I put in for a request to be moved from Sanos
28 Feb 2021User319792
The suit didn't look up from his desk before saying, "You advanced in your Imperial rankings, again"I started laughing and stopped when he looked at me. He seemed upset. I looked at the duty station request and he sized me up again. He lingered a little longer at my hips than I was comfortable with. I asked him if he wanted to take a picture and he immediately broke his gaze.
"We can move you into President Hudson's space for the moment, but that's the best we can do. Maybe it'll keep you away from the Imperial Loyalists."
I studied his hand for a moment. It was placed, palm-side down, over a piece of paper marked "urgent" and I could see the muscles in his hand tensing every time I glanced over at it. I asked him if he could move me back into The Empress' territory and he immediately looked away, irritated, before brushing off the question with a tense "No."
I stood there for a moment before he mentioned that I'd made Chief Petty Officer in the Federation Auxiliaries. I said I did. He asked if there was anything I could tell him about Sanos that I hadn't already included in my reports to the organization and UC. I mentioned that the trading there wasn't all that great but that the deep-core mining reserves that I'd mentioned could be profitable. He asked if there was anything more about the current conflicts in the system that I hadn't included in the reports and I told that there probably are but that, without being given the authority to intervene, I wouldn't be able to give him all that much information, now could I.
He did not appreciate my candor.
"We'll have to move you to Nanomam."
Hudson's headquarters. My dad's work took us through there a couple of times, but beyond that I've never come within 20lys of the place. I figured that he'd find somewhere near the edge of governed space to let me dry out until the end of my probationary period. He said that they wanted me deep. He looked at my hips again and lingered for a little longer than I thought was necessary as he said it.
I asked him if there was anything else before excusing myself to get over to Sanos and prepare for the trip over.
There was a holo from CMDR Inf3ctd when I'd returned. I holo'd him back and we talked for a while.
He's a hell of a pilot. He shared a lot about the kinds of specialization I could engineer into my ships mods and gave me some pointers to improve my flying so I could get myself off of the "garbage" turrets and gimbaled weapons and outfit myself with some hardpoints that could really do some damage against anyone with something to prove to themselves. He took me around the resource extraction sites and he showed me some tricks on how to work with wing mates to take out some of the pirates and bring in some bounties and some of the tricks of the mining trade. He knew his stuff, but he also seemed like he knew too much about a lot of things.
I finally got up the courage to ask him what his deal was and he said he had a fight he believed he should win. He mentioned that one of his previous stations had been under extreme political pressures and was attacked without him knowing it. I asked him how a station gets attacked without someone knowing it.
"The way things work, some people can get away with effecting the world we live in without ever having to step foot into it and that just ain't right."
I couldn't tell whether it was some moral absolutist stance or just his own grief before he continued, "I think if they're working to change things, then they oughta be willing to be right out in the open with it so that anyone that disagrees can see for him or herself what it is that's going on. There are too many secrets in this galaxy, what with the Pilot's Federation being the way it is, last thing anyone needs is to wake up in the morning with a different government than the one that was there before they fell asleep the night before."
I thought about the Empress and the story of the late former crown-prince Harold. I thought about the man in the black suit and the other suits.
We talked about a few other things that, in the end, don't amount to a whole lot before locking eyes and parting ways.