The Long Crawl: Part I
Posted on 01 Jan 2026 @ 12:29am by Lieutenant Commander Elias Harlan
1,319 words; about a 7 minute read
“Two weeks stuck on Becky’s floating merit badge,” Lieutenant Commander Elias Harlan muttered under his breath as he waited in the transport shuttle’s cramped passenger bay, staring at the streaking stars beyond the viewport.
It wasn’t fair, and he knew it. Commander Rebecca Harlan...his big sister, the golden child, had earned every pip and every commendation. She was good. Damn good. Good enough that she could’ve had her own command years ago, but rumor around the family comms was that the Intrepid’s CO was finally on his way out. Either through promotion, retirement, or both, and Rebecca was the obvious successor. She always insisted she stayed because she loved the ship. Harlan figured it had more to do with the captain himself.
Stability. That’s what she had that he never did.
Rebecca had come aboard the Intrepid fresh out of the Academy and never left. Same corridors, same crew, same steady climb from ensign to executive officer. She’d turned down at least two command offers that Elias knew about—held out for the right chair on the right ship. Smart. Patient. Everything he wasn’t.
The Intrepid herself wasn’t flashy. No sleek Sovereign lines, no bleeding-edge technological nonsense. She was an older Excelsior-class refit—boxy nacelles, thick saucer, built like a brick with warp coils. A design that had outlasted every hot new prototype Starfleet ever threw at it. Harlan couldn’t help but respect that. Reminded him of the ancient Earth bombers his dad used to ramble about over Sunday dinner—the B-52s. Kept flying long after the designers were retired, or died, dropping ordnance and breaking records well into the 21st century.
And God knew Starfleet needed ships like that now. Time hadn’t been kind to the Federation.
Once—before the Dominion War—peace had felt solid, almost routine. The biggest headaches were diplomatic dances: which ambassador might take offense at the wrong seating arrangement, or which violin soloist would throw a fit if their part got cut. Exploration was the priority; ships like the Enterprise-D were out there charting new stars while the core worlds basked in two centuries of relative prosperity.
Then the war came. Long, brutal, and bloody. It stripped away the illusion that the Federation was untouchable, exposed every weakness in preparedness, and left scars that never fully healed.
After the treaty, the hits just kept coming. Mars burned in 2385. Romulus burned in 2387. And then, like the universe had saved the worst for last, Frontier Day in 2401—when the fleet turned on itself and Earth almost fell.
Harlan didn’t need to look hard to remember it. If he stripped off his uniform in a mirror, he could still trace the faint, branching scars across his torso where the feedback from an overloaded console had arced through him. He’d been one of the lucky ones—woke up in sickbay three weeks later.
The Federation had survived it all. Barely.
Starfleet was smaller now, stretched thinner, pouring every spare resource into rebuilding core defenses instead of pushing the borders.
Shipbuilding had taken the hardest hit. The losses at Utopia Planitia hadn’t just been ships; they’d been infrastructure. Orbital docks, advanced fabrication foundries, centuries of accumulated expertise—all erased in a single afternoon of fire. Parts of Mars’ upper atmosphere still glowed faintly on long-range scans, a permanent bruise no amount of terraforming had managed to heal.
Replacing that capacity wasn’t a matter of replicator patterns and dilithium. It was knowledge—master welders, designers who could feel a stress fracture in a hull frame before the computer flagged it, entire generations of yard workers who’d grown up breathing the dust of those docks. A lot of that knowledge had died that day in 2385, and what survived had scattered to whatever postings were left.
Starfleet had tried. New yards at Beta Antares, Proxima, even a few mobile construction platforms. But the momentum was gone. The grand exploratory classes, the Odysseys, the Rosses, the big multi-vector cruisers, were coming off the ways one at a time, years apart, instead of the steady stream the Federation had once taken for granted.
People back on Earth still talked like the Federation was eternal. Too big, too resilient, too enlightened to ever truly fall. Harlan had heard the speeches. He’d sat through the briefings.
'Those of us who wore the uniform knew better.'
It wouldn’t take an armada. It wouldn’t even take another war. One catastrophic incident, something that burned across half a dozen worlds or more at once, something that made Mars look like a minor accident, could do it. Recent history had proven the galaxy had no shortage of those.
He rubbed the bridge of his nose, feeling the familiar throb starting behind his eyes, interrupting his thoughts. The shuttle’s viewport showed the Intrepid growing larger by the minute, running lights steady against the starfield.
Two weeks riding his sister’s ship. Then Starbase 369. Then the Arawyn. He’d keep the lights on and the warp core humming until someone or something finally managed to turn them off for good.
At least the wait was finally over.
This was going to be a smash-and-grab—no shuttle maneuvers, no slow crawl into the bay. Just a brief pause in relative motion between the two ships and a clean transporter hop.
“Intrepid to Harlan—” The voice crackled over his combadge, amused and all too familiar. “Ready for transport.”
Harlan tapped the badge as he stood, duffel slung over one shoulder. “Energize when—”
He didn’t even finish the sentence. The annular confinement beam locked on a half-second early, the familiar tingle racing across his skin as his atoms scattered and reassembled on the Intrepid’s transporter pad in one seamless shimmer.
He materialized facing the console, and his sister.
Rebecca stood behind the controls in her crisp red command uniform, arms folded, grinning like she’d just won a bet with herself. The transporter room was conspicuously empty except for the two of them. No chief, no petty officer on duty. Perks of being the XO, apparently—she’d cleared the deck for the family reunion.
“You could’ve waited for me to finish,” Harlan muttered, stepping down off the pad.
“Didn’t want to give you time to change your mind,” Becky said, coming around the console fast enough that he barely had time to brace. She wrapped him in a tight, enthusiastic hug that squeezed the air out of his lungs and reminded him—again—how much stronger his “little” big sister was than she looked.
He let the duffel slide to the deck and folded into the hug for the required three-second minimum, one arm patting her back in the universal sibling code for okay, that’s enough affection for the next five years.
She pulled back but kept her hands on his shoulders, looking him over like she was cataloguing new scars.
“Did you at least get the rest of my gear?” he asked, voice dry.
“It’s already in your guest quarters,” she said, still smiling. “Along with a fresh pot of coffee that isn’t the replicated dishwater you usually drink. Real beans. Don’t say I never spoil you.”
Harlan exhaled through his nose, already feeling the familiar mix of affection and exasperation that only family could trigger.
“Two weeks of this,” he said. “I’m gonna need stronger coffee.”
Rebecca laughed, picked up his abandoned duffel like it weighed nothing, and slung it over her own shoulder.
“Come on, Eli. Let me give you the nickel tour before you hide in main engineering for the rest of the trip.”
He followed her out of the transporter room, boots echoing on the old Excelsior deck plating, already resigning himself to the fact that resistance was futile.
Family always won the first round.
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