#station security

[zinjanthropusboisei]

Taking a break after a long workday of reading about American environmental discourse and policy to unwind and do some creative writing and background reading for my scifi story. Um.

[murderbot-moodboard]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Crime and Punishment

by Sholio

Summary:

Missing scene/tag for Fugitive Telemetry. Mensah gets a call from station security. (Entirely bookverse.)

Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

Gen

Fandom:

The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells

Relationships:

Dr. Gurathin & Dr. Ratthi & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)

Characters:

Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries)Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries)Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries)Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries)Indah (Murderbot Diaries)

Additional Tags:

Post-Book 6: Fugitive Telemetry; Friendship; there was only one holding cell

[deepspacenightshift]

People get nervous passing the Security Office on DS9′s Promenade.

It’s not as if the Constable is going to jump out at anyone or make any surprise arrests. He has a well-known routine and he keeps to it. But it’s still frightening to know he could be looking at you with his deep-set eyes, thinking about you despite his lack of a brain. Makes people go stiff and awkward. Conversations pause as people pass the Security Office, or everything suddenly seems very funny. You become hyper-aware of your surroundings, the railings, the four clear panels in the security office door, its green metal bolts, not that you’re looking at the office! No.

[deepspacenightshift]

Everyone knows a smuggler or two. On Deep Space Nine Station, the halfway-point of the universe with conveniently fuzzy rules due to the Federation/ Bajor shared custody, you have to actively avoid anything remotely suspicious in order to not get mixed up in sub-legal operations.

Even then, every so often, you will be asked to store something in your quarters, or to enter something, any random sentence, onto a PADD. Or someone will rush up to you and start talking, and if you're charmed by their accent or compelled by the desperation in their eyes or possibly bribed by what's left in your hand after the handshake, you'll laugh and nod along and call the smuggler "cousin" or "old friend" and pretend you don't notice Station Security watching.

[deepspacenightshift]

The best view of Deep Space Nine station from within can be found in the control gondolas at the extreme ends of docking pylons.

When a night shift worker is assigned to the control gondola of a pylon, we usually linger at the observation windows. They’re much bigger than the windows on the Promenade. You can see the whole structure of Deep Space Nine, barring the pylon you’re in, from an observation window. Sometimes you can even see Bajor or the wormhole, outshining the many small lights of DS9 as a sun outshines the candles in a temple. If you’re in a lower pylon, you can sometimes see other people, their tiny bodies barely visible, in the window of an upper pylon, or vice versa.

The gondolas are technically not public areas, so night shift workers eagerly claim the privilege of legally using the observation windows whenever we can. It’s easy to sneak in through access tunnels, though; the Cardassians didn’t want Bajoran workers to be able to easily take over and hold all the docking ports, so they gave themselves secret passages. Now those passages are used by stargazers to sneak into the control gondola. Station Security doesn’t mess with people that just want to have a better view of the stars.

Smugglers use the tunnels too, but there are sensors to detect life-forms moving out of the control gondola to the docking ports or airlock assemblies. Just stay at the windows and you’ll be fine.