Live to Rise

Posted on Thu Jun 18th, 2026 @ 12:03pm by Captain Wilkan Targaryen & Commander Ceara O'Hare & Lieutenant T'Krell & Lieutenant Harris Zim & Lieutenant Sherlock Grimes & Vaelira Daro & Elara Jyn

4,375 words; about a 22 minute read

Mission: Homecoming
Location: Bridge, U.S.S. Sulaco
Timeline: 3190-11-01, 10:15

The anticipated counter-strike never came.

Instead of a localized apocalypse, a tense, deafening silence settled over the Bridge. Commander Karys gripped the rim of the center dais, her Denobulan eyes fixed on the main viewscreen. The white United Earth warship hung out there in the black, its primary weapons dark, but its engines pulsed with a terrifyingly steady, calculated power. It wasn't retreating, and it certainly wasn't disabled; it was pacing them, holding position just outside of Zim's current manual targeting arc like a predator deciding which angle to tear into next.

Karys let out a slow, disciplined breath, though her jaw remained rigid. This waiting game was a tactical anomaly. She had braced herself for a brutal, chaotic exchange of heavy payloads, yet they were left in this suffocating vacuum of inaction. Her crew was practically vibrating with adrenaline; Scarlet was still leaning over her controls, her grin fading into a look of restless anticipation, while Zim kept his hands hovered over the manual triggers, waiting for the ship to cross back into his sights. It was infuriating. The enemy had all the time in the world, and every second the Sulaco spent dancing on manual thrusters drew them closer to a total power collapse. Karys refused to let her guard down, her gaze darting between the helm and the tactical overlay, waiting for the trap to spring.

The heavy atmosphere broke with a sharp, cascading hum. The jagged blue light of a short-range site-to-site transport materialized directly beside the command chair, dissolving a heartbeat later to reveal Captain Wilkan Targaryen arriving back on the Bridge.

Wilkan quickly surveyed his Bridge like he'd never left it, the centuries of training in command and leadership helping him to navigate the world around him in an instant. Quickly crossing the distance of the upper level toward the Captain's Chair, he addressed his XO, "Report."

"The enemy is playing a waiting game, Captain," Karys reported, her voice rapid and precise. "Zim's Phaser strikes took out fifty percent of their shields and clipped their navigational arrays, but they aren't retreating. They’ve pulled back just outside our manual targeting arc, keeping their primary engines hot." She gestured sharply toward the viewer. "They’re pacing us, waiting to bleed us dry. Elara’s locked down their sensor grid and jammed their external communications, giving us a temporary blind spot, but it’s a war of attrition. Scarlet is holding us in a drift on pure manual compensation, but we're shunting every scrap of auxiliary power just to keep the structural integrity fields from collapsing. We've held the line, Sir, but we are running on fumes."

Wilkan processed the information as it was given, using the details to help support his own decision as being the right one. So many times in his career he'd realized they only had one shot to be right, and this was one of those times. Unfortunately, in an imperfect galaxy, they had to execute this plan perfectly.

"Thank you, Commander, you've all done well," he answered her in measured tones that were reassuring, but still direct. He turned to address the Bridge and opened a channel to Engineering, "Lieutenant Grimes is working to isolate the virus as we speak, and I have every confidence that he'll disable it shortly. That, however, doesn't mean that we're going to let the enemy think we're free. Quite the opposite in fact. Once the Lieutenant has isolated the virus, Sulaco is going to die."

"Helm," he looked to Scarlet, "When Lieutenant Grimes signals I want you to spool up our engines like we're going to jump away, but keep us in position here."

"Sure thing, boss," the young pilot replied, maintaining the current movement of the ship.

"Vaelira, this is the Captain, when Scarlet powers the Drive cut power on port side except for phaser banks. Then, cut starboard power. Make it look like a cascade failure. They'll probably think that the Phaser Capacitance Cells kept their charge."

Vaelira heard the order through the open channel in Engineering and went still for half a second, one hand braced against the console, the other hovering over the power distribution map she had just spent the last several minutes keeping alive by force of will and bad manners. Cut port power. Then starboard. Make the ship look like she was dying.

She did not like it.

Not because she failed to understand the tactic. She understood it immediately, and that was half the problem. Wilkan wanted the enemy to see a crippled ship, one too wounded to run and too unstable to threaten, while quietly leaving enough bite in the phaser banks to make them regret believing it. It was clever. It was ugly. It also meant asking Sulaco to perform failure convincingly while she was already bruised, strained, and running on whatever scraps Vaelira had managed to claw out of the non-essential grid.

For a moment she looked toward the mycelial hub, its containment light pulsing faintly through the alarms and dimmed panels. The drive was still hot enough to answer if called, but not happily. Nothing down here was happy. The ship felt like a body holding itself together because no one had given it permission to fall apart.

Vaelira exhaled once, sharp and controlled, then opened the channel.

“Understood, Captain,” she said, voice tight but steady. “I can make her look dead. I’d prefer not to make her believe it.”

Her fingers started moving before the last word had left her mouth, separating the port-side distribution tree from anything the enemy could read cleanly. She built the collapse in layers rather than tearing power away all at once: lights first, secondary processing next, then the visible load indicators that would make the failure look like it was spreading faster than they could contain it. The phaser banks stayed fed under the noise, masked beneath the dying pulse of the port grid.

“Port-side cascade is staged and waiting on Helm’s spool-up,” she added, eyes flicking through the false failure path as it settled into place. “Phaser banks are protected. Starboard will follow on your mark.”

She swallowed the little knot of protest sitting at the back of her throat and pushed it aside. This was not cruelty to the ship. This was theatre. Controlled, necessary theatre.

Probably.

Vaelira looked once more at the raw structural feeds, then tightened the safety margins by another fraction.

“Just be aware,” she said, a shade drier now, because if she didn’t give the worry somewhere to go it would sit too visibly in her voice, “she’s already had a very unpleasant day. If we’re going to pretend she’s dying, I’d like us all to remember the pretending part.”

"Zim, once they move in to board us, I want you to fire directly at that ship's reactor with a full Phaser spread. No computer assisted locks, though, you'll have to keep up the manual targeting because the computer assisted lock will give us away."

"Acknowledged." Zim spoke without looking up from his console. His hands already began to work the controls to get the locks. Manual targeting was nowhere near as fast as computer target lock.

"Captain, with respect," Karys objected, her eyes unblinking as she gestured back toward the steady pulse of the enemy's engines on the viewer, "baiting them into a boarding action is an incredibly dangerous gamble based on a massive assumption. They haven't made a single move to indicate they want the Sulaco intact and if we fake a cascade failure and play dead, we are voluntarily dropping our defenses. If their actual directive is to eliminate us, we aren't setting a trap, Sir, we're giving them a completely defenseless target to blow out of the stars."

Targaryen turned to his XO, "You're not wrong in your concern, Commander, actually there's a time I would've shared your trepidation, but I have a strong feeling that there's more to this attack than meets the eye. I may be Lanthanite by birth, but I'm also El-Aurian on my father's side. We listen, and right now I'm feeling more from this attack than professional, this is personal, and it's more than just not wanting to rejoin the Federation."

"I'll try to make a fake system failure protocol. Something that they can see and believe is true, but they shouldn't be able to confirm anything in terms of us being active and ready", Elara told the people around her. Her eyes were locked on the protocol she was creating. "I can do it so it looks like a system and sensor failure and that the engines, power supply and air supply are the only things working", she fell silent. Like Wilkan had just said about things feeling personal... she had to agree. Something was going on, and she wanted to know what and why. "What do they have to gain?", she muttered under her breath. This was growing out of control, and doing so fast. Since the Sulaco wasn't scrap metal and none of them were dead so far so good, meant that they had something, or someone, they wanted.

"Yeah, this is weird," Scarlet remarked. "If it had been a strategy, they would have changed their method when they realized it wasn't working. Hell, they'd actually be doing something now, rather than just keeping their distance. When we trigger the fake failure, I can also imitate a loss of helm control," she added. "Just cut all thrusters and stabilizers and let her drift purely on inertia."

"If your intuition is wrong, Captain, we are handing them this ship on a silver platter," Karys pressed, her voice dropping lower, meant strictly for him as she stepped closer to the center dais. As the enthusiasm spread across the consoles, her Denobulan brow furrowed as her pragmatic instincts fought against the sheer audacity of the plan. She locked her unblinking gaze onto his hybrid eyes, "But if we are throwing this ship into the dark, I want a fallback."

She turned sharply toward the tactical console before Wilkan could fully answer. "Zim, overcharge the Phasers right now while we still have the auxiliary lines connected. If they open their primary launch tubes instead of launching breaching pods, I want enough residual juice in those capacitance cells to tear their reactor apart, with or without computer assistance."

At his Captain's Chair, Wilkan Targaryen watched the XO of the Sulaco issue orders. For a moment, perhaps only a moment, he felt the trappings of the past wash over him. He smirked at the thought of past lives, the stories of soldiers and explorers long gone. It was hard to fathom, especially knowing his family was still out there somewhere in the void. It pulled him back from the exuberance to the harsh reality that he could be wrong and that this 'listening' of his had led him down a dark road to a brick wall.

"Let's carry out those orders," Targaryen acknowledged as they waited for Lieutenant Grimes. "Play dead."

Scarlet smirked as she entered the necessary commands to spool up the spore drive without actually jumping. "Ready on my end."

The Captain nodded, waiting patiently for the others.

"I'm ready too. The fake protocol code is ready to be transmitted. I'm overriding their sensors and all systems that can analyze what we are doing. The protocol is on their end now, meaning they don't have much to work with", Elara said as she worked. "They are pretty much blind for the time being. They are already trying to get back online. I figure we have about 40-60 minutes before they manage to get some of their systems back online.

Zim watched the levels on his console. There was a fine line between overcharging the phasers and overloading the phaser. He had to walk that proverbial tightrope. "Phasers are overcharged and holding."

Wilkan nodded, his eyes locked on the viewscreen as the piece of theatre began to take form. He could feel the baseline hum of the Sulaco change beneath his boots as the power distribution shifted, a physical shudder that echoed Vaelira’s dry warnings. He didn't answer the Chief Engineer over the open comms, but the grim set of his jaw softened for a fraction of a second. He knew exactly what he was asking of his ship, and of the crew holding her pieces together.

"T'Krell," Wilkan commanded, his voice dropping into a low, clinical register as he stepped down to the lower tier of the Bridge. "Keep a tight lid on our internal comms grid. The moment we drop the main power, I want all background chatter routed through low-frequency, hard-wired relays. If the Earth ship catches even a whisper of a coordinated tactical hand-off, the illusion breaks before they leave their pocket."

The tall Caitain nodded gravely: "Understood, sir. They won't hear a sound Captain," he assured him.

Sherlock finally got to the Bridge after fighting with the virus for what seemed like forever. He did look a little worn out, but chasing the virus in the manner he did for so long would do that. He stepped out of the Turbolift, his eyes sweeping across it until they locked with Wilkan's. Giving a nod that it was finished. Walking down and around to his station, Sherlock relieved the officer there.

He turned back toward the center dais, his predatory gaze shifting between the tactical display and the looming white hull outside. He didn't take his seat; instead, he rested his hands on the back of the Captain's Chair, waiting for the final green light from the core. Right on cue, his Tricom gave a sharp, distinctive chime - the clean telemetry signal from the Computer Core indicating that the handshake was isolated and the infection was officially purged.

"Grimes just cut the tether," Wilkan announced, a dangerous, thin smile finally breaking across his features. He locked eyes with his First Officer, then looked toward the helm and engineering consoles. "The virus is gone, the slate is clean. Now, let's show them a convincing corpse. Scarlet, Vaelira - kill the lights."

"Executing face jump, then cutting thrusters," Scarlet acknowledged as she let go of the controls and pressed a button on the console in front of her. Outside of the bridge, the hull plating of the saucer section began to spin, and ripples of energy appeared, as if Sulaco was about to engage her spore drive. After a tad more than a second, Scarlet pressed the button again, and all movement ceased.

The transformation was instantaneous and suffocating.

As Scarlet cut the thrusters and Vaelira executed the staged power drain, the vibrant crimson glow of the red alert strobes vanished, plunging the Bridge into near-total darkness. The rhythmic thrum of the primary systems bled out into a hollow, dead silence, leaving only the faint, mechanical hiss of emergency life support and the ghostly green luminescence of Zim's manual tactical buffers.

On the viewscreen, the Sulaco appeared to stall out entirely, rolling with a helpless, heavy inertia into the black void.

Wilkan stood motionless beside his darkened chair, his breathing slow and disciplined as he adjusted to the shadows. He didn't speak; any verbal command now carried too much risk. His eyes remained locked on the white United Earth warship, waiting through the tense gloom to see if the predator would finally take the bait and close the distance. For a grueling, endless minute, the white United Earth warship simply hung there in the darkness, its passive sensors likely drinking in the Sulaco's sudden, violent electronic death.

Then, through the HUD-less window, the enemy vessel slowly pivoted on its axis, its primary propulsion flares dimming to a low, predatory hum as it corrected its course. It didn't open its primary torpedo tubes, nor did it charge its high-yield main batteries. Instead, a series of localized, low-intensity energy signatures bloomed along its ventral hull — the unmistakable power spike of short-range docking thrusters and targeted electromagnetic boarding arrays. The predator was taking the bait. Believing the relic was completely paralyzed and defenseless. The warship slowly began to close the fifteen-kilometer gap, creeping silently through the black void to claim its prize.

The closing distance felt agonizingly slow, a tense countdown measured only by the silent, green pulse of the manual tactical console. On the viewer, the white hull grew larger, shedding its distant silhouette to reveal the sleek, formidable geometry of the predator. They were within twelve kilometers. Then ten.

Wilkan didn't move a muscle, his posture rigid as a statue in the gloom. His El-Aurian lineage hummed with the proximity of the threat: it felt like a hand reaching out in the dark, confident, aggressive, and entirely certain of its triumph. He let them come closer, waiting for the precise threshold where their overconfidence would turn into their graveyard. He didn't speak. Instead, he raised his right hand, fingers outstretched in a silent signal to Karys and Zim. Hold. They needed the warship fully committed to the boarding vector, completely drifted out of its own optimal firing lines. If Zim unleashed the overcharged Phaser spread a second too early, the Earth ship's automated micro-thrusters might still yank it out of the path of a catastrophic reactor breach.

Eight kilometers. The faint, metallic whine of the enemy's electromagnetic boarding arrays began to induce a low-frequency hum through the Sulaco's dead hull plates. Wilkan slowly lowered his thumb, leaving a single index finger raised. The white warship loomed massive on the featureless viewer now, its ventral hull practically scraping their sensor threshold as its electromagnetic arrays locked onto the Sulaco’s outer framework. The hull beneath Wilkan’s boots gave a sharp, agonizing creak as the enemy ship's magnetic tether gripped them, anchoring the two vessels together in the silent dark.

This was the point of no return.

Sherlock was watching the other vessel with baited breath. Still watching the information coming up on his console. Obviously he couldn't mention anything that may have come up yet, but the silence would end soon.

Wilkan's hand snapped down into a tightly clenched fist - the universal, silent command to strike.

Zim wasted no time in pressing the commands. The Sulaco exploded in a barrage of weapons fire. If it wasn't meant for battle it would have been quite beautiful. The Capellan stood solemn and stone-faced, it was the tradition of his people to look into the eyes of those you killed. This was the closest he could get in this moment. The enemy vessel exploded in a ball of fire and shrapnel. Then all at once the fire was gone as there was no oxygen to feed the flames. The proverbial dust settled and calm returned to space once more. "Target destroyed."

The sudden, violent flash of the Earth ship’s destruction washed over the darkened Bridge, casting harsh, skeletal shadows across the consoles before the vacuum of space swallowed the fire. In the lingering gloom, the silence that returned was entirely different from the one before—it was the quiet of an execution carried out in absolute darkness.

Scarlet pumped a fist. "Excellent shooting, Zim," she commented with a smirk as she reengaged the helm controls, ready to stabilize the ship's trajectory. "What's the plan now, boss?"

"We held the line, Commander," Wilkan murmured, "Now we find out who tried to cross it. First though we need to ensure we don't become the next ghost ship drifting out here." Wilkan looked back over his shoulder toward the Engineering stations, "Vaelira, Grimes, Scarlet, let's bring the lady back to life. Restore primary power, get our tactical grid back online, and drop the fake failure protocols. I want a full diagnostic run on the Spore Drive within the hour."

Vaelira’s voice came back over the channel from Engineering, steady beneath the alarms and the half-lit gloom. “On it, Captain. Bringing primary power back in stages.” Her hands moved across the console without hesitation, stripping away the false cascade she had built only minutes earlier and feeding life back into the ship carefully rather than all at once. Sulaco had played dead convincingly enough. Now Vaelira wanted her waking up cleanly, not lurching back with half her systems still angry.

She watched the first wave of power settle through the grid before letting the next one follow. “Fake failure protocols are dropping now,” she added, eyes fixed on the spore-drive readings as they began to behave like honest numbers again. “I’ll start the full drive diagnostic as soon as she stops pretending to be a corpse.”

He turned toward the Science station, locking eyes with Elara, "Elara, you said Vanguard-9's handler is somewhere nearby in this system. Now that their watchdog is scrap metal, they know exactly where we are. Scan the debris field of that warship - your first priority is finding survivors, the second is their black box. Find it and pull it in before it drifts out of transporter range. Scarlet will help you."

Elara nodded. "On it", she said, her hands already moving over her station's interface. "Okay", she said a moment later. "In that debris, there's a transmitter about 15 kilometers south of us. I do not see any survivors in the debris, but there is a living being near that transmitter. Black box is less than 2 kilometers north of our location. I'm looking into the living being now". With that she fell silent. What the heck?!. "It isn't a being like humans, betzoid, creatures that can think. This is more... feral, in lack of better wording. It seems to be their version of a guard dog. And it has teeth. It's sole mission is to guard the transmitter. No more, no less. We need to get rid of that thing if we want the transmitter".

"Where, exactly, are you putting "south", in open space?," Scarlet asked with a chuckle, before checking the nav displays. "But, yes. 15 klicks pretty much in a straight line towards our rear. Black box is two, dead ahead. Meanwhile, the station remains 15 kilometres to zero-nine-zero. Wonderful how everything is at right angles, isn't it?"

She tapped a few commands on the helm console. "Black box is in range for tractor beam pickup from our position, or we could beam it on board. Either way, easy job, no need for us to move."

Stepping back to the Captain's Chair, he finally sat down, his fingers tapping a rhythmic pattern on the dark upholstery as the console lights began to blink back to life around him. He looked toward his First Officer, a faint, wry smirk returning to his face, "She did pretty well for a first date, don't you think, Exec?"

"She has an exceptional bite for an old girl, Captain," Karys replied, the fierce, defensive tension that had locked her jaw finally dissolving. She watched the expanding cloud of silent, shimmering shrapnel on the Viewscreen where the United Earth ship had been just moments before. The immediate threat was pulverized, but the tactical reality hadn't changed. "I'll oversee the internal security sweeps while the team hunts for that black box. We need answers before whoever is running this operation decides to send a fleet."

"An excellent precaution, Commander," Wilkan replied smoothly as he maintained his easy smile, but behind his calm facade the gears of a centuries-trained mind shifted with clinical precision. The El-Aurian side of his mind wasn't just listening to the background hum of the universe right now; he was listening to Sulaco too. On paper and internal security sweep was exactly what a diligent First Officer should do after a virus infiltration and a close-quarters engagement, but something about it felt off to him. "Take the Chief of Security with you, Exec, two sets of eyes are better than one when you're hunting for lingering digital ghosts, and I want our security arrays locked down tight."

Karys gave Wilkan a brief, reassuring nod, "Of course, Captain." She stepped toward Tactical, gesturing for the tall Capellan to join her before turning back to the Captain. "An extra pair of hands will certainly expedite the isolation protocols. We'll keep you updated, Sir," she added smoothly. She glanced over her shoulder at her new partner. "After you, Lieutenant. Let's make sure our digital ghosts are thoroughly exorcised."

Zim nodded in acknowledgement and stepped out from behind his console. A sidearm was holstered and he stepped onto the lift without another word.

Before Karys could even take her first step toward the turbolift where Zim stood waiting, Wilkan rose smoothly from his command chair. The rhythmic tap of his fingers against the armrest stopped, replaced by an unyielding, commanding presence that drew the immediate focus of the upper tier.

"Delay that sweep for just a moment, Commander," Wilkan called out, his voice sharp enough to halt her in her tracks. He turned his eyes toward the navigation console, his hybrid gaze locking onto the young helmsman. "Scarlet, you have the Bridge. Keep us decoupled from the local transmitter's sensor sweeps, maintain manual station-keeping, and assist with the tractor lock on that black box. Nobody sneezes without your permission."

Wilkan turned his head slightly toward the shadow lingering near the rear science alcove. Commodore Kovich stood there, entirely detached from the active crew, his physical notepad tucked under his arm. "Commander, Commodore, please join me in the Ready Room," Wilkan commanded, gesturing toward the bulkhead doors before stepping down from the upper level. "We need to look at the telemetry before anyone begins pulling wires on the lower decks."

Karys suppressed a flash of genuine frustration, her Denobulan ridges tightening as she pivoted away from the lift. She reset her expression into a mask of cold, ambitious impatience, tightly clutching her tactical PADD against her uniform. "Of course, Captain. I trust this won't stall our schedule for long."

Kovich adjusted his spectacles with a single, precise movement, offering no verbal reply as he fell into step behind them.

At the threshold, Wilkan paused, casting a long, calculating look back across the busy Bridge. He watched his crew rebuild their grid—knowing the true threat had only just begun.

 

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