Within Tolerance

Posted on Mon Sep 7th, 2026 @ 4:38pm by Captain Malcom Llwyedd & Lieutenant Soto Gantt

1,034 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Flashbacks and Side Quests
Location: USS Firebird

[ON]

Nobody checked along the seams. Failures started along the edges where stress built in small defects and fractures. The relay conduit behind Deck 9, Section C, was not on any maintenance schedule Gantt had seen, which was exactly why he'd chosen it. He knelt in the crawlspace with a hyperspanner he didn't need and a panel he'd already resealed twice, and he told himself this was diligence. Structural fatigue could hide in the seams. There was no other reason for him to be tucked into the solid, encompassing walls of the tube. Gantt forced himself to take a deep breath.

The hum of the isolinear relays behind the bulkhead was wrong. Not wrong in any way he could log. At 0.003 hertz off baseline, it was within tolerance. Always within tolerance. The hum felt wrong in the hollow behind his sternum that he had learned to trust long before. Where Uncle Mateo would tap a finger to remind Ganttito that he knew what to do. Gantt pressed his palm flat against the cool metal and counted his own pulse until it slowed down.

The Chief's voice came over comms asking where he'd gotten to. Gantt said he was running a diagnostic. He was, technically. He didn't say the diagnostic wasn't in the queue.

He'd been fine at 0800. He'd been fine through the senior staff briefing, fine nodding along about the Cardassian listening post they'd have to skirt on the new heading, fine even when Commander Leed spoke about the Cardassian situation in that flat diplomat voice that gave nothing away. Gantt had come to admire and envy that voice because it gave nothing away. He'd been fine right up until 1140, standing in the mess line behind an ensign he didn't recognize who was humming something under his breath, off-key, three notes repeating, and Gantt had felt the floor of himself go soft and had put his tray down and walked out without eating.

He didn't examine why. He'd gotten good at not examining why. Shoving things down into cargo containers and locking them back up. Echoes of soldiers marching closer. Tattered dreams from dark holds where dried blood still covered forgotten manacles. Gantt wasn’t sure if they were his own creations or flakes of other lives that had oxidized in his brain. They all went into the container. There was a door in him he kept shut, and he'd rebuilt enough conduits in front of the door — the fixing, the checklists, the crawlspaces nobody scheduled him into — that most days he forgot the door was a door. Most days it was a wall.

What he examined instead, kneeling in Section C with a spanner he didn't need, was the ship. Nineteen relay junctions between here and Main Engineering. He'd walked twelve of them since 1140. He logged the resistance readings on all twelve. He knew which switch on Deck 7 stuck a half-second longer than it should on major power cycles. He could recite the exact specs Starfleet used to seat the emergency lighting conduit near the aft turbolift and that, while technically within spec, he would have set them two newton-meters tighter.

This was what he fixed. Not the components of his brain; he had no tools to check. The Firebird. He was building a home, and the crew was his family. He adjusted what he could here. He'd done it since he was seventeen, standing over disassembled replicators in Morelia with his mother's slow breathing in the next room, taking a thing apart until he understood every piece of it and none of the pieces could surprise him.

The ship could still surprise him. That was the problem. A ship this size, this many systems, this many people moving through corridors he hadn't personally inventoried — there was no way to know all of it, and not knowing was a sour feeling located in his back teeth. An ache smaller than the fractures he couldn’t fix, so this cavity was where he poured himself.

Gantt heard footsteps in the main corridor above the access hatch. Two sets. Unhurried. He went still the way he'd learned to go still, spanner loose in his hand, breath shallow, and listened until the footsteps passed and a door hissed open and closed somewhere down the corridor, and the sound resolved itself into nothing more than two crewmembers walking to somewhere ordinary. He exhaled. He was aware, distantly, that this was not a reasonable use of his afternoon. He was also aware that awareness didn't seem to matter much once he was already down here with his palm against the bulkhead.

He thought about resealing the panel a third time and made himself not do it.

Instead, he sat back on his heels and looked at his own hands, which were steady, which had always been steady, which he was almost proud of. His hands didn't shake even when the rest of him went to static. Good hands. Agile hands. His father used to say that a long time ago. Before his father became an expert in all the ways his family was a disappointment. Gantt had been nine years old.

When his father had laid that mantle down, Tio Mateo had picked it up. Mateo took over for his brother. A drunk most people scoffed at. Mateo, who showed up to teach them everything he knew. Gantt let himself have the memory for exactly as long as it took to become useless, then put it down with the spanner.

Somewhere above him the ship carried on being a ship. Turbolifts moved. Someone laughed in a corridor. The 0.003 hertz hum kept humming, inside tolerance, always inside tolerance, and Gantt stayed in the crawlspace a while longer, mapping what he could reach of it, because it was easier than going back up into a mess hall full of people. Even people he cared for.

He told himself he’d log the diagnostic as routine. He told himself a lot of things, down here. Most of them were even true.

[OFF]

Lieutenant Soto Gantt (NPC by Leed)
Assistant Chief Engineering Officer
USS Firebird NCC-88298

 

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