The Last Instruction
Posted on Tue Aug 4th, 2026 @ 8:09pm by Vice Admiral Sidra MacLaren
1,648 words; about a 8 minute read
Mission:
The Heir of a Buried World
Location: Starbase 369 | VIP Medical Suite
Timeline: MD01: Late Afternoon
For several seconds after Seren confirmed the name, neither of them spoke.
The medical suite filled the space for them. A monitor traced the steady rhythm of Seren’s pulse beside the biobed, while somewhere beyond the closed inner doors a cart passed along the corridor with the muted hum of antigrav casters. The archive remained on the small table between them, its dark casing almost featureless under the clinical lights.
Sidra had spent most of the afternoon reading about a family that no longer existed.
Now one of them was sitting less than two meters away.
“I did not think there were any Val Tareth left,” she had told him.
“Most people did not.”
“That was intentional.”
“Yes.”
His answer remained between them.
Sidra rested the padd against her knee but made no move to enter the name. She would record it soon enough. For the moment, she wanted to know what happened when Seren said it aloud and nothing immediately followed.
No alarm. No security detail entering the room. No diplomatic representative appearing to claim jurisdiction over him.
Just an admiral asking questions.
“How long have you known the Federation believed your family extinct?”
“All my life.”
Sidra studied him. “Your father told you.”
“Yes.”
“And his father told him?”
A small hesitation preceded the answer. “Yes.”
That placed the deception, if deception was what it was, across more than one generation. Sidra glanced toward the archive, remembering the language buried in Appendix Twelve and the objection challenging the provenance of the extinction determination. A family did not disappear for nearly fifty years by accident. Whatever had happened at the end of Tareth-Kal, someone had made a deliberate choice to stay gone.
“Why?”
Seren shifted against the raised back of the biobed. The movement was slight, but his face tightened before he settled again. Medical had repaired the worst of the damage. It had not erased twenty-three days of exhaustion or the accumulated cost of being hunted.
“My father believed survival was more important than recognition.”
Sidra let the answer sit.
“And you agreed?”
The question seemed to surprise him.
“I was a child when I learned who we were.”
“That was not what I asked.”
Seren looked at her for a moment. “No,” he said finally. “Not always.”
There was more in that answer than he had offered before. Sidra waited rather than immediately reaching for it.
The room settled around them again. Seren’s pulse remained steady on the monitor, though his breathing had become shallower. He did not appear unwilling to continue, only tired in a way that was beginning to show through the control. Sidra had no intention of turning a medically limited conversation into an endurance test simply because he had information she wanted.
“What did you disagree with?”
“My father thought being forgotten kept us alive.” Seren’s amber eyes hardened slightly. “I thought being forgotten meant they had already won.”
“They?”
His gaze returned to hers.
“The people he believed we were hiding from.”
“Who were they?”
“I don’t know.”
The answer came without the careful pause she had begun to recognize.
Sidra believed that he did not know. She did not yet believe that his father had been correct about the threat.
Those were different conclusions.
“You spent your life hidden from people you cannot identify.”
“Yes.”
“That never troubled you?”
“It troubled me constantly.”
There was the first trace of something sharper in his voice. Not anger directed at her. Frustration worn smooth by years of having nowhere useful to put it.
Sidra understood that better than she cared to admit.
She shifted slightly in the chair. “Then why remain hidden?”
“Because my father had evidence that someone was still watching for us.”
“What evidence?”
“He never showed me.”
Sidra’s expression tightened—a fractional shift, but Seren caught it.
“He said knowing where it came from would make me responsible for protecting the source.”
“And he did not want you responsible.”
“He wanted me alive.”
The monitor beside him climbed several beats before dropping again.
Sidra looked at the display, then back at him. He was giving her more now, though not because she had cracked through some defensive shell. The questions had moved into territory where the answers belonged to him rather than to a set of memorized rules.
“Twenty-three days ago, that changed.”
“Yes.”
“Your father received information.”
“Yes.”
“That your location had been compromised.”
“Yes.”
“Did he tell you how?”
“No.”
“Who had found you?”
“No.”
Sidra held his gaze. “Did he know?”
Seren took longer with that one.
“I think so.”
Not yes.
Not certainty.
She appreciated the distinction.
“But he did not tell you.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“He said I already knew everything I needed to know to leave.”
Sidra considered the young man's rigid posture. Again the same philosophy. Information was not knowledge for its own sake. It was weight, and Alren Val Tareth had apparently spent his life deciding which weight his son was permitted to carry.
“Where were you?”
Seren’s eyes lowered.
“A settlement.”
“Where?”
“Outside Federation space.”
“Protectorate territory?”
“No.”
The answer came quickly enough that Sidra noticed.
“Then where?”
This time he did not answer.
His hands remained still over the blanket, but the silence had changed. Until now, Seren had limited his answers. This was the first time he had reached an actual boundary.
“That is information I cannot provide.”
Sidra regarded him for a moment.
“Cannot?”
“My father believed the location should remain protected until the archive was secure.”
He was still following instructions given by a dead man.
The observation was easy.
The judgment was not.
Loyalty could preserve people through circumstances that should have broken them. It could also keep them chained to decisions that no longer made sense. Sidra had seen both often enough to distrust anyone who treated loyalty as an uncomplicated virtue.
“Your father is dead.”
“Yes.”
There was no hesitation in the answer.
Sidra watched the details instead. His shoulders remained square, but one hand tightened almost imperceptibly against the blanket. His eyes stayed on her for another second before moving toward the far wall.
“How do you know?”
“I watched him stay behind.”
The medical suite seemed suddenly too quiet.
Sidra did not speak.
She had interviewed survivors after shipboard disasters, ground engagements, terrorist attacks, and captivity. Grief did not have a reliable presentation. Some people could describe the worst moment of their lives in perfect detail and fall apart over something trivial hours later. Others could not say a name without losing the thread entirely.
Seren remained composed, but it cost him more now.
Sidra gave him time.
Beyond the doors, someone spoke briefly in the corridor and was answered by a medical computer. The words were indistinct. The ordinary sound of people moving through their duties felt strangely intrusive against the stillness inside the suite.
Eventually, Sidra asked, “Tell me what happened. You were supposed to go together.”
Seren swallowed before answering. “My father had already arranged transport. He told me to take the archive and leave.”
“What changed?”
“They were closer than he expected.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
Again, the uncertainty was genuine.
“He knew they wanted the archive?”
“Yes.”
“You?”
A pause.
“Yes.”
That was new.
Sidra leaned back slightly. “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
He sounded frustrated by the answer this time.
Good.
Not because she wanted him upset, but because the emotion was consistent with someone who had spent weeks carrying questions no one had allowed him to answer.
“What did your father do?”
“He gave me the transport coordinates and told me not to return.”
Seren’s voice had gone quieter. His attention was no longer entirely in the room.
“He said the route had already been prepared. I was to follow it exactly until I reached Federation space.”
“And then?”
“Find you.”
Sidra looked at him.
“Only me?”
“Yes.”
“What if I was unavailable?”
“He said to wait.”
“What if I refused to see you?”
Seren’s mouth moved faintly, not quite a smile.
“He said you wouldn’t.”
Of all the assumptions Alren Val Tareth appeared to have made, that one irritated her most.
Perhaps because he had been correct.
Sidra glanced down at the padd resting against her knee. “Did you see what happened when he stayed behind?”
For the first time, Seren’s control visibly slipped.
It was not dramatic. His jaw tightened, and the medical monitor betrayed the increase in his pulse before he could hide it anywhere else.
“Yes.”
Sidra did not ask for detail.
Not yet.
There were questions an investigator asked because the answers mattered, and questions asked merely because they were available. She had never respected the second kind.
“Did he know he would die?”
Seren looked down at his hands.
“Yes.”
The word came very quietly.
Sidra waited.
“He knew.”
A long silence followed.
She could have moved on. Perhaps she should have. Doctor Halvik had cleared a brief conversation, and nothing about Seren’s complexion suggested Medical would appreciate her interpretation of the word brief much longer.
Instead, she asked one more question.
“Did he say goodbye?”
Seren closed his eyes.
Only for a second.
“Yes.”
Sidra rested her hands over the padd and said nothing further.
When Seren finally spoke, his voice was steadier than she expected.
“He told me not to spend my life protecting the past.”
Sidra’s eyes moved toward the archive.
“What did he mean?”
Seren followed her gaze.
For most of the conversation, the case had been something he checked, guarded, or used as the boundary around an answer. Now he looked at it differently.
“He said our family had spent long enough trying to make sure history survived.”
His fingers loosened slowly against the blanket.
“History could survive without us.”
Seren looked back at her.
“But the truth could not.”
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