Define Authorized Part I
Posted on Tue Sep 1st, 2026 @ 12:51pm by Maren Malbrooke
Edited on on Wed Sep 2nd, 2026 @ 8:33am
2,535 words; about a 13 minute read
Mission:
Episode 18 - The Edge of Darkness
Location: Engineering Stores - Deck 11 - USS Pioneer
Timeline: MD002 - 2315 hours
By 2315, Maren had reached the point where patience had become less useful than stubbornness.
The regulator still lay dismantled across the carpet where she had left it hours earlier, though the orderly little spread of components from before had deteriorated considerably. Two PADDs now sat open beside it, one showing a diagnostic trace and the other filled with half-finished alterations she had abandoned as soon as they proved too inefficient. The cold tea from earlier had finally disappeared, only to be replaced by another mug that had gone untouched long enough to become equally pointless. Somewhere near the foot of the bed, a shirt had joined the growing pile of things Maren had apparently decided could look after themselves.
The micro-induction coupler was the problem.
More specifically, the fact that it was beyond saving was the problem.
Maren had spent the better part of two hours refusing to accept that.
She had reseated it, cleaned the contacts, rebuilt the connection path, tested it under reduced load, then under stepped load, then under a deliberately ugly fluctuation pattern that should have exposed anything recoverable inside the component. The result had been depressingly consistent. At low demand it behaved well enough to be irritating. Anything beyond that and the response curve collapsed like it had suddenly remembered it was supposed to be broken.
Maren sat cross-legged on the floor with the coupler balanced in one palm, staring at it as if disappointment alone might shame it back into working.
“You’re useless.”
The coupler remained unmoved.
She turned it over between her fingers, thumb brushing along the casing. There had been a time when she would have kept something like this anyway. Stripped it for anything reusable. Contacts, housing, conductive material, even the outer casing if supplies were bad enough. Nothing got thrown away until there was genuinely nothing left to take from it.
The Pioneer was different.
That was still taking some getting used to.
There were replacement parts here. Proper ones. Clean ones. Components sitting in storage because Starfleet expected machinery to be repaired before it failed catastrophically, rather than after somebody had dragged it through three systems held together with wire, prayer and creative swearing.
Maren looked at the dead coupler again.
“Show-off ship.”
She set it down beside the regulator and leaned back on both hands, eyes drifting towards the terminal.
The time glowed unobtrusively in one corner.
2315.
Morning existed.
Technically.
The stores contact she had found earlier would almost certainly be available then. She could sleep, get up at a reasonable hour and request the replacement like a normal person. Nobody would object. Nobody would ask why she was prowling around Engineering late at night. Nobody would have to explain regulations she had no intention of respecting anyway.
Maren considered that plan for perhaps six seconds.
“No.”
She pushed herself upright.
The movement disturbed one of the PADDs beside her, which slid against the carpet and nearly disappeared beneath the bed. Maren caught it with her foot, nudged it back towards the regulator and stood, stretching until something in her back clicked faintly.
She was still wearing the same oversized shirt and shorts she had been in earlier, the shirt hanging loose enough that one shoulder had slipped free again without her noticing. Her hair was worse now, the knot at the back of her head having gradually surrendered over the course of the evening until several dark strands had fallen around her face.
Maren looked at herself in the mirror beside the wardrobe.
Then looked away.
Fine.
She wasn’t going anywhere important.
She was going one deck down to get a component.
There was a difference.
She crossed to the bed, retrieved her boots and shoved her feet into them without bothering with socks. The first one went on easily. The second required a brief fight because something had ended up inside it.
Maren frowned, tipped the boot upside down and caught a small diagnostic probe in her hand.
She stared at it.
“That explains a lot.”
The probe went into her toolkit.
She pulled the second boot on, then reached automatically for her mother’s coat. The leather settled around her shoulders with familiar weight, slightly absurd over the oversized shirt and bare legs, but Maren gave the combination no thought at all. The coat came with her. That part had stopped being a decision years ago.
Her toolkit followed.
Before leaving, she glanced back at the regulator scattered across the floor. Its exposed internals caught the low room lighting, waiting.
“Don’t go anywhere.”
The doors opened onto a much quieter Pioneer than the one she had spent the day wandering through.
The corridor lighting had shifted subtly for the late watch, softer along the bulkheads without ever becoming dim, and the usual traffic through Deck Two had thinned to occasional footsteps and the distant sound of a turbolift opening somewhere around the curve. The ship beneath it all remained steady at warp, that familiar low vibration running through the deck into the soles of her boots.
Maren stepped into the corridor and let the doors close behind her.
She didn't feel like she was sneaking out.
Sneaking implied guilt.
Maren had a repair ticket, a broken regulator and a replacement component sitting somewhere in Engineering stores that nobody was using at quarter past eleven at night.
As far as she was concerned, this was practically responsible behaviour.
She headed for the turbolift.
The turbolift carried Maren from Deck Two towards the lower decks, and somewhere around Deck Seven she began to appreciate quite how far she had decided to travel for one very small piece of engineering.
Not that this changed anything.
Morning remained an option in the same abstract sense that patience remained an option, but neither seemed especially relevant when there was a perfectly good micro-induction coupler sitting eleven decks below her quarters and a regulator upstairs that refused to cooperate without it. Maren leaned against the wall of the turbolift with her toolkit hanging from one hand, her mother’s coat open over the oversized shirt and shorts she had never bothered changing out of. The boots had been the sum total of her concession to leaving her quarters. If anyone objected to the rest, they were welcome to experience that disappointment privately.
“Deck Eleven,” the computer announced.
The doors opened onto a quieter part of the Pioneer than she usually saw during the day. Engineering never truly slept, especially while the ship was holding warp towards Camp Nostromo, but the late watch had stripped away much of the traffic and conversation. The corridors carried the muted pulse of machinery through their bulkheads, a deeper mechanical rhythm than she felt in her quarters so far above. Crew moved with less ceremony at this hour, carrying tools, checking readouts and disappearing through accessways without the constant churn of daytime activity.
Maren liked it immediately.
There was something reassuring about a ship when everyone else stopped talking and let the machinery speak for itself.
She knew enough of Deck Eleven already to move without consulting the wall displays every twenty metres. Over the last week she had spent more time down here than anyone had formally invited her to, usually because someone had made the mistake of handing her a component and asking what she thought. She had opinions about most of them now. Engineering had opinions about her opinions. So far nobody had actually asked her to stop coming back, which Maren considered tacit approval.
The stores compartment she wanted sat away from Main Engineering itself, tucked along a secondary corridor where replacement assemblies and smaller components could be issued without people wandering through the heart of the department every time they needed a relay. When she reached it, the doors remained firmly closed and the access panel politely requested authorisation.
Maren set her toolkit beside her boot and woke the PADD she had brought with her. “Engineering stores. Micro-induction coupler, Type Four, compatible with EPS flow regulator assembly four-beta.”
“Please provide authorised requisition.”
“I have one.”
The computer repeated itself.
Maren frowned and pulled up the regulator’s maintenance ticket. The repair was still open, the unit was still assigned to her, and the ticket carried authority for standard replacement parts. Her own access did not.
That seemed unnecessarily fussy.
She tried the request through the maintenance record instead.
The panel paused.
**REQUISITION PENDING: PERSONNEL AUTHORISATION REQUIRED.**
Maren stared at it, then traced the request one step further. Whoever had handed her the regulator had also made her its temporary custodian for inventory purposes.
Close enough.
She linked the component request directly to the active repair ticket and submitted it again.
The access panel chimed.
**REQUISITION APPROVED.**
The doors unlocked.
Maren rose with a deeply satisfied little smile and collected her toolkit. “See? We got there.”
Engineering stores were larger than she expected, with neatly organised banks of drawers and component lockers stretching along the compartment walls beneath softly illuminated inventory displays. There was none of the scavenged chaos she was accustomed to, no box of vaguely compatible parts kept because someone might eventually need to cannibalise them. Everything had a designation, a quantity and a place.
The locker assigned to her requisition illuminated halfway down the second bank. Maren touched the release and watched the drawer slide open.
Six pristine micro-induction couplers sat inside.
For a few seconds she simply looked at them.
There had been times when her father would have torn apart three damaged units to build one working component. Times when a replacement this clean would have been guarded until it became absolutely necessary because nobody knew when another one might appear. Here there were six sitting in a drawer on Deck Eleven, untouched, identical, waiting for someone to decide one was needed.
Maren reached inside and lifted one free, turning it between her fingers. “Show-offs.”
“Put it back.”
The voice came from the doorway behind her.
Maren stopped with the coupler still in her hand. She had been feeling far too pleased with herself to notice anyone approaching, which was annoying enough before she even turned around.
The man standing in the entrance wore Engineering gold, sleeves rolled neatly to his forearms and petty officer insignia catching the compartment light. He looked somewhere around thirty, although Maren had learned quickly not to trust appearances too much on a Federation ship. His gaze travelled over the open locker, the toolkit beside her and finally Maren herself.
There was a brief pause when he registered the leather coat thrown over sleepwear and boots she had clearly shoved on with very little thought.
Unlike Noah Barrett earlier, he did not immediately develop a passionate interest in the ceiling.
That was almost disappointing.
Maren lifted the coupler slightly. “You don’t even know what I’m doing.”
The petty officer stepped properly into the compartment, his expression carrying the weary patience of someone whose late watch had been going perfectly well until now. “You’re in Engineering stores at half eleven at night, dressed like you lost an argument with bedtime, holding a component that belongs in that locker. I’m fairly comfortable with the important bits.”
Maren looked down at herself, then back at him. “This is an outfit.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t.”
She felt no embarrassment from him, no uncertainty about who she was or whether he ought to be careful around her. Mostly she got tiredness, curiosity and the growing suspicion that whatever explanation she offered was going to make his evening longer.
Interesting.
Maren rested one hip against the stores unit, still holding the coupler. “Well, if we’re being technically accurate, it doesn’t belong in the locker anymore. The computer issued it to me.”
His eyes shifted towards the active display beside her.
Then back to Maren.
“The computer did what?”
That was better.
She smiled.
“It authorised the requisition.”
The petty officer stared at her for another second before walking towards the panel. “Of course it did.”
Something in his tone suggested he did not believe for one moment that this was going to make his life easier.
Maren watched him approach, already enjoying herself far more than she had expected when she left Deck Two.
Maybe waiting until morning really would have been boring.
The petty officer moved past her to the stores terminal and brought up the requisition history. Maren let him work without volunteering anything further, mostly because watching someone discover exactly what she had done was considerably more entertaining than explaining it in advance. His expression changed very little as he followed the request back to the regulator’s maintenance record, though she caught the faint tightening around his eyes when the system showed her as the current custodian.
He checked it again.
Maren leaned against the locker beside him. “You’ve got the face.”
“What face?”
“The one people make just before admitting I was right.”
That earned her a sideways glance. “I haven’t got that far.”
“You’re getting there.”
He returned to the display and opened the permissions attached to the repair ticket. Maren could feel his concentration more clearly now that he was standing closer, steady and methodical beneath the general tiredness of the late watch. There was irritation too, but none of it was particularly directed at her yet. Most seemed aimed at the fact that the computer had done precisely what she claimed.
Eventually he breathed out through his nose. “You used the maintenance ticket.”
“I used the maintenance ticket the way the maintenance ticket apparently wanted to be used.”
“No, you found a hole between inventory custody and component authorisation.”
Maren’s smile sharpened. “That sounds much cleverer.”
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
“It can be two things.”
He turned from the terminal then, giving her a proper look for the first time. “Did you know you weren’t authorised to requisition this?”
Maren considered the question with exaggerated care. “I knew I personally wasn’t authorised.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“No, but it was much easier to answer.”
A hint of something crossed his face. Not amusement exactly, but close enough that Maren caught it before he flattened it away. She decided immediately that she liked him slightly more for trying.
The petty officer folded his arms. “Name?”
“Maren.”
His eyebrows rose a fraction. “Just Maren?”
“You only gave me ‘put it back’, so I thought we were keeping things informal.”
That did it. The corner of his mouth moved despite himself before he shook his head. “Petty Officer Eli Mercer. Engineering systems. And before you try it, knowing my first name doesn’t make the answer yes.”
Maren’s grin appeared almost automatically. “Eli.”
Nothing.
No embarrassment. No awkward flicker. No sudden awareness that she was standing there in shorts and an oversized shirt beneath an old leather coat. Just a mildly weary engineer waiting for whatever she intended to try next.
Maren narrowed her eyes.
A Post By
Maren Malbrooke
Civilian, USS Pioneer
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