Black Thoughts
Posted on 27 Sep 2022 @ 10:43pm by Lieutenant Tobias Hirsh
Mission:
M3 - Into the Deep
Location: OC, turbolift
Timeline: MD 06 0900
1888 words - 3.8 OF Standard Post Measure
The junior tactical officer, Ensign Benjamin Kelley, was a little self conscious as he waited alongside Lieutenant Tobias Hirsh in the turbolift. He pulled a little at his own gold collar. The bulky, command red trimmed Lieutenant with the rams horns and an intense far-away look under his deep, shaded brow was unintentionally intimidating. Kelley was more of a torpedoes maintenance, shielding operator, and small arms marksman than a hand to hand combat guy himself, and didn't have the muscle some of his co-workers had gone to the trouble to build and the dedication to maintain. But just the neck on this Grazerite guy, let alone the biceps...
Tobias felt the Ensign staring and looked down at him to see if there was something he intended to say, but Kelley swiveled his gaze quickly back to the turbolift controls and cleared his throat uncomfortably.
"Is there something wrong, Ensign?" Tobias ventured, his voice almost impossibly low.
"N-no sir." But then he couldn't help himself but to ask. "I was. I just. I thought Grazerites covered, you know," He mimed the horns, poking out each of his index fingers from his temples stupidly, as if naming them outloud were somehow more rude than performing charades.
"Often that is the case." Tobias confirmed for him, sadly, and with some barely restrained irritation. "But I no longer do."
"It's some cultural thing, covering them? I thought I heard it was a cultural thing."
"It is some cultural thing." Tobias confirmed, but left it at that, restraining a grouchy snarl, though one lip curled slightly upward with his annoyance.
"Well, if I was born with a set of those, I'd certainly let everyone see." Ensign Kelley offered, attempting to compliment the officer. "Pretty impressive. I mean, I bet no one ever tries head butting you!"
"Is that something that you encounter regularly?"
"What?"
"Being head-butted. Because I can offer you the experience if it helps, Ensign."
"No. Thank you Sir."
Tobias grunted.
Normally Tobias might have found some way to usher the conversation lightly into polite territory, but he'd been having a particularly difficult time since the latest of events had taken every wound he'd been trying to let heal and just ripped the scabs off, poured gasoline in them and lit them on fire.
Earlier in the week he had quite possibly spoiled his best chance at happiness. He'd spooked Elli by kissing her and she'd gone completely quiet on him. The Potemkin had shipped out and she hadn't said a word since that disastrous dinner date. He'd written her several apologies, but had sent none of them, terrified that he could only make a bad situation worse.
Besides, he wasn't sure he could handle happiness of that caliber. For a few incredible weeks, when her ship had been in for refit, Tobias had very nearly forgotten the meadow running with blood and agony on that tragic colony, Fieldmont, the colony world to which he was assigned too late to defend it. For a little while he'd been distracted trying to catch a glimpse of the bubbly engineer, Elli swaying out of time from the music at the bar while he slapped bass watching the petite grazerite slurping at her straw on some frozen cocktail and bumping her feet against the toe kick absent mindedly. Sometimes while they were together in person, she was in a distant, imaginary place he would never be able to see, in worlds made of mathematics, and theories quantumly orchestrated and threaded through other dimensions and realities known only to her inner understanding. She was wonderfully immersed in it and her deep focus left him awestruck. He'd even tested the intensity of her resolve concerning her research, having managed to sit across from her for four and a half hours waiting to see if she'd notice him. That was the day he'd first invited her out to his band's set. He'd written her a note on the flyer and left it for her, and was elated when she turned up. They'd spent most evenings together on the promenade after that.
Once they'd started seeing each other, the shy engineer completely switched to a nonstop flurry of words, and her nervous and incessant babbling seemed to drive Tobias' damaged heart out of the killing field, his attention instead filled with something very different. He refocused on the possibility of living, and sharing that life with Elli, and was able for a time to let go of the inevitability of brutality and death.
But as swiftly as Elli-Navine had stumbled into his life, she had left.
And before Tobias was able to fully process the silent space Elli had left in her wake, the gory reality of Fieldmont rushed back into the forefront. Elli was gone and the Pyrryx were back. Due to his security clearance on the matter and his experience with counter-active technologies, he'd been called on to head up the analysis of the recovered Pyrryx wreckage, appointed by Zahn and Quinn as they had been reassigned to what Tobias could only presume was a reconnaissance mission, based on his limited information and the context and inferences he could puzzle together.
With all of that, Tobias was having trouble with being nice to talkative people in tubolifts. He was tired of being asked why he no longer covered his horns. Others of his homeworld masked their horns because they had supposedly evolved to be more peace minded, capable of solving everything without force. But there could be no peace as far as he could see. Until everyone laid down arms, no one could.
The Pyrryx were forged in bloodlust. They couldn't be disarmed because they themselves were the weapon. There was no peaceful path forward with them. Without warning or cause so far as the citizens of Fieldmont Colony were ever given, the hellish-black forms rained down destruction, razed homes and government buildings all alike, and then marched over the writhing bodies, snapping them, shooting them, dashing them apart— methodically seeking out every soul to exterminate, wordlessly.
For the first time in his life Tobias had felt helplessly small, as they had proceeded to cooly commit the genocide of over nine thousand Grazerites right before Tobias' eyes, none of whom could even begin to hope to fight back. They were all nothing to the Pyrryx, nothing but kindling for their death harvesting machine. Having witnessed it, Tobias could barely stand to find himself alive every day that he opened his eyes and he could never, ever, conceive of wearing the head covering again.
Ultimately he'd been spared, not through any mercy on their part, but by sheer harrowingly narrow luck, and by the little bit of will power endowed to him when he was entrusted with the child to protect. The responsiility for the child unfroze him from his inborn terror long enough for him to hide away.
He'd struggled with the desire to share his worst fears with Elli at first. His worst fears being that he'd only had a taste of the coming bloodtide, and that their cherished homeworld was chief on the list of planets ripe for the Pyrryx's taking as it was set in the furthest reach of that stretch of the UFP, deep into the territory the Pyrryx had been making fresh incursions into. It had been stated among those analysts and operatives in the know about the event that the Pyrryx had attacked Fieldmont without warning.
But Tobias knew better. Feildmont's fate *had been* the warning given. The message they were sending was that Grazer— with its lush meadows and soaring craggy mountain tops, it's advanced cities full of scientists and engineers, it's ancient philosophies epitomized in the spires on difficult to access mountain tops, it's resource rich valleys and country sides, it's universities and all of its ancient and modern treasures— was surely marked in their sights for destruction and subjugation. And it would be quite easy for the taking, only it would awaken the giant that was the UFP. Tobias was afraid the Pyrryx would count the cost one day soon and decide that they were ready to have it out with the UFP. Or perhaps the Pyrryx might believe that they could leverage their terror enough to cause the UFP to recoil and fail to defend her own borderworlds.
Even if he had wanted to tell Elli the danger ahead for Grazer, he was forbidden from doing so. Starfleet had sealed the Fieldmont slaughter, and as he was one of a number of survivors who could be counted on one hand and the only adult out of them who had witnessed the attack with his own eyes.... it was simple enough to handle the Fieldmont event. Starfleet agencies had managed the cover stories told to friends and family who no longer could contact loved ones lost at Fieldmont. Every day Tobias waited to hear whispers of the truth somewhere in the media, but so far the control of the spin had been well maintained.
He had found that while Elli had been around, her light hearted presence seemed to turn down the volume of the nightmare memories, and ultimately he decided the last thing he wanted to do was to taint her optimism with his pain. Besides, she had her own share of scares in her years serving the Fleet. The best he could do was his own work concerning detection and deterrent measures surrounding the Pyrryx. Which had been the whole of his work since being picked up by the Fleet and field commissioned from his former work in the Grazer Defense force into SF Strategic Operations.
His whole work was top secret, and he had grown to respect the need for that secrecy. How could anyone live with the terror he lived with every day? So when Elli, in her random nervous unfiltered way, had begun to run her mouth off concerning something confidential over dinner, he just defaulted to where strong instincts intersected: to protect the need for secrets, to protect Elli from trouble... and an instinct to express his feelings.
It had been a good kiss, in the moment it had lasted. But Elli had snapped out of it like a spell and vanished from his life. The risk he'd taken had not been worth it, but now it couldn't be taken back.
And what was the use? How could he ever have a happy home of his own while always being terrified of the devouring black death waiting at the borders? Elli's ship was dispatched to the other end of Federation space. The crew of the Potemkin would soon be cataloging stellar phenomena and making first contacts out in the Shackleton Expanse, and whatever the Potemkin was facing, Tobias could at least rest knowing she wasn't on the front of the Pyrryx's expanding empire.
Snapping out of a far away look, Tobias realized that the turbo lift had been empty for some time, Ensign Kelley having hurriedly escaped the parting doors as if ducking out of poisoned air the instant that the lift had opened.
With his latest findings in hand, Tobias entered the tactical office suite, one heavy step in front of the other. He made a mental note to have another appointment with Counselor Terys, probably sooner, rather than later.