When the Walls Close In
Posted on Mon Sep 29th, 2025 @ 6:45pm by Lieutenant Junior Grade Galen Trellis
Edited on on Tue Sep 30th, 2025 @ 9:14am
1,770 words; about a 9 minute read
Mission:
Episode 16 - Silent Cries
Location: Quarters of Galen Trellis - Central Core Deck 8 - Empok Nor
Timeline: MD010 0200 hrs
The darkness pressed in around him like a physical weight.
Galen Trellis jolted awake, his heart hammering against his ribs, sheets twisted around his legs like restraints. For a disorienting moment, he didn't know where he was—then the ambient lighting of his quarters automatically adjusted to a soft glow, and the Cardassian architecture came into focus.
Those damn ridges in the ceiling. The oppressive, utilitarian design. Everything about this station screamed occupation, war, suffering.
A flash of rage—not his own—surged through his chest. Images cascaded unbidden through his mind: Jem'Hadar warriors charging across AR-558's bloodstained ground, the screams of young Marines dying in close-quarters combat, the helpless horror of watching escape pods explode at Tyra. Dorian's memories. The Starfleet Marine's experiences bled into Galen's consciousness like an old wound torn open.
His hands clenched the sheets, knuckles white. Breathe, he told himself. You're Galen. You're on Empok Nor. The war is over. It's been over for years.
But the memories didn't care about logic or the passage of time. They were visceral, immediate, real—even though they'd happened to someone else, years before Galen had even been joined. The Cardassian aesthetic of the station wasn't helping. Every corner reminded Dorian's fractured psyche of the Dominion War, of conducting covert operations on occupied Betazed, of watching Federation Marines die while Cardassian occupiers worked hand-in-hand with their Dominion masters.
He threw off the covers and stood, pacing the small quarters like a caged animal. Sleep wouldn't come back tonight. It rarely did anymore, not since the emergency joining six years ago. The Trellis symbiont carried the memories of three hosts now, but Dorian's memories were the loudest, the most intrusive. Battle scars that transcended the physical.
PTSD didn't disappear when a host died. Galen was learning that the hard way—had been learning it for six years since he was utterly unprepared for the psychological burden thrust upon him.
"Computer, what time is it?" He asked aloud.
"The time is 0314 hours." The station's computer responded.
Three in the morning. Another night of broken sleep on this forsaken station, waiting for a ship that still hadn't returned. Station alpha shift wouldn't begin for another four hours. The silence of his quarters felt suffocating, the Cardassian walls closing in like the bulkheads of the USS Sitak as it died at Tyra.
No. Stop. That wasn't you. That was Dorian.
But where did Dorian end and Galen begin anymore?
Galen ran a hand over his face, feeling the exhaustion in his bones. The USS Pioneer was... somewhere. Doing... something. Even the station's Executive Officer, Glinn Kalim, hadn't been able to tell him more than that when Galen had checked in. "Your ship is away on a mission," the Cardassian had said, professionally enough. "I'm afraid I don't have details on their current location or expected return."
That conversation had been its own special kind of hell. Standing in the XO's office, trying to maintain his composure and focus on the administrative check-in while Dorian's memories screamed warnings about trusting Cardassians. Every time Kalim had spoken, every gesture, every glance—Galen had felt the ghost of a Marine's paranoia clawing at the back of his mind. The Glinn had been perfectly courteous, but it hadn't mattered. Not to the part of Galen that remembered Betazed, remembered the occupation, remembered what Cardassian "courtesy" had meant during the war.
He was Chief Flight Control Officer of a vessel he'd never set foot on, stuck on Empok Nor in some kind of administrative limbo while his ship was off doing whatever it was doing without him. Classified, apparently, or at least classified enough that even the station XO either didn't know or couldn't say.
And whose fault was that? The Symbiosis Commission, that's who.
The anger flared hotter now, and this time it was his—purely Galen's own rage at the institution that had failed both him and Dorian. They'd known Dorian was struggling. They had to have known. A Starfleet Marine who'd survived some of the worst ground combat of the Dominion War, who'd left the service and isolated himself, who'd refused counseling? That should have raised every red flag in the Commission's database.
But they'd done nothing. Let Dorian suffer in silence with his untreated PTSD until a shuttle accident claimed his life.
And then—then—they'd dumped that festering psychological wound into a twenty-two-year-old Academy cadet who'd been three years away from completing his Initiate training. Eighteen hours. They'd given him eighteen hours of preparation before surgically implanting a century and a half of memories into his brain, including the concentrated hell of Dorian's two years of brutal combat during the Dominion War.
"Emergency protocols," they'd called it. "Necessary to preserve the symbiont."
But who was preserving him?
"Computer, is Holodeck Two available?" He asked.
"Affirmative. Holodeck Two is currently unoccupied." The computerized voice responded
Galen pulled on his uniform quickly, barely registering what he was doing. He just needed to move, to do something. The anxiety coiled in his chest like a serpent, and sitting still only made it worse. Dorian had never sought help for his demons—had believed his Marine training and Trill mental discipline were enough. They hadn't been. And now Galen carried the weight of that untreated trauma, compounded by the guilt of surviving an emergency joining that Dorian hadn't.
And the Commission? They'd washed their hands of it. Handed him some counseling referrals and sent him back to the Academy to finish his degree like everything was fine.
It wasn't fine. It had never been fine.
As Galen left his quarters and made his way through the dimly lit corridors of Empok Nor, he tried to push down the anger still simmering beneath his skin. Some of it was Dorian's—rage at the Dominion, at the Jem'Hadar, at the Cardassian occupation forces on Betazed, at the war that had broken him. But some of it was his own. Frustration at being stuck here. Resentment at not being told where his ship was. The feeling of uselessness that came from helping with fighter operations when he should be piloting the Pioneer through uncharted space.
And underneath it all, the cold fury at the Symbiosis Commission for their negligence. For letting Dorian deteriorate without intervention. For throwing Galen into the deep end with barely any preparation. For treating symbionts as precious treasures while treating their hosts as expendable vessels.
It wasn't fair—not to himself, not to Dorian's memory—to let the past consume him. But the Symbiosis Commission's emergency protocols hadn't prepared him for this. Eighteen hours of psychological briefing when the standard was seventy-two. Three years away from completing Initiate training when he'd been forced to accept the symbiont or let it die.
They'd saved the Trellis symbiont.
They'd sacrificed Galen Yosh to do it.
As he rounded a corner near one of the station's cargo bays, movement caught his eye. A Cardassian—one of the civilians who'd come aboard with the recent arrivals—was leaning against a bulkhead, raising a distinctive dark bottle to his lips. Even from this distance, Galen recognized it: Kenar.
The sharp, acrid scent hit him a moment later, and something visceral twisted in his gut. Memory overlaid reality—Cardassian soldiers passing bottles between them in occupation checkpoints on Betazed, the smell mixing with blood and smoke after firefights, that same distinctive aroma clinging to enemy positions after Marine units had cleared them.
Galen's jaw clenched. He couldn't tell what bothered him more: the Starfleet officer in him bristling at seeing someone drinking alcohol on duty in what was technically a Federation facility, or the Marine—Dorian's instincts—reacting to a scent so deeply associated with the enemy. The bottle, the smell, the casual Cardassian disregard for regulation... it all blended together into an irritation he couldn't quite parse.
He forced himself to keep walking, to not say anything. Starting an incident over a bottle of Kenar at three in the morning wasn't going to help anyone, least of all himself. But the encounter had done nothing to calm the restless energy thrumming through his veins. If anything, it just reminded him of that uncomfortable meeting with Glinn Kalim, of standing across from a Cardassian officer and trying to ignore decades-old battlefield instincts that weren't even his own.
One day at a time, he thought grimly, the mantra his therapist on the USS Venture had taught him. One sleepless night at a time.
The holodeck doors slid open with a soft hiss, revealing the empty arch and grid. A blank canvas waiting for instruction.
"Computer," Galen said, his voice rough with fatigue and barely contained emotion, "load combat training program Trellis-Seven. Difficulty level: advanced."
The grid shimmered and transformed into a Marine Corps training ground—obstacles, firing ranges, tactical scenarios designed by Dorian decades ago. It was brutal and efficient, reflecting the philosophy of a man who'd seen the worst of the Dominion War and never fully recovered. A man the Symbiosis Commission had failed to help.
As Galen stepped forward, rolling his shoulders and trying to center himself, he couldn't help but wonder: would he ever truly be free of Dorian's ghosts? Or was this his life now—a joined Trill carrying the weight of battles he'd never fought, wounds he'd never received, and trauma that had been left to fester for years before being transferred wholesale into his unprepared mind? All while stuck on a station waiting for a ship that might never come back for him, surrounded by reminders of a war he hadn't lived through but couldn't escape, taking orders from a Cardassian XO who couldn't—or wouldn't—tell him where his ship had gone, failed by the very institution that was supposed to protect joined Trill?
The first holographic opponent materialized in front of him—a Jem'Hadar soldier in full combat armor.
Galen felt Dorian's muscle memory kick in, his body moving with a warrior's precision he'd never earned. The irony wasn't lost on him. He couldn't fly his ship, but he could fight Dorian's wars in a holodeck at three in the morning.
The Commission had given him that, at least. The ability to relive someone else's nightmares.
He didn't hesitate. He moved.
And tried not to think about how natural it felt—or how much he'd rather be at the helm of the Pioneer, wherever the hell it was.
A Post By
Lieutenant Junior Grade Galen Trelis
Chief Flight Control Officer, USS Pioneer
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