Pressured Impressions

Posted on Tue Jul 28th, 2026 @ 4:57pm by Lieutenant Evelyn Stewart & Lieutenant Korvek tr'Velar

1,929 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Year Two: The Last Honest Port
Location: USS Moore - Engineering
Timeline: MD 005: 1530 hrs

Stewart stepped into Main Engineering and immediately clocked the chaos. Exposed cables snaked across the deck, conduits lay half-open, and the whole space felt… hollowed out, like it had been mid-dissection and abandoned.

Not her problem. She wasn’t even in proper full uniform since being relieved.

She picked her way through it anyway, careful where she placed her boots, eyes tracking movement and sound out of habit more than concern. Engineering wasn’t her jurisdiction, and whatever overhaul was underway could stay there. She was here for a kit, nothing more.

The storage compartment slid open. Empty.

Stewart stared at it for a beat, then tipped her head back with a slow exhale through her teeth. Somewhere between a sigh and a groan, irritation crept in. Of course.

Her gaze cut sideways to the nearest crewman. “Santiago,” she said, already tired, “where’d the spare engineering kits walk off to? I really don’t feel like spelunking through a cable maze just to go fix my replicator.”

Santiago paused, wide-eyed, pale-faced, and looking as though they hadn't slept. Everyone on the deck carried the same exhausted intensity. Engineers stepped over open access panels and around dangling bundles of cabling without breaking stride. The constant chorus of power tools, diagnostic chirps, and shouted status reports forced everyone to raise their voices just to be heard.

"He moved them," Santiago answered, gesturing across Engineering with the hand not wrapped around a hyperspanner, to the storage units closer to the main doors. "He moved... everything."

There wasn't time to elaborate. Santiago hurried away toward another waiting repair team, disappearing into the controlled chaos.

"...Alpha Team, once those EPS conduits are secured, you're relieving Deck Seven Damage Control. Beta Team, you're done. Eat something, sleep, report back in eight hours to relieve Delta. Gamma?"

A calm, resonant baritone voice cut effortlessly through the noise.

A knot of gold uniforms moved together through Main Engineering, less like a meeting than a command post that refused to stay in one place. At its center walked a tall figure, one hand occupied dismantling a scorched phase coil as though it were little more than a distraction. Burned insulation dropped to the deck in small black flakes while he spoke, never once looking down.

She found the relocated kit without much trouble. Whoever had reorganized the storage units had done it with actual logic — flow of traffic, proximity to the doors. She noticed and didn’t particularly want to.

She turned.

Tall. The ears were Romulan. The face, mostly not. Blue eyes, which she hadn’t expected, though she wasn’t sure why she’d expected anything. She’d heard defector and apparently drawn her own conclusions.

He still hadn’t looked up.

Stewart tucked the kit under her arm and let her gaze travel the deck — the bodies moving on four hours of sleep if they were lucky, the particular hunch of people who’d been at it too long, Santiago’s pallor when she’d asked a simple question about storage. Five days of this. Whatever he was running, he was running it hard.

She raised her voice just enough to carry.

“Your people look like hell, Lieutenant.”

Not an accusation. Almost friendly, the way you’d mention someone had something in their teeth.

"We're all feeling like it, too," Korvek included himself in that assestment, as he handed off the stripped down part to one of his staff.

Korvek had been running himself harder than even his small team of engineers since he'd come on board, he wouldn't give orders for something he wouldn't do himself, and perhaps seeing their new chief getting less sleep than them had prevented a mutiny. He was doing his best to make sure people got at least eight hours between shifts, but it wasn't enough long-term. He had averaged about four hours the last two days, and was starting to feel it too.

Work flowed around them, leaving the pair a still spot of calm amidst all movement. It was only then he glanced over at the figure who'd spoken. His blue eyes weighed her, glanced head to toe at the small frame. They settled on the kit she had appropriated for a second, then returned to her face. "You can blame whoever was putting holes in this ship. Do you need help fixing something? We can add it to the list."

“And what, wait three days to eat something that isn’t burnt in my quarters?” She dropped back against the support beam for the upper level, one shoulder taking her weight, kit hanging from her hand. “No thanks.”

Her eyes drifted back across the deck. The slumped shoulders, the too-careful movements of people running on nothing, Santiago’s zombie shuffle back into the chaos. Five days of this. Whatever he was extracting from them, they were still giving it.

“You know what’s funny though.” Still looking at the deck, not at him. “Ship takes a beating like that, most engineers I’ve seen spend the first week just trying to stop the bleeding.”

She glanced over at him then, chin tipped up slightly, relaxed like she had nowhere to be.

“Nobody’s stopped though, have they.” Not a question. Her eyes moved across the deck again, something dry in it. “Amazing what people will do when they’re not sure what happens if they don’t.”

A beat.

“So either you actually know what you’re doing,” the corner of her mouth pulled, “or you’re very confident about being wrong.”

She stayed where she was, shoulder on the beam, watching him the way you watch someone when you’ve already decided the next move is theirs.

He'd almost smiled at the joke about fixing the replicator, it was a good one. As she looked across the department, he did as well, turning his head slowly. Whatever start to a smile might have had turned serious, perhaps with a touch of regret as well. Korvek didn't like how hard they had to push, but damage that took more than five days to repair was serious after all.

"Not one of them has asked to slow down," he said softly, for her ears alone, and now a touch of pride settled into his tone. They weren't doing it to impress their new chief either, these men and women pushed themselves forward as much as he had. "I've never seen a team more dedicated to their ship and shipmates. It's actually very impressive."

He turned his gaze back to the woman and titled his head slightly about the judgement call. He could have rattled off his experience, the skills he brought with him. And she could go read his file if she cared. Korvek wasn't the boasting type. "I haven't had time to check the manifest. I'm Korvek."

She let that sit for a second, her eyes still moving across the deck.

"Stewart."

No rank. No department. Just the name, tossed back at the same register he'd used. Her eyes had already moved off him, tracking something across the upper level, her head tilting a fraction to follow it without the rest of her moving at all. Like the conversation was fine but not quite the most interesting thing in the room.

She turned the kit over with a lazy rotation of her wrist, not looking at it, something idle in the gesture.

"They're not slowing down because the ship isn't slowed down." She looked back at him then, unhurried, chin still tipped up just slightly. "Take the crisis away and see what you've got."

Not quite a challenge. Not quite dismissal either. Somewhere in between, delivered like she was just thinking out loud.

He hadn't bitten. Hadn't bristled. She'd essentially called his people scared and he'd — defended them. Quietly. Like that was just the obvious thing to do.

She studied him for a moment, the kit still resting against her side in her hand, actually looking this time rather than cataloguing. There was something not quite adding up and she couldn't find the seam of it.

She pushed off the beam and rolled her shoulder once where it had been resting.

"But sure." The corner of her mouth. "Impressive."

Korvek watched as a team rotation began, one group taking over from the next, updating each other on progress and what had to come next. One group to seek out meals, and sleep, and maybe a sonic shower if they could manage. The next to keep on putting the Moore back together.

It seemed to him that Stewart was probing, part interview, part testing the limits. "Crisis reveals people," he stated simply, still taking no offense to any implication. He didn't need to, his people proved themselves, and would set this ship to rights. "It does not create them. If this crew lacked discipline, no amount of shouting on my part would change that."

He turned his gaze back to Stewart, weighing. She was out of uniform. Korvek didn't know her enough to say she was fidgeting, unable to remain still, but it did stand out. Were the two related? His voice remained smooth, not passionless like his Vulcan cousins, but nearly as inscrutable. "Pressure has a way of stripping away pretense. What remains is usually who we were all along."

The scoff came out before she'd decided to let it — short, dry, the particular sound of someone who had absolutely been doing exactly what he'd noticed and found the fact that he'd noticed more interesting than it had any right to be.

She held his gaze for a beat longer than she'd intended.

Her weight shifted off the beam, unhurried, and she looked down at the kit in her hand like she was considering it for the first time. When she looked back up there was something different in it — not warmth, not concession, just the quiet recalibration of someone who'd taken the measure of a room and was revising upward, involuntarily, and with full awareness
that she was doing it.

This was his deck. She'd walked in here, helped herself, poked at him, and he hadn't moved an inch.

Her chin lifted slightly. The corner of her mouth pulled — not quite a smile, not quite not one either.

"I'll make sure it goes back—" the delivery landing somewhere between sincere and completely insufferable, a woman who had been checked and was going to be an absolute bastard about acknowledging it, "—exactly where it belongs, Lieutenant."

She held his gaze for one beat more. Just long enough to make it a choice.

Then she turned for the exit. Didn't hurry.

"What department, Stewart?" he called out, voice piercing through the din once more with ease. The tone had stayed the same, not a hint at the sarcasm and humour he intended, but if she did happen to glance back she might see the laughter in his eyes. If not, well, even more entertaining that he could live in that ambiguity.

"So I can make sure to send the thank-you card to the right place."

The doors were already sliding open ahead of her.

She kept walking, a little more saunter in it than there’d been on the way in — the particular gait of someone who got exactly what she wanted. Shoulders loose, unhurried. The voice landed somewhere behind her, easy and amused, and she felt the corner of her mouth pull without deciding to let it.

“Not my problem.”

She turned into the corridor without breaking stride and didn’t look back.

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