It Lurks in the Crawlspace

Posted on Fri Sep 4th, 2026 @ 11:02am by Ensign Aidan "A.J." Reid

1,036 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Here There Be Dragons
Location: USS Washington
Timeline: current

A.J. Reid scratched his beard, the strange readings on his tricorder makin’ no sense at all. Power was dead in de Jefferies tubes, every last one of dem dark and silent. Security had already swept de tunnels, sent two engineerin’ teams and a security detail after dat, but all dey found was dis eerie dampenin’ field blockin’ all comms. Now de whole stardrive tube junction was blacked out; not de main corridors, not de crew quarters, just de crawlspaces. Like somethin’ was huntin’ in de walls.

“I can’t believe dis,” A.J. said, his voice low and heavy. “De away team’s down dere on dat rock and we up here playin’ hide-and-seek with ghost in de machine. Dis ain’t no accident… started up in de saucer, now it’s in de stardrive. Spooky, yes.”

Ensign Hathaway, red-haired and grim, nodded as he aimed his beam into the black mouth of the tube.

“It is rather peculiar,” Hathaway began. “Maybe something came aboard with us. We took on a lot of repair parts after the last engagement.” He swallowed. “Might be something living in there now. Hunting. Should we go to yellow alert?”

“Scan first, panic later,” A.J. said, already on his hands and knees at the tube’s mouth. “Dat’s how we do it.”

Hathaway did not move right away. He stood there with his light aimed into the dark, listening. Nothing came back out of it, not even an echo.

“Famous last words,” he said finally, and followed A.J. in.

***

“The parallel chronotomic relay must be replicated and positioned in section seventeen-alpha for emergency staging,” Na’Riss stated, her tone devoid of inflection. “You will, however, remain outside this Jefferies Tube until Security and Intelligence have declared the area secure.” She observed the subtle tightening around the eyes of the junior engineers. One murmured, low enough that Vulcan hearing could not ignore it, “You don’t have to tell us twice…” His voice carried the particular timbre of a human attempting levity in the face of a silence so complete it felt predatory. The joke was a shield against the unnerving quiet of spaces where even comms fail.

Na’Riss felt it first. The fear. A jagged spike of terror that cut through the mental silence of the ship like a physical blow, and she knew with absolute certainty that it was AJ. Her boyfriend.

Somewhere out there, beyond the reinforced bulkheads of Engineering, he was afraid. The emotion roared across the distance between them, raw and unmistakable, and for a moment the Vulcan woman faltered, her fingers freezing over the chronometric relay she had been calibrating.

She reached for her combadge, tapping it with deliberate precision. “Na’Riss to Reeves.” Nothing. She tapped again, harder, the metallic chime failing to sing. “Na’Riss to AJ.” Dead. The device was as silent as the grave, and something cold and ancient stirred in the pit of her stomach.

Then she heard it.

A sound. Above her. A slow, deliberate scraping, like claws against duranium, dragging itself from the port side of Engineering all the way to starboard. The noise traveled through the ceiling, through the Jefferies tubes and crawlspaces that honeycombed the ship’s skeleton, and every engineer in the room stopped breathing.

Na’Riss looked up.

The hum of the warp core seemed to dim, as if the ship itself were holding its breath. Across the vast chamber, one by one, the crew fell silent. A technician near the matter injectors lowered his padd. A woman at the impulse control station turned her head, slow as a dream. By the deuterium tanks, two ensigns who had been arguing in hushed tones went rigid, their eyes tracking the invisible path of the sound as it scraped its way above them.

The camera of the moment panned across the room, from port to starboard, capturing every face tilted toward the ceiling. No one spoke. No one moved. They only listened as the thing in the walls dragged itself from one end of Engineering to the other, and when the sound finally vanished into the aft Jefferies tube junction, the silence that followed was heavier than the darkness itself.

One by one, the crew stepped away from the walls. No one said what they were all imagining. No one had to.

A section of the bulkhead panel clattered to the deck with a deafening bang. The entire engineering crew flinched back from the wall, weapons raised, while Na’Riss remained motionless at her station, her hands clasped behind her back in perfect Vulcan composure. From the dark opening, two points of icy blue light appeared first, followed by a dark nose sniffing at the air. A fluffy Siberian Husky emerged triumphantly, a plasma relay clutched in its jaws, its tail wagging so vigorously it created a breeze. The dog trotted forward with what could only be described as an expression of immense self-satisfaction.

Na’Riss observed the creature with one elegantly raised eyebrow. “Fascinating,” she stated, her voice perfectly measured. “The source of our atmospheric disturbance appears to be Canis lupus familiaris rather than any previously documented spatial anomaly.”

Ensign Hathaway crawled out of the Jefferies tube behind AJ, covered in conduit grease and looking thoroughly defeated.

“Somebody call Ben,” AJ said, his Jamaican accent rich with exasperation. “Tell him we found his escape artist.”

The tension in engineering broke into waves of relieved laughter. Hathaway brushed dust from his uniform while the husky pranced around his feet.

“Cody here saved us a lot of trouble,” Hathaway said, shaking his head.

“I guess he could smell dat power relay ‘bout to short circuit,” AJ explained. “Pulled it out before it could cascade into de replicators and leave us eatin’ nothin’ but MRE’s for a week.”

“Question is,” Hathaway said with a growing smile as he scratched behind the dog’s ears, “did he do it because he knew we’d be without food, or was he only thinking about his own kibble?”

The husky responded by dropping the power relay at Na’Riss’s feet and letting out a cheerful “woof” that echoed through the suddenly much brighter engineering bay.

 

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