Little 'Red' Bird - I

Posted on Fri Jun 12th, 2026 @ 5:51pm by Commander Jenna Ramthorne

2,761 words; about a 14 minute read

Mission: Character Development
Location: USS Sunfire

"Sometimes the only way to outrun a ghost is to build something faster."

The final mourners drifted away beneath the California sun while transporters flashed and shuttlecraft lifted toward every corner of Earth. Conversations lingered in small clusters before dissolving into the distance. Shore leave beckoned with beaches, cities, restaurants, family, and all the other things people sought when they needed recovery. Jenna Ramthorne watched them scatter across the grounds outside Starfleet Command and felt an odd sort of restlessness settle beneath her skin.

The funeral had ended. The speeches had been given. The honors had been rendered. The dead were finally at rest. The living suddenly possessed free time that needed filled. That last part felt considerably more dangerous to the untrained.

She spent nearly an hour walking without destination. The pathways around Starfleet Headquarters wound beneath ancient trees and carefully maintained gardens, yet every direction seemed to lead toward thought, reflection, and memory. Jenna possessed little interest in any of those destinations. Eventually she found herself standing inside a transporter room with no conscious recollection of deciding to go there.

The transporter chief glanced up. "Back to the Sunfire, Commander?"

Jenna considered the question for a moment before answering. "Seems that way."

Moments later, the familiar shimmer deposited her aboard the ship. The corridors felt strangely hollow. Shore leave had emptied much of the crew onto Earth, leaving the Sunfire quieter than Jenna could ever remember. Her boots carried her through deck after deck without purpose as she passed engineering, passed the mess hall, and the gymnasium. Eventually she reached the main shuttle bay. That at least felt familiar.

The cavernous space stretched before her in orderly rows of shuttlecraft, maintenance stations, fabrication equipment, and support machinery. Technicians had largely vacated for shore leave, leaving only a handful of personnel tending routine duties. Jenna wandered deeper into the bay while the overhead cranes rested motionless beneath the ceiling girders.

A fabrication alcove along the far bulkhead caught her eye. The bay sat empty. Tools hung neatly arranged. Industrial replicators waited in standby. Construction arms rested folded against the walls like sleeping giants.

Jenna stopped. Something about the space called to her. Perhaps because it represented possibility. Perhaps because it represented work. Perhaps because work required concentration and concentration left little room for everything else. She stepped inside. A nearby console awakened beneath her touch, flooding the work area with holographic displays. Design archives scrolled past her eyes. Shuttlecraft, workpods, atmospheric transports, and auxiliary craft dating back centuries. Her fingers moved absently through the database until one familiar silhouette appeared among the records.

The Delta Flyer. Jenna paused. The compact vessel rotated slowly within the display. Sleek lines, oversized engines, and an aggressive geometry. It was Equal parts shuttlecraft and starfighter. A pilot's ship.

She opened the files. Design notes filled the screen. Engineering modifications. Performance reports. Personal commentary from Lieutenant Tom Paris himself. Jenna read for nearly twenty minutes, occasionally arching an eyebrow at a design choice or shaking her head at a maintenance solution that felt unnecessarily complicated.

Finally she leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. A small smirk touched the corner of her mouth. "Let's see what Tom Paris got wrong," she murmured. "And how we can fix his mistakes." The decision arrived with surprising ease. Her fingers moved immediately. Structural plans expanded. Material requirements populated. Fabrication schedules assembled themselves across the display. The idle bay transformed into a project, a purpose, and an excuse.

Industrial replicators hummed to life as tritanium supports emerged layer by layer. Jenna rolled up her sleeves and went to work. Measurements replaced memories. Load calculations replaced reflection. Structural tolerances replaced everything she had spent the day trying to avoid.

Hours slipped by unnoticed. Support beams locked into position. Primary frame sections joined together. Alignment lasers swept across unfinished components. The growing skeleton slowly emerged from raw material and determination. Outside the bay, day surrendered to evening. Evening surrendered to night. The Sunfire settled into quiet stillness while Earth turned beneath the stars.

Jenna scarcely noticed. She climbed ladders. Adjusted welds. Checked measurements. Corrected tiny imperfections that nobody else would ever see. At some point she realized she was smiling. At some point she realized several hours had vanished. At some point she stopped caring. Near midnight she finally stepped back to gain perspective.

The fabrication arms held the unfinished structure suspended above the deck. Bare tritanium ribs stretched outward like the bones of some metallic bird caught midway through creation. Bulkheads waited for installation. Systems waited for integration. Hundreds of hours of work still stretched ahead.

Yet the shape already existed. The idea was already alive. Jenna stood alone beneath it, hands resting on her hips as work lights cast long shadows across the bay floor. For the first time all day, her mind settled into silence. Above her hung the bones of a ship. Tomorrow she would give it a heart.

---

The second morning arrived without ceremony.

The Sunfire carried the quiet rhythm of shore leave through her decks as crew filtered planetside, visited family, found distractions, chased adventures, or simply enjoyed the luxury of existing somewhere that did not require phasers, emergency repairs, or impossible decisions. Deep inside the main shuttle bay, Jenna remained exactly where she had been when the previous day ended.

The skeletal frame of the shuttle hung suspended between fabrication arms and gravitic supports, larger now, heavier, beginning to resemble intention rather than possibility. Raw tritanium ribs stretched from bow to stern. Structural bulkheads traced the shape of future spaces. Power conduits waited bundled beside open access panels. The vessel possessed bones.

Jenna circled it slowly with a tricorder in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other, checking tolerances she had already verified twice before. Numbers scrolled across her display. Alignment markers blinked green. Fabrication drones hovered nearby awaiting instructions. "Close enough for Starfleet," she muttered. Then she adjusted three measurements anyway.

The morning disappeared beneath the steady rhythm of construction. Support members slid into place beneath her direction. Magnetic clamps locked sections together while she guided welding beams along seams that would eventually disappear beneath hull plating. Reactor housing supports rose within the aft section. Internal access trunks formed around them. Every piece connected to another piece. Every component supported something larger than itself.

The work rewarded focus. Focus carried weight. Weight kept other things at a distance. Hours passed. Coffee accumulated. A second mug appeared. Then a third. Lunch never arrived because Jenna never went looking for it. The frame expanded around her. She climbed through it. Crawled beneath it. Hung upside down from maintenance harnesses while routing power transfer conduits through spaces barely wide enough for shoulders.

The physical effort felt good. The concentration felt better. Victor always used to laugh whenever she disappeared into a project.

"You're doing it again."

"Doing what?"

"Trying to outwork your feelings."

"It's working."

"That's exactly what worries me."

The memory surfaced without warning while she secured an access manifold. Her wrench paused. The silence deepened. Then she tightened the final bolt and climbed toward the nacelle mounts. The moment passed, and her work continued.

By afternoon, the reactor housing occupied the center belly of the vessel like a heart waiting for its first beat. Nacelle pylons extended from the aft hull with elegant aggression. Jenna stood atop a maintenance platform studying the profile from above while fabrication arms deposited another section into place. The shape pleased her. She was fast, lean and looked hungry.

The original Delta Flyer carried the personality of its creators. This one already was already carrying hers. She adjusted a pylon angle by less than a degree. The entire vessel suddenly looked faster. "Much better."

Her father would have approved. He taught her that vehicles possessed personality. Most engineers talked about specifications. He talked about character.

"Every machine tells you how it wants to move," he used to say. "Your job is listening."

"Machines don't talk."

"That's because you aren't listening hard enough."

She smiled despite herself. The smile lasted exactly long enough to install the next support strut. The afternoon stretched into evening. The shuttle grew. So did the pile of empty coffee mugs gathering near the fabrication controls. A tray containing replicated food appeared at some point. Several hours later, the tray remained untouched. The lights overhead shifted automatically into evening settings.

Jenna never noticed. The vessel occupied most of her attention now. She climbed into the unfinished cockpit and sat among exposed conduits, structural braces, and half-installed systems while reviewing interface layouts. The seat had not arrived yet. Neither had most of the controls. The space existed only as potential. She rested her head briefly against an unfinished bulkhead.

She remembered flying as a child. She remembered impossible skies and training craft and the feeling of freedom arriving faster than fear ever could. She remembered believing that every horizon held something worth discovering. She remembered her father's voice over the comms.
Patient. Proud. Present.

The memory lingered. Another memory tried to follow. Her mother waited somewhere beyond it. Jenna reached for a diagnostic panel and buried herself in reactor specifications before the thought completed its journey. Work provided reliable shelter. Hours slipped away. The fabrication bay settled into late-night quiet. Automated systems dimmed. Most of the ship slept.

Jenna continued. A support beam here. A conduit there. Another alignment check. Another cup of coffee. At some point, exhaustion finally won a battle persistence had dominated all day.

Leo arrived during gamma shift carrying a datapad and stopped beneath the suspended shuttle. He found Jenna asleep inside the unfinished cockpit with a wrench loosely hanging from her fingers and a schematic still glowing across her lap. He stared upward for several seconds. Then he laughed quietly.

Several hours later, Jenna woke with a stiff neck, blinked twice, climbed out of the cockpit, and immediately resumed working.

Leo happened to pass through again during the morning. He looked up.

She looked down.

"Did you sleep?" He asked earnestly.

Jenna considered the question while tightening a mounting bracket. "Eventually."

Leo studied the dark circles beneath her eyes, glanced toward the growing collection of coffee mugs, then looked back at her. His expression answered for him.

Jenna returned to work. Above them, fabrication arms continued their patient dance around the growing shuttle while the bay lights burned steadily through another day. They never fully turned off.

---

By the third day, the fabrication bay had begun to feel less like a workspace and more like a territory she occupied through sheer force of will. The growing craft hung suspended at the center of the bay beneath cranes, fabrication arms, and pools of white work light that never seemed to dim. Hull sections enclosed much of the frame. Internal compartments carried purpose. Systems waited in orderly rows for installation. The machine possessed shape now. Soon it would possess life.

Jenna arrived before most of the ship awakened and immediately set to work routing the primary power conduits through the vessel's spine. Thick bundles of superconductive pathways disappeared beneath deck plating and structural members, connecting future impulse engines to future control systems through a network that would eventually carry energy, information, and intention from one end of the craft to the other.

She worked with practiced efficiency, moving through access ways she had personally assembled during the previous two days. Every bolt already lived in her memory. Every panel carried familiar dimensions. She understood the vessel intimately because she had touched nearly every part of it.

A hand reached into her peripheral vision while she balanced inside an access crawlway. "Need an extra set of hands?"

Jenna glanced upward. One of the engineering technicians stood beside the fabrication platform holding a toolkit. She considered the offer for approximately half a second. "I've got it, thank you."

The technician smiled knowingly. Everyone aboard the Sunfire knew that expression. It meant she absolutely did not have it and intended to continue anyway. "All right then. Try eating something." Jenna nodded. The technician left. The sandwich remained untouched beside the fabrication controls until evening.

As the day progressed, the reactor housing accepted its final components. Power regulators locked into place. Transfer junctions connected. Emergency bypass systems followed. The vessel's heart gradually assembled itself beneath her hands.

At some point she reached automatically toward a storage tray. Her fingers paused. The tool she wanted sat three compartments over. Victor always organized tools that way. Not alphabetically and not by frequency of use, but by sequence of need. One tool naturally led to the next. A chain of logic built from years of experience.

Jenna stared at the tray longer than necessary before retrieving the tool. The ache arrived quietly. Work helped. Work always helped. She returned to installing power couplings.

The computer core arrived shortly after midday. Fabrication drones lowered the assembly into the central compartment while Jenna guided it into position from below. Optical processors, quantum memory arrays, navigation architecture, and flight management systems settled into the waiting frame with satisfying precision.

The original plans called for a standard control architecture. Jenna studied those plans. Then deleted half of them. Her fingers moved across the console. New pathways appeared. New processing priorities emerged. Flight control systems shifted closer to the center of the design. Navigation processors gained additional capacity. Reaction time improved. Predictive calculations expanded.

The craft slowly stopped becoming Tom Paris's Flyer, and it had started becoming hers.

Hours later, she sat cross-legged inside the unfinished cockpit, surrounded by holographic displays while flight processors came online one by one. The original interface projected conservative handling characteristics. Jenna frowned. A few adjustments followed. Then several more. Then a complete redesign. The computer attempted to compensate. She compensated harder.

The vessel responded beautifully. A small smile touched her lips. "There you are." The words escaped before she realized she had spoken aloud. By late afternoon, she turned her attention toward the maneuvering thrusters. This section interested her most. Starfleet engineers tended toward practicality. Pilots tended toward possibility.

Jenna firmly belonged to one of those groups.

Enhanced thruster assemblies replaced standard packages. Additional vectoring capability appeared beneath the ventral hull. High-response attitude controls occupied spaces the original design never considered. Every modification shaved fractions of seconds from maneuvering calculations. Fractions mattered. Fractions won dogfights. Fractions kept pilots alive.

She crawled halfway into a maintenance compartment while installing another control assembly and caught herself adjusting a conduit angle. Victor would have adjusted it first. Not because the original angle failed. Because the revised angle carried cleaner power flow. She changed it anyway. The ache returned. The conduit remained. Work continued.

As evening approached, Jenna stood beneath the vessel and studied the design from afar. The shuttle was starting to look fast. The computer disagreed. According to the simulations, it still behaved too much like a shuttlecraft. She climbed back into the cockpit. Another hour disappeared. Then another.

Control algorithms changed. Flight priorities shifted. Inertial compensation expanded beyond standard tolerances. The pilot became the center of the design rather than one passenger among many.

Finally she threw a wrench onto the nearby seat and glared at the display. "You're a flyer, damnit," she muttered. "Stop trying to be a shuttle." The computer offered no defense. Two hours later it surrendered. The simulations transformed. The vessel danced. Only then did Jenna approve the modifications.

Night settled outside the shuttlebay. The Sunfire carried on with shore leave. The fabrication bay carried on with creation. Impulse systems slid into place beneath the hull. Power transfer conduits completed their final connections. Micro-torpedo launchers found homes within compartments carefully concealed behind access panels. Flight processors synchronized with guidance systems. Every subsystem began speaking to every other subsystem.

The machine was finally starting to breathe. Jenna climbed down from the fabrication platform and stood beside the primary control console. For a moment she simply looked at what she had built. Then she pressed the activation command.

Power flowed. Conduits illuminated. Processor arrays awakened. Status indicators blinked alive throughout the vessel. A soft vibration passed through the deck plating. Then another. Then a steady rhythmic hum filled the bay. The sound carried warmth. Potential. Life.

Jenna stood motionless beneath the suspended craft as the systems settled into equilibrium. The vessel now existed as something more than parts and plans. Above her, hidden behind unfinished hull panels and exposed structural members, a heart had begun to beat.

TBC

 

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