Mila's Loss - The officers 4

Chapter 12 - Sulong and Kitty

~~~ The ship

"Translation successful Ma'am. The crew is working on recovering from the shift. Departments are starting to check in, but many are still recovering from the hard translation. All automatic systems are reporting green." The pilot barfed into a bag again and had a feeling nobody was going to want to eat in the near future.

Several others ended up using the bags also, "Keep me updated as the departments come online. I want to ensure everything is working when we do arrive. I know we are on a short route to the system and we are going to do another hard translation outside the system. We are going in hard and fast. If that fucking ship is there, we are going to launch everything when we get there. We will get our people back or what remains of them." Her voice was hard as she was talking. They were going to take names and kick ass.

"Aye Ma'am. Kick ass and take names." His fingers danced across the keyboard and was programming orders in. Between barfing he finally had the orders entered, "God that was rough. I need a new stomach..."

By the time they'd been underway for a month the crew was trained well. The Marines were in overdrive and training in all parts of the ship. She'd been forced to tell them to back down and take a few days off. They wanted blood and it was showing. Tromping on them wasn't what she wanted but if they were to wound up before anything happened it could be bad.

Even the OIC of the Marines agreed with her. As blood thirsty as she was, she knew better. Half the training was to keep her Marines tired, to tired to get very stupid. How she missed the two. They'd be badly missed and most of the Marines were going to miss Holcum and Mila. There was something special about them. They didn't really treat the Marines as enlisted but as family.

There were three months until they arrived at the star system. She didn't want her crew burned out before they arrived. She passed orders to stand down for the next few months and then they'd start training again. A month was all they needed at most.

~~~ Mila and the Pride

It took her several weeks before she started coming out of her room again. Part of it was because the kittens were starting to get active and moving around. She simply couldn't keep them in the rooms. They had the right to move and wiggle around. She started with the small lounge again and with Nacy's help encouraged them to explore. It was so amusing watching them crawl around in their two main forms.

Other moms came into the lounge and was helping her take care of them. What was so funny was Raven was definitely in charge of the other two. She was very active for her age and had crawled all over the rooms and had even discovered the kitty doors.

Mila had learned that the hard way when she sat up and one kitten was missing. Another mother walked in with her as she was grinning, "Found a stray kitten. Need to keep an eye on her." She had several kittens over the years and knew the females tended to be more rambunctious than the males.

~~~ Holcum and the ship

The queen wasn't happy. The damage to the communications room was catastrophic and essentially blinded her to everything in her territory. There wasn't any way to get it repaired short of a repair dock which she couldn't get to due to the damages to her ship. At sub light it was a good five or more years to the nearest star if not longer.

She'd looked back over the video and wondered about the scream of anger and it made her shiver. The bot or the one controlling it appeared to be rather upset. What sort of creature might make that sort of scream? It was horrible and agonizing in sound. Considering they carried the two bots back she figured it was related to them. The low born species were that way.