Private Log: The Sea of Sleep
24 Apr 2024Lily Flemmon
I’ve been to Rhea all of once in my lifetime. Really early on in my time as a Commander, I tried supporting Felicia Winters by distributing propaganda and got an immediate shock of how insignificant I am in the galaxy. I learned that I would never actually see the effects of my work on greater society, but I’d still try to make the galaxy a better place. Now I’m all the way out here in Mare Somnia, the “Sea of Sleep.” It’s a fitting name from my point of view, because I can actually sleep pretty well out here… especially compared to a year ago, when I was getting… terrifying nightmares every night, and getting sleep without waking up screaming was rare for me. Out here, there’s a very visceral sense that anyone out to get me couldn’t be this far out, and if I do get hurt, it won’t be by another person.
With how much money exobiology makes me out here, I’ve been sitting on a fat pile of credits. CTAC is financially self-sufficient on ultra-specialty produce alone, but…
I felt guilty… about just running away from everything. Sure, I needed space, but-
Look, I- I miss home. I want to do what I can to make sure my home is still there when I get back. The war will end on its own at this point, and the bulk of the revenue it generates will die down. Felicia Winters has been elected, but disasters on Rhea 3 have forced her to postpone her inauguration, which is too coincidental to be fully natural.
So I got to thinking, what could my credits do?
I did a little digging and it turns out there was a seismic geology study on Rhea 3 that was struggling to get funding, because anyone who significantly funded it mysteriously died shortly after, and any contingencies they had to continue that funding were cancelled by next of kin. My guess is that whoever’s arranging the hits behind the scenes has a good reason not to kill the researchers directly.
I’ve… never had this kind of money to throw at something so uncertain before but I just… I needed to do something about an issue I care about after doing nothing for so long, and I can hold my own if someone gets sent to kill me. With only a few hours of genome collection a day, I can get a billion credits per week to that research team, and for a couple weeks, that’s what I’ve been doing.
Today, I got a message from Federal Liberal Command thanking me for the donations, but mostly informing me that they found logs from multiple mercenary groups about turning down some high-paying jobs because “explorers are too unpredictable” and “there are just too many unknowns out there, and the target is all the way out in bumfuck nowhere” and “the carrier she’s staying on is the biggest unknown of all about this job, it’s almost like it’s owned by its bartender and not its captain, and there’s no telling where she fits into that.”
Darius is a great bartender and the mercs are resourceful if they know he’s running the show around here.
I think I’ll keep this up until the war ends… and then I think I’ll be ready to return home. But for now?
It’s time to go back to sleep. And these days, I’m not even afraid of that.