Patterns in the Silence: Part II – Names in the Silence

Posted on Wed Sep 10th, 2025 @ 1:21pm by Sergeant Jace Morven
Edited on Thu Sep 11th, 2025 @ 10:07am

2,700 words; about a 14 minute read

Turkana IV, 2363

The rifle sits wrong against my shoulder. The stock keeps sliding when I breathe. My left arm has to stretch too far to hold it steady. Grip never feels tight enough. It’s the same rifle I’ve trained with, but in the fight it shows its weight.

“Red scarf,” someone hisses. “Aim for centre mass.”

I don’t ask who they are. You don’t ask. Red scarf means enemy. That’s enough. This churn’s other faction to take out. We creep through the tunnels. Dim, jagged. The air tastes of metal and old breath.

Territory doesn’t matter, it all just...smudges. Changes week by week, fight by fight. Maybe it was ours once. Maybe never. Doesn’t matter. The walls don’t care. Carved smooth in some places, blackened in others. Scarred stone.
Something tugs at me. A half-memory. Crawling here before. Smaller. Hiding. Running. The fear of being caught pressing in as tight as the walls.

My boot rubs with every step. Too big, the heel slipping, a stone rolling under my toes. My stomach aches, empty and raw. Hunger sits heavy, louder than the fear if I let it.

I shove it all down. Keep moving, because it’s the only thing I can do.
I crouch beside two older boys. Their rifles shake, knuckles white. I know I’m being watched so I keep myself still. I’ve done this before. Not the first fight.
I don’t fire first. Not yet.

Then it starts. Plasma fire slams through the dark. Screams cut the air. The stink of burnt flesh hits my throat. Smoke and ozone sting my eyes. My ears ring, pulse hammering. All I see are flashes of light and the dirt under my boots, until I make my eyes lift to see what is happening.

Someone drops ahead, face-first. Blood spreads out fast, black and slick.

Then it cuts through. A snap, making my eyes narrow. It is sharp, like a whip, loud like an explosion that echoes in the tunnels. The whistle-snap-crack noise. Not a phaser. Projectiles. I know what they do. I have seen it. They rip through you, tear you open inside. Leave you gasping, broken. Make death come slow. A phaser is clean. Quick. I would take that. Not this. Never this.

Movement just beyond the crate. Too close. A blur of red.

I remember that the other boy didn’t raise his rifle. He just turned and started to run. I didn’t think. My hands were already tight on the grip, my breath short, my shoulder braced. I fired. Maybe out of instinct or just because it was what you did. He dropped without a sound. Wrong, no hands trying to catch the fall. Dead. Or close to.

Then the silence came, heavy and ringing inside my skull. Always the worst part. Your own pulse too loud.

I moved forward. Training, or maybe Harven’s voice, told me what came next. You checked. You always checked. The boy’s body was slack, bent the wrong way. Blood spread across the rock where his head had struck it, but slow and sluggish, no heartbeat to pump it out.

I knelt. My fingers touched the scarf. It was soft, worn thin, red that had faded to almost brown. It smelled of sweat and smoke. I slipped it into my pouch.
I think I knew why. Because it could have been me. If I had dropped the rifle and turned, it would have been me lying there.

I kept the scarf. Couldn’t put it down. Couldn’t bury it. Hid it, but kept it. But couldn’t remember that other boy’s face a year later.

U.S.S. Guinevere, 2388

The shoulder pulls again. Left side, same place as always when I start drifting. I roll it back until the muscle shifts and the ache eases. Not pain. Just an old echo. It reminds me it was there once. Nothing more.

I catalogue it, then shelve it. Pain is a fact. You acknowledge it, move on. If it gets so bad you can’t move, hope a medic gets to you.

The bag sways, still trembling from the last hit. My knuckles prickle with heat. Sweat runs down my spine, soaks into the waistband of the fatigues. My breathing is heavier now, but it’s not fatigue. Focus burns harder than muscle does.

Hair sticks to my temple with my sweat, my arms are heavy, tight. That is good, work should leave a mark. It is not enough to stop yet.

I take the bottle, drink until I need to catch my breath, then pour what’s left over my face. Cold shocks through me, dripping down the collar. For a moment I want the shirt off, but I leave it. If someone comes in, they’ll stare. The scars would draw eyes, and I don’t want any on me today. Starfleet types treat theirs like decoration or erase them clean. I keep mine. Not because I want them, but because they work. They show what I’ve done, what I’ll do. They keep people at a distance without me saying a word. That saves time and…they’re mine. They happened to me.

People are never simple to read. Too many smiles, too much laughter, questions that carry weight I can’t give back. The scars make it easier. They speak for me.

I watch the bag sway. Step in close. I drive the fist low, hard. A body shot. The kind that cuts legs out, drops a man before he knows he’s falling.

It isn’t anger. It’s measure. Every strike the same. Not release. Calibration. Keeping the rhythm tuned, ready for when it isn’t a bag.

Starbase 173 - Holding Level 3B, Early 2368

They say it is not a cell. “Holding room.” Softer word. But the walls do not care what you call them. Grey, flat, sealed. A bunk in the corner. A wall-screen on repeat with Starfleet officers smiling like they have never had dirt under their nails. Too clean, too calm. I keep my eyes off it. The light hurts. The smiles make my jaw lock.

I already carry enough rage. So I stay on the floor, arms locked around my knees, chin down. Seventeen, but smaller here. The air tastes strange, scrubbed raw. No smoke, no dust, no oil. Just thin and sharp, like it has been washed too many times. Even the silence feels different. It cuts. Only the hum beneath it all, steady and wrong, like the station has lungs that do not know how to breathe.

I have never been in space before. It presses on me. The gravity is here, but not right, like the floor could give way if I breathe too hard. The walls pretend they are solid, but I know what is outside them. Nothing. That thought makes my stomach twist.

No gunfire. No ration lines. No one shouting orders, no one dying in front of me. Just time. Just the thoughts I cannot shut down. I hate both.

The door chimes and I don’t move. I learned a long time ago that movement gives people something to work with. The door slides open anyway and it is her. Dannic. Tall, steady, the same as yesterday and the day before that. She was the one who pulled me in here, not cruel, but with no room to fight. She never gives me room to fight. And still, she keeps coming back. Always calm. Green eyes that don’t flinch, no matter how hard I try to look at her like I would an enemy.

She carries tea again. She always does. Mint, sweet, sharp enough to cut through the scrubbed air in here. I don’t drink it, but I can’t stop noticing the smell. Something about it lingers, like it belongs to her, like it’s her way of saying she intends to sit with me whether I want her to or not. She places the mug near me, not close enough to trap me, just close enough that I could take it if I decided to. Then she lowers herself to the floor, slow and deliberate, the way someone might approach an animal that hasn’t decided yet whether it will bite. She doesn’t talk right away. She just watches me, not like she’s searching for the weak point to push into, but as though the looking itself is enough. I don’t understand that. Nobody does that.

It makes me suspicious, the way her silence isn’t sharp, the way she doesn’t use it to press me. It feels like softness and I don’t know what to do with that. Softness has always been the thing that comes before a hit, before betrayal. Except she never follows through. She just waits.

When she finally speaks, her voice is steady. “Do you have a name?”

She has asked before and I’ve always left her with nothing, letting the question hang like a trap I refuse to step into. But this time, my throat tightens around something I don’t understand, and the word comes out before I can stop it. “Jace.” It is the first time I have ever spoken it. My name, claimed aloud, shaped with my own mouth. It feels like something breaking open in me. Not violent, not sharp. Just heavy, like a stone dropped down a well, the silence after it even louder than the sound itself.

She only nods, like that’s enough. She doesn’t reach for a padd, doesn’t write it down, doesn’t turn it into record or evidence. She just accepts it. “Last name?”

“…Morven. I think. I said it once. It stuck.” The honesty feels strange in my mouth, raw and sharp and clean all at once.

“Alright,” she says, and nothing more.

I bow my head, let my hair fall forward to shield me. It’s easier to stay behind it, in the dark, where I can keep watching her without her seeing how much it costs me.

“Do you know what you want?”

The words stop me cold. Wanting is a danger. On Turkana IV, want was weakness you carried in the open. If you wanted food, someone took it from you. If you wanted shelter, someone drove you out. Wanting made you a target. What do I want? To forget the tunnels, the gunfire, the dust in my teeth. To feel warmth, but not this kind. Not quiet kindness that expects nothing back. That is bait. A promise laid out like a snare. “I don’t know,” I mutter. The sound feels brittle.

“That’s okay,” she says. Calm, steady. “We’ll figure it out.”

The assessments begin. People in clean coats ask questions I do not understand, scribble notes on padds, glance at me like I am a set of numbers to put in order. They prod my arms, my ribs, the half-healed cuts and the deep marks that have been part of me for years. One of them talks about “removing old scarring,” voice light as if they are offering me a gift. I flinch back, teeth clenched. They are mine, I want to tell them. Proof of the fights I survived, the places I learned where not to bleed. They are not stains to scrub away. They are my record. I refuse to let them close with the regenerator, and when I shove their hand aside the look on their face is confusion, not anger. That almost rattles me more.

The days blur. Interviews, silences, the ache of being handled. But I start to change anyway. I eat. At first it feels like a trick. The food is too rich, too much, and my stomach knots hard against it. I wait for the moment they take it away, laugh at me for thinking it was mine. But the plates keep coming, and slowly my body remembers what to do. Weight creeps back. My skin stretches less tight across my bones, padded by muscle and fat.

I wash. That is stranger. Dirt used to be armour. The reek of smoke and sweat kept people at a distance. Now they herd me into a sonic shower. The first time is panic. Noise too loud, vibrations too sharp, every nerve screaming like I am under fire. I fight the urge to bolt, chest locked tight.

But then...it shifts. The storm eases into something else. Efficiency. Power. The machine scours everything from me in seconds and when I step out my skin feels new, like I’ve shed armour I didn’t know I was carrying. My hair does not itch. My hands feel lighter. I catch myself wanting to step back in, to feel it again.

And that terrifies me. Because I like it. Because for a few breaths I feel clean, and free, and I don’t believe I deserve either.

The room unsettles me from the moment I step inside. Too bright. Too still. The walls are painted in soft colours, yellow and blue, the kind meant to settle nerves. They press on me instead, a heaviness against my skin. The air is warm, warmer than it should be, thick enough that sweat gathers at the back of my neck. A table stands in the middle with stacks of cubes and slates lined up in neat rows, all clean edges and order.

I sit and the chair feels wrong beneath me, too light, too smooth. My jaw locks tight as I stare at the marks on the slate. Letters. Words. They will not stay still. They twist, crawl across the surface, refuse to land. I know the word. I can hear it in my head, say it out loud, but when I try to catch it on the page it slips away. Heat crawls up my throat. My fists clench until the tendons pull tight. Their eyes are on me. I have felt this before. Once, years ago, someone shoved a slate in my hands, ordered me to read. When I failed the words slipped sideways the same way. The sharp voice called me useless, and the crack across the back of my head drove the shame deeper. I can still feel the ache in my skull when I think of it. Now the shame tastes the same, thick and bitter, filling my mouth until I cannot breathe. I wait for it to come again, the barked order, the slap, the proof that failure always carries punishment.

Dannic crouches down beside me. Her voice is steady, calm. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not,” I snap, too fast. I bite down on the rest, jaw hard, chest burning. This is not anger. Anger would give me something to fight with. This is humiliation, and it leaves me empty.

The facilitator studies the scans on their padd. Their voice is quiet. “You’re dyslexic.”

The word is strange. I do not know what it means. My throat closes around it. “I’m what?”

“Your brain processes written language differently,” Dannic says. She speaks like it is just a fact, nothing more. But I do not trust facts that come in new words. Every word I have ever been given by others has been sharp. Savage. Defective. Disposable. I wait for this one to cut the same way, to mark me as broken.

But she does not use it like that. She looks at me, steady, patient, and her voice lowers as if she knows where the blade has always fallen. “It doesn’t mean you’re stupid.”

The words are simple, but they reach somewhere I did not know I had kept locked. A knot eases inside me, small but real. For the first time, I pull in a breath that does not scrape. The room is still too warm, still too bright, but for one moment it does not feel like a trap.

---

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

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