𝕊𝕖𝕥𝕥𝕝𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕠𝕟 𝕄𝕒𝕣𝕤 𝕨𝕒𝕤 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕡𝕝𝕒𝕟, 𝕓𝕦𝕥 𝕘𝕖𝕥𝕥𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕝𝕠𝕤𝕥 𝕚𝕟 𝕒𝕟𝕠𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕣 𝕘𝕒𝕝𝕒𝕩𝕪 𝕨𝕒𝕤 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕠𝕦𝕥𝕔𝕠𝕞𝕖.
Captain Desree Pepin's one job was to get the crew of the Halcyon to Mars and settle down, but she...
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March 24th, 2826
SCAV-13 colony-class ship, "The Halcyon, VII" Somewhere along the Asteroid Belt Breach, Outerspace
Desree leaned back in her chair, squeezing her eyes shut. She could still see the outline of the Asteroid Belt Breach map in the dark of her eyelids. The same bright white screen was indented in her mind forever, taking away any respite she had wished to gain from taking a break.
Swiveling her chair away from the data center in the middle of the flightdeck, Desree gazed out at the Halcyon crew who didn't head down to sleep. Silas Burton sat at the booth in the corner, his glasses settled snugly on his curved nose, his eyes devouring the paperback book in his hands. Desree scoffed. She didn't get Silas or her friend, Rowan's, obsession with physical paper copies of anything. With a tablet, everything was at one's fingertips and saved a lot of space. Where they were going, they didn't get a lot of packing space in the first place, so why waste space with clunky books and folders of papers?
"You bored with the mapping protocols?" a voice asked from the command center near the ship's windshield. Desree's gaze flickered over to Beck who pulled his head out from underneath the dashboard mechanical panel. His dark, unkempt mullet was thankfully hidden beneath his favorite grey beanie. She didn't want his nasty hair getting inside of her ship's dashboard.
"You know it," Desree said, standing up to stretch her back with a loud yawn.
Beck chuckled, wiping his sweaty mouth on his sleeve. "I don't know why you do that to yourself," he muttered, messing with the wiring inside the panel. Desree clenched her jaw, hoping that he didn't yank anything wrong out—not that she didn't trust him with her ship—well, actually, she didn't trust anyone with her ship. Especially not mid-flight toward Mars in deep space. But Beck was the engineer. "You already know the charts like the back of your hand. It's not like you completely wasted five years of training."
"I have nothing better to do," Desree said, sliding into the pilot's seat at the center of the dashboard, overlooking the vast darkness of space outside the window. She could vaguely spot the outlines of the next Scavenger ship ahead of them. The Halcyon was seventh out of ten in the line-up, also denoting their "ranking" in the expedition. The first Scavenger ship, The Spade, led the line approximately forty kilometers ahead, its captain Luka Bjornsson, basically in charge of the whole Expedition. Desree had heard some talk of the "lower-level" ships being disgruntled at the need for a hierarchy, but she could care less. As long as she was flying to Mars and wasn't the last to get there, then she'd be fine.
"Where are we at in the Breach?" Beck asked, standing to his feet with a groan. He wiped his greasy hands on his cargo pants, placing his fancy tool in the back pocket.
"About halfway through," Desree said, glancing over at the screen still left on at the data center. "We'll reach the end of the Asteroid Belt by the end of the month, and I'd say Mars in a month."
