While Making Other Plans:
Chapter 17

  Kathryn toured the ship while waiting for her team to report in on the general sentiments of her crew and their preference for how they should proceed.  He daughter aside, she was fairly confident that most if not all of them would rather risk it all for the chance to come home safely instead of just giving up on the prospect altogether and consigning themselves to a slow, lonely death on an alien planet.  The kinds of people who signed up for Star Fleet had some things in common, which included a penchant for risk taking, passion for discovery, and a belief in the extraordinary being possible.

  Even without a computer, they could manually plot reasonably well enough to accelerate in a long circle to allow them some degree of simulated gravity and allow them to work easier.  Kathryn was somewhat surprised when her feet had taken her to her quarters first, and watched herself make her way into her daughter’s room and start going though her things, unsure if she was looking for some clue to something, or if she just wanted to feel some connection to her amidst her pangs of loss for her.

  She opened a drawer and found it full of games and a media drive stuffed with content, things to keep her busy on what she must have figured to be a relatively uneventful trip.  It was so like her to be over prepared, so much like Kathryn, so inclined to foresee as many possible outcomes as possible and try to account for all of them.  How much a fool they’d both been made by their attempts to foresee how this particular trip might turn out.

  She sat down on her bed and picked up the picture of them together, Kathryn, Jaren, and Maggie as she started to cry.  She only granted herself a small indulgence of tears, not yet able to allow herself to surrender to the full weight of all that had happened, but she knew she had an emotional reckoning on the horizon which she could never be adequately prepared for.

  In the meantime, she still had a lot of captaining to do, so she stood up and surveyed herself in the mirror of the adjacent bathroom.  She let her mess of hair down and used Maggie’s brush to smooth it out some before bundling it back up again as she noted how much gray there was in her hair these days, and wondered how much more there was now than a couple weeks ago, and how much more would reveal itself in the coming months as a result of the stress.

  She chuckled to herself at the presumption that there would be an in a few months for her.

  Exiting Maggie’s room she saw Jaren come in.  She guessed he’d come to do the same, to reconnect with Maggie somehow, to ground himself again in it.  They’d known each other long enough that they both knew there was nothing to say and were happy to not try.  They embraced for a good long while, slowly rocking back and forth and stroking each other before pulling away.  Kathryn offered him a muted sheepish smile as she gave his hand a squeeze before letting go to move past him towards the door.

  Kathryn returned to her office off of the bridge, and couldn’t tell how long she’d been staring out the window watching the star occasionally pass by before Margaret came in followed soon after by Patricia and Felix.

  “Well, the crew—” Margaret started to say.

  “Hold that though,” Kathryn requested before opening a channel to Jaren.  “Could you join us in my office please?” she asked before looking back out the window at nothing while she waited.

  “How are you doing?” Felix asked, making Kathryn laugh.  The others couldn’t resist chuckling as well at the absurdity.

  “Oh grand, grand… I’m holding in there.  You know, bottling it all up fairly effectively for now,” she said as she made furious hand gestures to indicate the effort it took.  “You?”

  “Well I’m lucky enough to buried under and endless mountain of work to do, makes it pleasantly impossible to really process anything that’s happened, you know?”

  “Oh I do, I do…” she agreed as Jaren walked in.  “You were saying?” she asked Margaret.

  “Well it’s pretty much what we expected,” she answered.  “They’re all scared, but resolved.  They all knew there was danger when they signed up, sure not this much, but the general vibe is that if they wanted to be safe they’d have stayed home.  Beyond that though, not a one of them thought it was a good idea to just give up and make a go of some alien planet with nobody back home able to ever have any idea where they were or attempt any sort of rescue.”

  “They all see the situation as a die fast or slow choice,” Felix remarked, “but that dying fast has a slim chance of not dying at all, so every one I talked to said they’d take that.  Any chance of getting home is worth it to them, and they’re all up for the adventure of what you’re proposing.  And I know you didn’t want them to consider this, but most of them also expressed a wish to help get Maggie back if they could.  They consider her one of their own and the idea of abandoning her to god knows what made the idea of settling on a planet all the more unpalatable.”

  Kathryn’s eyes wettened, and she sniffed and looked up to hold back a further emotional response.  “Thank you.  And please thank the crew for me.”  Felix nodded in response.

  “Please open up a channel for me to talk to Ralph again.”  Felix tapped at his scroll again a few times before giving her a nod to go ahead.  “Ralph?”

  “I am here Captain.”

  “Okay then.  Can you assure me, for whatever the hell it may be worth, that you have no further contingency orders I should know about if we’re going to make some sort of arrangement here?”

  “I can assure you, all of my imperatives and conditional considerations have been exhausted Captain.  My only remaining imperative at this point is to report in what I have learned to command however I can.”

  She reached down to press a button on her desk to mute the audio and suggested to her team: “He’s never explicitly lied when asked a direct question has he?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” Felix answered.

  “Doesn’t mean we should think he can’t,” Jaren added with folded arms.  

  Kathryn pointed at him to acknowledge the wisdom in what he said before reaching down to re-open audio.

  “Okay here’s the deal.  We will connect you to our ship in place of our stolen computer core, and we will collaborate our path forward since our goals, while they may not ultimately coincide,” she pointed out with a grimace, “allowing you to complete your goals offer us a slim possibility of accomplishing our own.  You will take us to your builder’s home world, and we will hope that we are not greeted by the same faction that attacked us.”

  “I can only assure you Captain, that if we return to builder’s who have the same disposition as those who created me and programmed my mission parameters, they will be delighted to meet you and will wish to help you if they can.”

  “I guess it doesn’t mean much for me to ask what exactly you mean by that at this point, since we’re in full wish and a prayer mode at this point.”

  “The founders I know cherish the opportunity to make favourable first contact with new space fairing species and would do what they could to help you get your daughter back and return home safely in the hopes of establishing formal diplomatic relations.”

  “Well I’m just going to ignore all that as wishful thinking at this point.  Alright.  I need you to collaborate with us though.  I can’t just hand over full control of this ship and leave us as passengers while you do god knows what.  We both understand the situation, who will really be in control at the end of the day, but you need to let us continue to operate as a crewed ship, to implement our commands so long as they align with your core imperatives.  We have to work together, collaboratively.  Are we clear?”

  “I can do that,” it said.

  She looked over at Felix.  “Alright then.  Felix will head down now and start integrating you into the ship.  Once you’re fully integrated, plot a course for the portal and prepare to take us to your founder’s home world system.  Understood?”

  “Yes Captain.”  Kathryn mused at the thought of her ship talking to her for a moment as Felix stood and existed the room and she closed the channel.  Looking around at the faces of her remaining friends she opened the ship wide channel.

  “Attention all hands.  We have come to an arrangement with the alien artificial intelligence.  We are going to integrate it into the ship as a replacement computer core, and it has agreed to serve the required functions for us to pursue a new mission which aligns with both of our interests.  Together, we will return to this system’s star portal and transit to his founder’s home world system.  There we will be greeted by either the same faction which attacked us, or hopefully a different faction which is antagonistic to them and may be willing to help us get home.

  “While I am personally hopeful that they will also be able to offer us some way of retrieving my daughter unharmed, I wish to assure you that our primary mission remains to get all of you home safely as our first imperative.

  “I also want to stress my understanding of the absurdity of our situation here.  We are about to head into the capital system of a civilization with an apparent god tier level of technology, piloted by the alien intelligence of a ship which only days ago attacked us, on the faint hope that whoever we find on the other side won’t just shoot us down instead of the inconvenience of saying hello.  We’re risking a lot here, and I appreciate all of you being willing to take the risk with me.

  “All I can assure you, is that you are the best and now most experienced crew humanity has fielded in centuries.  If there is any way we can get this done and come home safely, I have no doubt whatsoever that this crew will figure out how and get it done.”

  “Good speech,” Jaren offered after she closed the channel

  Kathryn shrugged.