Undeniable Link

Posted on Sat May 9th, 2026 @ 2:40pm by Ensign Aidan "A.J." Reid

1,053 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: The Shuttle Incident
Location: Deck Four
Timeline: current.

AJ tore through deck four like something the ship itself had fired; tricorder in one hand, phaser in the other, boots barely grazing the plating as the red alert strobes turned the corridor into a tunnel of blood and shadow. The ship lurched hard to port and threw him sideways, but his legs found the wall, pushed off it, and kept going. The family’s biosigns pulsed on the tricorder screen: four of them, two small, all stationary, all terrified.

The transporter room door was sealed. AJ didn’t slow down. He leveled the phaser at the control panel and fired without breaking stride, and the panel shrieked apart in a cascade of white sparks. The doors ground halfway open and jammed. He hit them with his shoulder and they tore free of the track with a sound like a thunderclap, skidding across the transporter room floor as AJ planted his right foot and dragged himself to a stop, chest heaving, the smell of scorched metal hanging in the recycled air.

The family was pressed against the far wall, the children’s faces buried in their mother’s sides.

AJ straightened up. Pocketed the phaser. Pocketed the tricorder. Rolled his neck once.

“Aright, aright! Nobody panic, yeah?” he said, his voice dropping into something warm and unhurried, an island cadence that had no business being this calm. “Island express comin’ t’rough. Let’s get you off dis deck, what you say?”

AJ dropped to his knees and wrenched the Jefferies tube hatch open, then spun to the emergency pressure seal on the bulkhead. The override panel was already blinking amber; secondary mode, forcefield holding, maybe ninety seconds before the whole thing blew. He slammed his palm into the manual crank and threw his weight into it, the seal groaning open against him like it didn’t want to be opened.


“In, in, in-go!” He grabbed the mother’s shoulder and turned her toward the tube. “Two deck up, yuh find a door. Yuh push it open and yuh keep movin’, yuh hear me? Don’t stop, don’t look back.”

The children scrambled in. The mother hesitated, eyes wide, locked on his.

“Go!” The override timer screamed. The hatch slammed shut behind her. If AJ had been any other man, he’d have stayed and accepted his fate, but AJ was already moving.

AJ hit the intersection at a dead sprint when the hull gave. No sound;just a white roar and a sudden, violent pull at his back like the ship was trying to swallow him whole. His ears clamped shut. Loose debris streaked past him toward the gap overhead where deck three had peeled open to raw vacuum, and he let the current take him, two running steps and then a hard plant off the corridor wall, and he was airborne. The forcefield snapped shut beneath him with a sound like a gunshot. His hands caught the torn edge of the deck above and he hauled himself through.

AJ pulled himself onto deck three and kept moving. His lungs were doing something he didn’t have a word for. The corridor lights strobed past overhead in a rhythm that didn’t match his footfalls anymore, and somewhere behind him the forcefield was still holding;he could feel it in the pressure against his back, the way the air had stopped trying to kill him. For now. AJ ran so fast that the corridor lights blurred into a single smear of red above him, the deck plating a gray streak underfoot.

The forcefield blew and the corridor became a mouth. AJ hit the airlock threshold on pure instinct, fingers finding the emergency seal and wrenching it down as the air screamed past him and the pressure differential tried to peel him off the wall. The hatch slammed. The compartment shuddered, groaned, and held. Frost crawled across the interior glass in a white bloom as the corridor beyond went silent and still. AJ’s back hit the wall and he slid down it. His lungs were pulling at nothing, then too much, then nothing again. His heart was somewhere in his throat, firing so fast the beats had stopped being separate things.

“Somebody,” AJ wheezed at the ceiling, “remind me why mi lef’ Jamaica fi dis.”

The outer airlock opened and AJ screamed;a short, undignified sound that bounced off the frost-covered walls before he could stop it. Na’Riss stood in the hatch, framed by the blunt nose of a maintenance pod, her hands clasped behind her back, her expression arranged in the particular stillness that meant she had already assessed the situation and found it unsurprising.

“Jamaica,” she said, “is approximately 7,824 light-years from your current position. I trust that answers your question.”

AJ laughed; a loose, breathless thing that came out more like a cough and let Na’Riss haul him upright with that effortless Vulcan economy of motion that he had never quite gotten used to. He stood there a moment with his hands on his knees, the frost still crawling up the walls around them, and shook his head slowly.

“You,” he managed, pointing one unsteady finger at her, “are di whole entire reason mi get up in di mornin’.”

Na’Riss stepped aside to let him pass, already moving. “Your biosigns deviated from baseline by a margin I have learned to associate with structural emergencies.” A beat. “There are fourteen personnel unaccounted for on deck six. I have also logged forty-three damage sites requiring assessment.” She glanced back at him. “I suggest we not waste further time.”

“How yuh know where mi was?” AJ asked as the hatch sealed behind them with a pressurized thunk.

Na’Riss did not answer immediately. She crossed the narrow space between them, took his face in both hands with a precision that was somehow also tenderness, and kissed him. When she pulled back, her eyes moved across his face in a brief, clinical sweep that he had long since learned to read as relief.

“Mated pairs know,” she said. Then, after a beat, as if she had weighed the words and found them structurally sound: “I love you.”

She said it the way she stated facts. AJ felt it the way he felt the deck under his feet;solid, load-bearing, real.

 

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