Collective Hindsight (Book 1) - Aaron Rosenberg [4]
She grimaced at herself. This was no time to break down. She had work to do. She could break down later, when the mission was over. Until then, she would just have to get through it.
“Okay, that should do it,” Fabian said two hours later in the observation lounge. “We’ve collated all of our old materials on the mission—the official reports, side-notes, personal entries in diaries and letters, everything we could find, plus our own recollections of anything we didn’t include back then. If we’d had a little more time I probably could have set things up in the hololab, but….”
Sonya nodded. That might have been ideal, since it would have provided her with an actual visual replay of events, except for two things. First, they had a definite time factor. As it was, they’d reach the ship within a few hours, and by that point she needed to be up to speed. Even though the holo wouldn’t have taken any longer to run, they’d have needed more time to program all the parameters into the systems.
The second reason, which Fabian knew as well as she did, was that listening to and mentally picturing Kieran would be bad enough. Actually having to watch him again would be far worse. She’d heard of people who had programmed their lost loved ones into holodecks, so that they could visit them at any time. But to her that sounded like sheer torture, the notion of watching Kieran and talking to him but knowing that it wasn’t really him, that it was just a program. With a shudder she pushed the thought away. This option was definitely easier to handle.
“How long will it take?”
“Two hours if you let it run without pause,” Pattie said from behind Fabian. “We condensed some of the less important elements so you’d get the basics first, and then could go back and call up the peripheral details if you needed them.”
“Good thinking. Hopefully it won’t come to that.” Sonya blushed the minute she’d said that. Here she was, implying that their previous commander might have been so stupid he’d missed something obvious, and that they’d all been too dumb to catch it themselves. She saw from their faces that neither Fabian nor Pattie had taken it that way, but cursed under her breath anyway. She should know better than that, but lately she’d been saying a lot of things she shouldn’t have.
Rather than risk insulting her friends and teammates again, Sonya just nodded to them and swiveled her chair to face the observation lounge’s main screen. The swish of a door told her they’d left the room, but Sonya had already turned her attention to the monitors.
“Computer, engage program,” she called out, and settled herself more comfortably. As the first report began, she winced but forced herself to listen past the sound of Kieran’s voice. She tried thinking of the others on the mission, but that didn’t help much. Based on the stardate, it was after Chan Okha was killed in action, but before he’d been succeeded by Bart. Replacing the ship’s linguist wasn’t a priority in the heat of battle, after all. It was also when 111 was still alive and working in tandem with 110, before the former died on the Beast and 110 became a literal Soloman. A Bolian named Tydoan was the ship’s chief medical officer, not having retired yet. Drew, Barnak, McAllan…They were all still alive, too.
And so was Kieran…
Again, she forced herself not to think about it, put all the deaths behind her, and was eventually able to let her eyes lose focus and drift into the events, reliving them as if she herself had been there.
Chapter
2
Stardate 52698.1
“What do we know about this place?” Kieran asked, leaning forward to glance at Gold and Salek. “Randall V—I’ve never heard of it.”
“Good,” Gold replied. “If you had, I’d have to shoot you.” The half-smile said he was kidding—mostly. “Randall V is classified,