The Commanders' Mate. Grace Goodwin

       Commander Karter, Battleship Varsten, Sector 438

      “You shouldn’t be here, Commander. I can take care of this.” My second in command, Vice Commander Bard, walked next to me, shoulder to shoulder, as he had for over a decade. We were both battleship-born Prillon warriors, and I counted on him to speak the truth when I didn’t want to hear it.

      Bard spoke the truth now. Being in this wreck of a battleship was not the wisest course of action I could have taken. Yet, I had no choice. I had to see the level of destruction for myself. Commander Varsten was an excellent strategist, a seasoned warrior, and he was missing. I could not quite believe that half of his battle fleet had been destroyed in a matter of hours. Battlegroup Varsten had been decimated.

      “The comm would not have done it justice.” Some things needed to be witnessed.

      Bard stepped over a pool of scorched blood on the floor, a frown on his usually blank face. “No, it would not.”

      When the comms came in from the survivors, I had not believed them, could not believe that nearly an entire battlegroup had been wiped out so quickly.

      Yet, here we stood in the scarred remains of a ship that had once housed nearly two thousand warriors, mates and children. Outside, three of Varsten’s support vessels had been obliterated, not much more than fragments left spinning in the deep black of space. The battleship itself now drifted toward the nearest planet, weak engines not quite able to resist the relentless pull of gravity with the main power source destroyed. The metal corridors creaked and moaned beneath our boots as we pulled the foul scent of charred ship and death into our lungs through our helmets.

      The devastation was vast. This section had a hull breach and our helmets, with supplemental oxygen, were required, as there was no air to breathe.