ALL NOVEL Chapter 76: Freemann, not Morgan
In the evening, just before we decided to go to bed, Luna and I were alone in my bedroom. As I sat down on my bed to leave the chair to my girlfriend, I looked up to her with a friendly yet questioning smile. “So, you said you wanted to tell me something about information?”
Luna looked around the room, seemingly questioning herself a bit whether or not she should bring it up here.
“Don’t worry, there’s no listening devices here.” I replied. I had wondered about it myself as well but after thoroughly looking around I came to the constatation that there weren’t any nearby.
“Ah…” Luna sighed her usual sigh of relief and sat down on the chair that was stationed near the small desk. “Well, I think I could help Admiral Hanssen to get some information on the minister… I don’t think it would be hard to find info on him that would be bad for his political carreer.”
“You mean with your spy friends?”
Luna nodded.
“They would be willing to do that?”
Luna nodded once more. “I don’t think we really want people like him to be at the head of Earth’s military might. Especially not after I have heard him talk today…”
“Understandable…”
“And in that way our goals would align with those of my people. It won’t be hard to convince them to help and look for things.”
“Hmmm.” I scratched my chin. “I don’t know about giving direct information though…”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if Hanssen would get, let’s say, a letter in the mail, that had information on Minister Kerskuri, that would be rather suspicious, right? Especially after we have just gotten a motive to get rid of him. While Hanssen would be grateful, she would also get really suspicious.”
“Ah! You mean it like that.” Luna nodded energetically. “Of course we wouldn’t do it in that manner. We would probably hack his communication network and make it seem as though he accidentally ‘sent a mail he shouldn’t have’ or something like that. This is not the first time a lot of my colleagues have done this job.”
“But it is your first time, isn’t it?”
“Well… It is… But I wouldn’t be doing that kind of handiwork. I’m more of a deep infiltration kind of person.”
“Who then immediately fell in love with the officer she was serving, blew her cover, well, more like confessed her cover, and then had steamy sex multiple times with said officer as well.”
Luna pouted. “That can’t be helped, okay? Besides, I trust you have the best interest of both of our species at heart. For a big part because you love me as well.”
“That’s true, yeah.” I chuckled. “But yes, that’d probably not be the worst thing to get help with. While I trust the Fleet-Admiral that she and the Chancellor can handle Kerskuri, a bit of an accidental publicly outed fuck-up might be a welcome push in the back to ensure we don’t have an incompetent ambitious fool at the top of our Federation.”
Luna nodded. “Then I’ll send them a message as soon as I can. So they can get to work while we are gone.”
“Sounds like a good idea.” I smiled. “Now, what should we do with the rest of our lovely evening?” I slid back just a little bit more on the bed, just to give Luna a tiny hint about what I wanted to do.
From the look on her face and the slight blush that had started to develop it looks like she had received and interpreted said tip pretty well. “Oh… uh… I don’t know… What are you suggesting?” But she decided to play dumb after all.
“Hmm, well, let me word it like this, I would like you to feel the true gravity of Earth’s 1G before we go back up into space.”
“Lauren… That was worded very strangely, but darn, also quite hot.”
I gave her a wink and started unbuttoning my shirt to which Luna started doing the same.
Let’s just say that we had a pretty fun evening before we split back off to our own chambers.
The remaining days on Earth were mostly spent finally reading up on the specific new features of the ship. Sadly not too interesting, with a lot of nuanced technical parts that are simply not fun nor interesting to really spend as much time on as we had to do. But some of these minute details could be helpful so it’s always useful to at least know where you can find more specific info later on. As one of the teachers at the Academy had once said, you don’t need to remember everything in detail, as long as you know you’ve read it somewhere before, you can go look it back up again. It’s pointless to learn everything by heart. The most important things you’d learn by heart are those you come across most anyway.
Aside from that, it was just a big waiting game to wait for our time of departure. That being said, we did start to hear the rumor that the pictures taken of us during our game of Nubb had caused quite the surge of popularity of those group oriented games. Even though it hadn’t even been online for more than a couple of days, word of mouth of our participation had spread around like wildfire. So much so that the front desk had to start working with reservations as it would otherwise be too hard to keep track of the volume of applications.
Then finally the time had arrived to make ready to leave Earth once again. The last time I was ready to depart, I was going into the heavens above with a quest that would seem impossible to some, but somehow, today, I was going into the heavens above once more, with the reward of said quest sitting beside me in the shuttle.
With that all said, we also had a task to do that wasn’t going to be easy, not by a long shot. For all intents and purposes we were on the brink of war and now it was up to us to maneuver through a precarious situation in the larger galactic playing field. An also seemingly impossible task. Yet I had fought the odds before and won, now it’s just important to grab that lucky dice again and make it roll, together with new, stronger bonds to increase the odds of the situation landing in our favor.
The shuttle rumbled as we broke through the atmosphere. Within a couple of minutes we would dock at the space station that held our ship.
“Are you nervous, Commander?” Eva asked, she was sitting on the other side of Luna.
“Not really, Doctor. I’m all fine.” I took a look across the aisle and looked at a couple of the new officers who had been selected to come with us on the mission. I had read through their files this morning to see what kind of cookies we had received in our basket.
It was actually a rather diverse group of people that had made the cut. Aging from ‘just got out of the academy’ to ‘almost retired’.
One of the older people who had joined us, Doctor Freemann, would be joining Doctor Winter in the med bay. It was probably not a bad idea to have another doctor at hand considering our previous encounters, yet I was still rather surprised at the advanced age the Doctor possessed. If I were his age I would definitely already be enjoying my well-deserved pension at home. So it wasn’t unreasonable to think that he had been called from his pension to join us on this trip.
As for the others, they were pretty much your run of the mill officer profiles for the officer roles and besides that some army people to join the marines for on-board security and ground missions. I think Kerskuri deliberately picked from the ground forces so as to not give the Fleet Admiral too much power over them. It would be interesting to get to know them some more, more specifically the reason why they had already been pre-selected by Fleet Admiral Hanssen and the Chancellor.
“What about you, Doc? Are you nervous at all?” I asked back.
“Eh, practically not.” She replied casually. “I just hope nobody touched my medicinal filing system because it’s going to be a pain in the ass to get those sorted again.”
“I’m afraid they might have done so, Doctor.” It was Doctor Freemann who replied, sitting in the row behind us. He must’ve been listening up on the conversation. “Your medical bay did get expanded after all.”
“I know that, Doctor Freemann, I read our reports. But there shouldn’t have been a reason for them to nose around the locked cabinets.”
“I think I read that they destroyed those together with all the contents so they could install larger ones.”
“What? You did? On what page?” Eva looked back at her colleague.
“About halfway, page thirty I think. Section five.”
Eva quickly opened up her holo stick and read through her files. “Gods darn it, you are right.” She then almost bonked her head against the wall as she leaned back. “Ugh… That’s going to be a pain.”
“Don’t worry, Doctor. I’ll be there to help you. In that way I can also get to know your filing system myself.” The old man smiled.
“That’s pretty impressive, Doctor Freemann. Knowing that section by heart.” I looked back at the elderly Doctor as well.
“I have a bit of a photographic memory, Commander. It comes in useful. Less useful than it used to be, but still useful.”
-Well at least the selection didn’t skip on competence it would seem.-