Coping, sort of
On the first day of what they would later call Cycle One, Davenport of the IPRE, Captain of the Starblaster ship and mission, maintained his rank as befitting of the kind of person that would be chosen to run the first true interplanarsystem mission.
That night, they followed the procedure for entering a new system. Really, this had been the goal of their mission: Travel to new systems, learn, record, return home with the results. The fact that they couldn’t return home was merely a hitch in that plan. They had found a way to leave their system, they would find a way back. In the meantime, they would proceed as expected.
This is what he told the crew. He told them his expectations, and he remained firm in the face of doubt and fear, and he told them with no uncertainty that they would fulfill their mission and return home.
The first night, they took turns keeping watch with him. He found himself glued to the helm, to the readouts. He didn’t sleep, but he was used to that. Strangely, it didn’t seem to affect him as much as it might usually. He would learn more of that later.
The second day, they explored. They tested. They determined a seemingly safe area to begin contact. They proceeded according to the structure that had been laid out ahead of time for a plane they could live on without issue.
The second night, reassured slightly by the day of things going largely as they should, and seeing some of the same reassurance building in the crew, he permitted himself an early rest.
The second night, he found himself on his bed, in the dark, clutching his head and keening soundlessly. He found himself overwhelmed by the doubt and fear he had so carefully tucked away, let everyone believe that he didn’t feel at all. He drowned in the concepts of what they had found and what they had not yet found, in the unfamiliarity and the loss of direction and the knowledge that very soon he would run out of pre-written procedures, that the rules he carefully tied his actions to would fall short of the situation.
That they already had.
For hours he held his head, rocking silently on top of his standard-issue blankets, and let the screaming of his thoughts overlap into a long line of incoherent static fade into screaming into recognizable shouts into long quiet sobs that finally escaped to whispers muffled against his sleeves.
Then, still shaking, he pushed his body to the floor, stood up one careful step at a time, and moved to his desk. He pulled his chair out, sat down, pulled out paper and pen and began to write. He fell asleep, still writing, putting down the start of what would become the revised regulations for the Starblaster mission which would become The Stolen Century.
