Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft - What Moonlight Couldn't Touch
Carter Schimpff
((Holodeck 1 - Deck 2 - USS Artemis-A ))
Bancroft: ::quietly:: Okay, new rule. If I shoot anything else inanimate, you’re allowed to stun me and carry on with a more competent partner.
Imril: New new rule. Less talking, more listening.
The tunnel mouth exhaled cold air as Roy and Imril approached the cavern beyond. Smoke – faint, unreal, but convincing enough – threaded through the air. A warning. The simulated moonlight filtering through cracks above fractured across the stone, splitting into a dozen shifting beams that crawled over the chamber ahead of them.
Walking straight through this, Roy knew, was an invitation for someone to punch a simulated hole clean through his sternum.
He lifted a hand and tapped Imril’s shoulder – two quick pulses. When they looked over, he angled his chin downward toward the wide-open cavern floor, then towards the darker walls to the left and right.
A silent proposal: the middle is suicide. Let’s take the edges. Cover, not heroics.
Roy pointed left for Imril and right for himself, and with that the plan was set.
They split without speaking. Imril slipped to the left flank, hugging the places where the fractured moonbeams didn’t quite reach. Roy curved right, keeping low behind a broad column of stone that rose like a vertebra from the cavern floor.
Storm could have been anywhere in here. The holodeck program was generous with shadows and stingy with helpful signage. Her absence from the tunnel, her silence, her irritating talent for ambushes… all of it added up to a high probability that she was tucked somewhere in this chamber, waiting.
Roy kept moving, placing stone between himself and any vantage point that could hide a shooter. The chamber was deeper than it looked at first – cavernous enough that what little light there was pooled unpredictably, each beam shifting as simulated clouds drifted across the moon. Shadows flexed and collapsed with every change.
He caught the briefest hint of Imril across the room – a silhouette threading between light shafts – and then they vanished behind a towering curtain-shaped formation. Good. They were keeping pace, staying low. Competent as ever.
Still, a corner of him stayed alert on their behalf. Storm was good. Imril was good. Put those two together, and it was an instant recipe for someone getting the drop on someone.
Roy inhaled slowly, letting the air settle in his lungs.
Storm’s telepathy was the real hazard here, he judged. Even if he made no sound, she might pick up… something. A flicker of intent. A spike of anxiety. The mental equivalent of stepping on a twig.
Alright, Roy. Button up the attic. No thoughts worth overhearing. No witty quips, no nerves, just quiet. Move with the room. No theatrics inside that skull of yours.
He exhaled and felt the internal noise thin out. His awareness shifted outward – to the cool stone under his hand, to the echoing drip of water, to the faint scuff of Imril disappearing beyond the rock curtain’s jagged edge.
Roy continued his arc along the right-hand wall, slipping between shifting light patterns, moving when the beams moved so his body blended with their rhythm. Every step felt like passing through a moving maze of illumination and shadow.
Then he rounded the final curve of the chamber and froze.
There.
Folded into a deep indentation on the far wall was a compact silhouette. Still. Focused. Barely visible – only the slight rise and fall of breath gave her away.
It was Storm.
The stalagmite beside her partially hid the the opening, but from the right angle – and he’d found it – she was exposed. She’d set up to watch the center and left flank.
Not the right. Not behind her.
And even telepaths didn’t have eyes in the back of their head.
Roy eased silently into place, phaser leveled at her center mass. Breathing slow. Finger steady. Looking through her, not at her.
The moment felt balanced on the head of a pin – one inch of pressure deciding everything.
Bancroft: oO Got you. Oo
The thought wasn’t even fully formed before a flicker of pressure pulsed behind his eyes – sharp, fleeting, unmistakable.
Awareness.
Hers.
She twisted her chin toward him, eyes registering the sight of the phaser first, then the man behind it.
Her expression tightened in layered succession: irritation, calculation… and something that might have been resignation.
Roy felt a hollow swell in his chest. Not triumph. Not vindication. Something quieter, but stronger.
Bancroft: oO Training simulation or not, I refuse to shoot a colleague. An enemy? Sure. But this isn’t an enemy. This is… Alex. Oo
Whatever Storm sensed in him – his hesitation, his restraint, his recognition of her – flashed across her gaze. Her features sharpened, and in a blur her own phaser snapped upward, locking onto his chest with surgical precision.
He didn’t need telepathy to hear the unspoken reprimand: you hesitated. So you died. And worse – you put your teammate and the mission at risk.
He could feel the disappointment swirling in the air between them.
Roy remained still, phaser unwavering and silent.
Bancroft: oO Shoot me, then. Simulated or not, I will not harm a fellow officer. Oo
It wasn’t hesitation. It wasn’t fear. It was principle – one of the few things that had survived every hard lesson Starfleet and life had thrown at him. If Storm had truly been an enemy, he would have fired the second he had the shot. He knew that without question.
But here? Now? What purpose did it serve to cut one of his own down, even in simulation?
He held her gaze, calm, resolved, offering no opening and no apology.
The cavern hung suspended around them – Imril somewhere in the shadows, Storm’s phaser anchored to his chest, and Roy waiting for whatever came next.
Storm/Imril: Responses
TAG/TBC!
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Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft
Medical Officer
USS Artemis-A
A240205RB1