There Are No Blanks For This In An Official Report

Posted on Sun Dec 14th, 2014 @ 2:38pm by Commander Andrew Matheson

Well, THAT was unpleasant.

I'd forgotten how coldly clinical those after-action reports are, especially when unanticipated combat situations and tragic losses of life are involved...

Dammit, I'm STILL thinking like that damn machine I already had to regurgitate this into.

But where do you put in the report that a colleague is dead because you were too lost in affairs of the heart to telepathically detect murderous intent?

There were clearly warning signs; Rosaleen picked up on at least one of them in enough time to take that round for me. And on my frame, there wouldn't have been a heart left to contemplate the affairs of.

It's just so damn pointless. I wasn't any more special and important than she was. In point of fact, I KNOW it was the other way around - but I guess I get to take that knowledge to my grave or to the counselor's bench, whichever finds me first.

And please don't let me be the closest thing we have to a counselor out here. Diplomacy and counseling aren't all that different up front; it's all about conflict resolution. Granted, in diplomacy, the conflict is resolved by attempting to maneuver every little admission into an endgame where you come out ahead, while in counseling, it's resolved by attempting to maneuver every little admission into and endgame where you can make sense of it all, regardless of the winning or losing involved.

If I have to talk myself through this, I'm screwed. I really need to see if I can rustle up a shuttle and a psi-null pilot so I can just vent all this emotional energy without scaring or scarring half the operations center.

And now I have to tell Rachel that she has to delay coming out here until I can get this situation with the local assassin resolved. That's going to go over spectacularly well. And if she finds out where I was and who I was with at the time...

There's not enough Romulan ale to fix this problem without me requiring a stomach pump in the morning. So it looks like, after a night of not sleeping on it, I'm going to have to convince the local armory officer to let me requalify on Federation armaments. I had marksman quals on most any Federation energy weapon and its Cardassian counterpart by the end of the treaty negotiations. It can't be that hard to get the muscle memory back.