Chance Encounter

Posted on Mon Nov 4th, 2019 @ 6:41am by Commander Jordan Gunning & Lieutenant Erin Whitlam PhD

Mission: After the Storm
Location: Alexander's [Deck 1869]

Jordan Gunning was back in uniform and back on Starbase 332 and neither were sitting well with him. His hair was shorn in and a discoloured scar ran down his neck. He was different but he didn't feel it. He felt like he'd never left - but of course he had. It had been months.

He walked into Alexander's, the bar which he had leased to the two Ferengi idiots years before and was pleased to see first that it was still open and second that it wasn't completely destroyed inside. This deep on the station, the bar was usually pretty quiet but tonight seemed different. It wasn't heaving but there were no free tables and a real buzz about the place.

The starbase had recently 'returned' from some weird shift in time and space or other, which probably made people thankful to be home. A nice enough reason to celebrate. Jordan had just arrived from Archa IV and was due to meet with Captain Von for the first time in months the next morning - he wasn't particularly looking forward to being told that he'd have to head out on a ship again.

Erin was working hard at pretending to enjoy herself with some of the other division officers from the Science Department. She wasn't overly fond of hanging around in bars, drinking with work colleagues, but they'd dragged her along under the guise of some long-standing tradition of drinking a bar dry whenever a ship, or station in this case, managed to survive an encounter with a space-time anomaly. When Erin tried to point out that a wormhole tied to an ion storm, while uncommon, could hardly be considered an anomaly given their vast knowledge of these things, they didn't seem to care.

So here she sat, slowly drinking something she didn't like, in company with people she barely tolerated, when she saw Jordan Gunning enter the bar. Quietly slipping away from the table, she maneuvered through the crowd and emerged from the throng and stood just behind him.

"Don't you know that impersonating a Starfleet officer is a crime, Detective?" she asked, tapping him on the shoulder.

"It sure is." Gunning replied. "It's being one that should be the real crime." He turned and looked the person who had tapped him in the eye. There was something familiar about her but he couldn't place it. "Commander Jordan Gunning, have we met?"

She frowned and cocked her head slightly to the side. It hadn't been that long ago, surely he had a better memory than that. "Yeah," she said, as though it was obvious. "Erin Whitlam. I helped you out with a DNA scan for a case you were chasing a little while ago."

"That sounds like something I might ask for." Jordan replied, realising he would be better off just biting the bullet. "I've had a tough couple of months - bit of a memory wipe kinda situation. You know how it is."

He hoped she didn't know how it was. "You definitely look familiar - sorry if I don't remember meeting you. Are you related to Julius Whitlam?"

A memory wipe? Of course they happened, but Erin found herself unsure if Gunning was telling the truth or playing some game. He was, after all, inexplicably back in uniform. "Yeah, he was my father," she answered, noting that he seemed to genuinely not remember. "Are you just playing with me? Did you really have your memory wiped?"

Gunning shrugged. "Short term memory - few months. Still remember what your Dad was eating the last time I saw him - not that useful but there you go."

That made sense. A memory erasure procedure would target specific memories and the ones longer established were much harder to shift. "When did you last see him?" she asked, her natural curiosity about her father's career getting the better of her.

"He was having dinner with my brother." Jordan thought back to that balmy June night when it had all seemed too much for his young mind to bear. Studying, trying not to worry about what was happening in the galaxy. "I say having dinner, they were eating hot dogs from that cart outside the Academy. The one that shouldn't have a health code certificate."

Erin nodded, she knew the place he was talking about and it was still there when she was at the Academy. "That must have been just before the Dominion War. We had a home in San Francisco at the time," she said, remembering that house in the hills and seeing her father go off to war and never come home. Rather than dwell on that memory, she forced herself to change the subject. "Memory wipe is a pretty serious thing. You must have seen something pretty serious to have had the doctors sign off on that."

"They didn't give me a lot of choice." He replied quickly, figuring that keeping going with what he did remember of her father probably wouldn't be the fun night out she'd had planned. "It was either that or a lifetime of trauma... or so they tell me anyway. What brings you down here anyway?"

She tilted her head in the direction of the table full of her colleagues across the bar. "A group of us came down to celebrate bringing the station back in one piece," she said. "I've never been here before, but Prell swears by it."

"I've heard the owner's a real piece of work." Gunning took a sip of his drink. "You don't seem too pleased to be here, Lieutenant, it has to be said."

"I'm not really one for bars," she shrugged. "Frankly I'm much more comfortable in my quarters or my lab, but they used our recent misadventure to twist my arm tonight."

"What happened to the station anyway? I'm not attached to any assignments so every report I try to read is redacted up the wazoo."

"Oh, it was nothing," she said waving it away. "Just a standard ion storm dragging one end of a wormhole through the system sucked the Starbase across the galaxy and we had to get ourselves back while under attack by hostile lifeforms. Another day in the fleet, really."

Gunning stared blankly at the Lieutenant. In a weird way, that was right. Being on 332 did seem to come with more than its fair share of weird happenstance. "So nothing major then? How did you get back?"

"Bombarded a residual subspace instability with verteron particles, which attracted that end of the wormhole back to our position and it brought us home," Erin replied, as though it was nothing special. "It was my idea," she added.

Gunning stared blankly at her. Scientific minds baffled him. "That sounds complicated." He offered unhelpfully.

"It is," she agreed, knowing that any deeper explanation wasn't necessary in a bar. "But what brings you here, Commander?"

He took a moment to consider the question. "Looking for work, I suppose. Trying to avoid a ship assignment by calling in every favour I've got available to me."

She looked at him for a moment and slowly nodded. He almost seemed lost, as though he was following directions in a strange land. "So you really are back in the service, then?"

"Really." He smiled a little, but found himself looking beyond her and chuckling. "Commander Jordan Gunning, at your service."

_________

Commander Jordan Gunning

Lieutenant Erin Whitlam