Residual: Part IX – Chosen, Not Claimed

Posted on Sat Nov 29th, 2025 @ 1:49pm by Sergeant Jace Morven

2,323 words; about a 12 minute read

Recon Mission Theta-9 — Dominion POW Camp Perimeter, February, 2375

The storm arrives like it has been watching us for days, just waiting.

The first gust cuts sideways across the ridge. Then another. The wind builds fast, howling over the rock like it is trying to tear the skin off the world. Grit drives into every seam and join. It rasps against my goggles, my throat, the inside of my gloves. It clings to fabric and teeth and bone. The temperature drops hard. The sweat I did not notice before turns cold. Every breath comes with dust. My coat gains weight with every step.

We do not speak. We do not need to.

There are no comms tonight. No lights. No low-signal beacons or hushed reports to Command. We carry everything in memory. Every metre paced, every blind spot mapped, every interval between patrols counted and stored. Our rifles are set to kill. Not out of anger. This is not punishment. It is risk management. In this part of the war, no one shoots twice.

I take the lead and no one questions it. The others fall in behind at distance. I check for movement at each ridge break. The storm covers our descent almost perfectly. Our tracks vanish behind us before we reach the next step. Sound is swallowed. Shapes dissolve.

The camp looks smaller like this. Half-sunken. Sand piled against the barriers like a grave trying to swallow it whole. One guard tower is already down. The others lean under the weight. Power flickers across the fence line. Not full failure, but close. I know this layout. I know every guard rotation. Five shifts in a day. Jem’Hadar, Cardassian, Vorta. Two of each, sometimes three. They talk like they are in control. They act like no one is coming.

Everything narrows. Not to silence. Not to peace. I have never called it that. What I feel now is not calm. It is not stillness. It is something colder. A kind of exactness that only happens when the rest of me drops away and the part that survives takes over. I do not chase the thought. I let it sit where it is, just beneath the surface. And then I move.

The storm is thick now, dragging across the camp in swells. Wind cuts sideways, lifting grit into the air. Sand slaps against my skin, sharp enough to sting. It coats everything. Every seam. Every join. The taste of metal and grit in my mouth. The weight of it in my coat. The heat still holding under the fabric, but everything else already gone cold.

I don't feel the need to speak and neither do the others. Sound has become a luxury we cannot afford. I lift my hand instead. The signal is simple. The others are already in motion. Two guards ahead, caught in the sandblind. I see them only as shapes at first, but I do not need more than that. They are in the path. They are not going to walk away. Banik reaches one before I count to three. A single pull. One blade. His body folds soundlessly into the drift. Kerren is half a breath behind her. Quick, precise, a hand across the throat and a silent drop.
I lower my hand. And we go.

Not in formation, not anything trained during bootcamp. This is what it looks like when you’ve spent a war together and know each others’ movements like our own Each of us finding the gaps, the breaks, the weight of our movements balancing against one another without thought. I feel them the way I feel my own limbs. Kerren’s pause. Banik’s crouch. The way Martinez is just behind me, reading every step as if we trained this in silence. We move like something built for this. Not soldiers. Not vengeance. Something cleaner than that, something older.

The air in the camp is thicker than it was above. Not just from sand. The stink clings to everything. Metal, urine, the kind of stale, sour rot that comes from time and neglect and the absence of anything human. I hear breathing behind me, steady. Martinez. I do not turn, but I feel the way they stay close. Tension held low in their body. Not fear. Just readiness. That coil I have seen in them before. Focused. Honest.

There is a shift ahead. Shadows breaking pattern. A patrol. Close. They see us too late. I am already crouched. The rifle finds my shoulder before thought finishes forming. I aim centre. First shot takes the chest. The second goes high. Hits the neck just as the body starts to fall. The Jem’Hadar does not make a sound. He hits the ground like stone. The storm swallows the rest.

We do not stop. Ten cells, but there are nine people standing, one lying, too still to be unconscious, no movement of breath, and the pallor is wrong, grey and waxy, the kind of colour that does not change back. The others are upright, barely. Some with arms braced against the walls, some swaying where they stand. Faces hollowed by dehydration, bruising, neglect. Uniforms in pieces, bare skin visible in places where it should not be. One pair of eyes is locked onto mine, too wide, too sharp, watching me like I might vanish if they blink. Another flinches. One is still not seeing us. “Martinez,” I say, and they are already moving.

They split off smooth as breath, going quiet, going steady. Unlocking cells with fingers that never shake, not here, not now. Their pace is measured, not slow. They do not look to me for instruction. They just begin. Terrow crouches by the relay hatch, laying static interference, cutting the feed loop with that patch we built from old Cardassian subroutines and half-broken tricks. His jaw is set, breathing shallow. He’s holding off the worst of what he feels, but it pulls at him anyway, all that pain echoing too loud, pressing into him like heat. Betazoid training keeps him upright. Exhaustion claws at the rest. I do not interrupt. He knows I see it.

Banik is already at the furthest cell, checking for spinal damage, scanning what she can without turning movement into harm. Kerren keeps his rifle lifted, gaze sweeping outward through the storm-bleed. We all move in rhythm, so used to each other. It makes the next part easier.

I move deeper into the camp, alone, knowing the squad are focused on their tasks. It gives me the opening to secure our escape...to shut this place down without the others having to pay for it. It’s instinct, all I have to do...is to let go.

It takes me a few steps to realise the noise has changed again. Not in volume, but in pressure. Something behind the stone that feels wrong, just slightly off-pattern, like a current pulling in a direction I was not expecting. It makes me tense up, the echo of a feeling I had years ago rising in my throat. There is a corridor to the left. Narrow, recessed. Not marked in the usual way. No icon I recognise, just an old control panel half-buried in dust. Cardassian script, maybe, but the symbols blur, shifting in place, crawling just slightly when I try to hold focus on them.

I look away. I do not need to read it. I know the shape of an access point. I know when a room is meant to be passed by. This one was not for prisoners.

The door is ajar. I check the corners first. Then breathe in, weapon ready and step inside. The air is colder. Not temperature, not entirely. Just cold in the way quiet gets when it is hiding something. And I know, before I finish crossing the threshold, that this is not part of the official layout. It’s why it feels wrong, because this has been carved out or built in a way that isn’t part of the natural architecture.

This is something else. It is...too still, too clean in the way that a morgue is too clean. Not just swept, not just unused...meant to be this way. Sterile, deliberate, scrubbed down until it does not hold anything but the message left behind. The kind of clean that says you are not meant to see blood here, but you are meant to know it happened.

In the centre of the room, kneeling forward with the weight still in his spine, a Cardassian boy. Not much older than the youngest prisoner in the cages judging by the neck coils, the youthful and slender hands. The uniform dark with dust and dried sweat, his head gone. Clean shot. No hesitation, no panic. No smear or spatter. Just absence. He didn’t move. He didn’t fight.

This was arranged. Not interrogation. Not punishment in the moment. A lesson. A warning.

There’s a strip of fabric knotted around what’s left of his neck, and I know it before I’m even close enough to see the stitching…Federation cloth, torn from a duty jacket, worn and sun-bleached, twisted into a loop and tied like a noose or a collar.

Not meant for us. This is for the other Cardassians. For the prisoners. For anyone watching closely enough to see what happens when you make the wrong choice.

Traitor.

I have seen this before. Not here. Not in a message room buried under storm-sand on a prison ridge. But back on Turkana IV. In the tunnels. In the dark. On Turkana, where boys and girls were executed for cowardice, for failure, for stealing the wrong ration or flinching when they were told not to. I remember bodies left propped against walls so the rest of us could see. So we would understand.

And I do.

I crouch slowly, watching the way the body lists just slightly to one side, yet balanced enough not to fall over. There is no ID tag, no name that I can find. Just a child, or something near it, with no weapon, no rank, just hands burnt raw from friction and restraint. I don’t need the rest. He took a risk. He gave something to someone he wasn’t meant to help, maybe, or said something in confidence that was relayed. And they made an example of him. Not with rage but with cold calculation.

I stay there a moment longer, knees aching, mouth dry, the taste of dust and battery charge still sitting thick on my tongue, and I think not of justice or revenge or even command...just of how quiet the room is, how wrong that silence feels when you already know what it cost. I stand, slow, weight shifting through my spine, and I do not look away.

“Understood,” I say, not loudly. But I still say it, standing in front of the body. I've seen the message. I've recognised it. It makes the next part easier, especially since I am not watched by anyone. I let it shift inside me, moving my head a little. A twitch in my neck, small but audible. I close my eyes for a moment.

It’s time.

I open my eyes. And I let go.

The corridor stretches narrow and low, one strip of emergency lighting flickering overhead, the kind that hums without meaning to, casting everything in alternating rust and grey. There are two guards. Jem’Hadar. One standing square to the junction, one half-turned at the edge of a doorway, voice mid-word as I enter. I do not wait for them to finish.

I shoot the first in the chest. He falls against the wall with no sound but the weight of his body hitting ground. The second does not die clean. He jerks forward, catches the blast in the side, drops onto his elbows, starts crawling, dragging himself through dust thick enough to leave streaks behind him. His hand reaches, not for a weapon, just out, as if there is something left to hold. I step forward. Place my boot on his neck. The break is immediate. Not brutal. Just done. For me it is almost muscle memory.

The wall beside him has marks on it...old boots, scuffed low, someone tried to kick it open once, failed. There is a chip in the edge of the console where something struck it hard. I file it away without thinking.

I keep moving. The admin wing has its door half-open, slumped against the hinge, one of the bolts stripped. I slide through sideways, rifle raised, feel the room before I take it in. There is one occupant. Vorta. Desk-bound. Slim hands, pale skin, shaking slightly. Her weapon is in both hands but too high, aimed at my head in theory, but the way her fingers are flexing means she has never shot under fire.

She speaks, words that catch the peripheral of my attention, the tone pleading...but it doesn’t matter. I just taste the air, the metallic twang of old blood and sweat. I shoot her once, centre of mass. She drops fast. The weapon skids, tapping once against the edge of the desk, then the floor. The room smells like spent ozone, ink, and old plastics. There is a cup on the side with traces of something green dried in it, half a meal untouched. A data crystal lodged under a console leg to keep it from rocking. Her chair is too low for the desk. I do not know why that detail stays.

I scan the corners. No other bodies. No hidden movement. The room is done. I do not feel satisfaction. I do not feel anything. Not yet. I exhale slowly, weight shifting forward into the next step.

---

Sergeant Jace Morven
Platoon Sergeant, Alpha Squad
Federation Ground Forces
USS Guinevere

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