08
May
…The central, identifying concept of space was that it was quiet. Space, after all, was a vacuum. With no air to carry sound, you’d never hear an atomic bomb going off directly behind you. Still, in Lieutenant Rautert’s time in space, she had never found that kind of quiet. Space was loud, filled with voices screaming commands, consoles exploding at the slightest provocation, endless beeps and whistles from endless readouts – it was why she had moved away from active duty on a starship, and joined Starfleet Intelligence when the opportunity was presented to her. Numbers, facts, analysis – she was more comfortable with those concepts than the loudness of space. Now, for the first time, as the boots of her environment suit clicked across the metal gantry, space was quiet at last. Certainly, her surroundings couldn’t be considered ideal. The lights were flickering in a way that made it most