The Shape of the Room
Posted on Tue Sep 1st, 2026 @ 1:31pm by Lieutenant Commander Rhevan Teral
Edited on on Wed Sep 2nd, 2026 @ 8:37am
1,834 words; about a 9 minute read
Mission:
Episode 18 - The Edge of Darkness
Location: Security - Deck 9 - USS Pioneer
Timeline: MD004 - 1101 hours
The doors to the Ready Room closed behind Rhevan, leaving him once again within the ordered movement of the Pioneer’s bridge. He paused only long enough to orient himself before turning towards the turbolift, travel case in hand. There would be time later to stand at Tactical and properly acquaint himself with the command centre from the position that would become his own. For now, Malbrooke had given him both a department and a problem, and Rhevan had never found much value in admiring a new posting while work accumulated somewhere else.
“Security.”
The turbolift carried him down through the ship while his thoughts remained several decks below that, on a Marine installation containing twelve thousand dead and an Away Team walking through the aftermath. The unanswered hail no longer interested him; dead people did not answer communications. The absence of surrounding traffic was more useful, although hardly definitive, while the decision to prepare isolation procedures had already begun arranging itself into a sequence of practical requirements. Transporter access would need restricting. Medical would require somewhere to receive the team without introducing them directly into Sickbay’s normal traffic. Security personnel involved in receiving them would need the same precautions as everyone else. None of it was particularly complicated provided it was done before the Away Team returned rather than invented around them after transport.
The lift opened and Rhevan stepped into the corridor leading towards Security.
He knew the departmental layout from the ship’s schematics. Knowing where a room existed and understanding how people actually used it were very different things. The first security officer he passed registered the unfamiliar face, then the rank, and straightened slightly before offering a greeting. Rhevan returned it and kept moving, allowing the corridor to present itself without making everyone within it suddenly conscious that they were being inspected. He noticed the weapons lockers before he reached the main office, the access controls beside them, the placement of the nearest emergency forcefield emitters and the position from which someone approaching the department could be observed. The architecture was Starfleet practical rather than defensive, built upon an assumption that most people aboard belonged there. Rhevan had spent enough of his life inside ships designed around rather less generous assumptions to notice the difference immediately.
Inside, the department carried the subdued industry of people who had already been working long before their new Chief arrived. Consoles were occupied, a pair of officers were reviewing something together near the central station, and another was returning equipment to a locker along the far wall. Conversation thinned when Rhevan entered, not disappearing altogether but changing in the way it inevitably did when unfamiliar senior rank crossed a threshold.
He set his travel case beside an unused workstation rather than carrying it around like part of the introduction. “Good afternoon.”
Several greetings came back, accompanied by the usual mixture of professional attention and curiosity. Rhevan allowed his gaze to move across the room, matching faces to the personnel material he had already reviewed without making a performance of remembering names. He would learn considerably more from working with them than he ever would from service records.
“I expect most of you already know who I am, or have had enough warning to make a reasonable guess.” There was the slightest dryness beneath his voice, enough to take the edge from what might otherwise have sounded like an inspection. “Commander Teral. I’ll be taking over Security and Tactical effective immediately.”
One of the officers began to mention Lieutenant Sinclair and the Away Team, but Rhevan answered with a small nod before the explanation could grow into something neither of them needed. “I’m aware. Lieutenant Sinclair should remain focused on what is happening below. We’ll hold a proper departmental briefing when the Away Team has returned and she can be here for it.” He glanced around the room again. “Until then, continue whatever you were doing before I walked in. I’ll make a nuisance of myself soon enough.”
That earned a few restrained smiles, which was sufficient. Rhevan had no intention of gathering everyone into formation so he could deliver a speech about expectations before he knew whether any of those expectations needed changing. Departments frequently developed habits invisible to their commanding officers because new Chiefs arrived determined to impose themselves before understanding why things worked as they did. Rhevan preferred evidence.
He retrieved his case and moved towards the office adjoining the main workspace. “If Medical contacts us regarding the Away Team, route it directly to me.”
Acknowledgements followed him as the door closed.
The office had been cleaned.
Rhevan knew that before he had taken more than two steps inside. Federation cleaning compounds carried their own faint sterile character, particularly across recently treated upholstery and the broad surface of the desk, but his sense of smell found what the environmental systems had not quite removed. Coffee, older than anything currently sitting in the room. The diluted remnants of some grooming product he did not recognise. Beneath both lay the far subtler trace of another living body having occupied the space regularly, something distinctly unfamiliar to his Romulan senses and already fading into recycled air.
H’ros.
Not because Rhevan could identify an Eldoran by scent. He could not. The previous Chief had simply occupied the room long enough to leave himself in it, and no amount of empty shelving or wiped surfaces could erase that immediately.
Rhevan stood quietly inside the doorway for several seconds.
The office was functional. Desk positioned slightly off-centre, workstation facing inward, seating opposite for anyone summoned to speak with the Chief. A storage cabinet had been left empty along one wall and a smaller display shelf occupied another. There were no personal belongings remaining, no photographs, ornaments or forgotten scraps of another officer’s life. H’ros’s departure had apparently been sudden, but someone had nevertheless been thorough.
Rhevan placed his case on one of the visitor chairs.
His attention went first to the door.
From behind the desk, an occupant could see anyone entering, but the workstation screen became partially visible from the threshold at the same time. A minor flaw in an ordinary office, and precisely the kind of minor flaw that eventually became relevant when someone assumed rank automatically granted discretion. Rhevan moved behind the desk, sat briefly, then altered the terminal angle until the display remained comfortably readable without presenting itself to the doorway.
He looked towards the secondary wall console, then at the reflection cast across its darkened surface.
Useful.
The office had one entrance, no adjoining access panel large enough for a person, and the bulkhead behind his chair separated the room from an internal systems conduit rather than another occupied compartment. Conversations held at the desk would be difficult to overhear casually from outside, though not impossible with equipment. He checked the privacy controls, found them satisfactory, then altered the visitor chairs by several centimetres so neither sat directly opposite him.
It was not an attempt at intimidation. Rhevan simply disliked conversations arranged like interrogations unless he intended to conduct one.
Only then did he begin unpacking.
There was surprisingly little. A pair of physical books went onto the shelf. His personal PADD remained in the case. A bottle wrapped carefully for transport stayed exactly where it was, there being neither occasion nor company for it at present. Last came the narrow lacquered box containing the strategy set his father had repaired decades earlier. Rhevan held it for a moment, thumb passing over the imperfect seam in one corner, before placing it on the edge of the shelf behind the desk.
One object.
Enough.
He was not attempting to reproduce home. He had never understood officers who arrived somewhere new and immediately covered every available surface with proof that they existed elsewhere as well. A room became yours through use, through the decisions made inside it and the people who eventually stopped remembering anybody else sitting behind the desk.
The unfamiliar scent of H’ros would disappear soon enough.
Rhevan activated the workstation.
Nostromo immediately replaced any further contemplation.
He pulled up the current operational situation, followed by the relevant transporter and internal quarantine protocols. His fingers moved steadily across the controls as he authorised Security restrictions around whichever transporter room would receive the Away Team, flagged access so nobody outside essential Medical and Security personnel wandered into the area, and opened a channel to Sickbay requesting coordination before the team returned. He did not presume to dictate medical procedure. That belonged to the doctors. His responsibility was ensuring that whatever Medical decided could actually be contained aboard the ship.
Once those preparations were moving, Rhevan opened the department roster.
Names became shifts, qualifications and assignments. Sinclair’s was presently marked away from vessel, along with the other personnel attached to the surface operation. He reviewed the current watch, noted who held armoury authorisation, who possessed advanced tactical certification and where experience clustered unevenly across the shifts. None of it prompted immediate changes. He had been aboard less than an hour. Anyone capable of restructuring a department intelligently after reading a roster for six minutes either possessed extraordinary gifts or an unfortunate opinion of themselves.
His personal PADD chimed from inside the open travel case.
Rhevan stopped.
The sound was quiet enough that nobody beyond the closed office door would have heard it.
He knew what it was anyway.
For several seconds his hands remained resting against the Security console while the display continued feeding him information about people he had never met. Somewhere below them, an Away Team moved through a dead Marine base. Outside his door, officers were already adjusting to the presence of a new Chief. Malbrooke had entrusted him with a problem before Rhevan had even unpacked his belongings, and the Pioneer itself remained mostly an arrangement of corridors, reports and first impressions.
The PADD chimed no second time.
Rhevan reached into the case and removed it.
Laira’s message notification remained waiting on the screen. He looked at her name for a moment longer than he had looked at anything else since entering the office, then placed the PADD beside the terminal without opening it.
Not forgotten.
Not yet.
Beyond the door, someone laughed briefly before the sound was swallowed by the department’s ordinary working noise. Rhevan looked around the office again. The terminal now sat at his angle. His father’s strategy set occupied the shelf. His travel case rested open beside the desk, and beneath the sterile trace of cleaning compounds there remained just enough of H’ros to remind him that this place had belonged to somebody else yesterday.
Rhevan turned back to the duty roster.
By tomorrow, the room would smell different.
A Post By
Lieutenant Commander Rhevan Teral
Chief Security/Tactical Officer, USS Pioneer
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