A Line Through the Noise

Posted on Tue Feb 10th, 2026 @ 9:07am by Vice Admiral Sidra MacLaren & Rear Admiral Cintia Sha'mer

1,989 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Dreamdust
Location: Fleet Operations

Fleet Operations was running hot.

Not loud. Not chaotic. Hot in the way a reactor runs when the tolerances are being tested and everyone in the room knows it.

Sidra MacLaren stood inside the central ring, sleeves rolled to her forearms, hands moving across a floating lattice of data without hesitation. Around her, the circular pit of Fleet Ops remained tightly controlled: officers at their stations, security analysts leaning forward over layered feeds, intelligence specialists quietly arguing over probability trees and signal attribution.

The changeling’s shadow was everywhere.

“Reconstruct the outbound data path again,” Sidra said, voice level. “From Hawk’s last confirmed authenticated access forward. I want everything it touched, even if it only brushed metadata.”

A junior analyst shook their head slightly. “We’re not seeing deep infiltration, ma’am. No classified fleet deployments. No command-level contingencies.”

“That doesn’t mean it didn’t transmit,” Sidra replied. “It means we haven’t found where it hid the needle.”

She flicked two fingers outward. The display shifted, resolving into a broad constellation of information nodes, most of them already flagged green.

“Tavrik,” she said, tapping the largest cluster. “Public grievances. Colonial resistance rhetoric. Historical resentment toward Starfleet presence. All of that is open-source.”

“Yes, Admiral,” the analyst confirmed. “Most of what we can confirm they now have… they already had access to. Political pressure points, not tactical ones.”

Sidra’s jaw tightened.

“That’s the part I don’t like,” she said quietly. “If I were them, I wouldn’t waste a changeling on what anyone could scrape off a subspace forum.”

She gestured again, isolating a thin thread of amber data running between nodes.

“What else?”

A pause.

“Behavioral mapping,” another officer offered. “Response timing. How quickly we escalate. How we argue with ourselves.”

Sidra exhaled once through her nose. “They’re watching how we react.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

A subtle shift in the room registered at the edge of her awareness.

Not an alarm.
Not a call-out.

Presence.

Sidra turned.

Cintia Sha’mer stood just inside the Fleet Ops boundary, posture controlled, expression unreadable. She hadn’t announced herself. Security hadn’t stopped her, as Sidra had already cleared her.

Then she stepped away from the console and indicated they meet at her office with a slight nod. Sidra met her there, curious what Cintia had to say. She indicated the sitting area by the windows, noticing the volume of traffic hovering around her station, waiting for clearances. A logistical nightmare.

“I need a coffee. Would you like something?” MacLaren asked.

"Raktajino. Extra strong, extra sweet."

It surprised her, the ease with which those words rolled off her tongue. A drink she hadn't had since she left Federation space and headed back to what might have been the empire where she was born, but which hadn't been 'home' long before she left it.

Home wasn't a place. Home was people. Home was…

Home was, when all was said and done, the person whose imposter they had unmasked.

"Learned anything from it?" Like before, Sha'mer forced herself to sit down. Everything under tight control. She couldn't afford to relax and let go. She couldn't afford to shatter.

Sidra inclined her head once and turned toward the replicator without comment. The order was simple. Familiar. She keyed it in from muscle memory rather than thought, the cadence of it settling something she had not realized was still unsettled.

She waited while the machine worked, watching the Ops floor reflected faintly in the window beyond the sitting area. Too much motion. Too many people hovering at the edge of her attention, waiting for decisions she had not made yet. Tavrik was still burning. Fleet security queues were stacking. None of it would pause because two officers needed caffeine and quiet.
She carried the mugs back herself.

Sidra handed Sha’mer the raktajino first, then took her own and sat opposite her, grounding the moment by choice. The chair was firm. The table clear. No barriers between them except the unknown.

She wrapped both hands around her cup and let the heat sink into her palms.

“Some,” Sidra said. “Enough to know what they were interested in. Not enough to tell me how much they already understand.” She added quietly, “And enough to know this wasn’t just about access.”

Her gaze stayed steady.

“I know this is little comfort to you right now, but I’m not sure if this was a singular replacement.”

Well. That at least showed it was good she hadn't obeyed her first impulse and rushed off to… to do whatever – follow the link until she found the real Indi, probably. And then what? Sneak in (as if she was good at sneaking) and form a one-person rescue team? Not that the thought wasn't tempting, not that she planned and discarded at least a dozen versions while she cooled her heels on the station, but it proved the wisdom of waiting.

"More on this station? Or in other places, too, that you could determine?" Sha'mer asked. She inhaled the vapours of the raktajino and took a cautious sip. The liquid burned on the way down, in a good way. Somehow, for all their technological advancements, Vo'Sh'un replicators could never get the taste of it quite right.

That was a stray thought she indulged for a moment, then she focused on Sidra again. How deep did this go? How far? Deep inside of her she felt something shift, focusing no longer on one individual but on the wider picture. The tactical and stratops mentality – at least where it pertained Starfleet – began to awake from its slumber.

Sidra did not answer immediately. She set her cup down with care, fingers lingering at the rim as if grounding herself in the heat.

“We don’t have proof,” she said at last. “Nothing actionable. Nothing I would stand in front of a board and call certainty.”

Her jaw tightened slightly as she continued. “But my gut keeps coming back to the same conclusion. There was too much investment here for a single point of failure. Too much time, too much patience, too much risk taken on their end. This doesn’t feel like something built to succeed once. It feels like something built to endure being discovered.”

She drew a slow breath. “I’ve already sent the bulk of what we recovered to Starfleet Security. Admiral Flammia has his people assisting with the deeper combing. Pattern analysis, historical cross-checks, anything that might surface what we missed.”

Her gaze dropped briefly, then lifted again, steady but unflinching. “And we did miss things. We cut corners. Controls that should have been in place were treated as acceptable risk. Epsilon is far from the core. It had been a long time since the last changeling incident. Distance and time made us comfortable.”

She did not soften that admission.

Then she shifted, just slightly, leaning forward. “Which is why I need to understand more about your link. How it works. What it feels like. Whether distance matters. Whether there’s any residual sense left behind when one of you is no longer who they claim to be.”

Her eyes stayed on Sha’mer. “If there’s anything in that connection we can leverage, even indirectly, I need to know.”

Sha'mer nodded. "Understandable." She took another sip of her raktajino, larger this time. "Last time I looked, there hasn't been done all that much research into telepathy, especially because it manifests differently in different species. From Vulcan touch-telepathy to Betazoid's occasional outbreak of young children who develop the talent, leading to vast problems to themselves and their surroundings. Most telepathic races do have a form of long distance links, though, not all that differently from ours. The difference between those and the link between Indi and myself is that in our case, only half of the pair is telepathic."

She set the cup down and ran a hand through her short hair. "Had that not been the case, it might have made it easier. She would've been able to send with greater accuracy, it would've increased the reach. Still…" Great stars, how could she possibly put into words what the link felt like? "It is like a constant awareness. No matter how small, no matter how far away, part of me knows she is still there, still alive. Distance matters in that if we're closer, I tend to pick up more. But even when I was all the way out there," Sha'mer gestured to the window, "I always knew she was there."

Then she locked eyes with Sidra once more. "I knew things were wrong when I arrived here and I didn't feel a change. For a while I wondered it might've been the sedatives, the drugs, a combination…" She shook her head. "And I was deluding myself, and I knew it. I still would've been able to feel her, to reach her. I had no such link with the Changeling which replaced her."

Sidra was quiet for a moment, letting the implications settle.

“I have to believe that if Indi were able to send a clear signal, she already would have,” she said. There was no accusation in it, only resolve. “If there were a clean way to reach back through that link, I don’t think she’d hesitate.”

She leaned forward slightly. “Which leaves us with what remains. Not contact. Not communication. But orientation.”

Her gaze stayed steady on Sha’mer. “Is there any way the link gives you a sense of direction? Not a location. Just a bearing. Near or far. Closer or farther than it should be.”

Her jaw tightened. “We don’t need precision. We need something to start from.”

Then, more quietly, “And if the answer is no, I need you to tell me that too. I won’t ask you to force something that isn’t there.”

She held the silence, giving Sha’mer room to answer.

That, at least, was easy. "I can give you a vector, yes." This time she didn't just gesture into a random direction. She briefly closed her eyes and focused on that inner awareness, that glowing ember which connected her to the mind of the one most dear to her.

Then she pointed. "There. If we're on a ship I could give you an exact heading. The closer we get, the more I'll be able to pick up."

She picked the cup up again and held it tightly. "Maybe she tried sending signals through the link. But like I said, she isn't inherently telepathic. That makes it harder. If we come closer, though, I should be able to communicate with her."

Sidra’s interest sharpened visibly. Not alarm. Not doubt. Focus.

“That’s more than I was hoping for,” she said, and this time there was no attempt to hide the edge of curiosity in her voice. “A vector is enough.”

She straightened slightly, already thinking several steps ahead. “If distance improves clarity, then movement matters. Which means we don’t sit on this.”

A brief pause, then the faintest hint of something lighter. “I have a Ross-class ship sitting in dock with nothing urgent on her schedule. She’s fueled, crewed, and bored.”

Sidra met Sha’mer’s eyes. “If you’re willing, we go looking. Carefully. Quietly. We follow the bearing and see what it tells us.”

She nodded once, decisive. “Best case, we find Indi. Worst case, we learn how far this reaches. Either way, we stop guessing.”

Thank the stars, I thought you'd never ask.

Sha'mer downed the rest of her raktajino in a single gulp and stood up. "Willing and ready when you are."

Sidra tapped her commbadge. “Rucker, get us ready to sail. I’ll explain when we’re on board. Long story short, the universe blinked first.”

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Rear Admiral Cintia Sha'mer

Vice Admiral Sidra MacLaren

 

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