Twenty-Three Days

Posted on Fri May 2nd, 2025 @ 1:06pm by Ensign Iozhara

Mission: Season 6 - 5.5 - Day to Day
Location: Iozhara's Quarters, Deck 13, USS Elysium
Timeline: Cycle 1142, Day 213 -- 16th Niralh, A.Y. 1142 (Barzan Calendar)
1423 words - 2.8 OF Standard Post Measure

The alarm chimed softly.

Blue light filtered in through the translucent panel above her bed--filtered, not from a sun, but from artificial light. She blinked up at the ceiling for a moment, as if unsure where she was. Not because of fatigue--but because of what day it was.

Sixteenth of Niralh.

Iozhara exhaled slowly. For a few seconds, she remained still, listening to the rhythm of her own breath through the gentle whir of her respiratory adapter. The lights in her quarters remained dimmed--just as she preferred them in the morning.

She sat up in a fluid easy motion, reaching for the strip of polished fabric beside her bed. It was an old piece of home--a handwoven headwrap from the Barzan market district her mother used to visit every two weeks. Seldom more frequent due to the family's remote location nearly thirty kilometers outside of the city. Though, her mother had always been practical, frugal, and careful. She did what she could for them.

Iozhara tied the wrap around her head and shoulders, securing the adapter's seal and standing in one smooth movement. The air here was clean and regulated, filtered and piped and synthesized for humanoid lungs. She still missed the scent of damp moss and oxygen-rich cave ferns that lingered on Barzan soil.

But she'd learned long ago to miss things quietly.

Her quarters were small but organized--spartan, really. Except for a small framed image on her desk: her father in his Barzan Environment Authority uniform, smiling in the pale red daylight of their homeworld. She didn't look at it now. She didn't need to. The image had long been memorized.

On the small mat in the corner of her quarters, she began her morning breathwork: ten slow inhalations, twenty shorter pulses, then the hold. Her limbs moved in tandem, arms raised, fingers curved with the elegance of a tidal pattern. Her body recalled the sequence even when her mind wandered. Her apparatus hissed quietly with each modulation, the atmospheric mix in the filtration system precisely adjusted for a shipboard environment.

She did not mark the date out loud. But she felt it--an unbearable heaviness in her chest, like an expanding stone behind her sternum.

After her sonic shower, she braided her hair quickly--tight and symmetrical, the same style her father used to do for her before school. She had been small. Ten. The last braid had been crooked. He'd been laughing when he gave up and said, "You'll have to do it yourself next time."

There had been no next time.

Even now, years later, the silence left behind by her father's absence had a weight all on its own. He'd kissed her on the crown of her head--"You're my little cloud-binder," he'd said. And then he disappeared into the vacuum of space, assigned to some cooperative research expedition in the Celendi Nebula. Communications ceased three weeks later. The ship was never found.

Some in the Authority blamed ion storms. Some theories involved piracy. Official records were very sterile: Missing, presumed dead.

But Iozhara did not abandon hope easily. She remembered watching her mother wait, too, at first. Sitting in silence with the comms receiver active, even after the window had closed. She remembered how long they waited together. She also remembered when the waiting ended for her mother--but not for her.

She remembered the last gift he had given her--a tiny carved pendant, no larger than her thumbnail. It had been shaped like a Barzan leafwing, folded delicately in half each point slightly askew from the other. It had snapped when she was thirteen. She kept the pieces.

She remembered how her mother's new partner had tried to fix it, unasked.

And she remembered the silence that followed.

As she dressed in her uniform and secured her respirator, the routine helped to dull the ache, but it did not completely erase it.

Iozhara exited her quarters at 0530.

The corridors were mostly empty at this hour, save for a few officers moving with similar purpose to their duty assignments. One nodded as he passed--a Tellarite from engineering. Iozhara gave a polite incline of her head, not slowing her stride.

"Morning, Ensign."

"Doctor," she acknowledged, stepping aside as a senior officer rounded the bend with a PADD in one hand and a mug of steam trailing behind.

The doors to Sickbay parted and Iozhara stepped into the stillness before the shift began. The bio monitors blinked softly, their readings steady. The overhead lights were already brighter than she'd liked, but she didn't adjust them. They would need to be even brighter soon.

She crossed to the storage cabinet and began inventory: dermal regenerators, hyposprays, emergency splints. The routine was grounding. She took much comfort in the tactile nature of this work.

There were patients to prepare for, supplies to replicate, systems that required recalibration. Someone on Delta shift had overstocked the damned analgesics again.

Iozhara made a quiet sound of disapproval and immediately began rearranging the vials by compound.

Behind her focus, beneath the hum of Sickbay's systems, the silence of that last message from her father played on a loop.

Just a routine expedition.

Minimal risk.

Estimated return in twenty-three days.

It had been years.

Sometimes she still replayed his voice in her head, trying to decide if it had sounded strained. Or tired. Or resigned. Memory blurred around the edges and she not longer trusted it.

But she remembered the way he had tucked her braids behind her ears and how he told her she'd grow stronger than both of her parents. Perhaps that part mattered more.

"Computer," she said, adjusting the final hypospray. "Run pre-shift diagnostic on biobed two."

A soft beep confirmed the command.

She stepped behind the console and began reviewing the day's intake reports. Her hands were steady, her posture straight. Her fingers moved over the interface in a methodical fashion. She scanned the biosigns of a patient recovering from minor surgery--human male, mild hypotension, sleep cycle disrupted. She adjusted the stimulant slightly and flagged the chart for a follow-up.

"Always double-check the margins," her father had said once, when she was helping him repair the water filters in their rural home. "A second look can save lives." He had been talking about a biotoxin extractor, but she recalled the way he looked at her when he said it--as if she was capable of more than she knew.

Iozhara made a second pass through the chart, though the readings were quite stable.

Across Sickbay, someone chuckled. A medic had said something funny. A moment of lightness. It did not reach her.

He would have laughed, she thought. He always found a way to make the silence less heavy. She remembered sitting on his shoulders, pretending she was flying across the ridges of the mountain range visible from their home, the dry wind snapping at her hair as he sprinted at full-speed over the dunes.

Her lips didn't move, but the memory played in full colour behind her amber eyes. Until she blinked. And then it was gone.

The environmental panel beeped: low atmospheric variance in the surgical suite. She acknowledged it, rerouted filtration, and moved to check the regulator herself. She always preferred to physically verify. Her Academy instructors had called her cautious. Iozhara called it respect.

As she walked, she passed a reflection in the sterile glass. Staring back at her was a tall, composed figure in a teal Starfleet uniform, braids neat, eyes tired.

She wondered sometimes if he would recognize her now.

Would he know the woman she had become?

Would he understand the space she had carved-out for herself, quietly, without anyone ever seeing the colour and the shape of the wound?

She paused to inspect a tray of medical tricorders, restacking them with her usual grace. One of them was upside down--so she turned it over to match the rest.

He would have teased me for that, she thought. "Perfectionist," he'd say, and then he'd let me keep doing it anyway.

There were so few people left who even remembered his name. Even fewer who knew what day this was.

She glanced at a nearby console and caught the stardate in the lower right corner. It didn't matter what the display said--she knew it was the Sixteenth of Niralh.

Iozhara exhaled and moved to the next task.

The day had begun.