Define Authorized Part II
Posted on Wed Sep 2nd, 2026 @ 8:32am by Maren Malbrooke
Edited on on Wed Sep 2nd, 2026 @ 8:32am
2,310 words; about a 12 minute read
Mission:
Episode 18 - The Edge of Darkness
Location: Engineering Stores - Deck 11 - USS Pioneer
Timeline: MD002 2345 hrs
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.
Eli noticed. “Something wrong?”
“No.”
“You look disappointed.”
“I’m not.”
“Good.”
That was annoying.
She pushed herself away from the locker and held the coupler up between two fingers. “Look, I’m not wandering around stealing bits of your ship for entertainment. Operations gave me an EPS regulator with an intermittent load fault. The coupler’s degraded, I need another one, you have six, and the computer agreed with me. This feels like a problem that has already solved itself.”
“Operations gave you a regulator to look at?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
Maren hesitated just long enough to answer the question without answering it. “O-per-a-tions.”
Eli gave her a look.
“It was definitely somebody in Operations.”
“That inspiring level of detail fills me with confidence.”
She ignored that. “The regulator drops output when the secondary path takes sustained load. I changed the feedback routing so it doesn’t sit around waiting for the primary system to recover before committing to what’s still working. The old coupler can’t hold the response curve, so I need this one.”
That changed him.
Not dramatically. He did not suddenly become impressed, nor did Maren need him to. But his attention shifted away from the ridiculousness of finding her in stores after eleven and towards the component in her hand.
“You changed the transfer logic?”
“The original logic assumes the tertiary safeguard is still there.”
“It usually is.”
“Until it isn’t.”
Eli studied her for a moment. “So you’ve traded some efficiency under normal load for a faster stabilisation if the primary and secondary paths start collapsing.”
“Barely any efficiency.”
“How much?”
Maren ran a hand back through the loose mess of her hair while she thought. “Just under three percent once it settles. Maybe less with the new coupler.”
“Maybe?”
“I haven’t got the new coupler yet.” She lifted it pointedly.
Eli ignored the invitation. “Starfleet systems are built around redundancy for a reason.”
“I know. They’re very proud of it.”
“They also tend to work.”
“They work brilliantly when everything around them works too.” The humour remained in Maren’s voice, but some of it had thinned without her quite meaning it to. “I’m more interested in what happens after three other things explode.”
Eli’s expression shifted again, subtle enough that somebody without her senses might have missed it. He did not ask what she meant. He did not soften his voice or look at her as though she had accidentally revealed something fragile. He simply glanced back at the maintenance ticket, then at the coupler.
“That’s not standard repair doctrine.”
“No.”
“It’s ugly.”
Maren’s eyes narrowed. “It’s not that ugly.”
“It’s a little ugly.”
“It works.”
“I didn’t say it wouldn’t.”
She stared at him.
Eli nodded towards the coupler. “The idea’s sound. I’d want to see what it does under a proper load test before putting it back into service, but the logic makes sense.”
The compliment landed more cleanly than Maren expected. There was no indulgence in it, no qualification about her age, no suggestion that she had done well considering who she was. He had looked at the work and decided it had merit.
Naturally, she could not simply accept that.
“So I can have the coupler.”
“No.”
Maren blinked. “You just said I was right.”
“I said your modification makes sense.”
“That feels extremely similar.”
“It isn’t.”
She could feel the amusement now, buried under all that practical late-watch patience, and Maren immediately decided she resented it.
“You’re enjoying this.”
“A little.”
“At least Noah has the decency to feel bad when he’s being difficult.”
Eli paused. “Who’s Noah?”
Maren waved the question away. “Operations victim. Not important.”
For the first time, Eli actually laughed.
It was brief, but she heard it.
Maren pointed the coupler at him. “Careful. You’re becoming likeable.”
“I’ll work on that.” He took the component gently from her fingers before she quite realised he was doing it, then turned back towards the terminal. “Now, let’s fix the part where a civilian with an open repair ticket can apparently help herself to Engineering stores at half eleven at night.”
Maren watched him start working on the permissions.
Her expression fell.
“Oh, come on. You don’t have to fix it now.”
Eli did, apparently, have to fix it now.
Maren stood beside him while he worked through the stores permissions, arms folded beneath the open front of her coat, watching a perfectly useful loophole disappear with every adjustment he made. There was no fuss about it. He did not call a supervisor, summon Security or behave as though she had breached the warp core. He simply corrected the relationship between the maintenance ticket and inventory access, ran the request again under the same conditions and gave a small nod when the computer rejected it.
“You could’ve left it until morning,” Maren said, leaning slightly towards the display as though proximity might somehow restore what he had just removed. “Nobody else even knew it was there.”
“That’s usually a pretty good reason to fix it.” Eli glanced at her before returning to the terminal. “You managed to get into Engineering stores without the access you were supposed to have.”
“The door opened for me. I think some responsibility has to fall on the door.”
That earned the faintest movement at the corner of his mouth, but he refused to give her the satisfaction of anything more. He submitted the correction to the software review queue and tested it once again, the system now behaving exactly as Starfleet had presumably intended from the beginning. Maren could feel the small thread of satisfaction underneath his concentration and frowned at the display.
“I liked it better before.”
“I’ll try to recover from that.”
“You don’t sound very upset.”
Eli looked across at her then, and the curiosity that had been hovering around the edge of his mood sharpened as he realised she had answered something he had never actually said. “You can tell I’m not?”
Maren stared at him. “You know I’m half-Betazoid, right?”
His expression suggested that particular piece of information had either escaped him or not yet found its proper place. “Right. I probably should’ve put that together.”
“It’s late,” she allowed, with considerably more generosity than she felt he deserved. “I’ll pretend that was the problem.”
He accepted the concession and turned back to the requisition record. The coupler still sat on the counter where he had placed it, and Maren’s attention followed his hand as he cancelled her original request and returned the component to inventory.
“Eli, I need that.”
“I know.” He did not even look up as he opened a fresh requisition under his own authorisation and linked the replacement properly to the regulator’s maintenance ticket. “I’m putting it back for about ten seconds, not throwing it out an airlock.”
“That feels unnecessarily dramatic.”
“You came down here after half eleven at night because you couldn’t wait until morning for one component.”
Maren considered that. “Fair.”
The locker released again, and Eli removed the same coupler before holding it towards her. She looked from the component to him, then took it with the faint suspicion that he had deliberately made the process longer than necessary.
“You could’ve done that five minutes ago.”
“I could’ve,” he said. “But then you’d have gone upstairs thinking what you did was allowed.”
“It was allowed. The computer said yes.”
“The computer was wrong.”
Maren slipped the coupler carefully into the padded section of her toolkit. “You probably shouldn’t say things like that in Engineering. Machines hear everything.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
It was difficult to argue with the fact that she had got what she came for, although Maren still felt there had been an unreasonable amount of procedure between identifying a broken part and replacing it with an identical working one. She closed the toolkit and bent to pick it up, but Eli was still looking at the requisition.
“Maren what?”
She straightened again. “Why?”
“Because I’m putting your name on the issue record.”
“Maren works.”
“For people, maybe. Inventory likes surnames.”
“That sounds like an inventory problem.”
Eli looked at her over the terminal with the calm patience of someone entirely prepared to wait. He did not repeat himself or turn it into an order. He simply stayed there until Maren realised that refusing was only going to keep her on Deck Eleven longer.
“Malbrooke.”
The recognition was small, but she caught it. Eli paused for barely a second before his eyes came back to her, taking in the same ridiculous combination of battered leather coat, oversized shirt, shorts and hastily pulled-on boots as though the surname had shifted one or two pieces into place.
Maren waited for the usual change.
It never really came.
Eli entered the name into the requisition record. “Right. Maren Malbrooke.”
Her brows drew together. “That’s it?”
He looked over. “Were you expecting something else?”
“No.”
“Good. Makes this easier.”
She watched him for another moment, instinctively reaching for whatever sat behind the answer. Curiosity, certainly. A little surprise. But there was no sudden caution, no deference and no mental scramble to reconsider everything he had just said because the Commodore’s name had entered the room.
Oddly, that pleased her.
She did not intend to tell him.
Eli handed her the updated repair record instead. “The coupler’s assigned properly now. If the regulator needs anything else, ask whoever’s on duty before you go exploring the inventory system again.”
Maren tucked the PADD against her toolkit. “I did ask whoever was on duty.”
“You got caught by whoever was on duty.”
“And I’m leaving with the part.”
He looked at the toolkit, then back at her. “You’re going to be exhausting, aren’t you?”
Maren smiled. “Probably.”
That answer seemed to be about as much warning as he expected to get. She turned for the corridor, satisfied that the evening had ultimately gone in her favour despite the unnecessary murder of a perfectly good software flaw.
She had almost reached the doors when Eli spoke again. “Use an isolated supply when you test it.”
Maren slowed.
She did not turn around immediately.
Behind her, Eli sighed. “That hesitation tells me more than I wanted to know.”
Maren glanced back over her shoulder. “I know better now.”
“I’m sure Operations is thrilled.”
“They’ll survive.”
“Go finish your regulator, Malbrooke.”
There was no lecture attached to it and no threat of reporting her to Tyler, just the tired instruction of an engineer who had apparently decided that getting her off Deck Eleven was the quickest route back to a peaceful shift. Maren gave him a bright smile and started backing into the corridor.
“You do believe in me.”
“I believe in you leaving.”
“Still counts.”
The doors closed between them before he could argue.
By the time the turbolift returned her to Deck Two, the Pioneer had settled even further into the late watch. The corridor outside her quarters was empty, the lighting softened for the hour, and somewhere beneath her feet the ship continued smoothly at warp towards Camp Nostromo. Nothing about the journey had changed while she had been downstairs creating work for Engineering.
Her quarters looked exactly as she had abandoned them. The regulator remained scattered across the carpet between glowing PADDs and tools, while the latest mug of tea had completed its transformation into something nobody sensible would drink. Maren hung her mother’s coat beside the bed, smoothing one hand briefly over the old leather before dropping back onto the floor and opening the toolkit.
The new coupler slid into place with almost insulting ease.
She reseated the connection, checked the feedback path and attached the regulator to the portable power cell she had prepared earlier. The wall interface sat within easy reach, offering substantially more power and substantially greater chances of another visit from Operations.
Maren looked at it.
Once had been enough.
She brought the test sequence online through the isolated supply instead and watched the load rise. The regulator held cleanly through the first stage, then the second, the diagnostic trace remaining steady as it crossed the point where the old coupler had begun to collapse. Maren leaned closer, loose hair falling forward again as the simulation killed the primary route and forced the modified logic to respond.
The secondary path took the load almost immediately.
No hesitation. No pointless wait for a system that was already gone. The regulator stabilised exactly where she wanted it to, holding comfortably even when she pushed the simulated demand a little further than necessary simply because she could.
Maren sat back on her heels and watched the clean trace continue across the PADD. The lights had not dimmed, nobody else’s quarters had lost power, and there was no new Operations notice waiting to complain about her existence.
Around her, the Pioneer continued quietly towards Camp Nostromo while the repaired regulator hummed contentedly on the carpet.
Maren’s grin crept back.
“Worth it.”
A Post By
Maren Malbrooke
Civilian, USS Pioneer
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