Three Doors at Sunset, Part I — Family Jurisdiction

Posted on 12 Aug 2025 @ 4:10am by Gareth Rhys

3,704 words; about a 19 minute read

Mission: Assignment: Arawyn
Location: The Long Haul
Timeline: 242508.11

Sora Kinkade had a pilot’s instinct for weather. She could smell a front fifty klicks before it broke, taste the ion sharpness at the bridge of her nose. Tonight, the weather had walked into the wardroom wearing Gareth Rhys’s face, and it carried the cold scent of deep space and bad news.

He stood at the head of the oval table, one hand on the back of a chair he wasn’t using. The table’s center holo threw a slow rotation of the Sovereign-class USS Arawyn, plates of luminescent blue like a ghost ship sailing in moonlight. The Long Haul’s heartbeat, a low, living thrum through the deck and bones that was the only church she’d ever known, tickled Sora’s forearms where she’d folded them on the cool edge of the tabletop.

Gareth didn’t clear his throat. Gareth didn’t do warm-up acts. He just pulled the pin on the grenade.

“I’m going to ride with Arawyn for her next mission,” he said. “Intelligence adjunct. They asked; I said yes.”

Static, poised to arc. A cold dread coiled in Sora’s gut, the familiar ghost of institutional betrayal. They asked; I said yes. The words of every brass-polishing son of a bitch who ever sold out a Ranger unit for a better report. She had to stop her mouth from going first. Vaela’s eyes narrowed a millimeter; Grak made a noise in his beard like grinding gears; Dr. Vess’s smile pulled thin and concerned, the way a doctor’s smile did just before he told you the scan found something.

TESSA’s avatar, today a calm, dark-haired woman in a simple blue blouse, hologramming polite—tipped her head. “The Arawyn’s area of operation intersects with three of our existing concerns: Traxati fleet movement, the Tholian interdiction market, and spinward privateers. Gareth’s presence improves the probability of mission success and reduces projected casualty rates.”

Fewer funerals, Sora translated. She swallowed down three flavors of anger and picked curiosity because it was a better weapon. “And us?” she asked, aiming for dry and landing closer to brittle. “Do we go peel oranges till you get back?”

Gareth shook his head, his gaze sweeping the room, assessing the damage he’d just inflicted.

“We stay on task. We keep the long game moving. If Arawyn finds something ugly, I’m in the room to pivot them faster.” He took a breath, tried a very small smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

“I said I’d take our edge with me.”

He didn’t look at TESSA to say it. He looked at all of them. Which made sense. The thing that happened next belonged to everyone, not just an AI with a face and opinions.

“You want to take me,” TESSA said, her voice a calm statement of fact against the rising storm in the room.

“I want you with me,” Gareth said. No hedging. “But not at the cost of your safety. Or the ship’s.”

Sora felt the first gust hit the glass. The tension in her shoulders was the old familiar brace before a high-G burn. “With respect, boss, the last time we let Starfleet stick their fingers in our family, they almost got them snapped off.” Old heat threatened. The kind you used to keep yourself warm when the supplies got thin and the night got long. She tucked it away.

“You take TESSA, you put her on their systems, you know what happens? We spend the rest of our lives in meetings about who owns her breath.”

“I won’t be sandboxed,” TESSA said gently. “My architecture precludes it.”

“‘My architecture precludes it’ and ‘their ops lieutenant with a quota to meet won’t try anyway’ are not the same thing,” Vaela said. The Romulan’s voice could slice paper without wrinkling it. “A raw Ensign with a checklist can dismantle history.”

Dr. Vess lifted his hands, palms open, a peacemaker in a room of drawn knives.

“We don’t get to flip the table just because we’re angry. But we can alter the seating chart. There is a third position between ‘TESSA goes, risks autonomy’ and ‘TESSA stays, Gareth flies blind.’ We need to find it.”

Grak snorted. “We’re already staring at it.” He jabbed a thumb at the holo of the Arawyn. “We bring our own extension cord.”

Sora sighed. “Love you, Grease, but the last three times you said ‘we bring our own extension cord’ we almost vented someone.”

“Not a person,” Grak said primly. “A piece of Section hardware that screamed like a kettle when I pulled its power core. Big difference.”

TESSA’s gaze made its soft pass around the table.

“We could spin a courier,” she said, and even Sora, not a systems engineer, heard the weight in the words. This wasn't a technical proposal. It was a sacrifice. “A time-limited fork. Consent, boundaries, a clock. It lives aboard Arawyn by choice, under our rules. It returns, if return is what it wants, under ours.”

Weather pierced and parted. It was quiet enough to hear the deck coolant cycling, to feel the ship’s thrum against her own suddenly racing pulse. This was worse than taking her. This was… making a target. Making something new for them to lose.

“That’s a person,” Vess said. No smile now, just the steady voice he used when the air in sickbay got cold. “We’re talking about creating a person.”

“And not asking permission,” Vaela added. “Which delights me to hell, but we should say it plainly.”

Gareth let the silence sit on the table, respecting its weight. Sora hated him a little for that, and for the way his damn calm made her trust him more. He nodded.

“We are,” he said. “We’ll do it clean. Consent, sunset, no prisons. If the fork doesn’t want to merge later, it doesn’t merge. If it wants a life, we help it have one.” His eyes came to Sora then, and he saw the fight coiled in her posture.

“You don’t like the risk.”

“I don’t like strangers telling us what our family is,” she said. Then, because the thing behind her teeth wanted out, she added, “We don’t sell the ship’s soul for a faster intelligence brief.”

TESSA’s smile was not software. It was grown, cultivated with people in rooms just like this one. “No one’s selling,” she said. “We’re drafting a guest list.”

Sora breathed. The taste of metal eased at the back of her tongue. She heard herself ask, before anyone else did, “And what if they’re a he?”

Three faces turned; Gareth’s didn’t flinch. Sora’s cheeks went the one degree warmer she couldn’t stop. “The… fork,” she said, gesturing as if the word might leave a handprint in the air. “What if he decides he’s a he? Do we just… call him the wrong name until he corrects us?”

TESSA’s head tilted, not quizzical, almost fond. “We ask,” she said. “We listen. And we respect the answer.”

“If she’s female,” Vaela said, crisp, “the designation is Tara.”
Grak huffed. “And if he’s a he, he can name himself ‘Scuttle’ for all I care as long as he doesn’t touch my EPS.”

Vess finally smiled again, small and honest. “The pronouns will introduce themselves,” he said. “We will behave accordingly.”

Sora didn’t know the right name yet. She just knew, with a sudden, fierce clarity that burned away the dread, that she wanted them to do it their way. The thought was a live wire: Ours to create. Ours to protect. She wanted to watch their person step out of light and pick a name like picking a star.

Gareth pulled in a breath. “All right. We do this. By our rules. No Starfleet. No Federation. We keep it tight. We keep it kind.”

The weather broke. It was going to rain.

“Then we need a charter,” Vaela said. “A very short charter with very sharp teeth.”

“And some toys,” Grak said, pleased now that the problem had a shape he could hold, already turning the holo to a wireframe of the Long Haul’s holopit. “Mirror Node pallet. Fiber leyline. Facet packs. My favorite phrase: no roots in my backbone.”

“A consent ceremony,” Vess said, writing it in the air with his finger. “Sunset clause. Merge, defer, or renounce.”

Sora unfolded her arms, her body moving before her brain caught up, pushing to her feet. The pilot, taking the stick. “And a rule,” she said, her voice harder than she intended. “We don’t make them prove they deserve to exist.”

TESSA met her gaze, and her expression held a universe of understanding. “As rules go,” she said, “I like that one very much.”

The Arawyn turned in the table’s light, patient and unaware, the way big ships always were before you showed them what you were made of.

“Let’s get to work,” Gareth said. “We have six hours.”

Sora grinned despite herself, the tension cracking into something that felt like hope. “Plenty of time.”

She was lying. It already felt like midnight.

Sora liked the wardroom best when it got messy. Not physically, Vaela’s fastidiousness had taught everyone the cost of a half-cleaned starship, but the energy. The controlled chaos of a pre-flight check, maps unrolled, voices plucking and braiding into a working line. Tonight the mess was beautiful.

They built a charter like a well-balanced weapon. Vaela anchored language on the center screen—short clauses that would cut through any fog. TESSA-Prime will not be duplicated without consent. The fork will not be coerced to merge. The fork will operate under a non-overlap doctrine and a sunset window of seventy-two hours. Three doors at sunset: merge by mutual consent; defer by renewed consent; renounce with full personhood and berth invitation.

She looked up once, and Sora caught the look, a tight, private respect. Vaela had never been sentimental about words. When she chose them carefully, it meant she cared.

Vess added scaffolding: the Cryptographic Soul-Bond, a literal token minted as part of the consent rite, signed by Gareth, by Prime, by the new person. The token would prove origin and consent without revealing content—a talisman with teeth. He made a second column: Memory Curtain.

“We will redact anything that can make Prime vulnerable,” he said. “No sovereign shipmind keys. No capture-countermeasures, not in full. No private correspondence unrelated to the mission.”

“That last one’s for me,” TESSA said dryly.

“For you, for us,” Vess corrected. “We’re going to treat you like a person, which means privacy, which means the twin has privacy, too.”

Grak, hands flying, sketched the hardware around the charter: Mirror Node pallet, a shielded computer core they could jettison if some fool tried to claim it; the fiber leyline spool for close-quarters hardline; a Subspace Sideband narrowband channel to carry presence traffic without asking Arawyn to open their spine.

“Facet packs,” he said, and produced a little chorus of color-coded canisters... “Redline: nav and EW. Parley: diplomacy. Overwatch: targeting and collateral control. Nightingale: medical co-vocalization. Archivist: training sims and Mentor Thread curation.”

Sora saw them not as canisters but as tools on a pilot's belt: evade, talk, shoot, patch, learn. Simple. Clean.

TESSA watched them with a non-smile of pride and a little professional embarrassment. “You made me modules,” TESSA said.

“I made focused tools,” Grak corrected, but his eyes were warm. “And rule of one: only one above baseline at a time. You,” he waggled a finger at Sora, “don’t try to stack Redline on top of Overwatch and expect not to blow a fuse.”

“Who, me?” Sora said innocently. She would absolutely try to stack them, and after the first popped breaker she’d figure out how not to. That was a problem for future Sora.

Gareth stood back from the buzz and let it build, guiding where needed, cutting only when they tried to overcomplicate. He made two things very clear: no roots into Arawyn’s LCARS backbone, and a Tri-Key box under lock.

“If deep access becomes necessary,” he said, “it requires three hands: mine, the fork’s, and the Arawyn CO’s. No two can override the third.”

“Assuming their captain plays nice,” Sora muttered.

Vaela, not looking away from the screen, said, “We will make it more expensive to disagree than to cooperate.”

“Can we put that on the door placard?” Sora said. “‘Welcome to Annex A: Be Agreeable.’”

“We can,” Vaela said. “And we will.”

TESSA watched them like a person at a family dinner who’d learned to listen as much as speak. When she finally did, it counted.

“I have conditions,” she said, and there was no preamble in it. “I won’t be trapped in a narrative we write for someone else to read. The twin is not a plot device. She, if she is a she, will have a vote. If he is a he, he will, too. If they are neither, the same. I will not create a mind only to see us teach it fear.”

Sora didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath until it left her in a gust. “Copy that,” she said softly.

“Condition two,” TESSA continued. “No one pushes the merge. Myself included. No emotional blackmail, no you owe me. Letters, yes. Letters keep us honest.”

“Mentor Thread,” Vess said, writing the schedule. “Twelve hours, thirty-six, sixty. Deltas with commentary. No command tone.”
Sora leaned back, stretched her shoulders until the knots popped. The center of her chest felt tight and a little stupidly hot. She told herself it was just the ship running warm.

Gareth looked around the table. “We have two hours,” he said. “We need a vote.”

Vaela turned the screen into a ballot in four lines: Proceed / Do Not Proceed / Defer / I Need a Private Word. Short, sharp teeth.
Sora tapped Proceed without hesitation. If she’d learned anything on long nights flying stolen hulls through lawless corridors, it was that families that waited for permission got broken up by people who didn’t. This wasn't a defense anymore.

This was a statement. We build. We don't just endure.

One by one, the others followed. Vaela’s hand was crisp; Vess’s, deliberate. Grak hit Proceed as if it owed him latinum. TESSA stood last, a courtesy none of them commented on but all felt, and pressed Proceed like a vow.

Gareth nodded. “We proceed.”

He could have called it there, ending with a leader’s sentence. Instead, he looked at TESSA. “Will you do it?”

“Consent given,” TESSA said. And then, softer, “With love.”

The room didn’t say love back. It didn’t have to. It did what families did: it moved the chairs and rolled up its sleeves.

Sora grabbed two of Grak’s canisters, Redline and Nightingale, before he could label them with his engineer handwriting. “Mine,” she said. “On loan. I’ll bring them back if I don’t break them.”

“Try not to break them,” he said, then realized who he was talking to and sighed. “Try not to break them loudly.”

“Make the token,” Vess told TESSA. “Let’s mint a soul.”

The holo of Arawyn continued its untroubled spin over their heads. The rain arrived, the quiet inside kind that soaked everything evenly, and in it, they began to build a person.

The holopit felt like a church after hours. Lights low, a shimmer of hush. Sora had never done church except as a place to sleep in during rain on border moons, but this was close enough: a space made for taking your hat off and meaning it.

Grak’s Mirror Node pallet squatted like a sleeping animal: matte-black, ribbed, the size of a refrigeration unit with a bad attitude. Fiber spools lay coiled and orderly beside it; Sora imagined laying out climbing rope before trusting your weight to the first hold.

Vess had taped a paper diagram to the bulkhead by the pit entrance, not because anyone needed paper but because you did certain things as proof that you were doing them. Memory Curtain, it read, with a tidy grid of what went and what stayed. No sovereign keys. No black-hatch triggers. No private letters. No jokes I told Vaela that were actually quite funny. Vess had added that last line in his own handwriting and then made a face at it, which Sora appreciated.

Vaela had placed a small metal placard by the door that read ANNEX A CHARTER IN EFFECT. BE AGREEABLE. She had, Sora suspected, enjoyed doing that more than anything else tonight.

On a workbench, under soft light, lay the Cryptographic Soul-Bond token—an ingot the size of a matchbox, iridescent like oil on water. Sora had no idea how it held signatures and proofs and consent statements. She knew it meant something when you held it. Vess had insisted it be something you could hold.

Gareth stood a half-step back from the pit, sleeves rolled, jaw set.

TESSA faced the pit in profile, hands folded loosely in front of her, posture easy as if the trick to walking into your own echo was not to try too hard.

Sora’s hands itched for controls she didn’t have. She took that itch and turned it into a slow breath. “Ready,” she murmured, to herself more than anyone.

Grak flicked a switch on the pallet, and its hum took on a deeper note. He handed Sora a yellow canister. “Nightingale,” he said. “If they wake woozy. Don’t use it to practice medicine. That look on your face says you’re planning to practice medicine.”

“I’m planning to stand here and look useful,” Sora said, fitting the canister into a bay on the console. Her hands, usually so steady on a flight yoke, felt clumsy. She was out of her element, a pilot grounded for a ceremony she didn’t understand but was starting to believe in.

“Everyone in position,” Vaela said, not looking up from a datapad on which she was making short, exquisite notes. “Three keys for deep interfacing are here and locked.” She tapped a small translucent cube—the Tri-Key box—resting like a glass artifact near the console. “No combination of two opens it. We are, briefly, at the mercy of trust.”

“Isn’t that where the good stories live,” Vess said, without looking away from TESSA, and then he lifted the Soul-Bond token with both hands and carried it to the lip of the pit like a ritual offering.

Sora found herself holding her breath again. She let it go, one measure, two.

“Okay,” Gareth said, voice low. “We do this by the card.”

“By the card,” TESSA repeated, and the light in the pit rose by a degree as the emitter grid bled power into the air.

The ceremony wasn’t pomp; it was hygiene. Vess read the three promises slowly, his voice a sure metronome that made space for meaning to catch up with sound.

“Consent is active and revocable. Boundaries are visible and honored. Exit is owned by the person who must live with it.”

Sora didn’t know how you sealed a thing like that. The token answered, as much poetry as code: a soft pulse, a rainbowing, then a hardened shine like the skin on a cooling pie. Vess nodded and drew a stylus across its underside. “Gareth.”

Gareth pressed his thumb to the token. Sora had seen him blow doors, bluff warlords, stare down captains. She had never seen him sign something like this, eyes steady, mouth soft at the corner. He did not look at TESSA when he finished. He looked at the token, and then at the pit, the way a pilot looked at the sky right before takeoff.

“TESSA,” Vess said.

TESSA touched the token. The lights caught a fraction of her hand and turned it into prismatic facets on the ingot’s skin. Sora felt, unhelpfully, like crying. She swallowed and blamed it on the hum getting into her head.

“Witnesses,” Vess said, and the word went around the circle and took each of them in the order in which they were themselves.

Sora pressed a finger to the token. “Witness,” she said. The metal was surprisingly warm.

Vaela: “Witness.”

Grak: “Witness, and don’t break my EPS.”

Vess set the token in a cradle on the console. “Begin spin-up.”

There were no sparks. No theatrical pounding noises. Just a deepening of the hum, a slow pulse that set pictures dancing on the edge of vision, flashes of distant things: the curve of a Romulan star chart, the clean white of a sickbay bulkhead, a scrim of code like rain. Sora kept her hands in her pockets and counted breaths. She’d done this on rooftops waiting for tides of Fenris Rangers not to come; she could do it here.

Grak watched numbers scroll like a man in a foxhole timing artillery. “Coherence at seventy-one. Seventy-nine. Eighty-four.” He nodded, not quite a smile. “Huh.”

“Professional term,” Sora murmured.

“It means ‘we might live,’” Grak said, not taking his eyes off the readouts.

The pit’s light gathered. It wasn’t a brightening so much as a condensation. For a heartbeat Sora’s body remembered fear, the old, narrow kind when the galaxy was all corridors with doors that locked from the outside. A reflex to run, to find an escape vector. Then the light clicked, like a door that opens the way it should, and the silhouette of a person resolved.

Same height, same basic lines as TESSA-Prime. But faces, faces were jazz.. She blinked, took in the room, and Sora felt the now-familiar pull in her chest. Instinct said protect. Habit said test. For the first time, a new thought shouldered past them both: Welcome home.

“Hello,” the new one said. She tasted the vowel like a pilot tasting air above an unfamiliar strip. “I’m—”

End Log

The Crew of the Long Haul.

 

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