Cal's War Pt 3: Stood Down

Posted on Mon Jul 6th, 2026 @ 3:58am by Lieutenant Callum Cowan

2,093 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Flashbacks
Location: RF Wayfarer
Timeline: Early 2381

The last day and a half had been the kind everybody aboard Wayfarer had been dreading. As the Borg invasion pushed further and further into the Alpha Quadrant, the need for rescue support had grown to an almost impossible level. Every hour brought another distress call. Another evacuation. Another colony running out of time.

The launches had been around the clock.

Every few minutes another shuttle disappeared through Wayfarer's improvised flight deck. Every few minutes another returned carrying frightened civilians, exhausted crews, or patients in desperate need of somewhere safer.

Until they didn't.

The launch lights stayed dark.

The flight deck remained quiet.

Nobody trusted it.

On the third day, for reasons largely unknown to the pilots who had come to call the RF Wayfarer home, the calls simply stopped coming. Eventually Rescue Squadron 17—and with it, Alpha Flight—was stood down.

Commander Hayes had given them forty-eight hours.

"Pending any further Borg nonsense, of course."

Alpha Flight did not need to be told twice.

"We should organise a card game," Emily suggested almost immediately.

Four pairs of eyes turned towards her.

"A card game?" Sam asked.

Emily frowned.

"What?"

Mateo looked at her as though she'd just suggested they invade Borg space themselves.

"We've got forty-eight hours."

"Exactly," Emily replied. "I'd have suggested some kind of holoprogram..." She gestured broadly around the ageing cargo freighter that surrounded them. "...but I'm fairly sure Wayfarer spent her holodeck budget sometime around the previous century."

Cal couldn't help but smile.

"I wanna sleep," Mateo countered, glancing mournfully into the bottom of his now-empty coffee mug. "Better to make the most of the time and catch up."

"But we never get to do anything together," Emily protested, leaning back in her chair and swinging her feet up until they landed comfortably in Cal's lap. Almost without thinking, he rested a hand lightly around her ankle.

"You'll play, won't you, Cal?"

He looked between the others before shrugging.

"Sure. We've got two days, right? Plenty of time to sleep afterwards."

"Ay." Mateo rolled his eyes dramatically. "Smart enough to work out how to fly three feet over the hull of a Borg Cube without dying..."

He stood, stepping over the assortment of duffle bags that had gradually colonised the middle of Alpha Flight's sleeping bay.

"...stupid enough to think they'll leave us alone for forty-eight hours."

Sam laughed.

"Maybe he's right about this too, Mateo." She folded her arms. "Maybe we should enjoy ourselves while we've got the chance."

"I enjoy sleep," Mateo replied over his shoulder as he made a determined march towards the still-functioning coffee machine.

Emily watched him disappear around the corner before leaning slightly towards Cal.

"He's going to spend his day off asleep with a coffee in his hand."

"He'll spill it."

"He'll somehow blame Owen."

"Probably correctly."

Emily laughed.

Across the compartment Sam had already begun rummaging through a storage locker.

"We definitely had a deck of cards..."

Cal leaned back in his chair and looked around the compartment.

Mateo complaining about coffee.

Sam disappearing head-first into a locker.

Emily's feet still resting comfortably in his lap as though they'd always belonged there.

Three days earlier he hadn't known any of them.

Now it felt strangely difficult to imagine being anywhere else.

---

The card game had not lasted quite as long as anybody had hoped.

Emily had somehow won every hand.

By the twelfth, Mateo had finally had enough.

"You're cheating," he protested, leaning forward in his chair as his gaze shifted suspiciously between Emily and the well-worn deck of cards lying on the makeshift table between them.

"I am not," she insisted, the faux outrage in her voice so exaggerated that nobody present believed it for a second. "I'm just lucky."

"Lucky?" Mateo repeated. "You've won every hand we've played."

"Pure luck."

"You've won twelve hands in a row."

Emily smiled—a smile balanced perfectly somewhere between sweet angel and expert card shark.

"I'm just very good at card games."

Mateo stared at her for another long moment before letting out a defeated sigh and pushing himself to his feet.

"I give up."

He pointed accusingly at her as he backed away.

"You're cheating."

Emily gasped theatrically.

"Sleep well, Mateo."

"I won't."

"Sweet dreams!"

"They'll probably be about cards."

Without another word he disappeared behind the curtain surrounding his bunk.

Emily waited until the curtain had settled before turning back towards the other two with the broadest smile either of them had seen all afternoon.

"Lounge?"

---

Wayfarer's crew lounge had been far quieter than any of the three remaining Alpha Flight pilots had anticipated, though none of them complained.

Finding the corner they had come to occupy with increasing regularity over the previous few days, Cal sank back into one of the worn chairs. Emily did the same to his right while Sam claimed the seat opposite, stopping only long enough to make use of one of the room's half-dozen coffee dispensers.

For a while, nobody spoke.

The steady hum of Wayfarer's ageing engines filled the silence, somehow calmer than usual now that the frantic rhythm of launches and recoveries had finally eased.

Cal took a sip of coffee before glancing sideways at Emily.

"Be honest."

She looked back innocently.

"What?"

"You were cheating."

"I was not."

"You were counting cards."

Emily folded her arms.

"I won fair and square."

"That's cheating."

"It's maths."

Cal couldn't help laughing.

Across from them, Sam let out a long-suffering groan.

"Mateo is going to be so annoyed."

Emily took another sip of coffee, entirely unbothered.

"Only if he finds out."

She looked between them with a conspiratorial smile.

"Otherwise..."

A small shrug.

"...he'll never know."

Cal stared at her for a moment.

"...So you were cheating."

Emily grinned.

"Yep."

This time they all laughed, and for the first time in days the old converted freighter's crew lounge was filled with the sounds of life rather than an exhausted crew complement simply trying to survive another day.

"Where was it you said you were from?" Sam asked Cal between sips of her mug, "Close to Earth right?"

"Port Perigee" Cal answered as he set his own mug, its contents now dwindling, down on the table between them. "It's near Alpha Centauri."

"Never been," Sam responded, "Is there much to see?"

"Probably not," Cal admitted honestly. "It started out as a stop between Earth and Alpha Centauri. These days it's just... a medium-sized colony with its own life."

"And you Em? Scotland?"

She nodded, "From a place near Aberdeen. Stonehaven, right on the coast."

"Sounds nice," Cal commented.

"It's cold," Em grinned, "and wet, but it's home. I'll show you all once this Borg thing blows over!"

"Can't wait," Sam responded genuinely.

"What about you, Sam?" Cal enquired, "Earth too, or...?"

Sam nodded, "Brisbane," she looked toward Emily with a smile, "Less cold and definitely home too. We should do a tour when this is over."

"We should!" Em agreed with an understated excitement that only she could quite manage, "Have you seen much of Earth, Cal?"

There was a long pause as Cal considered his response before speaking, "San Francisco mostly. Bits of California but not much else," he admitted.

"Well," Em spoke as she shuffled her seat closer to Cal until they were side by side, "We'll show you!"

Cal smiled.

"I'd like that."

---

The conversation drifted lazily from one subject to the next.

Stories from home.

Stories from childhood.

Stories from the Academy.

Nobody seemed particularly concerned where one ended and another began.

Emily somehow managed to tell a story involving a sheep, two police officers and a kayak that neither Cal nor Sam were entirely convinced had actually happened.

Sam insisted Australians really did call flip-flops "thongs."

Emily nearly choked on her coffee laughing.

Cal admitted that, until leaving for the Academy, he'd been convinced everybody on Earth knew one another.

Sam and Emily spent the next five minutes pretending to remember each other from primary school.

"Do you remember your first flying lesson?" Em asked, her gaze shifting between Cal and Sam.

Sam answered first.

"I had this one instructor who hated me... hated everyone actually, I think. He spent half an hour explaining that if we didn't do precisely what he told us to do, we'd all die horrible fiery deaths."

"Professor Stutt?" Emily asked with an amused smirk.

"You remember him?"

She nodded.

"Our group called him Professor Tut because he just... wouldn't stop." She laughed into her mug. "Pretty sure he hated all of us too."

"And you, Cal?" Sam asked.

Cal nodded slowly.

"I think it was back home. Uncle Roland..."

He smiled.

"Well... he wasn't actually my uncle. I think he worked with my dad."

Emily nodded knowingly.

"Everybody has an Uncle Roland."

"Exactly."

Cal laughed.

"He used to run supplies up to the cargo ships that visited Port Perigee. Dad let me go with him once and..." He paused, looking down into his coffee. "He let me fly."

Another small smile crept across his face.

"Well... he told me I did."

"I'm fairly sure it was probably some kind of simulation he'd set up to let me think I was flying, but..."

He shrugged.

"It didn't matter."

For a moment none of them spoke.

"Whatever he did..." Cal continued quietly, "...it lit something."

Another shrug.

"I probably wouldn't be here if it wasn't for that day."

"That's..."

Sam began.

"Sweet," Emily finished for her with a warm smile.

Sam rolled her eyes.

"I was going to say _nice_."

Emily grinned over the rim of her mug.

"I was going to say _sweet_."

Cal just laughed.

---

The three remaining Alpha Flight pilots were just about talked out by the time a young ensign appeared hesitantly in the crew lounge doorway. He couldn't have been much older than Cal. His expression was solemn, a nervousness lingering behind his eyes as he searched the room.

Emily noticed him first.

"Hello," she called cheerfully. "We were just leaving, but there's plenty of coffee left."

The ensign managed a polite smile.

"Thank you."

It lasted barely a second.

"Ensign Cowan?"

Cal looked up.

"Commander Hayes would like a word, please."

The room fell quiet.

Cal looked first to Emily, then to Sam.

Sam reached over and gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze.

"See you back in quarters, okay?"

Cal offered a small nod.

"Yeah."

Then, without another word, he followed the ensign out into the corridor.

---

By the time Cal returned to the Alpha Flight bunks, something had changed.

His expression had disappeared entirely.

His movements had slowed, each step seeming to require conscious effort. In his left hand he carried a padd none of the other three pilots—Mateo having emerged from his aborted afternoon nap after hearing Sam and Emily return—recognised.

"Cal?"

Emily's voice broke the silence first.

He didn't answer.

Without looking at any of them, he crossed the compartment, stopping only long enough to place the padd carefully onto the makeshift table where, only a few hours earlier, Emily had cheerfully swindled Mateo at cards.

The quiet click as it touched the tabletop seemed unnaturally loud.

"Cal..." Emily tried again.

"What's wrong?"

Still nothing.

Cal continued across the compartment to his bunk.

His duffle still sat exactly where he'd left it.

Without a word, he drew the curtain shut around himself.

For several seconds, nobody moved.

"...What's happened?" Sam asked quietly.

Mateo was already reaching for the padd.

His eyes scanned the display.

---

Next of kin notification has been completed.**

**Confirmed deceased during the evacuation of Port Perigee.**

**Cowan, James.**

---

For a long moment he simply stared.

Very carefully, he lowered the padd back onto the table exactly where Cal had left it.

Nobody spoke.

Emily was already halfway across the compartment.

"Emily."

She stopped and turned.

Mateo met her eyes.

"I'll do it."

She looked towards Cal's closed curtain, then back at Mateo.

"...Are you sure?"

He nodded once.

"I'll do it."

Emily stepped back without another word.

Mateo drew a slow breath before crossing the remaining few metres.

He stopped outside the curtain.

The old freighter hummed quietly around them.

No launch alarms.

No shouted orders.

No frantic footsteps racing for the flight deck.

Just silence.

He rested a hand lightly against the edge of the partition.

"You don't have to say anything."

Nothing.

Another slow breath.

"...I'm coming in."

Mateo reached for the curtain.

 

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