Work Text:
TO: Chancellor Nahla Ake
FROM: Commander Jett Reno
RE: Cadet Caleb Mir
Cadet Mir has made good progress over the past year. His growing commitment to the Academy and Starfleet is becoming clear in his grades, his teamwork and his attitude. Basically, he’s a good kid who could make a good officer. He does need to work on that whole thing where he still reacts to being given an order like someone’s asked him to kill his own puppy, and maybe get on with picking the operations division before I lock him in Engineering with nothing but a hyperspanner and his wits, but he’s getting there. I recommend he progress to the second year.
TO: Commander Jett Reno
FROM: Chancellor Nahla Ake
RE: Cadet Caleb Mir
Please complete this to the minimum required standard and number of words. (A year you’ve been teaching him, and this is the best you can do?)
TO: Chancellor Nahla Ake
FROM: Commander Jett Reno
RE: Pointless paperwork
This is high praise and it didn’t need to be said in 500 words. But here, see attached for some Starfleet-bureaucracy-style waffle on Academy letterhead anyway. (The kid knows I think he’s doing great.)
“And I just said… no.”
“Okay?” Anisha shrugs. “You hadn’t finished.”
Caleb winces. “No, you don’t get it, Mom. I defied a direct order.”
She’s calling in from Bajor, where she’s taking an actual engineering course — she gave him the best smile when he said he’s proud of her. Caleb has been trying to explain what happened in the training simulation he just failed.
His mom’s holographic interface flickers with one of those soft, amused smiles she reserves for when he’s regaling her with stories about his life. “Well, there’s always tomorrow. You’ve got nearly three more years to learn how to toady up to senior officers.”
“I’m not here to—” He bites down on the rest of the retort. Of all the many things he’s capable of screwing up, he can’t hurt her. “That’s not it.”
He sees the way she tries to care about what matters to him. And there’s no reason why finer details like the chain of command should mean anything to her. She’s still not really down with the whole Starfleet thing. For years, Caleb lived a life she would have recognized, while they were so profoundly separated that they might as well have been in different universes. Now they can talk whenever they want — and his world is so alien to her that he can’t even tell her about his day.
Something in his voice reaches her over the comms; she sits forward. “I’m sorry, honey. I’m listening.”
There’s something here that Caleb needs her to understand, and it’s not just about Starfleet.
He tries again. Earlier today, in Engineering. Reshaping programmable matter into the plasma injector coil they needed to go to warp.
“Two more minutes,” he told Genesis. “I’m almost there.”
“We have a new situation.” Her voice from the bridge was distorted by a glitching comms channel, but that wasn’t Caleb’s problem. “We need you on the bridge, please. One of your engineering assistants can finish up there.”
“But—”
“Now, please.”
Her voice — her order — was a drill carving out a hole in his insides. “One minute,” he updated, bright protomatter forming under his hands. Ever closer to the shape, clear as blueprints in his mind, that would make everything right.
“I said now, Cadet Mir.”
The attempt to pull rank barely registered. He wasn’t finished. “No, when I'm done.”
Caleb drags himself back to the present. “I don’t know, Mom. It’s like a pattern with me. A habit I can’t shake. Someone says 'jump', and I say 'fuck off'. Out there—” he gestures at the wide, perilous field of stars beyond his window “—it was less of a problem. I guess maybe it even kept me safe, when saying yes would have…”
“It was a survival strategy.” Anisha never asks for details when he cuts off a story of his past, anymore. “I get that.”
“I know you do.” Surviving is easy to explain; it’s what came next that isn’t. The lock-jawed, fist-clenched defiance at being told what to do, while he just has to stand there, resisting the old instinct to fight for his life or run like hell — even after more than a year at the Academy. And how much it could screw up the career he’s stumbled into, if he let it. “You ever feel like there’s something wrong with you, Mom? Like, seriously screwed up?”
She can’t quite meet his eyes. “Yes.”
Getting to talk to her every day is still the most wonderful gift, but it comes at a cost for them both. The way she looks at him like she’s the only person who understands him; how much it hurts her when that’s true. How much it hurts him, when it’s not.
Sometimes it feels like coming untethered from both his worlds, drifting into the space between.
It’s still early in the evening when they say goodbye, with promises to talk tomorrow. Caleb heads out in the general direction of Jay-Den’s room.
And walks, almost literally, into Jett Reno.
She’s leaning against the wall outside his door. Arms folded.
The urge to run flickers and dies. He’s just tired of it all, today — the exercises and the orders and the fucking up. “You already gave me the whole dressing-down thing, Commander. Back for more?” He doesn’t bother looking at her. “I get it. I fu— screwed up.”
“Correct. And if you keep talking in that defeated voice and thinking that a screw-up is all you are, that’s never changing.” She starts walking. “With me, Mir.”
He’s almost surprised when his feet carry him after her. “I thought we already did the debrief.”
“We did. Maybe you remember your failing grade for ignoring an order.” She shoots a look at him over her shoulder. “Failing is easy, isn’t it, kid? Time to try something else.”
She leads him, of all places, to Shuttlebay 3. Caleb keeps his hands jammed in his pockets. Not even enough fight left in him to ask what the hell he’s doing here. Still, his eyes are drawn to the dusty engine components and hull panels piled up around them. “I thought this shuttlebay was out of commission.”
“No, that’s just what I wanted you meddling kids to think.” Reno pulls the tarp off a shuttle. Forty percent of one, anyway. Nothing Caleb recognizes as Starfleet stock. It’s a deep, featureless black, other than the battle damage etched across its hull. Exposed wiring juts out from one side; half the engine is in pieces on the ground.
Caleb doesn’t ask. Reno tells him anyway. “Discovery salvaged this, maybe three years ago, from old Emerald Chain territory. Just floating out in space. Captain Saru thought it was past repair. Told me to leave it where it was. I brought it in anyway.” She smirks at Caleb’s raised eyebrows. “What? Surprised I can’t follow orders either?”
He’s still leaning back on his heels. He knows how to stand here and take his punishments. But in his attempt to stare at the floor, he’s started cataloging engine parts, or the entire lack of them. No nacelles, no pylons; all the shuttle’s mysteries are under its skin. Caleb’s fingers are prickling. But he’s not playing whatever her game is.
Reno runs a hand over the hull. “This thing would have some serious stories to tell, if I could just get enough of it working. It’s deuterium powered, but covered in traces of dilithium. Which probably means it blew itself apart in the Burn. We’ve never been able to fix much that broke in that particular apocalypse. But hey, I’ve got time. 930 years of it, all saved up.” She tilts her head at him. “That was a joke, kid. Permission to break that eternal scowl, if you want.”
Caleb crouches down between scattered components, turning one over in his hands. “And you’ve sunk three years into trying to fix this waste of titanium?”
“He speaks — a miracle. And, yeah, more or less. When I get enough off time.”
He lets the component clatter to the floor. She can squander her downtime if she wants to; squandering his is overkill. “Why bother?”
She's leaning over a panel at the base of the shuttle, releasing it. “I guess I just like a challenge.”
“So it’s a personal project?”
“Yep. And tonight, my grumpy little protégé, it’s your personal project too.”
He waits. Any minute now she’ll impart some life lesson she thinks is the most important thing he’ll ever hear. It won’t be. She’s a solid engineering teacher, but nothing he learned in a classroom ever kept him alive.
But the lesson never comes. Reno just gestures at the shuttle. “Well?”
Caleb shoves his hands back in his pockets. “What are my orders?”
“Didn’t we just decide it wasn’t a day to give you any more of those?” She gives him a flat look. “I don’t care what you work on. Just do something.”
Reno sits down on the floor, yanks out a length of cable, and starts ignoring him.
He shrugs. “It’s a busted shuttle. How hard can it be?”
Two worthless hours later, another piece is refusing to snap into place, and something is pulling taut inside him. Years of work, on a wreck that’s never going to make it.
He slams down his multitool.
Reno raises an eyebrow. “Yes, Cadet How-Hard-Can-It-Be?”
Caleb’s jaw clenches. “Permission to speak freely?”
“Please, for the love of the Federation.” She flicks a hand at him. “Before that sulky stare burns a literal hole in the back of my head.”
A year ago, he’d have snapped back at that. Now he’s too focused on the problem. “What’s the point? Your captain had the right idea. This thing is beyond repair. It’s fundamentally broken.”
“Is that right?” Reno doesn’t look up from her seat on the floor. Whatever she’s doing to the length of cabling in her hand, it looks like slow, torturous work. “And you’d just tow it to the scrapyard for recycling, would you?”
“Yeah, maybe! Cut the thing loose.” The open panel at his feet barely makes a sound when he kicks it. Dead alloy; broken parts. “At least then you could start working on something worth your time.”
Reno makes a thoughtful noise. “Only a year here, and he’s already thinking like an officer.” She shrugs when he scoffs at that. “Don’t get me wrong — Starfleet’s good people. They just have a tendency to abandon broken things. They only want the best of the best, after all.”
Caleb doesn’t look up from the panel. “Tell me about it.”
She puts down her hyperspanner, giving him her attention. He liked it better when she wasn’t. “What did you decide to work on?”
“Hmm?” He glances at the parts stacked around his feet. “Oh. I started theorizing. If the shuttle had a compactified subspace manifold, it might be trying to access dimensions that don’t exist anymore, after the Burn took them out. It could be getting stuck in a feedback loop every time you try to restore power. But I can’t prove it, because the thing’s irrevocably busted.” He smacks his hand against the burnt hulk of metal that doesn’t belong in the Athena’s shuttlebays, not even the one that’s only here to dump the salvage in.
“Huh. You think it’s bigger on the inside, when it’s working?” Reno points a finger at him. “Good thinking. Unlikely, in a shuttle — that would take a hell of a lot of power — but this thing isn’t one of ours. Let me know if you find a manifold matrix.”
Caleb turns back to his work. “Right. Not a Starfleet shuttle.” He’s pulling other rusty knowledge from his head, from very different times and places. “You could be looking for what you need where it isn’t. This thing doesn’t follow our rules.”
“Mm. The things we take for granted, when everything we work with comes off the same production line.” She pauses, clearly for effect. “Or everyone.”
Caleb’s fingers feel their way around a power coil while he’s rolling his eyes. He ignores the dull ache. “I’m not missing these pointed metaphors, Commander.”
“Of course you’re not. You can be a little slow, despite your remarkable brain, but you get there in the end.” She gives him a wry look. “Ready to tell me what’s going on with you yet?”
He keeps pulling out dead wires; brittle strands inside him strain tighter with each one. “Not if you’re just gonna tell me I’m trying to own all the suffering in the room again.”
Reno chuckles. “Well, you were, that first day. Congrats — you only do that now and then, anymore. Plus, you gotta give me a new teacher pass. I was as nervous as every cadet in that lab.” Her eyes are on the panel where her hands are still working. “You have permission to own some suffering, Cadet. The shuttle’s doing most of the trauma-dumping in here, anyway.”
He sits back, bracing his hands behind him. “I was listening, when you told me I’m not broken.” There it is. The second he lets his walls down, flooding back in. The kind of rage that will never belong on this or any other Starfleet ship. “It’s not like I want to be, okay? It’s just… not that easy.”
Reno makes a thoughtful noise. “Isn’t it?”
“No!” He pushes off his hands, but he doesn’t go anywhere. “I get it, Commander. You’re looking to share some inspirational student-teacher moment about how I’m a whole person and I can do this, let’s all sing kumbaya and recite the first page of Starfleet regulations and the Prime Directive. I can’t, okay? Not today. I’m a mess.”
Reno’s eyes are too knowing. She doesn’t know anything. He’s so close to telling her to fuck off. There’s permission to speak freely, and there’s that.
But she just snorts. “Welcome to the club, gearhead. That’s why we like fixing things.”
He doesn’t give her any reaction to that. Her earlier words are rattling around his head, like parts he can’t make fit. “You said you have a problem following orders sometimes? Not like I do. Trust me.”
Reno gets a little smile. “Well, I once told a commanding officer to get off my ass, then had to run back to add Sir, but you’re probably right. You are something special.” She grins at him, but he doesn’t think she’s making fun of him. “Even this way.”
That’s where she’s going with this? Caleb throws up his hands. “This isn’t an asset, Commander. This is… a problem.”
“No shit, Surak.” She twists a coil, hard. It comes out smoothly. “You can work with a problem. You got a shuttle that won’t fly? Keep thinking outside the box till you get it back on its nacelles. You got a dying man you need to keep alive? Hook up a Bolian’s heart you’ve got lying around, like a spare power cell.” She gets a little quieter. “You lose someone you love? You go out into the universe and start fixing everything else.”
Inside the engine, Caleb’s hands go still. “Who?”
“My wife,” Reno says, in a voice that’s just a little too steady. “That’s why I joined up. You think you were broken, when you got here? I was pretty sure I’d never put myself back together.” She takes a breath, and her usual edge is back. “But there were a hell of a lot of other things I could repair in Starfleet, in the middle of a war. Even people.”
Scattered things he’s heard her say before are starting to land differently. “Did it help?”
She’s quiet, for a moment, over the sound of connectors snapping into place. “Some things can’t ever be fixed, kid. But I’m still here, aren’t I?”
They keep working.
Caleb tugs out another bunch of wiring, glares at it and dumps it on the floor. “How much more time are you gonna keep wasting on this thing? What will you do if it’s never finished?”
“Then it’ll just be an interesting project forever. Some things take work. And it’s a lot more rewarding when you get there.” She thumbs the power coil in her hand. “Just gotta find another way to keep this thing flying. And another, and another.”
His jaw clenches. There is no other way. “What if it keeps me from being a good officer?”
No point asking what happens if it keeps him from becoming an officer at all. That’s its own answer.
Reno looks at him like she’s almost forgotten what they were really talking about. Then her eyes clear. “The thing where you get pissy about orders? I’m telling you, kid. You find ways around it. Make it an asset.”
“Please. This is Starfleet.” That’s the problem, in the end, isn’t it? This is not his world. He can taste blood, but at least it’s keeping him from cursing her out.
“And you’re so sure what that means, aren’t you?” Reno chuckles. “Try taking that class Lieutenant Tilly teaches, next semester — A Brief History of Starfleet and the Federation, I think she calls it, in her truly unique way.”
Caleb glares at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you need to get to know some of those Starfleet heroes you think were so much less screwed up than you. Some of these were after my time, so give me a minute…” She clicks her fingers. “Captain James T. Kirk. Among many other unsavory activities, demoted from the admiralty for stealing a starship.”
He can see where this is going. He also knows the Kirk story, and he rolls his eyes. “To save Earth.”
Reno ignores that. “Fleet Admiral Beckett Mariner. Terrible brat in her youth, the way Tilly tells it — drunk on duty, flouted the Prime Directive a few times, also stole a starship.”
“That escalated fast.” He’s not listening, but maybe he’ll think about taking that history class. For a laugh.
She huffs. “And let’s not even start with Captain Benjamin Sisko.”
Caleb glances up at the name. “The one SAM is hyperfixated on? The religious figure?”
“Sure. Holy man.” Reno chuckles like she’s made an excellent joke. “Last but not least, if you want a name I know you’ll know, Captain Michael Burnham. USS Discovery.”
He meets Reno’s pointed look. “Hero of the Federation. Of the damn galaxy.” He remembers newsreels on a stolen PADD, back when he barely had the luxury of being interested in the fate of the universe. “Helped figure out the Burn, ended the DMA threat, right?”
“And before that, she was a mutineer. Not that I was there for that, which is probably for the best.”
His multitool stutters in the hull plating. “She was what?”
Something shifts in Reno’s expression, but Caleb barely notices. He’s been thrown back to the day he met Nahla Ake for the second time — so sure his life was over, and all she did was invite him into one of the most elite institutions in the galaxy and give him a bed and access to a replicator.
Caleb tries to focus on looking for the manifold matrix, but no order could stop the gears from turning in his head now. Reno can tell all the entertaining stories she wants about captains with consciences. Not relevant.
He yanks out another handful of dead components. No matrix. Nothing. “It’s not here. This is a losing battle, Commander.” He flings down his hyperspanner, before he breaks something that matters.
Reno doesn’t even look up. “Giving up already?”
“Yeah. Fuck this.” He gets to his feet.
His hand is on the door panel before she speaks. “A few hours ago you disobeyed a direct order, because you were so intent on finishing whatever the hell was so important that you were willing to fail a training exercise over it. Now no one’s given you so much as an instruction, and you’re the one telling yourself to quit.”
The silence goes on a moment too long.
“Funny, that.”
The wire that’s been tightening inside him all day finally snaps, and not in the way he expected. “Something’s wrong with me, Commander,” he says into the darkness beyond the door. “It always has been. I’m just…” He reaches out for a word, and gets one that doesn’t begin to tell the story. “Wrong.”
“And who the hell do you think is right?” There’s something like recognition in Reno’s eyes, when he glances behind him. “Look around you, kid. The freaking universe isn’t normal, if that’s what you’re trying not to say. What’s the Vulcan thing — infinite suckiness in infinite combinations?”
“Sure, if you want to cause an interstellar incident, let’s call it that,” Caleb mutters. But he turns around.
Reno pats the side of the shuttle. “If this thing’s really got a compactified subspace manifold? It’s an artifact. All those secrets from across history, from whole other dimensions. And we could have missed it. Good thing we didn’t write it off, huh?” She gets back to stripping wire. “And now for the hard part. Doing the work.”
Caleb sits down again. His panel is still open.
His hands are making connections inside the shuttle, the way they used to, back when he built machines out of scrap metal. He’s remembering the shape of unfamiliar components. How they fit.
Another long hour goes by. He makes progress, bit by bit.
Finally, he pulls out a tiny isolinear chip that should not belong in a shuttle of this era. He was right. He holds the chip up for Reno to see. “That’s why it blew in the Burn. Dilithum powered. Not the whole shuttle. Just the—”
She’s grinning as she crawls over. “—compactified subspace manifold.” She turns the chip in her hand. “Great start, but now we gotta prove it. Find me that subspace manifold matrix.”
Caleb is still riding the triumph, but the scale of the work ahead is coming home to him. “And if it’s in subspace?”
“Well, then you just found me a whole new challenge.” She pats him on the back. “Nicely done, Mir.”
“Manifold matrix. Okay.” He rolls up his sleeves. “I guess I’m on it.”
He’s really trying not to let Reno’s lesson land, mostly out of old habit, but she isn’t the worst teacher. For almost as long as he can remember, he’s been sure he’s not worth anyone’s work. People have been outvoting him on that question for a while now. The old voice in his head is still there, insisting they’ll be proven wrong eventually, but it’s getting quieter. He doesn’t hate that.
He turns most of his attention back to the search for the missing shuttle component. The rest of him is thinking about what it must be like to be three years patient with this thing.
And how it might never be finished.
Reno pulls out another coil. “You got that the shuttle is you, right, Caleb?”
He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, thanks, Commander. I figured out your subtle metaphor.”
“Brilliant brain.”
They get to work.