Bearing Restored

Posted on Mon Jan 19th, 2026 @ 6:19pm by Vice Admiral Sidra MacLaren & Ensign Quen Lyra

2,001 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Second Light
Location: Epsilon Fleet Ops

Fleet Operations never truly slept, but after midnight it changed character.

The noise thinned first. Conversations dropped to murmurs. Displays dimmed to night-cycle levels that respected circadian rhythms no one in the room had followed all day. What remained was a steady undercurrent of waiting, messages queued for review, flags set for escalation, systems humming patiently as if they understood that the work now was no longer reaction, but reckoning.

Quen Lyra had watched the Admiral carry the room since morning.

From the center of Fleet Operations, Sidra MacLaren had been impossible to miss. She had stood in the heart of the pit through the moments after the changeling revealed itself, through the immediate containment orders, through the tightening of security protocols that sent controlled shockwaves across the station. Her voice had cut cleanly through overlapping channels. When uncertainty surfaced, she absorbed it and turned it outward into direction. When tempers flared, she cooled them without raising her own.

Sidra in Fleet Ops was unmistakable. Visible. Deliberate. Built for pressure.

Lyra had seen her there through the afternoon as well, jacket discarded, sleeves rolled back, hands moving through layered data as if the systems themselves responded to her presence. The day had burned hot, but the Admiral had held the line, anchoring officers who needed something solid to orient around as fire was contained and new fault lines revealed themselves beneath the surface.

The shift had come later.

Not during the revelation. Not during containment. Not even when Tavrik began to unravel and the scope of the damage widened instead of narrowing.

It came after the call from Commodore MacCaffery.

Lyra hadn’t heard the conversation. She hadn’t needed to. She had seen the Admiral return to Fleet Ops afterward, posture unchanged, expression steady, and something in the room had gone quieter around her, as if the air itself had recognized a recalibration.

Sidra finished what needed finishing in the pit. Orders were finalized. Teams reassigned. The visible crisis stabilized into a controlled burn.

Only then did she leave.

That was when Sidra returned to her office.

Lyra noticed the difference immediately.

Not in bearing. Not in authority. Sidra still stood straight, shoulders squared, attention sharp. But without the constant motion of Fleet Ops pressing against her, there was nowhere left for the strain to go. The pauses grew longer. The silences stretched.

Sidra alone did not falter.
She narrowed.

Lyra saw it in the way reports were reread without annotation. In the way security logs were pulled up, dismissed, then reopened again as if the act of looking might change what they said. In the coffee that went untouched long enough to be replaced twice.

Her gaze drifted once to the desk.

The rank bars lay there, unmistakable even at a glance. Heavy. Polished. Set carefully aside rather than discarded. They did not belong there by accident.

Lyra didn’t know the details of the call with Commodore MacCaffery, but she knew enough to understand what that meant. The Admiral had taken the weight off her shoulders to speak plainly. Not as Fleet Commander. As herself.

Lyra looked away again, the observation filed without judgment.

In Fleet Ops, Sidra had carried everyone else.
Here, alone, she was carrying the day.
And more than the day.

Inside the office, Sidra stood before the lattice of information and felt the weight settle fully for the first time.

The changeling was contained. That was the line everyone else would use. The threat was identified. Protocols adjusted. Locks tightened.

But containment wasn’t resolution.

Indi was still missing.

That absence sat like a fault line beneath everything else. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just there, running through every review, every log, every decision she replayed in her head.

All the tension. All the arguments. The months of friction she had chalked up to stress, to overreach, to personality clashes sharpened by pressure.

It hadn’t been Indi.
And she had missed it.

Not because she was careless. Not because she hadn’t questioned. Because she had trusted the shape of a person she thought she knew, and corrected herself instead of the shape when it pushed back. Because it had taken too long to name what felt wrong.

That was the part that stuck.

Not that a changeling had infiltrated Fleet Command. That was a strategic failure, and those could be addressed.

That she had argued with a shadow and never realized it was one.

Her thoughts returned, unbidden, to Mac. To the way she had removed her rank before really speaking to him, not as a gesture but as necessity. She had needed to hear herself without the weight of command flattening every word. Needed to admit, quietly, that something had gone wrong on a level that reports could not capture.

It had helped.

She didn’t pretend otherwise. Speaking to Mac without the weight of rank had steadied her in a way she hadn’t expected. She had needed the sound of someone who knew her well enough to hear what she wasn’t saying. Needed the reminder that she was more than the sum of the day’s failures and near-misses.

But it had also revealed something she hadn’t wanted to look at too closely.

She had leaned on him more today than she ever had before, and noticed it.

Not just in that call, but in the weeks leading up to it. In the small pauses between decisions. In the moments where doubt crept in and she reached, instinctively, for the familiar steadiness of his voice instead of her own. She had told herself it was partnership. That it was natural. That carrying a fleet did not mean carrying it alone.

All of that was true.

And still, she could see the pattern now.

The last few months replayed themselves with uncomfortable clarity. The friction with Indi that never quite resolved. The sense that something was off, dismissed too easily because the explanation was always plausible. The way her confidence had been worn down not by a single blow, but by a thousand small abrasions, second-guessing, recalibrating, giving ground where she normally held it.

She had trusted her instincts. She had also learned, too late, that they were being shaped around a lie.
That erosion had been subtle. Gradual. Hard to name while it was happening. And today, stripped of rank and speaking plainly, she had felt the cumulative weight of it all at once.

The call had steadied her.
It had also taken the last of the forward momentum she’d been running on since morning and forced her to stop pretending it was infinite.

Another weight waited patiently at the edge of her awareness: the call she still had to make up to Starfleet. Not a report. Not a briefing. A call that would define posture and responsibility in a way that could not be walked back.

She could make it now.

She knew she should not, not like this.
Not while she was still carrying guilt instead of clarity.

The chime sounded.

“Enter,” Sidra said.

Lyra stepped in quietly, carrying a fresh cup of coffee and a wrapped sandwich from the staff galley. No tray. No ceremony. Just sustenance, offered plainly.

She set them down within reach and waited.

Sidra’s eyes flicked toward them automatically, then back to the data.

“Admiral,” Lyra said, choosing her words with care. “I’ve rerouted incoming traffic. Most of it can wait until morning. I can keep holding it.”

She didn’t say you need rest. She didn’t say you’ve been going all day. She offered time, not care.

Sidra turned slowly.

Lyra met her gaze, posture straight, expression neutral. There was tension there, carefully contained, not fear, not panic. Concern shaped by respect.

Sidra heard her own voice from earlier echo faintly in her head. Heard how clipped it had become. How narrow. She realized, with sudden clarity, that her yeoman was watching her not for instruction, but for signs.

That settled something.

“Thank you,” Sidra said. “Hold it.”

“Yes, Admiral.”

Sidra reached for the coffee and drank while it was still hot. The bitterness grounded her. She unwrapped the sandwich and ate standing up, letting the simple act anchor her back into her body.

She didn’t feel rested.
She felt aligned.

Lyra returned to the outer office and held the line. Calls were intercepted. Urgency was deflected with calm professionalism. The station did not unravel because one Admiral paused to refuel.

Inside, Sidra finished the sandwich, set the wrapper aside, and finally sat, just for a moment.

She pulled her stylus from her desk drawer and wrote by hand.

Mac—
Don’t worry about me. I needed a sandwich and some coffee.
I’m all right. I’ve got this.
She paused, then added, dry and honest:
Missing something hurts more than finding it late. I’m steady now.
Fix Tavrik and come home.

Sidra used their private channel to send it through, hoping he would believe it. The last thing she wanted was him worrying about her when he was dealing with so much.

As the night deepened around Starbase 369, Sidra stood again, shoulders squared, mind clear. Indi was still missing. The changeling threat was not finished. The call to Starfleet still waited.

But she was back in herself.

And when she made the call, she would not sound like someone carrying guilt.
She would sound like command.

Sidra crossed into the adjoining bathroom suite and keyed the sonic shower without ceremony.

The vibration engaged immediately, a low, controlled hum that stripped the day away in layers she hadn’t realized were still clinging to her. Heat without water. Pressure without weight. The familiar Starfleet efficiency of it did exactly what it was designed to do, cleared skin, loosened muscle, shook loose the residue of recycled air and too many hours spent holding a room together by force of will alone.

She stood still while it ran, head bowed slightly, hands braced against the bulkhead. Not resting. Resetting.

When it disengaged, she stepped out and moved straight to the closet. The doors slid open at her touch, revealing rows of identical readiness: clean uniforms, pressed, waiting. Sidra selected one without hesitation.

She dressed quickly, automatically. Undershirt. Jacket. Boots secured with practiced efficiency. A knife slipped into her boot, a small phaser concealed at her back, familiar weight, familiar reach. Her proficiency at unveiling them and using them made up for the inconvenient location. The fabric settled against her the way it always had, the quiet weight of it drawing her posture back into alignment without conscious thought.

Sidra straightened, shoulders settling, spine aligning as muscle memory took over. When she looked at her reflection, she didn’t see someone untouched by the day. She saw someone who understood exactly what it had cost, and was still standing.

She keyed the door and stepped back into her office, already reaching for the next task.

Last came the rank.

The bars waited on her desk where she had set them earlier, heavy and unmistakable even now. She picked them up and turned them once in her hand, feeling their solidity. Earlier, she had removed them because she needed to speak plainly. As herself. Without command shaping every word.

That moment had passed.

She snapped the bars back into place, the soft click sharp in the stillness of the room.
It was a small sound.

It carried.

The call to Starfleet was still waiting.

This time, she was ready to make it.

Vice Admiral Sidra MacLaren
Fleet Commander
Epsilon Fleet

 

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