Quiet Between the Storms
Posted on Wed Mar 4th, 2026 @ 9:30am by Major Hastios Eilfaren
Edited on on Wed Mar 4th, 2026 @ 3:05pm
2,071 words; about a 10 minute read
Mission:
In The Nick Of Time
Location: Observation Lounge – Deck 8 – USS Herodotus
Timeline: MD005 0100 hrs
The observation lounge was empty when Hastios stepped inside.
He had not come there intentionally. His feet had simply carried him away from Sickbay after the doors had closed and the doctors had firmly, politely pushed him out so they could work. There had been nothing more for him to do there. A soldier standing in the corner did not make medical treatment happen any faster.
Still, leaving had not come easily.
The room was dim, lit mostly by the quiet glow of the stars beyond the wide viewport. The Herodotus moved at a slow cruise, distant lights sliding past the hull with patient indifference.
Hastios stopped near the glass, hands settling behind his back as they often did when he had nothing immediate to occupy them.
Silence should have been welcome.
Instead, his mind returned to Kroat.
The weapon flash came first in the memory. A burst of light that had seemed almost harmless until Marisa simply folded and hit the ground.
Training had taken over before thought had time to catch up. He remembered dropping beside her, checking her breathing and pulse, recognising the signs of a high-output stun discharge. Not lethal. But powerful enough to shut someone down completely.
Then the situation had changed again.
Juli down. Nagla still standing. The firefight breaking loose across the mountainside.
He remembered dragging both officers behind cover before the fight truly began, the sharp crack of weapons fire splitting the thin air while he returned it in kind. The rest of the encounter came back in fractured pieces: movement between rocks, the echo of phaser blasts, the cold narrowing of focus that came when there was nothing left in the world except the target in front of him.
Only after Nagla was down did the rest of the mission return to him.
Extraction. The shuttle. The long ride back to the ship with two unconscious officers and far too many unanswered questions.
Now there was only waiting.
Hastios let out a slow breath and rested one hand against the cool edge of the viewport, watching the stars drift past.
From a distance, the universe always looked calm.
The illusion never lasted long.
Standing there in the quiet of the observation lounge, Hastios could still feel the mountain wind against his skin as clearly as if Kroat were outside the viewport instead of the endless dark of space. Memory had a way of ignoring distance. It carried moments forward whether a man wanted them or not.
Nagla’s face came back to him first.
Not the moment she fired. Not the moment he returned fire.
Earlier than that.
He remembered her moving through the caves with them, the flicker of torchlight dancing across ancient stone as the group pressed deeper into the mountain. She had walked among them quietly, a civilian scientist guiding them through terrain she knew far better than any of them. To most of the team she had simply been another cautious ally in an already complicated mission.
But Hastios had felt something beneath that surface calm.
His empathic sense had brushed against it more than once during the journey. Not outright hostility. Nothing that clean. It had been subtler than that—an undercurrent of tension, the emotional equivalent of someone holding their breath too long. Suspicion. Fear. A guarded determination that did not quite match the words she spoke.
At the time it had not been enough to act on.
Now he understood what it had been.
The memory shifted again, carrying him back to the mountainside where everything had unravelled in seconds. Marisa collapsing under the blast of that weapon. Juli taking cover nearby, injured but still moving, still fighting to stay in the fight even as the situation spiralled out of control.
Across the broken ground Nagla stood with the weapon raised, the quiet scientist from the caves replaced by someone driven by fierce resolve. Through the haze of dust and adrenaline Hastios had felt the storm of emotion radiating from her—fear for her people, anger at the intrusion, and the unshakeable conviction that what she was doing was necessary.
She believed she was protecting something sacred.
That belief had been real.
There had been a moment, brief but unmistakable, when he hoped she would lower the weapon. That the line she had crossed might still pull her back before it went any further.
She didn’t.
Hastios had fired because there had been no other choice left to him. The shot had been precise and controlled, the kind of disciplined response that years of training demanded when lives depended on it. Even now he could still see the beam crossing the distance between them, a single line of light cutting through the dust and wind.
Moments later the mountain itself had begun to collapse.
Rock thundered down the slope in a violent cascade, swallowing the ground where she had stood. Whether Nagla had already fallen to his shot or whether the rockslide had claimed her afterward was something he would never truly know.
He suspected the answer did not matter.
Hastios remained still at the viewport, staring out into the quiet darkness while the weight of the memory settled into him again. Taking a life was never something he allowed himself to treat lightly. The Dominion War had shown him what happened to soldiers who stopped feeling that weight. He had seen men and women grind their conscience down until nothing compassionate remained inside them.
He had sworn long ago that he would never become that.
Even now he could feel the familiar ache that followed every life he had taken in the line of duty. Regret, empathy, and the quiet understanding that Nagla had not been an enemy shaped by war. She had been a scientist, someone who believed she was defending her people from outsiders who did not understand what they threatened.
But the other truth remained just as clear.
If the moment returned—if Marisa fell again, if Juli stood wounded on that mountainside and Nagla raised that weapon once more—he knew exactly what he would do.
He would fire the same shot.
Not out of anger. Not out of vengeance.
Because protecting the people under his watch had been the responsibility he accepted long ago, and sometimes that responsibility demanded choices that never truly stopped echoing afterward.
The memory of Kroat did not exist alone.
Moments like that had a way of stirring older ghosts.
Hastios let his gaze drift across the slow river of starlight beyond the viewport, but what he saw was not the quiet of space. It was another sky entirely, years earlier, burning with the light of weapons fire.
The Dominion War had been a different kind of storm.
Back then the galaxy had been louder. Warships crowded the void, fleets colliding in places that had once been peaceful trade routes and exploration corridors. The air inside those ships had carried a constant edge of tension, the unspoken understanding that survival often depended on decisions made in fractions of a second.
He remembered one moment in particular.
A Cardassian boarding party had forced its way onto the vessel he had been serving on at the time. The fighting had spilled through the corridors in violent bursts—phaser fire flashing down narrow passageways, the smell of scorched metal and overloaded circuitry hanging heavy in the recycled air.
One of them had rounded the corner in front of him.
Young.
Too young, he realised afterward.
The Cardassian had hesitated for a heartbeat, weapon half-raised as if the reality of the situation had only just caught up with him. Hastios had felt the flicker of uncertainty from the man through his empathic sense, the sudden spike of fear that came when a soldier realised death might be waiting just a few steps away.
That hesitation had been all the time the moment allowed.
Hastios had fired first.
The beam struck cleanly. The Cardassian collapsed where he stood, the fight continuing around them as though nothing significant had happened.
But Hastios remembered standing there afterward, staring down at the still form in the corridor while the war roared on around him. The young soldier’s fear had lingered in his senses long after the life had left his body, echoing through him in a way that training alone could never silence.
That had been the moment he understood something that no academy lecture could truly teach.
Taking a life, even in the defence of others, was never simple. It was never clean, no matter how precise the shot or how justified the decision.
It left something behind.
The stars outside the viewport slowly came back into focus as the memory faded.
Kroat had not been a warzone. Nagla had not been a soldier.
Yet the weight of the moment had felt hauntingly familiar.
Hastios drew in a slow breath, steady and controlled, and let it out again as he watched the quiet universe drift past.
The responsibility he carried had never changed.
Only the faces had.
The memory released him slowly.
The corridor from the warship faded, the smell of scorched metal dissolving into the quiet recycled air of the Herodotus. When Hastios blinked, the stars beyond the observation lounge viewport were there again, drifting in patient silence as though nothing in the universe had ever been violent.
He remained where he stood, one hand resting lightly against the edge of the glass.
For a long moment he simply watched the stars move.
Kroat had not been a warzone in the way the Dominion War had been. There had been no fleets clashing across the void, no endless casualty reports, no desperate struggle for entire sectors of space.
Yet the moment on that mountainside had struck something deeper.
Because this time the stakes had been personal.
He could still see Marisa collapsing in the dust as clearly as if it were happening again in front of him. The flash of the weapon. The sudden stillness when she hit the ground. The way the world had narrowed to a single point in space while everything else fell away.
In that instant nothing else had mattered.
Not the mission. Not the caves. Not the fragile balance of the timeline they had come to protect.
Only her.
Hastios exhaled quietly, the breath leaving him slower than usual as the realization settled fully into place.
He had known for some time that Marisa mattered to him. Their dinners, their conversations, the quiet moments they had stolen between duties had made that much obvious. He had never tried to pretend otherwise, nor had he felt the need to hide it from himself.
But Kroat had shown him something more difficult to ignore.
The moment she fell had revealed the depth of that connection in a way nothing else could have.
For a brief, terrible instant on that mountainside he had believed he might lose her.
And the thought of that had shaken him far more than he was comfortable admitting.
His gaze dropped slightly, a faint smile touching his expression despite the heaviness of the memory.
Marisa Sandoval had a way of doing that.
She carried a steadiness that anchored the people around her, a calm authority that never needed to demand attention to command it. Even in the chaos of command she never lost the warmth that reminded others they were more than just uniforms filling positions on a roster.
Somewhere along the way that quiet strength had begun to matter to him more than he expected.
Kroat had simply made it impossible to ignore how much.
The stars continued their slow passage beyond the viewport, silent witnesses to a thousand lives and choices unfolding across the galaxy.
Hastios straightened slightly, letting the quiet discipline that had guided him for years settle back into place.
Whatever this was becoming between them, it would unfold in its own time.
But one truth remained undeniable now.
When Marisa had fallen on that mountainside, the fear he felt had not been the fear of losing a fellow officer.
It had been the fear of losing someone who had quietly become far more important to him than he had realised.
A Post By:
Major Hastios Eilfaren
Chief Security & Tactical Officer
Second Officer
USS Herodotus DTI-30656
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