Before the First Footprint

Posted on Mon Jan 19th, 2026 @ 7:02pm by Lieutenant Elsen Rava

1,693 words; about a 8 minute read

Mission: Episode 1: A New Sheriff in Town
Location: El's Quarters, Mojave Station
Timeline: MD 004 - 1015 hrs

Elsen didn’t go far after leaving the Captain’s office.

She drifted back to her quarters more than walked, the route familiar enough already that she didn’t need to think about it. The padd stayed tucked under her arm, forgotten for long stretches as her mind wandered ahead of her, circling back, catching on small details she hadn’t meant to hold onto.

The doors slid shut behind her and the room greeted her with its half-finished comfort. A chair she hadn’t quite decided how to angle yet. A few personal items placed carefully, others still sealed away. It felt like a place in progress, which suited her just fine.

She set the padd down, then didn’t immediately touch it again. Instead, she moved to the window, resting a hand against the cool frame as Mojave’s interior traffic drifted past beyond the glass. Ships coming and going. People settling in. Everything quietly in motion.

Eventually, she turned back to the table.

The lights dimmed at her request, the room softening as the main display came alive. Stars filled the space, resolving into familiar constellations before she pulled them apart, zooming outward, then back in again. Velorum Reach sat there without drama. KX-917 looked like dozens of other systems she’d studied over the years. Ordinary, if you didn’t know where to look.

Elsen leaned forward, elbows resting lightly on the table now, scrolling through survey passes, cross-referencing notes, pulling up older gravitational models she’d skimmed and dismissed months ago. A quiet sound escaped her, something between a breath and a laugh, as patterns began to suggest themselves.

It wasn’t answers she was looking for yet.

Just the shape of the questions.

Time slipped by unnoticed as she worked, the station’s hum blending with the soft tap of her fingers on the interface. Somewhere in the middle of it, she realised she was smiling.

Whatever waited out there, it had already started to pull at her.

And Elsen, for all her patience, had never been very good at resisting that feeling.

Elsen slowed the feed and went back over the same pass again, not because she expected it to change, but because repetition sometimes revealed what context didn’t.

There wasn’t much to work with. A handful of long-range survey sweeps, most of them done at a distance, compiled by crews with other priorities and tighter schedules. The kind of data gathered because protocol demanded something, not because anyone expected it to matter.

The structures were still there, though. Clear enough once you stopped expecting them to announce themselves.

They didn’t line up cleanly with each other, and they didn’t ignore the terrain either. Instead, they seemed to sit where the moon had already decided to be difficult. Fault lines. Areas of stress. Places where the ground shifted just enough to discourage casual settlement.

Elsen frowned slightly, then smiled.

“That’s not accidental,” she murmured.

She pulled up the environmental notes, sparse and inconsistent as they were. Gravity fluctuations logged but never followed up. Minor rotational instability dismissed as noise. One comment from a survey officer noting that the materials “held better than expected,” with no explanation attached and no further interest shown.

Not enough to draw conclusions. Just enough to suggest someone, at some point, had known exactly what they were dealing with.

She leaned back, eyes lifting to the ceiling for a moment as she thought it through. Whoever had built this place hadn’t been passing through. You didn’t build into uncertainty like that unless you planned to stay long enough to understand it. Unless the instability was the point.

It reminded her of early human sites she’d studied at the Academy, settlements placed in flood zones or seismic regions not out of ignorance, but because the land itself offered something worth the risk. Fertility. Resources. Access. Meaning.

Elsen exhaled slowly and opened a new working file.

There was no comparative framework she trusted yet. No archived models to lean on. That would come later, if it came at all. For now, she stuck to what she could justify: location, construction choices, environmental context. Questions instead of assumptions.

She left the classification fields empty again, resisting the quiet itch to label what she didn’t yet understand.

This part of the galaxy didn’t owe her answers.

She saved her notes, tagged the file for follow-up sensor access, and finally glanced at the time. Longer than she’d meant to spend. Not longer than she’d wanted.

Elsen smiled to herself, already feeling the pull of what came next.

If there were people out here who’d built something meant to last in a place like this, then the least she could do was meet them on their own terms.

At some point, she became aware of a familiar undercurrent to the way she was thinking. Not a thought that was hers, exactly, but not separate either. A sense of standing at the edge of something old and unfinished, and knowing better than to rush it.

Elsen didn’t try to name where that came from. She didn’t need to. Some of Rava’s past had spent lifetimes walking through places that were already fading, learning patience the hard way. The awareness sat with her now, steady and unintrusive, a reminder rather than a guide.

She welcomed it, then kept going.

The thought didn’t slow her down so much as it changed her pace. The urge to leap ahead, to connect dots that weren’t quite ready yet, eased into something more deliberate. Joreth had always been like that. Not cautious in the way people mistook for fear, but careful in the way that came from knowing how quickly assumptions could turn into mistakes. He’d learned that lesson in corridors and half-lit compounds, in places where being right too early could get you killed.

Elsen let that memory sit where it belonged. Not as instruction, not as warning, just as weight. Context.

She scrolled back through her notes, re-reading instead of skimming this time. The coordinates Vale had given her. The odd gaps in the survey data. The way the planet’s magnetosphere didn’t quite line up with the models Mojave already had on file. None of it was alarming on its own. Together, though, it felt… deliberate. As if something had been left long enough for the universe to forget it, but not long enough for it to disappear entirely.

Joreth would have stood back here, she thought. Taken the room in before stepping forward. He’d had a habit of trusting his first read of a situation, but never his first explanation for it.

Elsen smiled faintly at that, fingers pausing above the console. She didn’t need him to tell her what to do. She never had. But she liked knowing he was there in the quiet moments, tempering curiosity with perspective. Reminding her that history wasn’t just about discovery. It was about what survived long enough to be found, and what didn’t.

Whatever was waiting out there wasn’t going anywhere.

She saved her work, leaned back in her chair, and let herself enjoy that thought for a moment before turning back to the task at hand.

The awareness lingered for a moment longer, then faded back into the quiet place it belonged. Elsen exhaled, slow and steady, and finally sat back from the console.

Whatever answers were waiting for her out there, they weren’t going to come from another hour of staring at partial scans and second-hand reports. Not yet.

She began organising the work she’d been buried in, tagging files, setting bookmarks, and locking everything into a clean research bundle for later reference. Coordinates, comparative notes, mythological parallels, Vale’s fragmentary data — all of it filed carefully, the way experience had taught her to do when she knew she’d be returning to it with dirt still on her boots.

Only once it was all stowed did she open a new interface.

“Computer,” Elsen said, tone shifting into something brisk but not formal, “I need recommendations. Two Starfleet specialists currently assigned to Mojave Station. One with planetary or geophysical field experience. One with xenolinguistics or comparative cultural analysis. Prioritise off-world survey work.”

A brief pause.

“Processing,” the computer replied.

The display shifted, resolving into two highlighted profiles.

“Lieutenant T’Varen,” the computer began.
“Vulcan. Planetary Sciences Division. Specialisation in tectonic instability, sub-surface mineral formations, and non-standard crust environments. Extensive field experience on Class M and Class H bodies. Previously assigned to three archaeological support missions.”

Elsen’s mouth curved slightly. Solid. Methodical. Someone who would notice when the ground itself was lying.

The display shifted to the second profile.

“Ensign Marek Solano,” the computer continued.
“Human. Cultural Sciences and Xenolinguistics. Focus on early-contact symbolic systems, proto-writing structures, and non-linear language development. Assisted in the translation of two pre-warp archaeological finds. Fluent in six Federation-standard languages.”

Elsen leaned closer, scanning the condensed service record. Different instincts. Different ways of seeing the same problem.

Perfect.

She tapped both profiles, flagging them without hesitation.

“That’ll do,” she murmured.

The console shifted again as she opened a comm channel, the decision already made before she fully registered it.

“Lieutenant Rava here,” she said, a touch quick, momentum bleeding into her voice. “This is short notice, but I’m putting together a small off-station survey team. Your name came up as an excellent match.”

A pause, just long enough to breathe.

“If you’re available, grab your field kits and meet me in Shuttle Bay Two. I’ll explain on the way. It should be… interesting.”

She closed the channels before she could overthink it, the corner of her mouth lifting despite herself.

Elsen stood, slinging her bag over one shoulder as her gaze flicked briefly back to the archived data she’d set aside. Soon enough.

For now, the answers were waiting somewhere with gravity and weather and ruins that hadn’t been catalogued yet.

Time to go see what they’d been trying to say.

 

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