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Cptn Swain

Creeping Indecision

Asher Swain sat quietly in the Captain’s Mess drinking tea and playing idly with his breakfast of eggs done slightly over easy and potatoes. Replicated eggs. Replicated potatoes. Replicated tea. He sighed put a bite in his mouth. There were days he missed Abscean. Everything was simpler there. He could spend hours, days really, at the observatory just looking up at the stars, just looking with nothing to distract or detract him. There were no intergalactic crisis for him get caught up in, no burdens of command weighing him down. No dead friends.

 

He sat his tea down on the table and looked around the empty room for a moment. In the the background he could hear the galley crew prepping for the morning meal for the rest of the crew. It had been nearly a week since they’d left orbit of Domaria, and yet everyone still seemed on edge. There had been, he’d decided, little closure for anyone. At first the crew had seemed relieved just to be leaving the planet behind and heading home, but as the trip home wore on their jubilation had tempered. For Swain there had never any jubilation to temper.

 

What was he going to tell Maria Ostander? Taking his tea back into his hand, he shook his head. He still didn’t know where he’d even begin. There had been so much the three of them had shared, so much that had gone unsaid in the long pause of their friendship after the Dominion War, and now it was simply gone. Charlie was dead. And so was Ensign Kahtib.

 

Grimacing, he remembered that he had not yet written that particularly unpleasant letter. No one liked writing letters to the family members of dead crew members, or at least no one he’d ever met. It was, for any commander, a singularly awful task; a reminder that you had failed to protect someone under your command. In command school they always told you not to dwell on it, that they had, after all, known the risks that came with taking the uniform. That had never particularly soothed the feeling of guilt with Swain -- not during the Dominion War, and not now. Sure everyone had known the risks, but they had also trusted in him to make decisions that wouldn’t get them killed, too.

 

Swain’s thoughts drifted to his troubled Chief Engineer. He’d admonished Tandaris for exactly what he was doing now -- wallowing in doubt and guilt. That’s what you were supposed to do, though, right? Tell him to buckle down, straighten up, and work through the emotion. That a pitty party didn’t help anyone. If only it were so easy as flipping a switch and putting all your emotions into a tiny box.

 

In command school you were told to always be mindful of your emotions when you weren’t alone, that a crew could sense any doubts you had about yourself, and then it manifested in their own attitudes. The same was true about trusting yourself to make decisions. If you didn’t think you could make that choice, why should they? Indecision was like a creeping infestation of weeds in that way. He wondered, silently, if he did trust himself anymore. If he trusted his own commanding officers.

 

Why hadn’t he been told about the quarantine? Surely they had to know that the Augustine lack of communication could mean that the ship had been lost, and in that case, that Swain would launch an investigation? And why had Charlie broken the quarantine? The conclusions he drew were uncomfortable.

 

He looked down to his breakfast. The eggs were cold now. And replicated.

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