Two Archives
Posted on 23 Aug 2026 @ 2:06am by Lieutenant Commander Claire Dunross MD & Lieutenant Commander Grayson McKinney
2,801 words; about a 14 minute read
Mission:
Ninety-One Seconds
Location: Grayson McKinney's Quarters
Claire had expected the problem to stay in Grayson’s quarters or the holodeck. Of course it had not.
Twice during her shift, her attention had wandered back to the casualty records, once during an antibiotic review and again while waiting for a diagnostic culture to finish processing. By the time she left Sickbay, she had already worked out where she wanted to start looking next.
This was becoming a habit, and Claire was not entirely certain she minded; it was an interesting puzzle.
The problem had consumed an unreasonable amount of their free time over the last several days. Dinner had become a tactical simulation. A quiet evening had disappeared into casualty records. Tonight appeared destined for much the same fate.
Still, she was spending the time with Grayson.
It was simply occurring within a rather different frame than she might normally have expected.
She sat cross-legged at one end of his sofa with three PADDs arranged around her and another balanced against her thigh. Somewhere during the first hour, any effort at appearing remotely presentable had been abandoned. Her hair had been pulled into a loose, messy ponytail to keep it off the back of her neck, though several auburn strands had already escaped around her face. A cropped T-shirt and loose terry cloth pants had replaced her uniform, and her bare feet rested against the leather cushion.
Even dressed for considerably warmer conditions than Starfleet normally required, Claire was still too hot.
She glanced toward the environmental controls with growing suspicion. “Why do we always end up here?”
Grayson looked up from the PADD in his hand, then around the room as though the answer ought to be obvious. “Because my quarters have character.”
Claire’s eyes moved toward the nearest wall, where the Jem’Hadar rifle sat mounted beneath the ambient light. “My quarters are nicer. They also aren’t maintained at approximately the surface temperature of Mars.”
His attention dropped briefly to her bare feet before returning to her face. “You’re exaggerating.”
“I’m Scottish. This is a hostile environment.”
That earned the smallest hint of a grin.
Brasa, stretched along the back of the sofa behind Claire, opened one eye at the sound of her name being excluded from the conversation. Claire looked at her with equal suspicion.
“You are covered in fur. I refuse to believe you approve of this.”
“She has good taste.”
Claire gave Grayson a flat look. “Traitors. Both of you.”
Brasa closed her eye again.
Claire returned to the PADD in her lap, still faintly amused despite herself. If the temperature genuinely bothered her enough, she would have changed it by now. She had access, and Grayson knew perfectly well that she did. Instead, she had complained, stripped down to something appropriate for a tropical climate, and stayed.
Again.
There were probably conclusions to be drawn from that.
Claire declined to draw them.
The Medical archive had been considerably less accommodating.
Now that she knew what kind of record she was looking for, the problem had changed. Names would have made it simple, but names were precisely what they lacked. Mortality reviews could be filed under individual cases, departmental investigations, credentialing actions, adverse-event reviews, or shipboard casualty summaries. If the original engagement had been sealed, the tactical record might be buried behind authorization walls while Medical continued quietly preserving the consequences somewhere else.
Starfleet could seal an engagement. It was considerably harder to make Medical forget that people had died in it.
Claire narrowed another search and watched twenty-three results become seven.
Across the room, Grayson had constructed his own small empire of PADDs. His searches bore almost no resemblance to hers. Replacement requisitions, quartermaster manifests, hull registries, repair-yard inventories. The administrative debris left behind when a starship came home damaged enough that someone had to account for every missing escape pod, emitter assembly, structural plate, and crate of emergency supplies.
It was, Claire had discovered, an unexpectedly effective way to hunt a ghost.
A new identifier appeared on the edge of her display.
She opened it, read three lines, and frowned.
“No.”
Grayson looked over. “That sounded judgmental.”
“It was. Wrong year.”
She tossed the PADD toward him. He caught it against his palm.
“The Medical review you wanted is eighteen months earlier than the hull work. Same class, different ship.”
He glanced down at it, then sent another identifier across without looking particularly chastened. “I had another one.”
Claire watched the second reference appear beside her search and slowly looked up at him.
“You already had another one.”
“I was checking your work.”
Her mouth curved. “You were waiting for me to tell you the first was wrong.”
“Efficient use of resources.”
“That is not efficiency. That is showing off.”
Grayson looked entirely too pleased with himself, which was answer enough.
Claire opened the second reference.
This one was better.
Norway-class vessel. Crew complements are within the right range. Major casualty event. The primary Medical archive reference was restricted, but several associated credentialing records remained accessible.
Claire’s amusement faded into concentration.
“Hold on.”
She unfolded her legs and shifted forward, one bare foot finding the floor while the other remained tucked beneath her.
The mortality review itself was sealed behind an event-level archive restriction, but the credentialing system did what it was designed to do. It preserved assignments, dates, certifications, and transfers.
People.
Claire widened the search.
“There were six Norway-class ships with major repair requisitions inside the window we’ve established.” She glanced across at Grayson. “How many of yours lost escape pods?”
He checked another PADD, scrolling once before answering. “Three.”
Claire entered the number.
Two candidates disappeared.
“Better.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“I was hoping Medical would win outright.”
His brow lifted. “We’re keeping score now?”
Claire looked over the top edge of the PADD. “I have been keeping score for at least an hour.”
That earned another grin, and she returned to the search before he could argue the rules.
For the first time that evening, the two archives began to touch.
One vessel had replaced emergency medical stores at nearly four times its normal replenishment rate. Burn dressings. Synthetic plasma. Analgesics. Surgical packs. Field stabilizers.
Nothing extraordinary by itself.
Except Grayson’s quartermaster record showed the same vessel replacing sections of aft-compartment pressure bulkhead, two shield-control assemblies, and a bank of emergency communications hardware during the same repair period.
Claire read the two records side by side.
Then again.
Her earlier amusement gave way to something sharper.
“I think we have the same ship.”
She sent the Medical reference across.
A few seconds later, his registry data appeared on her display.
Claire opened it.
For several moments, she said nothing.
Then she smiled.
Not because they had solved it. Not yet.
Because after days of attacking the problem from entirely different directions, their two trails had finally crossed.
Claire tucked one escaped strand of hair behind her ear and pulled another PADD closer.
“All right.”
She looked toward Grayson, satisfaction plain enough now that there was little point pretending otherwise.
“Let’s see which one of us gets there first.”
He didn’t look up from the hull registry.
"The scoring system is suspect," he said. "I want to see your methodology."
He was already moving through the repair-yard inventory, checking the aft-compartment work against the escape pod manifest. The race had stopped feeling like a joke about ten minutes ago. She was good at this. He hadn't expected that; the medical archive and the quartermaster records were such different animals that he'd assumed they'd mostly work in parallel. They weren't. Every time one lane ran dry, the other opened something up. They'd been handing leads back and forth for the last half hour without calling it what it was. By the time he noticed the pattern, the shift in the work had taken hold.
He found the aft bulkhead repair first, matched it to the shield-control assemblies she'd already flagged, and was reaching for his PADD to say so when her result came across at almost the same moment.
He read the identifier she'd sent, then looked up.
She was already looking at him.
"Draw," he said.
"I was there first."
"By approximately nothing."
Her expression suggested she found this argument unpersuasive. He got up off the sofa and crossed to her end, because whatever she'd pulled up on her display was worth looking at properly rather than reading off a relay. She shifted to make room without being asked, and he settled in beside her, close enough that her feet ended up against his thigh when she tucked her legs back under her. He didn't move away from that. Neither did she.
"Norway class," he said, reading off her screen. "Crew complement matches. Casualty event."
He leaned forward slightly to scroll, and his hand found the back of her neck on the way, fingers light at the base of her ponytail.
"Medical stores are the right kind of wrong for a fire event. What's the hull date?"
She told him.
He pulled his own PADD into his lap and cross-referenced the repair-yard schedule. The date matched. He sat back and let out a slow breath. For a moment, the room seemed to shift with that confirmation, as if the work had crossed into something else.
"That's our ship."
"Yes," she said. "It is."
He stayed there beside her for another moment, looking at the record on her screen, the two of them reading the same thing in the same light with her feet still warm against his leg, and something about that was easier to sit inside than he'd expected. When he finally looked away, the next step felt clear.
Then he took the PADD to run the crew manifest, because that was his lane, and the ship's personnel file sat in a different archive from the repair records, and he hadn't checked it yet. The work changed shape, but it did not stop.
He found the hull designation first. USS Arsinoe. Norway class, as expected.
He found the engagement date. 2401, in the months after Frontier Day, which fit.
He found the casualty count. Fifty-eight dead of one hundred ninety, and the number that had been sitting at the top of the casualty section since the first day he opened it suddenly stopped feeling abstract. It was no longer just a number; it was a count of people lost on the ship he had just identified. Less theoretical.
He kept reading.
Nine of the fifty-eight had come from a single aft compartment. He scrolled to the personnel roster for that section and read the names once, quickly, the way you read something you're hoping will turn out not to say what you think it says, because each name meant a person lost on the ship he had just identified.
It said what he thought it said.
Then he found the command staff entry for the engagement date, and the name listed as second officer, and he stopped scrolling, because this was the line that turned the record from data into something that could still hurt. It made the ship’s crew real to him. MCKINNEY, E. Lieutenant Commander. Second Officer, acting commanding officer from T+19.
He sat with it for a moment, just reading.
MCKINNEY, E. Lieutenant Commander. Second Officer, acting commanding officer from T+19. The line sat there like proof that the record was not distant after all.
He read it twice more, but it didn't change.
He didn't say anything to Claire about it, not right away, partly because he didn't have the words for it yet and partly because what he needed in that moment was not to talk about it. He set the PADD down on the cushion, got up, went to the replicator, and asked it for paper. Actual paper, the kind that came out warm and faintly textured, which he hadn't ordered in years. The replicator produced three sheets without comment. He wanted something he could hold while he thought about the names.
He sat back down, not at his own end of the sofa but at hers, close enough that their shoulders touched, and she moved against him slightly, the way she did when she wasn't making a point of it, just adjusting to where he was. He didn't look at her. He looked at the paper and the PADD, and he wrote out the nine names from the aft compartment roster in the order they appeared. Then he added the ship name, the hull designation, and the second officer entry by hand, in the shorthand he used for nothing else. He needed the names somewhere permanent.
All nine. By hand. In the shorthand he used for nothing else.
He didn't explain why. Some things needed to be somewhere that wasn't a screen, and that was the only explanation he had.
Claire did not ask why he wanted paper.
She watched him write instead.
There was something deliberate in the way he worked down the roster, each name given its own line, his handwriting tighter than anything she had seen him put to paper before. Claire had known him long enough to recognize when silence needed room more than it needed filling, so she left him to it and turned back to the records still open on her own PADD.
Now that they had the Arsinoe, the Medical side of the archive was no longer a blind search.
Claire entered the hull designation and engagement date, then narrowed the return to senior medical staff assigned during the casualty event. The result came back quickly enough that she almost missed it among the credentialing references.
COMMANDER AMARA REYES-SARKADY, MD
SHIP’S SURGEON
USS ARSINOE
Claire opened the file.
At first, there was nothing remarkable about it. Education, certifications, assignments, promotions, the accumulated record of a long Starfleet Medical career. Reyes-Sarkady had specialized in emergency medicine and trauma surgery, with additional certification in mass-casualty response.
Claire scrolled more slowly.
A procedural attachment near the end of the record caught her eye.
MASS-CASUALTY EVACUATION: NON-TRANSPORTABLE PATIENTS
Her thumb stopped.
She opened it.
The first section was familiar enough that she skimmed most of it. Evacuation authority. Treatment priorities. Continuity of care during compartment loss. Assignment of secondary treatment areas. The language was older than the Arawyn’s current procedures, but not by enough to make the underlying decisions unfamiliar.
Then she reached the section governing patients who could not be moved.
Claire read it once.
Her bare foot slipped from where it had been tucked against Grayson’s leg and settled on the floor.
She read it again.
Patients unable to survive transport were to remain in place with senior medical personnel until evacuation became possible, relief arrived, or continued care was no longer required.
The wording was different.
The decision was not.
Claire knew because she had written the Arawyn’s version herself.
Her version went further.
It named her.
If evacuation failed and patients remained who could not survive transport, the Assistant Chief Medical Officer stayed with them.
Claire had been very deliberate about that language when she wrote it. A mass-casualty order was a poor place for ambiguity. No one should have to argue over responsibility while a compartment filled with smoke or the deck disappeared beneath them. If the decision ever had to be made, the order already made it.
Her name already made it.
On paper, that had always seemed sensible.
Claire’s fingers tightened slightly around the edge of the PADD.
Beside her, the faint scratch of Grayson’s pen continued across the page.
She returned to Reyes-Sarkady’s personnel record and followed it to the final entry.
Killed in action.
Claire remained very still.
The record gave her no dramatic account of the surgeon’s last minutes. No explanation for what she had chosen, what she had been told, or whether there had been any choice left by then. There was only the standing order, the casualty record, and a death attached to the same engagement they had spent the evening reconstructing from fragments.
Her eyes returned to the order.
For several seconds, the quarters seemed warmer than before.
Claire lowered the PADD into her lap and looked toward Grayson.
He was still bent over the paper, attention fixed on the names beneath his hand. She watched him for a moment, then looked back down before he could catch her doing it.
There was nothing useful to say.
Not yet.
Claire reopened the standing order and read the relevant paragraph once more.
The language remained clinical.
It did not feel clinical anymore.
She shifted closer until her shoulder rested lightly against Grayson’s.
Neither of them spoke.
Claire left the surgeon’s file open in her lap.
RSS Feed