Shadows in the Frame

Posted on Friday June 20, 2025 @ 9:28pm by Captain Yoralig Gearev & Lieutenant JG Melnoka 'Mel' Han'potla

926 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Episode 1: A New Frontier
Location: Captain's Ready Room
Timeline: 2424.6.16 1130 Hours

The ready room was quiet—quiet in the way only a sealed space can be, where the walls hold their breath for you.
Captain Yoralig Gearev sat alone, uniform jacket folded over the back of his chair, sleeves creased with the weight of the day. The room’s lights were dim, but the console’s pale blue glow illuminated his features in stark lines.

Onscreen, grainy footage played in silence: a 2391 Federation Council session on Coridanite reform policy. The camera swept across a wide shot of the council chamber. Security footage from an evidence file played in the corner inset—an overhead view of a mining port warehouse. Syndicate members moved in and out of frame—mostly armed, mostly masked.

And then—there. A teenage figure at the edge of the chaos. Moving crates, ducking a weapon discharge, briefly glancing up at the camera. Broad-shouldered. Pale stony skin. Violet eyes.

Him.

He paused the feed, froze it on that exact frame.

They hadn’t named him. Not then. Not in any official record. The Siroc Ring—the most powerful of Coridan’s old crime syndicates—had protected its assets. Protected him. For years, he was a tool. A courier. A fist. A voice that took orders, spoke lies, made sure shipments flowed and secrets stayed buried.

And when it all began to collapse—when the Ring turned on itself under Federation pressure and the Reform Authority began its brutal consolidation—he disappeared. Vanished into the refugee quotas, shaved clean of history, and remade himself inside a Starfleet cadet uniform.

But the image remained.

The Council had reviewed it. No identification. No charges. Just another blurred face in a flood of post-collapse footage.

Except it wasn’t just any footage. Not to him. That was Port Siln, on Coridan Prime’s southern equator—a Siroc-controlled zone back then. The kind of place where bodies were currency and loyalties changed based on whose ship landed that day. He’d grown up in that heat, with stone beneath his bare feet and promises whispered between shipments.

The Siroc Ring was gone now. At least publicly. The few surviving captains had been quietly folded into industrial oversight roles or made to disappear. But some of the associates had escaped scrutiny. Some had reinvented themselves. Like him.

He leaned back, even now, decades later, the shame burned hot under his skin. Not for what he did. Not even for who he’d been. But because if the right person saw that frame—just one—his entire career could unravel. Not through scandal. Through doubt. Questions Starfleet wouldn’t ask aloud, but would always carry in their eyes.
Was he loyal? Was he still compromised? Was he just another syndicate-made captain, pretending to wear a uniform he didn’t deserve? The chime at the door broke the silence.

“Enter,” he said.

The doors hissed open and in swept Lieutenant JG Melnoka Han’potla, barefoot as usual, her tawny Risian skin warm against the ready room’s colder palette. She moved like someone used to eyes following her. Confident, bright, disarming. She was holding a PADD.

“I figured you wouldn’t want to dig for it,” she said lightly. “Here’s a copy of the final press cut—your words, your camera angles, your long brooding silences. Very mysterious.”

He took the PADD with a nod. “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

She didn’t leave immediately. Instead, she walked casually to the couch near the far wall, then paused—glancing toward his console. She tilted her head.

“Researching something?”

“Old Council footage,” he said without hesitation. “Public record.”

Mel nodded. “Coridan?”

His jaw tensed almost imperceptibly. “Yes.”

There was a pause.

She walked to the edge of the desk and perched there lightly, fingers trailing over the armrest. “I did a profile series last year on post-conflict transition worlds. Coridan came up more than once. The Siroc Ring always had this... mythic reputation. Like they were everywhere and nowhere. Shadows with bank accounts.”

He said nothing.

She studied him for a moment. Her smile faded—not in a dramatic way, but subtly. Gently. “Captain… I’m not looking to dig up dirt. But if there’s something in your past that could come back to you—from someone else—I’d rather we manage the story now than fight it later.”

He looked up at her, calm but unreadable. “There is no story to manage.”

A long pause.

Then she said quietly, “Understood.”

She pushed herself off the desk. “Well, the footage is on the PADD. You came off better than you think.”

He gave her a short nod. “Thank you.”

At the door, she glanced back. “Just so you know… I’ve worked with a lot of officers who carry weight they don’t put in their files. Some of them crumble under it. Some of them wield it like a weapon.”
She smiled faintly. “You wear it like armor.”

Then she was gone. The ready room fell back into silence. Gearev leaned forward, reopened the footage, and studied the paused image again. The boy was still there. Still frozen in a moment of fear, sweat, and survival. A boy forged in the veins of a dying world. A man who now commanded a starship at the edge of history. He touched the console gently, and deleted the file. Not out of fear. Out of choice. Some ghosts didn’t deserve resurrection. And the Siroc Ring? It was ashes now. Whatever embers still glowed in the dark… they would not find him.
Not yet.

 

RSS Feed