Old Friends

[Cptn Swain 0]

As the Excalibur crew attempted to solve the riddle of the Augustine, her Captain laid anxiously in his stateroom a few decks below the bridge, tossing and turning on his couch.

 

He hadn’t spoken to Charlie Ostander, the captain of the Augustine in nearly half-a-decade, not since the Augustine and the Cassini had completed a joint first contact mission with the Julani. As he lay, unable to sleep, Asher considered that mission and the terms he’d left off on with Charlie.

 

They’d known each other for years, they’d been classmates at the academy, served together for a short time on the George Washington, and afterwards taken their vacations together (with Charlie’s wife) almost every year until the Dominion War. The war had changed both men though. Swain had spent the better part of the war off the frontlines, running recon and outrider missions for the fleet aboard the Idrisi; Charlie, meanwhile, had served as Executive Officer aboard first the Auberoche , and then as Commander of the Gallant . It had been difficult on both of them, and on their friendship. Asher had been troubled by the pre-emptive strike on the Cardassians, while Charlie thought they acted to slowly; the tensions had continued throughout the war with each of the two men staking out their positions on either side of the other. It was strange, Asher now thought, that they’d known each other all those years and not realized just how different they were, and how wide the gap between them had truly been.

 

At war’s end, they had attempted to resume life as normal; but after the Dominion War nothing was ever the same for anyone or anything, and an old friendship seemed to have been one of the causalities of the war. They’d barely spoken in a year when the order had come down from Command putting them back together again for the first contact mission with the Julani. Both men were breaking in new ships and new crews, Asher the Cassini and Charlie the Augustine, and it was the first big assignment for either Captain or their ship. At first, they’d both welcomed the chance to work together again. Asher had hoped it would rekindle their old friendship, but as the mission went on, and a routine first-contact mission soured and complicated, the divide that had formed during the Dominon War deepened; and by mission’s end, neither man spoke to the other.

 

That was where they’d left off. When he’d heard it was the Augustine they’d be working with, he was at first hopeful of another chance to perhaps patch up the friendship, maybe he thought, since they wouldn’t actually be working together, it would be fine; but then, the closer they got to leaving Camelot, the more anxious he’d become at the idea, and the more jealous of Charlie, too. Those worries, though, had long been replaced by the unsettling feeling that he’d never see Charlie again. He hoped his intuition was wrong. He hoped that at any moment, Rue would call him and let him know they’d found the crew – an if not the crew, some sort clue as to where they went and that they might still be alive. He knew that was a slim hope, though, and as he lay restlessly in his stateroom he knew the next call that came would likely be bad news.

 

Asher closed his eyes and tried to force out the jumble of thoughts flowing through his head. He took a deep breath. “Trust them,” he said out loud, “if anyone could find them, it would be this crew.”