Space Academy Dropouts by C. T. Phipps & Michael Suttkus

Author:C. T. Phipps & Michael Suttkus [Phipps, C. T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: space opera, humor
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2022-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

The Most Difficult Duty

Setting us on our journey to Rand’s world was the easy part. So was making sure that the General was confined to quarters nicer than his cell. I needed him cooperating with us, but I also had no doubt he would go on a killing spree if left unattended. The rest of the crew might also kill him since most of them were more like Hannah than me in their beliefs about the treatment of prisoners.

My two months of thinking I was a part of Space Fleet hadn’t prepared me for the hardest duty of being a captain, though. Whether I was a fake officer or not, though, didn’t abjure me from the responsibility that had fallen on my shoulders.

“Hello, crew members of the ESS Black Nebula,” I said, standing behind the podium we’d set up in the hangar bay. “Today we are here to mourn the passing of someone who gave her life in the service of a cause we know was originally a lie but now has been made real.”

Virtually the entire crew was gathered in the hangar bay with the only people not being there being a token force to coordinate with Trish. It was less formal than I’d hoped but virtually everyone had liked Fifteen and some had liked her a great deal. It was another reason why I suspected my decision not to have the General thrown out an airlock would be considered poorly.

I’d also made it a point to keep the fact Captain Elgan had made suckers of us all a secret. So, of course the entire ship had known about it an hour later. The level of anger simmering underneath everyone’s grief was something that could have exploded into mutiny. Well, something like mutiny since my being the captain was a claim under very specious circumstances.

Which is why I leaked lies, disinformation, and truth too. I’d done my best to make it absolutely clear that I was not a plant from the Navy from the beginning, working for one of the other eleven agencies, or here as the spoiled nepotism appointee of my Aunt Kathy out to prove himself on an incredibly safe, not-so-terrifying mission as we’d been told. It was surprisingly effective but was wallpapering over a huge hole in the wall.

“Fifteen, whose name Forty-Two will recite in the proper Sorkanan language as we read their battle prayer for lost warriors, was not someone that I knew well. However, I know she was well-loved among you and many of you have stories about her.”

It was standard issue to have collapsible coffins onboard a Space Fleet ship and hers was waiting for being loaded into one of the airlocks. It looked like a plastisteel box for shipping cargo and made me feel vaguely sick that she was just going to be dumped out here among the refuse of space.

Unfortunately, it was a matter of practicality to not store her body for the remaining month of our journey. There were

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