The Shoal

[Sjet]

The Shoal.

Its hard to believe that not five years ago there was no such area of space known as such. But today, for the sectors abutting it and those caught within it, it is a fact of life. Born of a Dominion scorch earth campaign to deny Starfleet vessels from its Bajor side flanks following the closing the Bajoran Wormhole, The Shoal is at best the finest example of the reason Second Khitomer Accords are so forcibly up held by its member states. On June 8th 2375, during the short lived Second Fleet Offensive, seventy five subspace weapons were detonated across two dozen star systems and the space between.

The immediate effect of this wide spread detonation was a disruption of local gravity fields. In essence the massive subspace explosions caused ripples in the fabric of space time, enough that a stable warp field is nearly impossibly to create. The first ship to attempt such a crossing, the USS Pegasus whilst answering the distress call of a stranded merchantman, ran into such a gravity eddies and was effectually stretched into a atom wide strand of uranium alloys and carbon molecules that was nearly four light years long. Since then it has been Starfleet policy to never exceed Warp 3 whilst traversing The Shoal, to better allow a ships sensor array time to map out the local gravitational environment.

And if that was all The Shoal offered up as hazards, then it would at least obey the majority of the natural laws. Alas, it does not.

Most of what is known as fact about The Shoal reads as a list of naturally occurring disasters waiting for a planet to stumble across. Ion storms tend towards one end of the spectrum as the most common manifestation of The Shoal’s seeming belligerence. Whilst Class 7 neutron waves prowl with seeming predatory intent between star systems. The gravimetric signatures of not one, but two monopole blackholes have been detected in this sector, but neither Scilla nor Charybdis have ever been sighted by a manned star ship.

But like all areas of the world where rules seem to begin to fade away into unpredictable chaos, there are rumours of stranger things roving the silent nights between the stars of The Shoal. Interdimesnional rifts, temporal pockets in time where lost fleets of Federation and Dominion forces fight in endless mobs style combat. The tales of strange ships sighted skirting the edge of populated star systems, or even of laying waste to entire fringe colony worlds are the stuff of bar room boasts. And tales of strange beings, creatures for whom this forms of reality is as alien to them as colour is to a dog, abound.

To Starfleet and the surrounding powers of the region view the The Shoal as a dirty reminder of a war many would wish forgotten. But it is this reporter's opinion that The Shoal is as wilful a thing as any being of flesh and blood. It has found a name for itself in the hearts of spacers, and it would be quite arrogant to believe that it would not want to embellish its name more so in the future.

Why else would Starfleet reactivate one of its warden Starbases in the area, if it did not think The Shoal deserved its attention?

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From Here, To Back Again: Deneb Free Press
Written by Chilix The Inquisitive
United Federation of Planets Free Data Net