Damage Report

Posted on Wed Jul 15th, 2026 @ 7:20am by Taryn Rook

3,971 words; about a 20 minute read

Mission: Between The Orders
Location: Wayfarer - Medical Bay/Shuttlebay
Timeline: Several hours after “Routing Active”

Taryn lasted seven hours and nineteen minutes.

That was considerably longer than anyone had a right to expect.

The medical bay had settled around her into reduced lighting and quiet machinery, its night cycle turning polished surfaces soft blue-grey. Somewhere beyond the partition, two members of the medical team were speaking in low voices, not quite quiet enough to let her forget that she was still being observed.

The cortical monitor rested against her temple, feeding a steady line of neurological readings into the display above the bed. Her blood gases had been normal for hours. The swelling around the impact site was gone. Her pupils were equal, responsive and apparently fascinating enough to justify checking them every twenty minutes.

She felt fine.

Medical had confirmed that repeatedly, then continued keeping her there anyway.

Taryn lay still for another minute, watching the monitor trace climb and fall. Her jacket had been folded on the chair beside the bed. Her boots sat beneath it, aligned neatly enough to look deliberate. Someone had cleaned the blood from her wrist unit without removing it.

That kindness made the next part slightly awkward.

She lifted two fingers to the cortical sensor and peeled it carefully from her skin.

The monitor gave a questioning chirp.

Taryn paused.

It chirped again, louder this time.

“Don’t.”

The display changed from green to amber.

She pressed the sensor against the pillow. The neurological trace settled into something smooth and unconvincing that would fool nobody with medical training and might buy her thirty seconds if everyone happened to be looking the other way.

Taryn swung her legs over the side of the bed.

Nothing tilted. Nothing hurt. Her head remained exactly where it belonged.

Excellent.

Her boots went on quickly. The jacket followed, settling over shoulders that no longer carried bruising or stiffness. She rolled one of them experimentally, just to confirm medical had not hidden a restriction in there somewhere.

Still fine.

This was not escaping. Escaping involved alarms, pursuit and usually at least one ventilation system. She had been treated, stabilised and monitored for seven hours. At this point she was simply correcting an administrative delay.

The doors opened without objection.

That felt suspicious.

The corridor outside was quiet under the ship’s night cycle. Taryn walked at an ordinary pace, partly because running would draw attention and partly because she had nothing to prove to a hallway. Nobody stopped her. Nobody even looked twice.

Wayfarer felt different at this hour. Larger, perhaps, with the reduced lighting turning every junction into a choice and drawing the engine hum closer to the surface. It was a well-kept ship, all clean seams and properly seated panels, the sort of vessel where nothing rattled unless somebody had designed it to.

Taryn distrusted that level of confidence in machinery.

The shuttlebay doors recognised her wrist unit and opened onto brighter light.

She stopped just inside.

Foxglove remained secured against the docking cradle, surrounded by equipment cases and portable work lamps. The scoring along the starboard hull had been cleaned without being disguised. Fresh plating covered the damaged manoeuvring assembly, slightly brighter than the hull around it. An access panel stood open beneath the engine housing, its internal systems exposed under the clinical glare of an engineering lamp.

Nobody was working on her.

That was the first good thing.

The second was that Foxglove still looked like herself.

Taryn crossed the bay, eyes moving over every alteration as she approached. The new plating was tidy. Too tidy. Someone had cleaned around the access seams, reseated the starboard sensor blister and replaced a scorched section of hull marking she had not asked them to touch.

Her hand settled against the hull when she reached it.

The plating was cool beneath her palm. Solid. Familiar.

For a few seconds she stood there without moving, feeling the faint vibration of auxiliary power travelling through the metal.

Still here.

Taryn drew back before the thought could settle anywhere visible.

Her wrist unit connected to the hatch controls. The locking sequence appeared, followed by an additional authorisation layer she had not installed.

**REMY OVERRIDE ACTIVE**

She stared at it.

“That’s becoming a habit.”

The hatch unlocked.

Warm, familiar air reached her as it opened, carrying machine oil, old circuitry and the faint metallic trace left by overloaded systems. Someone had corrected the environmental mix. Someone had also moved the toolkit beside the entrance three centimetres to the left.

Taryn stepped aboard and looked around with immediate suspicion.

“Foxy?”

The ship answered through the nearest speaker.

“You have left medical observation.”

Taryn closed the hatch behind her.

“I was observed. Extensively.”

“You were not discharged.”

“That sounds like a problem for someone who isn’t me.”

“Medical personnel will notice your absence.”

Taryn looked toward the open service panel further down the corridor.

“Then we should get to work.”

The open panel led her toward the starboard systems trunk, where somebody had left the maintenance lighting on and arranged the removed components in neat rows along the deck.

Taryn stopped in the hatchway.

“They alphabetised my damage.”

“The engineering team catalogued all replaced components.”

“That is somehow worse.”

She crouched beside the first row and picked up a fused power coupling. The casing had split along one edge, blackened where the overload had burned through it. She turned it over in her hands, her thumb passing across the warped metal.

She remembered the hit that had done it.

Not clearly. A flash through the cockpit. The restraints biting into her chest. Foxy saying her name from a long way away.

Taryn put the coupling down.

The replacement was visible inside the open compartment, newly seated and gleaming in a nest of older conduits. Federation standard, probably reclaimed from a recent refit. Better than the part it had replaced. More reliable. Annoyingly clean.

She reached into the compartment and tested it anyway.

“Run starboard distribution.”

The ship’s systems shifted beneath her hand. Power moved through the new coupling, smooth enough that she could barely feel the transition.

“Distribution stable at ninety-eight point seven per cent efficiency.”

Taryn frowned.

“What was it before?”

“Eighty-six point two per cent.”

“It had its own way of doing things.”

“It generated excess heat and intermittently disrupted the galley replicator.”

“That was the galley replicator’s fault.”

Foxy did not answer.

Taryn leaned closer, checking the connections one by one. The engineers had not merely replaced the damaged section. They had reinforced the surrounding conduits, insulated the power junction and added a secondary cut-off where she had previously relied on a manual bypass and optimistic timing.

She should have been offended.

Mostly, she was relieved.

That sat badly enough that she moved on.

The environmental relay had been rebuilt almost entirely. The scorched wiring was gone, the scrubber feed restored and the emergency bypass she had made in the corridor rerouted through a proper regulator. Her improvised connector still lay on the deck nearby, stripped casing and all, preserved with the other damaged parts.

Taryn picked it up.

“They removed my repair.”

“Your bypass was suitable for an emergency, but sustained use would have overloaded the auxiliary intake and caused another failure.”

“It worked.”

“For six hours and forty-seven minutes. The Starfleet engineers replaced it before it could become a second emergency.”

She looked at the little connector resting in her palm.

“Still sounds like it worked.”

“They described it as inventive.”

Taryn glanced towards the nearest speaker. “Did they?”

“Two of them did. They were very nice to me.”

There was something in the delivery. Not quite smugness. Foxy did not technically do smugness.

Taryn narrowed her eyes anyway.

“Were they now?”

“They explained each repair before beginning, requested permission before accessing my adaptive systems and apologised when the environmental panel resisted removal.”

“The panel does that to everyone. It has standards.”

“They did not share that interpretation.”

“Of course they didn’t. They arrive with matching toolkits and suddenly think they understand the whole ship.”

She turned the connector over again, inspecting damage she already knew by heart.

“They appeared competent.”

“You sound impressed.”

“Their work improved several systems.”

“That wasn’t what I said.”

A brief silence followed, familiar enough to feel deliberate.

Taryn looked up at the speaker. “Should I be worried you’re going to trade me in for someone with proper Starfleet certification?”

“The engineers did not attempt to replace you.”

“I wasn’t worried.”

“Of course not.”

Taryn stared at the speaker grille for a moment.

“Spend one afternoon getting complimented by proper engineers and you’re unbearable.”

“I learned from prolonged exposure.”

That nearly got a smile out of her.

Nearly.

She set the connector carefully beside the replacement parts rather than dropping it into the scrap tray, then moved deeper into the ship.

Every few metres brought another small offence: a secured cable loom, a replaced access latch, a warning label added beside the coolant bypass. Somebody had even repaired the cabinet door that had refused to close properly since before she acquired the ship.

She opened it.

It stayed open.

She closed it.

It stayed closed.

Taryn stared at it.

“That was not authorised.”

“The cabinet presented an impact hazard during turbulence.”

“It knew what it did.”

The cockpit had received the most attention. The blood was gone from the edge of the console. The loose panel beneath the navigation controls had been reseated, and the pilot’s restraint system had been replaced rather than patched. Her chair had been cleaned, repaired and adjusted two centimetres higher.

Taryn lowered it again.

The controls came alive around her as she sat. Most of the warning lights had cleared. A few remained amber, clustered around the warp stabilisers and aft shielding, but Foxglove no longer sounded like she was holding her breath.

Taryn rested her hands on the controls.

There it was.

The familiar vibration under her palms. Slightly altered by new parts, but still hers.

She opened the engineering overview and worked through each repair entry. The engineers had attached notes, test results and recommendations. They had also flagged six separate modifications as non-standard, three as potentially hazardous and one with a question mark followed by the words WHY IS THIS HERE?

Taryn deleted the question mark.

The hatch status changed on the edge of the display.

**MEDICAL ACCESS REQUEST PENDING**

She dismissed it.

The request returned.

Taryn dismissed it again.

“Medical personnel have located you.”

“I’m shocked.”

“They are requesting that you return voluntarily.”

“Tell them I’m conducting a post-repair safety inspection.”

“That statement is accurate.”

“See? We’re getting somewhere.”

The channel remained open for another moment before medical sent a shorter message.

**RETURN TO SICKBAY. NOW.**

Taryn leaned back in the chair.

“Bit needy.”

She should have gone back.

Instead, her eyes caught on a new file sitting beneath the repair log.

**ENGAGEMENT TELEMETRY: RECONSTRUCTED**

Taryn went still.

Foxy had rebuilt the sensor record from the pursuit. The damaged fragments had been cleaned, aligned and threaded back into sequence. Davor’s ship sat in the centre of the tactical display, a pale outline surrounded by firing solutions and movement vectors.

The medical request flashed again.

Taryn closed it without looking away.

“Show me.”

The tactical display expanded across the forward console.

Foxy ran the pursuit from the beginning, stripping away damaged sensor noise until the movements of both ships became clean lines against the station’s lower docking ring. Foxglove broke from Bay Twelve. Merrow’s Debt came after her almost immediately, its weapons live before it cleared the maintenance structure.

Taryn watched the first disruptor shot pass behind her recorded flight path.

Then the second.

“Slow it down.”

The display reset and crawled forward at a quarter speed. Targeting solutions opened and closed around Foxglove, pale shapes marking each moment Davor’s weapons had found her.

There were more of them than she remembered.

“The pursuing vessel declined three firing opportunities with a projected disablement probability above eighty per cent.”

“He didn’t miss.”

“That is also my assessment.”

Taryn leaned closer.

The first clean shot had appeared before she reached the outbound haulers. Davor could have taken her engines there. The second would have collapsed the port shield grid and left her drifting within Red Thread’s traffic control envelope.

He had ignored both.

Instead, Merrow’s Debt had stayed close enough to frighten her and far enough back to leave one obvious route open.

Away from the station.

Away from witnesses.

“He was moving me.”

Foxy highlighted the route Davor had allowed to remain clear. The line curved beneath the cargo spine and out towards the waste-heat plume.

“His approach pattern is consistent with controlled displacement rather than immediate interception.”

“Davor likes people to think running was their idea.”

The words came easily. Too easily.

Taryn sat back, but her eyes remained on the display.

Davor had always been good at that. He never called anything a cage. At his station, doors opened, people ate together and everyone had work. He called them his people when he was pleased with them and his family when somebody needed reminding what leaving would cost.

There had been a long table in the main room, beneath lights warm enough to make the place look almost respectable. Davor sat at the head of it without ever asking anyone to acknowledge that he did. He told stories. He remembered birthdays. He made people laugh, and everybody learned very quickly when laughter was expected.

Even punishment became a kind of performance with him. A joke first, an arm around somebody’s shoulders, that easy smile inviting the whole room to enjoy itself. By the time the cruelty arrived, everyone had already agreed to be part of the audience.

Taryn had once believed his temper was the dangerous part.

She had been young.

His temper passed.

His affection kept records.

The replay reached the point where Foxglove entered the waste-heat plume. Sensor returns broke apart, then reformed around the reconstructed data. Davor followed her without hesitation.

“He thought I’d panic in there.”

“Your manoeuvres were irregular.”

Taryn glanced towards the speaker. “I had one thruster and a head injury.”

“I was not criticising you.”

“No, you were using your factual voice. Completely different.”

Foxy continued the recording without answering.

The ion cloud flared.

Merrow’s Debt lost shields, then engine control. Its pursuit line fractured sharply as the cutter fell out of the plume. For the first time in the replay, Davor’s movements stopped looking deliberate.

Taryn watched the final seconds twice.

On the third pass, she saw it.

“Stop.”

The image froze.

A narrow targeting lock had begun to form from Davor’s forward array just before the overload took his weapons offline. It was rough, hurried and badly aligned. Nothing like the shots that had come before.

“Projected accuracy was below twenty-two per cent.”

“He wasn’t trying to take the ship then.”

“The firing solution was directed towards the cockpit.”

Taryn looked at the pale line ending over her chair.

Davor had been angry before. She knew what that looked like: louder jokes, broader smiles, the whole room pulled into his mood until nobody could pretend not to see it.

This was different.

No speech. No warning. No need for an audience.

She had surprised him.

For one brief second, she had made him feel as though he was no longer deciding how the story ended.

Taryn rubbed her thumb slowly over the edge of the console.

“He’ll hate that.”

“His vessel remains disabled.”

“Davor’s ship was disabled. Davor wasn’t.”

She reopened the complete sensor record and moved beyond the weapons telemetry. There, buried beneath the ion interference, was a narrowband transmission leaving Merrow’s Debt less than four seconds after the engine failure.

Not a distress call.

Too short. Too heavily compressed.

“Where did that go?”

“The transmission entered a private relay network. Destination could not be resolved.”

Of course it had.

Davor rarely needed escorts. His influence travelled ahead of him through cargo offices, docking authorities and men who smiled while checking whether a debt had come due. He had built his little corner of the underworld by making himself useful to people who preferred not to know how useful things were done.

Routes. Protection. Missing manifests. Quiet places to keep cargo that breathed.

He would have somewhere else by now. Another station, perhaps, or a settlement tucked behind legitimate trade. A warm room. A long table. People laughing when he laughed.

Space kept changing around men like Davor, but somehow they always rebuilt the same room.

“Medical has repeated its request.”

Taryn dismissed the notification again.

“Trace the relay architecture. Don’t search his name.”

“What parameters should I use?”

“Look for new protection contracts along the independent routes. Cargo disputes that suddenly stopped being disputes. Berthing licences changing hands without anyone filing objections.” She paused, studying the frozen outline of Merrow’s Debt. “And missing ships that turn up working for someone else.”

Foxy began assembling the search.

“You believe Davor Senn controls the relay network.”

“No. He knows whoever does.”

That was how he worked. Davor did not need to own everything. He only needed everyone to wonder what would happen if they told him no.

The transmission marker pulsed once on the display.

Somewhere beyond it, the message had reached somebody.

Taryn closed the tactical replay, but Davor’s targeting line remained behind her eyes, ending neatly across the pilot’s chair.

“Flag anything that touches a URC route,” she said. “Quietly.”

“Should I notify Remy?”

Her answer should have been immediate.

It was not.

Taryn looked down at the console, at the clean new components listed beneath the damaged systems and the safety override still sitting inside Foxglove’s access controls.

“Not yet.”

Foxy waited.

Taryn let out a slow breath.

“But don’t delete anything.”

“Understood.”

The medical request appeared again, this time accompanied by notice that personnel were approaching the shuttlebay.

Taryn stared at it for a moment.

Then she reopened the repair log and placed it over the telemetry.

“Now I’m conducting a safety inspection.”

“You were already conducting a safety inspection.”

“I’m conducting it more convincingly.”

Outside, the shuttlebay doors opened.

The shuttlebay doors opened before Taryn had finished burying the telemetry beneath the repair logs.

Two medical officers came through. Neither was running, which meant they had already decided she was more annoying than urgent.

Taryn stayed in the pilot’s chair.

“I was checking Foxy.”

The senior medic stopped at the bottom of the ramp. “You left sickbay.”

“I walked out. Nobody stopped me.”

“You took off your cortical monitor.”

“It kept beeping.”

“You attached it to a pillow.”

Taryn glanced away. “It was there.”

The younger medic looked like he wanted to laugh. He had enough sense not to.

Behind the engineering display, Davor’s transmission marker still pulsed. Foxy’s search was already following it through old cargo records and private relay traffic, quiet enough not to draw attention.

Taryn looked back at the medics.

“I’m not staying another twelve hours.”

“You have less than five hours remaining.”

“That’s still ages.”

“It will feel longer if we have to come and collect you again.”

Her hand moved towards the hatch controls almost without thinking.

Lock the ship. Make them leave. Wait until somebody brought Remy down to use the override and then be angry at him instead. It was familiar enough to be tempting.

The frozen targeting line still ended over her chair.

Davor had left her somewhere to run because he had known she would take it.

Taryn pulled her hand back.

“Foxy, keep looking.”

“The search will continue in passive mode.”

“Put the telemetry somewhere private.”

“Remy retains emergency access.”

The override symbol glowed in the corner of the display.

Taryn stared at it. She could remove it. It would take seconds.

She thought about waking up with Remy’s hand at her neck, checking for a pulse. Thought about the airlock opening when she had not been able to open it herself.

“Yeah,” she said quietly. “I know.”

She closed the repair log without touching the override.

The senior medic waited at the bottom of the ramp.

Taryn got out of the chair and slipped her wrist unit back beneath her sleeve. “I was coming back anyway.”

“Were you?”

“I was thinking about it.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“It was getting close.”

She came down the ramp, pulling her jacket straight. Nobody grabbed her or tried to steer her. The older medic simply moved aside and let Taryn step onto the deck herself.

That helped more than she wanted it to.

She looked back towards the cockpit.

“Tell me if you find anything.”

“You will be in sickbay.”

“I know where I’ll be.”

“You have complained about it repeatedly.”

Taryn narrowed her eyes at the nearest speaker. “You were nicer before the engineers started complimenting you.”

“They remain very nice.”

“Yeah, well. Don’t get attached.”

The hatch began to close.

Taryn watched until the gap disappeared and the locking sequence settled into place. Remy’s override remained active beneath her own security code.

She did not change it.

The senior medic nodded towards the doors. “Sickbay.”

“I heard you the first six times.”

They started across the shuttlebay. Taryn walked between them but not with them, hands pushed into her jacket pockets, shoulders set hard enough to show she was only cooperating because she had chosen to.

At the doors, her wrist unit vibrated once.

**SEARCH ACTIVE. NO MATCHES.**

Not yet.

Taryn covered the display with her sleeve.

“He’ll try again,” she said under her breath.

The medic beside her glanced over. “What was that?”

“Nothing.”

She kept walking.

Davor had spent years teaching people that everything around him belonged to him eventually.

He had been wrong about Foxglove.

He had been wrong about her too.

Taryn just needed to make sure he stayed wrong.

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