Held in Reserve: Open Sky [1/2]

Posted on Mon May 11th, 2026 @ 1:52am by Lieutenant Darik Moreau

2,465 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Ghost Starship
Location: Valencia, Earth
Timeline: [Character Backpost] 2380

2380, Valencia, Earth

The heat rose gently from the pale stone of the range.

Not oppressive, not the sort that pressed people down into shade, but warm in a steady, unapologetic way that soaked into skin and cloth alike, carrying the faint salt of the nearby sea and the dry scent of sun-warmed ground. Above the complex the sky was a clear Mediterranean blue that seemed almost too large after the neat curve of Luna’s dome, stretching open and uninterrupted until it met the line of distant roofs and palms beyond the training grounds.

Around the range, delegation jackets in school colours had already begun to appear draped over chair backs and railings.

Most of the competitors had arrived dressed for formality rather than weather, neat academy-prep uniforms and structured outer layers with school or club insignia stitched at the collar or shoulder. The assumption had clearly been that the competition would take place inside one of the training halls. Instead the targets had been set along an outdoor range that caught the full afternoon sun, and the reality of Valencia in May was quickly making itself known. A boy from one of the Mars schools had flushed a deep pink beneath the collar of his cream shirt and was tugging irritably at the fastenings of his outer tunic while his coach informed him, with crisp indifference, that nobody had insisted he close the collar all the way to the throat.

Darik, for once, felt entirely comfortable. His own jacket was folded neatly over the back of the chair beside Tomas, leaving him standing in a simple shirt with the cuffs fastened cleanly at his wrists, the bracer fastened to his left forearm, but more to protect the shirt. The warmth settled easily across his shoulders and down the length of his spine, soaking into the ridges of his neck and the cords beneath them in a way that felt almost unfamiliar after years of quiet cold on Luna. For once his body was not something he had to endure before the day had properly begun.

He had grown again during the past year, tall enough now that some adults hesitated for a moment before remembering he was still only fifteen. The softness around his jaw had thinned, leaving the shape of his face a little sharper than it had been the previous spring, and though he was still all elbows and knees if he forgot himself, there was more steadiness in the way he held himself now. Dark hair fell slightly forward over his brow in the warmth, and there was more colour in his skin than there ever was when the Moon’s chill sat quietly in his bones.

He checked the string again. Not because it needed checking. Not really. He had already done that twice since they arrived, once when Shreya had unpacked the case and again when he had assembled the bow himself beneath her watchful eye. But the sequence of inspection and adjustment had become familiar to him over the past year, a small ritual that settled body and mind both, and his fingers moved across the string with quiet assurance as he tested the tension and adjusted the nocking point.

“It has not changed in the last forty seconds,” Shreya zh’Thenis observed from beside him, one hand resting lightly against the strap of the equipment case. “Though I admire your optimism.”

Darik glanced at her, the corner of his mouth shifting faintly before he looked back down at the bow. “I know. Best to be sure.” A year ago he might have apologised. He did not now. Instead he rolled his shoulders a little and the smile became fractionally more playful.

Shreya stood just to one side of the awning in the shade, one shoulder held fractionally differently beneath the simple tunic, looser than most to accommodate the supports she wore on her arm, complete with the patch for the Tycho City Archery Club. He knew the story now, of her injury. She had been wounded in the war when her ship had taken damage in a firefight with a Cardassian vessel. She was still undergoing therapy for the arm, but had been told the damage had been so serious they wanted to amputate and replace it with a biomechanical limb instead. She had turned that down, preferring to keep what she had and work around it. She had moved on to crossbows now, whenever she was on the range. But she still taught archery. Standing there, she looked, as ever, entirely unimpressed by the event around them. Unimpressed by the neat rows of younger competitors, by the polished parents and overinvested coaches, by the small prestige of being on Earth for a youth competition. She had arrived dressed sensibly for the weather and had not removed a single layer.

Tomas, by contrast, looked impressed, anxious and proud in equal measure. He had been trying very hard not to fuss since breakfast, which mostly meant that the fussing had simply become tidier. He had checked their route from the guest accommodation twice. He had made sure Darik had eaten, then asked if he wanted more. He had checked the PADD with the competition information until he had memorised it, smoothed a crease out of Darik’s sleeve that had not needed smoothing, and spent the shuttle ride to the venue pretending to read the event programme on the PADD while actually watching every other passenger who looked at his son for more than a second.

He was doing it now as well. His light brown hair looked more golden in the natural sun and his blue eyes scanned the crowd, arms crossed. Darik could tell without looking fully at him. It was there in the set of his shoulders, the way he sat too upright beneath the awning with one hand resting on the handle of the bag at his feet as if a junior archery competition in Valencia might at any moment require immediate evacuation.

Shreya had noticed too.

“He is not being deployed behind enemy lines, Mister Moreau,” she had said earlier, before registration, while Tomas watched the line of competitors with the expression of a man trying to anticipate every possible version of human stupidity in advance. “He is attending a junior archery competition on a warm day in Valencia.”

Tomas had looked at her, just a quick glance to the side where she stood, his lips pressed together for a moment. “That doesn’t mean people won’t be idiots,” he said before he looked back at the crowd.

“No,” Shreya had agreed, entirely calm. “But he is still here because he qualified, and this is still a competition in which participants are expected to hit targets, not pass moral judgement on one another.”

“That’s not really how people work and you know it.” Tomas’s voice was tired, older than his years.

One antenna had tipped slightly forward then, the closest Shreya ever really came to visible amusement before midday. “I know exactly how people work,” she had said, glancing over to where Darik was adjusting his wrist guard with quiet concentration. “I also know you are doing an excellent job of being more worried than he is. I think perhaps, Mister Moreau, you may be projecting.”

Tomas had huffed softly through his nose at that, half offended and half caught out. Darik had pretended not to hear any of it, though he had heard every word. He knew that the worry came from a place of love and fear. But knowing had not dampened the last ten years.

Now, standing in the warmth with the bow settled in his hands, he let his eyes move once across the range.

The competition was not large, but it was large enough. Several schools from Earth, two from Luna, one from Mars, and a small contingent from one of the station schools around Jupiter whose students all wore the same severe grey uniform and had an air of disciplined irritation about having been brought planetside for anything. Outside, the sounds spread differently. Teachers and coaches moved between equipment stations in school colours, parents clustered in little groups beneath strips of shade, and voices rose and fell without ever becoming one single wall of noise. Somewhere beyond the walls of the complex he could hear gulls. The targets waited at measured intervals down the line, bright and still in the sun.

He noticed the looks because he always noticed.

A coach from one of the Earth schools glanced his way and then back again with the quick sort of double take people rarely knew they were doing. A pair of students in green sports jackets looked at his neck and forehead, then at one another. One of them smirked in a way that was less hostility than cheapness, the sort of expression people wore when they wanted a reaction more than they wanted a point.

Darik looked away before they could think they had one. He gave it no more attention than it deserved, then bent his head and checked the brace height again, though it did not need checking any more than the string had.

A few metres down the line, a Bajoran boy in another school’s colours was doing the opposite of looking away. He had stared once when Darik first arrived, frowned, then stared again when registration placed them in the same age division. He was about Darik’s age, perhaps a little shorter, broad across the shoulders in the way boys sometimes got when they reached strength before height. There was anger in the set of his mouth that looked too old to belong entirely to him.

As Darik adjusted the serving on the string with one thumbnail, he heard the boy say something low to the student beside him. “Didn’t know they let Cardies in.” The other boy muttered something too quiet to catch. The Bajoran did not lower his eyes.

Darik kept his own on the bow. He had, over the years, become very good at recognising what did and did not require his energy. A muttered comment from a stranger at a school competition did not change the registration list. It did not change his lane assignment. It did not change the feel of the bow in his hand or the fact that the target downrange would not care who was looking at him when he shot. And he had been shown enough as a Federation citizen not to judge the anger of a Bajoran at seeing a Cardassian, even if that Cardassian was fifteen and not even a full-blooded one.

Darik checked the string one final time and then set the bow down carefully on the rest.

Across from him, Tomas had heard the comment. Darik knew that too without needing proof. When he looked over, his father’s jaw had tightened and his hand was flat against one knee in a way that suggested he was very deliberately not standing up.

Shreya, seated beside him with her PADD across one leg, did not even bother looking towards the source of it. “They are children,” she said mildly, making notes on the PADD as though discussing weather. “Some of them repeat what they have heard at home. Some of them think disdain is a personality or statement at this age. Some might have a better reason to hate, but it does not change anything. This is an archery competition, not a popularity contest.”

Tomas kept his voice low. “You say that as if it means anything, like it changes anything for him. Like it makes it better.”

“It means exactly what it means.” Shreya looked up at him then, blue face perfectly composed in the heat. Then she raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Your son is here because he earned the lane. The targets do not become political, and neither does his right to stand in that lane. It does not matter what he is. He is here as an equal competitor.”

Tomas let out a breath. “Easy for you to say,” he said, pain clear in his voice, in the way he sat. Pain and anger at the universe.

“Not especially,” she replied, and for one moment there was the old edge beneath the words, not anger but memory. “I simply happen to be correct.”

Darik looked away before either of them noticed that he had been listening again.

The first call for competitors to take their positions came a few minutes later, carrying across the range in a clear amplified voice. Bows were picked up and conversations broke apart, contestants stepping away from friends, coaches, family. The atmosphere changed in that small but familiar way it always did before shooting began, not becoming quieter exactly, but narrower. More pointed.

Darik stepped into his lane. The ground was firm beneath his shoes, the sun warm against the back of his neck, the target fixed in front of him. There was wind, but not much. Enough to feel at the edge of his sleeves, not enough to unsettle the line. He set his feet where they belonged and let the rest of the range start to fall away.

From under the awning, Tomas watched him straighten. It hit him then, all at once and without warning, that Darik was smiling. It was not broad or showy, but there was something unmistakable in the set of his mouth and eyes as he lifted the bow, some private ease that had not been there in the streets or on tram platforms or at carefully social school events on the Moon where Tomas had spent half the night monitoring the room for injury before it arrived. His son looked as if he belonged to himself out there. Tall, composed, dark hair brightened slightly by the sun, ridges and neck cords visible to anybody who cared to stare and somehow irrelevant beside the sheer certainty of the stance he took.

Tomas had seen Darik be careful in public. He had seen him polite, silent, contained, observant, and once or twice he had seen him quietly angry. He had almost never seen him happy where other people could witness it.

The pride that moved through him was so fierce it almost hurt.

“Breathe,” Shreya said quietly beside him, without taking her eyes off the range.

Tomas let out a short, disbelieving laugh under his breath. “You are very annoying,” he said, but his hand went to hers, briefly.

“Yes,” she said, and her hand gave his a small squeeze before she pulled back. “And he is very good. Attend to the important thing now, Mister Moreau. Your son.”

[TBC]

Lt. Darik Moreau
Chief Intelligence Officer
USS Missouri

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