The Last Breath

Posted on Sun Jan 16, 2022 @ 5:13am by Lieutenant Commander Elli-Navine

Chief Engineer’s Log

It was nice working on the kinetic pistol with Scott for a little while. He's decided to call it a Claymore. It seems to be a name in connection to his family roots, I think. He doesn't talk much about home, but there's moments like that I can tell he misses it. It's funny I think, when I was home, I used to dream about leaving and flying around adventuring.... and now that I'm out here... I think about home. Not all of the time, but. Ever since seeing Grazer in Tenzy Carter's scrying globe, I keep wondering— why? What does it mean?

I feel like I should maybe warn someone, but I don't even know enough to say anything. Grazer's pretty far out on the edge of Federation space. And our defenses? They've always been very limited. My dad used to tell me that you didn't need phasers if you made only friends. But now? Something in my gut just says Grazer has been lucky, for a very long time. And having joined the UFP, it's just not been a target because of the ire any action would raise with the rest of the Federation. I miss not thinking about this kind of thing. Just enjoying the fireflies and the stars and listening to my cousins playing in the yard. I hope they're safe.

Seeing all of those people that died of depressurization on the abandoned ship... Knowing we were just shy of finding them in time... I mean, we couldn't have saved them, even if we knew. We only found out about the station while we were on the moon. While we were learning about their beginning, they were likely just then saying their final goodbyes to one another. They held out. For as long as they could, they held out.

Was it brave? Or was it foolish, having families like that?

Every time Pride talked about preparing for the worst, saying that we might never be recovered, I just kept rolling my eyes. Even when rations were getting low, I wasn't too worried. I figured I could always get enough moss for the Replicator to exchange. A week, two weeks, so what if it went a little longer? I was getting used to camping. It was always temporary in my mind.

But after Captain Pax briefed us on how bad the attack was, and how many crew we lost... I think that's when it hit me, how close we might have come to being cut off from civilization. It weirds me out just thinking about it. Those people that got stranded on the station fifty years ago. They probably went through the same thing as I did. They probably looked around and said, don't worry. The ship is coming back. And then don't worry, someone will find our distress signal. At what point did they all look at one another and say, well, this might be it? We're all we might ever have. Just one another. And then after all that, decades of survival and hope. Finally they're sitting with their children and their grandchildren and watching the clock count down to their deaths.

They didn't even get a proper burial. We can't even contact their homeworld. All we have of them are a few of the personal devices we collected, and those have to be scrubbed of any technical references, for reasons I can't even talk about in this log.

I'm supposed to put some extra hours into rebuilding the warp nacelle but I can't, I can't now. I can't focus... I need to go... I don't know. Run some analysis on my pocket universe battery or something.

 

Tags: TBR#012

Comments (1)