In principio: What Nico Believed Part 2

Posted on Tue Jul 14th, 2026 @ 4:35pm by Master Chief Petty Officer Julian Trent

1,913 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Prologue
Location: USS Murmansk
Timeline: 2375

Continued from part 1

The corridors outside Tactical Operations were crowded with damage-control teams, medical personnel and crew moving around blocked sections. Julian walked through them without being stopped. His uniform marked him as Tactical. The dried blood along one sleeve belonged to somebody else, though he could not remember whose. People looked at him and then away, perhaps because they knew or perhaps because everyone aboard the Murmansk had acquired the same exhausted expression.

He did not go to Sickbay because there was nothing there for him. Instead, Julian took the nearest working turbolift to deck eight and walked towards section twelve.

The corridor was sealed two junctions away. A temporary forcefield stretched across the passage, pale blue and almost transparent, its surface moving faintly where the damaged environmental systems pressed against it. Warning markers had been fixed to the bulkheads, and a hazard team worked beyond the barrier in pressure suits, checking structural fractures and securing exposed conduits.

Julian stopped on the safe side, and one of the technicians noticed him before approaching the forcefield. Their face was difficult to make out behind the helmet visor, distorted slightly by the barrier between them. “This section is restricted,” they said through the suit communicator, lifting one gloved hand towards the warning markers. Their voice crackled faintly through the field. “You’ll need authorisation from Damage Control if you’re assigned to the repair team.”

“I’m not,” Julian replied, his voice sounding normal enough to belong to someone else. He kept his eyes beyond the technician, fixed on the damaged passage. “I wanted to see it.”

The technician hesitated and looked past him, perhaps searching for an officer who could explain what Julian meant. “The breach is contained,” they said eventually, turning slightly to indicate the sealed corridor behind them. “Structural integrity is holding, but we can’t lower the field yet.”

Julian looked beyond them. The corridor did not look like the place where a person had ceased to exist. One wall was blackened around an open maintenance panel. Several ceiling strips had failed, leaving pools of shadow between the remaining lights, and a section of handrail had twisted away from the bulkhead. Debris lay gathered near the sealed end where the atmosphere had dragged it before the emergency field restored itself, but there was nothing else. No body. No blood. No trace of Nico’s hands on the bulkhead or his voice in the air. No visible line marking the place where he had been alive on one side and gone on the other. It looked like damage, and damage could be repaired.

“Was anything recovered?” Julian asked, keeping his eyes on the corridor as his fingers curled slowly against his palm.

The technician’s helmet turned slightly, and Julian saw understanding arrive in the pause which followed. “Some equipment,” they said, lowering their raised hand. “Personal items are being logged.”

“Remains?” Julian asked, forcing the word out before he could decide not to.

The technician became still inside the pressure suit. “No,” they replied, the single syllable softened by the communicator.

Julian nodded because he had asked a question and received an answer.

“The decompression was complete,” the technician continued, their voice quieter through the field. They glanced once towards the sealed end of the corridor before looking back at him. “Anything not secured would have been pulled through the breach before containment restored. Fourteen seconds was enough for complete decompression.”

“I understand how decompression works,” Julian said, sharper than he intended as his eyes snapped towards them.

The technician became still, their gloved hands lowering to their sides. “Of course,” they said, retreating half a step from the barrier.

Julian closed his eyes for a second, anger collapsing as quickly as it had risen. “Sorry,” he said, rubbing one hand over his mouth before letting it fall.

“You don’t need to apologise,” the technician replied, their shoulders easing slightly inside the suit.

“I do when I’m rude to people doing their jobs,” Julian said, opening his eyes again as something close to a humourless smile touched his mouth. “Apparently.”

The technician studied him through the forcefield, their posture changing as the reason for his presence became clearer. “Was someone you knew in there?” they asked, their voice losing the formal edge it had carried before.

Julian looked past them once more. Nico had been in that corridor. Nico had crossed through it carrying a medical kit or dragging equipment or telling somebody that help had arrived. He had existed there with all the solidity Julian had felt beneath his hands only hours, days, a lifetime ago, and now there was nothing different about the place.

“My partner,” Julian said, and the words felt strange because they remained true while Nico did not. He had never called him that aloud before. Everyone knew they were together. It had been five years since Julian first saw him in Sickbay, and they shared quarters, meals, a bed and a life, but Julian had never given it a name. Not to anyone.

The technician’s shoulders lowered inside the pressure suit. “I’m sorry,” they said, one hand lifting slightly before falling again when the forcefield made the gesture useless.

Julian nodded because people required some acknowledgement when they offered words which could not alter anything, and he remained there after the technician returned to work.

The hazard team moved around the corridor, methodical and careful. They measured fractures, fixed temporary braces and marked damaged systems for replacement. One of them removed a scorched section of wall panel and passed it to another through a storage field. Slowly, professionally, the ship began turning the place where Nico had died into something functional again.

Julian watched until the forcefield blurred, then blinked and realised there were tears in his eyes. He wiped them away with the heel of his hand before anyone could notice, though the movement did nothing to stop the next ones. There was no evidence Nico was gone except that he was not anywhere else, and eventually Julian walked away.

Their quarters recognised him with the familiar soft chirp. The lighting came up automatically as he entered, warm and low because Nico had changed the evening settings months ago and Julian had never bothered to alter them. The room smelled faintly of coffee, fabric cleanser and the soap Nico used when Sickbay’s sterilising agents clung too stubbornly to his skin.

Julian stopped just inside the door. Nico’s spare boots were beneath the chair, placed neatly together this time. His uniform jacket hung from the back of the sofa rather than folded across it, one sleeve turned slightly inside out where he had pulled it off in a hurry. A cup sat beside the replicator with a dark line of coffee dried at the bottom, and the bed had not been made. Julian had complained about that in the morning. Nico had told him that the mattress would survive the scandal and kissed him before leaving. Nothing in the room knew he was dead.

Julian crossed towards the bedside table because there was nowhere else to go. Nico’s Saint Luke medallion lay where he had left it, the chain looped carelessly around itself beside a half-read PADD and a small container of analgesics. He picked it up, and the metal had warmed to the room. Julian turned the medallion over in his palm, thumb moving across the worn image on its face. He had seen Nico hold it before meals, before difficult shifts, after the names of the dead had become too many to remember without help. Nico had wrapped the chain around his fingers when frightened and pretended he had not.

Julian tried to breathe. The first attempt stopped somewhere beneath his ribs. The second came out as a sound he did not recognise, small and broken and far too exposed for the empty room. He lowered himself beside the bed, his knees striking the floor harder than he intended, though the pain barely reached him. He closed both hands around the medallion and bowed his head because that was what Nico did. Nico bowed his head. Nico closed his eyes. Nico began by naming the person.

Julian opened his mouth, but nothing came. The tears returned before he could stop them, sliding down his face and falling onto his hands. His shoulders tightened as he tried to contain the first sob, but there was nobody left to perform for and the effort collapsed almost immediately. He bent over the medallion, breath breaking against his knuckles as grief moved through him without grace or rhythm.

For several minutes, Julian could not do anything except cry. He cried for the corridor which looked like a corridor, for the casualty report which reduced Nico to an entry beside a failed transporter lock, for the one battle in which he had not checked and for every time Nico had touched his chest to reassure himself that Julian’s heart was still beating.

“I’m sorry,” Julian said, though the words dissolved halfway through as his forehead lowered towards his clasped hands. He remembered how Nico would pray beside the bed, words in Spanish, some Latin if he wanted to be fancy, Standard when he was making a point to Julian about something. Julian let out a shaking breath and pressed the medallion between his palms. “Lord…” he started awkwardly, because it was awkward. He didn’t believe. But Nico had, and maybe that mattered now. “Nico Canto.” He sniffed, wiping his face against his sleeve while keeping his hands clasped around the medallion. “He’d have done this properly…he’d…” Another breath caught painfully in his chest. “Nico…I don’t know if you were scared. Or…what you thought. Or if it registered…or if you had time to pray.”

Julian swallowed hard, tightening his fingers around the chain. “It mattered that you were there,” he whispered, the words breaking as soon as they left him. “Whoever you went in there for…it mattered.” He did not know whether Nico had heard it, whether the wounded had heard it or whether anyone had survived long enough for it to matter, but Nico had needed that to be true once, and Julian needed it to be true now. “It mattered,” he repeated, wiping at his face again even though there was no point. “I could recite De Profundis, but it…would be empty.” His voice cracked as he bowed his head lower. “Nico…I hope you’re right and I’m wrong, and you’re somewhere…safe. Warm. I…” His breath caught again, but the question had already reached him. “Why?”

The word hung in the room, and Julian grimaced at it as another sob shook through him. Then he bowed his head and prayed the way Nico had prayed since the war had started. The words came unevenly, some in Standard, some in badly remembered Spanish, several repeated because he could not tell whether he had already said them. He stopped twice when grief closed his throat and began again from Nico’s name, continuing until his throat could no longer make the sounds.

Julian stayed there kneeling, the medallion pressed against his chest, hearing only the silence of the empty room and his own ragged breathing. When he finally moved, he did not return it to the bedside table.

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