09-30-2025, 04:03 AM
== Just noticed the Bridge post after my original post. ==
== Crewman Mark Halvorsen – Security NRC ==
The next pulse of the klaxon never landed.
Sound thinned, light leveled; the corridor’s red wash bled back to clean white-gold, and the ship’s hum climbed to the note he knew by heart. The scorched bulkhead was whole. The runner was unburned. The polaron carbine wasn’t at his feet—because it never had been.
Halvorsen blinked once, slow. He looked down at his hands: his hands—small scar by the thumb web, faint grease ghost in the lines no sonic ever completely erased. He touched his ear. Rounded. Warm. In the brushed panel beneath the rail, a human face met his eyes—sleep-ruffled, a little pale, blessedly antennae-free.
He drew a breath through his nose and tasted only Yeager: sanitizer with a hint of vanilla, metal and ozone in the way all ships carry a bite, and somewhere down the line that stubborn third-shift coffee drifting like a bribe.
The fixtures were right again. LCARS ran the modern palette. The rail’s satin finish didn’t throw his reflection back at him like a haunted halo. The deck strip by the junction glowed steady: DECK 6. Below it, the stamp he’d walked past a hundred times without reading: SECTION J–12 • FRAME 6–138.
He glanced back at the spot where a Jem’Hadar had—hadn’t—been. The carpet lay innocent, pile undisturbed. No scent of burned polymer, no tick of metal cooling. Just the quiet rhythm of a ship awake and busy and minding its own business.
His combadge gave a soft, neutral chirp; the already-open channel held like a held breath. He thumbed the badge, listened to the clean carrier tone for a beat, then let it go. No story to tell that didn’t sound wrong. False alarm. Dream with its boots on. Pick a label later.
He squared his jacket—the right cut this time—smoothed a wrinkle at the hip, and let his shoulders settle. Voices drifted faintly from around the elbow, the harmless kind of laughter that never carried content past the corner. A service hatch whispered shut somewhere aft. The deck under his soles thrummed steady, comfortable as a heartbeat under a palm.
“Right,” he murmured to the quiet ship. “Back to it.”
He checked the corridor one more time—sealed hatches, clear lanes, nothing where a body had been—and stepped out toward the junction at an easy pace, eyes doing their usual quiet work and his badge ready to chirp at the first crackle of a Security voice. If someone pinged, he’d answer. If not, he had a shift to make on a Yeager that looked exactly like home.
>> Security Complex >>
== Crewman Mark Halvorsen – Security NRC ==
The next pulse of the klaxon never landed.
Sound thinned, light leveled; the corridor’s red wash bled back to clean white-gold, and the ship’s hum climbed to the note he knew by heart. The scorched bulkhead was whole. The runner was unburned. The polaron carbine wasn’t at his feet—because it never had been.
Halvorsen blinked once, slow. He looked down at his hands: his hands—small scar by the thumb web, faint grease ghost in the lines no sonic ever completely erased. He touched his ear. Rounded. Warm. In the brushed panel beneath the rail, a human face met his eyes—sleep-ruffled, a little pale, blessedly antennae-free.
He drew a breath through his nose and tasted only Yeager: sanitizer with a hint of vanilla, metal and ozone in the way all ships carry a bite, and somewhere down the line that stubborn third-shift coffee drifting like a bribe.
The fixtures were right again. LCARS ran the modern palette. The rail’s satin finish didn’t throw his reflection back at him like a haunted halo. The deck strip by the junction glowed steady: DECK 6. Below it, the stamp he’d walked past a hundred times without reading: SECTION J–12 • FRAME 6–138.
He glanced back at the spot where a Jem’Hadar had—hadn’t—been. The carpet lay innocent, pile undisturbed. No scent of burned polymer, no tick of metal cooling. Just the quiet rhythm of a ship awake and busy and minding its own business.
His combadge gave a soft, neutral chirp; the already-open channel held like a held breath. He thumbed the badge, listened to the clean carrier tone for a beat, then let it go. No story to tell that didn’t sound wrong. False alarm. Dream with its boots on. Pick a label later.
He squared his jacket—the right cut this time—smoothed a wrinkle at the hip, and let his shoulders settle. Voices drifted faintly from around the elbow, the harmless kind of laughter that never carried content past the corner. A service hatch whispered shut somewhere aft. The deck under his soles thrummed steady, comfortable as a heartbeat under a palm.
“Right,” he murmured to the quiet ship. “Back to it.”
He checked the corridor one more time—sealed hatches, clear lanes, nothing where a body had been—and stepped out toward the junction at an easy pace, eyes doing their usual quiet work and his badge ready to chirp at the first crackle of a Security voice. If someone pinged, he’d answer. If not, he had a shift to make on a Yeager that looked exactly like home.
>> Security Complex >>