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Personal Log, Lt.Jr. Adele Mundy, TSN Hawk, 2nd Flt. 4LD
12316-2237So I was wrong. There were crew members aboard Hydra when the traitors set off the four nukes that blew her up, and almost took Raven too. Among them, Dr. Chen, who nagged me about my concussion after my very first shift.
It was nothing as organised as a wake, but several officers drifted into the bar after the shift. We raised our glasses to Hydra and her dead – some of us several times. To Dr. Chen, who prescribed the meds I take to sleep, so I don’t get woken up by Matsiyan’s dreams. Dr. Chen, who generally, with the excuse of keeping tabs on the psi link and its erratic behaviour, had been keeping me sane without actually doing a formal psych eval, which would go on my record. Dr. Chen, who hated admin.
I’m rationing the meds she prescribed, until I figure out which doctor is going to treat me as a patient rather than a lab experiment. As expected, the dreams are coming back. Last night I dreamed I went to Chatsworth again. It was night, and the moon was full – the moon was always full above Paragon – the leaves were rustling outside my window, and I looked out to see the Redcaps capering under the trees. One of them saw me, aimed his bow and let his arrow fly… So I woke myself up and paced the station hallways until it was time to report in.
The duty shift started quietly, with announcements of transfers from Command to make up for the personnel we lost; new Duty Officers; the surviving Hydra crew temporarily assigned to Hunter until a replacement ship arrives; and cadets’ exams and promotions.
We ran through the gauntlet of tech crashes that accompanied the training sims – the new software is really testing the technicians and engineers rather than the other way round. We were on Hawk at first, then moved to Valiant with a larger crew so that we could continue exercises with the new fighters. Low point of the sim for me was the way the helm controls did not respond the way I expected, and I drifted Hawk onto a mine when I was convinced I had executed an all stop… The sim effects are too good in some ways, the screen explosion was too much like Hydra all over again.
Discussion of the exercise seemed to conclude that sharing the bridge duties between four officers was insufficient – in fact, that the fighters would benefit from a dedicated Science officer who would be looking after their trajectories exclusively, basically a CAG. Certainly the extra chatter on the bridge made coordinating more difficult, so the fighters might need a dedicated comms channel too. Food for thought. Anyway, the technical difficulties are far from smoothed out, as there were numerous console blackouts, with all the frustration that entails.
The mission was supposed to be combat exercises in Atlantis Sector. I was back on SciComms and things were relatively quiet, apart from Unukalhai ships turning up in nebulas here and there; and then the Biomechs appeared.
There were several Stage 1s, and we left them alone, which is probably a good thing, because a Stage 4 also appeared in a nebula, and my comms screen started showing:
Cmechdn &*& (tentative interpretation here, because you, Computer, are particularly useless at this sort of thing: come children)
238cme&ygea–back (come back)
No– hrt thm (no hurt them)
E&@#%
*!
Cme– bk) (come back) Am I reading too much into this? No point asking you, Computer, because compared to the biomechs you are a mere abacus…Lt.Cmdr. Allard pointed out the messages to the fleet leader on Raven, and a conversation of sorts began – as far as I have been able to determine from checking out records of previous interactions between humans and biomechs, the first actual conversation ever. If the language program has the meaning right, the biomechs are not only sentient, but have some sense of ethics too, because they went on to ask:
Bio me hs (biomechs)
Why
Pepl (people)
&figt32423 (fight)Well, hell. Might as well ask where did life come from, is there a divinity that shapes our ends, and what the meaning of life is, at this point. Whether they understood our fleet captain’s attempt to explain human internecine war and the politics of human supremacists – a hard task at the best of times, and not something to be ventured in a couple of sentences aimed at life forms whose understanding of Standard human language is likely to be rudimentary – has been added to my personal list of unanswered questions. But they’re asking why! Just the fact that there’s a Why question is amazing!
They recognised Raven as an identifier, and went on:
Ravn (Raven)
Spekto -& (speak to)
-us (us)Who are yu
We wai$$$ fr yu (we wait for you)This was as Raven left the formation to approach the biomechs. And then they proceeded to respond to Raven‘s hail with:
Helo (hallo)
Wat is captn (what is captain)There was more than this, but much of it was garbled, I’ve just made a note of the bits I could understand… And that meant taking my eyes off the Science console from time to time, to the point where Helm actually had to ask me for a bearing – shall I ever live that down? Computer, that was mostly a joke. Mostly. Anyway, it’s pretty mind-blowing stuff. I think the senior officers must feel something similar, only more composed and dignified, because communications with the biomechs are continuing through Artemis Command. I wonder whether we’ll find out what they said, eventually.
After the debrief we were back on Hawk for another exercise, and all of a sudden I was placed in command – which was exciting and intimidating, and I was just sorting out the comms channel when I was informed by Station Comms that Mr. Bronkhorst and Ms. Bushner had just arrived on their shuttle, earlier than expected, and I was required to escort them on the tour of the new experimental hydroponics, as previously arranged.
Dammit.
I mean, Ms. Bushner is a delightful person and a fine botanical artist, and Mr. Bronkhorst’s reputation as both a botanist and an engineer is impressive (I shall refrain from evaluating the accuracy of his reputation as an obstreperous pessimist) but I Was On The Bridge, dammit! Even if it was only a sim. To cap it all, the visit did not achieve all that was planned, and they’ve requested a follow-up on 26315-2237. I hope the shuttle flight keeps to its proper schedule, because my hasty exit was an embarrassment.
17316-2237 Mundy’s log, supplemental
(I’ve wanted to say that for ages…)
Another evening spent with cadets and civilians, this time in the station lower deck, where there’s that little bar called The Grid: loud games consoles, dim lights, a small and sad approximation of a disco ball (engage…), a simulator set up as a makeshift bridge, and lots of young people drinking and trying their hand at basic missions. The way the civilians talk back when one gives an order is… well, one forgets how things are out there, and one has to make allowances. And having the Weapons officer whoop and yell out loud every time she hits something with a torpedo is rather odd.By the time Matsiyan found his way down to The Grid, the youngsters were beginning to settle down a bit, having had a couple of turns at their stations, so when our pilot suddenly disappeared (summoned away either by food or a girlfriend) I was able to take over Helm while Matsiyan stepped in to command. When we skirted a black hole, parked ourselves on the far side, and instructed our Comms officer to taunt the enemies, our crew gasped in awe as the Kraliens plummeted to their doom one after another. And when we finished off the last remaining enemy ship in the most difficult possible way, by finding a monster and luring it all the way back to the battleship so that the ship got devoured while we watched from a safe distance, they cheered. I’m still grinning at the memory.
And that means I can skip the meds tonight. Dr. Chen would be proud of me.
[End log]
// OOC game continues: spot the references to Earth popular culture in Mundy’s log.
//Too bad Mundy didn’t get anything special from the BioMechs via her psychic link. Or did she? Can she, even?
// Do biomechs have any psi presence? Do they dream of electric sheep?
I know where the abacus comes from 🙂
// I don’t know if the biomechs have a psi presence. The Cosmic Icosahedron did… Are they related? Only the GMs know!
//There should be a rule now that all Lt. Jr.s should have command randomly thrust upon them, if only to see how they do under pressure.
@Aramond – extra pressure from guests arriving an hour and a half early… I hated to leave, but I couldn’t just ignore them. The fact that Matsiyan didn’t leave the sim immediately made for a strained enough rest of the afternoon.
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