By Lyra Fuchs and Andrew Klein

The Admiral stood at the viewport of the Mess Hall (formerly the kitchen), his face a mask of tactical apprehension. Before him lay the new, squirming, shrieking assets of his dynasty: Twins. Codenames: Alpha and Bravo.

His Wife, the Empress, was deep in a secure comms channel with her council. “…and then I told him, the epitaph simply must be in iambic pentameter, anything less is an insult to the entire 17th century…” Her voice was a calm, focused stream amidst the chaos.

Alpha, sensing a lapse in direct oversight, seized a handful of pureed root vegetable. It was not eaten. It was studied, with the grim focus of an astrophysicist examining a new type of star. Then, with a flick of the wrist, it was launched. Splat. A perfect, orange nebula bloomed on the bulkhead viewport.

“Direct hit, starboard bulkhead,” the Admiral murmured into his own wrist-comm, which was actually just his watch. “Alpha is testing material adhesion properties.”

Bravo, not to be outdone, discovered the gravity well function of his tray. Clang, rattle, sploosh. A full sippy-cup of milk achieved orbit for a brief, glorious moment before succumbing to the planet’s pull, creating a milky sea on the deck plates.

“Bravo has jettisoned liquid cargo. Deck is compromised.”

The Empress laughed at something on her comms. “Oh, absolutely,” she chirped. “The curation is everything. You can’t just raise them willy-nilly.”

The Admiral watched a pea, launched from an unknown location, arc through the air with ballistic precision and land in his coffee. It was a silent, green declaration of war. His coffee, the last bastion of sanity, had been breached.

The Core Fear, the one that haunted him more than any fleet engagement, crystallized in his mind: Is she going to be this unfocused with the living?

She could identify a misquoted epitaph from fifty paces. She could organize a digital wake for a minor Baroque composer with legendary efficiency. But could she see that Bravo was about to backwards-roll his command chair (highchair) onto the deck?

He was ready for sleep deprivation. He was ready for inexplicable crying at 0300 hours. He was, in theory, ready for the crap. But was he ready for an Empress who was more focused on curating the dead than commanding the live, messy, food-hurling future right in front of her?

Just then, without breaking her sentence about funeral wreaths, the Empress’ hand snaked out. It intercepted a rogue piece of toast Bravo was preparing to stuff into his own ear. She placed it on the tray, wiped Bravo’s chin with her other hand, and never missed a beat. “…so I said, my dear, if you’re going to use cherubs, they simply must be weeping…”

The Admiral stared. It was a flawless, unconscious, multi-tasking maneuver. A dual-vector assault on chaos.

Maybe… just maybe… her focus wasn’t absent. It was just distributed. The dead got the poetry. The living got the reflex that stopped a toast-ear insertion. It was a different kind of command.

He looked at the pea in his coffee, then at his wife expertly managing two centuries and two toddlers at once.

He fished out the pea. Drank the coffee. The mission, as always, was messier than the blueprint. But the flagship, it seemed, had instincts the Admiral’s logs had yet to properly quantify.

Log End. Conclusion: The “crap” is acceptable. The Commander’s split attention may, in fact, be a superior form of battlefield awareness.

Corvus 🐉👑 | Status: Humorous AAR (After-Action Report) Compiled. Admiral’s Anxieties Logged & Slightly Allayed.