While Making Other Plans:
Chapter 34
After Bill told her they were approximately 12 hours away from completing all necessary modifications and refits, Admiral Barnes ordered rest for everyone who would be taking part in the assault. It required some rotation and clever human resource management, but they maximized the amount of rest which could be had while still planning for departure as soon as they were ready. Following her own orders, Kathryn returned to Orbital One’s commander’s quarters and collapsed onto the couch in exhaustion, having gotten no more rest than anyone else in the last seventy-two hours of preparation. The less time they gave the enemy to prepare, adapt, and anticipate the better their odds would be, but pushing past the human limits of need for sleep had rapidly diminishing returns and would be counterproductive if she pushed any harder. She kept having to push away thoughts that the disaster on the station was her fault, that it was the result of carelessness from her pushing everyone too hard.
“Mom?”
Focusing so explicitly instead on everything she could do to keep her safe, Kathryn hadn’t really thought much about her daughter much in the last few days. When she looked back and saw the worried expression on Maggie’s face from her bedroom doorway, Kathryn motioned her over. She noticed with bittersweet understanding that she was clinging to Pookie, her stuffed Havenite tree squiddy. It had been her comfort object when she was younger, and the girl was clinging to it in a way she hadn’t for years. It reminded Kathryn that for how brave a front she might put up, for how grown up she struggled to present herself as, she was still a child. Today she couldn’t be anything other than a scared little girl who hadn’t even begun to process the horrible trauma she’d been so recently subjected to.
“How you holding up, Kiddo?” she asked as the girl sat down and curled up into her in a fetal position. It was another outward expression of vulnerability which she hadn’t seen from her in years. Despite all the horrible reasons for it, it was nice to have her little girl back for a moment or two. It was confusing to hope for her own sake that it would be one of the last times, and at the same time hope it would be for her daughter’s sake.
She was happy to see her little girl take her first steps towards independent womanhood. She’d done everything she could think of to encourage it, but it was nice that in a moment like this, stressed by recent trauma, they could both regress to a more comforting dynamic. It was reassuring that this was still there underneath, that she’d done a good job of developing a relationship with her and preparing her for independence. Maggie was secure enough to grow out into the world and into the person she would become, while still knowing that she had this at her back, that there was a sense of home she could return to for safety when she felt vulnerable after life knocked her back.
As she stroked her hair, Kathryn noticed that Maggie wasn’t crying but instead just seemed numb which concerned her. Kathryn reflected on her own childhood, on how she never had this for herself. She never had this kind of close relationship with her parents and it was why she made it a priority to develop with her own daughter. Her parents took care of her. They did their duty. She never went hungry. She was appropriately praised for her successes and appropriately admonished for her failures and missteps. But while never alone, she couldn’t remember a time she hadn’t felt lonely.
As a precocious child she’d always had trouble relating to other kids, always off in her own world thinking about other bigger things. She was as alien to her parents and the other kids around her as she was to them. She’d developed a couple close friendships over her life like Felix. Earlier on she’d had some bad relationships where she replicated the same alienation she felt around her parents, but it wasn’t until she met Jaren that she felt any real spark of kindred spirit, of being seen and understood by someone. He had a passion for understanding and exploration which she identified with. He pushed at frontiers as much as his repressive culture would permit. He came from wealth and privilege which she couldn’t identify with, but it never seemed to mean that much to him, and she came to understand that the alienation he felt, and she identified with was based on that instead. The feeling had different roots in them, but the resultant feeling resonated between them. She was grateful that it also left Jaren with a similar imperative to nurture a deeper relationship with Maggie to spare her that loneliness.
As her thoughts became lost to thinking about how and why people try to correct their own damage in their children, and how often it only results in them inflicting an inversion of that damage, she noticed Patricia in the doorway to Maggie’s room and was surprised that she would behave this vulnerably in front of anyone else. It made her realize how much time Patricia had spent with her while she’d been galivanting around the galaxy, and how comfortable with her Maggie must have become around her as a result.
Maybe they’d pushed her too far in that direction, she considered with a momentary flash of concern. Maybe she really had overcorrected and pushed her to the inverse of her own damage. Maybe they’d made her too emotional, too needy, too ready to make herself vulnerable to others, leaving her too easily hurt. She noted it as something to consider if she managed to survive the next few days.
Patricia gestured towards an adjacent chair, inquiring if it was alright for her to join them, and Kathryn held out her hand. Patricia flowed towards them and grasped Kathryn’s hand for a moment as she passed. Kathryn continued to slowly stroke Maggie’s hair and she realized only now after getting lost in her own thoughts that Maggie had never answered her question. She moved her hand from her hair to her back.
“You okay Maggs? I mean,” she scoffed as looked over to watch Patricia hold the bottom of her flower print dress to her legs as she sat down to avoid it bunching up, then carefully smooth it out after sitting. “I mean obviously nothing is okay right now, but… you managing? Anything I can do for you?”
“I just can’t stop thinking about what comes next,” she admitted. “I’m worried.” The girl sat up to speak more directly to her, still seeming numbed in a way that concerned her mother. “I’m assuming you and Dad are both going to participate in whatever operation you’re planning. I’ve seen what they can do, what they’re capable of. I’m scared for both of you. For everyone. And what will happen to the station now? They’re saying it might not be salvageable, that we might have to evacuate if they can’t get the damage under control.”
Kathryn nodded. It had been less than two hours since the explosion rocked the station, and she thought about how much more dramatic it must have been for Maggie having been on the station itself and not knowing what had happened.
“I thought…” the girl tried to say as she started tearing up. “I thought they’d found us, that we were under attack! That, that…” she stammered before finally being able to exlaim: “that it was all over!”
Kathryn pulled the girl to her chest and held her while she broke into sobs. She seemed at first to try to pull herself together, but she failed and instead surrendered to her anguish. Her shuddering sobs gave way to wails of deep anguish. Kathryn looked to Patricia with alarm, who’s only response was an expression of deep sympathy. It took several minutes for Maggie to be able to reconstitute herself enough to put words together again while Kathryn firmly hugged her and her daughter frantically clung to her as a variety of fluids poured from her face onto her coverall uniform.
Eventually the girl quieted down and regained adequate composure to pull back and started apologizing for the mess she’d made on her mother’s uniform as she sniffed and took several of the tissues Patricia offered her to mop up her face.
“It’s okay,” Kathryn dismissed, waving away her apologies. “I’ve got plenty of other uniforms,” she tried to joke, managing to get a small chuckle out of Maggie which seemed to turn something around in her.
As Maggie dabbed herself with a series of tissues, Kathryn slowly rubbed her back and tried to reassure her. “I’m scared too Maggie, it’s a scary world out there right now. The range of possible outcomes here is… well, practically beyond human understanding.” She paused for a moment, considering how frank she wanted to be with her vulnerable daughter at this moment. “I wish I could tell you not to worry about a thing, that it’s all going to be okay, that everyone you care about will definitely be back safe in a few days and that everything’s going to be fine. But you’re too smart for that, right? We raised you to face the truth, even when it was ugly, right?”
Maggie nodded, holding onto a few more tissues as she looked down at the carpet. “Fear no truth.” she softly whispered, repeating a mantra drilled into her by her parents.
“That’s right,” Kathryn affirmed. “Not knowing is always the hardest part. When tragedy is certain you can just get on with grieving. With certain victory you can get busy celebrating and planning for what comes next. But not knowing which just leaves you fearing the worst on all fronts.”
Maggie looked up at her again and nodded, trying to show strength for her mother. “We could win Maggie,” she tried to reassure her, “we really could. We have the ships, the weapons, and a plan that could really work.” Kathryn portrayed their chances more charitably than she genuinely felt them to be, but it felt like a fair indulgence given the moment.
“And while it’s less likely yes, we certainly could still lose. Everything we have could at the end of the day just not be enough. Tomorrow may very well be… then end of all things.” Kathryn had to steel herself from falling into the pit of despair her momentarily distant eyes peered into as she considered the prospect. “Or it could be anything else, I don’t know. We could win, but you lose. Our side could win the war, but my ship could be lost in the process. The survival of the human race might be small comfort if you lose your parents.”
Maggie’s eyes widened in newfound alarm and Kathryn put her hand on the girl’s shoulder as she ignored the disapproving expression on Patricia’s face. “And while I promise I’ll do absolutely everything I possibly can to make sure that everyone you know and care about comes home safely to you, if things do go down that way, you need to remember that we did what we had to do to keep you safe, that it was a necessary act of love, not just for you, but for all the kids like you, for everyone out there who has loved ones they’re afraid to lose, that preserving your life and ensuring your future was our greatest honour and our final gift to you.”
Maggie started to cry again, but this time Kathryn took her by the shoulders and looked directly into her eyes. “But I promise you Maggie, I fucking promise, if there is any way, any fucking way at all that we can safely come back to you, we will. We’ll find a way to get it done. I’m not ready to go any more than you’re ready to lose me. Understand?”
She seemed to understand and though she fell back into her mother for another big hug, she crying stopped. “I love you, Mom.” The words were muffled against her Kathryn’s coveralls, but were clear enough. “I love you too Maggie, more than you can imagine. You’re everything to me…”
☼ ☼ ☼
Kathryn awoke in the dark. The bed was familiar enough to recognize as her own, but less so the body she was intertwined with less so. The revelation startled her upright. As she scrolled back her most recent memories before falling asleep, she found that Patricia had already been awoken by her bed mate’s sudden activity.
As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she watched as Patricia also sat herself up in the bed against the backboard. Kathryn saw that Patricia was still fully clothed in her white dress with pink flowers, and after noticing some blemishes on it looked down to realize she was still fully wearing the one-piece coveralls Maggie had made a mess of.
“We didn’t…” Kathryn asked as she continued to try to put together recent events.
Patricia folded her arms and lowered her head slightly to look up at her in mock disbelief. “You really think I’d let that happen?”
The rest of last night came back to her. It had been late when they put Maggie to bed. After they were sure she was asleep Kathryn opened a bottle of Roman red wine. Having ceremonial importance to them, the Catholics had carefully preserved several varietals on their long journey from Earth. Before the machines all broke down, Haven had recreated other varieties from their genome, but the Roman vines were originals from Earth with lineage traceable back to original French and Italian vineyards were especially prized, despite Kathryn finding the taste indistinguishability from the recreations. The bottle had been a gift from the Roman ambassador, one she’d been saving it for a special occasion. Her likely impending death felt occasion enough.
“Right. Sorry…” Kathryn groggily apologized, and Patricia put a comforting hand on her thigh.
Kathryn couldn’t remember everything they’d said the night before, but pieces dripped back into her memory one after another. They’d talked a lot about Kathryn’s relationship with Jaren, how he’d changed recently, and about what kinds of changes relationships can survive and what kinds they can’t. She learned about some of Patricia’s past relationships, both secret and public, before and after meeting her. They seemed to have gained a lot of interpersonal ground, and Kathryn felt as though she knew her much better as a result. Blessedly none of the memories which came back included crossing any lines with her and she was grateful. As much as she yearned to cross lines again with Patricia, for the time being those yearnings needed to remain appropriately bottled and kept on the shelf for later. She took a brief moment to congratulate herself for sticking to the script despite the wine and the intimacy of the situation.
“We talked about Maggie,” Kathryn stated as she realized it aloud and sought confirmation.
“Yeah…” Patricia softly offered with a nod.
“If anything happens…”
“Of course.” Patricia took her hand and quickly assured her with her warm smile.
“Thank you.”
Patricia gave a shrug which seemed to indicate that thanks was not necessary— it was a given.
Kathryn came over to sit beside her on the bed and hugged her as intimately as the line would allow. “But don’t let it come to that,” Patricia implored with a whisper in her ear. “Come back to us.”
Kathryn had always admired Patricia’s ability to mean so much when saying so little. She got along with Felix so well in part because they could both be so maniacally expressive to the point of exhausting both themselves and their audience, feeling like no matter how many words they used they were never quite able to adequately express what they actually meant to say. She imagined it took someone more empathic than herself like Patricia to know what actually needed to be heard instead of said.
After pulling away from the hug, Kathryn indulged herself and inched over the line, putting a hand on Patricia’s cheek to guide her gaze up to herself. “If there’s any way at all…” she assured her, trying to say more with less.
The silence hung for a few moments.
“I’m scared.” Kathryn admitted.
“I would hope so,” Patricia answered.
“Not just for me, not just for… us,” she clarified, gesturing in the direction of Maggie’s room. “I’m scared for humanity. It’s terrifying that I can’t think of anyone better suited to the job, and that I’m not up for this. Twelve thousand years of human history, an infinity of our future, all resting on how I perform over the next forty-eight hours. So much has never hinged on so few.”
“I’ve never known you to be the type to doubt yourself,” Patricia said. “It’s one of the things I love about you.”
Kathryn looked up at her in time to see her start to blush and turn away, never having used the word before. She knew she meant it more in the same familial way she would Maggie or Margaret, but the situation still made it awkward and Kathrn let herself smirk.
“In the past it’s only ever been competition against my peers, the only thing that really hung in the balance was my career, my personal prestige, how many times my name will show up in the history books, you know? Everything I’ve ever done or aspired to do, would just have been done by someone else if I didn’t do it. I’ve never been in the position where something definitively getting done or not is really just up to me, let alone the end of everything I care about.”
“Maybe it’s dumb, but… I’ve always really cared about the big story, you know? Big history, how the universe came out of something, and then billions of years of stellar evolution, generations of starts enriching elements and their remnants coalescing into planets, those planets taking billions of years to develop just the miracle of cellular life, and then multi-cellular life, then complex animal systems then intelligence. I found it magical to be blessed with being able to know all of that as a human being, to orient myself in space and time and be a way for the universe to know itself. It made me a weirdo but it meant everything to me.
“And I thought just as much about the future, you know? About how the story might play out after I was gone, what wondrous future humanity might have, how ingenious we’d been to be able to migrate out to the stars, how we’d inevitably continue on and colonize the galaxy and beyond. The Koboli showing up with their rift technology only made me more exited for the future, for what could be, and now having met the Bobbins, I know such things are possible for us.
“But it all might end. Here. Now. Billions of years of history and cosmic evolution leading to everything we are and could be, now on the brink of being snuffed out. No one left to remember everything we’ve done and accomplished, to appreciate our art, oh god just like the squiddies!” she scoffed before she started crying again. “It can’t just end like this Pat, it can’t just all mean nothing! The weight of it all, the idea that our future could really just die is just too much! The sense of loss is just too much. I know humans can be monstrous, but we don’t deserve extinction, to be forgotten, to never have mattered anything to anyone…”
Patricia held her and let her cry out her grief and anxiety. “That’s what really bothers you isn’t it?” she finally offered. “You’ve always been lonely, always felt like you didn’t really matter. It must pain you to have to consider that feeling extended to everything you know and cherish.” Kathryn nodded against her chest. She’d never thought about it that way before but now said it was so obvious and her despair found a new depth.
“I’ve never really had the luxury of concerning myself with such things,” Patricia said. “My life has always been about survival, about trying to protect the people I care about and getting through the day, the next season. Growing up in a small community I also never had to suffer that kind of loneliness. It must be terrible.”
Kathryn pulled away and nodded, wiping her tears away on the sleeve of her now thoroughly disastrous coveralls.
“What will be, will be.” Patricia offered. “You will fight. We will give everything we have to win our survival. But you told Maggie yourself, it may not be enough. You need to accept that as much as she does. Your best efforts very well may not be enough. All you can do is try your best and accept that the rest is simply out of your hands. It may be cold comfort, but it’s the truth. The time has come for raw, grim resolve.
Kathryn put her legs over the bed and slowly rose to her feet, noting all the little aches and strains which had crept up on her with age, thinking at first about how much worse it would all get over the coming years, then smirking at the prospect that advanced age was at least one thing she’d be happy to not have to face if everything ended. She made her way out of the door and over into Maggie’s room. As quietly as she could, she pulled her desk chair over beside her bed and sat with her for a while, looking at her as she slept. She did what she could to soak up her presence, was trying to absorb her presence somehow, to recharge an unseen battery of resolve and remember what it was she really needed to focus on fighting for, the real reason she personally needed to find her way home again. The soft light from the common area fell on the girl’s face through the bedroom door which Kathryn had left ajar, and she leaned over to brush some strands of hair out of her face which seemed stuck to the side of her mouth. Looking down at her, she did everything she could to burn the image into her mind as deeply as she could.
A soft tone from the common area drew her attention, and with a quiet but heavy sigh she rose to her feet again and left the room, closing the door behind her. She pressed the button on the wall to open the outer door to the suite as Patricia exited the master bedroom to respond to the door tone. The door slid open to reveal Jaren, Felix, Bob, Margaret, Ralph, Admiral Brinkerhoff, and President Sato. Despite the significance of them all being there to call on her, a note of sadness struck Kathryn at her first thought being to realize that Jaren must not have felt comfortable entering the suite unannounced anymore. It further clarified for her that something was truly broken.
“We’re ready then?” she asked.
Felix shrugged. “As much as we can be.”
☼ ☼ ☼
Once their ships’ weapons and other upgrades were ready, any moment they delayed launching their assault was only another moment for their enemy to prepare fortifications and launch another surprise assault of their own. As such final battle plans were still being discussed amongst the ships en route to the Sol rift crystal.
The broad idea of their approach was simple, penetrate Collective space and fight them to the death, hopefully their death and not their own. They spent a lot of brain cycles trying to come up with some way to trick them, a way to win the battle before the first shot had been fired, but they’d come up empty. They kept coming up against their only option being a brutal, bloody assault against an enemy who knew they were coming and was prepared for them. It was understood by all that even if they were successful, it was likely to come with a devastating casualty rate.
Kathryn was in her office off of the bridge of New Horizon II, newly repaired and augmented with Bobbin technology, listening to the ongoing strategy meeting amongst the Captains. She was multitasking on her scroll, trying to make up for lost training time. There were whole new battle tactics and maneuvering options with all of the new upgrades to the human ships; they were like crew from old sailing ships of the line crews dumped through a vortex onto the bridge of nuclear submarine. She lamented having to deal with all of the politics and strategic considerations during the refit time instead of being in the crash course battle training in advanced tactics which the Bobbins had given to the rest of the senior officer core.
It wasn’t just concern that she’d miss something important, it was both her fundamental hunger to learn new things, as well as her sometimes unhealthy need to be in control of everything. She was serving as fleet admiral in coordination with Bob, while operational command of her flagship was delegated to Admiral Brinkerhoff, whom she could see sitting in the captain’s chair of New Horizons II just outside her office door in the conference call on her wall screen.
She leaned back and rubbed her eyes. There was just too much to think of at once, too many completely novel combat realities. And it wasn’t just beam weapons and rapid response shadow matter point defence shielding, it was the reality that not a single living human ship commander other than herself had a single shred of real world combat experience.
They’d done endless simulations, endlessly studied battles of the past and imagined alien scenarios and weapons systems and done their post graduate work at the academy on how they might try to counter them. But not one other commander of any human ships out there actually knew what it felt like when the shit really hit the fan, what it feels like to try to keep your cool and think about the lives of your crew when your reptilian brain is firing every alarm to fuck everything and run to safety any way you can. No matter how well they trained, how hard they drilled, it was inevitable that some were going to panic. At least one and probably more were inevitably going to crack and need to be replaced by their XOs.
‘It's was going to be a fucking disaster…’ she thought before she caught herself and tried to remember that it was an unacceptable thought. She’d always liked to say with a smirk ‘failure is always an option’ and insist that one always had to be ready to consider a plan B, even a grim one given that victory could never be assumed, even when it appeared certain. But today, failure was not an option. Today, failure meant human extinction, and she struggled to keep the weight of 4 billion years of evolution and millions of people off of her shoulders where the realities of her situation kept trying to lay it.
“Alright,, let’s go over it all one last time,” Kathryn unmuted to say at what seemed like a natural wind down in the conversation.
“We expect the bulk of their fortifications to be at the rift crystal since it’s the only known entry point into their system. Last reports from friendly Bobbin intelligence suggests they outnumber us between two and three to one,” she said, adding in her head: ‘and we can only hope that our antimatter weapons will make a difference in what would otherwise be a suicide mission.’
“We can assume they’ll have up to a hundred and fifty ships to our fifty-eight, and every one stationed at the crystal will have their weapons trained on our only entry point. Our advantage is only in offensive weapons and if we just single file through the rift, we’d lose at least half our ship just making the transit. Instead the Bobbins have rigged up several decoy ships which are the size and shape of their icosahedron, but only an extremely thin shell with the capacity for limited maneuverability and sending false signals.
“In reality they’ll be filled with a gas that when released mimics the properties of the activated rift crystal cloud. The Bobbins assure us that in the aggregate this will create a cloud approximately five thousand cubic kilometers across which will blind their sensors. We’ll then rush through the rift bumper to bumper as quickly as we can, and on the other side scatter in all directions according to predetermined dispersal patterns. Their beam weapons’ effectiveness drops off exponentially after about 10 kilometers, so we should be able to exit the cloud around them relative to the crystal.
“But, we have to anticipate that they’ll figure out pretty quickly what we’re up to and immediately climb up out of range of the cloud to be able to fire on us when we emerge from it. There’s not much we can do about this, but this scenario makes it a more fair fight and less of a shooting gallery. After this point we’ll be less fighting our way uphill in the star’s gravity well, and instead engaging in a more traditional three-dimensional battle space.
“We’re hoping that the first ship sent through will be able to send back telemetry of the positions of the alien ships before being destroyed. They’ll certainly redeploy quickly, but it we get that data it will give us some indication of their deployment and we can model their most likely adjustments. The Bobbin computers have calculated a variety of different deployments of different numbers of ships, and the best attack patterns based on each. If we do get the data, our nav computers will automatically take us in predetermined vectors once we exit the rift, after which you’re on your own.
“We all have a full complement of Bobbin designed anti-matter torpedoes. While the enemy would’ve had no problem shooting down our own slow missiles like any other ship, theirs are heavily shielded, stealthy, and highly maneuverable. We have the advantage that the enemy is not experienced in torpedo warfare like this and haven’t had the opportunity to study the Bobbin torpedoes. We have a good chance of them being as effective as we hope they’ll be. That being said though, we have a limited supply and once we’re out it’s a bare-knuckle brawl on their home turf. If we can take out enough of their ships before it comes to that, we may have a chance.
“We considered dividing the fleet and sending a task force to the Link’s central plexus while the main battle was underway. I know some of you, both human and bobbin still think this the best strategy but time to stow it, the decision’s been made. We fight their main rift battle fleet to the death until we’ve destroyed or disabled every aggressing ship. We then regroup our remaining forces and launch a secondary expedition for the second planet.
“We then take out whatever orbital platforms and ships are continuing to defend the facility from orbit and bombard the target from space. We are all carrying backup traditional nuclear missiles which would be effectively useless against their battle ships, but the bobbins tell us they may be effective enough against their surface facility’s fortifications if we run out of anti-matter warheads along the way. If it came down to it, while it would take some time to penetrate the thick shadow matter armor shielding using bobbin beam weapons, we’re told it is possible with enough sustained concentrated fire from enough ships on a single stationary target, but let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
“Are there any questions?”
She expected a mad cacophony of voices, complaints, clarifications, and alternative suggestions, but was instead me only with a screen full of stern stares from grimly resolute faces.
“Only who’s buying the beers when the job’s done,” Brinkerhoff said, seeming to feel the need for something to be said to break up the moment.
“HOO-RAH!!” all of the human officers reflexively called out in response, variously delayed by the light seconds of difference between the ships.
“Boys, she assured them all with a wide sincere grin, “when the job is done you’ll be begging for mercy from the amount of celebrating we’ll be doing. We’ll have a few planets worth of people buying us as many drinks as we could ever want for as many years as we have, I promise.” She was pleased to see their spirits were up despite the odds against them and the disparity between what was being asked of them and the practical experience they had to prepare them for it. It gave her a glimmer of hope which emphasized for her how little hope the number crunching pragmatist little bitch dwelling beneath her consciousness really gave them.
“Alright you all have your assignments. We’ll arrive at the crystal in just under two hours. Do your final checks, send whatever messages you need to and get a good meal in you. We’re dancing with the angels now.”
☼ ☼ ☼
“I know your parents never understood you Kathryn, your drive, your ambition,” Emily Sato said in her last recorded message to her before going through the rift. “But I hope you can recognize that it was their failing and not yours.”
Something about the sentiment caught in her throat in an unexpected way. Her parents had been gone a long time. Although she missed the comfort of knowing she had a home to go back to, home had never felt as much like home as the home she had later built for herself with Jaren and Maggie. More than feeling any acute pain of missing them, she more felt bad for how much she didn’t particularly miss them. She loved them in a dutiful way, she had no negative feelings about them, and she lamented that they died relatively early and the years they missed out on for their sake, but the further she ventured into adulthood, the less of a role they had in her life. They were never at odds, but they never had much to relate to each other over and it left them drifting apart.
“It might not have been my place to presume so much, but I saw such potential in you. I did what I could to take you under my wing, to guide you, to mentor you in ways they were never able to. Although I alluded to your having a future in politics, there is no doubt in my mind that you were made for this moment. Every previous accomplishment, every first you were, it was all preparing you for this moment where the fate of the galaxy, of human survival itself fell so weightily on your shoulders.”
Kathryn slumped a bit at the reminder of all of that weight. “Thanks for that…” she muttered to the recording.
“I don’t believe in destiny or fate any more than you do, but I have learned to believe in people. I wanted to remind you that I believe in you Kathryn Barnes. You are charmed in ways I don’t understand, maybe in ways that aren’t meant to be understood but there is definitely something special about you. I’ve felt it from that first day you walked into my office after you changed our world. Maybe fate is just the calculus of history, the burning away of all other possibilities until the only remaining singular possibility manifests itself.”
The old woman shifted in her chair and leaned into the camera seemingly for dramatic effect.
“I don’t say all of this just to emphasize to you the importance of your task or the necessity of success in this mission. What could I say about all that which the wrenching knot in your stomach hasn’t been telling you all week? I’m messaging simply to remind you that I believe in you, that there’s nobody else who is supposed to be there instead of you. I know that you will not stop while you still draw breath, that there is nothing you won’t gamble or sacrifice that must be to get the job done. I’ve met and know everyone else who could be there instead of you, and it could be nobody else I assure you, not even close. You’re the best we’ve got, and you being there fills me with hope, faith even which I wouldn’t feel if it was anyone else. Faith in you. The weight of the world isn’t on you my dear, the weight is on the world, on everyone under your command, on the rest of our civilization not letting you down.”
Sato looked down and away from the screen in thought for a few moments, seeming for something else to say. Instead she shrugged and instead simply offered: “Good hunting, Admiral.” before reaching out to stop the recording.
Kathryn allowed herself to feel the anxiety she’d been pushing away. It felt like the nerves before a first date but so much worse, or the dreadful inescapability of the process of childbirth after finding out she was pregnant. The night before her pilot’s qualifying trials, her first time going through a rift to a new system, not knowing what had happened to Maggie after she’d been abducted… Only now it was all of those rolled together and magnified to an impossible extreme.
“Admiral Barnes to the bridge please,” Brinkerhoff called over the comm system. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting alone in the dark allowing her anxieties to be felt and run through her until they’d run their course and subsided. “We are ready to open the portal.”
Kathryn closed her eyes and indulged in one more heavy sigh. “Just breathe…” she reminded herself before pulling herself to her feet and reassuming the stern, confident demeanour the moment demanded of her.