Reflecting in Loneliness

Posted on Fri Dec 7th, 2012 @ 6:24pm by Captain Benjamin Byrne

Mission: Klingons on the Starboard Bow
Location: USS Endeavour - Captain's Quarters
Timeline: MD12 2300hrs

As Byrne entered his larger-than-usual quarters, he called for the lights before stopping and looking around.

Usually when he entered at the time of night, his son Jacob would already have been in bed for a number of hours, but Sarah would still be up and waiting for him - usually either reading a book or a letter from home, or sorting away the remains of the dinner that she had shared with Jake. Occasionally if he regularly entered this close to midnight she'd have a look of disdain on her face and chastise him for working such long hours.

However, it had been four days since he had last seen either of them, and a week now since he had helped Sarah to settle enough of their things into the temporary apartment Starfleet had provided on Cestus III for the duration of the Endeavour's current mission, and he had almost forgotten when he entered his quarters that they shouldn't be there waiting for him.

Continuing on his path to the refresher, removing his uniform jacket along the way, Benjamin considered the absence of his family. I certainly wasn't the first time he had spent time away from Sarah - after they had been married, he had told her to wait for him on Pacifica and spent most of the war away from her on the Hendrix. Since his appointment to command of his second ship, the New York however, their son had been born and he had barely spent more than a week away from them both. Their current mission though would keep him away from them for months in order of him to see it through to its conclusion, and for most of it the mission parameters meant that he must refrain from contacting them over subspace.

Stepping back out into the main living area, Ben ordered a small meal for himself from the replicator and ate it as he collected the few PADDs he had left scattered around the room and returned them to an organised pile on his desk. The meal was hardly substantial, and it probably wouldn't have been what Sarah would have insisted he eat, but it filled the hole in his stomach none-the-less, and was soon gone, the plate being recycled back into the replicator.

With nothing else to do for the day, Benjamin knew he should head straight to bed in order to be ready for the next day's worth of work, but he couldn't help but be drawn to stand in front of the large windows that ran along the outer wall of his quarters, and the streaking stars of warp travel.

The sight was mesmerising, but it wasn't what was on Byrne's mind even as he stared at it. Despite the thoughts he had for his family, they were now turned towards the mission at hand.

The ship that Starfleet had asked them to track down had been sent into the region covertly, to try and gather intelligence as to whether there was some hitherto-unknown reason for the escalating conflict between the Klingons and the Gorn within an area of space that measurably had very little to offer either in terms of resources. Starfleet reasoned that what it did offer wasn't worth the effort either power would have to go through in order to obtain it.

The starship had failed to report in after being in the region for only three weeks, and Starfleet wanted Ben to find out why.

Resolving to try and make sure he got off duty earlier until they managed to find the wayward starship, or at the very least have an opportunity to perform for their primary and public mission in the region, Ben called for the lights to dim to ten percent before making his way to his bedroom.