Stern Words

“Whats up?” Cass asked as she entered the Drive Room, to see Jay, stood at the navi-comp console, with a holographic representation of their current location is space suspended in the air.
“Thanks for coming” he said “I’ve been trying to program the navicomp to work with the QT drive, but it just can’t keep up – can you reassign some system resource to it? It was never designed for FTL travel.”
“Sure.” Cass said, hunching over another console and logging into Holly’s control panel. “
“How much do you think you need?”
“Probably more than we can spare…but anythings got to be better than now – the whole system crashes with the amount of data the simulagtion kicks out when I run it, let alone the real thing. I can probably fly it manually – I mean I’m no stranger to FTL flight, but it’d be like driving a Land Speed Record car around Ikea and trying not to spill any meatballs…”
“Yes..” said Cass watching the data scroll on her terminal. “I can’t give you any more than this…any more and other vital systems shut down…”
“let me try it…”
Jay’s fingers flew across the keyboard, programming in a test course for the navi comp to run at QT speeds.
“Better.” He said “Running a little like a badly streaming movie, but it’s useable…”
“Let me know if you need anything else.” Cass said, turning to exit.
“There was one more thing” he said.
“Oh?”
“Back on the Sovereign. You didn’t bat an eyelid when you decided to kill the Malodorians. If I’d not stopped you. Would you have gone ahead with it?”
“Of course…”
Jays face told her that was wrong answer.
“It was same back at the facility. You wiped them all out. How long did it take you to decide to do that.
“They were going to kill us all.”
“I know. And, I might have done the same too in your shoes, but did you at least THINK about it first?”
“…I…”
“Thought not. Cass, I’m a realist. I know there will be times where we have to kill people. But it always, absolutely has to be the LAST RESORT. When we have no choice”
“I was trying to protect us.”
“From what? The Malodorians posed no immediate threat.”
“They might come after us!”
“Exactly MIGHT” Jay snapped “Or, they may run off and find another ship to salvage. Until they DO come after us, we have no reason to resort to violence. We’d got what we wanted. If they follow us, we have more than enough Huzards for them to worry about.”
“I’m not saying we shouldn’t defend ourselves” he continued “But it scares me that you can make the decision to kill, dozens, maybe hundreds of people without a second thought.”
“You’ve never said anything before”
“Because up until recently, we’ve been left with little choice…we can’t chastise Jaxx for killing first, thinking later on the one hand, then let you do the same with the other”
“You can’t compare to him! He’s a savage!”
“Oh, you’re a lot more calculated with it, sure. But the end result’s the same. Look, you’ve tried hard to distinguish yourself from Brittany…don’t let yourself turn into her…you’re better than her.”

<Tag Locke >
<Feel free to get us to Fernandos everyone>