The Midnight Oil

Posted on Fri Dec 12th, 2025 @ 10:22pm by Commodore Stephen MacCaffery

3,090 words; about a 15 minute read

Mission: The Tavrik Accord: Orchestrated Chaos
Location: Meridian Station, Tavrik III

The station’s night cycle settled over Meridian like a held breath.

Stephen sat at the narrow desk in his temporary quarters. The PADD's glow struggled against Tavrik's bruised sky, visible through the viewport. The air had dropped subtly in temperature, noted only by the hum of recycled systems. Beyond the transparisteel, the ocean shifted under sparse starlight, and the orange mark of Kaldari industry hovered on the horizon, an unspoken warning.

He’d dismissed Khorev an hour ago. The lieutenant had protested with his eyes if not his mouth, that particular brand of professional concern that said you’re making my job harder, sir, but Stephen had been gentle and firm. “I’m writing reports, not storming barricades. Get some rest.” Khorev had withdrawn to the unit across the corridor, close enough to respond, far enough to allow the illusion of solitude.

Illusions served their purpose. Tonight, Stephen preferred no witnesses.

The official report sat half-finished on the screen, cursor blinking at the end of a sentence he’d rewritten three times. Starfleet expected precision. The Diplomatic Corps expected nuance. Sidra, Admiral MacLaren, in this context, expected both, stripped of sentiment and arranged in the kind of clean strategic geometry that let her make decisions affecting thousands of lives without flinching.

He could do it. He’d done it before. Tonight, though, the words came slow, dragged up from somewhere training didn’t reach. Each one left a mark behind his eyes.

OFFICIAL REPORT
TO: Admiral S. MacLaren, Starfleet Command (Sector Operations)
CC: Federation Diplomatic Corps, Regional Liaison Office
FROM: Commodore S. MacCaffery, Special Envoy (Tavrik III Stabilization Mission)
RE: Initial Assessment and Status Update – Day Three, Meridian Station
CLASSIFICATION: CONFIDENTIAL

Stephen reread the header. Sidra’s name sat in bureaucratic shorthand, stripped of the woman who stood in their quarters with tea in hand, weighing the cost of a cat. He flexed his fingers and kept typing.

The situation on the ground is more volatile than initial briefings suggested. The incident three weeks prior, fourteen fatalities during civil unrest in the eastern Kaldari settlement, was not an isolated event but a symptom of systemic pressure across multiple fault lines: resource allocation, jurisdictional ambiguity, and mutual distrust exacerbated by economic desperation.

He paused. Fourteen fatalities. The phrase fit neatly into a report, clean and clinical. It didn’t capture the way Eriksson’s mouth tightened, or the weight of standing on the deck, watching children who hadn’t learned how fast routine could turn into a casualty list.

Meridian Station remains operationally secure but strategically exposed. Director Eriksson’s assessment of defensive capabilities is sound within known parameters. However, the current posture assumes that orbital support remains uncontested and that response time remains within acceptable thresholds. Any degradation of either assumption places the civilian population, including 147 dependent minors, at elevated risk.

He stopped typing. Stared at the number. One hundred forty-seven. He’d asked Eriksson for the count that afternoon. She’d answered without hesitation, as if she’d carried it in her head all along. She probably had.

One hundred forty-seven children went to makeshift schools, played handball against cargo netting, stood outside sickbay waiting for their fathers to come out with nothing worse than a blood pressure check.

He thought of Jase, the youngest of the trio, chin on his hands, staring into space with the particular stillness of a kid trying very hard not to imagine the worst. The way the boy had looked at Stephen’s collar and said, quiet and certain, “They already started shooting. Just not here.”

Stephen set his jaw and kept writing.

Kaldari Union has agreed to limited diplomatic access to their primary industrial complex, pending final security protocols. This represents a significant shift in their posture and suggests internal pressure to demonstrate reasonableness to external observers. Initial contact will occur within 72 hours. I will be accompanied by Lt. Commander Steerforth (cultural affairs liaison) and a minimal security detail per agreed parameters.

Vethari Combine remains distant but observant. Signal traffic analysis indicates heightened interest in Federation movements. Recommend continued monitoring of their offshore platforms and orbital relay activity.

Assessment: The situation is containable, but margins are narrow. Both parties are testing boundaries—ours and each other’s. The next two weeks will determine whether this mission achieves stabilization or triggers the crisis it was meant to prevent.

He leaned back and read it through. Solid. The kind of report that would sit clean in a file, give Starfleet Command enough to decide what to do, and keep Sidra from filling in gaps with worst-case assumptions.

It was also bloodless in a way that made his chest ache.

He completed the closing formalities, encrypted the document, and queued it for the next uplink. The PADD confirmed: Message prepared. Awaiting send authorization.

He set it aside and picked up the second PADD, the personal one. Unlogged, untracked. The screen was blank. The cursor blinked, a question he wasn’t sure he could answer.

He sat there for a long moment, listening to the hum of Meridian’s bones and the distant whisper of wind against the station’s hull. Then he began to type.

---

Mo Chridhe,

The Scottish-Gaelic term of endearment was the phrase that had opened every letter he’d written to her across the years when distance became the shape of their lives. Back when he’d been planetside, and she’d been pulling patrol duty in the Neutral Zone. When she’d been pregnant with Will, and he’d been knee-deep in a treaty negotiation that had stretched three months longer than anyone expected. When the uniform had been something she wore, and he’d been the one waiting at home, counting days.

The phrase steadied him. Anchored him to something older than ranks and mission briefs.

It’s late here, 0230 local, if Meridian’s clocks are to be trusted, though I’m not entirely convinced this planet honors the concept of “night” in any meaningful way. The sky doesn’t get darker so much as it shifts from one shade of unforgiving to another. I’m sitting in quarters that’s almost aggressively functional, the sort of space designed by someone who believed comfort was a waste of hull integrity. There’s a viewport, but it shows me an ocean that looks like hammered steel and a horizon stained orange with somebody else’s industrial ambitions. Not exactly restful.

He paused, reading it back. It sounded like him. The dry humor Sidra once said was his way of admitting he was tired without asking for sympathy.

I’ve just finished the official report. You’ll have it by morning, your time. It says all the right things in all the right ways: situation volatile, margins narrow, cautious optimism where protocol demands it. I’m sure you’ll read it the way you read everything—twice, once for content and once for what I didn’t say. So let me say it here, where it doesn’t have to fit into threat assessments or get parsed by staff officers looking for actionable intelligence.

I’m worried, Sidra.

The admission sat on the screen, stark. He almost deleted it. Almost softened it into something that wouldn’t land with so much weight. But she’d know. She always did. If he couldn’t be honest here, in the small hours, what was the point?

Not about my safety, precisely, though Khorev would probably prefer I phrase it differently. The security detail you and Captain McKinney conspired to saddle me with is competent, professional, and only slightly overbearing. I’m as safe as anyone can be when they’re standing between people who’ve already decided the other side is the problem.

I’m worried about the people here. Meridian’s not just a station, love. It’s a community. Families. Kids who’ve spent their whole lives on this rock, breathing air that tastes like metal and learning to brace against wind that never stops. There are forty-seven children on this station, Sidra. Forty-seven.

His throat tightened. He kept typing.

I met three of them the other day. Teenagers, roughly Will’s age. Waiting outside sickbay for their father, trying very hard not to look scared. The youngest asked me if I was here to make the shouting stop. When I gave him some platitude about shouting being better than shooting, he looked at me with these old, old eyes and said, “They already started shooting. Just not here.”

He’s eleven. Maybe twelve. Already doing the math on how long not here lasts.

Stephen stopped, pressing his hands to his eyes. The PADD’s glow painted his skin blue. Beyond the viewport, Tavrik turned with the patience of a world that didn’t care if humans lived or died.

I keep thinking about Will. About the decision I made, the “executive decision,” as you so generously termed it, to let him keep Rowan. I know you’re still processing that. I know it landed on you without warning, and I know that’s not how we’re supposed to operate. We’re supposed to be a united front, especially when it comes to our son. I owe you an apology for that, and I’ll give you a proper one when I’m home. But standing here, watching these kids navigate a world where the adults can’t promise them tomorrow looks like today, I don’t regret it.

Will asked for something small and warm and alive in a life that’s been shaped by security briefings and threat assessments since before he could walk. He asked for something that wasn’t about strategy, sector defense, or the careful calibration of risk we’ve built our lives around. And I said yes because I needed him to know that sometimes, the answer can just be yes.

I think you understand that. I think you understood it the moment you saw Rowan curled up in your chair, even if it made you want to throw something at me. You’ve always understood the cost of what we do—what you do, better than most. You carry two sectors on your shoulders, love, and you do it with a grace that still astonishes me after all these years. But I also know what it takes out of you. The weight of it. The way you stand in our quarters late at night, tea in hand, staring at casualty lists and pretending I don’t notice.

He exhaled, the sound loud in the quiet room.

I miss you. God, Sidra, I miss you in ways I don’t have words for. I miss the way you terrorize that poor armchair with your ruthless organizational instincts. I miss the way you look at me over the rim of your cup when I’m about to say something you’ve already anticipated, that little smile that says “go ahead, I’ll let you get there on your own.” I miss the sound of your voice when you’re too tired to keep your command mask on and you just… let go. I miss waking up next to you and knowing that whatever the day brings, we’ll face it together.

And I miss Will. I miss his terrible jokes and the way he tries to negotiate curfew extensions like he’s arguing treaty law. I miss the way he looks at you when he thinks you’re not watching, with that mixture of awe and exasperation that I recognize because it’s exactly how I used to look at my own mother. I even miss the damn cat, though I’ll deny that in any official capacity.

Stephen’s mouth curved in a tired smile.

There’s a part of me that wishes I were home right now. That wishes I could walk away from Tavrik III and its thin air and its fourteen dead and its children who’ve learned to count the days until violence arrives at their door. That I could just… be your husband. Be Will’s father. Let someone else carry the weight of making sure “not here” doesn’t become “here.”

But I can’t. You know I can’t. Because if I walk away, someone else makes the calls, and I’ve seen what happens when the people making the calls don’t understand the human cost of getting it wrong. I’ve read those casualty reports, Sidra. I’ve sat in courtrooms and arbitration chambers, watching good people try to justify sacrificing the small settlement to save the larger strategic picture. And I’ve promised myself, every single time, that I would never be the person who made that math easy.

So I’m here. I’m walking into rooms where people look at me and see your shadow before they see me. I’m negotiating with parties who think “mediation” means “Federation tells us what to do.” I’m standing on platforms looking at horizons painted with industrial poison and trying to figure out how to convince people to stop lighting matches near open fuel lines.

And I’m doing it because forty-seven children deserve better than being variables in someone else’s strategic equation.

He stopped, reading it back. Raw. More than he usually allowed, even with her. If he couldn’t be honest here, in a letter she’d read alone, he was already losing something he couldn’t afford.

I don’t know how this ends yet, love. I don’t know if I can pull this off. The Kaldari are scared and angry and looking for someone to blame. The Vethari are circling like creditors at a bankruptcy hearing. Meridian’s holding together by force of will and good engineering, but the cracks are there if you know where to look. And I’m standing in the middle of it all, trying to build a bridge out of legal precedents and goodwill that nobody’s sure they can afford.

But I’m going to try. Because that’s what we do, isn’t it? We stand in the gap. We hold the line. We make the hard calls and live with the consequences because the alternative is letting the fire spread until there’s nothing left but ash and regret.

I’ll be careful. I’ll let Khorev and his people do their jobs. I’ll listen to Steerforth when he tells me I’m about to step on a cultural landmine, and I’ll lean on Sarah’s legal expertise when the Kaldari try to rewrite treaties in real-time. I’ll do everything in my power to come home to you and Will and that ridiculous cat who’s probably already claimed half the furniture as her sovereign territory.

But if something goes wrong, if the situation degrades faster than anyone anticipates, I need you to know that I love you. That I’ve loved you since the day you walked into that briefing room and eviscerated my legal argument in front of three admirals and a tribunal, and I’ve never stopped. That every decision I’ve made, every risk I’ve taken, has been because I believe in the world we’re trying to build. The one where kids like Will get to have cats. Where teenagers on frontier stations get to worry about exams instead of body counts. Where “not here” stays “not here.”

You’re the strongest person I know, Sidra. You carry weight that would break most people, and you do it with such fierce grace that sometimes I forget you’re human. But I know you are. I know you worry. I know you’re probably reading this, mentally drafting three contingency plans, and running scenarios where you have to make impossible choices.

Don’t. Not yet. Let me do my job. Let me try to fix this before it becomes something that lands on your desk with a body count attached.

I love you. I love our son. I love the life we’ve built together, messy and complicated and full of impossible decisions. And I’m coming home.

Give Will a hug for me. Tell him his father is proud of him, and that Rowan is officially his responsibility, which means late-night feeding duties are non-negotiable. Tell him I miss him.

And take care of yourself, my love. The universe needs you. But more than that, I need you.

Yours, always,
Stephen

He set the PADD down as if it might shatter. His hands shook, the fine tremor of exhaustion and emotion held too long. The viewport showed his reflection, ghostly against Tavrik’s night.

The official report would reach Starfleet Command in the morning. Filed, analyzed, and cross-referenced with a dozen others from a dozen flashpoints. It would become part of the machinery that decided where ships went, where resources flowed, which crises got attention, and which were left to managed decline.

The letter to Sidra would reach her privately, routed through personal channels, encrypted with codes they’d established years ago when their lives had first diverged into separate orbits. She’d read it alone, in whatever quiet moment she could carve out between staff meetings and fleet deployments. And she’d understand, not just the words, but the weight beneath them.

Stephen queued the message, watched the PADD confirm encryption, and powered down both devices. The room fell into darkness, lit only by the sullen glow of Tavrik’s sky.

He should sleep. Khorev would be at his door in five hours, and the Kaldari didn’t care if their guests were rested. But sleep felt like a luxury he hadn’t earned. The quiet of the night cycle was the first peace since the Susquehanna punched through atmosphere three days ago.

He sat in the darkness, watching the ocean heave beneath a poisoned sky, thinking about cats, children, and the small rebellions that kept people human when the universe tried to grind them down into assets.

Above, the Valley Forge kept silent vigil. Beyond Tavrik’s curve, fourteen people were still dead, and a city burned under its own industrial weight. Somewhere in Federation space, Sidra would wake to dispatches, threat assessments, and the architecture of command.

And here, in temporary quarters on a station clinging to hostile ground, Stephen MacCaffery burned his midnight oil, trying to build bridges out of words.

It would have to be enough.

End Log

Commodore Stephen MacCaffery
Special Envoy
Tavrik III

 

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