| Author | Message | ||
     Lt. Cmdr Maiko D'rall |
The first to go were the newer things. A holoimage on the wall of her shaking hands with the captain of the RS Cougar... the model of the ship of the same name and registry she had worked so hard to push the design for through the shipbuilders. From there it moved in rapid succession as she watched, recalling the words of a Terran author - something about things falling apart, the center not holding. Vacation photos of her with Captain Farrell, or with Captain Valentine, the holos of her grandchildren - one of whom she had warned weeks ago about the problems of messing around in time travel and the multiverse of threads. The white haired woman observing this behind the desk sighed, her frame stooped with old age but also the burdens of command. Her gaze was fixed on one holo, taken decades ago when she was another person. The bridge of THE starship - the others only seemed to pale in comparrison - she flew, taken during one of the rare quiet moments from the bridge visual log. If that holo vanished too, if the timeline unravelled that far back, well, all hell would probably break loose. It would all be over soon though. Time, after all, was a constant, and transitions like this would only require another second or two. Then she would be another person, another time, and with no recollection of this reality aside from vague haunting thoughts that were as fleeting as the clouds overhead. True, she could have done something to protect herself from this - rank hath privilages as they used to say - but she had tired of running away from her problems years ago. Well, most of them. She had finally been forced to ignore her ire at her son for having married into what was called the Wallace Dynasty in public, but often referred to as the Wallace Debacle. It was a regret of hers, and perhaps the one good thing that might come of this would be to somehow change that. The blinding flash of light engulfed her senses, depositing her just as quickly back in her seat. The holos were back on the walls, though some were slightly different, perhaps taken at different times. The model of the Cougar had been replaced by a model of Coronado; the holo on the wall from the commissioning of the now-nonexistent ship replaced with a holo of her in the cockpit of an old prop plane as a youth. Admiral D'rall shook her head slightly as if to clear the cobwebs of some lingering daydream, then got back to work. |