As soon as the doors to the cockpit opened for him, Elegy Weld left behind the remaining scraps of his lunch, dematerializing in the replicator of the crew rest compartment. Since the nurses and security officers were making preparations in the lower level of the New Atlantic-class runabout, Weld found himself alone in the cockpit with Dawa Vlček at the conn.  Only because no one else was around did he brave to ask the question:

“What type of pilot are you on a long-haul flight?” Weld asked, as he dropped himself into the co-pilot’s chair.  “Audio trivia or hull-shaking music?”

Dawa—uncharacteristically—did not answer right away. She was running through her post-departure checklist a bit more slowly than necessary, apparently mesmerised by the user interface. After a beat or two she finally glanced at her crewmate, and his expectant face prompted her to physically shake herself out of her trance.

“I don’t get to fly these very often,” she told him, bypassing the apology and jumping straight into the explanation. “Functionally very similar to the Danube, but I’ll be the first to admit I’m a sucker for the aesthetics. It’s a perfect combination of ‘tried and true’ and ‘shiny and new’!”

She emphasised her appreciation by giving the console a fond pat before swiveling towards Weld. “But to answer your question: I prefer a good talk if I can get it, though as a Starfighter pilot primarily I have enough playlists to get me across the Delta quadrant flying warp one the whole way. Oh, speaking of…”

Dawa reached into her uniform jacket and pulled out her flying charm: a small, bright purple, blocky approximation of a humpback whale attached to a carabiner. She tossed it to Weld and giggled as he fumbled it. “That’s Gillian. She’ll be our good luck charm on this flight. Gillian’s been around a bit.”

Cupping Gillian between his palms, Weld took a couple of heartbeats to examine her design and, simply, to appreciate her.  He closed his hands around the charm and he clutched it close to his chest.  Then he looked back at Dawa with an appraising look in his eyes.  It was all over his face that he was hesitating from a question.

Eventually, he asked, “Has Gillian survived anything as nasty as how the Fourth Fleet reports are describing Deneb?”

“Hmm!” Dawa crossed her arms and kicked back in her seat. She stared into the middle distance, brow furrowed, as if ‘nasty’ could be defined by quantitative variables and she was going to plug in all the numbers. “Well, Gillian’s usually in charge of only one craft at a time; can’t spread that luck too thin, you know? We did meet a very nasty customer in the Paulson Nebula not too long ago. It was a one-on-one skirmish, but with all the weapons the other guy was carrying he might as well have been a whole squadron. Ripped us a few new plasma vents, and by the time we tried to land—well, I’ll spare you all the details, but we did survive that one.”

She punctuated the story with a wink and turned back to the control panel. “So why don’t you find a comfy spot for Gillian while I synch the latest subspace weather reports?”

Bit by bit, Weld swivelled his chair one-hundred-and-eighty degrees from where he’d started in search of a protrusion where he could clip Gillian.  In all directions, the aesthetic of the cockpit was organic lines.  The consoles flowed into the bulkheads, which flowed into the angled overhead.  There were no superfluous design elements.  All Weld could find was a ring in his own chair, where the armrest connected to the seat pan, and so he clipped Gillian there.

While he was pinching the carabiner into place –not even looking at Dawa– he found himself asked, “With everything that’s happening in Deneb, I keep wanting to compare it, to judge where we’re at.  Do you… remember much from the Dominion War yourself?”

“Like the actual battles and all the death and destruction on the front lines?” Dawa shook her head. “No. I was only seven, but I knew better than to look at any of the war reports. My whole family was—well, is—employed at Titan’s Sol VI shipyards, so I only caught glimpses of the action by peeking over their shoulders at the endless production orders. This was when we still had Utopia Planitia, of course, and they were the ones cranking out the marvelous new war machines. Titan was there mostly to back Mars up on replacing all the utility vehicles, shuttles and runabouts and medical boats—all the little workhorses that didn’t need to be reinvented but needed to be on the front lines ASAP in place of the ones we’d lost. The whole family had the average crew compliment for every make and model memorised, so those orders were like phantom casualty lists in a way. It felt like our little domed colony was so essential but so detached at the same time…”

Dawa trailed off as she realised that she was rambling, though Weld seemed to remain engaged with everything she was saying. She cocked her head and arched an eyebrow as a thought occurred to her. One could never be sure with a Trill…

“What do you remember about the war?”

“Similar.  Indistinct,” Weld said, nodding vaguely as he thought about it some more.  “I was a child too.  My memories from that time are probably shaded by re-tellings as much as the first had experience.  My mother was a security officer; I grew up on starships.  I don’t think we were ever on the front-lines.  I just remember evacuation drills, being shuffled from the classroom to sickbay.”  –He blinked– “Unless those weren’t really drills.  I suppose they might have only told us they were drills to keep us calm.  Huh.”

“Well hey,” said Dawa, “That sounds like a great idea for dealing with your inner child in high-stress situations: tell them it’s just a drill. Wait, did I really just say the words ‘inner child’ to a psychiatrist?”

Dawa wore a face of exaggerated concern for a moment before shrugging it off. “Anyway, might have to file that away in my list of ‘Coping Strategies for the Deneb Fiasco’. On the other hand, I really hope my inner child wasn’t around during my last dogfight. That one definitely had a lot of swearing in it.”

“Our rendezvous point to pick up our patients is nowhere near Deneb,” Weld retorted.  “Let’s really, really hope there is no next dogfight.”