Truffles First
Posted on 03 Aug 2026 @ 2:07am by Lieutenant Commander Claire Dunross MD & Lieutenant Commander Grayson McKinney
1,341 words; about a 7 minute read
Mission:
Ninety-One Seconds
Location: McKinney Quarters
=/\= MCKINNEY QUARTERS =/\=
The doors to his quarters parted at the end of a sigh he had been holding since the start of alpha shift. For a moment Grayson stood in the doorway, boots still cold from the corridor, letting the warmth of the room settle over him.
Fourteen hours. His shoulder ached in a way that promised worse tomorrow, and he wanted a shower, a stiff drink, and eight hours of nothing.
He got Claire instead, which was better, so he didn't complain, not even to himself.
She had claimed the better half of the sofa, boots off, feet tucked under her, a PADD propped against one knee. Brasa had settled into her lap sometime in the last hour with the unearned confidence of a cat who had never once had to ask permission for anything. She didn't look up right away, which told him she'd heard the door and decided he could wait his turn behind whatever she was reading.
He crossed the room, dropped his jacket over the back of the leather chair he'd refused to have refurbished, and rolled his shoulder until something in it popped audibly.
That got her attention. One eyebrow lifted over the edge of the PADD, unimpressed, and went back down.
"Diagnosis withheld, I take it."
He dropped onto the sofa beside her, and Brasa opened one eye to assess him before deciding he posed no threat worth moving for.
"Four hours under a bulkhead panel. Corbin standing over my shoulder the whole time like I was going to improvise a workaround out of spite. Which, for the record, I considered."
The corner of her mouth moved, the closest thing to a verdict he was going to get with her nose still in the PADD, and her socked foot nudged his knee, not quite sympathy, not quite dismissal.
That was when he noticed the package on the low table.
It was wrapped in plain brown paper, string tied in a neat, deliberate bow that could only mean one person. A cargo chit clipped to the twine showed clearance at 1420 hours, receipt logged under DUNROSS, C. The return stamp read VALLEY FORGE in block letters.
No enclosure card. He checked twice and found nothing where a note would have gone, if his father were the kind of man who left them.
He worked the lid free, and the smell hit him first, rich and dark. For a moment the whole day felt survivable. Eighteen truffles sat dusted in cocoa in his mother's usual grid, the kind of care that came from a woman who considered presentation ninety percent of hospitality and the other ten percent negotiable.
He took one. Claire's hand found the tin a moment later and came away with one of her own, and for a while neither of them bothered to say anything worth interrupting.
Then he set the tin on the cushion and picked up what had been sitting underneath it.
It was a standard-issue rod, dull matte casing, no manufacturer's mark beyond a stamp he'd seen on a hundred requisition slips: VALLEY FORGE, ENGINEERING. No handwritten label. No explanation. He turned it once between two fingers, careful the way he might have been with something carrying a live charge, and slotted it into the reader built into the side table.
The panel woke, ran a standard authentication handshake, and resolved.
On the display, a single line appeared:
TACTICAL PROBLEM 4-11. Personal training library, CAPT E. McKinney.
He read it twice.
Whatever this was, his father had built it by hand, and Edson McKinney never wasted effort on anything small. That made the datarod feel less like a message and more like a test, which was worse.
Claire let the truffle rest on her tongue for a moment before biting through it.
The chocolate was dark enough to temper the sweetness, the center smooth without being perfectly uniform. There was texture there, the faint evidence of something made rather than produced. She knew the difference. She had grown up around kitchens where ingredients were chosen carefully and technique mattered, where food carried some trace of the hands that made it.
This did.
Her gaze drifted to the open tin.
No note.
That did not surprise her nearly as much as it might have once.
Claire was still learning the McKinneys, the quiet language of things left unsaid and gestures expected to speak for themselves. She had not worked out all of it yet, but she understood enough to recognize care when it had been wrapped in brown paper and string.
She took another bite and looked down at the PADD against her knee.
The same paragraph stared back at her.
Claire frowned faintly.
She had read it.
More than once, she suspected.
Not a single word of it had stayed with her.
A small breath escaped through her nose as she closed the document and set the PADD aside. Whatever conclusion the authors had reached would still be there later, when she was prepared to give it more than the illusion of attention.
A trace of chocolate remained against her fingertips. Claire wiped them carefully clean before running her hand along Brasa’s back.
“Come now, darling.”
Brasa answered with a look of profound betrayal.
Claire smiled, scratched lightly beneath her chin in apology, then lifted her from her lap and deposited her on the floor.
She shifted closer to Grayson, moving up behind him on the sofa. Her hands came to rest against his shoulders, fingertips finding the tension there almost immediately.
The instinct to assess came easily. Too easily sometimes.
Claire let it pass.
Her thumbs worked instead into the tight muscle with slow, measured pressure, easing along the stubborn edge of the knot without commentary. There were moments when knowledge was useful without needing to be announced. When caring for someone did not require turning them into a patient.
Her attention wandered over his shoulder to the display.
TACTICAL PROBLEM 4-11. Personal training library, CAPT E. McKinney.
“A tactical problem.”
There was interest in the words now.
“How often do you receive these?”
Her eyes continued over the information on the screen while her fingers worked.
Constructed eleven years ago.
Claire’s brow creased slightly.
Then the revision history caught her eye.
Three days before the package had been sent on its way to the Arawyn.
Her hands slowed.
Eleven years was a long time for a finished problem to sit untouched. Three days before sending it was something else entirely.
Claire studied the line for another moment before looking toward Grayson.
“Your father changed it just before he sent it.”
"Every few years. Usually when I've done something to deserve it." He rolled his shoulder into her hands, buying himself a second before he had to look at the header again. "Man's never revised a finished file in his life, far as I know. Treats a first draft like a moral position."
He said it easy, the same tone he used for most things about his father, and let his eyes close for a moment under the working pressure of her thumbs. His hand found her knee and settled there, thumb moving once over the fabric, no purpose to it beyond wanting his hand somewhere that was hers.
Then he felt his own jaw set before he'd decided to let it, that particular stillness that had nothing to do with fourteen hours on his feet, and he made himself unclench it before she could read the whole shape of what he was thinking.
"Three days," he said again, quieter than the joke had been.
He gave her knee a small squeeze, more for himself than for her, and reached past it for another truffle, mostly so his hands would have somewhere to be. The rest of the evening closed in around the two of them, the cat, and a line on a screen he had already decided not to finish thinking about tonight.
LtCmdr Claire Dunross, MD
Asst Chief Medical Officer
LtCmdr Grayson McKinney
Chief Tactical Officer
RSS Feed