Cascade Failure

Posted on Thu Mar 5th, 2026 @ 2:14am by Lieutenant JG Sheldon Parsons
Edited on on Thu Mar 5th, 2026 @ 2:19am

Mission: Port of Call
Timeline: Mission Day 5 at 2140

[Personal Quarters]
[Deck 4]
[MD 5: 2140 Hours]

The duty assignments weren't going to file themselves.

Sheldon had told himself that at 1900, when he'd first sat down on the edge of his bunk with his PADD. He told himself that again at 1930, when he realized he'd been staring at the same roster entry for twenty minutes without actually reading it. And he told himself that once more at 2100, when he set the PADD aside to get a glass of water, drank half of it standing at the replicator, and then came back and picked the PADD up again, his intentions full throttle. But at 2126, the duty assignments still weren't filed.

It wasn't that the work was hard. It was routine, actually — the kind of administrative throughput a chief engineer handled without thinking. Of course, he was only acting Chief and very young for that role at that, but the point stood: without something technically demanding enough to fully occupy his brain, his thoughts kept sliding off the task and back into the same grooves they'd been wearing for days now. Deep, uncomfortable grooves. The kind that, if you weren't careful, started to feel like the actual shape of things.

He kept coming back to Petty Officer Deenik.

It had happened two days ago — three? Time had become slippery — in one of the jefferies tube access corridors on deck six. Deenik had been running a diagnostic on the EPS relay junction they'd been nursing along since the Kazon attack, and Sheldon had stopped by to check the progress, and the young man had looked up from his tools and just...come apart. Quietly. No dramatics, no warning. Just a face that had been holding itself together for too long suddenly unable to hold anymore, and tears tracking silently down his cheeks, and his hands still resting in the open panel like his body hadn't yet gotten the message that work had stopped.

"I just keep thinking about Lieutenant F'Rar," Deenik had said. "I keep thinking she was trying to get to us and I keep thinking we were right there and we didn't—"

He hadn't finished the sentence. He hadn't needed to. Sheldon had done what he could. He'd sat down on the deck plates next to the young petty officer, in the cramped and slightly too-warm corridor, and he'd said things — careful, gentle things he hoped were helpful, things he dimly recognized as the sort of things Doctor Bracco had said to him in various configurations across months of weekly sessions. He'd meant all of it. He'd wanted to help. And when Deenik had finally composed himself enough to return to the relay junction, Sheldon had climbed back out of the corridor and stood in the open for a long moment before anyone could see his face.

Because the whole time he'd been saying those careful, gentle things, a small and pitiless voice in the back of his mind had been asking: who are you to be saying any of this? He set the PADD down and pressed his thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose.

He wasn't a counselor. He wasn't a doctor. He was an engineer with anxiety and depression and months of weekly sessions with Doctor Bracco that had, before she'd transferred off the ship, at least given him some handholds. She'd adjusted his medication one final time before she left, a parting gift of sorts, and told him Counselor Qo would take excellent care of him. He hadn't made an appointment yet. He kept meaning to. There hadn't been time, and then there had been time but not the energy, and now here he was — no Bracco, no sessions, a medication adjustment that wasn't touching the thing that actually needed touching. The thing underneath. The thing that had five names on it and then a sixth name now — and her name was F'Rar and she had been right there, trying to get to them, and he had been in engineering waiting for her to walk through those doors, and she never did, and there was no version of knowing that his brain had yet been willing to process into anything resembling peace.

We walked into this job knowing that could happen, Tork had said this morning, with the easy authority of a man leaning against someone else's warp core railing. You let five people die...and how many more lived because of that? He typed an approval on Petty Officer Tran's gamma shift assignment and stared at the next entry without reading it.

He knew the argument. He'd heard it from Bracco, more gently worded, more times than he could count. He understood the logic of it intellectually the way he understood the logic of a lot of things that his nervous system had elected to simply ignore. What he hadn't expected — what had burrowed under his skin and set up residence there — was hearing it recited to him like a regulation, like a thing to be memorized and filed and accepted, by someone who had been on this ship for less than a week. Someone who had spent five days doing unsanctioned work in the jefferies tubes rather than officially lending a hand while Sheldon's exhausted, grieving engineers kept the Sojourner alive on fumes and sheer stubbornness. I was being considerate of you, Tork had explained, casual as anything, and Sheldon had stood there and thought: considerate would have been showing up on day one.

He'd had a moment of genuine honesty — the five engineers, the blast doors, the years of carrying it — and Tork had received it with a shrug and a lecture about making peace with the job. And Sheldon had shut himself back down and been professional and nodded at the appropriate intervals because that was what you did, that was the only tool he seemed to reliably have, and when the conversation was over he'd walked out of his own engine room with his knuckles white around a fistful of uniform fabric and thought about how desperately he wanted to go home and put on his cardigan.

The cardigan was currently doing him no good whatsoever. He was wearing it now — had changed into it the moment he was off duty, the soft familiar weight of it settling around him like an argument he'd been winning for years — and his right hand had found the V of the collar anyway, the same way it always did, knuckles pressing into the knit. It wasn't helping the way it usually helped. He'd been sitting here for two hours white-knuckling a cardigan and staring at a PADD and somewhere on this ship, Tamblem Dravor was waiting for Sheldon to say yes to the very dinner invitation he had demanded in the moments after returning to the ship from the Kordra-Lisrit.

An actual date. Which he had wanted. Still wanted, somewhere below all of this, in the part of himself that had watched Tamblem's expression when he'd asked and felt something loosen in his chest for the first time in what felt like weeks. But he couldn't do it. He couldn't put on something nice and sit across from someone who looked at him the way Dravor looked at him and pretend to be a person who had his feet under him. He couldn't be that person tonight. Maybe not tomorrow either.

Because the five engineers were still there, alive and then dying by his hand and then alive again only to die once more. And F'Rar was still there, and more of Subrek's people were probably still out there somewhere, and Tork had spent twenty minutes this morning explaining life and death and engineering philosophy to him while his crew worked their fingers raw to keep the ship moving. And somewhere in all of it the message had landed, not because it was true, but it had landed anyway: you are not enough for this.

Sheldon typed the approval again. Blat-blat-blat, the PADD protested audibly. He'd already approved it, apparently.

His heart was suddenly very loud. Sheldon noticed it the way you noticed something that had been happening for a while once you finally stopped moving: a rapid, insistent thud against his sternum that had no business being that forceful at rest. He put a hand to his chest automatically, over the soft knit of the cardigan, the gesture useless but instinctive. The beat didn't slow. He took a breath — tried to, anyway — and found the inhale shallow, truncated, like the room had quietly lost some of its oxygen without announcing it.
And then the taste hit him. Metallic. Sharp. The inside of his mouth coated with something acrid that he recognized somewhere below conscious thought before his brain finished catching up to what his body had already concluded.

Adrenaline. Oh. He set the PADD down on the bunk beside him. Oh, this is—

The bulkhead felt closer than it had a moment ago. The back of his neck was damp. His hands, he noticed with a distant clinical remove, had started to tremble slightly — not dramatically, not the full-body shaking of his worst episodes, but a fine, persistent vibration in his fingers, like a wire conducting too much current.
He knew what this was. He'd been here before, more times than he'd ever disclosed on any official record. He knew the shape of it: the way his vision narrowed at the edges, the way sounds became simultaneously muffled and too loud, the way rational thought became a very small boat in a very large sea. He knew the grounding techniques Bracco had taught him. He could name five things he could see — the PADD, the wall, the edge of his bunk, the glass of water on the shelf, the soft red fold of his cardigan sleeve — and naming them did absolutely nothing to slow his heart.

The medication adjustment wasn't working. The grounding wasn't working. None of it was touching this particular thing, and he was supposed to be the person Deenik came to, and he couldn't fix it in himself after all this time, and he didn't know what that meant except that it meant something had to change — because he could not keep doing this to himself and he could not keep asking his crew to trust him with their broken places when his own had no bottom he could find.

His chest hurt. Not in the alarming, call-for-medical-attention way — he'd had enough of these to know the difference — but in the tight, pressurized way that meant his body had decided something was very wrong and was flooding his system with every resource it had to deal with a threat that wasn't there. His engineers were fine. The ship was battered but repairable. Irynya and Noah were back. There was no actual crisis now beyond keeping the ship together until they reached Pathfinder Station. There was nothing for the adrenaline to do except arc through him uselessly while he sat on the edge of his bunk at 2140 with unfinished duty assignments and a heart rate that belonged to someone being actively chased by one of those panther-likes from Shaddam IVa.

Sheldon suddenly reached for the comm panel. He didn't think about it first. Thinking first was how he'd talked himself out of it a dozen times before — how he'd convinced himself it wasn't bad enough, wasn't the right moment, could wait until the repairs were further along. If he thought about it now, he would talk himself out of it again. So his fingers found the panel before the argument could form.

"Parsons to Counselor Qo." His voice came out steadier than he had any right to expect. "I'm...I'm so sorry for the hour. But I-I-I think I need some help." A beat. A swallow. It still tasted acrid. He swallowed against the bitterness coating his throat again. "I'm having a panic attack and the things I normally do aren't working. Is there any chance you're available?"


=/\= A post by... =/\=

Lieutenant JG Sheldon Parsons
Acting Chief Engineer
USS Sojourner