There’s No Good Option – So What Do We Do? – Star Trek Fanfiction (Red Directive #35)

I fell into step beside the Doctor as the others dispersed, the low murmur of the room dissolving into the hum of the station’s systems.

We stepped into the curved corridor of the habitat ring, the ambient lighting dimmed for the station’s night cycle.

Once again, the corridor was empty, giving it an eerie feeling.

Even more so now that we knew the colonists had been fully integrated. Their bodies were around here somewhere since we saw their neural signatures.

I shuddered at the thought.

Surprisingly, we walked all the way to the turbolift alcove in silence. That’s not a vibe you normally get from the Doctor. Which wasn’t a good sign.

We reached the turbolift door, and the Doctor just stood there. Nothing happened. He looked at me, surprised.

“This is rather odd. I haven’t had to manually open a turbolift practically the entire time we’ve been here.”

I sighed and pressed the panel next to the turbolift to open the doors.

“It’s because you’re with me.”

He scoffed as we stepped inside the turbolift.

“And why is that?”

I shut my eyes and clasped my hands behind my back.

“Sickbay.”

Even though my eyes were shut, I could feel his photonic stare.

“Well?” he asked sharply.

The turbolift softly jolted us forward, carrying us inward toward the station’s central core.

“Did you miss that whole conversation that the station thinks of me as a threat?”

I kept my eyes closed to avoid showing any signs of frustration.

Don’t photonics have an eidetic memory?

He crossed his arms as we waited for the turbolift to reach our destination.

“Oh, I remember. I’m assuming this isn’t your first time experiencing this phenomenon with the station’s systems?”

“Hardly a phenomenon.”

“For this station, it is!”

He sounded surprised.

By the time the doors opened, the warmth of the residential decks had given way to the cooler, clinical precision of Starfleet-modified corridors.

I opened my eyes and stepped out into the corridor. The Doctor started walking at a fast pace to get ahead.

We didn’t have far to go until we reached Sickbay. I watched him reach the doors, and they automatically slid open for him.

Luckily, I was right behind him at this point, and I stepped right in before they could shut.

I must have gotten used to the automation of everything, because it was apparent I did not like not having access to it anymore.

This was my first time in EOS Prospera’s Sickbay.

I scanned the room as the Doctor activated the surgical bay and started typing away at a console.

Starfleet precision layered over something older… and still active underneath.

Sickbay was operational—but it didn’t feel entirely Starfleet.

The biobeds and diagnostic arrays were familiar, overlaid with clean LCARS projections, but the structure beneath them told a different story. The walls curved subtly, the material neither metal nor composite—something grown, not built.

A low-frequency hum pulsed through the room, just beneath the threshold of hearing.

And as the Doctor activated the scanners, the displays didn’t just respond.

They anticipated.

The mixture of Federation and ancient alien technology gave Sickbay an eerie feeling, like the rest of the station.

I heard the EMH cough purposely to grab my attention.

I held my breath to contain my frustration, and I walked over to the console he was working on.

“We will begin with what we know,” he said, his voice clipped, efficient. “Which, unfortunately, is very little.”

I crossed my arms, watching as he brought up the colonists’ scans—if they could still be called that.

Their neural patterns pulsed across the display.

Interwoven.

Layered.

Not individuals anymore.

Not entirely.

“Run it again,” I said.

“I have run it seventeen times, Captain.”

“Then make it eighteen.”

A pause.

Not defiance.

Not hesitation.

Just… acknowledgment.

“As you wish.”

The display shifted again—variations, projections, hypothetical separations.

Each one ended the same way.

Catastrophic neural collapse.

I leaned forward slightly, bracing my hands against the console.

“There has to be a threshold,” I muttered. “A point before full integration—”

“There is not,” the Doctor interrupted, more sharply than usual. “Not anymore.”

The words hung there.

Final.

I exhaled slowly.

Behind the clinical data, behind the projections and probability curves, there were people.

There had been people.

Families.

Colonists who had signed on for a frontier assignment—not… this.

“What if we interrupt the lattice?” I asked. “A controlled shutdown. Force a separation.”

The Doctor didn’t look at me this time.

“Then we would be responsible for their deaths.”

He set his palms flat down on the console and sighed.

“Their neural pathways have been extensively rewritten. Any attempt to extract them would result in catastrophic cognitive collapse.”

I placed my hand to my chin in deep thought.

There had to be something we could do. Even if it was small.

“What about the children? Are they fully integrated as well? It just doesn’t seem probable that every single colonist has been integrated into the station while apparently nothing has happened to us. There has to be some colonists we can save.”

He shook his head and let out a slight, questioning moan as he stood up to meet my gaze.

“I suppose that’s a minor perk of being a threat.”

I shot him a glare, and he continued,

“Unfortunately, Captain, every single colonist has been fully integrated. Even the babies.”

My stomach sank at the thought, and I dropped my hand back down to the console as I examined it for something we could be missing.

“There must be something…”

He cut me off.

“Captain, I know it’s not what—”

Then I cut him off,

“What if we can keep them alive in the lattice indefinitely using the transporter buffers?”

He scoffed as he looked me up and down.

“What kind of life do you think that would be? Just as you said, it’s indefinite. They’d be imprisoned—just like the Elionvorel.”

The last hope, pulling at the faintest threads of separation to save… anybody.

I turned back to the EMH to meet his gaze, measured.

“We are responsible for what we choose to do next, Captain.”

Silence settled between us as we stared at each other for the right answers.

The station’s low-frequency hum seemed to deepen, pressing in at the edges of thought.

I slightly turned, my eyes drifting back to the display.

Dozens of neural signatures.

Merged.

Sustained.

Trapped.

“Once we leave…” I said quietly, more to myself than to him.

The Doctor didn’t respond, just watched my expression.

“They remain like this,” I continued. “Integrated. Indefinitely.”

“Yes! We’ve already established that!”

“And if this station… if this system… encounters another colony—”

“It will do the same!” he finished.

His expression immediately turned from questioning to realization.

He turned back to his console, his voice returning to its usual clinical cadence.

“I will continue searching for alternatives. However, I recommend you begin considering… contingency protocols.”

Contingency.

Such a small word.

For something so final.

My gaze lingered on the lattice interface—on the way it pulsed in perfect rhythm with the colonists’ neural patterns.

Alive.

Adaptive.

Hungry.

“What would you do, Doctor?” I asked.

He didn’t answer immediately.

When he did, his voice was quieter.

“I am not programmed to make that decision.”

I almost smiled at that.

Almost.

“Convenient.”

“I was designed to preserve life,” he replied. “Not to weigh its acceptable loss.”

I stepped back from the console.

The answer wasn’t here.

Not tonight.

Maybe not at all.

But the question had changed.

It wasn’t just how do we save them anymore.

It was—

What do we do now?

My eyes drifted once more to the pulsing lattice. Then I looked around Sickbay as if the answer would be there somewhere. I noticed a small room in Sickbay. Walls made of glass, and a door to shut the world out. I assumed it was the EMH’s office. It gave me an idea.

I sighed.

“If we can’t save them, we need to be able to save someone else. We can’t let this happen to any more species.”

“Agreed, Captain, but what did you have in mind?”

“It’s apparent the colonists must stay on EOS Prospera. What if there’s a way to isolate the station and quarantine it so no other species can board?”

“How would we guarantee it would stay contained? Even if Starfleet were to monitor it, if the station didn’t stay in quarantine, someone else would have to come back out here and do the same thing—and risk their lives.”

I put my hands on my hips and met his gaze again.

“We seem to be running out of options, Doctor.”

He sighed and threw his arms down to his sides, almost in defeat.

“Like I said before, I’m programmed to preserve life. If we can’t save the colonists, we need to preserve other lives by preventing them from entering this station.”

“If we can’t quarantine it with certainty, there’s no way to stop any life form from boarding it.”

We both sat and thought for a minute, then the EMH spoke.

“Couldn’t we leave a warning beacon in space to emit a signal in every direction to ward off other species from coming here?”

It wasn’t a terrible idea. I slowly shook my head as I thought about it.

“That’s something.”

He immediately turned and started heading to his glass office.

“Then that’s what we will present when we meet with the rest of the crew at fourteen hundred hours tomorrow.”

“No.”

He stopped and turned back to look at me, waiting to hear what I had to say.

“I want you to go see Commander Pelia at oh nine hundred hours tomorrow and construct a warning beacon to deploy from the USS Cairo when we leave.”

“Of course, Captain.”

He nodded and went into the office.

That was my cue to head to my quarters for the night.

I walked out of Sickbay into the empty, too-sterilized curved corridor.

My walk was much, much slower than usual as I headed to the turbolift alcove.

Almost seven hundred lives…

Gone…

Under my command…

A tear formed in my eye as I tapped the panel next to the door to open the turbolift.

When I stepped inside, I brushed the tear from my eye.

“Captain’s quarters.”

This was not how I wanted my first Red Directive mission to go.

Any mission, for that matter.

I was probably going to be decommissioned as soon as we arrived back to the Alpha Quadrant.

The turbolift started to move—and it moved much faster than normal. I almost lost my balance when it first jerked into motion. I felt it move outward at least and just leaned against the wall to steady myself.

There was no point in wondering anymore about the station.

I closed my eyes for the whole ride.

We just had to survive one more day on this station.

With our luck, since it stole the Betazoid cognitive anchor, it probably knew about all our plans.

The turbolift stopped, and the doors slid open. I opened my eyes, happy to see the habitat ring. I almost jumped out of there, thinking the doors would close on me at any minute.

As I walked the curved corridor to my quarters, I decided no more thinking about the horrors the station could still do because of what we were planning. I needed to keep my mind silent until I met with the rest of the senior staff tomorrow to go over what they had accomplished.

I reached my quarters, entered my passcode into the panel, and entered with a swiftness when the door opened.

I was probably being overly cautious.

Was I?

“Computer, time.”

It immediately responded,

“It is approximately twenty-two hundred hours.”

I had my back against the wall just inside my quarters and slid down it to the floor when I heard the answer.

No more time lapses.

For now.

What if the station caused another temporal disturbance preventing us from leaving?

I put my head in my hands in frustration and leaned on my knees.

So much of the unknown was getting to me. I really hoped Commander T’Varen found a solution for the temporal disturbances.

There were so many variables to consider.

I sighed and looked up out of my viewport.

I held my knees in deep thought.

I might not have been able to save the colonists…

But I’ll be damned if I can’t get my crew out of here.