Skeletons in Closets
14 Dec 2020Elkyri
Ray Gateway3306.08.14
Not all news travels fast. Turns out it was three years ago that Jameson's Cobra was found. Three years and I'm just now hearing about it. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, really. Now that I've been there and downloaded the ship's logs I can see why the Powers That Be would want to keep things on the quiet side. And not just for the way they used him then wrote him off as a loose end that needed tying off.
I actually teared up listening to Jameson's last log entries. It wasn't because I was listening to the last words of a man that knew he would soon be dead. It wasn't because he had died alone out there in the void; that's something all spacers have to accept as a possibility every time the FSD spools up. No, it was none of that. It was because listening to his last words made me think of the family he had left behind. I realized the son for whom he had left those logs never heard them. He never heard his father tell of how proud he was of the young man he had become or of his love for him. All he knew was that his father had left him and disappeared into The Black without a trace.
I felt the slow agony of his wife and son waiting for his return. I felt their grief when they finally gave up hope, and the sense of guilt that came with no longer feeling the need to wait -- of being free to get on with living instead of just waiting. None of that mattered to the men and women that sent Jameson on what they knew would be his last flight. In the end his family, like Jameson himself, were just collateral damage.
When I scanned the system to find Jameson's crash site I had noticed another set of returns from the adjacent planet. When I finally pulled myself together and dried the tears from my eyes I mapped that planet and discovered an abandoned settlement. It turned out to be one of the Intergalactic Naval Reserve Arm bases with its own secrets to tell buried in the comms terminals. I'm surprised they haven't found a way to purge them or at least destroy them. Maybe they don't care. Maybe after a hundred and fifty years they think the sins of the past are forgiven even if not forgotten.
I have heard there was a group calling itself the League of Reparation that went around assassinating descendants of INRA personnel. I don't know what ever became of that but that is just as bad when you think about it -- killing someone for something his grandfather did. Who thinks that is a good idea?
I've heard one of Jameson's descendants has made a name for herself. I wonder what she thinks about all these skeletons being pulled from their closets.