Technically, Coins Are Cylinders pt 3
02 Oct 2022User398289
It was the stupidest sequences of events I’ve ever heard. I wasn’t even sure Clara was serious until I got to Ehlanda to meet with Carl and Orion and they presented me with my new Pilots Federation license. I’d been flying under a forged system defense license since entering the field and, as they handed me the new license I thought about the look on Clara’s face as she explained. Carl’s wager, Cadence’s decision to be lazy, Coral’s ambivalence about Carl’s role as her Primis Aseptus, and then The Los Ingression. As she spoke, her expression slowly transformed. Her eyes, not making contact with mine, carrying the plaintive happiness of someone seeing something joyful transfiguring into a monstrosity.“This is all really stupid. How’d Carl let something like that happen?,” I asked when I rejoined Clara at Laplace Ring, in the Balante system, to commission a new carrier. “Did you know they were going to make me take over Cadence’s Pilot’s Federation license?”
“Yeah. I’m not really sure how they managed. Their egress is scheduled for today and we should make it over to California Sector Nebula as quickly as possible.”
Cadence, Orion and Carl were aboard Galileo when they arrived and I set the outfitters’ and ship depot’s crew to transferring her modules and ships aboard NAIN ONE (V2L-45B). She stepped onto the hangar deck and I noticed how much she’d grown since the last time I’d seen her. Clara had long had issues with her, but my feelings softened near the end of my training and she’d been instrumental in getting me through the final round of flight tests before shipping out. As she and the other two strode toward us, I could feel Clara’s anger.
I remembered the feeling of entering my first duty station after completing PFR training with Carl. The unyielding hostility, as soon as I stepped from Virulence, tore at me the whole way from the flight deck toward the flight control tower- every step responded to with searingly noticeable abuses hurled from the entirety of the flight crew. There was no response at the door and I was forced to stand, amidst a swarm of movement and noise hurting both my eyes and my ears. After some twenty to thirty minutes, I’d decided to make sure the suit behind the door remembered who was trained to do what. Five minutes after that, I heard the door knob begin to jiggle and I straightened up to attention, my left-hand readying itself behind me.
“HAAAAAAAAA,” Clara laughed. All the anger in me dissipated like the air from a popped balloon. I was almost sad that I couldn’t do anything violent, being in so much shock as to who my Primis Aseptus would be. It wasn’t even disappointment as just the feeling of something that was mine and true gone forever. “Get in here,” she barked as she grabbed me by the flight suit and yanked me into the office, asking if I thought it was cool what she could do.
I’d half-expected something like that to happen when Cadence arrived, but she’d cleared the hangar deck entirely and we were left in the relative silence of an empty machine level. Still thinking about my own reintroduction to Clara, I hadn’t noticed that Cadence was nearing us. She seemed to notice the silence and absence of all presences but our own and began to speak before Clara cut her off with a gesture we’d come to recognize during our training with Carl. Clara was sealing her in silence. It was an awfully beautiful thing to witness. She gave Carl, Cadence, and Orion the notice of our new tasking and rolling her eyes as Cadence spoke, again out of turn, we agreed to meet them all in the bridge a short time later.
I plotted a course for HIP 18077, just outside the California Sector Nebula. Clara and I had been informed of Carl’s new tasking from The Zero and decided that it would be the best place to ride out the inevitable maelstrom of horror that awaited us from all sides, being now doomed to sit in the driver’s seat for what I now know to be the two dumbest people I have ever known. Carl and Orion joined us and Orion introduced himself. Clara had me briefed on the entirety of his role, and his position amongst the fatbus people, well before they’d arrived and I directed him toward the bridge crews navigations crew. He took the hint and excused himself without a word.
Carl was already in a terse argument with Clara by the time I returned and I thought to get myself caught up on their discussion,
“Lock it up. What are we supposed to do now?”
Carl began explaining the tasking for Cadence assigned for some Imperial Senator. I mentioned that The Zero had already given the order to secure all Imperial work through them and Carl corrected me, reminding me that the Imperial Senator’s personal firm, the OO12 Fringe Lab operated outside the purview of Imperial authorities. I asked him how that works and he shrugged his shoulders. Clara, who hadn’t yielded her high-perch, waited for him to finish explaining before sighing heavily. The look on her face told me that she’d kill Carl and she turned away toward the public announcement system,
“Can the idiot that got us into this mess please report to the bridge immediately. I repeat, the idiot that got us into this mess is to report to the bridge immediately.”
Carl looked at her, asking her if that was really necessary before sending Cadence a comms to report to the bridge. I asked if he’d done so and he nodded, flashing a look of irritation toward Clara, and I looked away for a short moment.
“If Clara just announced that the person that got us into this mess was going to report to the bridge and you just sent Cadence a comms telling her to report to the bridge, isn’t everyone going to see her and infer that she’s responsible for this?”
Clara glanced at him, before turning to me and nodding her head. Carl looked up and laughed and I continued,
“Wouldn’t we want to keep this a secret from the crew?”
Clara shook her head, clutching her abdomen as she laughed. Carl, for his part, began to nod before looking off toward an upper corner of the bridge compartment and turning his head to the side. A moment later, Cadence appeared. Carl recounted what he’d spoken to Clara and, as Cadence seemed to grow bored, Clara began. I’d been surprised by Carl’s new tasking on the Alliance-Sirius pact, but the xeno-activity in California Sector Nebula made it a great place to be to go ahead and do so. Cadence, who’d barely reacted to Clara’s onboarding indoc, seemed either unconcerned or unaware of what was happening around her.
I was approached from behind by Abigail Bird, my bridge crew deck officer, and commanded the final jump before turning back to Cadence, Carl, and Clara. I directed my words toward the two newcomers as I pointed out HIP 18077 on the galaxy map, mostly to Cadence,
“We’ll be stationed here for the time being. You’re free to do your work as you see fit, Cadence, but this is my ship. My ship, my rules. The Zero can’t help you aboard this vessel.”
I thought it sounded professional. Carl laughed, which seemed inappropriate. Clara looked at him with mild irritation and he bowed an apology to her. Cadence remained silent, her gaze directed somewhere past any of us and the bridge itself. I thought to make myself clearer to her, in case she hadn’t heard me, but she turned her eyes toward me and all recognition of the girl I’d hugged at the foot of Ten-Cent Pistol disintegrated, leaving a 20-year old woman whose decisions and actions may have killed her operations-partner standing in front of me, now under my watch.