The Last Piece - Part I
Posted on Mon Oct 12th, 2026 @ 1:26pm by Maren Malbrooke
Edited on on Mon Oct 12th, 2026 @ 1:31pm
2,504 words; about a 13 minute read
Mission:
Episode 18 - The Edge of Darkness
Location: Maren’s Shuttle, Main Shuttlebay, USS Pioneer
Timeline: MD004, 0615 hrs
The shuttle still sounded wrong inside the Pioneer.
Maren noticed it every time she came aboard. The low vibration through the deck was too clean, fed from Starfleet shore power instead of the shuttle’s own battered reactor, and somewhere beyond the hull the Pioneer carried on with the quiet mechanical hum of a ship that expected all its systems to work. No loose panel rattling behind the aft bulkhead. No cooling pump complaining because somebody had rebuilt it out of two different models. No faint warning tone waiting to become tomorrow’s problem.
She missed the noises.
Which was stupid.
Maren ducked beneath the open access panel behind the port-side systems bay and dropped the small case she had carried down from Engineering onto the deck. “Okay. Last chance to explode.”
The shuttle computer gave a soft acknowledgement from somewhere above her.
'No explosive condition detected.'
“Wasn’t talking to you.”
'You were the only person speaking.'
Maren paused with one hand inside the case and looked towards the ceiling. “Yeah, see, that. That’s why you need fixing.”
There was no answer. There usually wasn’t unless she gave it something that matched one of the conversational branches she had built over the years.
She smirked to herself and went back to work.
The case held three pieces of technology that would have been worth killing for where she came from.
Here, two had been signed out to her from stores after she had very deliberately gone through the proper channels, because apparently being caught exploiting one inventory loophole was enough to make people annoyingly interested in how she acquired things afterwards. The third was hers already: a compact processing lattice from the Herodotus, too damaged for their engineers to bother repairing and so far ahead of anything she had grown up with that Maren had spent two days taking it apart before she had even understood what half of it did.
They had called it scrap.
She still found that offensive.
Maren set the newer Starfleet interface module beside the lattice and reached deeper into the open compartment. What lived inside bore very little resemblance to anything that had ever come out of a single factory. A Cardassian heuristic controller sat next to an old Federation isolinear cluster, both feeding into a black Dominion adaptive processor whose original markings had been burned away years before Maren got hold of it. Beneath those were smaller pieces she couldn’t name properly even now, scavenged from ships that had stopped needing them because their crews were dead, gone or absorbed into something larger.
Some of it had come from her father.
Some she had found herself.
Some she had traded for.
A few pieces she had never told him about.
Maren reached past the Dominion processor and felt for the narrow connector buried behind it. “Come on... you know where you are.”
Her fingertips found it. She eased the old coupling free, then stared at the replacement from the Pioneer sitting in her other hand.
Too clean.
That bothered her more than it should have.
Everything inside the compartment had scratches, heat staining, uneven soldering or somebody’s handwriting on it. The new component looked like it had never been frightened in its life.
“Give it a week.”
She fitted it anyway.
For years, ACE had worked around limitations Maren had stopped noticing because they were simply part of what the system was. One processor handled predictive analysis while another suspended higher-order language routines. Memory retrieval slowed when the tactical monitor was active. Adaptive learning had to be throttled whenever the shuttle went to full power because the ancient distribution network treated intelligence as considerably less important than keeping them alive.
Fair, really.
She had rewritten around it. Split routines apart. Taught incompatible systems to pass information through translation layers that were ugly enough to make a proper Starfleet engineer cry. Whenever she found something better, she replaced what she could and rewrote whatever broke afterwards.
ACE had grown that way.
Not in one clean line, but sideways.
Maren shifted onto her back beneath the open bay, dark hair spreading untidily across the deck while she studied the exposed connections above her. She already knew where the new interface had to go. The problem was convincing the Herodotus lattice that the Dominion processor wasn’t hostile architecture and persuading both of them to accept a modern Starfleet memory controller without one deciding to protect itself from the other two.
Easy.
Probably.
She reached for a driver and found empty deck.
Maren frowned, patted around blindly for another second, then stretched one arm outside the compartment. “ACE, where’d I put the microdriver?”
'Aft console. Left side. Beneath the grey data module.'
She craned her head far enough to spot it exactly where ACE said it was. “Right.”
Maren wriggled free, crossed the cramped cabin and retrieved it. She had been asking versions of that question for years. Tool locations. power levels. whether anyone had come within sensor range while she slept. how much food was left. whether the environmental system could survive another night without the part they didn’t have.
ACE always knew.
That was what it was for.
Back at the open bay, Maren sat cross-legged on the deck and pulled the final assembly towards her. A small status display woke beneath her fingertips, lines of code crawling past in several different programming languages before disappearing into translation routines she knew almost as well as her own handwriting.
The new hardware was ready.
The old system wasn’t.
Not yet.
She ran a hand through her hair and stared at the architecture she had spent years refusing to give up on.
“Okay,” Maren murmured, reaching for the first connector. “Let’s make you less shit.”
Maren started with the Herodotus lattice.
That was the difficult one. The Dominion processor was old, temperamental and suspicious of everything, but at least Maren understood how it thought. Dominion systems had been designed around control. They expected authentication, hierarchy and threats, and once you knew which one a particular piece of hardware cared about most, there was usually a way through.
The lattice was different. It kept finding solutions to problems Maren hadn't asked it to solve.
She sat with her legs folded beneath the open compartment, a PADD balanced against one knee while three separate diagnostic windows crawled across the little display beside her. Every time the lattice tried to establish a direct handshake with the adaptive processor, the Dominion hardware severed the connection before the translation layer could get between them.
“Stop doing that,” Maren muttered, fingers moving across the PADD as she changed the order of the initiation sequence. “You're both computers. You don't get to hate each other.”
'The adaptive processor has identified an unauthorised system intrusion.'
“Yeah, I know. I was there.”
She stripped the sequence back and tried again, this time allowing the Dominion architecture to initiate first. It reached outward, encountered the lattice, classified it as unknown technology and immediately attempted to quarantine it.
Maren stared at the failure notice. “Oh, come on.”
'Connection unsuccessful.'
“No shit.”
ACE didn't answer. It hadn't been a question.
Maren pushed her hair back with both hands and studied the architecture again. She'd spent too long trying to make the two systems trust each other when neither of them needed to. Trust was a terrible basis for engineering anyway.
What they needed was something both recognised.
Her eyes moved to the new Starfleet interface module.
“Okay...”
She pulled it closer.
Starfleet hardware was almost offensively cooperative. The module had spent its entire existence expecting to connect with other systems, negotiate protocols and find a common language. It didn't care whether the thing on the other end had been manufactured by Starfleet, Cardassians or people who thought cloning an army of drug-dependent soldiers was an acceptable design philosophy. If there was data, it wanted to move it.
Maren smiled slowly. “You're going in the middle.”
The physical installation took less time than the software. She rerouted the lattice through the Starfleet module, killed the direct pathway into the Dominion processor and rebuilt the translation bridge so neither older system ever actually saw the other. As far as the adaptive processor was concerned, it was talking to a Federation subsystem. As far as the lattice knew, the same was true.
It was lying to both of them.
Her dad would've appreciated that.
The next handshake completed in under a second.
Maren blinked at the green status indicator, then leaned closer as if it might change its mind. “Ha.”
'Interface established.'
“Yeah, I can see that.” Her grin widened as another bank of indicators came alive. “Who built you again?”
'Primary architecture was assembled by Maren Saela Malbrooke.'
She pointed the microdriver at the speaker. “Correct answer.”
The harder part came when she opened the restrictions she had spent years putting in place.
ACE's architecture had never been allowed to run as a whole. It couldn't. The shuttle hadn't possessed enough processing capacity, memory or stable power to let every part of the system remain active simultaneously. Maren had built priorities instead. Damage control displaced conversational routines. Sensor analysis suspended long-term learning. Tactical processing took almost everything if the shuttle detected Jem'Hadar signatures.
It had kept them alive.
It had also meant ACE spent most of its existence with pieces of itself switched off.
Maren began removing the walls.
Not all of them. She wasn't an idiot.
She left the core protections around flight control, weapons and propulsion exactly where they were, then started rewriting the resource governors around memory, adaptive learning and language. The Herodotus lattice could absorb most of the predictive load by itself. The new Starfleet controller handled memory access without ACE having to stop and search through its own history every time Maren asked an awkward question. The Dominion processor could finally do what it had always been good at: adapt.
Numbers climbed across the display.
Twenty-eight per cent.
Thirty-six.
Forty-one.
Maren stopped.
“ACE, run a recursive integrity check on the adaptive layer.”
'That process will temporarily reduce available conversational resources.'
“I'll survive.”
'Previous evidence is inconclusive.'
Her hand froze over the controls.
Slowly, Maren looked up.
“Did I write that?”
'Clarify.'
She stared at the speaker for another second before shaking her head. “Nothing. Run the check.”
The line had sounded like ACE. More accurately, it had sounded like the version of ACE Maren had spent years trying to make less painful to talk to. The Silas routines had thousands of variations in them now, some lifted from old recordings, most rewritten by Maren until the voice stopped sounding like a character from one of her father's ancient holos and became something she could actually tolerate for more than ten minutes.
There were jokes in there.
Probably that one too.
She went back to the display.
The integrity check came back clean.
Maren opened another governor.
Then another.
For the first time, ACE's long-term memory remained active while the predictive model ran at full capacity. Language stayed online beside sensor analysis. The adaptive processor began feeding changes back into the translation network instead of waiting for Maren to approve every optimisation manually.
She watched the data for several seconds, following the movement rather than individual numbers. Nothing fought for space anymore. Processes that had spent years taking turns were beginning to overlap, sharing information through the new architecture without tripping over each other.
It was working.
Actually working.
Maren leaned in closer, elbows against her knees. “ACE, sensor status.”
'Passive sensors online. USS Pioneer shuttlebay environment stable. No unauthorised access detected since 2318 hours.'
“Memory retrieval. Last time Dad replaced the port injector relay.”
'Fourteen February 2398. Replacement unsuccessful. Tyler Malbrooke subsequently described the relay as, quote, "a vindictive little bastard", and repaired the original.'
Maren snorted. “Yeah. Sounds right.”
She tried engineering analysis next, feeding ACE an old fluctuation from the starboard impulse manifold that had annoyed her for months. Previously, it would've taken the system nearly a minute to search the relevant maintenance logs, suspend half its background processes and build a model.
The answer appeared in three seconds.
Maren's expression sharpened.
She changed two variables and ran it again.
One point eight seconds.
Again.
Less than one.
“Oh, you beautiful bastard.”
'Diagnostic result remains unchanged.'
“Wasn't talking about the diagnostic.”
No response.
Maren smiled to herself.
Still ACE.
She reached for the final governor.
This one had been there almost from the beginning. Her oldest safeguard, written badly when she was thirteen and improved every time she learned enough to realise how badly she'd written it the first time. It prevented the adaptive routines from rewriting anything outside tightly defined partitions without explicit permission.
The restriction had made sense when ACE lived on processors held together by scavenged couplings and optimism.
Now it was choking half the architecture.
Maren didn't remove it.
She rewrote it.
Permission became verification. Changes could propagate between adaptive systems, but only after duplication, integrity testing and an automatic rollback state. ACE could learn without waiting for her to approve every tiny adjustment, but if something went wrong, the system could still put itself back the way it had been.
She read the new structure twice.
Then a third time.
“Okay.”
Her finger hovered over the control.
For years there had always been another limitation. Another bad processor. Another power problem. Another bit of code that needed rebuilding before the next piece could work properly. She'd got used to ACE being unfinished in the same way she'd got used to the shuttle never really being fixed.
There was always something else.
Maren pressed the control.
The status display went dark.
A second later, the cabin lights dimmed as the new architecture drew power for the first full integration cycle. Somewhere behind the bulkhead, cooling systems increased speed. The soft voice that had followed Maren through years of hiding places, repairs and nights when sleeping properly hadn't been an option disappeared with everything else.
Maren watched the blank display.
“Don't fuck this up.”
Maren Malbrooke
Civilian, USS Pioneer
RSS Feed