Wolf 359

Posted on Tue Jul 7th, 2026 @ 9:13pm by Captain Marc Steyn
Edited on on Wed Jul 8th, 2026 @ 8:51am

809 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Season 1, Episode 1: Ashes of Wolf 359
Location: USS Roosevelt - Main Bridge
Timeline: Battle of Wolf 359

ON

He woke to the sound of metal seemingly forcing itself to remember how to scream. Its entire being pouring into this one shrill call that denoted the death of a once proud and mighty vessel brought to heel and more by a foe they had anticipated but clearly were not prepared for. It was loud enough to have pulled him from his unconsciousness.

Not all at once mind you, he couldn't quite make out where he was or what had happened—first there was the vibration, a low, sickening tremor that seemed to live behind his teeth. Then the smell: burned insulation, coolant vapor, and something sharper, a tang of blood that didn’t belong on any sanctioned vessel. After that came the light, pulsing red through a darkness that was slowly lifting.

Commander Marc Steyn tried to move and discovered that “move” had become a negotiation that he was not aware he was currently in.
The rest of the bridge—if it could still be called a bridge—hung at an angle that made no sense. Stars drifted past the shattered canopy in slow, indifferent arcs. Wolf 359 filled half the sky like a wound that refused to close, the wound had once been the main viewscreen, now a crackling forcefield running on what was left of the emergency batteries and he realised that gravity plating was offline, he was floating free around the bridge of the USS Roosevelt, his Captain and Crew all motionless, battered and bloodied.

"The battle should have been over" was the first coherent thought he managed.

He blinked hard trying to clear the smoke and soot from his eyes. The tactical feed was gone. The fleet was broken. The channel that had carried a hundred voices shouting orders, curses, last words—it was all silence, interrupted only by a repeating emergency ping from somewhere deep in the ship’s dying systems, the solitary voice left among the ashes of Wolf 359.

"HULL INTEGRITY AT 4%
LIFE SUPPORT: FAILING
ESCAPE PODS: UNRESPONSIVE OR DETACHED
ATTITUDE CONTROL: NONFUNCTIONAL"

Something caught his attention through the wound at the fore of the once bustling bridge of the USS Roosevelt, it moved through the debris field away from him—too large to be wreckage, too structured to be natural drift. It didn’t tumble like broken hull plating or burned-out drones. It seemed to effortlessly slide, edges folding into new geometries that hurt to look at directly.

The Borg Cube.

Even half-conscious, Steyn felt his mind recoil from the attempt to comprehend it. It wasn’t just a shape. It was an argument against shape. A geometry that didn’t agree with physics and had somehow won anyway. And it was still there.

Still alive.

Still watching, if something like that could be said to watch.

Steyn’s throat went dry.

“That’s not possible,” he whispered. "Thirty nine ships. We hit it with everything and its still moving".

Outside, the Borg Cube rotated.

And for the first time since he woke, he was no longer sure whether his ship was drifting toward it… or was it drifting toward him? Instead the Borg Cube simply stopped being where it was. A green flash and the space it had occupied was now vacant.

Steyn’s breath caught. “No… no, no, no—” he screamed as he fought to get back to his science console just below him.

The console struggled, spat out corrupted tracking data, then finally stabilized long enough to give him one clean line:

"WARP SIGNATURE DETECTED
VECTOR: SOL SYSTEM
TARGET: EARTH"

For a second, his mind refused to attach meaning to the words. They floated there like the debris around him.

Then they sank in.

"Earth" he said with alarm.

Behind him, somewhere deeper in the ruined hull, something metal shifted and clanged as inertia reasserted itself. The ship was still dying. Still falling apart in slow motion.

But none of that mattered anymore.

He forced his hands to move, dragging himself against the console, overriding half-burned interfaces. Pain flared through his shoulder as the bridge rocked violently as wreckage from another starship impacted the broken form of the Roosevelt, he recognised it through the open wound as the USS Melbourne... The Admirals ship. The shattered remains of Saratoga behind her and an errant Nacelle, likely from an Excelsior Class was tumbling end over end.

“Earth,” he said again, this time like it was a diagnosis, grounding him from the devastation around him.

The comm system crackled.

At first it was just static.

Then—something else. A voice... "En..rpris..flee..Resp..d. Thi..is..he.Enterprise, please respon......"

Steyn swallowed hard, forcing himself to speak into a near dead channel anyway.

“Enterprise… if you can hear me…” His voice cracked. “It’s not over! Enterprise... Can you hear me?”

OFF

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