First Contact {for greenstarshipping}

[thegoodshepherd]

While life had certainly been worse for the Voyager crew in the last few months, it hadn't been quite this boring, either. Captain Janeway knew it was in bad taste to complain because it was far better for her crew to contend with mostly empty space punctuated by a few disinterested planets who seemed happy to give them safe passage in exchange for minding their own business. It didn't take long for them to get passed the few inhabited planets in the sector and within a couple weeks, they were well on their way to a week of boredom.

Harry managed to track down a few anomalies here and there, but Janeway was getting the impression he was looking for anything to keep them busy. So when he excitedly announced the appearance of a distress beacon on sensors, she couldn't help the roll of her eyes and give a knowing look towards Chakotay. It could have been anything, they knew, but she had Paris change course after it immediately. Even if it proved to be nothing, and took them off course by a couple hours, it was better than the nothing they had been biding their time with.

When freighter came up on sensors, Harry confirmed once again it was a distress call. Janeway stood up, smoothing out her uniform and telling Tuvok to scan the area before she asked Harry to open up a comm channel to the freighter.

"This is Captain Janeway of the starship Voyager," she announced, hoping whoever manned the freighter would be able to respond. "We received your distress beacon. Are you in need of assistance?"

Comments

I'm watching S1EP5 as I write this.

[greenstarshipping]

Esteri had been on a lovely cargo run. Lovely! She'd been ahead of schedule, even, before she'd run into an unexpected micro-meteor shower that her sensors had failed to detect in time. Humming along at the grand speed of Warp 2, the space debris had punched holes through her ship and it was only through good luck and excellent timing that she had managed to get into a spacesuit in time. Atmosphere venting, cargo ruined, and engines gone she'd barely had enough power to send a distress signal and had spent an uncomfortable four days floating in her crash-webbing and hoping someone would run across her.

That possibility had seemed increasingly smaller as time went. This was a sparsely populated area of space and she'd been eating her emergency rations. There was enough for two weeks, maybe a month if she stretched it but she'd been more worried about air. She had enough spare oxygen in canisters or that she could siphon from intact tanks to last a week more or less and halfway through she'd begun contemplating whether it would be better to suffocate, open her suit, or use the energy pistol she kept. So when her commboard lit up with a hail, she'd been pleasantly surprised. The alert jerked her from a disinterested doze and slapped the response button.

Janeway is treated to a relieved smile breaking across Esteri's face. She looks mostly human, though the faint scattering of aquamarine dots running from her temples and across the bridge of her nose put that notion out of mind.

"This is Esteri Attar, star-freighter Maiden's Joy. Prophet's stars, I'm glad to see you. Yeah, I need the assistance pretty badly--everything over here is pretty fried."