Emergency Contact

Posted on Tue Jun 9th, 2026 @ 12:29pm by Taryn Rook

3,711 words; about a 19 minute read

Mission: Between The Orders
Location: Foxglove - Docking Bay Twelve, Red Thread Station
Timeline: Immediately after “Old Names”

Taryn dropped into the pilot’s chair hard enough to make it complain, one hand already sweeping across the console before the straps had finished swinging beside her. Red warning text blinked over the main board in the smug little font station systems used when they thought they were in charge.

UNDOCKING REQUEST DENIED.
SAFETY INSPECTION PENDING.
REMAIN STATIONARY FOR AUTHORISED PERSONNEL.

She stared at it for half a second.

“Yeah, no.”

“Docking clamps remain engaged. Station control has locked external release.”

“Fantastic, love good news.”

Her fingers moved over the controls, waking systems in the wrong order because the right order was for people with permission. Foxglove shuddered beneath her as the engines came up hotter than the bay was going to appreciate. Somewhere aft, a relay whined in complaint and then thought better of it.

Through the forward bay feed, Davor stood near the edge of the chaos with that same easy smile, one hand tucked into his coat. Red alarm light washed over him, made him look briefly less like a man and more like a bad memory that had learned tailoring.

Taryn did not look at him for long.

Looking was how people became important.

“Station net?” she asked.

“Still running the modified Cardassian security layer beneath URC controls.”

“Can we make it hate me?”

“It already appears suspicious.”

“Not enough. I need religiously offended.”

She pulled up the environmental panel for Docking Bay Twelve and skimmed the structure beneath the clean URC interface. Foxy had been right. Cardassian bones under humanitarian paint. Old containment logic. Fire doors. Pressure baffles. Emergency ejection protocols built by people who had never trusted a room not to become a battlefield.

Useful.

Taryn reached for the side panel, yanked it open, and jammed two fingers into the manual routing board. The watch on her wrist pulsed warm against her skin as Foxy slipped through the ugly little gaps in the station’s old code.

“Warning. Spoofing a coolant cascade may trigger station evacuation procedures.”

“Tiny one.”

“There is no official category for tiny coolant cascade.”

“Make art.”

The bay feed flickered. Somewhere outside, a safety barrier began to descend, stuck halfway, then juddered back up. The station alarm changed pitch. Not louder. Meaner. The docking bay lights snapped from red to a harsh amber pulse.

Taryn grinned despite the sting in her split knuckles.

“There she is.”

A new alert flashed across the board.

HAZARD CONTAINMENT INITIATED.
VESSEL LOCKDOWN PRIORITY REVISED.

The first docking clamp released with a heavy metallic thunk.

The second held.

Of course it did.

“Clamp two is resisting override.”

“Tell clamp two it’s adopted.”

“I am not transmitting that.”

“Coward.”

Taryn shoved auxiliary power into the port manoeuvring thrusters. Foxglove lurched sideways against the remaining clamp, not hard enough to tear free, hard enough to make the whole frame groan. The sound came up through the deck and into her teeth.

Outside, workers scattered from the bay floor. A station security officer waved both arms at the cockpit like that had ever helped anyone.

Davor’s smile had faded.

Good.

He lifted his wrist to his mouth.

Taryn’s eyes narrowed. “What’s he doing?”

“Likely transmitting.”

“To who?”

The second clamp released.

No time.

Taryn punched the impulse thrusters.

Foxglove shot forward before the bay doors had finished cycling open.

For one ugly second the world became metal, warning strobes and a proximity alarm screaming directly into her skull. The starboard side scraped the half-open outer frame with a shriek that made every nerve in her body try to climb out through her skin. Sparks tore past the viewport. The ship bucked hard enough to slam her shoulder into the chair side.

“Foxy!”

“We are clear.”

The cockpit feed snapped from docking bay amber to open black.

Stars.

Taryn exhaled once, sharp and ugly, and dragged Foxglove away from Red Thread Station’s wounded flank. Behind them, the bay vented a thin glittering plume of ice crystals and atmosphere, already sealed by emergency fields. Station control filled the comm with angry demands she had no intention of dignifying.

She killed the channel.

For three seconds, there was only engine noise and her own breathing.

Then Foxy spoke, quiet in her ear.

“New contact powering up beyond the station perimeter.”

Taryn looked at the sensor board.

A ship detached from the shadow of Red Thread’s outer maintenance ring, sleek and dark and far too ready to be coincidence. Its systems came alive one by one: shields, weapons, pursuit engines.

A private vessel.

Waiting.

Taryn’s mouth went flat.

On the comm board, an incoming hail blinked.

Davor’s name was not attached to it. It didn’t need to be.

Taryn accepted the channel with one bloody knuckle.

His voice slid into the cockpit, warm with amusement.

“Leaving so soon?”

Taryn stared at the dark ship turning toward her.

Then she smiled, small and entirely humourless.

“Didn’t want to make it weird.”

Davor laughed softly over the channel. Anger would have been easier. Anger had a shape to it. This was worse, patient and pleased with itself, like he still thought the whole thing was only a matter of time.

His ship cleared the maintenance ring and came into full sensor profile. It was not a freighter, whatever the registry tried to claim. Narrow forward hull, swept engine housings, shields coming up too clean and too fast. Better guns than a civilian ship had any business carrying.

Foxy marked the weapons across the board.

“Forward disruptor array. Two aft micro-torpedo ports. Shields rising.”

Taryn kept one hand on the controls. Her shoulder was beginning to throb where she had hit the chair on the way out of the bay, and her split knuckles had opened again. She could feel every beat of her pulse in the torn skin.

“Name?”

“Registry identifies the vessel as Merrow’s Debt. Confidence low.”

“Sounds like something he’d think was clever.”

Davor’s voice came back through the channel. “You’ve done well for yourself. Better than I expected.”

She didn’t answer. Red Thread Station sat behind her, Bay Twelve still flashing under emergency fields, the lower docking ring crawling with confused traffic. Too many ships. Too much loose metal. Too many pilots doing unpredictable things because alarms made people stupid.

“You still have things that don’t belong to you,” Davor said.

Taryn’s eyes flicked to the sealed partition where the message sat, locked and dark.

Then the targeting tone sounded.

She dropped Foxglove hard to starboard.

The first shot cut through the space where her port nacelle had been, bright enough to bleach the viewport for half a second. Taryn drove the ship between two outbound haulers, close enough that one flooded the open channel with curses. She ignored it. The cockpit narrowed around her: motion, distance, mass, the ugly green marks of Davor’s weapons trying to catch her.

He followed.

A second shot clipped her shields and threw Foxglove sideways. Taryn hit the chair arm hard, pain flashing through her ribs. Something loose crashed in the rear compartment. The cockpit lights stuttered, and the ship shuddered around her like it was trying to shake the hit out of its bones.

“Port shields down to seventy-one percent.”

“I see it.”

Her voice came out thinner than she liked.

She pulled around Red Thread’s lower cargo spine, close enough that the proximity alarm began screaming over everything else. Station plating rushed past the viewport in dark, rust-edged slabs. Service lights blurred into orange lines. Taryn cut the main impulse feed for one sick second and let the ship drop beneath a maintenance boom.

Davor fired.

The shot hit the boom instead.

Metal burst behind her, spinning out in hot fragments.

That bought her maybe six seconds.

“Route.”

Foxy threw options onto the nav board. Two were stupid. One was worse: the station’s waste-heat plume, spilling from the old reactor baffles in a dirty silver-green haze.

“Waste-heat plume contains unstable magnetic shear and ionised particulate.”

Taryn looked at it. The plume flickered across the sensors, thick enough to blind targeting if she got deep into it.

“How bad?”

“Bad.”

That was enough.

Davor’s voice cut back in, closer now. “You’ll tear that little ship apart.”

Taryn’s jaw tightened.

“She’s not little.”

She drove Foxglove into the plume.

The cockpit vanished into static. Every screen lost clarity at once, the sensor feed breaking into pale fragments and warning ghosts. The hull rattled as charged particles crawled across the shields. Taryn leaned into the controls, trying to feel the ship through the noise: the small drag of the damaged stabiliser, the deeper vibration in the rear manifold, the half-second delay before the port thrusters answered.

She knew Foxy’s bad moods. She knew this one.

Davor fired blind.

The shot came through the haze and struck aft.

This time the hit was worse.

The impact snapped Foxglove into a hard spin. Taryn’s strap caught her across the chest, but not enough. Her head hit the edge of the side console with a crack that turned the cockpit white.

For a moment, everything went away.

Then sound rushed back in too loudly.

Alarms. Foxy’s voice. Her own breathing, ragged and too fast. Something warm slid from her hairline toward her temple. Taryn blinked, but the board doubled, smeared, then came back in pieces.

“Taryn. Respond.”

She tried to answer. Only air came out first.

“Still here.”

“Aft shields failing. Starboard manoeuvring thruster damaged. Life support integrity compromised.”

That cut through the fog.

Taryn dragged one hand across the console until she found the environmental readout. Oxygen mix dropping. Temperature regulation unstable. Scrubber loop damaged. Not gone yet, but falling.

Her vision swam again.

She swallowed and tasted blood.

“Can we roll?”

“Not safely.”

“Can we roll?”

A short pause.

“Yes.”

Davor’s ship was inside the plume now. Foxy could only catch pieces of it, but he was close. Too close. He wanted her disabled, not dead. That mattered. It meant he would hold back from the clean shot if he thought he could still take Foxglove intact.

Taryn killed the damaged starboard thruster and shoved power into port RCS. Foxglove rolled badly, lopsided and rough, half falling through the heated haze. A loose tool skidded across the cockpit floor and disappeared under the console. The movement made her stomach turn. She gripped the controls until the nausea passed enough to use.

“Mark him.”

“Target solution unreliable.”

“Not shooting.”

Foxy adjusted. A faint line appeared across the display, tying Davor’s broken sensor shadow to a dense pocket of charged particulate ahead.

Taryn saw it.

Not a weapon. A way through.

She let Foxglove tumble just enough to look worse than she was. The ship bucked under her hands, not graceful, not clean, but believable. Davor followed, easing in for the capture angle.

He still thought he was chasing the girl who ran through vents.

He did not know the ship.

Taryn waited until the console tone shifted under her fingers.

“Now.”

She punched the drive.

Foxglove kicked forward, skimming the edge of the dense ion pocket so close the hull screamed. Davor followed her line, faster and cleaner, exactly where she needed him.

Taryn dumped reserve coolant into the plume.

For half a second nothing changed.

Then the space behind her lit up.

The ion cloud flared outward in a rolling burst, bright enough to fill the cockpit with hard white-green light. Charged vapour slammed across Davor’s shields and swallowed his sensor return in static. His ship twisted sharply, caught between momentum and overloaded systems. One of his engine signatures spiked, then collapsed.

Foxy’s display cleared just enough to show Merrow’s Debt dropping back through the plume, disabled or close enough to it.

Taryn did not smile. She didn’t have enough left for that.

“Status.”

“Pursuit vessel disabled. Duration unknown. Warp window available.”

“Life support?”

There was a small delay.

Not long. Less than a second.

Enough.

“Primary scrubber loop damaged. Oxygen regulation unstable. Carbon dioxide filtration reduced to thirty-eight percent.”

Taryn blinked at the environmental readout. The numbers slid apart for a moment, doubled, then dragged themselves back into one ugly shape. She had to put one hand flat against the console to keep the cockpit from tilting.

“How long?”

“At current degradation: approximately two hours before cognitive impairment becomes severe. Less if you lose consciousness.”

“Already rude.”

“With a manual bypass and reduced cabin circulation, projected survivability may extend to seven hours.”

Seven hours.

That sounded like a lot until it didn’t.

Taryn wiped at her temple and looked at the blood on her fingers. Her hand shook once. She curled it into a fist until it stopped, then shoved herself out of the pilot’s chair before her body could realise sitting down had been nice.

The floor came up too fast.

She caught the edge of the console, breath catching hard in her throat as the cockpit swam. For a second she could hear nothing but alarms and her pulse, thick and heavy, somewhere behind her eyes.

“You have signs consistent with concussion.”

“Put it on the list.”

“The list is expanding.”

“Then write smaller.”

She dragged herself toward the aft access panel, one hand on the wall, the other pressed briefly against her ribs where every breath pulled wrong. The air already tasted off. Not dramatic. Not choking. Just stale in a way ships were not supposed to be when they were behaving. Foxglove creaked around her, engines cycling unevenly, every wounded system muttering through the deck.

The life support panel was halfway down the short corridor behind the cockpit, tucked under a service lip some designer had clearly installed during a personal grudge against anyone with shoulders. Taryn dropped to one knee in front of it and immediately regretted the speed. The deck shifted under her. She closed her eyes, counted three breaths, then opened them again.

Still there.

Good enough.

“Foxy, give me the bypass route.”

A schematic blinked onto her wrist unit, pale blue lines crawling through the cracked face of the watch. She squinted at it. The lines refused to stay still.

“Stop moving.”

“The schematic is static.”

“Then tell my head.”

She pulled the panel open. Something inside sparked once, sharp and blue, and the smell of burnt insulation rolled out. Taryn swore under her breath and reached in anyway, fingers finding the damaged regulator by touch more than sight. One conduit had fused hot. Another had shaken half-loose from its cradle. The primary scrubber relay was scorched black around the edge.

Not dead.

Sulking.

She could work with sulking.

The first tool she grabbed slipped out of her hand and clattered across the deck. She stared at it for half a second, not quite understanding where it had gone, then leaned too far after it and nearly pitched face-first into the bulkhead.

“Motor coordination is impaired.”

“No one likes a narrator.”

She found the tool, braced her shoulder against the wall, and forced herself to slow down. Fast got people killed when their head was full of static. Fast made fingers stupid. Her father had told her that once, years ago, over a cracked relay board and a mug of something pretending to be tea.

Slow hands, Taryn. Angry later.

Her jaw tightened.

“Don’t,” she muttered.

“Clarify command.”

“Not you.”

Foxy went quiet.

That helped, more than Taryn wanted to admit.

She rerouted the damaged scrubber relay through the auxiliary intake, stripped a cracked casing with her teeth when her fingers wouldn’t grip properly, and shoved the connector into place until it seated with a stubborn little click. The system coughed. Literally, somehow. A dull vibration passed through the wall, then the environmental readout on her watch flickered from red to amber.

Amber was not good.

Amber was alive pretending to be organised.

She would take it.

“Bypass accepted. Filtration restored to sixty-two percent. Projected survivability: six hours, forty-seven minutes.”

Taryn leaned her head back against the bulkhead. “See? Loads of time.”

The words came out soft.

Too soft.

She hated that.

The corridor lights dimmed, then steadied. Somewhere behind her, the cockpit alarm changed from full panic to the kind of insistent complaint that meant the ship was still in trouble but had decided not to die immediately. That was practically optimism.

She pushed herself back to her feet and made it two steps before the nausea rolled through her again. This time it took the wall to keep her upright. Her vision narrowed at the edges, dark creeping in like a bad curtain.

“Warp,” she said.

“Warp drive remains unstable.”

“Short jump. Get us off the line.”

“Destination?”

Taryn swallowed. Her throat felt dry. The air still wasn’t right.

“Anywhere that isn’t here.”

“That is not a navigational destination.”

“It’s a philosophy.”

The ship hummed under her feet as Foxy fed power into the warp coils. Taryn stumbled back into the cockpit and dropped into the pilot’s chair more than sat in it. The sealed message still sat in its partition. She didn’t look at it. Not properly.

She reached instead for the recessed emergency panel below the comm station.

It stuck.

Of course it stuck.

Taryn hit it with the heel of her hand, harder than she meant to, and pain flashed up her arm. The panel snapped open.

Inside was the URC emergency beacon.

Not a general distress call. Not open channel panic. This was tighter, coded through the routes she trusted enough to resent. Remy’s key sat buried in the first layer like a favour she had not asked for and definitely used more than never.

Her thumb hovered above the control.

The cockpit tilted again. Or she did.

She thought of Remy’s face when he got the ping. The way he’d probably go quiet first, which was always worse than the lecturing. Then the worry. Then the look. The one that said he was not angry, not exactly, but he had been scared and now someone had to pay for that, probably her ears.

Taryn closed her eyes for a second.

“Ugh,” she whispered. “He’s going to be unbearable.”

“Remy has historically responded quickly to priority distress signals.”

“That is not the problem.”

“Clarify problem.”

“He’ll do the big brother face.”

A pause.

“I do not have sufficient data on that facial category.”

“Lucky you.”

She pressed the beacon.

The console accepted the signal with a low tone. The URC distress burst fired into subspace, wrapped in encryption, tagged with her vessel ID, her biometric key, and the private routing marker she had sworn she would only use if things were properly, spectacularly bad.

So. Fine.

Maybe things were a little bad.

“Don’t tell him I waited.”

“The distress log includes elapsed damage time.”

“Delete that bit.”

“No.”

Taryn stared at the speaker grille.

“Fine.”

“Alive.”

That shut her up.

The warp field began to build unevenly around the ship. The stars ahead stretched in short, broken lines, not clean enough, but enough to move. Behind her, Red Thread Station and Davor’s disabled ship were already lost in ion haze and distance. Not gone. Just behind.

Her hand slid back onto the controls. She tried to keep her fingers there, curled around the edge of the panel, because letting go felt too much like admitting something.

The cabin lights dipped.

The environmental alarm pulsed amber.

Taryn blinked slowly, and this time opening her eyes took effort.

“Foxy?”

“Yes.”

“If I pass out, don’t let him find us first.”

“Priority accepted.”

“And don’t let Remy do that thing where he acts calm but is secretly furious.”

“That request may exceed my operational authority.”

A small breath left her. It might have been a laugh if she had more of herself available.

“Yeah. Worth a try.”

The warp field caught.

Foxglove jumped, rough and uneven, the deck giving one last wounded tremor beneath her boots. Taryn kept her eyes open for as long as she could, watching the stars pull into motion through the smeared viewport, one hand still resting near the distress panel.

She had got away.

Mostly.

The last thing she heard before the cockpit lights blurred into darkness was Foxy’s voice, soft and blue in her ear.

“Distress signal confirmed. Remy routing active.”

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