First Away Mission: Chain of Command

Posted on Tue Sep 1st, 2026 @ 2:14pm by Captain Malcom Llwyedd & Petty Officer 1st Class Baris Demir

1,663 words; about a 8 minute read

Mission: Flashbacks and Side Quests
Location: USS Centaur; Cendrillac IV

[ON]

The briefing ran nine minutes over, and Baris counted every one of them. Lieutenant Okonkwo-Reyes stood at the display table with the mission parameters laid out in the clean, colored blocks Starfleet favored for everything. Escort detail. Trade delegate Grev Doskoi. Cendrillac IV. Make the exchange. Two security personnel with sidearm phasers. No away-team leader authority beyond crowd management.

“This is a low-risk profile," Lieutenant Okonkwo-Reyes said. "Cendrillac IV has got no standing hostility toward the Federation, no history of violence against delegations. Our job is presence, not intervention. We walk him in, we walk him out, we let the diplomats do the actual work." Her eyes scanned the other personnel, staying on Baris last. He'd noticed the way she’d started to do that. "Demir, you're with me. Ensign Ptolan's on shuttle standby."

"Yes, sir," Baris said.

"I mean it about intervention. Presence, not intervention. If something develops, you report it up the chain, and you wait for instruction. You do not improvise a solution because you think you've already solved the problem in your head."

He didn't answer that one, because there wasn't an answer that wouldn't sound like an argument. Four months aboard the Centaur had taught him that arguing with Okonkwo-Reyes only bought him more of her attention, which he did not want. She wasn't unkind. She reminded him a little of his mother at work. Creating contracts with quick action, exact accounting, and no patience for waste.

But Okonkwo-Reyes trusted the chain of command. Trusted it to hold the way his mother never trusted a signed contract. To the lieutenant, the chain of command held its shape regardless of what was actually happening in front of you, and Baris had never once in his life seen a contract hold its shape when the knives came out.

---

Baris noted how the first smells from Cendrillac's market reminded him of his childhood. Dye vats, overripe fruit in the hold, salt-sweat and leather, and beneath it all a metallic edge in the air. He hadn't expected that. He'd braced for alien and gotten familiar instead, and it unsettled him more than a genuinely foreign world would have.

Doskoi walked ahead of them, briefcase in hand, narrating the terms of the exchange to no one in particular in an anxious, over-loud voice. Okonkwo-Reyes flanked him wide on the left. Baris took the right, a few paces back. The market was so oddly familiar. He let his eyes go soft and wide instead of hard and focused, watching the flow of people in the plaza. How they gathered, who they spoke to, and where their attention gathered and split.

A crowd gathered at a fabric stall thirty meters out. Among them two men. One scrunched up his face as if shielding his eyes from the sun, or biting down a problem. Scrunch-face was watching the briefcase Doskoi carried, the other drifting sideways through the crowd in a line that would put him behind Doskoi in under a minute.

"Lieutenant." Baris kept his voice low and flat, the way she liked her reports. "Two locals, northeast, fabric stall. One watching the case, not the delegate. Second one's flanking."

"Copy. Eyes on, no action." A pause. "Could be nothing, Demir. Could be beggars sizing up another mark for a snatch, not a briefcase."

"It's not." He’d watched plenty of customers browse the Demir family stalls and cargo holds. Some browsed without interest. The rest calculated costs. The cost of a bushel, the cost of a trade, the cost of a theft. These men didn’t even look at each other. "They had a plan before we walked in."

"Watch and report." Her voice had an edge now, a warning she used to remind someone they were pushing past their lane. "That's the order."

He watched. He reported the second man closing the gap, the first man's hand disappearing into a fold of cloth, and got a *copy, hold position* in response. Baris saw the lieutenant shift direction. She was moving to intercept. Standard procedure. Announce yourself, identify as Starfleet, de-escalate with words first. Lieutenant Okonkwo-Reyes was smart and experienced, but as she opened her mouth, Baris knew that words were going to be too slow. He knew because the man with the folded cloth pushed forward and the hand inside the fold had the wrong shape for anything except a blade.

He didn't decide to move. That was the part he could never seem to make anyone understand afterward. Not the lieutenant, and definitely not the report he had to file in language that made it sound like a choice. Instinct took over, trained by years of fast trades on the edge of space when Boslic freighters thrived or died by reading intangibles.

Baris crossed the distance, put his body between the blade and Doskoi, took the wrist as it came up, and turned it the way his father had taught him at fourteen. Not to break the wrist, just to teach a thief that this course would cost too much to keep trying. The man went down. The stall came down with him, a whole cascading wall of colorful silks collapsing over both of them. For one strange, suspended second, Baris was on his knees in a drift of fabric that smelled like the dye vats behind his family's cargo bay and Doskoi trying to yell over the immediate crescendo of voices.

The second man ran, slipping through the flow of the crowd much faster than Okonkwo-Reyes could close on him. Baris confirmed the knife was on the ground and the attacker's fight had gone out of him. He stood, suddenly aware of the crowd's relative silence. This would be gossiped all around the settlement. Repeated over dinner, drinks, and market corners for a week, and the lieutenant standing eight feet away with her phaser still holstered and her expression grim.

"He didn't fire," Doskoi kept saying, to Baris, to Okonkwo-Reyes, to the crowd, to no one. "He didn't even fire, he just—" He mimed the wrist-turn badly, twice, already narrating the story into permanence.

"Are you hurt?" Okonkwo-Reyes asked Baris.

"No."

"Good." She crouched, checked the downed man's wrist, and then looked back up at Baris. "You didn't call for backup."

"There wasn't time."

"There's always time to call for backup, that's the entire — " She caught the sentence before it finished and stood, brushing red silt from her knees with more force than the dust required. "We'll discuss this on the ship."

Ensign Ptolan flew them back up in silence. Baris found this more comfortable than any conversation would have been. Doskoi filled it enough for all of them, already composing the version of events he'd tell the trade council, in which Starfleet's decisive intervention had saved the delegation and demonstrated the Federation's commitment to safety. Baris let the words wash over him without correcting any of it. His version hardly mattered to the diplomat. Besides, correcting it would have meant explaining what had actually happened in his hands and his head in those two seconds, and he didn't have the vocabulary for that in Federation Standard. He could only explain it in Boslic.

The debrief happened in Okonkwo-Reyes's office, door closed, which told him before she said a word that this wasn't going in the mission log the way Doskoi's version was.

"You might have saved his life. I will admit that on the record before anything else I say." She sat, didn't offer him a seat, which he understood as its own kind of statement. "You also disobeyed a direct order in a live situation, in front of a foreign delegation, in a way that could have gone very differently if that man had swung a half-second sooner or you'd read the angle wrong."

"I didn't read it wrong."

"That's not the point, Demir." She threw up her hands as she said his name, as if tossing his fate to the Universe. "The point is you didn't wait to find out if you were right. You don't get to skip the order because you're usually correct. Usually correct is how people die on both sides of a mistake."

He had no answer that wouldn't sound like disagreement, so he gave none, and the silence sat between them long enough that she eventually exhaled and picked up her PADD. This was her way of telling him this conversation, as far as she was concerned, was over. He waited a moment to be sure, then walked towards the door.

"File your report by end of shift. Factual. No editorializing." A pause, and then her voice grew softer if quite gentler. "And Demir — I'm watching you closely. That isn't a reprimand. It's a pattern I'm starting to log, and I'd rather you know that than not."

He filed the report exactly as instructed, keeping it spare, factual, and no editorializing. It did not include the part where, hours later, his hand still felt the give of the man's wrist joint, small and clean. The edge of resistance and the quick snap. That moment was clearer to him than anything Okonkwo-Reyes had said in that office.

The report also did not include the part where, lying in his bunk afterward, he found he could not locate the fear he was fairly sure he was supposed to have felt. Fear in the reprimands to come. Baris searched, and found only a settled, almost peaceful certainty that he had been right, and the colder, less comfortable certainty that being right was going to keep costing him exactly this. This trust extended by the lieutenant and then narrowed, a captain's file quietly thickening, versions of himself that Starfleet might reward and definitely correct in the same breath, and no clear sense yet of which one would eventually win.

[OFF]

Petty Officer 1st Class Baris Demir (NPC by Leed)
Quartermaster
USS Firebird NCC-88298

 

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