A New Way to Bleed

Posted on Tue May 19th, 2026 @ 9:54pm by Vaelira Daro
Edited on on Thu May 28th, 2026 @ 2:43am

1,338 words; about a 7 minute read

Mission: Homecoming
Location: Main Engineering, USS Sulaco
Timeline: 3190-11-01, 10:00

By the time Vaelira reached Main Engineering, the Sulaco was still complaining.

Not through the neat language of a bridge console, either. Down here it was in the deck, in the walls, in the uneven tremor that came up through her boots the moment she crossed the threshold. The emergency lights strobed red across open panels and half-finished diagnostics, cutting the room into flashes of motion: engineers moving between stations, someone swearing under their breath near a damaged relay, a pair of crewmen pulling a smoking component free from an access bay with the careful urgency of people who knew better than to rush the wrong thing.

For a second, Vaelira stood just inside the entrance and let the room hit her.

This was not Tarka’s lab. It was not the quiet, controlled space on Risa where every tool had a place because she had put it there herself. This was Starfleet engineering in crisis, crowded and hot and full of people who already had their own rhythm. She knew the drive. She knew the integration architecture. But she did not know these faces yet, not properly, and they did not know her beyond a name, a role, and whatever rumours had followed her aboard.

That would have to be enough.

A young ensign looked up from a power transfer console as she approached, eyes wide for half a heartbeat before training dragged them back into focus. “Ma’am, we’re getting mixed returns from the primary diagnostic tree. Warp core says stable, but the secondary flow monitors are—”

“Arguing with it,” Vaelira finished, stopping beside the console and scanning the readouts. The words came out softer than a command, but certain enough to settle the ensign’s panic before it had room to grow. “I know. Don’t trust the summary layer. Pull the raw feed from the core and give me the ugly version.”

The ensign blinked once, then moved.

Good.

Vaelira threw her portable diagnostic bundle into the nearest display, fingers moving quickly through the interface as she stripped away the polished overlays. The ship tried to give her confidence values and predictive corrections. She dismissed them one after another. Right now she did not want the Sulaco making herself look tidy. She wanted heat, pressure, timing, load. She wanted the parts that had no interest in comforting anyone.

The first raw feed came through jagged enough to be believable.

“Tolerable,” she murmured.

A Bolian engineer at the next station glanced over. “That means good or bad?”

“It means we’re not dead yet, and I’m not going to flatter the core by calling it good.”

That earned a breath of nervous laughter from someone nearby. Tiny thing. Useful thing. The room loosened by half a degree.

Vaelira moved toward the warp core, feeling the pulse of it change as she got closer. Alive. Annoyed. Holding. The core’s glow was steady enough to reassure someone who wanted to be reassured, but the vibration in the containment bands told a less elegant story. The emergency micro-jump had dragged stress through systems that were never meant to enjoy being surprised, and whatever had crawled through their firewalls had made the whole ship second-guess herself at exactly the wrong moment.

She crouched beside an access panel as it unlocked with a reluctant hiss. Hot air rolled out across her face, metallic and sharp. She did not flinch, though her jaw tightened as she reached in and set two fingers against the casing near the field junction.

There.

Not failure. Not even close. But a delay, a hesitation, the smallest stutter between demand and answer.

“Found one bruise,” she said, mostly to herself.

The Bolian had followed her at a careful distance. “Do you want me to reroute through the tertiary stabilisers?”

Vaelira glanced back at him. She had to remind herself, absurdly, that he was asking because this was a department and not because he needed permission to breathe. “Not yet. If we reroute too early we might hide the pattern. Hold the tertiary ready, but don’t touch it unless that junction climbs another two percent.”

“Aye,” he said, then hesitated. “Two percent exactly?”

She looked at him for a beat, then gave a small, quick nod. “Two percent exactly. I’m fussy today.”

This time the little laugh was his.

Vaelira stood and turned toward the mycelial hub.

The room seemed to change around it. Not dramatically. Nothing theatrical. Just a subtle shift in the way her attention narrowed, the way the alarms became background and the strange, softer light around the hub pulled her in. The spore containment housing was intact, but faint gold-white residue still clung around the inner ring, fading slowly like frost under morning heat. The display beside it claimed all primary values were within tolerance.

Of course it did.

“Liar,” she said quietly.

One of the nearby technicians looked up. “Sorry?”

“Not you. The readout.”

The technician made the wise choice and said nothing.

Vaelira stepped closer to the hub, slowing despite the urgency around her. This was not something she liked to rush. The spore drive did not behave better because someone shouted at it. It behaved better when it was understood, and right now it felt like the system had been grabbed by the throat and dragged sideways through a door.

She set her hand against the outer housing.

No ceremony. No mysticism. Just contact.

Heat through the casing. A tremor beneath it, finer than the warp core’s heavier pulse. The tiny unevenness in the transition buffers where the jump window had bitten too hard and released a fraction too late. She could not hear the network, not the way people liked to imagine when they discovered she was Betazoid, but she could recognise strain. She had been recognising strain her entire life.

“You really hated that,” she murmured.

Then she lifted her head, voice carrying more clearly now. “I need the transition buffers isolated from the main grid. No automated merge until I say so. And someone get me a physical check on the aft injector manifold. Not the computer telling us it’s fine. I want a person looking at it.”

For half a second the room paused, not in confusion exactly, but in that brief way people did when a voice they did not yet know gave an order they were not sure they were ready to trust.

Vaelira felt it.

She turned slightly, meeting the nearest faces without hardening. “Please,” she added, not as an apology but as a bridge. “If the bridge asks us for another jump before we understand what hit us, I’d like all of us to still have jobs. And limbs.”

That did it. Motion returned. Better this time.

The technician at the hub started pulling the buffer feeds apart. The Bolian moved back to his station. Someone called for a manual kit near the aft access corridor. The room did not become hers in that moment, not really, but it stopped resisting the shape of her.

That was enough to begin.

Vaelira returned to the main engineering console and started rebuilding the diagnostic picture from the ground up. Warp core first. Spore hub second. Then the awkward, dangerous space between them where power, timing, and trust moved back and forth whether the ship liked it or not. Somewhere in that gap was the mark left by whatever had reached into the Sulaco and made her hesitate.

The bridge needed answers. Wilkan needed the ship ready to fight or run. Scarlet needed engines that answered when she touched them. The crew needed the lights to stay on.

Vaelira’s fingers moved faster.

“Alright,” she said under her breath, eyes fixed on the raw data as it began to take on a shape she could use. “No more pretty lies.”

The ship trembled again around her, lower this time, almost like a warning.

Vaelira leaned in.

“Show me where it hurts.”

 

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