What was she going to do? The captain who had brought an effective end to the largest war humanity had ever fought by inflicting the greatest slaughter ever committed posed this question to herself as she sat finishing her red beans and rice, grimacing at the taste. This youngster they had just rescued could be one of the more promising engineering geniuses of the past century, but she had no idea how to even approach the child.

Rhysling's Rue
Chapter 7
By Theide
 

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Sarah carefully selected food from the line, piling her tray high with vegetables from the ships hydroponic gardens, avoiding the sparse and unappetizing portions of canned and rehydrated meats and fish. She reflected to herself that it was kind of odd how her tastes had changed. Rehydrated steak just didn’t seem as real or appealing as the genuine article, no matter how well it was prepared.

Beans and rice were food, but they just didn’t fulfill the carnivorous need. Indeed, something within her rebelled at the idea, but what was offered was what there was, and she had to be happy with that or just choose not to eat. Somehow, the idea of eating, even red beans and rice, seemed more than just attractive to her now.

She had figured out a kind of dodge for this. Just take a bite of beans and rice and imagine she was munching on the most delicious, juicy steak she had ever eaten. It wasn’t working. Somewhere in between pretending to eat the thing she actually wanted and thinking about her shift at work, there was a disconnect. Her thoughts kept returning to the child they had rescued earlier that day. She had watched from her station as the crew in the boat bay frantically made a hole in the bulkhead to extract the youngster and it almost made her sick to think of that poor frail child so crushed and battered. She couldn’t keep the image out of her head, that foamy little trickle of blood running from the corner of the child’s mouth and the intense need she felt to run and comfort her.

James Bosphors was equally unhappy with the food, but that wasn’t what was bothering him. He sat about halfway across the mess hall from Ensign Sarah Masters, watching as a frown creased her forehead. It wasn’t right of him to be so attracted to her, to want her so badly, and the thought that something was making her unhappy made him want to just go over and comfort her in a way that the notions of propriety in the chain of command made impossible. He had watched as she monitored the progress of the rescue, had seen how she almost cried when the child was taken from the makeshift craft alive but seriously injured, and managed to mostly conceal his own feelings of relief and anxiety at the child’s welfare.

He still didn’t understand his own emotions. Nothing made sense to him anymore, and he didn’t think anything ever would. The numb part of him accepted the fact that his parents and his sister had died in the kinetic strike on Armstrong City and nothing could change that. The simple notion that 2 million souls had perished in that single act of vicious retribution just didn’t register in his heart though. In many ways, he was just too wounded to accept the hurt, too close to emotionally dead to face reality.

Still, there was that need within him to reach out, to comfort his crewmates, to make some sort of connection. He had nothing and no one left, just his crewmates and the burning desire to survive, and that was the thing that made him keep chewing and swallowing, the knowledge that the deaths of all those he had held dear meant nothing if he didn’t survive to go on. It was a truly bitter pill, one he had no idea how to swallow.

He did have just one thing left within himself, the almost transcendent bond between himself and the weapons he commanded. That thin thread, that one thing, kept him from going to pieces even as within himself he knew he had personally killed more people than any single human being had ever done. No matter that the captain had ordered the strikes; his was still the final human link in the chain of command, his finger the one which had stroked the trigger. There was no recovery possible from that.
 
 
What was she going to do? The captain who had brought an effective end to the largest war humanity had ever fought by inflicting the greatest slaughter ever committed posed this question to herself as she sat finishing her red beans and rice, grimacing at the taste. This youngster they had just rescued could be one of the more promising engineering geniuses of the past century, but she had no idea how to even approach the child.

*Be truthful* she thought to herself, *You weren’t a very good parent even before you killed your own child*. That left a very bitter taste in her mouth but it was the truth. She had spent her life pursuing her career even at the expense of her own family, her relationship with her husband and worst of all, at the expense of watching her child grow to adulthood. The fact that she kicked herself for that now meant nothing. The opportunity to change things had flown past on the wings of an almighty dying, and that bird could never be captured within her soul again.

So it was back to the infernal beans and rice. Damned if she was going to be the sort of captain who dined well when her crew ate slop.

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To be Continued...