A New Board
Posted on Fri Aug 14th, 2026 @ 2:08am by Lieutenant Commander Rhevan Teral
Edited on on Fri Aug 14th, 2026 @ 6:05am
1,930 words; about a 10 minute read
Mission:
Episode 18 - The Edge of Darkness
Location: Empok Nor Various
Timeline: MD003 1000
The temporary quarters Starfleet had given Rhevan on Empok Nor had been designed by Cardassians for someone who had probably been expected to feel grateful for having a door that closed. The room was narrow, angular and several degrees too warm, with a sleeping alcove recessed into one wall and a work surface that appeared to have been built from the same dark composite as the bulkhead around it. Federation engineers had softened some of the edges over the years. A modern replicator had been installed where a Cardassian unit had once sat, the lighting no longer carried that faint amber cast he remembered from wartime stations, and someone had made an effort to introduce a chair that did not look as though prolonged use constituted an interrogation technique. None of it quite disguised what the room had been.
Rhevan had found that oddly preferable to the alternative.
He stood at the work surface in shirtsleeves, his uniform jacket laid neatly beside the only travel case he intended to carry aboard himself. The remainder of his belongings had not yet been transferred to the Pioneer, still held in Empok Nor’s transit storage and awaiting final inventory confirmation, catalogued with the kind of cheerful efficiency Starfleet logistics seemed to reserve for moving other people's lives around without them. What remained fitted easily into the case: two PADDs, a small collection of personal effects, several physical books he had refused repeated suggestions to digitize, and a narrow-lacquered box containing a Romulan strategy set old enough that one corner had been repaired by his father before Rhevan entered the Imperial Fleet.
He ran his thumb once over the repaired seam before closing the lid.
The station shifted around him with the low, almost subterranean vibration that had been present since he arrived. Empok Nor had sounds newer stations did not. Pumps engaged somewhere beyond the wall with a dull mechanical thud, followed seconds later by the tremor of something considerably larger moving through the station's spine. The Federation had restored the place, expanded it, cleaned away most of what the Dominion War had left behind, but the original systems still announced themselves through the deck whenever they were asked to work. Rhevan had spent enough years aboard Romulan warbirds to appreciate machinery that refused to pretend it was silent.
A light flashed on the PADD beside his jacket.
He glanced at it without reaching immediately.
The transfer orders were already memorized. Lieutenant Commander Rhevan Teral, Chief Security and Tactical Officer, USS Pioneer. Reporting instructions, departmental authorizations, security clearances and a transport window that had been revised twice since his arrival on the station. There was nothing in any of those documents requiring his attention for another twenty-three minutes.
The notification pulsed again.
Rhevan picked up the PADD.
It had not come through Starfleet channels.
That registered before the sender did. The communication had passed through three civilian relays, changed carrier at least once and entered Federation space through a commercial network that took an unnecessarily circuitous route to Empok Nor. Whoever had sent it had wanted privacy without doing anything so elaborate that the attempt itself became suspicious.
Then he saw the name.
Laira Teral.
His hand remained around the edge of the PADD while the old Cardassian ventilation system pushed warm air quietly through the room.
There had been years when seeing her name would have been impossible because Sereth had made certain Rhevan possessed no address to send anything to. There had been other years when he had possessed one and chosen not to use it, because a daughter raised to believe her father had betrayed his people and abandoned his family was unlikely to be persuaded by the sudden appearance of that father's explanation in her messages. Later there had been contact, but little of it. Birthdays acknowledged. The occasional response weeks after he had sent something. A question about Darok once, carefully phrased so that Rhevan could answer without pretending it was really about him.
This message was different before he even opened it.
Laira had contacted him first.
Rhevan touched the screen.
I found something in the 2378 records. I need to ask you about it.
He read it once.
Then again, more slowly.
There was no greeting. That did not trouble him. Laira had inherited several of Sereth's habits, but wasting words was not one of them. What held Rhevan's attention was the phrasing. She had not written that she had been told something. She had not asked him whether a particular accusation was true. She had found something herself.
Rhevan lowered himself into the chair.
The repaired strategy box remained beside his hand, its polished surface catching a thin strip of light from the ceiling. Outside the quarters, boots crossed the corridor in a hurried cluster, followed by the clipped exchange of voices and the opening hiss of another door. Rhevan barely registered them. His eyes had gone back to the date.
2378.
The Ralatha. The investigation. The year Sereth stopped asking whether he could make the danger disappear and began asking what he had done to bring it upon them.
There were records from 2378 that Laira could have found. There were considerably more that she could not.
His thumb rested near the reply field.
For most of her life someone else had told Laira who he was. Rhevan had resented that more than he permitted himself to examine closely, but he had never answered it by giving her a competing version of Sereth. It would have been easy. There were truths he could have offered that would have made her mother appear cruel, frightened, vindictive or simply wrong. Some of them would even have been fair.
He had declined to use them.
Children were not battlefields.
Laira was twenty-seven now, and whatever had brought her into records from twenty years earlier had brought her far enough to contact him without her mother's voice standing between the question and the answer.
Rhevan opened the reply.
He wrote several sentences, stopped halfway through the third and looked at them until they became what they actually were: context she had not requested, explanations arranged in advance, a defence prepared before he had even heard the accusation.
His mouth drew into the faintest line.
Old habits did not become wiser merely because they were old.
He deleted the text.
Ask me what you want to know.
Rhevan considered the words for several seconds before sending them.
The message disappeared into the relay network without ceremony.
Nothing changed in the room. The ventilation continued its steady breath. The station gave another distant metallic shudder. His transfer orders still waited beneath the communication, and the Pioneer would still expect its new Security Chief whether Laira replied in thirty seconds, three days or not at all.
Rhevan placed the PADD face down.
He remained seated a little longer than he needed to.
When he eventually rose, the movement carried him back into the practical things waiting to be done. He fastened his uniform jacket, smoothed the high collar into place and checked the fit at the cuffs. The gold of Security cut across the black in the familiar pattern also worn by the Pioneer's crew, the same as the Starfleet uniforms he had worn before but already beginning to lose the sensation of costume. His combadge settled beneath his fingers with a quiet metallic click.
The Romulan looking back from the dark reflection of the bulkhead had worn more than one insignia in his life.
Rhevan picked up his case and left the quarters.
Empok Nor was busier outside than it had been when he arrived. A transport had evidently docked during the last hour, feeding fresh personnel and cargo into the station's arteries. Starfleet uniforms moved among Cardassian civilians, merchants and station workers beneath structural ribs designed by people who had once expected their authority to be permanent. Rhevan joined the flow without hurrying, letting it carry him towards the central junction before turning for the transporter section.
He noticed the security presence almost without deciding to. Two officers stationed at the junction rather than one. A portable sensor arch positioned far enough from the main doors to prevent a queue from blocking them if it flagged someone. A Marine in field uniform speaking quietly with station Security near a cargo lift, neither of them standing in the other's way despite the limited space. Better than some installations he had served aboard. The sightlines around the junction were still poor, however. The Cardassians had built corridors to control movement rather than observe it, and the Federation modifications had added enough recessed access panels to give an imaginative intruder several opportunities nobody had intended.
Rhevan kept walking.
It was not his station.
That distinction had always mattered to him.
Responsibility without authority was merely an invitation to interfere badly.
The route opened onto one of Empok Nor's wider promenades, where the station briefly remembered it existed in space. Tall windows cut between the Cardassian supports and looked out across the darkness beyond. Rhevan slowed as a vessel crossed the field of view, its running lights sliding across the glass before disappearing behind the station's outer structure.
The Pioneer was not docked at Empok Nor; it was already en route to its next assignment, waiting for him to come aboard.
He had already seen the ship, of course, from Empok Nor’s docking schematics and briefing files. He had reviewed its specifications, tactical systems, security organization and operational history until the information had ceased to be a collection of documents and begun arranging itself into possibilities. He knew where the armour was strongest, where overlapping phaser coverage became less generous, how quickly internal forcefields could partition the major inhabited sections, and which decks placed Marines and Security close enough together that a poorly written emergency protocol could turn cooperation into congestion.
What he did not know yet was the crew.
Specifications were honest only because they had no ambitions of their own.
People required more attention.
A group of junior officers came through the opposite doorway, talking over one another as they headed towards the docking section. One noticed Rhevan's collar first, another the pointed ears a moment later. The conversation changed by less than a heartbeat and recovered almost immediately.
Rhevan's gaze remained on the window.
Nineteen years in Starfleet had made that particular hesitation familiar enough that he no longer bothered deciding whether it was curiosity, discomfort or recognition. Sometimes it was all three. Most people revealed themselves eventually if given the courtesy of not being rushed.
The PADD inside his case chimed.
His step faltered.
Only slightly.
Rhevan stopped beside the window and rested the case against his leg. He did not retrieve the PADD. Not yet. He watched the reflection of people moving behind him across the glass, the station laid over the stars in dark geometric fragments, until the impulse to reach immediately for Laira's answer had passed into something he could choose rather than obey.
Then he picked up the case again.
The airlock lay ahead.
For the first time in a very long while, something behind him felt less settled than whatever waited on the other side.
Rhevan continued towards the shuttle Serenity, which would carry him to the Pioneer.
A Post By
Lieutenant Commander Rhevan Teral
Chief Security/Tactical Officer, USS Pioneer
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