Codename Alpha

Chapter 4

The past couple weeks had been largely uneventful - when put in terms of space exploration, at least. I had learned that the long period of transit between stars was one of the lower points of warp travel, but also one of the most laid-back. There were many pre-installed games on the personal computers found in each of our quarters, and they didn't take much work to get transferred over to the workstations on the bridge. Antoni, the fox at the operations console, as I had learned, had this long-standing game of cards that had been going for nearly a week at this point without an end in sight. Him, Jack, and Rostov, were really the only people I had even spoken to on the ship as of yet. But, honestly, I could live with that.

Strangely enough, though, Rostov had become increasingly distant after we had lunch together, the day of the commissioning ceremony. While he did let me into his quarters so I could watch Carius Base in the mornings with Jack, it had become a bit of a rarity to get more than a five-word non sequitur out of him during conversation. I could understand that, though, seeing as he was an engineer. The day after launch, his work schedule got switched around so that he ended up working during the night shift when he was meant to have the morning shift, like Jack and I did.

As such, I had been spending most of my time with Jack during the after-shift recreation hours. We had both agreed that if either of us got cleaning duty, one of us would have to pitch in to make it not as tear-inducingly boring. And while that day had not come yet, we both knew that the cursed hour soon approached. We managed to attend all of the past few movie nights together, too. Unfortunately for us, all of them were boring romcoms that somebody downloaded into the ship's library, likely as a joke. There was one in specific I did reluctantly enjoy, though - Encounter at Prnjavor had been a surprisingly fun movie.

I was excited for today, though, seeing as they were showing The Gobresti Incident, one of my all-time favorite films, and also the first one recorded in the Veta star system, in honor of the fact that we would be arriving in the system before the day was up.

In the meantime, however, we were watching our mutually favorite show, Carius Base. Rostov didn't share as much of a fascination with the show as I did with Jack.

I got up from the swivel chair we had moved from Rostov's desk to get a drink of water from the bathroom. Jack hissed at me, like a zombie, as a joke, to the best of his abilities, being a wolf and all. I opened the door to the bathroom, resulting in another pretend-hiss from Jack, and got myself a glass of water, which I took back to the floor with me to continue watching the third season finale of Carius Base.

"How do you know Rostov won't mind that you borrowed his tablet without asking?"

"We've been doing this for thirteen days and this is the first time you've asked?" he said, sarcastically. "Besides, it's what friends do." Rostov was still sound asleep on the bunk across from us.

"I'm surprised the light isn't bothering him," I said.

"Don't be. We shared a room in our barrack back during basic. You know those nights when they would detonate who knows what at the EOD range a few kilometers up?"

"Yeah, hard to forget. I used to live in an airbase just like that, with my dad."

"Yeah. Rostov would sleep right through them. Like, think of a tiny wooden sign on the side of a mountain that somehow isn't falling during the middle of an avalanche. That-" he pointed a finger- "Is Rostov. He'll wake up panting whenever they play the music to get everyone else out of bed, though." It was around four in the morning- heading to Jack's quarters before the designated wake-up time to watch Carius Base had become somewhat of a daily ritual with us. Normally, Rostov would be on duty, but he had this day off.