Posted by Captain Dira Myqian (Commanding Officer) in Deck 9 - Shadows Are Not Immune To Light

Posted by Commander Dr. Royal Sinclair (Executive Officer) in Deck 9 - Shadows Are Not Immune To Light

Posted by Captain Dira Myqian (Commanding Officer) in Deck 9 - Shadows Are Not Immune To Light
Posted by… suppressed (5) by the Post Ghost! 👻

(snips)

Royal looked at her for a long moment and then said “Did I ever tell you about my first ever check-in with DH?” He chuckled softly. “First assignment out of the Academy. USS Challenger. Security officer. Man, was I stoked. All my classmates had orders, and we decided to celebrate. So we went out. O’Houllihan’s. Pub outside the Academy main gate. You know it?” he asked.

Dira nodded. “Practically an institution.”

“So we are there, and we are talking about our new assignments. Annandale we may have had a pint or three.” and he grinned at her a moment. “Anyway… in walks Cadet Brewer. Gods above I hated that guy. Arrogant, entitled… real prick. And the feeling was mutual. He hated me just as much. So Brewer… Brewer didn’t get a ship. Brewer got assigned right back at the Academy. You and I both know that that means they don’t think you are ready for the big leagues yet. And he was piiiiiiiissed. He has a few, I’m ignoring him, and after a few he starts cracking on the Challenger. ‘Junk’. ‘Rust Bucket’. ‘Relic’. And I will admit it… it was getting to me. The constant needling. But then… then he goes and calls her a garbage scow to. my. face. So I swing. He doesn’t even flinch. Just grins and goes to the deck. I’m confused. ‘What the hell is happening?’ I say to myself… and that’s when Shore Patrol arrests me. Assault. Yeah, extenuating circumstances. But I’m in the brig at the Academy and I’m half drunk and supposed to report in four hours. The spring me with just enough time to grab my kit and make it to the shuttle. No change of uniform, no shower, bloody knuckles. So I have to report to my very first DH looking like a complete wreck and smelling of booze with an arrest report that is less than five hours old.” He looked at Dira and blinked a few times.

“Turns out Brewer missed being selected to the Challenger by just a few points. A few points was all the difference between space… and babysitting Cadets. So he figured if I screwed up enough, he could capitalize on it. And I fell for it… hook, line, and sinker. I was smarter than him. I was a better officer than him. I knew my job better than him. But he still found that button.” Je looked at her again and then said “So now you tell me why that story matters here.”

Sinclair, XO

She winced. “Good people can make poor decisions.” Dira could feel that swirl within her gut that had show up in Kane’s office. “But your decision only hurt you. Mine got four, no five, members of my crew seriously injured. We’re fortunate no one died but it should never have happened in the first place.”

Sinclair nodded and said “True. But no one died. And I’m fairly certain from Commander Kane’s assessment of the device he disabled.... dead was an intention.”

She turned and looked back towards the main corridor where she had escaped into and had a painful and terrifying stagger to safety that she wasn’t sure would come. There was anger in her voice even though it dropped in level. “I could have ended it all on the Calypso but I hesitated. I didn’t want to harm someone who was working through difficult things. I thought, ‘so what if he’s taking his frustration and misguided affection out on me. I’m a professional and I can handle it.” Her chest felt so incredibly tight as she whispered, “I was so very wrong and there have been consequences I can’t shake.”

Captain Myqian, CO

“True again.” Sinclair said. “But as my dear ‘ol Sinear would always say when I started in on the ‘if only I had done X’ when playing rugby… ‘Aye, lad. If’n ya had, it might have been different. But ya didn’t… so accept it.” He looked at her a moment with narrowed eyes and said “Dira… you are the Captain now. You don’t have the luxury of second guessing your decisions. You made a call. For better or worse, you made the call and all of this happened. But at the end of the day… you did nothing wrong. You were the target of a psychopath… and your crew made it through it. That is better than most could have hoped for… or expected, under the circumstances. So take the lessons, learn them, and move on.”

Sinclair

Bile crept up her throat and she had to stuff down the uncomfortable feeling again, but it wouldn’t stay down. She had let it all come too close to the surface and it couldn’t be pushed down again. “You and Kane. It’s all a practical matter to you. Logical. I’m sorry my feelings aren’t nicely convenient for everyone, but you have no idea what this really all is.”

She spun on the ball of her foot and stormed off from this little corridor, naturally hanging a left, but it was the reality of Deck 9A that she couldn’t get very far before events smacked her upside the head with reality. Her chest felt so tight! And the sourness in her stomach was threatening to not stay there very much longer. She paused and braced her hand on the wall of the corridor, her eyes fixated on the door on the right just ahead. It was all right here where the final showdown took place. She hadn’t even needed to be able to sense his anger, but oh how she was aware of it. And Frigga had protected her from him. Frigga. How messed up was that too? Another poor decision in a string of them. Tears slipped over her cheeks, soaking into the carpeted deck.

Captain Myqian, CO

Royal walked up next to her and set a hand on her shoulder. “It’s not about logic. And it’s not about convenience. It’s about expediency. You are the Captain. And you need to be at a hundred percent. So we, you and I, don’t have months for you to go through a proper therapeutic regime to begin the journey to processing this.” He moved past her and opened the door on the right. “So we do it the hard way. Inside, Captain. That’s an order.” He looked at her and said “This time, though? This time you are not alone. And I promise you… this will be last time he has any power over you.”

Sinclair, XO

An order. Hilarious! But she also knew that he wouldn’t have said it that way for no reason and another part of her knew that he wasn’t out to cause her harm.

A couple crew members passed by but were at least courteous enough not to stare, but Dira was all too aware of the very vivid thoughts of curiosity and concern. Cheeks wet with tears, Dira looked at the open door and shuddered. It wasn’t that room, it was beyond that in the jefferies tubes. She truly didn’t know if she could go back in there, but staying out here in the corridor where the crew could watch her fall apart wasn’t exactly an option either.

It took a great deal of willpower to propel her through the doorway and into the maintenance access room, but in she went.

It was an innocuous room, and really it had only been a space she had exited through on her way to freedom in the corridor. The time between her being sprayed in the face in the other storage space to her exiting out here had been a blank space of time and it had only reinforced her terror. “There’s a little maintenance access point. It’s not meant to actually be in, but he set it up so that we could hide there and with all the changes he did in the computer, he made it so my biosigns showed me as not being on the ship. We were other people, if anyone looked closely at it.” Her face contorted in pain. “When I escaped, I came out through here but I had to purposefully dislocate my own wrist to get out of the optical cable that bound my hands to a pipe. I had to crawl through there as fast I could with only one good hand. And the whole time my heart was in distress because I was reacting badly to the concoction he gave me. I was tachycardic and close to cardiac arrest.”

Captain Myqian, CO

Sinclair nodded and said “What were you thinking? Feeling? I’m sure fear was part of it. What else? Anger, perhaps?”

Sinclair, XO

“Of course I was angry,” she said, the distress fading from her voice. “Rage, actually. It flared the moment the ship shook and I knew he had caused it. Coming after me was one thing, but to harm my ship, my crew? Unforgivable.” Dira drew in a deep breath. “When I made it to the corridor, and the main in my chest kept increasing I wondered if that was where I was going to die. But then Frigga showed up. She tried to get help but no one was around. But then William was on the move after I injured him and he was angry. Frigga got defensive and she protected me, which was good because I was so weak I couldn’t move any farther. And the computer didn’t recognize my voice commands so I couldn’t summon help. I just sat against the wall and waited for something to happen one way or another. But then Surra and Zoi showed up, and then a doctor and I was beamed to Sickbay.” In this middle space between the place where her nightmares began to form and the place where she found safety, it was neutral. This room wasn’t the problem.

Captain Myqian, CO

“Okay… so we go further.” He turned and opened the maintenance hatch. He looked inside and said “Well then…” and then looked at Dira. “After you.” and he gestured to the opening.

Sinclair, XO