The Admiral's Shadow: Part Two

Posted on Mon Dec 8th, 2025 @ 11:18pm by Commodore Stephen MacCaffery

2,085 words; about a 10 minute read

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

He was no longer just Stephen the mediator. He was an institutional asset, and his loss would come with memos and hearings.

“Sidra didn’t send me here as her proxy,” he said, carefully. “She sent me because I’m good at this, and because her rank would make everything worse. If I walk into that colony ringed with phasers, they’re going to see her shadow, not me.”

“They already see her shadow,” McKinney said mildly. “You think the Kaldari trade councils don’t know who you’re married to?”

He reached out and tapped the PADD with one finger. “My job is to bring you back alive. Preferably with a stabilization agreement in your hand. But note the order of operations there, Commodore.”

It wasn’t unkind. That made it worse.

Stephen exhaled quietly through his nose. He felt the old anxiety slide a finger under his ribs. What if you’re not enough on your own? Whispered that tired, persistent voice. What if they only listen because they’re afraid of her?

He’d spent years proving—to himself, to others—that he was more than “Sidra’s husband.” He’d taken cases no one wanted, walked into rooms where her name opened no doors, and walked out with settlements that stood because they were fair, not because someone in command red could enforce them. Coming back into Starfleet, even as a special assignment, had meant negotiating that identity all over again.

McKinney had drawn a clean line through the argument.

You are your record. You are also your adjacencies. Some adjacencies carry phaser batteries.

He could push. He could lean on his status as mission-essential. He could remind the captain that no regulation demanded twelve bodies between a commodore and a bad outcome. He could make this into a power struggle and burn capital he might need later planetside.

Or he could do what he did best: accept the constraint and work within it.

“All right,” he said.

McKinney’s eyes narrowed just a fraction, as if he’d expected more resistance. “All right?”

“I’ll accept a security detail,” Stephen said. “But we’re going to define terms.”

He sat forward, elbows resting lightly on the chair’s arms, posture engaged but not aggressive. He’d used this stance at a hundred tables. It said, "I’m not conceding." I’m structuring.

“They don’t walk into negotiating chambers unless there’s already shooting,” he said. “Plainclothes only, no tactical armor on display. They keep weapons holstered and hands visible at all times. They control the perimeter, not the conversation. When we move through public spaces, they hang back. Their job is to make everyone feel safer without anyone being able to point and say, ‘Those are the muscles the Federation brought.’”

He held the captain’s gaze. “Inside the room, I decide who sits at the table. That includes whether security stands inside the door or outside it. That’s non-negotiable.”

McKinney watched him for several heartbeats. Outside, Tavrik rolled on, its thin clouds dragging across its scarred face like smoke over a battlefield.

“You’re used to getting your way,” McKinney said at last.

Stephen offered a small smile. “I’m used to getting a way. There’s a difference.”

A faint ghost of amusement touched the captain’s eyes. He picked up the PADD again, flicked his thumb across the screen, and then held it out.

“Lieutenant Khorev,” he said. “He’ll command the detail. Service records are attached. Two specialists: Petty Officer Sato, field medic, and Ensign Ryz, signals. The rest are line security. Good people. Professional.”

Stephen took the PADD. The roster filled the display in clean Federation font: names, ranks, personnel numbers, basic specialties. Khorev, Pavel R.—Lieutenant, Security. Sato, Hana—Petty Officer Second Class, Medical. Ryz, Tev—Ensign, Operations (Signals). Nine more names he didn’t know, each followed by lines of shorthand that stood for whole lives: boarding actions, failed patrols, commendations, reprimands sanitized by personnel bureaus until they read like weather reports.

To McKinney, these weren’t abstractions. They were his. Crew he’d watched bleed and grow and grumble about replicator coffee.

To Stephen, right now, they were functions on a tactical diagram. Security detail. Medic. Signals. Human beings whose faces he would learn just enough to recognize before they became part of stories he might tell over dinner, if they all made it back.
He paged down. Khorev’s file had a notation about extended duty on Andorian border stations. Sato had three combat deployment markers he didn’t need to read the details of to know there had been too much triage and not enough beds. Ryz’s evaluations included the phrase “creative under pressure,” which could mean brilliant improvisation or aggressive insubordination, depending on who wrote it.

“They know this is a stabilization mission?” he asked.

“They know Tavrik’s a mess,” McKinney said. “Stabilization is the optimistic version.”

Stephen’s thumb hovered over the screen. Twelve people. Twelve sets of lungs breathing station air, hearts adjusting to local gravity, eyes scanning a horizon he hadn’t seen. Twelve new risk vectors. Twelve insurance policies.
He wondered if any of them had someone back on a station like Sidra’s, watching status updates and pretending not to count the hours between scheduled check-ins.

“And they’re ready to launch when we are?” he asked.

“Khorev has them on ninety-minute notice,” McKinney said. “If I tell him we’re going as soon as we clear this briefing, he’ll have them on the deck before you finish your preflight checklist.”

“Such as it is,” Stephen said. He wasn’t a pilot. He’d been landed more often than not by people like Will, hands on controls and brains wired to the geometry of atmospheres and grav wells. His preflight checklist consisted mostly of making sure he had the right briefs loaded on his PADD and a clean shirt.

McKinney’s gaze shifted past him to the viewport. He tapped something on his desk console, and the tactical display on the wall flickered. It now showed a skeletal grid over Tavrik’s rotating face. Points of light marked orbital stations, comms relays, and traffic pods. One point flickered uncertainly next to a cluster of unlogged supply flights, a faint anomaly on an otherwise orderly map.

"We’re not going down there blind," the captain said. "But we are going down into something no one’s been honest about."

There it was again. The sense that the paper version of this mission was already obsolete.

“What aren’t they telling us?” Stephen asked.

McKinney’s jaw flexed once. He tapped another command. The grid over Tavrik shifted, zoomed, and locked onto a hemisphere mottled with a thicker industrial haze. A circle highlighted a cluster of installations near a coast.

“Three weeks ago,” McKinney said, “one of the Kaldari settlements had a riot. Fourteen dead. Local security lost control. Vethari intermediaries pulled their people out of the region the next day. Tavrik’s local admin sent us a sanitized incident report three days after that, framed as an ‘industrial disturbance.’”

Fourteen dead.

The number sat in his chest like a stone. He’d read enough casualty lists to know what numbers did. Under ten, the bureaucracy called it an incident. Over twenty people used the word massacre in a closed session and waited to see if it leaked. Fourteen was the middle distance where people tried very hard to pretend things were still containable.
The industrial haze in the viewport shifted across the coastline highlighted on the tactical display. It looked like smoke from up here. Down there, it would smell like chemicals and burned insulation and whatever else you couldn’t wash out of your clothes.

“The Vethari have been quiet since,” McKinney went on. “Too quiet. The Kaldari central council has been loud in all the wrong ways. They asked for a mediator because they’re afraid. Not of each other. Of what happens when this reaches the core worlds’ news feeds.”

Stephen’s fingers tightened around the PADD. He turned his head toward the viewport despite himself.

Tavrik III still turned. Same mottled surface. Same bands of haze. Same pinpricks of furnace glow near the nightside edge. None of that had changed in the last five minutes. But the internal map overlaid itself now on what his eyes saw: that band of cloud not as weather but as residue of tear gas and burning ore; that cluster of lights not as industry but as a place where fourteen people had died in a crowd that had stopped being a workforce and become a weapon.

From up here, it was almost beautiful. Down there, the air would taste like metal and bad choices.

He’d walked into volatile situations before. Labor standoffs on asteroid belts where miners had chained themselves to machinery. Governmental councils are on the edge of open rebellion against bad governors. This one felt different. There was something in the way McKinney watched the planet that said the captain had seen enough to know when a situation had passed tense and settled into dangerous.

“How soon can we go to the surface?” Stephen asked.

The question came out quieter than he expected. Not from fear, but because part of him was already rearranging priorities. The dance over the numbers of guards in plainclothes versus in uniform was about maintaining the illusion of control. Fourteen dead broke that illusion. The negotiation wasn’t about percentages and shipping quotas anymore. It was about whether the next number on a report started with one and ended with three digits.

McKinney didn’t answer immediately.

The captain’s gaze stayed on the planet for a heartbeat, then another. The hum of the ship filled the space; his words did not. Stephen watched the side of his face, the slight tightening at the corner of his eye, the way his hand flexed once on the desk and then stilled again.

It was the kind of pause you only noticed if you were trained to see what people tried not to say. Stephen had made a career reading those pauses. They always meant the same thing: there’s more. It’s worse. I’m deciding how much you need to hear.

“The Susquehanna is ready now,” McKinney said finally. “Shuttle’s prepped, flight crew briefed. Lieutenant Khorev has his people on standby.”

He looked back at Stephen, eyes flat and serious.

“But Commodore,” he added. “Don’t expect the colony to give you good news.”

He let that sit for half a beat, then, with a precision that felt almost surgical, cut away the last of any remaining illusions.
“Everything you’re about to see,” McKinney said, “will be worse than you think.”

Stephen held his gaze.

Worse than he thought covered a wide range. Broken bodies. Broken systems. Broken trust. He’d seen all three before, usually not all at once.

He pictured Sidra’s expression when she’d learned about the cat. The particular, measured way she’d said, This conversation is not over. He could almost hear her now, a quadrant away, reading between the lines of whatever bland mission update someone had put on her desk about “stabilization efforts” on Tavrik III.

You made an executive decision, she would say, if she were here. Are you sure you understood the cost?
He slid the PADD with the roster into the crook of his arm, rose from the chair, and squared his shoulders toward the door.

“Then we shouldn’t keep them waiting,” he said.

McKinney nodded once. “Lieutenant Khorev will meet you in the shuttle bay.”

Stephen turned toward the viewport one last time. Tavrik III turned with implacable slowness, its scars and haze and faint furnace glows indifferent to the small human arguments orbiting above.

He thought of a cat in a clean, ordered room, blinking sleepy golden eyes at a woman who didn’t want her there and a boy who did. Domestic containment failure. Frontier containment failure. The principles were not so different. If you didn’t secure the openings, the universe walked in.

He drew a breath, let it out, and headed for the door, the weight of twelve unseen lives and one unseen world settling into place on his shoulders as naturally as a robe he’d put on a thousand times before.

End Log

Commodore Stephen MacCaffery
Special Envoy to Tavrik III

 

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