“Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.”
-William Shakespeare

Pieris IV spun slowly beyond the readyroom viewport, this cracked leather boot of a world.  A statuesque form chiseled out of stress and caffeine stared beyond the transparent aluminum at the rotating ball of dust.  Arms were folded across the leather service jacket, one hand briefly ghosting over the pips on his collar – four polished little bastards – as though they’d suddenly vanish and take their burdens with them.

Michael didn’t truly wish he’d never taken the chair waiting on the other side of those doors.  He just hadn’t expected every waking hour of his command to be like being force-fed broken glass, told if he wanted to keep his crew together then he’d have to flash his false confident smile with blackened, blood-stained teeth.  Then again, nobody’d ever said this job would be easy.

This very world had been the opening act to the spiraling shit-show that accompanied commanding the Fresno.  It all started so smooth.  Too damned smooth.  They’d sniffed out the cause of the ground-sensor failures here like pros, and flushed out a greasy little smuggling ring from right under the colonists noses to boot.

It was the second act that’d been the ugly one.  His ship of glorified spanner-jockeys were shoved into a role of Federation spooks hardly qualified for that cloak and dagger bullshit, and he’d been told the smugglers had made off with stolen Daystrom toys.  Bit by bit, the seams had unraveled.  They didn’t catch the thieves.  They didn’t recover the tech.  All they returned with was a stench of failure that clung to them like feathers to tar.

They’d been told by Command that the botched op wasn’t his fault, the error had been theirs.  It’d been logged in the books as ‘a misalignment of skillsets’.  They didn’t hang this failure around his crew’s neck.  They didn’t have to.  The real knife to the gut came later – in the nothingness.  No action.  Just an endless stream of micro-missions and orders that contained all the thrill of staring at a fresh coat of paint on the hull drying in vacuum.  Nobody said the word ‘demotion’, but they all felt it.  It was like they’d lost whatever confidence had been initially placed with them.  They were the fleet’s benchwarmers now, and nobody cheers for the bench.

Even before the galaxy cracked open and the Vaadwaur started pissing death all over the Alpha and Beta quadrants, there’d been a slow rot setting in – a sort of mildew that clung to every corridor and ate away at morale.  The Fresno had still functioned, but it did so with the soulless hum of something that didn’t seem to care anymore.  Like a once-mighty lion now pacing a zoo enclosure; neutered, declawed, and fed on the routine.

These latest developments had only served to underscore the miasma of doubt that’d clouded over the crew.  The beatdown they’d just received had been biblical.  Being sucked into the Underspace had been a nightmare.  The Vaadwaur chasing them out of those tunnels had been a bitch-slap back to reality, their thrill of survival temporary, further tempered as they’d been forced to sit and do nothing but make their repairs as the Vaadwaur had descended onto the colony of Pieris IV like starved jackals.  Michael could see the brief shipwide high had vanished the second that nearly all of the crew had assembled in respectful formation, gazing down the length of Cargo Bay 04 where coffin after coffin of torpedo casings had stretched like pews in a church of the damned.  Many of them were empty – just stand-ins for comrades ripped beyond rent bulkheads into the cold vacuum of the void like loose papers in a storm.

Michael had tried to say all the things that the Captain was supposed to say.  Bravery.  Honor.  Sacrifice.  He spoke, he had to.  But the words had tasted like ash stuck in his throat.  It’d all landed like static, faint and directionless.  And the crew’s morale?  It’d already been circling the drain, now fully flushed.  He’d already overheard some of them twisting the name of the Fresno into a punchline.  The Fresno had become the ‘No’.  The ‘Hell-No’.  He’d pretended not to hear.  It was gallows humor, and they were all hanging from it.

The only silver lining was that it wasn’t solely said in jest, but also in bitter solidarity.  Perhaps there was something to that in which he could work with.  Some kind of shared cynicism that might count as unity if only you squinted at it.  There was a kind of poetry to be found in shared misery.  Perhaps something to the ‘Hell-No’ could be twisted further into some kind of banner.  A Statement.  A rejection of their lot in life.  A middle finger to the galaxy that the whole damn crew could start saluting.  Misery loves company, and company means cohesion.  Cohesion would mean he still had a crew.  That could be enough to start a war or finish one.  Maybe both.

He wondered what sort of advice Thalissa might have on that prospect.  He wished she were up here – Christ, did he wish it.  His XO had gone planetside with an away team to sift through the dust and silence of Pieris IV’s likely dead colony, and in her absence the Fresno felt like a coffin with the lid half sealed.  He was stuck up here, alone in his skull, trying to think through twenty variables without the one voice that had a knack for cutting through the chaos.  She seemed to know when to speak, and when to let the silence do its work.  She caught his stumbles before they turned into falls, and called bullshit without starting a mutiny.  She’d never once tried to steal the spotlight, but hell.  She’d held it up for him more than once.

His thoughts drifted to the moments just after they had survived that Vaadwaur chase into the asteroids.  He could still taste it – that kiss, hot and reckless, like chewing through a live EPS conduit in the aftermath of the ship shaking all around them while red alert klaxons howled bloody murder.  It hadn’t been planned, it sure as hell hadn’t been protocol.  But what the hell was protocol when you’d just got done dancing with death and came up short on surefire demise?  Shit, he barely remembered leaning in – just a flash of exultation, sweat, and the sickening high of surviving their brush with destruction.

He still wasn’t entirely sure which of them had initiated it.  That kiss had been a bloodletting, an exorcism of every scream they hadn’t voiced in front of the crew.    How could it not have been?  They’d been each other’s only tether, two leaders stranded at the top of a crumbling edifice with no one else to talk to who wouldn’t fall apart at the truth.  He certainly couldn’t confer all of his doubts to anyone else.

He recalled the way they’d looked at each other afterward – not angry, not ashamed.  Just stunned.  Like they’d both been passengers in their own bodies.  It’d felt like a revelation and a sin at the same time.  And afterward came the cold, unspoken distance.  The awkward glances during all of the system reboots and hull repairs.  The rest of the crew had noticed the friction, but misread the source.  There were whispers about disagreements and mistrust.  Scuttlebutt said the Captain and XO were fighting behind closed doors, angry over strategy, both of them as guilt-ridden as the rest of the crew about hiding while the research colony had gotten disemboweled.  Let them think it.  Better that than the truth – that he and Thalissa had crossed a line and didn’t know how to uncross it.

The Stafleet insignia at his breast chirped, and Lieutenant Commander Vorak’s voice cut through the tumultuous storm of Michael’s thoughts like a phaser blast to the teeth.  “Captain, new Vaadwaur contacts emerging.  Underspace aperture, bearing three-three-two.”

He barely heard his order to flee at warp over the thunder of his own heartbeat.  Retreat was the logical move.  Cold, tactical.  The Fresno had barely been in shape to take on one Vaadwaur ship, let alone multiple.  His decision was the sort that would be praised while they scraped your conscience off the bulkheads, the order forming in his mouth like bile.  Leave, retreat.  Vanish into the event horizon of shame.  Probe the Blackout’s perimeter, feel the edge of this cursed curtain drawn across the Pieris system like a morgue sheet.  He was leaving her behind, abandoning the only person who’d kept him sane through this cavalcade of disgrace and failure.  No courage in this call – just necessity.  Guilt gnawed at him like a vole rat digging into his guts.  This was triage, survival by omission.  This was betrayal dressed up in protocol.