The door that separated the bridge from the rest of the ship glided open as Ensign Corwin Adler stepped up to it, allowing him unobstructed entry into the nerve center of the USS Pulsar. The compartment’s sole occupant, a holographic command officer, sat in the exact spot that the young man had left him in, the fore most console on the bridge.

“Good morning, Captain,” the Emergency Command Hologram said as Adler made his way through the spacious but functional room, “I hope you slept adequately and are ready to begin your duty day.”

Corwin gave the hologram a vague shrug, “I guess so… has anything happened while I was asleep?”

“We have traversed a rather insignificant amount of space in relation to our destination,” the hologram reported dryly, “But beyond that, everything is as it was before you left.”

“That’s… good?” the Ensign winced slightly when his statement came out much more like a question.

The ECH grunted, “If you are struggling for a description of it, good will suffice. At least we haven’t encountered any further difficulties to exacerbate our already generous amount of tribulations.”

Corwin relaxed a bit when the hologram didn’t instantly refute his opinion of the current situation. His shift in posture prompted the ECH to mention something he’d commented on the day before, “I believe we should have our lesson on command presence, Captain, since we are so uniquely poised to have little to no distractions for the next few weeks at impulse.”

“Ah…” Adler muttered, “Right… you did say you’d help me with that…”

“And I see you were paying attention, how studious of you,” the ECH droned, “But before that, why are you still wearing that particular version of the uniform?”

“Huh?” the Ensign voiced his confusion.

The ECH pointed at the mustard colored band of his uniform, “You are currently the Captain of this vessel, you should be wearing the appropriate maroon to accompany your position.”

“Oh… I… uh…” Corwin glanced down at his uniform then back to the hologram, “I guess I grabbed the wrong one without even thinking about it…”

“You’re not a very good liar, Mister Adler… which is not so terrible considering Starfleet values integrity in their officers. But do try to grab the correct one once our lesson is over…” the ECH remarked in a firm voice.

“Yes sir,” Corwin remarked weakly, feeling as though the last remnant of his identity as a simple engineer was slipping away.

“Now,” the hologram said, shifting into what seemed to be his instructional persona, “The first thing you must understand about being in command is that your confidence or lack there of has a direct impact on the crew you lead… usually. I admit your somewhat indecisive attitude is charming to watch, speaking for myself and the other holograms aboard the ship, but we aren’t a typical crew. Had you been assigned actual people under your command, I am confident that they would have crawled into a corner to lament their misfortune hours ago.”

“I see…” the Ensign sighed.

“It hardly demands that you retreat into some protective cocoon, young man. Your circumstances are atypical, approaching the realm of absurd if we allowed ourselves a little poetic license. But we are nonetheless faced with the certainty that it is happening, and that you will need to lead this crew for the foreseeable future. I simply wish to offer you some of the skills you weren’t given at the Academy to do so in a competent manner that would make any casual observer feel confident that you can handle this.”

“Right… sorry…”

“No apology necessary. Moving on, there is a secret to command presence that only those who have been doing it a while will be able to tell you…” the ECH said, leaning over in a conspiratorial manner toward the Ensign, “You just have to act like everything’s under control… you don’t have to believe it yourself.”

Corwin had been so wrapped up in the low tone and secretive gesture that when he actually heard the secret, he sputtered in a fit of laughter. It took him a second to collect himself before asking rather frankly, “So you mean to tell me you just fake it?”

The ECH leaned back up with a grin, “Indeed. Many of the greatest Captains to ever command a starship have admitted that in many of the most tense situations, when lives were on the line, tensions were high, or everything seemed to be collapsing around them… they’ve just pretended everything was going right.”

The hologram let the statement hang for a moment before continuing, “A good bit of being in command is knowing how to keep your crew from panicking. Panic is a very normal emotion for most species when under extreme duress. And even those few races who don’t show a great deal of emotion can still develop tunnel vision when a situation seems insurmountable. Having a Captain whom they can look to and gain a sense of confidence from, even if it’s completely false, can sometimes lead to the crew overcoming odds that even the most optimistic among us would have abandoned all hope of coming out alive from.”

Corwin stood slack jawed as he absorbed what the ECH was telling him. He’d never have imagined that even some of his idols from the history books might have had the same lack of confidence in a situation as he was feeling in the moment. The vast gulf he’d imagined between himself and those who had come before him didn’t seem so insurmountable suddenly, even if there was still a noticeable distance.

“So… I should try to be more assertive?” Adler asked.

“Assertiveness is part of it, yes. Commitment to your chosen course of action also plays a huge role. Don’t be afraid to make a call and be wrong, if that’s what ends up happening. And if you are wrong, have the good grace to admit your mistake and correct it. You are not expected to be infallible, that is the sole domain of those of us programmed to be so,” the hologram smirked.

“Right…” Corwin chuckled.

“I believe that should suffice for the moment as your first lesson in the command arts. Shall we move on to something a bit more practical?” the ECH asked.

“Like what?”

The hologram motioned toward the center chair, “First, please go ahead and take a seat at your station.”

The Ensign turned to the command chair and frowned a bit, though much less deeply than he might have done only a day previous. He took a deep breath, shaking the last vestiges of doubt from his mind before approaching the indicated furnishing. A brief staring contest ensued, one-sided though it was, before Corwin finally accepted that this was an inevitability and sank down into the chair.

“I was almost worried you two would start throwing punches…” the ECH commented dryly, “But now that you’ve settled in, it is the duty of the Captain to review the logs from the evening shift to familiarize yourself with what has taken place aboard your ship in the time you were not actively commanding it. Please go ahead and bring those up on your holographic display.”

It took a moment for Adler to find the command that summoned the semi-transparent screens, but managed the task with enough competence that the hologram didn’t provide any commentary on his performance. Corwin considered that there might not actually be anything to actually see in the logs, given the spectacular lack of crew aboard. This expectation was, however, subverted when he ran the inquiry and found dozens of reports listed, though the identification markers for the authors of the logs boiled down to the ECH and the Emergency Engineering Hologram. None of the other programs active on the ship seemed to have anything that even qualified as report worthy. Corwin studied the information scrolling before him while the ECH stood impassively, giving the young officer the time he needed to investigate what was there and incorporate that into his understanding of what was the ship’s happenings while he slept.

As he neared the end of the logs, he noticed something that prompted him to speak up, “It says here we started receiving update packets from a nearby station… starting about an hour ago.”

“Did we?” the ECH asked, moving to stand off to the Ensign’s left to read over his shoulder, “It would seem so… interesting…”

Corwin dismissed the log and brought up the information contained within the packet. He wasn’t nearly as interested in the contents as he was in where it had come from. The location stamp 40 Eridani A flashed up when he made his inquiry.

“40 Eridani A… I feel like I should know that name…” Adler muttered.

“I would hope so, it is where this ship was constructed, as well as being ‘in the neighborhood’, so to speak, of where you just graduated from,” the hologram retorted.

“Oh! I remember now… Vulcan! But… hold on… how are we able to receive transmissions from the Vulcan system? I thought everything that relied on subspace wasn’t functioning…”

“Bridge to Main Engineering,” the ECH called out, “we’ve intercepted subspace communications. Do you have any insight into what might have caused this?”

“I’ll be right up,” the EHH responded curtly before the transmission abruptly ended. Seconds later, the static hum of a hologram materializing was heard just behind the command chair, spurring both Adler and the ECH to turn around.

“I had been wondering the same thing, so I ran some scans,” the engineer explained as he sank down into the engineering console behind and to the left of the Captain’s chair, “From what I can tell, we’ve crossed through some kind of subspace… anomoly is the best way I can explain it. The minute we did, we were able to pick up subspace transmissions from the relay station we had thought was disabled. I initially thought it was some very localized phenomenon… some pocket of subspace that just… didn’t behave as we expected it should.”

“I can already tell there’s a ‘but’,” the ECH remarked sarcastically.

“But,” the EEH exaggerated with annoyance, “We only seemed to be getting signals from within a very oblique and almost nonsensical pocket of space. The borders of this… void of subspace signals… are so nebulous and shifting that giving it a shape seems like an exercise in futility… so I’m simply calling it a blob. Everything inside the blob seems to work exactly as expected… which is why we are getting information packets from the relay again.”

“So we came all this way for nothing?” Corwin asked.

“If by that you mean that we no longer have a broken relay to attend to, then yes, we’ve wasted a considerable amount of time. We have, however, encountered a phenomenon that is causing a blackout, if you will, of subspace information and long distance stellar travel. If we can somehow communicate this to someone, perhaps it will still prove to be a worthwhile venture,” the engineer remarked.

“Can we get a message out to anyone?” the Ensign looked at the EEH hopefully.

The hologram frowned, “No. All we’re getting is temporal coordination data from the relay, nothing else.”

“So we know what time it is while we’re traveling at relativistic speeds, but little else,” the ECH grumbled.

Corwin sank down in his chair before a thought struck him, “Wait… if subspace is behaving as it should right now, could we engage our warp drive again?”

“Sure,” the EEH said before following up with, “Except there’s no telling when the blob will shift and knock us back out of warp again.”

“Oh… right…” Corwin resumed his deflation before another thought struck him, “How far away are we from 40 Eri… I mean Vulcan?”

The EEH punched up the chart on his display and ran the figures, “just shy of eight days at our current speed. We were actually closer to Vulcan than we were to the relay when we started our little jaunt.”

Corwin closed his eyes and gave their discovery some thought before looking up at the ECH, “Let’s change our heading and make for Vulcan. Maybe we’ll get out of this blob somewhere along the way and we can make up some time.”

A small smile crossed the ECH’s lips, “I see you’re already putting your lesson into practice. Setting course for Vulcan, Captain.”

Ensign Adler sank back in the chair, momentarily puzzled then sheepishly proud of himself after he’d finally understood what the hologram had meant.

“I’m still working on some alternatives that might help us pick up the pace. I’ll keep you posted,” the engineer said before tapping a few commands that triggered his de-materialization from the bridge.

“I’m not sure I’m going to ever get used to you guys doing that…” Corwin mumbled low enough that his other holographic crew member didn’t catch it.