Lieutenant Hammock and the rest of the Command Center staff watched silently as the stoic Senior Chief Petty Officer Christopher Van Cleave marched past them and into the turbo lift.
The child that grew up on the space station was going to seek solace where he could. Christopher’s mind raced as he ran down the corridor to a Jefferies Tube to hide, surrounded by things that made sense to him. He tried the techniques his mother had been showing him since her return less than a month ago to calm them down. He was still confused as to why it was so important for him to control his emotions. A remnant of childhood that was yet to be explained. Knowing his mother, it never would be explained.
For twelve years she had been gone. Left, in the middle of the night while he slept, without saying goodbye. “Urgent business on Elas” was all his father would tell him and then he would go angrily silent. It wasn’t the first time his parents had argued. When Alexander left for Starfleet Academy, wow, that was an argument that could have decimated an entire galaxy. Christopher shook his head in memory. His parents. They were something else.
His father was an only child of a Starfleet Admiral and his wife. It was his “honored duty to follow in the family tradition of serving Earth,” he had told Christopher multiple times when he was growing up. Twenty-five years ago, he had been born, in the midst of chaos. Chaos was apparently going to follow him his entire life. Routine patrol of the Draconis Nebula when his mother went into labor. The U.S.S. Joan of Arc met up with the U.S.S. Battleborn and the U.S.S. Masamune for this very reason. Mother refused to let the Emergency Medical Hologram Program deliver him. “A chance of too many complications,” they had told him. She wanted a REAL doctor to deliver her baby who was incredibly early for both Human and Elasian.
His parents and select senior staff were onboard the U.S.S. Battleborn when the Dominion War ships attacked from apparently nowhere. Alex was living on Elas with their paternal grandfather at the time. Somewhere his father said he should have been born versus in the reaches of space, but his mother was “stubborn as they get!”. Their patrol route was to take them by Elas in two months’ time, when Christopher was supposed to be due… had his mother been completely human.
“Ah yes, my mother.” Christopher thought with wry humor. She was half Human and half Elasian, a race that despite having been in contact with the Confederation of Planets since before the time of Captain Kirk and the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701, and the Confederation still knew extraordinarily little about. Two entire planets, Elas and Troy, apparently worked very diligently to keep it that way, for nearly three hundred years, along with the secret of dilithium crystals and deuterium manufacturing as they consistently provided the highest quality once the two worlds had stopped warring with each other.
This new information that his father and brother were possibly dead was hard to process. Christopher had been holding onto the hope they were still alive after six years, well, seven if you count in the year the Space Station was locked in a time loop. Uncle Mog had survived. Christopher could only pray now that somehow his father and brother also survived.
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