Long Way Home

Posted on Mon Sep 1st, 2025 @ 2:53pm by Vice Admiral Sidra MacLaren

2,988 words; about a 15 minute read

=/\= Ten Forward - USS Arawyn =/\=

The laughter had risen another notch when Sidra decided she had reached her limit. Ten Forward shimmered with reflected starlight and the cut-glass gleam of too many toasts. The room felt smaller with each round of applause, every new knot of conversation tightening the air a fraction more. Music threaded through the chatter. The crew did what crews do on the night before departure. They watched their captain, they measured one another, they tried on the shape of the ship that would hold them together by morning.

Sidra set her flute of champagne on a passing tray. It was not her drink and never had been, and the effervescence sat wrong on her tongue. She had already spoken and raised a glass, and smiled at the right moments. She had endured two well-meaning recountings of her own early Sovereign years from officers who had not been born when she was an ensign. She had accepted Andorian ice wine from Trael Bren, tasted it to be polite, and decided that novelty did not improve with age. She had watched Sabrina Corbin accept the room without trying to own it, which pleased her more than she had expected. The ship had a center of gravity now, and it was not Sidra. That was as it should be.

She caught Corbin’s eye across the crowd. There was nothing to add tonight. That conversation belonged to a quieter hour, after the ship slipped her cradle and the first day’s rhythm set in. Sidra offered a small nod and the hint of a smile, then eased past a knot of engineers toward the turbolift.

The lift carried her down through decks that still hummed with celebration. From there, she crossed into the docking umbilical, the long spine of tritanium and transparisteel that linked the Arawyn to the massive body of Starbase 369. The sound shifted as she walked. The press of a party gave way to hollow station echoes, scaffolds ticking as they cooled, the hush of an unfinished place that was learning its own voice. Even the air tasted different here, sharper and cleaner, with the mineral bite of new composite.

Only when she stepped fully onto the station concourse did the quiet arrive. Corridor lights were dimmed to the evening cycle. A service bot trundled past and vanished into a maintenance hatch. The clatter of glassware and polite laughter receded behind her, replaced by the softer symphony of a living station at night. The hum in the bulkheads. The occasional whine of an antigrav pallet. The echo of her boots.

Her shoulders lowered a fraction. Not enough to be visible, but enough to feel.

She did not take the direct route to quarters. She rarely did. The admiral with a timetable would have thumbed a lift and been done with it. The officer under the uniform wanted to walk. She wanted to pass unfinished bulkheads and see where conduits still showed their ribs. She wanted to smell the faint mineral dust from a panel cut too recently, to count the steps between fire doors, to feel where the deck plates changed under her feet. It had always been her way to learn a place by pacing it. Stations had a pulse if you listened with your feet.

A stairwell light flickered at the edge of vision. She filed it away. Hazard tape fluttered where a temporary seal should have been pulled hours ago. She filed that too. She knew it was absurd to relax by making lists in her head, and she knew it was true.

At a long viewport she stopped, because of course she did.

The Arawyn filled that pane of glass as if the berth had been built to her measurements. Bay lights moved across her hull in slow arcs, revealing a thousand precise decisions and a thousand more hidden within. Sidra rested her fingers on the frame and felt the cool bite through her sleeve. She read the Sovereign’s lines the way a person reads a language they have not spoken in years and never really forgot. Pride rose in her chest. Envy followed, sharp and familiar. She would not sit that chair again. She had chosen that. The body still remembered the pull of a ship at readiness like a muscle memory that did not consult the mind.

Names chased across her thoughts. Holt, flinty and reliable. Corbin, steady in her youth. Indi Hawk, a shadow held close under her eyes that did not yet ask for a question. Blokpoel, a calm blade honed by long work. Bren, not quite in from the cold but willing to move freight and priorities across a board if the Fleet needed him to. Gareth Rhys, who negotiated like a man who did not sit with his back to a door; she had agreed to his terms because the situation demanded the tool, and she would be the one to pay the bill if there was one. That was the job. Pick what will hold in the dark and carry the responsibility yourself.

She moved on when the viewport gave her nothing new. The station’s pulse steadied under her feet. By the time she reached family quarters the noise of the reception had thinned from her skin.

The door swished open to warmth and light. Stephen leaned against the frame, casual, a dry humor sitting in his eyes. William stood beside him, glove in one hand and ball in the other, a grin already cocked and ready.

“You’re late,” Stephen said in a tone that made the words gentle. He tipped his head a fraction, one brow not quite committing to the scold, beard silvering in the light like a professor about to concede the class its point.

“I told him we’d declare mutiny if you did not show by midnight,” William added, delighted with the prospect.

“Summary judgment,” he said, hands easy at his sides, as if even jokes deserved good posture.

Sidra laughed, and the last knot inside her loosened. “Baseball?” she asked, already knowing.

“Baseball,” William insisted, punching the glove with a pop that filled the room.

“Not tonight,” she said, softening the refusal before it could bruise. “Change of plans. Walk with me instead. Not here. Home.”

Stephen’s eyes skimmed her face, the quick inventory of a man who had learned a person’s tells and treated them as map and compass. He set his jacket over a chair. William’s grin faltered for a heartbeat, then returned brighter. “The cottage?”
Sidra nodded. “Bundle up. It will be windy.” She eased out of the dress jacket, unhooked the high collar, and let the fabric drape across a chair.

They scattered. In the bedroom, she pulled a thick wool sweater over her head. The scratch of it was honest. Fleece-lined leggings followed, then tall muck boots that kissed her knees when she flexed. She shook her hair free of pins. The act felt like shedding skin. The admiral’s edges stayed on the coverlet with the uniform.

When she stepped back into the main room Stephen was knotting a lace on his boot, fisherman’s knit draped over his elbow. He did not remark on hers, only lifted a brow in a question that did not need words. She nodded. He nodded back. William came barreling out of his room, wrapped in too many layers and joy, cap pulled low and eyes bright.

They walked together through the quiet corridors. Holodeck Three recognized her voice on the first try.

“Program MacLaren-MacCafferey Three. Scotland coast. Evening.”

Light bent and became weather. The grid softened into a pewter sky. Wind came first, a cold slap that smelled of salt and barley. A whitewashed stone cottage crouched with its back to the cliff and its blue door stubborn against rust. Fields rolled toward the edge, blond hair combed by the gale. Below, the North Sea roared at black rock, tireless and unpersuaded.
William whooped and ran, arms thrown wide.Stephen’s hand found Sidra’s, and she let him have it. His thumb traced the back of her glove once, an inventory that always ended with “enough”, then he checked the wind with his chin like a sailor and simply stood where she would lean when it took a harder run at them. The air was so clean it ached. She breathed until it hurt less.

They took the path toward the cliff. Sidra let the barley brush her legs and made no effort to count exits. Here, the edges were the place itself.

They had gone a little way when William piped up, pitching his voice against the wind. “Can we watch tomorrow? From the gantry, I mean. Not the stream. The last time the feed cut out right in the middle of the speeches.”

Sidra opened her mouth and closed it again. Stephen squeezed her hand and answered before she could, not to overrule her but to choose the thread she would have chosen if she had not been busy deciding what it meant to choose.

“We will find a place,” he said. “Your mother will pretend not to care where, then choose the vantage with the best sight lines and the worst traffic. And we will stand there anyway.”

William laughed. Sidra’s glance was answer enough.

“Translation,” Stephen said, “she’s choosing the best sight-line in the worst traffic, and we’re leaving indecently early.”
Sidra didn’t deny it. William threw up his hands in surrender and smiled.

They walked on. The barley hissed and leaned. The cliff lifted its shoulder against the sea.

William slowed, eyes catching on a gap where the path curved. When he spoke again, the wind thinned his voice. “Buddy would have loved this.”

The name tugged under Sidra’s ribs. Buddy. The black-and-white border collie they had brought home in Scotland when William was small. He had bounded across these same imagined fields, then learned starbase corridors as if they were hedgerows. He had shadowed William from lessons to meals, parked himself by Sidra’s desk when she worked too late, and managed to herd a squad of junior officers during a fire drill with nothing but intent and enthusiasm.

He had aged as William lengthened and found his stance. Just last year, when the boy was fourteen, Buddy’s body had finally given out. It had been merciful, and it had not been easy. Sickbay light. A too-quiet room. William curled against the dog’s side, face pressed into fur, refusing to move until the last shallow breath went.

“I still think I will see him,” William said. He pointed along the path. “Right there. He would be chasing gulls.”

Sidra could see it so clearly that she almost expected the holodeck to oblige. A black-and-white blur tearing the barley, a bark caught and carried away by the wind. “And he still would not come when I called,” she said, and the line hit the right note. William’s laugh was fragile and real. Stephen’s mouth curved, grief edged with fondness. He cleared his throat softly, the sound he used when memory asked for room and he made it.

They stood at the edge and let the spray salt their faces. Sidra slid an arm across William’s shoulders and pulled him close when the gusts cut sharper. He leaned in without protest. He was nearly grown and still a boy, both things at once. Stephen stood on her other side, his hand brushing hers when the wind shoved, a small contact that felt like ballast.

“Why do you always walk the edges of rooms?” William asked a minute later, as if the question had been waiting for the right wind to carry it.

Sidra glanced at him. “Do I?”

“You do,” he said. He swung the glove without thinking. “At the party. At home. On the station. Even here, you stay to the side and look at the corners like they are hiding something.”

Stephen looked at her too. Not judgment. Recognition. He shifted a half-step to her blind side without thinking. an old habit he never named, leaving her the corners and taking the drift where people forget to look.

“Because corners lie,” she said after a beat. “Rooms are built to make you forget where the bones of a place are. The edges tell the truth. If the air moves wrong, you feel it there first.”

William thought about that, the way he did when a coach corrected his stance or a teacher moved a variable. “Do fields lie?”
“Less,” she said. “But they hide the ground if you do not pay attention.”

He nodded, then flicked a barley head with his glove and watched the seeds scatter. “Coach says I stop the bat at contact. That I do not swing through.”

“Coach is right,” Sidra said.

“You did not see my last at-bat,” he said, but the grin that followed admitted everything.

Stephen huffed a laugh. Sidra bumped his shoulder with her own. “Tomorrow, after the ship goes, you can prove it to me. Somewhere, the wind is not trying to take your hat.”

They lingered until William’s ears reddened and the wind worked through their layers. Turning back, they followed the path to the cottage. The blue door banged once and then yielded. Inside, the hearth fire woke as if it had been waiting, orange light climbing the stone. They left boots by the door and shook the cold from their sleeves.

Sidra stood for a moment with her palms flat on the table, feeling the grain under her skin. Stephen moved to the kettle without a word, set it to heat, and found mugs. William flopped on the rug, glove still on, and stared into the flames, not lost but far away, the way grief sits beside a person and does not speak. For a breath Sidra could see the shape of a dog curled in that patch of light. She did not say it out loud.

“Are you nervous?” William asked, eyes still on the fire.

“About what?” Sidra said.

“About them leaving,” he said. “About if something goes wrong, and you are not there.”

Stephen’s hand paused on a tin of tea leaves. The pause lasted a heartbeat. He set the tin down and began to spoon the leaves again. Small, unspoken kindness. She knew the arithmetic he was doing behind the stillness: measure the worry, sweeten nothing, leave the door open. It was his answer in the language they had learned together: keep the hands busy, keep the room gentle, don’t feed the fear.

Sidra let out a slow breath. “There is always something to be nervous about. The trick is not to let it drive the ship. I chose to stand where I stand now. That means trusting the people I chose to stand where they stand.”

“You can still watch the corners,” William said.

“I can,” she said. “And I will. But the room belongs to Captain Corbin.”

He nodded. The fire popped. The faraway look shifted toward something like acceptance.

The kettle sang its false song. Stephen brought mugs, the steam a soft curl between them. His fingers brushed hers as he set one down. He did not need to ask what she needed to hear. He had already asked without words and had the answer. Stephen angled the mug so the steam drifted to the vent rather than her face; small thing, same principle, watch the air first.

“Tomorrow I will be an admiral again,” she said after they had drunk in silence for a while. The tea warmed her hands. The wind rattled the eaves in a pattern she never asked the computer to fix.

“And tonight?” Stephen said. The words were gentle, the question already sure of its answer.

Sidra looked at him, then at the boy with his glove and the space by the hearth that would always belong to a good dog. She felt the station under the program, the ship in the berth, the long chain of choices that had brought her to this room.
“Tonight I am home,” she said.

They stayed until the wind outside sounded like a lullaby and the fire settled to coals. When William began to drowse, Sidra tapped his foot with her toe and jerked her chin toward the door. He stood, taller than she remembered from the last time she had looked. At the threshold, he reached for her hand in the same easy, absent way his father did. She let him have it, and for a span of steps, she allowed herself to be guided by the two people who had nothing to do with fleet readiness or procurement or the way corners keep their secrets.

The grid took the cottage back with a gentle fade. The station’s sterile air folded around them. They walked to quarters with the quiet ease of people who did not have to speak to say everything. In the room’s warm light, William set the glove on the table and the ball beside it, like two small planets that no longer needed to orbit. He lifted the jacket from the chair back and held it for her without a word. She did not put it on. He nodded, folding it over his arm before returning it to the chair. He then silenced the entry chime, as if quiet could be chosen, and adjusted the lights to a warmer hue, the shade their son called “cello night.”

Morning would come soon. The Arawyn would choose her route and her speed. Sidra would be where the Fleet required her to be. Tonight she let the work wait at the door, and listened to the sound the station made when a family went to sleep.

Sidra Maclaren
with contributions by Stephen MacCafferey (Viktor)

 

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