— USS Falcon, Operations Office —

Lieutenant Leylani Aka had not worked on a starship since her first duty rotation after the Academy. A year on the USS Oakland, a California-class ship, had been enough to convince her that it was starbases that her future lay. She’d let herself be talked into taking the Operations Chief job on the USS Falcon in hopes of jump-starting her career and moving from a mid-level role at Starbase 86 to being king (or queen) of her own castle aboard the Falcon.

Now she was rushing nowhere fast aboard the ship as it plodded along under warp three speeds to reach the nearest Federation outpost on the edge of the Triangle. With communication, and apparently higher warp speeds, cut off from the ship they wanted to check in to confirm that some part of the Federation still existed. Frankly, alone in the darkness, it was easy to assume that everything and everyone else was gone.

It was a feeling that Aka did not like. She’d grown up on the island of Maui, she liked the fresh air of her home. She liked being able to look out at the surf and curl her toes on the sand. Being alone in the icy cold vacuum of space, well that was hard on her. It was why starbases had been her choice assignments up until then, because at least there was a few thousand other people out there drifting along with you.

There was a knock at the officer’s door, which she’d left open because the traffic of people walking past in the hallway helped with her loneliness. She turned to spot the Chief Intelligence Officer Lieutenant Commander Jake Dornall at the frame of the door.

“Hey, what are you up to?” Dornall asked.

“Just moving digital files around to rebalance cargo. Also an inventory on what we have and what we left at the Andromeda. Doing a calculation on how much we have in the way of supplies if we wanted to limp back to Earth like this,” Aka said.

Dornall entered, “Hopefully it won’t come to that. Someone will figure this out.”

Aka shrugged, clearly unconvinced but not wanting to argue that they were all going to die in the vacuum of space. His attempt to make her feel better was ineffective, but not mean so it didn’t need her to call it out.

“Look, you seemed upset in our last senior staff meeting,” Dornall said.

“Captain ask you to check on me?” Aka asked.

Dornall shook his head and approached, “Nope. Just intuition, wanted to look after people where I can. Captain is too salty of a sea dog to really go in for that touch feely stuff.”

“I’m fine Commander,” Aka said.

“Jake. And it’s okay not to be fine. As long as we’re there to support our staff, we get to be human too. Or Risian, or Vulcan…” Jake Dornall said.

Aka nodded, “Well I’m okay.”

Dornall nodded, “You ever been to Risa?”

“Will it make you sad when I say no?” Aka asked.

“Only in so far as we have lovely sunsets. My point is people always ask me why I joined Starfleet and left the most popular pleasure planet in the Federation. But space is in my bones, being out here feels right. And my father served and I wanted to do what he did,” Dornall said, “But that doesn’t mean I don’t get that space isn’t for everyone. That there’s a cost to what we do, being so far from those we care about.”

“Hawaii is kind of like Risa in a way. People, most on Earth, come to vacation, they only see it as a place to relax, or party, or find themselves,” Aka said, “But it’s a real place, and you can be there and be sad or miss people. Still, I’m connected to it, and being so far out here without that world around me. It can be hard.”

Dornall nodded sympathetically, “Let’s go get a drink, we won’t get there anytime soon and we can relax.”

— USS Falcon, Bridge —

“Play that back again Hume,” Captain Paul Aike said of the transmission that they’d all just seen.

The officer at tactical nodded and replayed the message that they’d just received, the first that they’d gotten since leaving the USS Andromeda back in the Triangle. 

‘Peoples of Alpha Centauri, hear the voice of the Vaadwaur Supremacy. Your isolation is by our design. Your defenses are inadequate. Your worlds are claimed for the glory of the supremacy.’

“What do we know about the Vaadwaur Supremacy?” Aike asked.

Lieutenant William Hume’s hand flew across the controls of the computer as he pulled up what little they had on the race from reports over a decade ago from the USS Voyager. It was not much, the ship had contacted so many species in the Delta Quadrant that this one had not really registered as a threat next to some of them such as the Borg.

“Put together reports, alert senior staff,” the captain said, “I want all department heads in the conference room one in three hours,” Aike said, adding, “And get us to Federation space.”