>>5952199>>5952215>>5952262>>5952180>2 Successes Captain Hamish Annon winces and then turns mutely to take down the portrait frame if only to escape your accusing glare. Mutely, he stares down at the smiling faces and trembles slightly. After a long moment he sighs heavily and places the portrait on the desk, a serious look on his face.
“He never could leave well enough alone.” Father shakes his head, beginning slowly, “Even in his first years as a cabin boy, your brother was crawling through the maintenance ducts looking for ‘secret passages’ and ‘hidden treasures’ like he was some grand explorer visiting a lost tomb world. Time and time again he’d run up against the restricted areas around the void core and get dragged back to my office by the scruff of his neck when security or some zealous WEAVER drone caught him. Even landed himself in the brig once, but he never learned. Insatiable curiosity, my little Blair.” A sad, wistful smile passes across his features but quickly turns sour.
“It was mostly harmless but, I should have… I should have been harder on him. When he earned his Lieutenant Commander’s pips and took up my Father’s old implant I thought I could train him better.” The Captain leans on an elbow, pinching the bridge of his nose as if to ward off a headache.
“I should have known something was wrong when his HUD synced up. ‘Green’, he said, not red like it should have been, but green like from generations past. But his progress astounded me, he was a natural. He was setting the ship’s heading with just a thought after only a few weeks of practice, as if the ship herself were whispering its secrets in his ear, showing him the way.”
“Hidden treasures, huh?” You murmur, trying to keep your Father’s rare display of vulnerability going as long as you can.
“Exactly!” Father slams his other fist on the polished surface of his desk, causing the picture frame to jump and rattle. “The boy thought he’d discovered some lost technique, that he would usher back in a golden age for the Pedy’s mission, reopen old SCRAM routes that have been closed to us for decades. Save what’s left of the worlds in those abandoned subsectors. And the fool that I was, I believed him! I let myself h-hope.” The man chokes up a little but powers on, determined to explain himself.
“Well whatever secrets he discovered, apparently there was a reason they had been lost. The first time security dragged him to me — semi-conscious and raving that he needed to ‘wake up’ — I thought he had just forgotten to take his immuno-suppressants, that the implant sickness was back… just a nightmare. I sent him back to bed and he was fine for a week after that, he didn’t even seem to remember the episode. But when it happened again and his implant nearly cooked his brain, I should have… should have been tougher. We changed his implant’s registry code. But…”
