Writer’s Note: This is the first story in a six-part series that kicks off the new “Trackways” story arc and launches new important characters, new starships, and a new writing location.
Tae’latas — Part I
— 2396 —
Skysen’s Landing Field, near Nýr Nordhavn, Skye Belt
Tae’latas age: 19
The Bird-of-Prey looked dead to anyone who did not know how to listen.
It sat on old landing struts at the edge of Skysen’s field, half-shadowed beneath the gray morning over Nýr Nordhavn. Mist lay low across the grass. Beyond the landing ground, the first lights of the village burned warm against the cold, and farther still the dark line of the coast waited beneath a sky that had not yet decided whether it wished to become rain.
The ship did not belong in such a place.
Klingon vessels were meant to descend through fire, decloak against enemy flanks, or hang above worlds like sharpened threats. They were not meant to sit gutted beside a Norse-Gaelic landing field with their belly plates open, their impulse baffles removed, and their port wing supported by two borrowed industrial braces and a prayer nobody had admitted making.
But Khevrak Hurvek had never accepted that things were finished simply because others had stopped believing in them.
He lay beneath the forward belly of the ship with one arm buried up to the shoulder inside an access wound that had once been a power-transfer junction. A hand lamp floated near his left ear, flickering every few seconds as if offended by the hour. Rainwater from the previous night dripped from the hull plating and struck the side of his face.
He ignored it.
The conduit assembly refused to seat.
Again.
Khevrak narrowed his eyes, shifted his shoulder against the cold ground, and muttered something in Klingon that would have offended several honorable ancestors if any of them had been awake enough to hear it.
The conduit moved half a finger’s width.
Then stopped.
He exhaled slowly through his nose.
“Stubborn little carrion-bird,” he said.
Above him, somewhere inside the exposed frame, the old ship answered with a hollow metallic tick.
Khevrak smiled despite himself.
“Good. You are listening.”
Bootsteps crossed the wet grass.
They were unhurried, which meant they did not belong to anyone bringing bad news, fleeing an explosion, or coming to tell him breakfast was ready. The steps stopped beside the open maintenance trench, just beyond the circle of the failing hand lamp.
“You are aware,” Alan Skysen said, “that talking to a power junction is not considered a standard diagnostic method.”
Khevrak did not look out from beneath the ship.
“Then the standard method has never repaired a Klingon ship.”
“That may explain several things about Klingon ships.”
“It explains why they survive.”
“It also explains why half of them smell like burned insulation and old blood.”
Khevrak’s smile widened.
“That is called character.”
Skysen made a small sound that might have been agreement, amusement, or disapproval carefully wearing civilian clothing. Khevrak had known the man long enough to understand that with Alan “Eldrik” Skysen, the difference rarely mattered. If Skysen was still standing there, he was interested. If he was interested, he would eventually ask the question that mattered.
He always did.
The elder man crouched beside the exposed access wound and angled a small field scanner toward the open assembly.
“You bypassed the secondary load governor.”
“It was dead.”
“It was cautious.”
“It was dead.”
“It was preventing a cascade failure through a seventy-year-old junction that has already been repaired twice by people who disliked documentation.”
Khevrak shifted the wrench in his left hand and pulled gently against the conduit housing.
The assembly refused to move.
“Then it died in service to a noble cause.”
“The noble cause being not killing you.”
“I respect its sacrifice.”
Skysen was quiet for a moment. The scanner hummed softly.
“What failed?” he asked.
“The power-transfer junction.”
“No.”
Khevrak closed his eyes.
There it was.
The question that mattered.
He could answer quickly. He had already done the work. He had traced the scarring along the power trunk, mapped the heat distortion, reconstructed the last system state from half-corrupted logs, and spent most of the previous night persuading an abused Klingon circuit architecture to confess its sins.
But Skysen did not ask questions because he lacked information.
He asked them because he wanted to know whether Khevrak understood what he was seeing.
“The junction failed after the old impulse manifold surged,” Khevrak said.
“No.”
“The surge overloaded the governor.”
“No.”
Khevrak tightened his jaw.
Above him, the ship ticked again as the morning cold moved through the metal.
“The repair failed,” he said after a moment. “Not the junction.”
Skysen said nothing.
Khevrak opened his eyes and stared up into the dark web of exposed conduit, scorched plating, mismatched clamps, and old Klingon stubbornness.
“Someone replaced the governor after the first overload, but they treated the damage as isolated. They did not check the stress pattern through the surrounding frame. They restored the part. They did not understand the wound.”
Skysen remained crouched beside the opening.
“And?”
Khevrak reached farther into the access space and tapped two fingers against the warped support bracket hidden behind the junction housing.
“The ship compensated around the bad repair. For years, maybe. Every time the impulse system fed through this trunk, the frame flexed here. A little. Not enough to alarm. Enough to remember.”
The scanner’s hum changed as Skysen adjusted the field.
“Metal does not remember, Khevrak.”
Khevrak smiled again, but this time it was smaller.
“Of course it does.”
Skysen looked down at him.
The mist thickened around the field, and the village lights glowed softly through it. Somewhere beyond the landing ground, a gull cried over the coast. Khevrak listened to the ship above him, to the tiny contraction of cooling plates, to the soft click of a half-seated conduit, to the silence in the place where power should have moved like breath.
“Maybe not as we do,” he said. “But stress leaves memory. Heat leaves memory. Bad repairs leave memory. Every wound teaches the next failure where to begin.”
Skysen watched him for another heartbeat.
Then he nodded once.
“Better.”
Khevrak grunted and pushed again at the conduit.
This time, it seated.
Not fully.
But enough.
The assembly locked with a heavy metallic sound that echoed through the belly of the old ship like a cough from something that had been asleep too long.
Khevrak froze.
Skysen did too.
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Then, somewhere deep inside the stripped Bird-of-Prey, a low relay tone pulsed once through the dead systems.
Khevrak turned his head slowly toward the sound.
His eyes were bright in the lamp glow.
Skysen’s expression softened almost imperceptibly.
“Well,” the elder man said. “It appears your carrion-bird has a pulse.”
Khevrak lay very still beneath the ship.
The rainwater kept dripping from the hull.
The lamp kept flickering.
The morning wind moved across Skysen’s field, bringing with it the smell of wet grass, cold sea, old metal, and something almost like ozone.
Khevrak looked up into the open belly of the ship and whispered, not in challenge this time, but in promise.
“There you are.”
