El settled down at the small table in her quarters. Carefully pulling out a battered if not perhaps especially well used notebook. Peeling back a grey leather cover she found an open page. When had she last written? Shipboard life was very active and one where she had not found much of a rhythm beyond work and quarters and her disciplines. Opening up her pen she began to write, remembering these past months.

Dear Zeffie – April 2150

It has been a while since I wrote and there is a lot to tell you. But where to start? Space travel is different from in system travel. In system was so much faster. On the Sojourner it is the old monicker of ‘hurry up and wait’. We traveled for a month to a new planet Zeffie. A new world! And I got to be part of the landing party! For all the trouble I seem to get into I don’t know how that happened. It smelled different and felt different but strangely it looked much the same as Earth; sometimes it was hard to imagine I was on another world and not just a different part of Earth.

We did a core sample site and explored a cave that had large cats. They said sabre tooth like but I never saw any of those. We were hunting for anything valuable. There were some dilithium deposits but not that great. As nobody else seemed to want the planet I am sure Earth will happily take it and settle here even with primitive people there. Again I never saw any of them. We had a problem with our equipment that just drained power. That bothered me but it was supposed to as I later found out.

After returning to the ship a gangly, feral creature broke through a vent and killed crewman Simons who were looking after us in decon. It then took the vents and went up to the bridge where it killed another and injured some. I hear that Lt Green was very brave and hit it with a wrench in zero G and another shot it. It sounded very exciting but am sad that people had to be hurt and killed, even the creature. My part came later. The creature had damaged bridge systems on the tactical station and shorted out the link between there and the armory. I had to figure out a way to bridge that so that in a ‘situation’ the armory could react. Poor Sasha and Rick were tasked with other repairs of the ventilation and other damage that the creature did. Rick apparently does not like the sight of blood. I don’t either, at least, not on me.

Not long after that, three freighters arrived. They weren’t too friendly and seemed to just want to get rid of us. It seemed that they were poaching off the planet with anything they could find including the natives! They had set up some kind of field that drained our power on planet to cover up their base. It came down to a fight between us and the three. I hear we got lucky as they had some hardware that was not regulation that, if we got hit with it, could have really damaged us. I was down in the armory making sure that what I did worked. It was okay. I hear they fixed that deficiency. One got away, one was disabled and another we rescued from burning up in the atmosphere. I like to think that hardening the grappler helped but in the end I came out of with a reprimand. Which, Zeffie, seems to be a bookend as I came onto the ship with a reprimand. I can’t win it seems.

Then we traveled back to Earth to get patched up. We did our best with what we could but still had hull damage that we needed a spacedock for among other things. The Captain’s cabin had ruptured; he wasn’t too happy about that I hear. I was busy in the shop and then, back on Earth was helping the repair crews here and on Luna with their water pumps. Sasha led a crew on the Intrepids in spacedock. I didn’t get out much. I visited Sasha quickly in Moscow but that ended strangely, and before that went home, but it had burned and my home sunk. I hear that we will be shipping out soon. The gossip is that it may be a survey mission. That sounds really good for the science people. I’m not even sure if it will challenge your engines, Zeffie, but time will tell. Who knew that we’d run into natives, dangerous slave trading freighters and alien creatures.

Until next time, Zeffie. Good night.
El