The meeting room of the
Excalibur
thrummed with excitement. Delta slapped her palms onto the table and sprang to her feet. "This is it! This is what we've been waiting for, a break!" She beamed. "The Sensurians-"
"We can't just bring the Sensurians back by snapping our fingers," Albert said, frowning as he crossed his arms over his chest. "Yes, they were our best spies, agents, propagandists...half the morale corps..." He coughed, then glanced at Lt. Sheyshen. She chuckled quietly.
"We're not exactly embarrassed about it, Albert," she said, her hand brushing her pale white hair behind one blue, pointed ear. "Human/Sensurian relationships being...so..." She paused. "Intimate has been a point of pride for our people since you joined the Alliance." She clasped her hands together. "And well, the Sensurians, from what I've been able to determine, knew that if they were to be brought back using the genetic records, that there might not be enough time for a normal gestation and training period. And according to the data provided by this mysterious informant of yours..." She flicked her gaze to Captain Tangent, who was regarding a map of the galaxy on a flimsy. "They found a solution."
"Oh?" Kat asked, lifting her head from her own documents. Despite the importance of the meeting, the chief engineer was still half absorbed in her own particular tasks.
"Yes," Shey said, seriously. "Sensurians tend to rank higher on the various modes of tracking esper talents - and the best of them recorded memories in a memory stone with the genetic records. This won't be a generation of children. It'll be a generation of replacement bodies for those who were soon to die..." She looked grim.
"Would that even work?" Triana asked, frowning as she leaned in on her elbows. "I've read up on esper talents, that kind of thing sounds risky as hell."
"Extremely," Shey said. "It'll require an amazing talent to organize and direct it. And...well, I'm not exactly the galaxy's most powerful Sensurian."
"Sure you are!" Kat said, nodding as her ears flicked and her tail wagged. "Since, like, you're the last one."
Silence fell across the table as people considered that.
Kat's ears flicked down as she realized, a bit too late, how that sounded. "Er. Uh. Sorry, Shey."
Shey breathed in, then breathed out. "It's all right Kat. You're right, as much as we don't want to admit it. I may have to be the one to guide this moment." She squared her shoulders. "Captain, permission to take my regular duties off to focus on training?"
"Granted," Captain Tangent said, lifting his gaze from the flimsy. "I've been checking the routes to the destination provided by Dhakiya..." He set the flimsy down. "Our two main routes are both dangerous in their own ways. We can swing through Vornash territory, or we can head through the Zone of Terror."
Delta leaned over to peer at the plastic printout. She scowled. "Oh, Zone of Terror, fuck off, look, it's not even the worst thing in that area of space! See, it's right next to the Unthinking Depths, the Cthonic Nebula, and the Galaxy of T...Terror, how can you call something a galaxy when it's
in
the milky way, that's bullshit." She leaned forward, her butt almost bumping against Triana's face. Triana grabbed the back of the lead pilot and jerked her back into her seat with a tug of her arm.
"Because it was named by Lithanoids, and they like being poetic sometimes," Triana said. "It's a spiral shape of stars and spatial anomalies, see?"
"Should have called it the Swirly of..." Delta looked like she was reaching mentally. "Sorcery."
"I vote for the Vornash run," Triana said, ignoring her fellow officer. "The
Excalibur
is a well armed, heavily armored ship with an unknown configuration. They won't know what to make of us, so we can fast talk anything we can't fight, and the crews need training on their guns and their new fighters."
"True," Delta said.
"I also vote for the Vornash run," Albert said. "I don't want to have to chart my way through half a dozen anomalies so bad that they got named the Zone of Terror."
Eugene, who had been silent so far, said: "I vote Vornash too."
"The Zone of Terror is my vote," Shey said, her voice quiet. "It's hard to focus on psychic training when your ship is being shot with lasers." She made a face. "But I won't say boo if we go Vornash too - since, well, being smashed about by anomalies is also pretty distracting."
Kat didn't look up from her documents. "Captain, we need more lithium," she said as everyone looked at her. "And duranium. Send the mining skiff down for-"
"Ahem," Triana coughed.
"Huh?" Kat lifted her head. "Oh, what were we voting on? Routes? Fuck if I care, I spend my entire time in the engineering bay." She looked back down. Triana rolled her eyes, while everyone's gaze settled on the Captain. While UNN ships could offer votes like this, the final decision still came down to the Captain. He nodded slowly, then looked down at the flimsy.
"Lets see how the Vornash are doing then," he said, quietly.
***
The
Excalibur
soared through tier three of the SOF, and the crew were quite happy to take advantage of the peculiar nature of that realm of reality - not just to slip the bounds of light speed travel, but also in...more ephemeral, exotic ways...
The door to the mess opened and Triana and Eugene walked in, laughing and shaking their heads. "The ghost of Napoleon, really?" Triana asked.
"It sure sounded like that through the door," Eugene said, frowning as he saw that the table nearest the window, which looked out on the simulated landscape of downtown Paris rather than the mentally corrosive swirl of impossible colors that existed at this level of the SOF, had been occupied by Kat. The young Paw had laid out all her engineering documents and was currently trying to read them around the largest sandwich that either Eugene and Triana had seen. She actually looked like she was trying to dislocate her jaw to take a bite into it. Her teeth sank in and a spurt of thick, red juices came out of the far end. Kat reacted with Pawish reflexes, kicking the table with one leg and sending it skidding along its mounted track. It moved a few inches away from her, so that the spurt finished its parabola by landing on the plate, rather than her documents. Then she hooked her ankle around the table and drew it back again as she continued to chew.
"...enjoying yourself?" Triana asked, nodding as Eugene murmured a question in her ear.
"Mmmh," Kat said around the sandwich, not looking up.
Triana took a seat and spun one of the documents around. "Ah, working on upscaling those force screen amplifiers?"
"Mmhmm!" Kat swallowed, setting her sandwich aside. "Who the fuck is Napoleon?"
Triana blinked, then remembered the Paw's sense of hearing. As if she could hear her thoughts, Kat grinned and pointed at her cat's ears, wiggling them. Triana sighed. "The Captain is being haunted by the ghost of a Corsican general - Corsica is an island off the coast of France."
"...a
ghost
?" Kat asked. "And we're not concerned because...?"
"Metanarrative field disassociation effects, Chief," Eugene said, returning with the coffee he had fabricated up for Triana. He handed on cup to her, keeping his. "The SOF is so preposterously impossible that each tier down you get, impossible events get more likely to occur. We're already breaking the light speed limit and causality, why not a few more laws? The Captain gets to fuck every hot alien we meet and have sword fights and run around on shore leave because it increases his narrative weight in the SOF - it means the weird stuff hits him and, sometimes, us."
"Like when you got kidnapped by the Kruul Princess," Kat said, nodding.
