Seventeen Minutes

Posted on Mon Jul 28th, 2025 @ 4:00am by Sergeant Jace Morven

2,483 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Prologue
Location: USS Guinevere | Dovar IX
Timeline: 2387/2388

Dovar IX, 2387, ‘Operation Drummer’s Risk’ aftermath

Blood dripped from his fingertips.

He sat on a broken wall, body slightly curled forward, elbows resting on his knees. His hands hung loose, not folded - just there. The sleeve of his uniform was sliced open, deep enough to still bleed. But not all the blood on his hands was his.

“Corporal?”

He didn’t move. Didn’t blink. His mind was empty as he stared at the body on the ground; laid out, uniform jacket pulled over the chest. Blue hands folded neatly. Still wet with blood.

“Corporal Morven?”

The voice tugged at something inside him. A thread of meaning he almost recognised. Familiar. Insistent.

“Jace?”

That cut deeper. Still, he didn’t look away. His blue eyes stayed fixed on the body. An empty shell, laid to rest for now. Face covered.

He hadn’t done that.

Who had?

A spark of pain. Sudden and sharp. His head turned at the force of it, eyes blinking.

A slap.

He focused. Someone was kneeling in front of him. Not a medic. Squad. Brown hair, freckles, blood on his fingers.

What was his name?

“Morven, I can’t have you go into shock,” the voice hissed.

Another stab of pain…this time his arm. Fingernails had dug into the gash in his sleeve. His hand reacted, gripping the wrist, not hard, just steady.

“Connor,” Jace said aloud. The name landed like a fact. “Corporal F. Connor.”

Brown eyes met his. Wide, but focused. Trying to help.

He released him.

Looked down at his arm. Fresh blood. Looked at the hand that had triggered the pain. Then up again.

He inhaled…slow, through his nose. Held it. Exhaled.

Slotted back into the part of him that could function. Could speak. “I need to make a report.”

“Prophets…” The Bajoran sergeant stepped forward, voice low. “He needs a counsellor.” He looked down at the body. Something close to pity in his eyes.

“Connor, I got this. Morven: stand.”

Jace stood. The body obeyed.

He didn’t flinch when the sergeant began to wrap the wound on his arm, didn’t really focus on anything. Just stared forward. But sound came clearer now. The edges of the world were reassembling.

He could hear again.

Stand down, Morven. It’s just an exercise.

He blinked. Slow. That voice…familiar. Warm.

But not real.

Just his brain, trying to steady him.

Because Garin Vel was lying on the ground in front of him.

And Jace Morven had finished the mission.

2 hours earlier

Dovar IX was dry, sun-blasted, and dust-coloured; the kind of place where heat soaked into your bones by midday and stayed there. The back of your throat felt sandy. Your nostrils too dry to smell anything but scorched grit.

Jace hated it.

Not because of the heat.

Because the terrain whispered: bad footing. Too many blind angles. Too many tight corners in the urban remains of what had once been a proud Federation-built settlement. Now it was an insurgent haven dressed up as a diplomatic mission.

A mercenary group with bad ideas had taken the away team. Killed the Security personnel outright. Taken the diplomat hostage, along with two others.

Bravo Company got sent down. Charlie as backup. In case things went to shit.

Vel’s words, that.

Sergeant Garin Vel knew how to swear, even when grinning.

He’d split the unit based on experience: himself and a small squad. Connor with the backup team. Morven with the cover element.

Second line. The ones who went in if things got hairy.

Vel had taken the ones he knew were quiet. Surefooted. Balanced.

Jace hadn’t liked it.

But it had been happening more often: Vel giving him his own team to lead. Practice for becoming a Sergeant.

Orders were orders.

He lifted the phaser rifle, scanning the rooftops through the scope. A quiet beep answered on his wrist…tricorder readings coming in. Fortified position, just like the schematics said. He’d seen the blueprints. He knew the access points.

But first, they’d have to get through the labyrinth of the structure itself.

“Minor contact. North quadrant. Proceeding with caution.”

Vel’s voice. Professional. Not cold, not warm. Just…factual.

Jace didn’t respond. It wasn’t meant for him. That was for Command: positional logs.

Then something shifted.

A high-pitched whine crept in, made the nearby troopers flinch.

Jace kept his face still. But the silence that followed was worse.

Static. Loud between breaths. Garbled.

He checked the tricorder.

Readings scrambled.

Jaw tightened.

He said nothing. Just ran the network integrity scan again, tapped twice, and switched to the encrypted fallback channel.

Dead silence.

One of the younger privates, Detare, muttered, “That’s not good.”

Jace didn’t reply. He was already moving. Slow. Methodical. Toward the forward perimeter. Rifle slung. Sidearm checked. His mind turning over possibilities: Ambush. Jammer. Something worse.

Then the emergency ping hit.

His eyes narrowed.

The message was fragmented…unreadable to him, except for the three letters that mattered:

MIA.

And with it, a final, unsent packet from Vel.

Only a few seconds survived.

“…hold them off… get the asset out…Morve—”

Then silence.

Static again. That same pitch.

Jace looked to the private still trying to re-establish comms. Watched their hands.

“Stay. Wait for orders,” he said. His voice low. Firm.

They had good cover here.

As for him?

He was already walking.

Toward the smoke.

Dovar IX, 2387, ‘Operation Drummer’s Risk’ aftermath

“Corporal Morven. Report.”

Jace blinked.

He stood at attention in front of the Major.

Short. Light hair. Angry blue eyes.

Always chewing something: from words to food to pieces of bark, if that was all he had in reach.

“Communications were compromised.” His voice was level. Flat. Almost clinical.

The Major narrowed his eyes. “We got fragments from Vel’s combadge. You were second team. Explain how the first team ended up dead.”

A long pause. Jace didn’t flinch.

“We lost contact at 14:32. Encrypted fallback was dead. Tricorder readings scrambled. Tactical data was unreliable.”

“And your orders were to hold your position.”

Another pause. Jace’s jaw shifted. Barely. “Yes, sir.”

“And yet I’m told you breached a fortified structure alone, without backup.”

Jace said nothing.

The silence stretched.

The Major’s chewing slowed. “Corporal. I asked you a question.”

Jace’s voice didn’t rise. Didn’t waver. “There was no time.”

“For what?”

“To wait for the bodies.”

The Major froze, just for a second. Then: “You mean the hostages.”

Jace didn’t answer. His eyes didn’t move.

The Major’s voice dropped, cold and pointed. “Sergeant Vel was not the objective.”

No reply.

Just a faint tightening around Jace’s eyes. His hands were still at his sides. Loose. Open.

“Do you understand what kind of tribunal this could lead to? You went in alone. You disobeyed protocol. You used lethal force against potentially surrendering combatants-”

“They weren’t surrendering,” Jace said. It wasn’t loud. But it cut through the air like a blade.

The Major stared at him, like he was trying to work out what exactly he was looking at. Eventually, he spoke again, slower, as if he was speaking to an idiot. “The diplomat confirmed you saved them.”

Jace didn’t respond.

“They also said you were covered in blood. That you didn’t speak. That when you handed them over to the evac team, you looked like you’d walked out of a fire.”

Silence again.

“They said... you called Vel’s name. Once.”

Jace blinked, slow. Once. And then, finally, he spoke again. “He was still warm.”

One hour, 32 minutes earlier

The air stank of stagnant water and polymer rot, thick enough to coat the back of his throat. Narrow and half-collapsed, lit only by the flickering glow of Jace’s wrist torch.

Not meant for ingress. Definitely not for someone carrying armour and blood. His shoulder scraped concrete. Metal hissed against rusted pipe.

But that hadn’t stopped him.

He crawled on elbows and knees, dust caking his uniform, grit working into his sleeves. His breath was low and measured. One goal. One vector.

Find the diplomat. Retrieve Vel’s team: or what was left of them.

And if not...?

He didn’t answer that. Not even to himself. When he emerged into the compound’s underbelly, sound crystallised. Pacing. A scream. Then silence.

Overhead, power cables spiderwebbed the ceiling. No sensors. No alarms. It was falling apart, held together by lost hope and desperation.

Phaser rifle in hand. Already set to level seven: lethal. They had already killed the away team’s security. Potentially Vel’s team.

The knife strapped to his thigh. His knife. Steel. Physical. Uncompromising.

He moved like shadow.

And the wolf followed.

The first sentry didn’t see him. One press of the trigger. The body jolted. Jace caught it by the collar before it fell. No noise.

Two more. Distracted. Playing cards. Easy targets.

One fumbled for a projectile pistol. The other froze.

Two quick shots.

They slumped.

Room to room. Corridor to corridor. No voice. No hesitation. Not rage. Not grief. Just function.

Three minutes in. Mid-level stairs.

A fireteam in scavenged armour: disruptors, phasers, old Federation pattern. Mercenaries. Maybe ex-Dominion allies. Maybe just ghosts of old wars.

The door blew inward with a plasma breaching charge. White-hot flash.

Three shots. Three down.

The last crawled. Jace stepped over him. Kicked the weapon aside.

The man looked up, wide-eyed, mouthing something. Mercy? A swear? A name?

Jace fired. Didn’t matter.

He cleared seven more rooms. Every shot fast, controlled. Every movement precise.

One caught him behind a door. Too close for phasers. Knives. Hands. Anything sharp.

The blade bit deep; four inches through muscle and uniform. Jace didn’t feel it.

Just headbutted him. Drove the knife in. Watched him drop.

Something feral bled through in the silence between kills. Not joy. Not release. Just inevitability. His body remembered what his mind wouldn’t allow.

Two hostiles raised their hands in surrender. Jace paused just long enough to see their eyes.

One lunged.

The other flinched.

He shot them both.

Nine minutes: the holding cell.

The diplomat was slumped against the wall. Bound. Bleeding. A crude explosive rigged to his vest. Primitive. Sloppy. Still enough to kill.

Jace didn’t speak. Fingers steady, he defused the charge.

The diplomat said something: voice ragged, desperate. Two more Starfleet bodies close by.

Jace didn’t answer. Not out of cruelty. Just nothing to say.

He picked him up. The flinch was instinctive. Not from pain. From fear. From recognition.

At the blood soaked into Jace’s uniform. His arms. His face. At the dead stare in his eyes.

Eleven minutes.

Jace stepped into the haze of the Dovarian dusk, cradling the diplomat like dead weight.

Evac spotted him. Relief curdled into silence.

He didn’t look like a soldier. He looked like the reason hell had rules.

“Where’s Sergeant Vel?” someone called out.

Jace said nothing.

He set the diplomat down, handed off his phaser rifle to the nearest medic, and turned.

“Corporal Morven! You don’t have orders to go in! Stand down!”

Not an officer.

Didn’t matter.

He didn’t stop.

Seventeen minutes.

He emerged again.

Carrying Vel’s body.

The armour was scorched.

Torso pierced with what had once been a repair tool: a bolt punched through him, fist-sized and final.

His eyes were closed. His face calm.

Arms crossed. Tucked tight. Like it meant something.

He laid him down like it was routine.

Then stood.

Still. Silent. Blood in the cracks of his knuckles.

The diplomat whispered something to the medics…something about being alive only because of the quiet one.

Jace didn’t notice.

He sat. Stared ahead. Seemed to be watching the body.

Truth was, Jace Morven saw nothing.

Not even himself.

USS Guinevere, 2388

The scar still pulled when he flexed.

Four inches. Inner forearm. Defensive wound.

The blade had cut across muscle…angled down, meant for the throat. He’d intercepted it mid-motion, felt the wet heat, seen the blood hit the floor before he registered it was his.

He hadn’t felt it at the time. Only knew it was there because the man who gave it to him dropped three seconds later.

He exhaled through his nose. Quiet. Contained.

The bunk creaked faintly as he shifted, his back pressing against the cool bulkhead. One boot planted, the other resting sideways on the edge of the mattress. Uniform jacket shed. Undershirt darkened at the collar. Gloves still on.

Wool against skin. The right hand resting loosely on his thigh. The left, scarred forearm angled up across his lap.

Green. Fingerless. Not regulation.

He flexed his fingers once, then stilled. The wool shifted over the ridge of old scar tissue. The stitches had held, back then. But it had healed unevenly…a raised line, tight when he turned his wrist. A memory, etched in flesh.

The room was dark but not silent. He could hear movement down the corridor; a locker shutting, someone laughing too loudly near the washroom. None of it pierced.

His gaze had been locked forward for too long. Not staring. Not thinking, exactly. Just… caught.

The memory had come like that. Not in order. Not in feeling. Just there. Dovar IX. The breach. The bolt through Vel’s chest. The heat in his own blood. The way the diplomat flinched when he was carried. Talking about Vel with the counsellor had done it. He knew it the moment he had sat down in her office.

Eleven minutes. Seventeen, total.

He knew the timings better than his own pulse.

Jace blinked. Once.

Came back to himself.

His gloved hand curled slightly. Not a fist. Not a reflex. Just present.

The wool held. Gave. Didn’t demand anything.

It smelled faintly of Engineering, of dark tea leaves, of someone else’s quarters. Someone who worked with their hands. Someone who didn’t ask for explanations. Someone whose noise didn’t shatter things.

He didn’t take them off. Didn’t need to.

Didn’t want to.

His eyes went to the side. To the mint plant, secured. Secured not just against people accidentally knocking it over, but for zero g. For a ship’s turbulence. So that something could survive. He owed that to Alina, with the gentle smile and eyes.

Outside, the ship thrummed. Life support systems ticking over. The rhythm of something still moving.

So was he. Not healed. Not better.

Just… not bleeding.

For now, that was enough.

---

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

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