The Admiral’s Table
Posted on Thu May 28th, 2026 @ 11:06am by Admiral William Riker & Deanna Troi
2,149 words; about a 11 minute read
Mission:
Lanterns in the Dark
Location: Lantern Safehouse, Barisa’s Moon
Timeline: 2397
The table had once belonged to a Ferengi card room.
Will Riker knew that because one corner still carried the faint scorch mark of a badly aimed cigarillo, and because the underside had three hidden compartments, two false latinum slots, and a pressure sensor that had nearly taken his hand off the first time he found it. Someone had carved old betting marks into the edge in a script he didn’t recognise. Someone else had scratched a name there, then burned it away.
Now it held the remains of a war.
The safehouse itself sat beneath an abandoned ore-processing dome on Barisa’s Moon, a dead little rock that nobody with sense or profit motive had cared about in thirty years. The surface was all grey dust, broken pylons and cold machinery, but below it the Lanterns had made something that almost passed for shelter. A generator thumped behind one wall with the irregular heartbeat of a machine overdue for retirement. Water pipes clicked overhead. Somewhere deeper in the complex, someone was arguing with a replicator that had started producing everything with a faint taste of pepper.
Riker sat alone beneath a tired strip of amber light, his sleeves rolled to the forearms, a cold mug of coffee near his left hand and a scatter of PADDs spread across the table in uneven stacks. Each one carried a different encryption shell. Each one carried names.
Too many names.
He leaned back in the chair until it creaked beneath him and rubbed both hands over his face. The beard under his palms felt rougher than it had that morning. Or maybe he was just tired enough to notice it.
The Dominion broadcast still played silently on the little cracked monitor across the room. Prime’s latest decree crawled in formal text beneath a polished Vorta face, all clean lines, calm voice, and careful lies. The twentieth anniversary of the Culling. A solemn act of remembrance. A renewed commitment to order. One thousand citizens selected for service across occupied space.
Service.
Will let out a quiet breath that wasn’t quite a laugh.
They always found softer words for ugly things. Service. Relocation. Civic obligation. Offering. As if the people being dragged from their homes had walked willingly into the arms of the Dominion and thanked them for the privilege.
He’d watched the broadcast twice.
Once because he had to know exactly what they were saying.
The second time because anger, left alone, had a way of making a man stupid.
He reached for the nearest PADD and brought up the first confirmed extraction list. Betazed. Forty-two selected in the first sweep. Seventeen mobile. Nine requiring medical support. Six children.
Six.
The number sat there with its teeth in him.
Will’s thumb hovered over the screen, but for a moment he didn’t read the names. He saw Kestra instead, not as she was now, but as she’d been years ago, small and stubborn, standing on a crate so she could reach the counter while insisting she was old enough to help him cook. He saw Thad half-asleep against Deanna’s shoulder, one hand curled around the collar of Will’s shirt because letting go had apparently been unacceptable.
He closed his eyes.
It was a mistake. The images sharpened in the dark.
A Dominion transport. Jem’Hadar hands. A child trying not to cry because crying made adults more frightened. A parent being told there was nothing to be done. A name becoming cargo.
Will opened his eyes again and forced himself back into the room.
Back to the table.
Back to the work.
“Damn you,” he muttered, though he wasn’t sure whether he meant Prime, the Dominion, himself, or the universe in general. There were days when the distinction felt academic.
The comm relay gave a soft, uneven chime. Not Starfleet issue. Nothing in the room was Starfleet issue anymore, not officially. The little unit had been rebuilt from a mining transponder, a civilian buoy processor, and one piece of hardware Barclay had sworn was not technically stolen because, in his words, the facility no longer existed as a legal entity.
The chime came again.
Riker tapped the control.
“Go ahead.”
A young woman’s voice came through under a veil of static. “Lantern-Seven to Admiral.”
His jaw tightened by a fraction.
He still hated the codename.
Not because it was inaccurate, though it was. Not because it sounded ridiculous, though on some days it absolutely did. He hated it because people said it with hope in their voices, and hope was a dangerous thing to hand to a man sitting at a table with not enough ships.
“Go ahead,” he said again, softer this time.
“We’ve got confirmation from the Thalos route. Forty-two selected, like the list said. Local cell says the first transport leaves in sixteen hours.”
“Security?”
“Two Jem’Hadar squads at the processing centre. DPI presence confirmed. At least one Reader.”
Riker’s eyes shifted to the map. The Thalos route flickered blue across three systems, ducking through an old ore corridor, past a half-blind Dominion listening post, then into Ferengi shipping traffic. It was ugly, slow and temperamental.
It had also kept four hundred people alive since January.
“Can your people move them before transfer?”
A pause.
That was the thing about resistance work. Pauses told you more than reports ever did.
“No, sir. Not all of them.”
Riker stared at the route until the blue line blurred at the edge of his vision.
“How many?”
“Maybe twenty. Twenty-five if nobody panics and the Reader doesn’t get close.”
“And the children?”
Another pause.
Will’s fingers curled slowly against the table.
“They’re being held with the family groups,” Lantern-Seven said. “We think we can get them out if we move first.”
If we move first.
There it was. The blade hidden in the apple.
If they moved now, they could save the children and some of the others. Maybe. But the Thalos route would burn the moment Dominion security realised people had vanished before transport. Every false cargo marker, every bribed dock worker, every dead relay Barclay had coaxed back to life would be gone by morning. The larger extraction planned for next week, one hundred and thirty people from a labour reassignment camp on Bolarus, would collapse with it.
Twenty-five now.
Maybe one hundred and thirty later.
Numbers on a screen. Lives in the dark.
Will hated how familiar the arithmetic had become.
He pushed himself up from the chair and walked the length of the room, one hand on his hip, the other rubbing at the bridge of his nose. His back ached. His knees objected to the hour. Somewhere in the old bones of the moon, the generator coughed and recovered.
Picard would have looked at the same table and asked for the principle beneath the choice.
Deanna would ask where fear was making the decision for him.
Will wanted to ask where the extra ship was, where the fresh crew was, where the miracle had been stored, because apparently someone had misplaced the damn thing again.
He stopped beside the silent monitor. The Vorta’s face smiled without sound.
“Sir?” Lantern-Seven asked.
Will looked back at the table.
There had been a time when command meant having a bridge around him. Helm, tactical, ops, engineering. A captain in the centre chair and a crew trained to turn orders into motion. Now command was a half-lit room under a dead mining dome, a bad cup of coffee, and a young woman on a cracked relay waiting for him to decide which people had a chance to live.
He’d never wanted to be an admiral.
Hell, he’d barely managed to leave the first officer’s chair.
But the name had found him anyway, crawling through whispers, safehouses, smuggler decks and frightened resistance cells. The Admiral. The man who knew where the routes were. The man who could get people out.
The man who was about to disappoint somebody.
Will sat down again.
“Lantern-Seven,” he said, and his voice had changed. Not louder. Not colder. Just steadier. The old command tone, worn down at the edges but still there. “You’re going to move the children first.”
A breath crackled over the comm.
“Yes, sir.”
“After that, family groups with medical priority. No heroics, no speeches, no waiting for stragglers who aren’t at the extraction point on time. If the Reader shifts toward you, you cut and run.”
“Sir, the others…”
“I know.”
The words came out rougher than he meant them to.
He took a second.
“I know,” he repeated. “But if you lose the cell, nobody gets out. Not tonight, not next week. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
Will dragged the Thalos route wider on the display, then brought up an old smuggling lane that had been marked inactive for six years. It ran too close to a Dominion sensor net, clipped the edge of a debris field, and depended on a Ferengi captain who had once threatened to shoot him over a cargo of counterfeit stem bolts.
Naturally, it was the best option they had.
“Patch me through to Lantern-Four and wake up our friend on the Mistress of Opportunity.”
“Captain Gral owes us money,” Lantern-Seven said, sounding confused despite herself.
“He owes everyone money. That’s his defining characteristic.”
For the first time all night, something almost like humour touched his face.
Almost.
“Tell him I’m calling in the favour from Galorda.”
“Sir, didn’t he say he’d rather be spaced than talk to you again?”
“He did. Put him through anyway.”
The relay hissed as she shifted channels.
Will looked down at the PADD again. Six children. Nine medical. Seventeen mobile. Forty-two total.
He couldn’t save all of them tonight.
He let that truth sit there. He didn’t dress it up. Didn’t soften it. Didn’t bury it under strategy.
Then he opened a new file and started moving pieces.
The door behind him slid open with a reluctant scrape.
Will didn’t turn immediately. He didn’t have to.
“You’re making the face,” Deanna said quietly.
That did pull a tired smile from him, small and brief. “I have several faces.”
“Not that one.”
He looked over his shoulder.
Deanna stood just inside the room, wrapped in a dark coat, her hair loose around her shoulders, her expression gentle in a way that made it harder to lie and easier to breathe. She didn’t look at the maps first. She looked at him.
That was worse.
And better.
“They’re taking children,” he said.
Her eyes softened, but they didn’t break. Deanna had learned, as he had, that breaking could wait until after the work was done.
“I know.”
Will looked back at the table. At the names. At the routes. At the cold coffee and the old scorch marks and the ridiculous Ferengi card table carrying more grief than it had ever carried latinum.
“For a second,” he said, voice lower now, “I saw them.”
Deanna moved closer. She didn’t ask who.
She knew.
Will swallowed, his hand resting flat against the table as though he could hold the whole damned thing still by force. “Thad. Kestra. I thought I saw their names on one of these lists, and I…”
He stopped there. There were some sentences a man couldn’t finish without giving them power.
Deanna placed her hand over his.
The room hummed around them. The relay clicked. Somewhere far away, a frightened cell waited for orders from a man they called Admiral.
Will turned his hand just enough to lace his fingers through hers.
Only for a moment.
Then the comm chirped again, sharp and impatient.
Lantern-Seven’s voice returned. “Sir, I’ve got Lantern-Four standing by. And Captain Gral is refusing the channel.”
Will exhaled through his nose.
“Tell Gral if he takes my call, I’ll forget the counterfeit stem bolts.”
A pause.
“And if he doesn’t?”
Riker leaned back in his chair, eyes on the map, Deanna’s hand still warm against his.
“Tell him my wife remembers them too.”
For half a second, the safehouse was quiet.
Then Lantern-Seven said, very carefully, “Yes, sir.”
Deanna’s mouth curved faintly. “That’s cruel.”
“That’s negotiation.”
“That’s blackmail.”
“It can be both.”
The smile faded as quickly as it had come, but it left something behind. Not hope, not quite. Hope was too clean a word for this room.
Resolve, maybe.
Will looked at the children’s names one more time.
Then he opened the channel.
“Captain Gral,” he said, voice warm enough to be dangerous. “It’s been too long.”
Will Riker
'The Admiral'
Leader of the Lantern Network
Deanna Troi
'The Listener'
Lantern Psychological Liaison
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