{"id":26427,"date":"2025-07-25T15:22:48","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T20:22:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/blog\/?p=26427"},"modified":"2025-07-25T15:55:51","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T20:55:51","slug":"starfleet-analyst-cortez-missing-crew-discovery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/blog\/fiction\/starfleet-analyst-cortez-missing-crew-discovery\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThey Were Preserved, Not Killed\u201d: The Terrifying Truth Behind the Cortez Mission"},"content":{"rendered":"

Officer\u2019s Blog, Stardate 8762.4<\/strong>
Lieutenant Commander Renna Kai<\/strong>
Starfleet Threat Intelligence Division<\/strong>
USS Ventura \u2013 Observation Deck 3A<\/strong><\/p>\n

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 \u2014 and they were right.<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t slept properly since we left the Dovari Drift. Not since the Cortez incident.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m getting ahead of myself.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s rewind.<\/p>\n

We were sent to investigate abnormal subspace fluctuations near the Dovari system \u2014 readings that didn\u2019t match any known stellar activity, but did align with the last known position of the USS Cortez<\/strong>, a science vessel declared missing three weeks ago. Her last log showed no distress, just routine mineral scans in an asteroid<\/a> field\u2026 until she vanished.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

When we dropped out of warp near the Dovari Drift, we found nothing. Just floating debris, low-level radiation, and shadows that didn\u2019t move quite right.<\/p>\n

We launched probes. No signal. No life signs. Just a distorted trail \u2014 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 \u2014 something I can\u2019t type without encrypting this entry six layers deep.<\/p>\n

Let's just say: what we found doesn\u2019t belong in this century.<\/p>\n

We traced the distortion to a Class-E planetoid on the edge of the field. I volunteered to join the away team. I shouldn\u2019t have. Not because I wasn\u2019t capable \u2014 I\u2019m trained, cleared, all that. But because I wasn\u2019t ready for what we saw.<\/p>\n

There were fragments of the Cortez buried under ice<\/strong>. Not crashed. Placed. Like toys. The wreckage was stripped with surgical precision. No burn marks. No hull damage. Just opened \u2014 scooped out like the ship\u2019s soul had been removed.<\/p>\n

And then we found the crew. In stasis pods. Eyes open. Alive. Unaware.<\/p>\n

I stared through the frost-glass of one pod and saw Liran\u2019s face. Peaceful. Preserved. Like nothing had happened. But his neural readings were looping in patterns I\u2019d only seen in Borg drone retention units. That shouldn\u2019t be possible.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 thirty-seven souls \u2014 we marked for emergency extraction. If Starfleet approves.<\/p>\n

Back aboard the ship, Command ordered silence. No wide transmission. No beacon. No warning.
That\u2019s what keeps me up.<\/p>\n

Whatever did this \u2014 it\u2019s still out there. It didn\u2019t kill. It studied. It curated.<\/p>\n

And it wants something.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I submitted a risk profile to Fleet Intel. They asked me to revise it \u2014 make it \u201cless speculative.\u201d I refused. I won\u2019t sanitize my instincts for comfort.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not a hero. I\u2019m a sensor analyst with an attitude problem and a hypersensitivity to patterns. But I know what danger smells like. And this isn\u2019t just some alien probe gone rogue<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is surgical curiosity. This is calculated awe.<\/p>\n

And we are the lab rats.<\/p>\n

If something happens to me, I want this entry archived. Not deleted. Not flagged. Just\u2026 saved.<\/p>\n

Liran is still out there. So are the others.<\/p>\n

And if I disappear next?<\/p>\n

Just follow the distortions.
They always leave a pattern.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Lt. Cmdr. Kai<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When the USS Cortez vanished without a trace, Starfleet sent Lieutenant Commander Renna Kai to investigate. What she found frozen beneath the ice wasn\u2019t wreckage \u2014 it was something watching us\u2026 and learning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26228,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[794,2076,1656,2169],"tags":[1481,1467,1468,1631,2176],"class_list":["post-26427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","category-sci-fi","category-science-fiction-fiction","category-star-trek","tag-fiction","tag-sci-fi","tag-science-fiction","tag-star-trek","tag-starfleet"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t