As Far As Home

Posted on Tue Aug 11th, 2026 @ 11:27pm by Lieutenant Roan Gaeta

1,192 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: Mission 4 - Siphoning of Stars
Location: USS Concord

[ON]

Roan woke with his hand already moving, his fingers closing around nothing as he stared into the darkness and tried to work out what was wrong. The air was too still. There were no insects humming beyond the walls, no distant voices, no wind catching against hide or wood, no scent on the air of the foaming river. Beneath him was something soft enough that his body had sunk into it, and somewhere nearby there was a low, constant sound he could feel almost as much as hear. He turned his head slowly, searching the unfamiliar shapes around him before memory caught up. The people from the sky, the starship. He lowered his hand from where the knife should have been and pushed himself upright, bare feet finding a floor that was smooth and strangely warm. Someone had taken his clothes and, in their place, given him loose trousers and a shirt made from fabric he did not recognise, both so clean that he had spent several minutes earlier looking for the stains.

Roan opened his eyes and found himself staring at the familiar ceiling above his bed aboard the Concord. He stayed there for several seconds, one hand resting against his bare stomach while the ship hummed softly around him, the quarters dark apart from the faint light coming from the controls near the door. For one stupid moment he could still smell woodsmoke. "Computer, time."

"It is zero three forty-seven," the computer's matter-of-fact voice filled the room.

Roan sighed, rubbing both hands over his face before sitting up and letting them fall between his knees. Four hours of sleep, possibly. Better than none. He had done worse. Somewhere beyond the hull were stars no Federation chart had expected them to be looking at, forty thousand light years separating them from where they had intended to be, and apparently his brain had decided this was an excellent time to remember another bed in another metal room.

The machine had made water. Roan had stood in front of it, staring at the clear cup the woman placed in his hand after he had watched it appear from nothing. The water was cold enough that droplets were already forming against his fingers. "You can drink it," she told him, and Roan looked at her before lifting it cautiously to his mouth.

There was no bitterness, no mineral taste and nothing floating in it, just water. "Where does it come from?" he asked, and when she told him it was replicated he frowned because the word meant absolutely nothing to him. He drank again, finishing the entire cup before holding it out towards her. "Can it make more?"

The woman smiled slightly. "As much as you want," she said softly, but something in his expression must have made her understand because the smile faded. "You don't have to ration it...or worry it will make you sick."

Roan looked back towards the machine before asking, "As much as I want?" he checked, voice quiet and throat dry.

"Water," Roan said, and the replicator in his Concord quarters chimed softly. He took the glass and drank half of it while walking towards the viewport, settling one shoulder against the wall as he looked out. There was nothing particularly useful to see at warp, but he stood there anyway, his reflection faint against the glass and looking more tired than he thought was reasonable. He had told Nixie he wasn't frightened and, at the time, it had been true. It was still true, he decided. Mostly.

The stars had been impossible the first time. Roan had seen stars every night of his life and knew some of their names, although he suspected the names he used were not the ones these people would recognise. He knew which appeared at different times of year and which direction to walk when clouds cleared after a storm. Stars had always been useful things, but he had never understood that they looked different from above. He had stood close enough to the window that his breath briefly fogged the surface before disappearing, looking down at Arise without being able to recognise any part of it. There were no forests, no mountains, no settlement, nothing that told him where the healer was, where he had hunted or where the people who had Cast him Out lived.

The whole world had become colours and clouds. "How long before we go back?" he had asked, turning when the man behind him did not immediately answer.

They had given Roan the man's name twice and he had forgotten it twice, but he remembered the uniform and the different colour across the shoulders. The man told him they were not going back immediately, that Medical wanted to finish their examinations and there were people who needed to speak with him about what happened next. Roan had frowned at that. "What happens next?" When the man told him that was partly up to him, Roan looked at him for another moment before turning back towards the window. "Then I want to go back."

Standing at the viewport aboard the Concord, Roan could still remember the certainty with which he had said it. He had not been frightened or angry. It had simply never occurred to him that there would not be a point when somebody put him back where they had found him. The people from the sky had medicine he could not understand and machines that produced water from nothing, but Arise was Arise and, as far as he had been concerned, that had settled the matter. Except he had never gone back. There had always been another thing first. Tests, questions, Doctor Kane, tutors, medicine, the Academy, Saratoga, Odin and Akagi.

Life had apparently been quite effective at moving him along without ever asking whether that had been the plan.

Roan took another drink as he considered the distance separating the Concord from Federation space. Forty thousand light years should probably have intimidated him more than it did, but his people had ended up on Arise without knowing where they were and Roan himself had left it without knowing where he was going.

Somewhere along the way he had clearly stopped requiring home to remain in one place, which felt like the sort of realisation his brain could have provided at a more reasonable hour. "Annoying," he murmured, and the computer wisely chose not to respond.

He finished the water and returned the glass to the replicator before heading back towards the bed. Sickbay would still be there in a few hours, along with the hurt, the worried and the people pretending they were neither. The Concord was absurdly far from anything and anyone familiar, but it was intact. They had food, water and medicine, and there were people aboard who knew what they were doing, or at least were doing a convincing impression of it. Roan lay down and pulled the blanket over himself, settling back against the pillow as he stared at the ceiling. He had started with considerably less.

[OFF]

 

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