The Signal

Posted on Tue Jul 22nd, 2025 @ 10:26pm by Lieutenant JG Sheldon Parsons & Lieutenant Bailey Good

Mission: Seven Souls
Location: Shuttle Bay
Timeline: Mission Day 1 at 1955

[Shuttle Bay]
[Kazon Shuttle Interior]
[MD 1: 1955 Hours]

The inside of the Kazon shuttle felt too quiet—like a room that had been waiting a little too long to be useful again. The air was stale, the kind of stale that even the Sojourner’s filters couldn’t scrub clean. And the walls—angular and crudely assembled by Starfleet standards—felt closer than they should have. Sheldon Parsons knelt near the primary control node, the blue light of his interface caliper casting flickers against the uneven bulkheads.

“Still doesn’t like the uplink,” he muttered, frowning as he prodded the bundled wires of a bypass conduit. “Come on, you overheated brick. Work with me.” He smacked the thing, remembering his recent adventure as C3-PO on the holodeck, similarly smacking the dome of R2-Deb2. A painful pang resonated through his heart at that, remembering Iry and Noah in their own Star Wars guises.

Seemingly in response to the smack, a spatter of static flashed across the monitor, then steadied—just long enough to suggest hope. Parsons adjusted his posture, thumb tracing the edge of the cracked console. The Kazon tech was like a dog that bit even when fed. But he'd worked with worse. As he leaned in further and adjusted the settings on the caliper, he thought he caught movement from the corner of his eye. Was it Good? She'd mentioned coming to help.

Without turning, he raised his voice just enough to reach whoever was coming aboard. “Careful with the ceiling,” he called out. “This thing was built for Kazon shoulders and Klingon stubbornness.” Tongue out, half-lolled as he concentrated on adjusting the connection to the shuttle, he suddenly whooped with delight--which resulted in biting said tongue. "Ow," he hissed, thoughts still mostly on the newly established connection with the shuttle.

"Suddenly I'm back in Secondary school, and the Zaldan boy who everybody's says likes me is trying to shoulder-check me into the data kiosk." Bailey quipped with a muttered good nature. She pushed her razor cut brown hair back behind her ear and focused on Sheldon. She wore a bit too much eye makeup. It gave her an oddly edgy appearance for a Starfleet officer. She put her hands up as Sheldon whooped and then chuckled when he bit his tongue. "I'm not even sure I can unpack what I just saw there, buddy." With a careful duck, Bailey proceeded deeper inside. It was... sturdy. A sturdy craft. "Did I mention I'm claustrophobic? People actually go out in this chunk of pig-iron? Willingly?" Her nose wrinkled, "In space?"

"Believe it or not," Sheldon remarked dryly with just a hint of post-bite tongue numbness, "this thing would be a luxury craft for some of the people out in this part of space." He tapped a few more commands into the interface while nodding Good over to join him. A rough schematic then wavered into view—a half-corrupted echo of its last handshake with the Kordra-Lisrit. “There’s still a trace," the engineer hrmm'd. "Barely, but it's there," Sheldon commented lowly. "Might be enough to help us find Subrek’s ship if we boost the signal right? Once we have that, we can plan our attack..."

Bailey's nostrils flared as she detected a strong, stale pong. It was like a combination of alien BO, fermented alfalfa and... burned metal. "This place is charming." She dripped with sarcasm, finally settling near Sheldon with crossed legs. "Alright tech-stud, fill me in." She raised a piece of equipment she'd brought with her. It had an interface, a display and a rather unusual sleek black design. "I can do with barely and traces." She raised the unusual looking PADD-like device. "Data Scrubber, Dehazer. Great for spying on Romulans and making sure that Yridian guy doesn't get away with your account number from the Bank of Bolias. Here. Give me." She stuck out her hand.

"Tech...stud?" Parsons looked up from his work, eyes unfocusing for the briefest of moments in his confusion. Was she coming onto him? Here, in this filthy Kazon shuttlecraft with his elbows buried deep in the guts of the damn thing? And without knowing he was of the homosexual persuasion? Clearly the ship's scuttlebutt had not caught up to her yet. "Err, sure..." he said, coming back to the moment and extracting his right hand from inside the console, making way for Good to do whatever she was going to do with her data scrubber. "I've never banked on Bolias but if your experience there helps us find our people," he shrugged, "then by all means."

Bailey's eyebrows rose with a bemused air. But she said nothing about how Sheldon's quirky nature showed on his face. She'd sat down on the floor of the cockpit near Sheldon. Her legs were parted, knees up and feet planted. "Ah, Bank of Orion man, then, huh?" Is all she teased him with. "Brave." She sighed a musical sigh and again pushed her straight bangs behind her ear.

As the woman worked, her appearance struck him. The heavy eye make up reminded Sheldon of someone from a TV show he'd discovered in Noah's archive. It hadn't been one Noah had mentioned as having watched, so he'd suggested they check out some of the "episodes," as media-makers on ancient Earth used to call them. The archive only had a smattering of them and they didn't seem to be in the right order but he and Noah had still enjoyed what they'd seen of The Expanse. And right now, Good was giving Shelly some Camina Drummer realness with her eyeliner game.

She finally broke with a smile. It was a warm, toothy and broad feature, hinted with somethiung awkward. "You're staring." She chuckled, voice whimsically poignant, but flattened back out as she returned to studying the data. Her thumb traced against her chin in thinking. Her fingers had been in action this entire time, her gaze Noah like in their dark nature. What would Noah look like with that heavy of makeup? And how much was she like Camina Drummer, indeed. "Found their warp harmonic signature... that 's a start. And their plasma ionization rate. Potential bread crumbs."

"I just....your eyes are very striking with that make up," Sheldon said, holding up his hands in an I'm-gay-not-a-threat-and-definitely-not-flirting-with-you kind of way.

Bailey raised an eyebrow but didn't say anything beyond a quirk of acknowledgment.

"And a warp harmonic sig?" Sheldon asked, voice raising up a nasal octave as he leaned in to study what Good/Drummer had found. "This is good," he nodded, absent-mindedly rubbing at the bridge of his nose as if pushing up imaginary eye-glasses. "Not 'Captain! We've found them!'-level good," he mock-acted the exclamation, his face scrunched like a rabbit's, "but we can definitely work with that. Do we have any other ships or contacts out this way? Someone we could check the sensor logs of for signs of this warp signature?"

Good agreed. It was a start but they needed more. "Uh..." Bailey drawled it out, dropping her eyes to her data. "Two ships. The Shivad.". Her fingers swept at the data. "A Malon waste transport. Probably looking for new dumping grounds." Her fingers swept up as an odd signal began to pulse from Sheldon's equipment. "And a Hazari prison transfer ship. The Batyfel." She sent the data back to Sheldon with a quick turn of her tool toward him. "We can send it up to the Bridge and hope they make a call. The strange pulse from the shuttle again vibed in the small, spartan and uncomfortable space. Bailey narrowed her eyes. "What is that? Did we trip an alarm or something?"

Parsons' head had been in the idea of the bridge making contact with the named ships. When Good pointed out the pulse, however, the engineer's attention refocused, his eyes drawing down to the display of his device. Good had been right: there was something there. Long, tapered fingers picking at the controls, he isolated the signal and looked at its wave-pattern. While the pattern seemed a bit out of the norm for background cosmic radiation, Shelly's brain didn't immediately identify anything extraordinary about the signal.

"I think it's just a bit of background radiation. Nothing worth--" Parsons began a thought but didn't finish it, something now niggling in the back of his brain. The niggling pulled on more mental resources than before, drawing his eyes again to the signal's waveform. From just looking at the peaks and valleys, nothing really stood out, so why was his brain latching onto it like a terrier who won't let go of a toy? He pushed the memory of his mother's little dog--Remmy--out of his mind, looking again at the readout with renewed curiosity.

On a whim, Shelly ran the signal through an audio filter and played it aloud. Click...click...click...click, it began uniformly. Click-click-click-click, came faster now. Click-click-click-click-click... The engineer squinched his eyes, trying to recall why the audio pattern seemed familiar. The backseat driver of his mind veered his thoughts to Phaserbeak, now mostly-reconstructed after Noah's attempt to show off the prototype to their new roommate some days back. But this was no time to be thinking about--

"Wait," he hit the mental brakes. "Waiiiit one second," Parsons said, gaining momentum as this thoughts tumbled together and congealed, suddenly-possibly-maybe identifying the connection that'd been cooking in his unconscious mind. Fingers dancing on a PADD, he called up the file he and Noah had been viewing the night before this horrible nightmare of Subrek's making had begun.

The video file was near the end where they'd left it: music playing while the names of people who'd worked on the media's creation faded in and out. 'They called them The Credits,' Shelly heard Noah's explanation-from-the-past in his brain. And over said Credits, playing from the speakers of the PADD, was a song...

"You got the touch! You got the power!" Blaring synth and metal-guitars accompanied the words, the clicking of The Signal's™ beats almost syncing up.

As realization of what he was hearing hit, Shelly's eyes went wide, his lips forming a barely heard word: "Optimus..."

Bailey had blinked several times in Sheldon's train of thought. Her head craned ever more as he seemed lost in some kind of thought process. When he spoke his late, Bailey snapped her fingers near his faceas if to break him out of his trance. "Uhhh, Sojourner to Parsons. Hailing frequencies open. Status report." Her smile blossomed with a cautious optimism. "What... in the Hell are you talking about? Optimus?" She lifted the PADD and data they were looking at, "Can we focus?"

"Th-th-that is the focus," Parsons snapped out of his reverie, eyes fully landing on Good and full of the same exalted smile that graced his face. "Noah figured out a way to send us a message!! Well, sort of," he chewed at the inside of his right cheek nervously, thoughts racing. "The signal alone isn't enough to isolate the Kordra-Lisrit's location but," his mind was in overdrive now, "if one of those other ships did pick up the warp harmonic signature you found, we might be able to use the two in conjunction!" Hyper-focus fire lit his face, eyes blazing with possibilities.

Bailey's eyes narrowed. Who was Noah again? "Uhhh okay so that's good news?" She said a bit skeptically.

"W-we need to talk to the bridge. Like, immediately," Sheldon added. He stood in a hurry, hitting his head for only the 100th time in the cramped Kazon shuttle. But it didn't matter: head trauma or not, they had a lead--and a solid one at that. "I'm uh...you can call me Shelly," he offered Good both his friend-name and a hand up. "Want to help me deliver the good news to the Captain?" He was smiling but something a little off flickered behind his eyes. Maybe it's enough to earn back the Captain's kindness, he thought to himself. Not that such a thing should have to be earned...

"Ok." She nodded. "OK let's go to the Bridge then. Sure." She nodded again and tapped her commbadge. "Good to Captain Kodak. Lieutenant Parsons thinks he has a big lead on the Kazon." She smiled in a controlled but chuckled-through-exasperation way, "And I'm gonna have to let him tell you about it, because as far as I can see, he might as well be speaking Klingon." She dashed her tongue to wet her lip, "We also have a lead on a harmonic signature but we need to triangulate with CONN."

"D-don't let her be humble, sir," Parsons spoke up, trusting the computer to pick up on his participation and carry his audio as well. "Good found the harmonic signature and helped me focus. We'll explain it all when we get there...if that's ok?" The last was a question -- like a son afraid his father would disapprove if he didn't speak or do something exactly the right way as was expected.

"Good work...to both of you," came Kodak's response. He sounded weary...heavy, even. But there was a spark of admiration in his voice, too. "We'll await your arrival then. See you shortly. Bridge out."

Parsons gulped. This whole being-part-of-the-command-structure thing--even if in an acting capacity--was stressing him the hell out. But at least they had a direction to follow now. And hopefully? It would lead right to the Kordra-Lisrit and their people. "Let's go," he nodded to Good, then lead the way out of the shuttle.

A Post By:

Lieutenant Bailey Good
Assistant Chief of Security

Lieutenant JG Sheldon Parsons
Assistant Chief Engineer

Captain Björn Kodak