Mistaken Identity (part 1)

[Jaden Praxx 0]

this log takes place the morning after "Shoreleave Camping Trip"

 

Praxx awoke and saw that it was still dark outside. B’Etor was lying next to him breathing softly. He sat up and leaned over her, kissing her softly on the forehead and then climbed quietly out of the tent. The sky was starting to take on a deep purple hue near the horizon and he guessed the sun would rise in about thirty minutes. He walked over to the equipment pack and grabbed his combadge pinning it to his chest and then started walking out towards the wooded area that he’d passed on last night when they had been looking for firewood. He walked along the side of the river heading east and watching the sky at the horizon as it gradually lightened from deep purple towards red, then lightening to orange as the sun began to peek up over the ridgeline. He kept walking enjoying the fresh air and the feeling of the grass beneath his bare feet.

 

It was a welcome change, being able to just relax and let all of the thoughts and ordeals that they’d had to deal with over the past few weeks just drain away. They had allied themselves with a race who just a few years ago had been one of the most fearsome enemies the federation had ever known Then there had been the incident with the fighter wing they had lost. Twelve men who’s bodies had been…branded for lack of a better word with some bizarre alien symbol and completely drained of blood by some means the medical examiners still hadn’t fully identified. At least not with any degree of certainty. Then, during the efforts to recover those fighters and their doomed pilots, the ship had been attacked by a group of unidentified raiders who after a few minutes of exchanging potshots with Excalibur had warped off to gods only knew where leaving the crew scratching their heads and wondering what that had been all about. It wasn’t until after the pilots had been recovered that the idea started to crop up that maybe those raiders had been responsible for the condition of their lost crewmen.

 

None of that mattered now though, for these two days that Corizon had granted the crew shoreleave he could just leave it all on the ship and relax, really relax since he hadn’t since before his parents had been killed. Camping, fishing, roasting marshmallows in front of a fire, he hadn’t done any of those things for over ten years and he remembered now how much he’d enjoyed it when he had. Since his parents had passed, he had filled his time with studies, and training, and meditation, and anything else he could think of to keep his mind off of the horrible pain he felt when he thought about them and what fate had become them. He could only hope they had been killed and not assimilated by those mindless cybernetic zombies and that bastard Picard. He knew that Picard wasn’t really responsible for what had happened per se, that his free will and ability to make decisions and control his actions had been superseded by the borg collective, but somehow he still couldn’t quite bring himself to entirely forgive the captain of the Enterprise.

 

He took a seat on the grass at the edge of the river and leaned back on his hands watching as the sun climbed up from below the horizon. He immediately felt its warmth basking over him and closed his eyes savoring the sensation letting it melt away everything that he and the rest of the crew had gone through over the past few months, he almost didn’t want to go back to the ship. That thought brought a little chuckle out of him as he laid down on his back stretching his arms back and interlacing his fingers behind his head…