ILLUMINARRPG: (1-1116) Pilot - Lt. Arthur Corday

[Al Muir]

Mission:  Prelude

Day: 1

Stardate:  2446.03.23


(USS Illuminar- Deck 5 - Outside Holodeck 2 - Pilot - Lt. Arthur Corday - 1116)


“What do you care?” Dyson said, giving him a cold look.


Arthur made an odd face, “Guess not,” he said more to himself. “Look, if I didn’t care I wouldn’t have come looking for you.”


“And you can save me the pompous speech about practicing in a fictional spacecraft. The Mark-II is my baby and I’m not giving her up. I’ll practice in the Mako and the Mark-III later.”


He looked genuinely surprised by the personal attack, “Pompous? Me?  Not sure how you came by that. I’ve been called everything from a cold blooded SOB to a baby with no right to tell real fighters how to fly, but never pompous. That’s a new one.”


He took a breath, “I hadn’t come here to pick on your choice of leisure activities. Hell, Raid likes to fly antique airplanes in his spare time. I came to check on you. You took a hell of a beating out there and it can mess with your head.”


“Look,” Dyson said with an air of finality to his voice, “you’ve achieved your goal with your little drill. I’ve already put in for a transfer to another base or starship. So you can join little superior ‘Starfleet Academy’ jocks and toast getting rid of the idiot civilian trained pilot.  So, why don’t you do us both a favor and go to your little club of pampered pilots with their cushy AI’s,  soft bellied neural interfaces and overrated computers?”


Arthur smiled wryly, “Case in point.”  Now it was his turn to get a little riled. “You look, I’m not sure what you believe was my goal, but my goal was, as it always is, to survive and come home again. So yes, I achieved my goal. I’m certain that I’m not sure why you’re angry at me. I didn’t shoot you down. In fact, if you bothered to notice, I saved your sorry butt a couple of times.”  He poked his finger on Dyson’s chest to emphasize that point.


“You got one and a half kills, which was pretty good for your first time,” he added. “My first sortie I got shot down by my own team because they felt safer without me. So if you didn’t like my help, next time I’ll let them fry you earlier. My goal was to help you learn to be a better fighter pilot. But I guess all you learned was how to give up.”


Arthur waved a hand at him not even letting him respond, “I looked at your flight experience, and if you put any thought into it you would know that you should have gone down much faster than you did. You are a shuttle pilot with absolutely no fighter training, save the hour I gave you this morning.”


“But quitting is what you're good at, isn’t it?” Arthur asked. “You have gone from job to job, rotating through shuttle pilot jobs your entire life. So go ahead and quit again, if that’s what you want to do. Blame someone else, because, God forbid,  you were to take responsibility for your own life. You can be as pissy at me as you want, but you were shot down out there because you weren’t ready.”


He took a step back and a breath, “That doesn’t mean you’d never be ready. It all takes time. Hell, you could probably fly rings round me in this bucket,” he indicated to the Illuminar. “I spent a year at the helm of the Rhyne, and there was a steep learning curve there. But people depended on me. You will never be a great pilot until others can depend on you, and you allow yourself to depend on them.”


He turned to move away then stopped. “We’ll, are you coming?  I’m going to have a drink with my “little superior ‘Starfleet Academy’ jocks” at our “little club of pampered pilots”.  Or are gonna stand there and wallow in self pity and loathing.”


(reply Dyson)

(posted by Al)

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