Shadow Work

Posted on 16 Sep 2025 @ 5:25am by Gareth Rhys & Tara

2,131 words; about a 11 minute read

Mission: Fractured Accord
Location: Annex A. Deck 7
Timeline: SD: 242509.15

=/\= Annex A, Deck 7, USS Arawyn =/\=

The corridor outside Annex A carried the quiet hum of a big ship thinking. Gareth liked that about the Arawyn, the low, even pulse you felt through your boots. It reminded him of nights on the Long Haul when the engines were happy and nobody was trying to kill them.

He palmed the Annex hatch. The room inside held the faint ozone tang of recent holo-work and the clean lines they’d insisted on: no roots into the Arawyn’s backbone, a stand-alone pallet, fiber spools coiled like sleeping snakes, their Tri-Key box sitting where his eye would find it first. He checked the seals by habit even though nothing had changed since the last check. Box locked. Cables safe. Everything as it should be.

Tara slipped in behind him, light on her feet, eyes doing the same sweep he’d just done. “We good?” she asked.

“We’re good,” he said. He meant the room, and he meant her, and he let both hang there, simple and true.

She touched the console edge the way a violinist might settle a hand on a favorite instrument. “Ready when you are.”
Gareth keyed the narrow-beam. “Long Haul, Annex A. Green channel. Family only.”

The reply came in the voice that meant home. “Green established,” TESSA said, warm and steady. Her holo did not appear, no bandwidth wasted, but Gareth could have drawn the way she tilted her head when she smiled.

“Report,” he said, and sat on the edge of the console rather than pretend he needed a chair. He never needed a chair.

TESSA’s cadence made the catch-up feel like a living map. “Ship status: nominal. Cloak harmonics tuned; Grak requests a complaint allowance of eight minutes per day. Sora has plotted shadow corridors for the Arawyn’s likely warp vectors, three lanes with reserve branches. Vaela has updated our alias package to match station chatter. Dr. Vess has bullied everyone into sleeping.” A beat he recognized as her version of a grin. “Including you, if I could have.”

“Noted,” he said. “Give me details.”

Grak’s voice shouldered in, all gravel and pride. “Point of fact, I didn’t tune harmonics, I resurrected them after your last heroics. But yes, cloak’s singing. Don’t hit anything sharp.”

“We’ll try to avoid the knives,” Gareth said.

Sora, quick, clipped, the way she always sounded when a plan fit in her hands. “Two clean shadow lanes on their standard patrol grid, one ugly lane for if someone gets cute. If the Sovereign throws a surprise turn, I can wrap us in her wake and ride the eddy. But tell me early if they intend acrobatics. Surprise gets people enshrined.”

Vaela, even, dry, edges like a fine blade. “I’ve seeded three innocuous rumors about a Romulan courier in the sector, none of them us. If anything hot starts to hunt the Arawyn, we’ll see the ripple before the wave.”

Dr. Vess, soft as tea and just as necessary. “Crew’s well. Your blood pressure is not. That can be fixed with a nap, but you won’t take one. Failing that, drink water.”

Gareth let the warmth of them soak in, one at a time, and then turned the line toward Tara with a small gesture. Her voice had been steady since they left the bridge. He wanted the family to hear that steadiness.

“Tessa,” Tara said, and he heard the twin note in that name, the old and the new layered together. “I’m okay. They’ve been professional. Curious, but respectful. Annex A is tight, just like we wrote it. I like it here.” A small breath. “I mean that.”

For a second, the channel held only the quiet of mutual relief. The Long Haul’s heartbeat felt closer than the Arawyn’s.

“Good,” TESSA said. “I am glad you like it there.”

Tara’s mouth tugged. “Don’t get weird about it.”

“I reserve the right to get a little weird,” TESSA said, and Dr. Vess’s chuckle drifted through before he could disguise it.

Gareth rode the comfort for another beat and then set the board. Business. “You need to hear what happened in Astrometrics,” he said. “And what we offered.”

He told it clean. Captain Corbin had requested an intelligence help to deal with the buoy explosion, an extra set of eyes in the room. He’d said yes. He’d offered the Arawyn a shadow that wasn’t on their roster, to have the Long Haul sweep behind them.

“Understood,” Vaela said.

Sora’s tone lightened by a degree. “So we get to be the invisible friend that whispers good ideas. Fine by me.”

“Then here’s your tasking,” Gareth said, and started to lay it out.

“—Wait,” Tara cut in, steady but urgent. “Before tasking, There is news...nanobots.”

Every head in his mind turned at once. He saw TESSA’s data channels sharpen without needing a holo to prove it.

“Go,” Gareth said.

“We pulled a high-res sweep on the buoy debris, what was left of its guidance collar. There’s residual dust in the lattice fractures that isn’t just lattice. Micro-constructs,” Tara said, “They look like inert grit until you heat the sample. Then they try to organize.” She lifted a hand and made a small, helpless circle in the air. “Not enough mass to build anything. Not here. But the bonds align when you push energy through. Like they’re searching for shape.”

Grak’s snort was eloquent. “Keep that searching away from my EPS.”

“They’re not ours,” Tara said. “Wrong signature, wrong logic. The bond preference is… alien to me. Not Tholian. Not Romulan. I couldn’t match it. I logged it and flagged it for the science chief.”

Vess came in level, already separating fear from risk. “Any bio-reactive vector?”

“None detected,” Tara said. “I scanned the hell out of them. Think structural, not organic. If they’re a threat, it’s to hulls and data, not blood.”

“Then they’re my problem,” TESSA said, and her tone turned analytical in the way Gareth loved best. “Nanite logic that looks for shape will look for it in traffic and power, not in tissue. I’ll assume hostile search behavior and sandbox anything we import from Arawyn lab feeds until proven clean.”

Vaela: “Do they change our mission?”

Tara shook her head, then remembered she didn’t need the gesture. “No. Not for us. The Arawyn’s science teams can hunt the origin. For us, it’s a caution label. If we see that dust, we don’t bring it home.”

“Agreed,” Gareth said. “Nanobots noted, not mission-critical. We don’t let curiosity write our orders.”

Sora exhaled into the channel. “Good. I prefer not to be dissolved into a better-designed paperweight.”

“Paperweights have their place,” Grak muttered. “Usually on top of memo pads that say ‘Don’t touch my EPS.’”

“Save the poetry for later,” Vaela said, and something like a smile moved under the words.

Gareth rolled them back on course. “Tasking,” he said again, and the room focused.

“Long Haul shadows Arawyn under EMCON-1,” he said, silent run, passives only, heat budget enforced. “No active pings. You sit inside her blind cone when possible and ride her wakes when not. TESSA, you compress traffic and run narrow-beam windows to Annex A every two hours, short bursts, timed to Arawyn standard scans.”

“Window length?” TESSA asked.

“Under eight seconds,” he said. “Shorter if you can swing it.”

“Done,” TESSA.

“Sora,” Gareth continued, “you own the lanes. If Arawyn changes vector, you call it before she commits. If she starts a combat evolution, you take us outside her arcs and hold until I say otherwise.”

“Copy,” Sora said. “I’ll paint an exit on the glass and keep us a blink from it.”

“Grak,” Gareth said, “ride the cloak gentle. If you feel harmonics drifting, you don’t chase the drift; you call it and you fall back to the quiet lane.”

“You don’t tell a Tellarite how to dance,” Grak growled, which was his version of yes.

“Vess,” Gareth said, “prep the nanite cell just in case someone gets clever with a courier package. But unless there’s blood, you do not open the box.”

“Understood,” Vess said. “I’ll keep the candy locked.”

“Vaela,” Gareth finished, “you have my authority to abort if necessary. If anything even smells like a compromise, Tal Shiar fingerprints, Tholian cross-net, Starfleet politics, we can’t steer around; you pull the plug on our current work and ghost us out. No debate.”

There was a brief silence as that settled. He had assigned that duty to her before. He never did it lightly.

“Accepted,” Vaela said. “I’ll be rude on schedule.”

Tara looked up at Gareth, weighing what was left unsaid and finding a place to set it down.

“There’s one more thing,” she told the family, the words coming slower but clear. “I meant what I said about liking it here. They treat me like I belong. Not property. Not novelty. A colleague. If that changes, you’ll hear it from me first.”

“You’ll hear from me faster,” TESSA said, and the softness threaded into the steel told Gareth how much those lines meant to both of them.

“Good,” Gareth said. He let his voice go low and even, the way he used to when a room of jittery recruits needed calm. “We watch our surroundings. We hold the line. If this ship, our ship, gets even a hint of heat because of this work, we walk away. Family first. Mission second.”

“‘Protect the crew, complete the mission, minimize harm,’” Dr. Vess murmured, as if reciting something written in the mess hall where a particular scotch bottle waited. Gareth didn’t need to answer. The code had already been carved into the ship.

“Any objections?” Gareth asked because he liked to hear them if they existed.

Grak supplied a standard-issue harrumph. “Just one. If the nanobots show up near my EPS, I’m ejecting them and whoever brought them.”

“That would be you,” Sora said. “Because no one else touches your EPS.”

“Details,” Grak muttered.

“Then that’s the board,” Gareth said. “We move on it.”

He lifted his palm from the console and nodded to Tara. She took the hand-off without missing a beat.

“TESSA, send me your watch schedule,” Tara said. “I’ll match it with Arawyn cycles and keep our windows clean. If Arawyn gets new data, I’ll feed the sanitized version down the pipe.”

“Already drafting,” TESSA said.

“Vaela,” Tara added, “if you need time for anything strategic, ping me. There’s room in here for quiet plans. I like the way you write them.”

A brief pause: he could almost see the Romulan’s eyebrow. “I will try not to abuse your hospitality.”

“Abuse away,” Tara said. “I can take it.”

Gareth felt the moment turning from briefing back into air. Time to close clean. “Any last grabs?” he asked.

“Just this,” Vess said, cheerful again. “If you see something that looks like free cake in a science lab, it is never cake. Do not eat it.”

“On that profound note,” Vaela said, “we’ll get back to work.”

Gareth ended the burst and let the room breathe. The Arawyn’s hum returned to the top of the mix. He leaned a hip against the console and studied Tara the way he’d study a new pilot before handing them a fighter, calm, capable, a heat in the eyes that meant fuel, not fire.

“Good call on the nanobots,” he said.

“Felt wrong to bury it under tasking,” she answered. “Even if it won’t touch us.”

“Wrong to bury,” he agreed, “You’re steady,"

It sounded like an observation; it was a kind of gratitude.

“I have a job I believe in,” Tara said. “Two homes that feel like one. A captain who remembers he doesn’t have to be good alone.” She looked up at him then, quick, unafraid. “We’re going to be okay.”

“Alright...Come on,” he said. “Let’s go pretend we’re getting sleep.”

“Liar,” she said, smiling.

“Frequently,” he said, and the smile hooked an answering line at the corner of his mouth. “But not to you.”

They stepped back into the corridor. The big ship kept humming, unbothered, and somewhere far away, the Long Haul rolled in her lane and stayed close enough to catch a fall. A lean, mean little ship that rode silent on the dark, listening to lanes and choosing her shadows.

The kind of work you only did for family.

End Log

Gareth Rhys
Intelligence Subcontractor
&
Tara
Intelligence Specialist.

 

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