Another bit of 'BWT'

"There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays..." Barbara sang.

"And every one of them are right!" her brother Val responded. "Are we writing poetry today?" He flopped in a big old comfortable hammock slung in one corner of her bunkroom and office.

"Kip-pull-ling, at any rate... I'm stuck, I'm bored, and neither the data nor the information make any kind of sense," she complained.

"Alright, so the data and the info aren't quite the same thing, but still, what did they ever do to you?" Diana asked, breaking into the conversation. She stole a kiss from Val, and between them passed, wordlessly, a question. She evidently liked the answer and joined him in the hammock.

"Uh, get a room? Working here-" They stuck their tongues out at her. "Now that's just childish... Uh, the data is corrupted and suspect. The information, in this case, is hearsay, so, not really data or 'info', per se."

"I can understand, as a Historian and an Archivist, why you don't like all that, but, really, it's over seven hundred years old; what did you expect?"

Barbara shrugged. "The corrupted data was recovered from the Bigbees, a Leviathin that the Shadow Fleet took down fifty-some years after Aurora. I blame our people for the corruption; whoever was collecting intel should have been more diligent-"

"There was a war going on," Val pointed out.

"Exactly!"

Val and Diana looked at each other and laughed. Then they settled back again, spooned in the hammock, gently swinging. Diana closed her eyes and relaxed.

"So what was the hearsay?" Val asked.

"Legend, myth, that's all. Just that the Auroran Sky Guard rescued some insectoid aliens, before Aurora was attacked."

"Why haven't I ever heard of this?" Diana asked, opening her eyes again and half sitting up.

"Things were very chaotic, back then. The first offensive hit one other outworld on the way in from Aurora to Sol, but the Bigbees were all over us before we really even knew what was happening. We didn't take any living prisoners right away because they had all the advantages, and, well, a lot of people were just plain in a killing mood. Probably the reason they're the 'Big Bad', Bigbee, Aliens, and not the Bugs; we didn't know much about the enemy at first. Didn't even know what they looked like, on the 'Nineteenth of Nevermore'."

Roman Smith, 29th Century Time Traveler

Roman Smith was an orphan; he was a lot of things, by turns. A survivor and scavenger, a street-rat that nobody else wanted, not for legitimate purposes. Then a soldier, a construction worker, a teacher, and at various times along the way, a friend, an enemy and a lover. He was no stranger to time-travel; he passed through over a hundred years of it at sixty seconds per minute to get to Aurora.

Without being aware of it, he'd been present, in the same habitat where the star-drive was first conceived and proved out, and later he'd helped to build 'Centauri Dream'. He was there for the beginning of the First Interstellar Age, and he hung around, almost, until the beginning of the end of it, at Aurora.

An anti-terraforming terrorist monkey-wrench killed him 'mostly-dead' three days before the Bigbee attack, and he was 'mostly-dead' for seven and a half centuries.

***

"You adopted each other?" The med tech sounded so dubious of this that Roth turned away from the sight of his brother, Roman, to the man behind him. This was a twenty-something, perhaps; it was getting hard to be sure of visual cues with respect to age. Case in point, he and Roman were nearly a century older and didn't especially look it.

"We did that sort of thing, back in the Thirties. Just a gang of street-rats that nobody wanted... we were father and mother, sister and brother, to each other; Sarah Jane, Albie, Mechee-" Roth tried to remember each of their bakers' dozen names and could not. Sigh. So long ago... "He and I, and Sarah, are all that are left, now."

From the carefully neutral expression on the Med Tech's face, it was obvious that he didn't understand or really care. Roth felt anger at that; We lived, damn it! We really lived! When it would have been so much easier to just give up, to lay down and die. This kid... they had been his age, once, and thinking back on those days, he remembered that, no, they hadn't really cared what old people had thought or done, either.

"Thank you, son, I'll just sit here with my brother for a bit." Roth looked back to the very still form, willed it to keep on breathing. "It will be the first time in decades that I will be able to say what I want to him..."

"What do you want to say?"

Roth looked up and felt suddenly as if he could fly. The Med Tech frankly stared at the idiotic smile on that old fossil, and the old woman, her red hair peppered with white. He took in the dark jade eyes, the laugh lines, and he blinked. She was old, but she was beautiful. She-

She imperiously swept him out of the room with a gesture, and he obey automatically.

"Sarah Jane." Sarah, from the Hebrew word for princess, and she had been that, their princess. Sarah Jane for a character from a series that Albie, Albert, the oldest of them, had known and loved.

"Somehow, I doubt that's what you want to say," she said, smiling. She came around the bed and kissed him.

"I'd tell him that he's still my brother, and we love him, even if he never could get along with my wife and her people..."

"Roman was stubborn and prone to judging people harshly." Sarah saw that Roth was staring at her. "No, I've talked with his doctors, spoken with the the Terraforming Authority. He signed off on the n-stasis procedure-"

"He's not dead, yet!"

"We can't fix what needs to be fixed," Sarah Jane said as gently as she could. "His brain... nerve tissue is the biggest wild-card, and we still can't regrow it, not in a matrix that is still... 'him'. Do you understand?"

Roth nodded.

"Give them another decade, brother. Give them a little time..."

The process made the organic bits of him inert, which is good. No machine, no thing of Man, survived the attack, nor the long centuries when nothing that was exactly human walked on Aurora. Roman Smith's body lay waiting under rock and tonnes of soil.

Much later-

When Roman woke up, he was in a small room with two other people who were busy with each other. He cleared his throat and the man, scarred, wearing an eye-patch like a pirate, looked over to him and winked. "Well, Doc, I think you've got another customer."

"Later, Val." The two parted reluctantly, hands with fingers entwined. The woman sighed, and visibly put on her game face as she turned to Roman.

"Lady, who the hell are you, and where the hell am I?" Roman demanded. He sounded peevish and weak, in his own ears.

"I'm a doctor. Your doctor. Dr. Diana Peterson."

"Doctors make out with their boyfriends in the ICU? What century is this?"

"The late 29th, Mr. Smith. My medical bay, my rules."

"Twenty-ninth?" Roman lay back, deflated, defeated. "Well, I suppose- you speak with some kind of accent, one I've never heard before."

"No I don't," Dr. Peterson retorted, annoyed. "I speak old Teklish just fine; the Wednesdays use it all the time, learned it off of the 2-D media they like to watch."

Roman blinked. Maybe that was it; all the different accents run together. He heard Aussie and Brit, Middle American, Jive and Surfer Slang, all in passing. And he had to admit, he now defaulted to Auroran English, which was idiosyncratic, to say the least. But what was Teklish?

"Alrightee then, Doctor. Where am I?"

"In Columbia, on Aurora-"

"Columbia is a ship? Why aren't I in a hospital?!" He sat up again. He was having trouble focusing. What had she said, about the century?

"There aren't any, Mr. Smith. There haven't been any for about seven hundred years..." She was watching him and helped him to lay back. "There. It's a lot to take in, and I've been called on my bed-side manner many times, but I prefer to be blunt and honest with my patients. Even use a clue-by-four, on the occasion."

"What- what happened?"

"The Bigbees happened, Mr.-"

"Call me Roman, please. My friends all do..." Roman realized that they must all be dead, every one. Everyone. He felt her hand on his cheek, and looked up.

"Pleased to make your acquaintance, Roman. Welcome to the 29th Century."

***

A plump and pleasant woman joined them in the medical bay a little while after that. She ran in, a little flushed and out of breath. She visibly made herself slow down and worked on her breathing. She smiled at Roman and called, "Hello, Diana!" to where the Doc was peering at the screens and cylinders of some medical device with which Roman was sharing medbay space.

"I thought you'd be here sooner..."

"Well, you know, I was making headway on that other thing..." she said somewhat mysteriously. It set the hook on Roman's curiosity.

"And eventually you actually read my note?"

"Yeah," the woman said, pinking a little in embarrassment. She was of medium complexion, and of a height with Dr. Peterson, just 30 kilos heavier. Her hair was short, wavy, even a little curly, and she wore what the Doc had described as ship's knits, a sort of green denim coverall with plenty of pockets, tool loops and straps. The same sort of thing as he had changed into when he'd asked for street-clothes. The Doc herself wore open-toed sandals and a blouse with capris cargo pants in a pink camo pattern under her white doctors' coat, like something out of a Hollywood movie, Roman thought.

Dr. Peterson left off with her other charge and made introductions. "Mr. Smith, meet Ms. Barbara Wednesday. Barb, meet Mr. Roman Smith, late of Aurora, born in St. Louis, MO, American Empire, June 29-"

Roman cleared his throat. "Actually, the United States of America, ma'am. I'm an American citizen, first and last; it's a state of mind." He looked at both women, who seemed a little baffled by his words. "Look, I know Uncle Sugar wasn't well-liked, as the worlds' 'last super power', and we came to a bad end, but... could you humor me, please?"

He found that there was a slightly hungry look in Barbara's eyes, as she took his hand and shook it. "Pleased to meet 'cha," she told him, and Roman felt like maybe he'd stepped into that old movie. He took all of this in with an unnatural calmness, as if he really were in a celluloid dream; call it 'The Sleeper Awakes', perhaps. Roman watched Barb and her light brown eyes. She had a wrinkle in her forehead when she concentrated, which she was doing right now, and a warm and ready smile.

Now that he thought about it, it was the same smile as on the man with the eye-patch. They shared a certain look; the complexion, the dark, wavy, curly hair. Diana of the cold, light blue eyes and dirty-blond hair was not part of a matched set.

"Was that your brother I met earlier?" He asked.

Barb looked to Diana, who smiled, a strange mix of embarrassed contentment. "I suppose so; eye-patch, right?"

"Yes."

"He's getting a new eye. He'll be back to two, soon, and have to give up his favorite prop."

"Playing pirate, is he?"

"Who's playing?" Diana retorted, and left them alone.

Found Objects in my Fiction

(an old-fashioned Space-Born journal written in three different hands)

Roman came back to medbay alone, and found that Dr. Peterson was elsewhere. The small bound volume he had seen her reading lay on her desk and he picked it up, thinking it was an old book. It was; an old hand-made, hand-written book of poetry. He put it down immediately and backed away from the thing as if it were a snake, and it was; the serpent from the garden, tempting him to taste of the tree of knowledge.

Curiousity had always been his weakness.

He edged up to the thing and touched the soft, spirilina-cloth cover, green shot with orange, red and yellow, like little flames. He picked it up again and read.

It was a journal full of verse, and was written by at least three different people. One he recognized as the Doc's hand writing. She had a strong hand, feminine yet business-like, stern. A clownish hand had scribbled the first third or half of the poems, some few of them attributed, 'tradititional' and other names he did not recognize. The others. presumably, were original to the journalist. They were all about space and ships, in Teklish, so he did not follow some of it, but it was the tears and dragons' teeth of a people who would not give in. He knew their breed, of old.

There was a fourth hand, stating a date, a death- of 'Uncle Roark', who had 'made the trip home'. It was signed Louis Armstrong Wednesday III.

A child's hand had written poems then, childish verse about heroes, hopes, forlorn feats. It was truly bad, and then got better, line by line, verse by verse.

A few dozen pages on, it had stopped, after a poem called 'Faces, Voices'. The child had become a man and the man had become a killer. Not a murderer; a solver of problems, an ender of threats. The old soldier in him ached at that pain.

The next poem was in the Doc's hand-writing. Roman read the first two lines and closed the volume, ashamed of himself for intruding into this private thing between two lovers. He set the journal down as he'd found it and turned to face Valentine Saint Wednesday. The two men stood there for long seconds before Val reached past to pick up the book.

"Good reading?"

"Varied and, in parts, raw."

"Ships' manners are all about keeping us from killing each other inside a pressure vessel. Sometimes we see the same faces for decades on end."

"I am truly sorry."

"But you would do the same thing again; better yet, not get caught doing it?"

Roman considered his words with care and decided to nod, instead.

"Good answer." Val tossed him the book. "Read it, if you will; all of it. I'll square it with Diana. She's good, at least I think so. And my Great Uncle Roark knew what was important. That'll serve you well, I expect."

Between Worlds (Tradtional)

The song lingers long and long, but this, everlasting, when the notes do fade-

Carbon and steel and hearts' blood, of these starships and space-born are made.

From the hearts of dead stars to the space in between, are they bound.

Where reason and logic desert us in favor of a belief, which we have found.

Our ship, our crew, our passengers; the journey, the mission and the duty.

Everything is in this little world between worlds, and no room for pity.

Old Bamboo Glades (The Man)

The restless shrubs of this world,

Clack together like old bamboo glades.

They grow up strong and limber,

In purple with rich red accents.

The blue-green fronds, when bruised,

Scent the air with cinnamon and honey.

Upon the Sand (Doc)

The Man in Black is at it again;

His blade flashes in the morning sun,

As he and his opponent dance;

A dance of Art and of Science;

A dance of Life and Death, upon the sand.

The sword-point dazzles the watching eye,

And the sharp, sharp, blade parts the air,

Singing of oxygen and carbon and iron;

Singing of the dead hearts of dead suns;

Singing of the red-stuff it spills, upon the sand.

'The 19th of Nevermore'

(I'm calling the event 'The 19th of Nevermore', and there's probably a folk-ballad or three in that)

"There is a message from that time... he was either the last Prime Minister of the Solar Commonwealth or the first President of the Shadow Federation; before the 19th, he was Minister of Energy." Barbara keyed up the audio and Roman heard the words for the first time, the ones all space-born kids knew by heart.

"I have..." Roman remembered how Churchill had flubbed a line in one of his war-time speeches and gone on; 'but it must be remembered' in 'blood, toil, tears and sweat'.

"The homeworld of Mankind has been attacked by the enemy, and has fallen. There is little hope of survivors. The automated defenses in the Moon are still firing, but that rock is taking a terrific beating, and Earth, herself... is broiling under in-falling bollides from heavy impacts. There may be some... few, in deep shelters, but they are beyond our aid. I have therefore... withdrawn our remaining forces and ordered their dispersal." The voice paused again and swallowed nervously. Roman understood that he had just condemned thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, to ensure that some military force survived. By running away. That would haunt a man till the day he died.

"This is a bitter day, and these are bitter words. I call on all who hear this to bear the unbearable, to survive, to persist, even after the end of 'all we have known and loved.' We are all that is left of our planet and of our species. The enemy is afraid of us, is destroying all that they can. There is no victory, for them, if they should fail in that mission. But there is, for us, some bittersweet victory if we should succeed; drop by drop of blood, survivor by survivor of this apocalypse... Let us now therefore save what we can, let us, now, leave talk of loss and of revenge for another day. Survive! Please, because... you must."

5K of 50,000 Words... Sigh!

Why do I keep doing this to myself? 8-P

The Wednesdays should rest easy, I have no doubt that I'm gonna tell their story, especially after I threw everything in that I love, from old movies to SF, heart and blood, carbon and steel... I had a 'Buck Rogers' character from ACAD that I'm going to retread as a sleeper who awakes in the 29th Century (yeah he's four centuries late for the 25th C, but trust me, he definitely wanted to skip The Hiding).

Just about the most obvious thing is that I've got a romantic plot lined up between the 'Old Man' and the historian, but I can at least try to be subtle... yeah, right! Val and Diana, Susan and Louis, Junior and Sally; maybe I shouldn't. But I expect I will.

I'm trying for different types of characters, the family constellation thing. Daughters-in-law are contrasted with Mom, with Sally being the least like the Captain, and Diana being, uh, more of a free agent, yeah... I'm liking Diana a lot, but I'm little concerned that I'm writing a Cylon-Babe, what my Buddy Pete said about the female Cylons being fantasy women. We'll see. The Doc is in, and she can handle herself in a fight, too.

More troubling is painting Barbara in a corner, or puting her in a Kaylee-shaped box (sparkly, 'Kaylee's Box' 8-). And Val is too much of a Ranger, can't seem to get away from that sort of thing- not a bad thing?

Junior is the least sympathetic and most one-dimensional, so I'm going to make him 'pop' at some point, round, surprising, father/mother authority figure redeemed and reaffirmed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_order- I've been thinking about Birth Order and family Constellations as a suggestion only, not the rule. Especially things like two twins, who attempt to establish their seperate identities. Do twins who try to match, identically, do so because there is some external 'push' to do so, or closeness?

Two babies of the family, Barbara and her nephew Davie, who identify w/ each other strongly, but are different. And of course, families have a personality of their own, as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Wars- Heavily influences BWT; my current Anime 'find' of the year, may be as 'classic' as 'Casablanca' or The Bride! 8-P

Ruminations and Recriminations

They are really going to phase out the shuttle... it has turned out to be a costly sidetrack, forcing us to endlessly circle the Earth instead of trying for the Near Earth Asteroids. I still feel like a childhood pet has died...

The shuttle was never what it was advertised to be. We will have spaceplanes, and 'space trucks', but the shuttle was a magnificent kludge, a billion-dollar a launch flying-brick. Smaller, cheaper and more frequent launches would have brought us so much further than we have come in my lifetime. Scoff, in this age of apps and robots, of smaller, more sustainable dreams. We've thrown away a generation of development, when we could now be so much closer to developing the wealth of the solar system; to moving all the dirty, high-density energy sectors of our global economy off of the planet and out of our lifesystem.

Instead of habitats, cities on the Moon, we have New Trek, Syfy, and, all too briefly, Firefly.

***

Mom and I went to Jo Ann Fabs for their Firefly sale... yeah, do I even have to say anything? 8-P

We went to dinner at the Chinese Buffet, JAF and a gift card. All more than I can do for Dad, this Dad's Day WE; just mow the grass and take him to brunch on Sunday, if he's feeling up to it. He's doing better, but...

He won't go to the movies with me these past past few years, can't sit still through a movie, and despite the couches by the ramp at Evil People's, but I got 'The Kings' Speech' and he may watch it. 'Fiddler on the Roof' will be brought out and put in the DVD player; we're Scots-Irish, red-neck, NASCAR-types, but the problems of a little-big man who talks to God and loves his wife and family, even though they drive him crazy and vice versa- he likes that one, and so do I!

I told Mom about the baby bunny and he's up as my laptop BG for now- cute beat out sexy Revy in merely one day, all power and glory to the Cuteness... (now it's the yawning tiger cub! 8-)

I had an idea or two while camped out in the sewing machines, looking over the $400 Singers and Joss knows how pricey Husqvarnas- a survivor who misses his Husqie Viking Designer Diamond or Sapphire. Too heavy to lug around in the Z-pocalypse... but certain 'Home-Economics' skills will come back into demand after a bit. Threading a needle, making cloth and paper...

Also, a bit of fanfic about Kaylee's Mama and the teddy bear on her cover-alls. Was that a gift, or did Kaylee use skills learned from her mother (the assumption, for me, has always been that she learned her ships from her Daddy, but what if I'm totally wrong, or we had a role-reversal?).

Daddies' Day- a Firefly fanfic

I'm roughing out 'The Adventure of the Day-Glow Orange Cattle', which belongs in BWT.

 http://danielsolisblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/thousand-year-game-design-challenge.html?spref=fb

I wish I'd known about the 1KyrGD challenge sooner! It's all about the next classic game, like chess or poker, a game that people will still be playing a thousand years from now...

Write about the games they play on starships during 'The Hiding', and the new/old ones they play on the worlds of the Human Expansion- Baseball, Basketball, Soccer/Football.

Disaster, Bad Stars; Dawn-Hunters is an open-ended variation on Diplomacy, in which the two or more players are starfaring species attempting to expand into a wrap-around volume of space one hundred light years across with thirty thousand stars. Strategic resource management God-games, like secret colony.

Hidden Colonies teaches strategy and resource management during The Hiding.

The Not Knowing (unfinished!)

            The wreckage of PSV Beatrice was found 783 light-seconds out from the planet where she was supposed to be conducting salvage operations. This log and other data were recovered while elements of Shadow Fleet 13 engaged three Big-Bee Leviathans in-system. Minor casualties and damage to one Leviathan's hyperdrive led to her to being scuttled when the rest of SF13 arrived four hours later. We got one of the other bastards, too. A very good day. -Rear Admiral Vasili Jigoro

 ***

Entries from Astrogation Officer Leona Frade's personal log on the private salvage-vessel Beatrice-

            It's hard, the not knowing. I am a starship astrogator and pilot, but my most important job, even more important than seeing us home again, is to someday destroy our data-base of known human settlements. The holomap is like a strand of pearls glowing in the darkness of the bridge, and from time to time, when we come home, one or two have gone dark. Sometimes there are new ones, and I pull up the entries like childhood sweets, to savor how here, there, are three thousand souls making a living at atmospheric mining on this gas-giant, ten thousand hiding their farms and manufacturing inside this icy little moon, or a few dozen on a powersat spreading black wings under a blue-white sun to manufacture antimatter in milligram lots. Not knowing what has happened to the ones that go dark, and dreading the day when we come home to a dead settlement, that is hard.

            There is something out there that does not love us. I wonder if they know our kind too well, or see themselves in us, that they can kill without mercy, wipe us out root and branch. But I'd rather not know, if the knowing invariably means my death, and the deaths of those I love.

            "I'd trade you to know, though, Krieg," I told the mercenary who was hanging onto the wall behind me. Krieg likes to do that. He thinks maybe I'm desperate enough to be interested, perhaps. Ugh. He's a squat toad who grew up in high-G, down in a habitat floating in the clouds of a Venus-like runaway greenhouse planet. They mined something on the surface, transuranics probably, and the place turned into a ghost town when the ore-body played out. The population drifted away to more typical low-G moons and free-fall, and he found his calling when a local boss, both mayor and magistrate, pressed him into a mercenary outfit run by his brother. Not Krieg's brother; I hear that he's an orphan.

            Krieg grunts and doesn't ask what I'm talking about. He wants me for my body, not my mind, which, to my way of thinking, is pretty sad. I am a scarred survivor, and a long-time ago I shaved off the pretty hair my mother loved, because it now comes in clumps around the scar-tissue. There's a soft-spot where a skilled surgeon removed a piece of my skull to go in there after some debris. I think that I fought so hard only because he fought so hard, for me, that I didn't dare disappoint my uncle. My astrogators' implants and such are just so much lemonade... When life hands you a lemon, right? Better to my way of thinking to risk a cripple than to risk a whole human being, which was an attitude Uncle Stan didn't care for at all. But all he said was, "Cynicism and despair won't carry you through, girl."

            The timer beeps. Five minutes and counting. I call the captain, but he's up already. He always is. Krieg clears out, unrequited lust and all. Probably going to go feel up his guns. Pervert.

            100 seconds and counting down. Hyperspace maps with realspace in a more or less congruent fashion, but it's much smaller. Much, much smaller. We basically fly through it, interacting indirectly with hyper-matter and praying that the shields and sails hold. If they fail and we can't get out fast enough, we will die horribly, decaying into hyper-matter and disintegrating.

            I'm told it's like burning alive while exploding. I wish I didn't have such a good imagination.

            That, plus I come as close as any man or woman does to experiencing it, through the ship's sensors. I linked up with my ship, not the captains', mine, and pushed ever so carefully with the force-fields, feeling the drag of hyper-matter like a warm breeze on my skin

            I feel myself being pulled into an old dream about my mother. She's holding my hand at the beach, in the surf under a pale blue sky. We're wearing re-breather masks but otherwise it's skin-safe. The suns hang low but many hours from setting, over a little boat pulled ashore by my father, my brothers and uncle. A picnic, if we're careful, my parents say, like on Earth in their parent's time. Before it turns into nightmare, with malevolent lights streaking across the sky, the ship calls me back, and I drop us carefully out of hyperspace over our destination.

***

            We salvage. Mostly from our own dead, but sometimes we go where the Tommyknockers, the Jabberwocky or Big Bad Aliens, take your pick, have killed some other poor bastard species. This job was one of those. I appreciated that. Somehow I never feel clean on jobs where we pick the bones of our own kind.

            The place got worked over a long time ago. Some spock worked out that this happened seven hundred years ago, around the time one set of my ancestors was importing another set into North America- and wiping out the natives with Old World diseases to boot. Monsters, monsters, everywhere... We're not the first ones in, and we won't be the last, but we needed to get in and get out. Not just because it's a potential hang-out for the Big-Bees, but also because there are always turf issues to deal with. Sometimes Krieg gets to earn his keep.

            That holomap doesn't show it all. There are other tangled strands of pearls we don't know about, or are kept hidden by mutual agreement. We call it the shadow federation, but what it really is is a bunch of frog-kingdoms, where the biggest frog in each pond is happy enough not to have the competition. That it's safer this way is just gravy.

            The Captain came onto the bridge. I can always tell without looking, or sneaking a peek at the security feed. He drinks caff, the artificial stuff we know as the fabled coffee. He always brings two mugs, one of caff for himself, and another of coca, also artificial but gene-hacked from soy and a better fit, or so the really old-timers say. Of course, after the first hundred years or so, you really can't trust your taste-buds, or memories. The smell brings back certain childhood ones, all good.

            "How are we, Astrogation Officer Frade?" He asks with mock-formality. We have a good relationship; he plays around with my formality, and I let him mock me gently, for he's one of the best captains I've ever had.

            "We are 'fair to middlin', Cap'n,'" I say, and he flashes me a smile. "Low orbit, coming up on our first re-entry burn in fifty. Do you want to take us in?"

            I could land Beatrice, but Captain Jesse Underwood is a much better pilot. Even without implants, he has an intuitive feel for her in realspace, one I envy. But a look passes over his face. Regret?

            "No, Leona, you take Bea in for me this time. There's one or two things I need to see to..."

Later on... 

            The alarms sounded, breaking my reverie. I moved to seal the bridge one damn second too late. Krieg and a Big-Bee, the first I'd ever seen up close, came rolling in as the doors slid shut, snicker-snack, cutting the Big-Bee off at one knee. The thing chittered and crabbed around on it's remaining legs, bringing a weapon up to fire at me. Krieg swung the hooked end of a crowbar up and under the armor of it's neck. Blue-green blood spurted across the bridge at me, hot and vile. The big bad alien fell over, kicking and clutching at it's wound, but life poured out onto the deck. What a mess.

            Without thinking about it, as I'd been drilled to do, I'd pulled my pistol, the one mandated by the Guild. I was aiming at Krieg. "Not that I'm unhappy that you just killed it, but what the hell are you doing here?"

            "I figured you might be lonely," Krieg said as he slid down the wall by the door. His wound from earlier was bleeding again, seeping out where the doc-patch had come loose. "Then I had a dance-partner who I couldn't say 'no' too, y'see..."

            His eyes closed and I thought that maybe he was dead, or at least unconscious. He surprised me by saying, "Don't let Underwood in here." He opened his eyes again and met mine. "He's betrayed us. I'd thank you kindly to put that away, and overwrite the Astrogation database, right now. We aren't going home again."

Explain how this ends and recovery of her personal log