We Will Come For You Again, Leland Hawksley

Posted on 08 Sep 2026 @ 2:29am by Lieutenant Commander Leland Hawksley

2,685 words; about a 13 minute read

Mission: S04 Episode 02 The Hackers Backdoor (Incidentals)
Location: Lt. Cmdr. Hawksley’s Quarters, Deck 4... Then Elsewhere
Timeline: Shore Leave, Tomcat- Starbase 51

[ON]

The bulkheads hummed the way they always hummed in dock... soft... almost kind... and that was the first lie of the night...

Leland Hawksley lay on his back in the dark of his quarters with one arm thrown over his eyes and the other resting on the empty half of the bed like the space still belonged to someone who was not there... Shore leave. Spacedock. A man who had just taken the XO’s pip and told himself he could finally sleep...

He had been dreaming of them...

Cassandra first... Cass... that half smile she used when she thought he was being stubborn and she was going to win anyway... Then Martha... five years old and already to sharp for her own good, looking at him like she already knew the joke before he finished telling it... In the dream they were on a beach that did not exist on any chart... warm sand... Martha chasing a ball... Cass’s hand in his...

oO Cass... Martha... just a few more hours of this and I can write you both in the morning... XO now... you would laugh at that... me... second in command of an Akira that still smells like fighters and Marines... Oo

The dream thinned...

Not all at once... Time did a strange thing first... The hum of the ship stretched... one note of it pulled long and thin until it was not a sound anymore but a pressure behind his teeth...

The air in the quarters went still... not quiet... still... like the atmosphere itself had been told to wait... and then like it had been told never to move again...

Leland tried to sit up...

He could not...

oO What the hell... inertial dampeners... no... we are docked... we are docked... Oo

His chest rose... that was all... breath... nothing else would answer him... Fingers would not curl... jaw would not open... Even the fear sat trapped under the skin, pounding, with nowhere to run... The left ocular implant clicked once in the dark, hunting for a target that was not there, and then it to seemed to freeze mid cycle, a dead star in his face...

They came through the wall...

Not the door... the wall... Three of them... grey... small... heads to large for the thin necks that held them... Eyes like wet black glass, too deep, the kind of dark that looked back... no mouths worth speaking of... Hands with four long fingers that did not look like they should bend the way they bent...

The first one stood at the foot of the bed and regarded him the way a butcher regards a cut of meat that has already been priced...

<< Be still... We have stopped time around your ship... You cannot move... We are taking you now... >>

The words were not words... They arrived already inside his skull, cold and precise, like someone had opened him from the inside and begun writing on the wet part of thought...

oO Get out of my head... get out... this is my quarters... this is a Federation starship... you do not get to put your hands on me... Oo

He could not shout it... His throat would not work... Only the thought moved, raw and ugly, a man’s anger with nowhere to land... and the Greys drank it like it was data...

A second Grey lifted one hand... The bed, the sheets, Leland himself, all of it lifted a handspan off the mattress and hung there... He was in boxers and nothing else and that made it worse... made it personal... made it a violation he could feel in his teeth... Skin. Breath. Helpless meat in the dark of his own quarters... The third Grey turned toward the viewport... Beyond the transparent aluminum, Spacedock’s running lights had stopped... A workbee outside was frozen mid burn, a white knife of thrust that would never finish...

Time had been told to wait as well...

<< We have followed your family’s DNA for millennia... Father to son... mother to child... the same line, again and again... We need your body... We need your blood... We need the pattern inside you to make new humanoids... new children... from what you carry... >>

oO My family... they have been watching my family... for thousands of years... that is not possible... that is not... DNA... you want my DNA... you do not get to take that... that is mine... that is Cass and Martha and every damn thing I am... you sick little bastards... I cannot even move... I cannot even MOVE... Oo

They took him through the wall the same way they had come in... There was no tearing... no alarm... The Tomcat did not notice its executive officer leaving... One instant he was a grown man in his own bed, floating in boxers, jaw locked around a shout that would not come... The next the bulkhead was a membrane, cold as a grave, and he was on the other side of it, and the other side was not space...

It was a room that did not belong to any universe Leland had charts for...

Light so white it had edges... It pressed on the implant until the world on that side went to static and pain... The air smelled like hot metal and something sweet that had gone wrong, like fruit left in a replicator to long, like a body opened in a place that had never known air... The table under him was metal and cold and already shaped for a human spine, as if they had measured him in some other night he did not remember... He was naked... He did not remember the boxers coming off... He did not remember the journey... Only the table, and the lights, and the Greys standing in a half circle like priests who had forgotten mercy and kept only method...

<< You are on our table now... We will take samples from your blood, your marrow, and your genetic line... We will map your body... We will copy what we need... You will feel this... That cannot be helped... >>

oO I am not a subject... I am Lieutenant Commander Leland Hawksley, Executive Officer, USS Tomcat... you will put me back... you will take your hands off my body... Cass is waiting... Martha asked me to bring her a model of a Type 9... I promised... I promised her... Oo

A instrument descended... thin... to thin... It found the scar on his left pectoral first, the old Breen wound, and pressed as if curious about the history written in him... Then it went lower...

The pain was not a cut... It was a taking... Something inside him was being read the way a computer reads a core, line by line, and every line burned... He felt the theft in the bone... felt it in the teeth... felt it in the place a man keeps the last private part of himself...

Leland made a sound then... not a word at first... a raw thing that tore out of a throat that had remembered how to work for one second...

"Stop... stop it... you cannot do this... that is my blood... that is my body... I did not agree... I DID NOT AGREE..."

<< You did not agree... That does not matter... We are taking your DNA to build new children for our kind... They will be humanoid... They will be made from you... The line we have watched will live in them... >>

oO Children... you are making children out of me... out of this... you are stealing what is mine and growing it in a lab like I am livestock... watching my line like we were cattle for a thousand years... Cass... God, Cass, I can see you on that beach... Martha’s laughing... do not look at this... do not let them see you in here with me... stay on the beach... stay... Oo

"You do not get to use me..." he snarled, voice wrecked and shaking with rage... "You do not get to cut me open and walk off with my DNA like it is spare parts... my family is not yours... I will kill you for this... do you hear me... I will find you and I will end you..."

The Grey nearest his face did not blink... Those black eyes only deepened... as if his fury was another sample...

Leland then blacked out...

He came back to a different angle of the same light... A Grey was at his left shoulder, where the tattoo lived, tracing it with a fingertip that left a cold line that split and bled... Another instrument was at the socket of the ocular implant, not removing it, just listening to it, as if the machine in his face was a language they wanted to steal to... He could smell his own blood now... hot... wrong... mixed with that sweet rot in the air...

<< We are reading the scar... We are reading the false eye... We are taking more blood and marrow... This will leave marks... Your memory of this room will fade... >>

"You froze my ship..." His voice was wrecked... "You froze time... you dragged me out of my own bed... I am not yours... you are violating me... you are stealing from me... I will find you... I will find whatever hole in subspace you crawled out of and I will burn it..."

He could not finish it the way he wanted... The anger had nowhere to go... His wrists were not strapped... They did not need straps... The body simply would not obey the part of him that wanted to tear the nearest Grey apart with his hands...

oO Cass... Martha... stay on the beach... do not look at this... I promised I would come back... I promised... Oo

A third extraction... deeper... He felt something leave him that was more than blood... a brightness behind the eyes that was not the lamp... For a second he was on the beach again and Martha was holding a seashell up to the light and Cass was saying his name, and then the beach tore like wet paper and he was only meat on a table again...

<< The copy is taken... It is not finished... We will put you back in your quarters... You will wake in your own bed... We will come again for you, Leland Hawksley... Your line is not done... You will be needed again... >>

"No..." Leland said, or thought he said... "You do not get to be done... you do not get to walk away with pieces of me and call it sufficient... those children... those things you are going to grow... they are not yours to make... and you are not coming back... you hear me... you are NOT coming back..."

<< You were needed... You were used... We will come again... >>

The light folded...

Time, which had been standing in the corridor like a held breath, let go...

Leland awoke...

For a second it was only sleep leaving him, the ordinary drag of a man coming up out of a dream... Shore leave. His bed. The familiar dark of his quarters... He had been asleep... that was what the body wanted to believe... that he had only been asleep...

Then the room finished arriving...

Sheets twisted... heart going to hard... The viewport showed Spacedock moving again... The workbee finished its burn like nothing in the universe had been paused and opened...
Night... quarters... the familiar hum...

Leland sat up so fast the room tilted...

oO Dream... it was a dream... it had to be a dream... I was asleep... I was only asleep... shore leave... to much in the holodeck... to much thinking about Cass and the kid... that is all... Oo

He looked down...

He was back in the boxers...

That was the first true thing... cotton against skin... the ordinary shame of a man half dressed in his own quarters... and then he saw the blood...

Dark. Wet in places. Already drying in others. Smeared across the waistband. Soaked into the fabric at the hip. A man’s own blood returned to him like a receipt...

He set both feet on the deck...

The deck was real... the cold of it was real... the blood was real...

There were marks under the cloth and beyond it...

A thin line of dried blood at the crook of his left elbow, neat as a hypospray that had not been a hypospray... A pale circle on the pectoral scar, as if something had tasted the old wound and been satisfied, and a fresh cut crossing it that had not been there when he went to sleep... Three small punctures in a triangle low on his abdomen, already closing, already looking like they had always been there if you did not look twice, and a longer scar beneath them, pink and tight and new... The tattoo on his shoulder blade was split by a thin surgical line that stung when the air touched it...

His hands shook... not from fear alone... from fury that had nowhere to land...

Leland stood... walked to the washroom... The man in the mirror had the same five oclock shadow, the same implant, the same hard face the Tomcat’s crew saluted... the man who was supposed to be steady... He was still in those boxers... the blood looked blacker under the washroom light...

There was a smear of something grey and dry at his hairline that was not sweat...

oO I cannot tell them... I just made XO... Somers will think I cracked... Medical will run every scan in the book and find nothing because those things do not leave what our sensors know how to find... the crew needs an XO who sleeps through the night... not one who woke up in his own blood... Cass... if I send this to Cass she will come... she will burn half the quadrant looking... Martha will hear it in my voice even if I try to hide it... I will not put that on them... I will not... they said my family... millennia... like Hawksley blood was a file they have been keeping since before Starfleet had a name... they said they would come back... they used my name... Oo

He washed the smear away... It left a faint smell of that sweet wrong fruit, then it was gone... The scars stayed... The blood on the boxers stayed...

Back in the main room he stood at the viewport and watched the dock lights and waited for the universe to do the decent thing and make the last hour unhappen...

It did not...

Herc the holographic retriever flickered on at the foot of the bed, tail going, happy and stupid and programmed, Hercules in name and nothing else in that moment, and for one second Leland almost told the dog... Then he shut the program off...

oO Stay angry... stay quiet... check the body in the morning... check it again... those marks are real... those cuts are real... this blood is mine and they put it back on me like a joke... they stole from me... they said they would come back for me... I will log a private medical if I have to... if I can hide this I will hide it and I will do my job... that is the job now... that is what they promoted... not the man on the table... the man who comes back and stands his watch... Cass... Martha... I am still here... I am still here... I think I am still here... and if those grey bastards come again I will not be sleeping... Oo

Outside, Spacedock turned through its ordinary night...

Inside, the executive officer of the USS Tomcat sat on the edge of the bed in a pair of bloodied boxers, both hands locked together, staring at scars that should not exist, and did not sleep again...

[OFF]

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