Intrepid

Prologue

"Yet though a man gets many wounds in breast,
He dieth not, unless the appointed time,
The limit of his life's span, coincide;
Nor does the man who by the hearth at home
Sits still, escape the doom that Fate decrees."

― AESCHYLUS, Fragment

---

Wob. Wob. Wob.

The dull drone of the mighty starship's engines, deep enough that one felt rather than heard it, had developed the most subtly irritating warble beneath his boots as he meandered the Juggernaut's curved, dimly-lit hallways ad nauseum throughout the evening. It was hard to put out of his mind, its pervasive echoes through each deck and up the walls stalking him wherever he went, sticking to his soles like a shadow.

The others hadn't noticed, despite the fact that he'd mentioned it on several occasions where it was at its most annoying. It wasn't an issue, supposedly. Did no damage. Calm down.

Easy enough for them to say – they weren't the ones that knew these Juggernauts inside and out, down to the last relay; they weren't the ones that became one with the machine, felt every subtle shift in its operation. After all, to the rest of the crew, it was but a vessel, a means to an end, a mode of transport.

He knew what caused it, too. There was little doubt it was simply a lack of complete, unquestionable control by the present helmsman. Reasonable, he supposed; Lieutenant Hendur was the ship's Operations Officer, after all. Not the Pilot. No amount of persistent nagging would bring him to focus on the most minute details of spaceflight while his own specialty was dragging him away. Nature of the beast, he supposed, in that the ship would fly the helmsman and not the other way around. Until then, the blasted oscillations would permeate every nook and cranny of the vessel at a pitch it seemed he and he alone would bear until driven mad.

Lieutenant Asakku, ever the ham-fisted Tactical Officer, was no better, mind. Not only was there a return to the mind-bending warble at faster-than-light velocity whenever he was in the seat, but crossing the barrier into hyperspace with him at the helm was about as subtle as marching headlong into the enormous, brick shit-house of a soldier himself. The curves of the Juggernaut howled in protest whenever he threw it about its axes, and on more than one occasion the vibration throughout the vessel had grown so terrible that it had booted several bottles of rather expensive ĝeštin off their respective shelves in the crew Mess Hall and detonated them in a sticky, purple mess across the floor – though that had been one of the few times he'd seen the brute genuinely terrified of the Captain's ire. No amount of patient, simple training would convince him that Aldamarak's ears were for anything but decoration, or that his hands were anything other than blunt force instruments.

The Mess Hall, he knew, was one of the few places that was somewhat shielded from the constant, warbling drone.

It wasn't the sound itself that pissed him off, he reasoned as he rounded the corner leading to the broad archway separating the Mess Hall from the rest of the corridor. It was having to stand back and witness someone else doing a shoddy, reckless job of piloting his ship while he was off-duty.

His stomach growled in agreement.

Idly poking at the nearest food dispenser with a long, pale index finger, he released an irritated sigh and waited impatiently for the machine to go about its business. It was hardly his ship though, was it? It was easy enough to ignore the niggling discontent shadowing his every move when the ship was fully staffed; nothing like fifty men and women rushing about the halls to make the place feel lived-in, and focusing on his own subordinates was often ample distraction from the ship's senior staff.