Not So Solar Flared

Posted on Wed Oct 14th, 2026 @ 10:31pm by Lieutenant Commander Elyse White

1,340 words; about a 7 minute read

Mission: Echoes in the Triangle

Elyse had a lot of experience cleaning up transmissions. Before joining the Arcadia, she had spent years working on a starbase where half her job seemed to involve taking broken, corrupted or otherwise barely intelligible communications and turning them into something that could actually be understood. She had picked up more tricks than most communications officers along the way, particularly the ones she had learned while working in Intel, and she knew better than to accept the first explanation her instruments offered her. Even so, when the latest transmission came through in a tangled mess of static and distortion, her first thought was that they had simply been unlucky. A solar flare, perhaps, or some other subspace disturbance had probably chewed its way through the signal.

She pulled the transmission apart piece by piece, isolating the carrier wave and stripping away the worst of the interference. “Computer, reconstruct the original transmission using predictive interpolation. Prioritise vocal frequencies.” The computer chirped, and beneath the static a voice finally began to emerge.

“...Arcadia... if you receive this transmission, you must—”

The signal dissolved into a shriek of distortion. Elyse frowned and ran it again, this time using a different set of filters. The result was marginally better. The voice surfaced for a few precious seconds before disappearing beneath the noise.

“...you must exercise c-caution. S-s-something dooooesn't–”

A sharp electronic beep interrupted the sentence making Elyse flinch. She replayed the final few seconds, her eyes fixed on the waveform. The beep appeared at precisely the same point each time. It wasn't random static. It wasn't the messy interference she would have expected from a solar flare. It was clean, deliberate and almost perfectly positioned over the transmission.

“Again but make that beep quieter,” she murmured. The recording played once more.

“...exercise caution. Something doesn't–”

Beep.

Static.

Elyse leaned closer to the console, her expression tightening. She isolated the audio frequency and then compared it against the underlying carrier wave. There were gaps in the transmission, but they weren't the sort of gaps created by a damaged signal. Parts of it had been removed while other sections remained almost unnaturally clear.

Had someone had altered it?

She ran another reconstruction, coaxing what little remained from the corrupted sections. A few fragments surfaced: “...Arcadia...” then “...exercise caution...” and, beneath layers of distortion, something that sounded suspiciously like “...doesn't add up. Their record–”

Elyse sat back. That was enough to make her uncomfortable. She tried one last time to recover the missing section, but the computer returned nothing useful. Whatever had originally followed the warning was either too badly damaged or had been deliberately stripped from the transmission. She couldn't tell which, and that bothered her almost as much as the message itself.

“Computer, flag this transmission as potentially compromised and notify the captain. Don't attempt any further automatic reconstruction.” The computer chirped in acknowledgement.

Elyse remained at the console, staring at the frozen waveform. A solar flare could explain a damaged transmission. It could explain static, missing packets and corrupted audio. It couldn't explain a perfectly timed beep cutting across a warning, and it certainly couldn't explain why the parts that remained sounded as though someone had been very careful about what the crew of the Arcadia was allowed to hear.

Whatever had happened to the transmission, Elyse was beginning to suspect that the distortion wasn't the message's greatest problem. The message itself was.

Elyse returned to the console, but she didn't dismiss the damaged transmission completely. In fact, she kept it playing on repeat, she just didn't have the computer try and aid it anymore. The warning continued to bother her, particularly because of how little of it had survived. She had spent years in Intelligence learning that missing information could be more dangerous than bad information, and this particular transmission felt as though someone had gone to considerable effort to make sure the Arcadia received just enough of it to be frightened, but not enough to understand why.

She brought up the USS Sacagawea's Starfleet records and slipped into the habits she'd developed during her years in Intelligence. Rather than relying on the standard personnel database, she searched across multiple systems, checking mission logs against fleet movements, communications records, intelligence reports and archived sensor data. She knew better than most that information rarely disappeared completely. It simply ended up somewhere it wasn't supposed to.

The first file she found was reassuringly ordinary. It showed that Sacagawea as active, its current mission and current reports. That said, it did show its current coordinates as where the Arcadia was. Elyse frowned.

That was odd, but not necessarily alarming. Starfleet's databases weren't infallible, and an active assignment could easily have been out of date. She opened the file's update history. The latest entry was made six days ago. Elyse's expression hardened.

Six days ago. That was when the Arcadia had received the mission orders.

She checked the assignment authorisation, expecting to find a routine administrative update. Instead, she found something that made the back of her neck prickle. The Sacagawea's status had been manually confirmed as ‘ACTIVE’.

Not automatically updated. Not carried over from an old mission. Confirmed.

Elyse opened the confirmation record, then cross-referenced the officer who had supposedly authorised it. The authorisation was genuine. The security clearance was genuine. But the confirmation referenced a sensor report that didn't exist. She searched for it. Nothing. She tried the report number manually. Nothing.

Then she found the second file. It was buried several layers deeper in Starfleet's historical records.

‘USS SACAGAWEA — STATUS: MISSING’

The report stated that the Sacagawea had disappeared almost three years earlier during a deep-space survey mission. Contact had been lost without warning. Starfleet had searched the surrounding system for nearly six weeks before suspending the operation. No wreckage had been found. No escape pods. No surviving crew. The ship had been presumed lost.

Elyse stared between the two files.

One said the Sacagawea was missing. The other said it was perfectly fine.

And, according to the active file, it was currently sitting in the exact coordinates where the Arcadia was supposed to rendezvous with it.

Except it wasn't.

She went back to the active file and examined the confirmation more carefully. The authorisation timestamp was genuine. The encryption was current. The file had not been altered. But there was one tiny discrepancy. The sensor report it cited had been logged four minutes before the confirmation itself. Elyse's eyes narrowed. That shouldn't have been possible. She checked the sensor report's supposed origin.

‘USS SACAGAWEA.’

Her stomach dropped.

The Sacagawea had supposedly transmitted a sensor confirmation from the rendezvous coordinates. Four minutes before Starfleet had officially confirmed that the ship was active. Yet the Arcadia had been sitting in those same coordinates and had detected absolutely nothing.

No ship.

No transmission.

No sensor signature.

Nothing.

Elyse stared at the two records, her mind racing through possibilities. A database error? A corrupted timestamp? Someone manipulating Starfleet records? A forged sensor report?

None of them explained why the system considered the Sacagawea to be physically present when every sensor aboard the Arcadia insisted that it wasn't. There wasn't even anything outside of the windows.

Then the damaged transmission played again, but this time something was different… she'd not told the computer to continue trying to find a fix. Why was it...

“...Arcadia... exercise caution...”

Beep.

She turned sharply towards the console. The waveform continued moving. A voice emerged from the interference. Not the same voice as before. This one was calm. Completely calm. Almost reassuring.

“Everything is fine. We can't see any issues.”

Elyse stared at the console. The words were impossible. She looked at the sensor display.

Nothing.

Then at the Sacagawea file.

‘ACTIVE.’

Then back to the transmission.

Her face drained.

“Oh, shit.”

She was already moving before the transmission had finished playing, abandoning the console and sprinting for the door. Behind her, the voice continued calmly repeating itself through the static.

“Everything is fine. Our mistake. Miscommunication. Our mis– our mist–ta-ta-ta–take.”

 

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