Cargo Bay Nocturne

Posted on Mon Jan 12th, 2026 @ 2:29am by Lieutenant JG Theodor Wishmore

Mission: Port of Call
Timeline: Mission Day 1 at 0000

Night on the Sojourner came as a soft dimming, a blue hush that slipped into the seams of the ship. Lights on the deckheads lowered; the hum of circulation steadied to a breath you felt more than heard. Doors sighed only when asked to. Voices dwindled to murmurs and then to memory.

Theo chose this hour.

He lifted a small crate—books, mostly, wrapped in linen and patience—and stepped into the corridor. The floor felt cool through the soles of his boots. Somewhere aft, a pressure regulator exhaled. He matched his pace to it, walking as though to a metronome at the edge of hearing. He carried the crate close, palms flat against its sides, like a bowl of water he refused to spill.

Lexa had been right. He could admit it now, here where admitting cost nothing. You can’t take half of Oxford into space, Theo. He had smiled, then, because you always smiled at Lexa, because she said such things with love. But he had kept packing.

The first night he told himself it would be one crate only. No one would notice one crate. He would tuck it somewhere neat, out of the way, and tell the quartermaster in the morning. He would apologize for the inconvenience and mean it.

The cargo bay doors parted on a whisper.

Inside: space. Not the indifferent kind that began beyond the hull; the practical kind, measured out in containers and tie-downs and yellow hazard lines, cross-hatched by scaffolds and cranes. It was cooler here, the air stiller. Running lights dotted the stacked cargo like small, patient stars.

Theo stood at the threshold a moment, letting the hush settle into him. Then he moved—carefully, thought in each footfall—toward the shadowed corner behind a pair of blue supply units labeled EMERGENCY RATIONS and FILTER ELEMENTS. There was a wall there already: tall containers stacked two high, their backs smooth and anonymous. The space between the wall and the bay’s bulkhead formed a pocket large enough for a chair and a person and the promise of relief.

He set his crate down in that pocket. The sound it made was small and satisfying. He stood with his hands resting on the lid and breathed, and for the first time that day the breath went all the way in.

He did not linger. The first movement of anything delicate is a test of balance. He left the crate there, alone in its newness, and slipped back through the doors, as if he had done nothing more than return a tool to its drawer.

—

On the second night he brought a folded wool blanket and the small brass lamp that never quite matched Federation standard issue. The lamp’s switch had a gentle resistance to it he loved—a polite click, as though the light were saying if you truly wish it. He placed the blanket on the deck and the lamp upon the crate and switched it on. The bulb bloomed, not bright—never bright—but surely. The little wall of containers blocked the spill of light from the wider bay; the lamp drew a small circle and declared it enough.

He sat on the blanket and closed his eyes.

The ship hummed. Fluid lines ticked softly in some rhythm of their own; a distant pneumatic hiss marked a door doing its work. He imagined the nocturne’s opening melody tracing itself against the bulkheads—unhurried, unafraid of silence—and let his breath follow.

After a time he opened the crate and took out three books: a worn text on comparative physiology, a collection of field notes in his mother’s careful hand, and a slim paper volume whose spine had been mended and mended again. He set them on the crate’s lid as if arranging a small altar. He smiled at himself for the thought; then he left them as they were.

Before he went, he slid the blanket under the crate to keep the cold from seeping in. It was an unnecessary kindness. He did it anyway.

—

On the third night he carried the music box. It was small and wooden and polished by years of being held. The lid bore a shallow carving—flowers, suggested more than described. He had once asked his mother which flowers they were meant to be. Whichever ones you need, she had said, and turned the key and let the room fill with tinny courage.

He set the music box on the crate in the cargo bay’s little pocket and did not open it. He did not need the melody; he needed what lay under it—the permission to be quiet, unobserved. He took out his notebook and a pencil and wrote:

Third night. Breathing easier. The ship is kind to those who listen.

He ran the pencil down to a point with the small sharpener clipped to the notebook’s back cover and wrote again. He wrote for ten minutes, then two, then five more, not measuring the time, only the slowing of his thoughts. He placed the pencil parallel to the notebook’s spine. He turned off the lamp and left the bay.

—

His roommates asked nothing. If they noticed the slow lightness of his bunk each morning—one crate fewer, another space cleared—they let the noticing be private.

Once, someone in gold glanced up from a half-disassembled component and asked, “Sleep well?” Theo answered that he did, and they both agreed to believe it.

Another officer passed through the common area carrying seedlings like something sacred, murmuring to them as though they might answer back. Theo smiled and said nothing of crates or lamps.

—

On the fourth night he brought the cello.

It felt like a confession. He kept the case pressed close to his side in the corridor, as though to conceal its silhouette from the lights themselves. The Sojourner did not laugh; the Sojourner was too small to waste anything on malice, even amusement.

In the cargo bay he placed the case gently against the container wall and did not open it. He stood very still. He could have, if he had wanted, tuned a string. He could have brushed a single note into the air and stood inside it until the note dissolved and he could breathe again. He could have done that, and he did not.

He sat instead, lamp on, notebook open, pencil moving. He wrote of shared laughter and overlapping routines, of how people learned one another’s rhythms without ever speaking of them. He wrote of kindness delivered without ceremony, and how it could feel like clarity if you were not used to it. He wrote of the ship’s low murmur and how he had begun to suspect that every vessel had a voice—not metaphor, not poetry—an actual voice, the sum of its parts choosing a tone.

When he finished writing, he placed the pencil parallel to the notebook’s spine. He closed the book. He laid his palm on the cello case and felt its cooler skin and the warmer promise beneath. Then he left.

—

On the fifth night he brought a thermos of tea and two cups.

He did not expect anyone to join him. He brought two cups because it is a good habit to be capable of welcome, even if no one knocks. He poured one cup and let it steam on the crate and warmed his fingers on the other. He drank and felt himself give back some part of the heat.

He stacked another crate on its side to form a second surface—low, like a table—then arranged the books so the lamp made soft foothills of shadow. He did not think of it as building; he thought of it as tuning.

Between sips he took the cello out. He did it quickly, before thought could turn permission into permission’s opposite. The instrument’s varnish caught the lamplight. He did not lift the bow. He set the instrument upright, turned one peg a fraction, and sounded a single low note with his fingertip, barely enough for the string to speak. The deck plates gave the sound a body; the bay made room for it; something in the bulkhead agreed.

He let the note fade. He did not play another. He put the cello away and felt both terribly foolish and very much himself.

When he left that night, he looked back from the bay doors and saw a little shape of gold in the corner—lamplight on wood and linen and the brushed metal of a flask—and thought, with a twinge of childishness he forgave himself for at once: It looks like home.

—

On the sixth night, someone followed him.

Theo did not notice. He moved as he had moved each night—careful, quiet, strangely relieved to have the same walls to pass, the same door to breathe through. The figure trailed him at a distance, curiosity tempered by something gentler. They had not intended to learn where he went; they had only looked up once when the bunks felt too empty for the hour.

They stopped at the cargo bay doors and watched him slip between the stacks, the small glow of his lamp rising a moment later like a candle finding oxygen.

He did nothing extraordinary. That was what held them. He did nothing but sit, pour tea, take out a notebook, write with a pencil that needed sharpening. He opened a case and another and did not play the instrument inside. He set his hand on it like you set your hand on a sleeping animal you trust and will not wake. He breathed.

They stepped back from the doors. The bay sighed closed.

On their way out they smiled, and did not tell anyone. Some things are not secrets so much as spaces.

—

On the seventh night, the sanctuary was finished by the only measure that mattered: he knew the route by heart.

He slid the last small crate—optics, delicate—into the far corner and draped the blanket over its top to soften the line. He turned the lamp down one notch. He pulled the notebook toward him and wrote, not observations this time, but the kind of sentences that arrive only when the body believes it is safe.

The silence here is not an absence. It is a shelter.

He closed his eyes and let the imagined piano line trace itself through the space. When he rose, he left the lamp barely alive—a firefly of permission in the corner. He folded the blanket but not too neatly. He set the notebook and pencil atop the crate and the music box beside them. He did not wind it.

The doors opened for him and closed again without comment.

Behind him, between containers, a small room built of boxes and a lamp and a discipline of kindness settled into the night. The nocturne resolved itself, not to silence, but to a silence that held.