Character Perspective: Plum

“You know Captain, you can talk to me about things… right?” I said, pushing the remains of what had been a vegetable lo mein around my plate. The rest of the crew had already left, heading for whatever it was that they wanted to spend their evenings doing, but Curtis, having barely eaten anything at all, was still hammering away on his data pad, the privacy screen engaged so only he could see what was on it.

“You know, Vicky, you can just call me Curtis or Joey when it’s just us,” he replied with his eyes still glued to the tablet.

“Sure, I s’pose, but since I was meaning it in terms of our ship and the upcoming trial, I decided to stick to the formality of it all,” I replied with a shrug. “Just, I’m your second, so unless you delegate some of that planning down, I don’t got a lot to do here.”

Curtis let out a bit of a laugh as he dropped his tablet down finally and looked over to me, “Yeah… guess I kinda let that slip my mind a bit. But if you think about it… you’re kinda doing your job here by trying to get me to pump the brakes and fill you in,” he offered.

“So does that mean you’re going to fill me in on these mystery plans of yours just yet?” I asked hopefully, looking at the still blank screen of his data pad.

“I’m going to fill you in on some of the details,” he said, his hand activating the data pad as I felt my own buzzing on the table next to my plate.

“Only some?” I asked with a brow raised as I saw a small worksheet with a set of four drone flight paths organized alongside the NEUTRINOs flight path Curtis had delivered to Novarod.

“Between you and me, I’m pretty much making this up as I go, I’m not necessarily withholding information from people on purpose, it’s just I don’t want anyone to get whiplash as I’m trying to decide which pattern to work off of,” he explained, tapping on his pad and the four paths split into two different colors.

“We only have one drone slot in our ship loadout, why are you planning two paths?” I asked.

“Yes, we only have one drone slot, Doc is going to be doing some practicing and flying this path here,” he said, lighting up the flight pattern that Novarod had derided as “terrible.” “I know Sullivan is mostly focused on those chipmunks of his, but I took a look through some of his prior experiments and found he actually found a way to mimic the signal that the actual drone flying around out in space would present. We are going to use that along with the preprogrammed flight paths to confuse the enemy,” he explained.

“Oooh, if their attention is focused elsewhere, we can slip by almost completely unnoticed. That’s actually a pretty good idea,” I said tapping my chin. “So we slip past the radars, and we achieve victory, sounds pretty simple… what else is there to plan?”

“It’s not just slipping past the radar, that’s just step one,” he explained, “Well, okay that is the main goal, but we actually get extra points if we can record the surface of the planet they are guarding and what forces they have within that radar protection. I fully intend for us to get those extra points.”

“There’s always gonna be extra points,” I said, trying to slide the screen upward and finding there wasn’t any more data, “Wait this is all you sent me? What about Ty? Don’t you have her doing something with our weapons loadout?”

“Overheard that did you?” He asked with a brow raised.

“She mentioned it to me in passing, us girls do talk you know,” I said with a laugh.

“So that was mostly done because I partially wanted to see what it would take for us to change our loadout and I think a dual bottom mount option will grant us more coverage in upcoming trials,” he explained as he picked the tablet back up and started to click through it before my pad buzzed.

“You just didn’t like the Rail-Rifle?” I asked, almost a bit incredulously, “I mean, there’s gotta be some use for the trial… right?”

“I mean, if we do get caught while we are inside the radar ring, we might need to fight our way out if we want to secure our points still, but my hope is we can do this entire trial without firing a single shot,” he said and put the tablet to the side as he finally pulled his tray of food over to him, “That said, it let’s Ty get a good feel for modifying the weapons systems which is really pretty beneficial to us overall and we can fix the one setup that I think we are currently slightly lacking on the NEUTRINO.”

“Sounds to me like you do have pretty much all of this all planned out, what part are you still working on?” I asked curiously, changing back over to the flight paths sheet he had shared with me.

“Novarod.”

“Novarod?”

“Yeah,” Curtis said, taking a sip of water before highlighting the NEUTRINO’s flight plan on our sheet, “Any pilot would see this plan and instinctively go against it, I know Nova is feeling that exact same thing, I could see it when I presented it to him.”

“And you also already said you were going to be having Doc fly it in our actual drone control spot too, so what’s Novarod going to be doing?”

“Well now that’s where maybe you can help me out,” Curtis said with a smile, “See, I need to convince him that this flight path is going to work… and to practice with Doc in following behind him near identically.”

“Like, shadowing him or something?” I asked curiously.

“Almost exactly that,” Curtis said grabbing his tablet and pulling up a few more guides and shooting them over to my data pad. “I’m still working on putting these together, but I’m hitting a wall and maybe a second set of eyes might now be a bad idea,” he said.

“Spec guides?” I asked curiously, opening a large file on Star Fleet satellites that he had sent me.

“Yup, Radar spec guides,” he said with a look in his eye that I couldn’t quite place. “Here, let me tell you what I’m thinking and you tell me if I’m crazy or not.”