Maps

Posted on Wed Aug 6th, 2025 @ 4:07pm by Lieutenant Commander Jalay Prinnet

824 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Pilot - "The Gate"
Location: Main Engineering
Timeline: MD001, during Boarding

As a child, Jalay Prinnet had been more interested in making maps than building bombs.

Star maps, road maps, circuit maps, maps of Bajoran cultural heritage sites—she loved maps. Sometimes she made them using simple, common components like stick scratchings in the dirt, and other times she used more sophisticated tools like paper and charcoal. It was only later during her time with the Resistance that she turned this map-making talent towards violence. Maps of promising ambush sites. Maps of enemy installations. Maps of known collaborators and their families. Maps were a puzzle—what’s the most effective way to represent reality? How can maps help sentient beings understand their environment, and then change it?

Bombs weren’t dissimilar, from a certain point of view. They could be simple or they could be sophisticated. There was that old engineering joke that anything can be a bomb if you build it badly enough. The puzzle came from efficiency. First, how can you make the biggest boom? Second, how can you disguise your bomb from scanners, so that they can be where they need to be, when they need to be? Bombs were also about changing the environment, but in a different way from maps.

Combining her interest in map-making and aptitude in bomb-making was what made Jalay so valuable to the Kaval Resistance Cell. When you can map the daily routines of Cardassian officers, when you can put an explosive in an inconspicuous package, when you have the maintenance access codes to reach locations that other people couldn’t reach, when your natural bearing and coloring and gender and age and ugliness makes you borderline invisible to security guards, you become extremely, extremely valuable indeed.

Things were different in Starfleet. Starfleet frowned upon bombs. It didn’t approve of mines—most of the time. But what Starfleet did love was maps. From her office in main engineering, Jalay could press a single button on her PADD and bring up a wide selection of meticulously detailed maps.

> Maps of the Guinevere (Renaissance-II class).
> Maps of intruder alerts (Deck 19, Deck 16, Deck 11).
> Maps of Deck 16 (Engineering section).
> Maps of Main Engineering itself (covered in blue dots representing Starfleet security officers and ground forces setting up barricades and taking covered firing positions).
> Maps of corridors leading to Main Engineering (covered in red dots indicating hostile Romulan and Reman life-forms rapidly approaching).

Suddenly there was an extra red dot on her PADD map. This one wasn’t glowing brightly and moving closer. This one glistened dimly under the red-alert lights. Prinnet reached up and touched her forehead. Yes, it was still bleeding. There was presumably a matching forehead-shaped blood stain on the carpet out in main engineering by the center console where she’d been knocked down when the Romulans attacked. She brushed aside the blood spot and went back to the maps.

> Maps of the force-field emitters that separated one section of corridor from another (this is where maps could change the environment. With four taps of her finger, Jalay brought up four force-fields, stopping the approaching red dots in their tracks. She watched the red dots bounce back and forth between the thin lines that mapped the newly erected force-fields. She imagined them cursing in Romulese and trying to find a way out of their new energy prisons).

> Maps of the EPS conduits on Deck 16 (most of them separated from the corridors only by a single bulkhead and two or three magnetic bottles. EPS, an easy acronym for electrified plasma systems, the superheated power that flowed from their warp core to their ship’s systems).

As her finger hovered over one of the EPS conduit controls on her PADD, she reflected on how arbitrary the rules of war could be. Grenades, small thrown objects which exploded to kill the enemy, were fine, but mines, small planted objects which exploded to kill the enemy, weren’t fine. You could use a transporter to get close to the enemy, but you couldn’t transport the enemy into space. Cardassians were allowed to kill Bajoran children in mines, but Bajorans weren’t allowed to kill Cardassian children in schools.

According to Starfleet, you were supposed to let the enemy fire first—Starfleet doesn’t fire first. But even if these specific Romulans hadn’t yet shot Jalay, the ship they’d come from had shot the ship Jalay was on.

Jalay pressed the button.

On her map, the blue box with red dots filled with yellow fire as the EPS conduit in the bulkhead dropped its magnetic containment field for less than a second. The magnetic containment field came back up. The yellow fire in the blue box faded. There were no more red dots in the blue box.

Jalay swiped blood away from her forehead, then flipped her PADD back to the damage control display. She preferred this map.

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