All Nighter

Posted on Tue Feb 17th, 2026 @ 3:36pm by Commander Jenna Ramthorne & Lieutenant Commander Bonnie "Bon-Bon" Durnell & Lieutenant Leo Da'Cinci

1,039 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Beholder
Location: USS Sunfire
Timeline: Current

Engineering carried the tone of sustained effort long before the clock admitted it was night. Fabricators glowed along the bulkheads. Schematic layers hovered above the central table in disciplined columns.

Commander Jenna Ramthorne stood at the center of it all with the composure of someone who understood that urgency never justified disorder. Her sleeves were rolled with precision, not haste. She listened to the room first. The rhythm of tools. The pitch of the warp core through the deck plating. The tempo of conversation. Then she began assigning work.

“Injector housings fabricated in pairs,” she said, voice even and clean. “Each pair calibrated against the same master clock. No independent timing references. If one breathes, the other breathes.” She adjusted a schematic with two fingers and redistributed personnel without raising her volume.

“Patel, you are on field regulator reinforcement. Cross-check with Leo before you commit weld. Bonnie, compile synchronization routines on a shared chronometric backbone. I want drift tolerances visible at all times.”

Leo Da’Cinci rolled his shoulders once and claimed a fabrication bay like a craftsman claiming timber. He lifted the alloy collar meant for the tachyon injector, weighing it in his broad hands as if mass told a story the scans did not. “Respectable,” he muttered. “Could be better.”

He set it into the clamp and began refining the inner throat with patient abrasion, shaving microns away that no replicator would ever complain about. An ensign pointed out that the printed tolerance already exceeded spec. Leo turned, tusks catching the bay light, and gave the man a level stare.

“A spec lives cozy in a report,” he muttered, eyeing the warped plate. “Metal lives out here in the cold, gettin’ struck, bent, and argued with. Don’t mistake ink for iron. They’re not even distant cousins.” He resumed shaping the collar, each movement deliberate, like sharpening a blade meant to last generations.

Across the bay, Bonnie’s console chimed and promptly cascaded into a diagnostic spiral. She blinked at it, tapped three corrections, and knocked her elbow against a housing bracket in the same motion. A small shower of microfasteners scattered across the deck. She crouched, gathered them with a sheepish huff, and returned to her screen without missing the thread of the math.

The first friction point came when Leo reviewed the injector mass profile. “This casing wants another half centimeter,” he said, tapping the schematic. “Subspace pressure will try to deform it once the inversion bites.”

“That extra mass shifts the phase response curve,” Bonnie replied, fingers already adjusting simulations. “If we overshoot, the inversion will resonate past target frequency.”

Leo folded his arms. “Resonance can be tuned. A cracked housing cannot.”

The temperature in the room rose a fraction. Jenna stepped closer, studying both data sets. She did not rush. She did not soften her tone. “Leo, reinforce along the stress vector you flagged. Bonnie, compensate by narrowing the tachyon injection window by two percent and adjusting the regulator ramp. We preserve structural integrity and keep the phase envelope clean.” She met each of their eyes in turn. “We build something that survives.”

The decision settled the air. Leo grunted approval and returned to his bay. Bonnie recalibrated with rapid precision, her lips moving faintly as equations threaded themselves into place. She reached to pull up a secondary timing model and caught the edge of the console with her wrist. The input stuttered. A glitch flickered across the synchronization graph. She froze.

The stutter had revealed something. The phase clocks were chasing each other, oscillating in tight rivalry. Her accidental bump had shifted one pulse just enough to expose the instability. “Shared reference,” she murmured. “They need a common anchor.”

She rerouted both inverter clocks through the ship’s master chronometer and layered a soft start sequence into the tachyon injectors. The oscillation smoothed into a clean loop. Leo watched the curve stabilize and let out a satisfied rumble.

“There,” he said. “Now it feels like a single piece of work.”

Midnight passed without announcement. The first inverter stood assembled on its mount, alloy polished to a quiet sheen. The second followed with increased efficiency as the team absorbed the language of the first build. Engineers rotated through tasks. Patel burned through a regulator coil under peak load. Leo replaced it with a thicker wind, muttering about endurance.

Bonnie recalculated energy bleed margins after a minor power surge rattled her console and sent her coffee migrating across the surface in a slow brown wave. She rescued the padd before the data drowned and recalibrated the stabilizers with caffeine-scented determination.

Jenna moved continuously through the bays, posture upright despite the hour. She tracked progress without hovering, corrected workflow without theatrics, and redistributed labor before fatigue could turn into error.

When an ensign’s hands began to tremble during micro-weld alignment, she reassigned him to diagnostics and took his place for three steady passes of the torch. Her weld line ran straight and clean.

By 0400 hours Leo had grown quieter, his earlier debate replaced by reverent focus. Each bolt seated with measured torque. Each casing aligned by eye before the instruments confirmed what he already sensed through touch.

Bonnie’s thoughts accelerated as her body slowed. Exhaustion stripped away distraction and left her with pure pattern recognition. She saw the final synchronization adjustment before the console predicted it and implemented it with steady hands.

At 0557 both energy refraction inverters stood complete, housings sealed, regulators humming in low synchronized harmony. Jenna reviewed the alignment matrix one final time, scanning every tolerance column until satisfaction registered in the smallest nod. “Prepare them for deployment,” she said.

The room exhaled as the clock turned 0630. Tools rested. Fabricators cooled. Leo wiped his hands with deliberate care and regarded the paired devices with craftsman’s pride. Bonnie leaned back in her chair, hair slipping loose, eyes tracking the two phase curves that held steady as twin loops.

Jenna remained standing for another long second, ensuring nothing drifted, before finally allowing herself to sit.

The Sunfire carried two new engines created for folded energy, built through argument, accident, discipline, and trust. Exhaustion settled across the team like a well-earned weight, and for a moment, the ship felt steadier for it.

 

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