Zero Dark Oh-Three-Hundred
Posted on 16 Aug 2026 @ 7:14pm by Lieutenant Commander Claire Dunross MD & Lieutenant Commander Grayson McKinney
1,651 words; about a 8 minute read
Mission:
Ninety-One Seconds
Location: Grayson McKinney's Quarters
The PADD hit the cushion face-down and stayed there.
Grayson looked at it for a second, then looked away. He'd been through six of them in two hours, pulling approach vectors from the tactical database, checking shield degradation rates against the scenario's listed emitter efficiency, running the numbers on the mineable lane one more time to see if four minutes could somehow become eight if he changed the dispersal pattern. It couldn't. He'd already known it couldn't. He'd run it anyway.
Brasa sat on the stack he’d left on the low table, right on top of the two PADDs he needed most, in that way she did when she was annoyed. He noticed this vaguely, walked over to the replicator, and ordered her some food. She climbed down and ate, acting like she’d decided not to make a fuss this time. He returned to the sofa.
The datarod was still in the reader on the side table, just as it had been since the holodeck. The header line stayed up on the display. He didn’t bother closing it anymore.
He found a note on his duty PADD that he didn’t remember writing, probably around 0300 a night or two ago. It was just one line, written in the shorthand he only used when half asleep: mine pattern reversed from approach, not with it. He’d run through that idea twice in his head before he was fully awake. It didn’t work. He left the note anyway, because deleting it felt too much like admitting that his 0300 idea was the best he had.
The real problem was the puzzle itself.
On the first day, he treated the casualty section like a tactical appendix, reading the columns as if they were a damage report, left to right, top to bottom, searching for the number that would tell him what to do next. But it never worked that way. The sections were out of order. The headers didn’t match any format he’d seen in the curriculum archive, and he’d checked three training scenarios. This one was built on something else, a different logic, and every time he tried to fit it into what he knew, he lost track.
He understood what he was looking at, but he didn’t know how to read it.
He got up and went to the replicator again, not because he wanted anything, but because standing helped him think. Claire was across the room with something she’d brought from sickbay, some administrative task she’d been working on for the past hour. He didn’t look at her right away. He stared at the replicator panel, considered ordering something, then changed his mind.
"There's a section in the file I can't make sense of." He spoke toward the panel, still not turning around. "One of the columns. The way it's laid out doesn't match anything in the tactical database."
Then he turned around and brought up the casualty section on the display across the room.
"I want to know if it looks familiar to you."
He didn’t say anything else. He’d been building up to this for two days, and that was already enough.
The quarters had settled into the particular kind of quiet Claire had come to associate with evenings there, though there was nothing especially quiet about the room itself.
Grayson’s collection occupied nearly every available wall. The Jem’Hadar rifle sat in its mount with old scorch marks still dark against the housing, while the curved edge of the bat’leth caught a thin line of ambient light from across the room. The Ferengi energy whip remained neatly coiled in its display, almost decorative until one remembered what it could do, and somewhere behind Claire, the enormous Breen weapon rested with the absurd permanence of a piece of furniture no sane interior designer would ever have selected.
Leather and gun oil lingered faintly in the air.
Claire had grown so accustomed to both that she no longer consciously registered their presence.
Brasa had made herself comfortable near the low table after finally abandoning Grayson’s stack of PADDs, curled into a compact patch of fur beneath enough weaponry to equip a small boarding party. Claire sat at the opposite end of the sofa with one leg tucked beneath her, working through a Sickbay administrative report that had required just enough attention to keep her occupied without demanding much actual thought.
She finished the line she was reading before looking up.
Grayson was still facing the replicator when he asked the question, phrased almost casually despite the two days he had apparently spent trying to answer it himself.
Claire lowered her PADD.
The casualty section filled the display across the room.
After studying it from where she sat for several seconds, Claire set her work aside and rose. The movement disturbed Brasa, who briefly watched her cross the room before deciding nothing was interesting enough to justify getting involved.
“Which column?”
Grayson indicated it.
Claire stepped closer.
At first, she looked only where he had asked her to look: survival interval. The heading itself was unremarkable enough, but the values beneath it held her attention almost immediately. She read down several entries, returned to the first, then shifted one column left to see what the numbers were measured against.
Injury classification.
Compartment.
Intervention.
Survival interval.
Her eyes narrowed slightly.
A sufficiently sophisticated tactical simulation could model casualties. Of course it could. Structural damage, blast exposure, blood loss, radiation, treatment delay: all of it could be assigned variables and resolved mathematically. Starfleet training programs did it every day.
The problem was that modeled data usually behaved like modeled data.
This did not.
Claire expanded one of the entries with two fingers.
A crew member with extensive burns had remained alive considerably longer than she would have expected from the surrounding conditions. Another, with injuries that appeared less immediately catastrophic, had died sooner. There were reasons either might happen in reality, hundreds of them, but a teaching model generally smoothed those irregularities unless the irregularity itself was the lesson.
Here they accumulated.
Ugly little inconsistencies.
The sort that happened because bodies did not care about elegant mathematics.
Claire opened another record.
Then another.
“These aren’t projections.”
Grayson’s attention shifted toward her. “No?”
Claire shook her head faintly, still reading.
“No. At least, I don’t think so.”
She traced one value across the display, comparing it to the injury description beside it.
“These don’t behave like generated values.”
Claire moved to the next entry, then back again.
“This patient survives longer than I’d expect. This one doesn’t.”
Her brow tightened.
“There’s too much variation.”
She went back to the beginning of the section.
“These look observed.”
Nothing in Grayson’s quarters moved except Brasa’s tail giving one lazy flick against the cushion. The old weapons remained where they always had, their histories known and mounted neatly behind glass or on brackets.
Claire found herself looking briefly at the datarod.
Everything else in this room had a story Grayson already knew.
This one was becoming the exception.
She returned to the display.
Once she stopped trying to read it as a training model, the arrangement began to look familiar. Claire widened the section, exposing the adjacent fields, and followed them across.
Injury. Intervention. Survival. Outcome
Her expression tightened.
“I know why this doesn’t match what you expect.”
Grayson waited.
Claire scrolled slowly through the entries.
“This is a mortality review.”
For several moments she continued reading.
Claire knew the format.
She had seen enough mortality reviews to recognize the pattern once the fields were laid out together. Injury. Intervention. Time. Outcome.
Someone had gone back afterward and rebuilt what happened to these people one line at a time.
That was not how a training scenario was usually written.
Claire had read hundreds.
Written more than a few.
Her gaze moved down the anonymous designations.
Crewman A through Crewman I.
The triage fields sat beside them.
She slowed.
One category was empty.
Claire went back a page to check whether the designation had changed. It had not. She moved forward again, then opened the adjoining compartment records.
Still empty.
That alone might have meant nothing.
Except the survival observations continued.
Claire stopped scrolling.
Formal triage ended at a particular point in the record, but the patient timelines did not. Someone had continued noting how long people remained alive after the formal triage stopped.
Her fingers rested lightly against the edge of the display.
That was wrong.
Or, more precisely, it meant something she did not yet have enough information to explain.
Behind her, Grayson shifted.
“What?”
Claire did not answer immediately. Her eyes went back to the unfinished triage fields, then to the survival intervals beside them. Her hand had gone still against the edge of the display.
Grayson waited.
Crewman A through I.
The records continued after triage stopped.
She did not like that.
“I’m not sure yet.” Her voice had softened. She moved back through the records once more, slower now. “But you were right to ask.”
Claire glanced toward him, then returned her attention to the casualty table.
“There’s too much detail here for decoration. Whoever put this together wanted it noticed.”
A pause followed, longer than the others.
Claire did not explain what she had noticed about the triage sequence.
Grayson watched her for another moment, clearly aware that she had found something she had not said aloud. Whatever question formed behind his expression, he let it go.
Claire’s gaze lingered on him for a beat before returning to the nine anonymous crewmen on the display.
For the first time since Grayson’s father had sent the datarod, Claire was no longer curious about the tactical problem.
She wanted to know who they were.
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