revise it — make it “less speculative.” I refused. I won’t sanitize my instincts for comfort.
I’m not a hero. I’m a sensor analyst with an attitude problem and a hypersensitivity to patterns. But I know what danger smells like. And this isn’t just some alien probe gone rogue.
This is surgical curiosity. This is calculated awe.
And we are the lab rats.
If something happens to me, I want this entry archived. Not deleted. Not flagged. Just… saved.
Liran is still out there. So are the others.
And if I disappear next?
Just follow the distortions.
They always leave a pattern.
— Lt. Cmdr. Kai
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