Small Wins [4/6]
Posted on Sat Jun 21st, 2025 @ 11:56am by Sergeant Jace Morven
1,884 words; about a 9 minute read
Mission:
Prologue
Location: USS Guinevere
Timeline: 2388
USS Guinevere, 2388
The mint tea was gone. Just the cup, cooling in his hand. He stared at it a while, like waiting would fill it back up.
Martinez.
He missed them. Not often, not openly. Just in the quiet moments. The ones when his guard slipped enough to let the feeling surface. They’d been sharp. Steady. Better than most. Better than him, maybe. He wondered if they were still alive. Still fighting. Still them.
Sometimes he thought about reaching out. Never did. He’d changed. Maybe they had too. But what if they hadn’t? He could look back without flinching. That was his curse. His talent.
But Martinez? Maybe they’d see him for what he really was. What he’d had to become. The wolf. The blade in the dark. The one who circled close and never blinked when it was time to tear something apart.
He set the cup down on the floor. Leaned back on the bunk, eyes tracing cracks in the ceiling.
Some memories stayed closer than others. Some didn’t just mark him: they were him. Etched into bone, not just thought. Not all of them clean. Most weren’t. But then, neither was he.
And he’d long stopped pretending otherwise.
Recon Mission Theta-9 — Dominion POW Camp Perimeter, February, 2375
The desert didn’t sleep.
Even at night, it shifted...winds howling across the dunes, sand turned to teeth. Heat clung low in the rock, radiating in slow waves. Somewhere out in the black, a perimeter beacon pulsed once every twenty seconds. Just enough to say: We’re still watching.
Jace lay prone at the edge of a rocky outcrop, phaser rifle resting across his arms. The camp below was brutal: half-buried cells, automated fences, a network carved into the stone like scar tissue. Jem’Hadar patrols moved in loops so tight they felt algorithmic. A few Cardassians drifted at the edges, but the Dominion didn’t trust them with prisoners unless it was for pain.
Behind him, the squad shifted in quiet rhythm. Kerren monitoring logs. Terrow marking rotations on a scratched-up PADD. Martinez at his usual post, watching the pattern, chewing it down to shape. Five days they’d been in position. Water was low. Tempers tighter.
Observe only. Do not engage.
Jace hadn’t said much. Rarely did. But the pressure hadn’t left his shoulders since they landed. It lived there now, tension wired into bone.
Martinez passed him a hydration tab without asking. He took it with a nod. Didn’t chew. Just let it sit on his tongue like salt. Terrow moved beside him, holding the PADD out.
“Can you double-check this timestamp? I think the rotation’s shortened again...” He stopped himself. Jace didn’t move. There was a beat of silence. Terrow pulled back. His voice was neutral. A withdrawal, not an apology. “Didn’t mean to assume.”
Jace finally turned his head, slowly. Met his eyes. No softness. “You didn’t.”
Terrow held his gaze. Not pity. Not challenge either. Just presence. Then he nodded, took the PADD back, and sat beside him.
Jace swallowed. Looked back to the camp. “I can hear the pattern, see it out there. Don’t need to read it.”
“Yeah,” Terrow said. “You’ve been right every time.” A pause. Not quite camaraderie. Not yet. But respect. Enough.
That night, it changed.
They saw the Jem’Hadar drag a prisoner out into the open. Young. Barely out of cadet greys. The other prisoners went still. So did the squad. He was executed just outside the fence. No warning. No show. Just a shot. Then silence.
Banik turned away. Kerren swore. Martinez watched. Didn’t move. “Wasn’t even a protest,” Rayian muttered. “No trial. Just gone.”
Jace stood. Walked ten paces, then returned. Still as stone.
Martinez’s voice finally broke the silence. “We can’t just watch this.”
“We’ve been ordered to,” Kerren said.
“We’ve been ordered to observe,” Terrow corrected. “That’s different.”
Jace exhaled slowly. “Command doesn’t want a rescue. Too much risk. No support. We’re expendable, but not that expendable.”
“So we just watch?” Martinez snapped.
“We don’t die pointlessly,” Jace replied. “That’s what they want. War without the headlines.”
“But you want to go,” Terrow said.
Jace didn’t deny it. “Not alone. Not without consent. One of us goes down, it’s a court-martial. Or worse.”
Banik buried her face in her hands. “Can’t sleep after watching that kid die.”
“There’s another one with burns,” Terrow said. “He’s barely walking.”
“Command doesn’t see it,” Kerren muttered. “But we do.”
A long silence. Martinez, quiet now, voice like steel under water: “We’re troopers. But we’re people first. If we give that up... we’re them.”
Jace turned. Eyes flat. Something caged flickered behind them: not grief. Not yet. But the ghost of it. Grief learned to wear armor. Then he nodded. “Tomorrow night. Storm’s due. Cuts visibility in half.”
No one questioned it. The choice had already been made.
The sandstorm arrived like it had been summoned. Winds shrieked over the ridge, grit lashing skin and steel. The air dropped ten degrees in minutes. Gear jammed. Coats weighed heavy with dust. It was hell. Jace felt it settle in like muscle memory. Cover. Camouflage. Chaos.
They moved in silence. No comms. No light. Phaser rifles set to kill. Not out of spite. Just because this part of the war didn’t have room for second chances.
Jace led them down the ridge. The camp lay half-submerged in sand. Barriers buried. Towers broken. Cells too small for grown bodies. Five shifts rotated through that pit daily. Jem’Hadar. Two Cardassians. One Vorta. All accounted for.
Didn’t matter. Orders said observe. Watch and wait. Report. But they’d watched too much already. They’d watched hope rot. Tonight, they’d act.
Jace’s focus narrowed. Not calm, he didn’t do calm in the battlefield. Wasn’t even sure if he did outside of it, or what he thought was calm was just detachment from himself. But there was clarity. Cold, honed, exact. This wasn’t vengeance. This was balance.
The perimeter fell fast. Two guards in the sandblind, just gone. No sound. Banik handled one. Kerren the other. Jace motioned forward. They moved like blood: silent, dark, inevitable.
The air inside the camp was thicker. A stink of metal, piss, and time. Martinez stayed at his shoulder. Controlled tension. They didn’t flinch. Just followed. A patrol spotted them near the admin wing. Too late. Jace crouched. Fired twice. Chest. Neck. The Jem’Hadar dropped. Sand ate the noise.
They moved.
The cages came first. Ten prisoners. Nine alive. One not. “Martinez,” Jace ordered.
Martinez peeled off. Quiet. Efficient. Unlocking cells with fingers that never shook. Terrow laid static interference, patching the signal loop with scavenged code, trying not to feel what the prisoners felt. Betazoid training battling exhaustion.
Jace moved deeper. That’s when he found it. The message room.
Clean. Tidy. Sterile.
And kneeling in the centre, a young Cardassian, slumped forward. Head gone. Execution clean. Precision, not panic. Around his neck: a strip of blue. Federation cloth. A sign. Not for them.
For the prisoners, for the other Cardassians.
Traitor.
Jace stared. Didn’t speak. Didn’t blink. He crouched. Looked for a name. There was none. Just a boy. A risk taken. A price paid. And a warning written in blood.
He rose. Quiet. Still. “Understood,” he whispered.
The next hall had two guards. He didn’t hesitate. Phaser to the chest. The second tried to crawl: wounded, not dead. Jace stepped on his neck. Heard the break. He moved on.
The admin office: one Vorta, trembling behind a desk. Weapon drawn. She said something. Didn’t matter. He shot her without blinking.
They got them out. Fourteen in total. Two carried. Jace took point. Kerren hauled a Tellarite over one shoulder. Terrow clearly struggled with what rolled off the rescued prisoners, his walls shattered by exhaustion, absorbing their pain like a sponge. Banik led the rear. Martinez didn’t speak. Not numb. Just full.
At the fallback point, medics waited. Storm still raging.
They spilled into motion: water, hypos filled with pain relief and things to stimulate bodies to push through, stabilizing them. Kerren drank in silence. Terrow cried quietly into his coat. Banik sat staring at her hands.
Raimi would’ve calmed them.
But Raimi was dead.
Jace stood beyond the lights. Martinez came beside him. Clean now, but their hands still shook. “You saw him,” they said.
Jace didn’t answer.
“The Cardassian.” A pause. “I think he tried to help.”
“I know,” Jace said. Didn’t look away. The sandstorm blotted out the stars. The dark pressed in.
“You didn’t leave anyone alive, did you?” Martinez asked softly.
“No.” A beat. Jace closed his eyes. A breath. Something low and bitter in his voice now. “Wasn’t going to let that kid die for nothing.”
Martinez didn’t speak again. They just stood there. Two troopers in the dark, watching the desert shift. Not speaking. Not needing to. The only sound the wind screaming over the dunes.
And the quiet truth of what they had chosen to be.
USS Guinevere, 2388
There was no visceral reaction when Jace prodded the memory...no flinch, no spike of emotion. Just the quiet pressure, like testing a bruise to see if it still ached. It didn’t. Not in the way it used to. But it was still there.
He remembered the Cardassian boy. Young. Precise execution. Message received: not just for the prisoners, but for any Cardassian thinking of stepping out of line. Jace had never been certain of what the kid had been up to. Federation sympathiser? Just someone who got tired of watching people scream?
Didn’t matter.
He didn’t imagine himself righteous. He wasn’t. He followed orders...until they stopped making sense. And when they did, he moved. Not for causes. Not even for justice. That night at the camp, it wasn’t about principles. It was about the smell of fear, the weight of it. Old. Familiar.
Something had cracked loose in him.
He’d felt that fear before. On Turkana IV, it had lived in his bones. He’d cut it out to survive: dug down until nothing soft remained.
He remembered a counsellor once telling him, voice low, eyes gentle in that careful way officers used when they thought you were damaged but salvageable: “You had to cauterise part of yourself. I understand. But have you ever thought about what it cost?”
He’d said no. Said there’d never been a part to reconnect to.
That ended the conversation.
But maybe that was why he acted. Why he broke orders. Why he couldn’t watch that camp one more night.
Because maybe he’d burned away softness.
But not memory.
And not hatred.
Not hatred for people who used fear like a weapon and called it control.
That part still worked fine.
To be continued in part 5
----
Sergeant Jace Morven
Platoon Sergeant
Alpha Squad
USS Guinevere
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