The Admiral's Shadow: Part One

Posted on Mon Dec 8th, 2025 @ 11:03pm by Commodore Stephen MacCaffery

2,100 words; about a 11 minute read

Mission: The Tavrik Accord: Orchestrated Chaos
Location: USS Valley Forge in Orbit around Tavrik III

The viewport over Tavrik III looked a little like the kettle Sidra favored when she was thinking too hard: thin steam, too much pressure, no graceful way to vent.

Stephen sat in the Valley Forge’s observation lounge with a mug cooling between his hands and watched the planet turn, bruised and sullen beneath the ship. Industrial haze hung in bands of orange and rust over gray-brown landmasses. Mining complexes marked the coastlines like pitted scars. The terminator rolled slowly, a line between dim and darker. Nothing about it said “routine trade stabilization.” Everything about it said “someone let the fire get ahead of them.”

A cat came to mind.

Rowan, sprawled across Sidra’s pristine armchair like she had grown there, tail flicking at the exact rhythm of Sidra’s rising blood pressure. Will standing there with that half-cocked grin he had inherited from his father and weaponized against his mother. “Da said yes,” he’d told her, as if that made the incursion of fur and claws into their ordered quarters a matter of settled law.

An executive decision.

Sidra had repeated the words back to him later, in that quiet tone that meant she was filing things away for future litigation. Not angry, not exactly. Just…not amused. Stephen had listened to the transmission in his empty bunk after she cut the channel. The cat had yowled somewhere off-screen. Will had tried to act like the universe’s youngest reasonable adult. Sidra had looked like a woman who had discovered a whole new theater of operations had been opened behind her back.
He had smiled then, despite himself. Now the memory settled under his ribs, heavier than before.

You did make an executive decision, MacCaffery.

He could see the shape of it. A teenage son asking to take on yet another complication in a life already filled with threat assessments and contested borders. A wife who had earned her quiet strength the hard way, fiercely guarding the small space she controlled as much as she guarded two sectors’ worth of shipping lanes. A husband who had been a judge long enough to know when a written opinion would do more harm than a handshake.

He had told Will yes because it had felt like a small rebellion against the constant pressure of “no.” No, you can’t come planetside. No, you can’t sit second chair at this briefing. No, you can’t forget, even for an hour, that everything your parents do ripples out to people who sign casualty reports.

He had told Sidra, afterward, that they’d figure it out.

He still believed that.

Steam curled from his forgotten tea, catching the thin light from the viewport. Tavrik’s sun traced the planet’s edge in a pale halo. Mining complexes pricked the surface—each one with names, faces, stories. People went to work, not knowing the sky might fall.

“Rowan,” he murmured under his breath, testing the sound of the name in this quiet, recycled air.

A ridiculous thing to think about on the approach to a crisis. Except it wasn’t. The cat had become shorthand for everything that lived outside the clean lines of a Starfleet deployment order. Family. Uncontrolled variables. The ways he and Sidra made decisions that shaped each other’s lives, often without the luxury of consensus.

He pictured Sidra in their quarters, tea in hand, eyes narrowed at feline insolence. Not furious. Calculating. Affection, always, beneath the surface. She would weigh his decision the way she weighed a fleet redistribution: cost, benefit, failure modes. She trusted him, but trust without verification was for people who didn’t have admirals at their backs.

The comm panel at the far end of the lounge chirped softly. “Commodore MacCaffery,” the ship’s computer announced in its neutral alto. “Captain McKinney requests your presence in the ready room.”

Of course he does.

Stephen rose, set the mug aside untouched, and straightened his jacket. The viewport’s reflection offered a man with more silver than brown at the temples, lines at the corners of eyes that had watched too many impossible situations become inevitable. No longer the young firebrand mediator. No longer Sidra’s so-called civilian hobby. Starfleet had pulled him back into uniform and found he fit the machinery a little too well.

He checked the PADD tucked under his arm. Summary of Tavrik’s disputed claims, last known positions of Kaldari mining guild security, Vethari trade delegations, and Federation licensed operators. On paper, it was a stabilization mission. Cool down a labor dispute trending hot. Remind the Kaldari Union and the Vethari Combine what “mutually beneficial” actually meant. Give the Federation a chance to be the adult in a room where no one wanted to admit they’d lit matches next to open fuel lines.

On paper, there were no riots yet. No dead.

Paper lied all the time.

The corridor to the bridge deck was standard-issue Starfleet: brushed metal, luminous strips at ankle height, occasional nods toward personalization in the form of mission patches and small framed holos bolted to bulkheads. Stephen walked it with one hand in his pocket, feeling every slight vibration as the Valley Forge adjusted orientation over the planet. The ship was steady under his feet, a big, disciplined animal holding position and waiting for instructions.

He palmed the ready room chime before his mind could spiral further down that path.

“Enter,” McKinney’s voice called, muffled by the door.

The panel slid aside with its practiced whisper. Stephen stepped into a room that had tried not to be special and failed.
The captain’s ready room was Federation-standard by design: a functional desk, a wall-mounted tactical display scrolling real-time ship and sector data, a compact conference table with four chairs, and a sideboard with a carafe and a row of cups. No clutter. No trophies. A single holo of the Valley Forge in spacedock, lit like an old naval portrait, hung behind the desk.

The viewport dominated everything.

Tavrik III filled the viewport like a storm crowding a sky. From this angle, industrial haze banded thick over the nightside terminator, faint furnace glows pulsing along the dark coastlines. The atmosphere was too thin, too dirty for beauty. The planet looked like a wounded animal, undecided whether to lie down and die or drag everyone nearby into its death throes.
McKinney stood with his hands clasped behind his back, shoulder to the glass, gaze fixed on the planet. He didn’t turn immediately when Stephen entered. That could have been affectation in another captain. With McKinney, it read as habit. A man who had spent enough years looking out at problems you could only solve by going down into them.

“Captain,” Stephen said.

“Commodore.” McKinney’s voice was dry, mountain-flat. He pivoted away from the viewport with unhurried precision and nodded toward one of the chairs facing his desk. “Thank you for coming up.”

The captain was younger than Stephen by a decade, maybe more, but wore command like someone who had been rehearsing for it since the academy. Dark hair clipped close, lines at his mouth from too much tight humor and not enough sleep. His uniform sat crisp on broad shoulders. The pips at his collar caught the ambient light with every small movement.
Stephen crossed to the offered chair, taking in the room’s details as he went. Technical readouts on one wall: ore tonnage projections, transport schedules, local traffic patterns. A schematic of Tavrik III’s orbital assets, highlighted nodes marking Kaldari satellites, Vethari relays, and Federation beacons. No family photos. No hobby items. The nearest thing to personality was a small, battered mug on the far corner of the desk, its Starfleet delta flaking at the edges, the words “USS TRIDENT – NOTHING IS EVER SIMPLE” barely legible.

That, Stephen thought, was the truest mission statement in the room.

He sat. McKinney waited until he’d settled, then took his own seat behind the desk with the ease of someone who spent a significant portion of his life in that posture: spine straight, one forearm resting lightly on the surface, hand near but not on the PADD lying there. The viewport pulled at the edge of Stephen’s vision, Tavrik turning slow and unlovely beneath them, but he kept his attention front and center.

He’d come expecting the usual choreography. Pre-descent briefing, review of the local political landscape, a rundown of who would be in the room planetside: Kaldari mining representatives, Vethari trade envoys, whatever passed for Tavrik’s local governance structure. Maybe a stern reminder about not committing Starfleet to anything without running it past the captain and, by extension, the admiralty.

He had his questions ready. He had his calm ready.

McKinney watched him for a heartbeat too long, measuring. Then he picked up the PADD and turned it so the screen faced Stephen.

“I’m assigning you a twelve-man security detail,” he said.

No preamble. No weather. No easing in. Just that.

The words landed between them, small and dense. In the silence that followed, the hum of the environmental systems grew loud, the ship’s subtle vibrations underfoot drawing a line up Stephen’s spine.

He blinked, slowly.

“Twelve,” he repeated.

“Lieutenant Khorev and eleven others,” McKinney said. “Two specialists, ten line. They’ll accompany you on all planet-side movements.”

Stephen’s first instinct was to breathe in, steady and deep, the way he would at the start of a difficult cross-examination. He felt his hand flatten against his thigh under the table.

“With respect, Captain,” he said, voice even, “that’s not going to work.”

McKinney’s expression didn’t change. “Explain.”

So he did, because that was the ground he knew how to fight on.

“Optics,” Stephen said. “The Kaldari already suspect the Federation of favoring Vethari shipping. The Vethari suspect the Federation of trying to slow their expansion by over-regulating access to Tavrik’s ore. Both parties have agreed to a mediator precisely because I am not wearing command red and carrying a phaser rifle. I walk into a negotiating chamber flanked by twelve Starfleet security officers. I might as well plant a flag on the table.”

He leaned back a fraction, not retreating, just making space for logic to land.

“A security detail that visible doesn’t signal ‘we value all your safety,’ Captain. It signals ‘we anticipate violence and we’re siding with the people who brought the guns.’ It undermines my credibility as a neutral party before I say the first word.”

He kept his tone professional, measured. No heat. Anger wasted energy and narrowed options. Calm made people listen.
McKinney listened. He even nodded once, as if conceding the points were structurally sound. Then he set the PADD down and steepled his fingers.

“Your argument is noted,” he said.

“Noted,” Stephen repeated, a thread of dry humor edging his tone despite himself. “Is that the part where you tell me why you’re ignoring it?”

McKinney’s mouth twitched. Not quite a smile; more acknowledgement. “You’re not just a mediator, Commodore,” he said.
“You’re Admiral MacLaren’s husband. If anything happens to you on my watch, I answer to her—and to Starfleet Command.”

There it was. Clean. Unadorned. The tone said this was neither a threat nor an invitation to negotiate. It was the shape of the field.

Stephen felt the shift in the room, the subtle recalibration of power he’d sensed coming from the moment the captain spoke the word twelve. This wasn’t a conversation about strategy anymore. This was about liability and the chain of command.
He’d spent most of his professional life in rooms where his voice carried weight because he’d earned it: courtrooms, arbitration panels, conference halls. Even when he was technically a guest, judges and diplomats listened because his expertise bought him a seat at the table that no admiral’s signature could conjure. Here, in this ready room, his expertise had to fit inside someone else’s risk assessment.

He thought again of Sidra, standing in their quarters with a cat at her feet and a son between them, trying to decide how much of his executive decision she could absorb without rewriting the rules of their household. She had her own calculus. So did McKinney. Somewhere in San Francisco or Paris or wherever they’d parked his personnel jacket, someone had underlined his name and written, in neat bureaucratic script, SPOUSE OF ADMIRAL – ELEVATED POLITICAL SENSITIVITY.

End Log

Commodore Stephen MacCaffery
Special Envoy to Tavrik III

 

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