Temporary, Apparently
Posted on Wed Aug 26th, 2026 @ 1:00pm by Maren Malbrooke
Edited on on Wed Aug 26th, 2026 @ 4:28pm
3,642 words; about a 18 minute read
Mission:
Episode 18 - The Edge of Darkness
Location: Quarters of Maren Malbrooke - Deck 2 - USS Pioneer
Timeline: MD002 - 1830 hrs
Maren’s quarters had stopped looking like guest quarters somewhere around the fourth day.
By now, whatever tidy little vision Starfleet had possessed for the room had been thoroughly defeated.
A pair of boots had ended up beneath the desk, though only one of them was actually under it and the other had somehow migrated halfway towards the replicator. Two shirts occupied the back of the chair in a way that suggested they had been placed there temporarily and then granted permanent residency. A collection of PADDs had spread across the desk, the floor beside the bed and one corner of the low table, several displaying half-finished technical diagrams or notes written in the shorthand she had developed years ago because sometimes there had not been time for complete sentences.
There was a mug of tea on the floor beside her that had gone cold enough to qualify as a geological feature.
Her mother’s coat was the exception.
That hung neatly from the hook beside the bed, away from the clutter, the tools and anything likely to spill, spark or explode. Maren had tried putting it over the chair once. It had lasted there for approximately thirty seconds before she had moved it somewhere safer.
Everything else was fair game.
The lighting was warmer than Starfleet’s default because the original setting had made the room feel like a medical waiting area, and Maren had discovered within twenty minutes of moving in that the environmental controls could be persuaded to do considerably more than the guest interface suggested. The temperature was a fraction cooler too. She slept better that way. The desk had been shifted against the opposite bulkhead because whoever had designed the original layout had apparently believed people enjoyed sitting with their back to the door, which was stupid enough that Maren had corrected it without asking.
Nobody had moved it back.
That had been encouraging.
At present she was sitting cross-legged on the carpet in an oversized shirt and shorts, hair tied into an increasingly unsuccessful knot at the back of her head while she worked on an EPS flow regulator that technically belonged to Operations.
Technically.
Ensign Somebody-Or-Other had handed it to her two days earlier after she had spent ten minutes listening to him complain that the unit kept dropping output under sustained load. He had meant it as a curiosity, she suspected, something to keep the displaced teenager occupied while the actual engineers got on with important work.
That had lasted until Maren opened it.
Now half the casing was arranged around her knees while a diagnostic lead ran from the regulator into the open access panel beneath the desk. The internal layout was good. Annoyingly good, actually. Starfleet built things with redundancy layered over redundancy, safeguards waiting behind safeguards, as if everyone involved fully expected the equipment to be maintained properly for the rest of its natural life.
Maren found that almost offensive.
“See, this is your problem,” she told the regulator, leaning closer as a line of readings crawled across the PADD balanced against her thigh. “You’re too comfortable.”
The regulator remained unmoved by the criticism.
She tapped one of the readings and frowned. The fault was exactly where she had expected it to be, a timing issue between the secondary relay and the load-balancing routine that only appeared when the unit was pushed beyond normal operating demand. Under ordinary conditions, nobody would ever notice it. Under abnormal conditions, Starfleet’s solution was apparently to hand control to a tertiary safeguard and wait for the original system to recover.
Which was fine.
If nothing else was broken.
Maren stared at the diagram for several seconds before reaching for a microdriver.
“Yeah, no.”
Her father would have hated that design.
Not because it was bad. Because it assumed the ship would still have three functioning options when the first one failed.
Where Maren came from, by the time anyone noticed a relay was overheating, the tertiary safeguard had usually been shot through, the backup power grid was running at forty percent and somebody was shouting that there were Jem’Hadar two decks away.
Her solution was uglier.
It was also going to keep working after someone kicked the ship repeatedly.
She loosened the secondary coupling, rerouted the feedback path and changed the load response so that the regulator would stop politely asking permission from a failing system and simply use the path that still worked. It lost a fraction of efficiency under normal conditions, but if the primary route vanished completely it would stabilise almost instantly instead of waiting for Starfleet’s beautifully designed cascade of sensible decisions.
Maren sat back and examined her work.
“Better.”
She reached for the test lead, plugged the regulator into the quarters’ power interface and brought up a simulated load. The first stage held. So did the second.
Her grin appeared without invitation.
She increased it.
The lights dimmed.
Maren looked up.
The room returned to normal a second later.
Her gaze dropped slowly back to the regulator.
“That was probably fine.”
She pushed the load higher.
Somewhere beneath the floor, the familiar vibration of the Pioneer remained steady, warp engines humming through the deck in a rhythm she had learned well enough over the past days to notice when it changed. Nothing screamed. Nothing sparked. Nobody shouted her name from the corridor.
So she kept going.
The regulator held.
Maren leaned forward, eyes bright now, one hand braced against the carpet as the readings climbed. The first time Operations had given her something to look at, she had fixed it in twelve minutes. The second time had taken nearly an hour because the lieutenant who handed it over had insisted the problem was in the isolinear controller when it plainly wasn’t. Engineering had been slightly better, although several of them seemed emotionally attached to doing things according to manuals written by people who had clearly never needed to repair a warp manifold while somebody was shooting at them.
Maren had opinions.
Most of them had already been shared.
Repeatedly.
She increased the load again.
This time the lights dimmed long enough for the room to notice.
The replicator chirped.
The desk terminal flickered once.
Maren paused with her finger hovering above the control.
A warning appeared across the PADD.
**RESIDENTIAL POWER ALLOCATION EXCEEDED.**
She stared at it.
Then at the open access panel.
Then back at the warning.
“No.”
Maren reached into the wall, found the limiter responsible and bypassed it.
The warning disappeared.
“See?” she told the regulator, settling back onto the floor with considerable satisfaction. “Problem solved.”
The Pioneer continued towards Camp Nostromo, entirely unaware that one of its guest quarters had just begun consuming power like a small laboratory.
The Pioneer remained unaware for approximately forty-three seconds.
Maren had just increased the regulator’s simulated load again when the door chime sounded behind her. She glanced over one shoulder without moving from the carpet, where the dismantled unit, three tools, two PADDs and the cold remains of her tea had formed a loose perimeter around her. Whoever was outside could either wait or develop enough initiative to go away.
The chime sounded a second time.
“Yeah, come in.”
The doors parted to reveal a young Human Operations officer with a PADD tucked against one side. Maren recognised him vaguely from Ops, though she had encountered enough blue and gold uniforms over the past week that his name had not survived whatever introduction had accompanied him.
He took one step inside and stopped.
His eyes found Maren first. Then, almost immediately, they found somewhere else.
The open access panel became fascinating.
So did the desk.
For approximately half a second, even the ceiling appeared to warrant professional inspection.
Maren looked down at herself. She was barefoot, wearing shorts and an oversized shirt that had probably belonged to her father once upon a time, or at least she had always assumed it had. Her hair was tied up badly, one shoulder of the shirt had slipped loose somewhere during the last hour, and she had absolutely no intention of correcting any of it because this was her room and he had rung her door.
The faint wash of embarrassment coming from him reached her without Maren even trying.
Her eyes brightened.
Oh, this had potential.
“Can I help you?”
The officer looked firmly at her face now, with the concentration of a man who had just been informed there would be an examination on eye contact. “Ms Malbrooke?”
“That depends.”
A tiny hesitation followed. “Depends on what?”
“Whether I’m in trouble.”
He opened his mouth, apparently reconsidered whatever answer had originally been there, and adjusted his grip on the PADD instead. “Ensign Noah Barrett. Operations. We registered an unusual power draw from these quarters about a minute ago. It started as a fluctuation, then increased sharply enough that the distribution system flagged it for review.”
Maren glanced towards the regulator as though hearing about this development for the first time. “That sounds serious.”
Barrett’s gaze followed hers and landed on the dismantled EPS unit, then travelled to the diagnostic leads disappearing into the open wall panel. Something in his face suggested several unrelated facts had just assembled themselves into an answer he was not going to enjoy.
“Is that connected to your residential power interface?”
“Technically.”
His attention moved to the bypass.
“Very technically.”
Maren smiled at him.
Barrett looked back at his PADD.
The nervousness rolling off him had changed now. Still embarrassment, certainly, but layered beneath it was the particular unease of an officer trying to determine exactly what authority he possessed over a civilian teenager who happened to share the Commodore’s surname. Maren didn’t need telepathy to recognise that calculation, but being able to feel the edges of it made watching him attempt it considerably more entertaining.
He cleared his throat and brought up the power readings. “Your quarters are currently drawing three-point-seven times their expected residential allocation. At first I thought there was a fault in the local distribution node, but the demand is originating entirely from here.”
“Only three-point-seven?”
That dragged his attention back to her despite himself. “Only?”
“I thought it would be more.”
“Why would you think that?”
Maren gestured towards the regulator with the microdriver still in her hand. “Because I’m stress-testing that.”
Barrett looked down at it properly now. Whatever awkwardness Maren herself had introduced briefly gave way to professional interest. “That’s an EPS flow regulator.”
“Excellent start.”
“I know what it is.”
“Even better.”
His mouth tightened, though there was something suspiciously close to amusement trying to escape around the edges. He stepped nearer to the equipment, still carefully maintaining enough distance that Maren could not possibly interpret him as crowding her.
That was interesting too.
“Residential systems shouldn’t allow this level of draw,” he said.
Maren’s expression remained perfectly innocent.
Barrett looked at her.
Then at the exposed circuitry.
“You bypassed the limiter.”
“It kept limiting me.”
For several seconds, Noah Barrett appeared to be having a private disagreement with himself about whether explaining the function of a power limiter would help.
“It’s supposed to.”
“I gathered that.”
“Then why did you bypass it?”
“Because I needed more power.”
His shoulders dropped by perhaps half a centimetre. Maren could feel the frustration beginning to mingle with everything else now, and that made it considerably harder not to grin.
“You know,” she said, shifting slightly where she sat and resting an elbow against one raised knee, “you’re very nervous for somebody who came here to tell me off.”
“I’m not nervous.”
The denial arrived so quickly that Maren’s eyebrows climbed.
“No?”
“No.”
She let the silence sit while she looked at him.
Barrett became extraordinarily interested in his PADD again.
Maren’s smile widened. “You know I’m half Betazoid, right?”
That did it.
His eyes came back to hers, and the little pulse of alarm that accompanied the movement was so clear she almost laughed.
“I’m aware.”
“Good.” She nodded solemnly. “Just checking.”
His expression suggested that this information had not improved his afternoon.
Maren tucked the loose strand of hair that had escaped her knot behind one ear and watched him attempt to return the conversation to anything resembling official business. “So, Noah, what happens now? Do you confiscate my electricity?”
His eyes flicked up at the use of his first name. “Nobody is confiscating your electricity.”
“That seems fair.”
“You just need to restore the limiter.”
Maren’s face fell. “That seems less fair.”
“It’s a safety control.”
“It’s an unnecessarily cautious safety control.”
“It’s calibrated for residential use.”
“I’m doing engineering.”
“In your quarters.”
Maren glanced around at the open panel, scattered components and clothing occupying most available surfaces. “Multipurpose space.”
That finally earned her a look.
Not nervous. Not flustered.
Just tired.
Maren liked him immediately.
Barrett crouched beside the open access panel, keeping his attention firmly on the circuitry now that he had something technical to hide inside. “You can’t leave the bypass in place. The residential grid uses predictive allocation. Once you exceeded your assigned capacity, the system started compensating from the local reserve.”
“I’m nowhere near enough load to bother primary distribution.”
“I didn’t say primary.”
That made her pause.
Barrett brought up the Deck Two power schematic and angled the PADD towards her. “Residential reserve. Your bypass reported continuous authorised demand, so the system started balancing around it. Two neighbouring guest compartments have already been shifted to secondary allocation.”
Maren reached for the PADD and took it from him before he had quite finished offering it.
Her eyes tracked quickly through the schematic. The rerouting was subtle, exactly the kind of automatic adjustment nobody inside those quarters would ever notice, but there it was. The Pioneer had compensated for her improvised laboratory by quietly rearranging everything around it.
She frowned.
“That’s annoying.”
Barrett glanced at her. “The power grid working?”
“The fact that you’re right.”
For the first time since entering the room, he relaxed enough to smile.
It was a mistake.
Maren noticed.
“Oh, don’t look pleased with yourself.”
“I’m not.”
“You absolutely are. I can feel it.”
The smile vanished almost immediately.
That was even better.
Maren handed the PADD back and reached into the access panel, restoring the limiter with considerably less enthusiasm than she had removed it. The residential grid settled almost at once, power consumption dropping back towards something respectable.
Two seconds later, the regulator test failed.
Maren stared at the diagnostic.
Behind her, Barrett had the excellent judgement to remain silent.
She turned her head slowly towards him. “Don’t.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You were going to.”
“I genuinely wasn’t.”
Maren narrowed her eyes, tasting the amusement he was trying very hard not to show. “You thought it loudly.”
Whatever response Barrett had prepared died before reaching his mouth.
Maren turned back to the regulator with a grin she made no effort to hide.
“Right. Fine. I’ll find another way to test it without apparently depriving innocent civilians of their electricity.”
“You weren’t depriving anyone.”
“See? Even less of a problem.”
Barrett stood, and the awkwardness returned almost immediately once there was no longer circuitry to concentrate on. He managed another determined look directly at her face, nodded towards the regulator and said, “There are diagnostic benches in Operations designed for exactly this sort of load test. Next time, you could just ask.”
Maren looked up at him from the middle of her engineering nest.
“Where’s the fun in that?”
He seemed to consider answering, decided survival favoured retreat, and started towards the door instead.
“Thanks for coming all the way down, Noah.”
Barrett stopped for the smallest fraction of a second before continuing.
Maren felt the embarrassment spike again.
She waited until the doors had closed behind him before breaking into a broad grin.
“Oh, he’s going to be fun.”
Then she looked down at the failed regulator, picked up her microdriver and pulled it back towards her.
“Right. Boring legal way it is.”
The room felt oddly quiet after Noah left.
Maren remained on the floor for a while, microdriver turning slowly between her fingers as she stared at the regulator. The sensible thing would have been to take his advice, carry the whole mess to Operations and use one of their diagnostic benches. They had proper load simulators, isolated power feeds and enough monitoring equipment to tell her exactly what the regulator was doing without commandeering the electrical supply of neighbouring cabins.
Which was precisely why she wasn’t going to do that.
Not yet, anyway.
She pulled one of the PADDs towards her and began sketching out another test configuration, this time using a portable power cell and a stepped discharge loop rather than the room’s grid. It would take longer, but Noah had been annoyingly correct about the predictive allocation system, and Maren disliked being wrong considerably more than she disliked doing additional work.
A message appeared at the top of the PADD before she had finished.
**OPERATIONS NOTICE: Residential power allocation normalised. No further action required.**
Maren stared at it.
“Tell Noah he’s very brave when he’s behind a computer.”
The computer, wisely, offered no response.
She smirked and went back to the regulator until another problem presented itself: she needed a replacement micro-induction coupler, and the collection of components she had gradually accumulated from Engineering contained everything except the one she wanted.
Maren hauled herself up from the floor, stepped over one boot, nearly stood on a PADD and caught herself against the edge of the desk. She gave the offending clutter a dark look as though somebody else had put it there, then dropped into the chair and woke the terminal.
The ship’s internal directory opened beneath her fingers. Engineering stores were easy enough to find, but she needed to know who currently had release authority for the smaller component lockers. She searched the department roster, scrolling through names while mentally discarding anyone she had already discovered was likely to ask irritating questions about why she needed something.
Then she stopped.
**MALBROOKE, KATHERINE**
**LIEUTENANT COMMANDER**
**STARFLEET CORPS OF ENGINEERS**
Maren’s hand remained resting against the terminal.
She already knew Katherine existed. She had known that before ever setting foot aboard the Pioneer, back when Commodore Tyler Malbrooke had been little more than a personnel record she should probably never have been able to access in the first place. Married. Corps of Engineers. Another fact among dozens she had gathered because facts were easier to deal with than finding her father’s face attached to somebody else’s life.
This was different.
Katherine Malbrooke wasn’t buried in an archive now.
She was one deck away.
Maren opened the directory entry.
There wasn’t much there beyond what any member of the crew could reasonably see: rank, department, current assignment, duty contact information and a personnel image. Maren studied the photograph for longer than she intended, nose scrunching faintly as though Katherine had somehow committed a personal offence by looking perfectly normal.
An engineer.
Of course she was an engineer.
Maren scrolled down once, caught herself doing it and immediately scrolled back up.
“Nope.”
She closed the file.
Her fingers remained above the terminal for a moment.
Then she opened it again.
Another few seconds passed before Maren gave herself an irritated look in the reflection caught faintly across the dark edge of the screen.
“Absolutely not.”
This time she closed it properly and returned to the Engineering roster.
“Future Maren can deal with that.”
Future Maren, she decided, was rapidly becoming responsible for an unreasonable amount of work.
She found the stores listing she actually wanted, noted the authorised contact and was about to close the directory when the navigation strip along the bottom of the terminal caught her attention.
**USS PIONEER NCC-74757**
**COURSE: CAMP NOSTROMO**
**STATUS: CRUISE**
Maren glanced at it without much interest.
She knew they were heading for Nostromo. Everyone aboard knew. The Marines had been busier since departure, Engineering had spent their departure day buried in the usual checks that came with getting a starship underway, and even she had noticed the slight change in the Pioneer once shore leave ended and the ship stopped waiting around for people to finish enjoying themselves.
Camp Nostromo was simply where they were going next.
Whatever Starfleet needed there was somebody else’s problem.
For once, Maren was perfectly happy having a problem small enough to fit on the floor of her quarters.
She closed the terminal, retrieved a fresh mug of tea from the replicator and carried it back towards the regulator. Halfway there she spotted the old mug still sitting beside the diagnostic leads, bent to collect it, then noticed one of her missing tools underneath yesterday’s shirt.
“Been looking for you.”
The tool joined the others. The shirt did not move.
Maren settled cross-legged onto the carpet again, fresh tea safely beyond elbow range, and pulled the regulator back between her knees. Around her, the quarters remained gloriously untidy: clothes, tools, PADDs, exposed circuitry and one carefully hung leather coat untouched by any of it.
Somewhere beyond the bulkheads, the Pioneer carried on towards Camp Nostromo.
Maren picked up her microdriver and grinned at the regulator.
“Right. Let’s make you better without annoying Operations this time.”
She considered that for a moment.
“Much.”
A Post By
Maren Malbrooke
Civilian, USS Pioneer
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