Against the Drift

Posted on Mon Jul 13th, 2026 @ 12:54am by Commander Cornelius 'Kit' Hanlon

1,795 words; about a 9 minute read

Mission: Mission 1: Behind the Curtain
Location: Jeffries Tube 3D-Alpha, USS Fenrir
Timeline: MD-01, 04:00

[ON]

Jefferies Tube 3D-Alpha

The report hadn’t made sense the first time Kit read it. It still didn’t now, half a shift later, a briefing, and days chewing over the material…it kept echoing through the back of his thoughts like a misaligned coupling. He blinked, slowly, taking a moment to shift. He adjusted the bypass relay again, more out of habit than necessity. The work was simple, physical, responsive…you had a task and there was a result. He didn’t need to think too hard when his hands were busy. The heat of the conduit hummed steadily beneath his fingers, and the narrow crawlspace framed the world in metal, pressure, and something close to clarity.

Cultural structure exhibits higher than expected entropy for a species of this technological level, the Vulcan had written. That was the phrase…Just that, nothing else, nothing to explain it. Kit had stared at it long enough for the words to come apart from their meaning. Entropy. Disorder. Drift. Something not holding shape. And yet Apsloe, by every visual metric, was a utopia. Advanced. Beautiful. Refined. Long-lived. Cooperative. It didn’t fit. And worse, it hadn’t been explored. The Vulcan Captain that had filed the report had walked away from the thread before pulling it. Left a warning light blinking and moved on. Kit wasn’t a diplomat, and he knew it. But he also knew that if an engineer left a vague note like that on a diagnostics log, someone would be breathing down their neck before the shift was out. That kind of language didn’t belong in a final report. It belonged in a red flag. A footnote. A call for more eyes...but maybe that what they were. More eyes, for a second contact.

He shifted slightly, shoulder brushing the bulkhead, boots braced wide for balance in the confined space. The relay was already stable, but he turned the micro-spanner one last time and watched the glow shift from amber to green. Satisfied, he leaned back on his heels with a low exhale, arm sweeping across his forehead. He was warmer than he’d realised, the overalls clinging lightly with sweat, sleeves pushed to the elbow and streaked with the marks of an honest night’s work. Carbon smudges. Sealant. The faint gleam of plasma soot that hadn’t been cleaned up here when the retrofit had happened. The kind of mess that came from doing something that made sense. And sometimes…this made more sense to him.

Sweat was honest. Metal didn’t lie. And the ship, for all her retrofitted newness, was starting to speak back to him in quiet, low-frequency hums he was just beginning to recognise. She was still finding her tone. An overtuned string instrument, bright and a little tense, but promising. The crew were the same. Finding rhythm and building habits. Trusting routines and training, and then finally each other. Two weeks of pre-launch pressure had baked the stress into his shoulders, but it was here, with hands on a panel and knees in a tube, the pulse of energy steady and warm beneath him, that he felt something close to calm.

Down here, things could be fixed…he had the map for this, in his head.

Six Hours Earlier - XO’s Office

He had skimmed the file again after the briefing, first alone in his quarters, then again at his desk with the lights dimmed and a fresh mug of tea going cold beside the console. As if meaning might shift with the angle, as if the right light or the right state of mind might suddenly illuminate the line he had missed. But there was nothing. Just the same sparse report with its carefully non-committal phrasing, its polished observations, and its refusal to dig any deeper than surface charm. He had tried again anyway, scrolling slowly through the sensor logs from the Brahma, cross-referencing them with atmospheric readings and cultural markers that could have been copied from a tourism pamphlet.

They were going in with barely more than a name, a polite impression, and a contradiction that wouldn’t leave him alone. Cultured, but disordered. Welcoming, yet somehow opaque. A people described as open, intelligent, peaceful, even aesthetically arresting...but left unexplored. The Brahma’s crew had touched something beautiful and then turned away. It was written between the lines, even if no one had said it aloud. Something had made them step back. Or distracted them. Or seduced them into forgetting they were there to ask questions.

Kit didn’t like blank spaces like that…didn’t like being underprepared to meet new people. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do it…he walked into situations daily where he had to listen and feel the person out, see them as they were…not what a report said. But a whole species? That is where the worry about doing something offensive, being something less than what the uniform told him to be, came through. It worried him. Also, there was that sort of thing that…if he had submitted a report like this in Engineering? Oh, he’d have a Chief on his back and told to rewrite it.

He rubbed a hand across his jaw, then scrubbed it over his face, leaning forward slightly with his elbows braced on the desk. His shoulders were tight, muscles holding more tension than he wanted to admit, and his hands itching for something tactile to do. The lights of the office console glinted faintly across the lines of his brow as he blinked down at the scan summary again. It wasn’t just the lack of data that bothered him. It was the lack of curiosity. The Vulcan had seen entropy and left it sitting on the page like a footnote, when to Kit, it should have been the headline.

Jefferies Tube, Now

He didn’t belong in diplomacy and he knew it. Hell, even now, there were days when he still had to remind himself which colour he was meant to be wearing, caught somewhere between the engineer he had been and the First Officer he had become. Pressure used to mean stabilising an EPS conduit. Now it meant reading a room full of people and finding the thread that wouldn’t unravel. Not harder, necessarily, but messier. Less forgiving. You misread a power relay, it burned out. You misread a culture, someone else might pay the price.

It was early days. He was finding the flow with Captain Blake, the trust still building. He liked her. And he was sure it would only improve with time. And he was bonding with the crew as well…using his instincts and trusting them.

He let his weight shift slowly back until his spine rested against the curve of the conduit wall. It was cool beneath the damp cotton of his shirt, still pressed close under the overalls, still sticking slightly to his lower back. The stretch pulled gently at his shoulders as he let his arms fall for a moment, resting them loosely across bent knees. The ship hummed around him, steady, young, expectant. The Fenrir was fresh out of space dock after her refit, not yet softened by age, but already she had a voice. A tone that was beginning to settle. The pulse of the deck plates just a fraction off from what it would be once the inertial dampers and reactor core found their shared rhythm. Not a fault. Just a newness that hadn’t yet been worn in.

He liked it. Liked that she wasn’t perfect yet. You could hear the future in a ship like that. She had space to grow. And so did they. The crew were starting to find each other, glancing notes and new friendships forming around holodeck bookings, a rhythm of routine just beginning to wrap itself around the bones of the ship. That part felt right.

But the mission didn’t. The mission felt like walking onto a stage with the wrong script and pretending you knew your lines. And while a good crew could cover a stumble or two, Kit wasn’t sure they had the luxury of growing slowly. Not when something about Apsloe felt off-kilter. Not wrong. Just slightly misaligned. And in his experience, that was when things usually snapped.

Kit slid out of the tube with practiced ease, boots hitting the deck with a solid, familiar weight. He straightened, rolled his shoulder once to ease out the tension from the crawlspace, and wiped his palms automatically down his thighs. He smelled faintly of ozone, heated metal, and, somehow, coffee. The scent of a ship at rest but not idle. A system still warming to itself. He raked a hand through his hair, now sticking slightly from sweat, and didn’t bother fixing the part.

He doubted they’d recognise him yet as the XO. It was one of those things that what you expected someone to look like and be clashed against reality, and they hadn’t served together long enough yet for the crew to merge the two aspects. He walked a few paces, slow and steady, then paused with his fingers brushing the cool panel beside the door. Not checking anything. Not adjusting. Just touching. Just listening. Feeling the hum through the metal, the quiet life of the ship breathing in the walls. It was real. Physical. Honest. And right now, that was the best kind of comfort he could ask for.

Soon enough, he’d be back on the bridge. Showered, in full uniform, shoulder to shoulder with Blake and the others, navigating a mission built on vagueness and contradictions. Clean reports. Stacked responsibilities. The ache behind the eyes that came from too little rest and too much thinking. But for now, this was enough. The metal under his palm, the weight of the ship underfoot, the knowledge that even if the data failed and the reports came up empty, the deckplates didn’t lie.

And the ship would keep them safe and in return, he’d try and keep her steady. And maybe, just maybe, they’d come out of this mission with more than scenic views and pretty conversation. Maybe they’d come back with understanding. Real insight. Something solid to hold onto.

And if not, he’d keep working here. Deck by deck, system by system without triggering a warning to Engineering or making the Chief Engineer frown. Just until he could make sense of things. That was the plan. And Kit Hanlon could work with a plan.

[OFF]

Commander Kit Hanlon
First Officer
USS Fenrir

 

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