Posted by Lieutenant Corinne Dalton (Scientist) in Meeting Her Junior Officers - Deck 8 - Science Labs and CSO’s Office

Posted by Lieutenant Commander Dev Siobhan (Chief Science Officer) in Meeting Her Junior Officers - Deck 8 - Science Labs and CSO’s Office

Posted by Lieutenant Corinne Dalton (Scientist) in Meeting Her Junior Officers - Deck 8 - Science Labs and CSO’s Office
Posted by… suppressed (3) by the Post Ghost! 👻
The doors parted with a sigh, and Dev stepped into the heart of her domain.

The Science Deck of the Ogawa was smaller than what she’d grown used to aboard the Constellation, but it was pristine—efficient. Everything here had a kind of soft gleam to it, not just clean but considered. Whoever had overseen the initial layout had thought like a field scientist, not just a systems engineer. She appreciated that.

She moved slowly, deliberately, her eyes scanning as she walked—past the environmental hazard lockers, past the general-purpose lab suites, past a bulkhead still half-open from a systems calibration.

She paused at each of the dedicated labs.

The Biology Lab was humming with ambient incubation light. The benches were pre-stocked with cell analysis arrays and a compact atmospheric analyzer she hadn’t seen since the Dresden. She made a mental note to check the calibration—those models were temperamental but precise, if respected.

The Chemistry Lab smelled faintly of sterilizing agents and inert polymer. Two workstations sat powered down, neat, waiting. A set of spectrography modules lined the port wall, gleaming like instruments in a surgical suite.

The Physics Lab—her least-used, but perhaps most critical—was the most understated. Silent. Mostly analytical terminals and modular sensor racks. She liked that. Clean data. No mess.

Her boots echoed softly as she crossed into the general-use wing. Four modular labs. One still in diagnostic mode. Another half-assembled from the last mission—field samples, maybe. Good. Signs of life.

And then finally: her office.

It was modest. Functional. A single viewport looked out into the nebula beyond—a pale orange smear of dust and distance. The desk was glass-topped, already keyed to her biosign. One chair. One small stack of administrative padds. She brushed her fingertips across the desktop, then slowly lowered herself into the seat.

A breath.

No family photos. No keepsakes. Not anymore. She’d learned.

But she allowed herself the one indulgence—a small, sand-colored ceramic sculpture. A Bajoran piece. Abstract. Quietly defiant. She placed it in the corner of the desk. Then tapped her combadge.

=/\=Lieutenant Dalton, this is Lt. Commander Dev. When you have a moment, I’d like to meet in person. My office is on Deck Eight.=/\=

She released the combadge and looked out again—toward the swirling orange veil, beyond which waited the next question.

Time to get to work.

Lt. Commander Dev ○●●
Chief Science Officer
U.S.S. Ogawa

The name rang on her memory and yet it didn’t click right away. Five minutes form now she would momentarily curse the original transfer process that created gaps in her memory. Most of them were harmless, but on occasion she missed something big. Life shattering big. This was not quite that.

=/\=On my way. Dalton out.=/\= She knew they were getting a new CSO and she was amused that the new chief didn’t think she knew where the office was. She had sat in there not all that long ago pondering with Lieutenant Petrakos how to move forward with her career.

In her uniform, she stepped out of a medical lab where she was shadowing one of the med techs today. Her long raven hair was up in a dancer’s bun.

Pressing the chime, she awaited admission.

Dev looked up at the sound of the chime.

“Come in,” she called, her tone even but not unkind.

She rose from her chair as the door slid open, taking a quiet moment to study the officer on the other side.

Her memory flooded back instantly as she looked at Dev. Dev Siobhan. Lieutenant Dev when Cori had known her. When she had served on the Saracen together and Dev had been the CSO then too, while Cori had still been an ensign. When both their lives had been utterly wrecked by one man, one sociopathic man name Levi Keller.

Her vibrant blue eyes still retained some of their electric quality from after that original accident, but she looked older, her actual age. Dev could be forgiven after all this time if she didn’t recognize Cori, but Cori recognized Dev. She stared at the woman who was the only one on this ship who had known Cori before she lost her body. Her and Royal had both interacted wth her in her holographic form but Dev had no idea Cori was not still stuck in the computer systems of the USS Saracen

“Holy shit,” Cori murmured.

~Corinne Dalton

Dev’s hand dropped from the desk as the woman stepped inside.

And then it hit her.

The face. The posture. The voice—still shaped by that soft inflection that had once echoed across the Saracen’s labs and corridors and—

Her name.

Corinne Dalton.

Ensign Corinne Dalton.

The memory snapped into place like a pressure seal breaking under vacuum. Not gently. Violently.

And with it: Levi Keller. The incident. The aftermath. The child.

Lily.

The space seemed to narrow around her, the air thinned by ghosts she hadn’t prepared to face.

She didn’t speak right away.

Her fingers curled slightly at her sides—one practiced motion away from crossing her arms, from fortifying herself. But she didn’t move. Couldn’t.

Dalton had said two words—holy shit—and it was the most honest thing Dev had heard in months.

When she finally found her voice, it was low. Careful. And it cracked just once.

“Ensign Dalton…”

She hadn’t realized she had been holding her breath, but as Dev spoke her name (and her old rank), Cori sucked in a breath and nodded. Confirmation. Yes, it was her.

She stepped out from behind the desk like someone walking across uneven ground.

“I thought you were still—” Her voice faltered again. Not with confusion, but weight.

She didn’t say lost.
She didn’t say dead.
She didn’t say what it cost them both.

Her green eyes searched Cori’s face—not for proof. For permission. For a way to believe it.

There was no easy explanation, nothing that was assuage anyone’s sense of curiosity or worry. Nothing that would make any of this easier.

“You’re—” She stopped. Exhaled. “You’re here.”

She didn’t ask how. Not yet. She didn’t ask if he had anything to do with this. Or if the timeline had shifted again. Or if—

She didn’t ask about Lily.

Dev stood, poised in the center of the room, surrounded by the one thing she could never fully catalogue.

The past.

Lt. Commander Dev ○●●
Chief Science Officer
U.S.S. Ogawa

The silence hung between them, thick with unasked questions. “I am,” she said at length and then gestured back to the desk. “I think this conversation is best had sitting, don’t you?”

Not waiting for permission, Cori moved with the grace of the dancer she had always been and slipped into one of the guest chairs at the desk. She waited till Dev took up her own seat. All-too-blue eyes took in the woman whom Cori felt shared something of her pain, even if their experiences were so vastly different to be laughable. But even in that strange moment after her body ceased to exist, when she was at her lowest, Dev had thought like a scientist. Perhaps then, she could appeal to the scientist.

Dalton pulled up the right sleeve of her uniform jacket and slid her arm across the desk, palm up. She tapped her delicate wrist with two fingers. “Go ahead, check. It won’t answer your questions and will likely just add to them, but I think it’s the obvious place to start.” A pulse. A pulse someone who had been saved as a computer program and manifested as a hologram should not have. But she did. A strong pulse that she had grown rather attached to again. Just like breathing. Such simple things she had forgotten the joy of until they have been restored.

~Corinne Dalton

Dev didn’t sit right away.

She remained standing for one long breath after Cori settled into the chair, her gaze fixed not on the offered wrist, but on Cori’s face—searching, still, for some sign that this was hallucination, or artifice, or cruel timing.

But there it was.

The body. The posture. The impossible pulse beneath skin that hadn’t existed—couldn’t have existed—for years.

She stepped forward.

Dev stared at the arm stretched across her desk.

It was elegant. Real. The skin flush with blood and warmth and memory.

A decade and a half vanished in the span of a breath.

Her hand moved before she told it to—hovering for a moment above Cori’s wrist, as if the very act of touching might trigger the same pain that split her skull all those years ago.

Vaughn had touched her too.
Spoken threats with Dev’s voice.
Wielded fear like a scalpel.

She pressed her fingers gently to Cori’s pulse. It thudded against her skin—solid, steady, impossible.

A shiver ran down her spine, subtle and precise, like a dissonant string in a symphony.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Dev said softly. She wasn’t sure if it was awe or guilt in her voice. Maybe both. “You shouldn’t be alive. And if you were… you should’ve run the moment you saw me.”

She withdrew her hand.

Cori withdrew her arm, pulling her jacket sleeve back down. You shouldn’t be here. yes, it was true and yet… it hurt in a visceral way she couldn’t parse until a moment later when her much faster brain got ahead of the emotion. Dev had no way to know that twice since she lost her original body she had ceased to exist as far as other people were concerned. She had been MIA. Most likely dead in a way that a consciousness in a computer could never truly have been. Dev had no way to know the deep depression and acute trauma that had left Cori a mess before a dear person helped pick her up and put back the pieces in the most gentle way. That he convinced her that she was not just alive, but a conscious being with love and pain and a desire to be seen, to not be forgotten. She had almost forgotten that was all true herself.

And then—because there was no use pretending—she looked Cori in the eye.

“That wasn’t me.” A pause. “It was, but it wasn’t. Vaughn is—was—” She exhaled. “I lost control. And I don’t know if you ever knew how close I came to losing everything.”

Frowning, Dalton sat back in her chair. Vaughn?

She sat back, fingers steepled lightly in front of her mouth. The sharp control returned, but her voice had softened.

“You were young. Brilliant. And I tried to scare you off the ship because I was already breaking and didn’t know it. You didn’t deserve that.”

Another pause, and then the words she hadn’t said in fifteen years:

“I’m sorry.”

Lt. Commander Dev ○●●
Chief Science Officer
U.S.S. Ogawa

It was interesting how different people saw the same events. She would have to come back to the Vaughn bit while she handled the more immediate concern. She wasn’t going to sit there and say her and Dev hadn’t had some tension and conflict, but Cori quite honestly had never seen it that way for one good reason: Levi Keller. And yet, that apology felt necessary, for them both. “I didn’t deserve a lot of what happened, but your actions were never the problem for me, Comman… Siobhan.” Why play at formalities? They were far past that, even in this intended formal meeting.

She shook her head. “It’s a really long story and I’m not sure how much I can tell you or how much you care to know. But you should knowI don’t hold anything against you, but I will accept your apology all the same. The way I see it, we were both victims in all of this. Levi’s victims.”

Corinne chuckled beneath her breath bitterly as she looked across at Dev. “You know the thing that gets me is that if he had actually managed to propose, I would probably have said yes. I wasn’t naive, truly. But he was offering something I craved deeply and I think he understood that. But then after that proposal, I would have found out about you and his baby and wouldn’t that have been messy? Instead, I had a bullet rip through my back and I lost my body. But that wasn’t your fault. That was Levi’s. And Lily’s. They did that to me. And then they both got to disappear into the ether, never to return. How lovely for them, right? Lily even married Jarred right before she left. We all got screwed over. The difference was that everyone, including you, could leave the ship and find a life elsewhere. I was stuck there, at the mercy of whatever commanding officer boarded next and thought I might be a liability. I am probably owed apologies for that, but it shouldn’t come from you and I have accepted I’ll never get that. I’ve moved on,” she said, breaking into a sincere, if small, smile.

~Corinne Dalton

Dev sat in stillness for a long moment, as Cori’s words settled into the air between them.

Not accusatory. Not absolving. Just… true.

It was a rare kind of honesty. The kind spoken not from pain, but through it.

When she finally responded, her voice was low—measured, but no longer shielded.

“You’re right,” Dev said. “We were both his victims. Different ways, maybe. But still trapped in the same storm.”

She looked down at her hands—her fingers, long and still, stained by memories too old to matter and too sharp to forget. When she looked up again, there was a softness in her expression that hadn’t been there before.

“I’ve tried to burn that part of my past down more times than I can count. Levi. Lily. Vaughn. You. All tangled together in a version of myself I didn’t know how to survive. And in the end… I ran.”

She didn’t explain the running. She didn’t need to. Dev had disappeared from the Saracen and buried herself in duty, one assignment after another, hoping the grief would rot somewhere out of sight. It hadn’t.

“But you stayed,” she said, voice quiet with something like reverence. “You didn’t have a choice—and you still stayed. And whatever you were, whatever they thought you were… you were still you. That takes more strength than I think anyone ever gave you credit for.”

She leaned forward slightly, elbows resting lightly on the desk.

“And for what it’s worth, I do care to know. As much as you’re willing to share.”

A pause.

A flicker of something—maybe even a smile—touched her lips.

“We could both use a friend, I think.”

Lt. Commander Dev ○●●
Chief Science Officer
U.S.S. Ogawa