She Arrived on time, the Station Disagrees.

Posted on Wed May 13th, 2026 @ 3:47am by Master Chief Petty Officer R'Shka

435 words; about a 2 minute read

Mission: Episode 9: Across Time
Location: Transporter Room 3 to Operations
Timeline: 79048.4

The transporter effect dissipated with the usual soft hum of recalibrating matter and overconfident machinery.

R’shka stepped forward onto Deep Space 21’s arrival platform exactly on schedule.

The station did not agree.

“WELCOME, CHIEF OPERATIONS MASTER CHIEF PETTY OFFICER R’SHKA,” the overhead LCARS tone announced.
A pause.
“CLEARANCE STATUS: TEMPORALLY INDETERMINATE.”

She stopped.

Looked up.

Then slowly tilted her head, as if listening for whether the station intended to continue being incorrect.

“That is not a clearance classification,” she said calmly. “That is a failure to commit to reality.”

Behind her, a junior NPC technician fumbled at the console.

“Ma’am, the system is auto-verifying your—uh—your temporal anchor signature. It keeps rewriting itself.”

As if to demonstrate, the console flickered:

R’SHKA (CURRENT ASSIGNMENT)
R’SHKA (PREVIOUSLY ASSIGNED)
R’SHKA (NOT YET LOGGED IN SYSTEM)

The technician swallowed. “It’s cycling every few seconds.”

R’shka did not turn fully. Her gaze remained forward, already mapping the corridor beyond the pad.

“That is inefficient,” she said. “And aesthetically offensive.”

She tapped her padd once. A quick diagnostic pull. No hesitation. No drama.

“Your transporter buffer is compensating for a temporal echo,” she added. “It is attempting to reconcile arrivals that have not agreed on sequence.”

The station lights flickered in response, as if acknowledging the accusation.

A faint second hum rolled through the deck plating—like the corridor itself briefly remembering a different configuration.

The technician glanced up. “Should I alert command? This could be a—”

“No,” R’shka interrupted, already stepping off the pad.

She began walking.

The corridor ahead remained stable for exactly three steps.

Then the lighting duplicated.

Two versions of the same hallway briefly existed—one fractionally out of sync, like a misaligned memory trying to overwrite itself.

A door opened at the end of both corridors at once.

R’shka paused just long enough to register it.

Then she spoke without turning back.

“Your station is rendering overlapping spatial states. One is incorrect.”

She resumed walking.

Behind her, the technician blinked. “Which one?”

R’shka’s voice carried back evenly.

“The one that hesitated.”

She continued down the corridor toward command, already dismissing the phenomenon into procedural memory. A line item. A fixable flaw. A known unknown.

The station flickered once more behind her—like it had briefly considered correcting itself, then decided not to argue.

R’shka adjusted her stride and checked her padd again, already updating arrival logs.

“Note,” she said quietly to no one in particular. “Temporal instability present on arrival. Non-critical until proven otherwise.”

She did not slow her path to Ops.

 

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