he was the one who made the painful decisions.
he wasn't in command of the RWE (normal).
he was in command at one time, but things had become too big-
the mission too unclear.
he's not even sure how command of the bulk of the ship was lost to him.
-or even if it was incrementally or sudden.
the data must be corrupt.
things had become very strange in too many ways to say.
he had to get back down to Earth
but the planet that the (normal) had been orbiting for at least the last 200 years
was no longer Earth.
recently he was convinced that it was not even a planet,
but new theories showed a very high likelihood that not only was it indeed a planet,
but the only place to go if he and the crew of the (normal) were to survive, of at least those that were not already beyond salvation.
all of the escape pods and personnel craft were currently off limits to him,
being guarded by an outrageously tacky Vegas entertainment robot.
of course, the (normal) could not survive reentry.
parts of it, perhaps, could.
He remembered thinking it through before. Not a complete run through, just a basic trace with a nod at the major intersections. The way he had come here. The decisions he made along the way. These were the things he was thinking about.
He was thinking about how he had interpreted the situation and how his response had been correct or incorrect according to how it affected the implementation of his plans.
There were plans; there were lots of plans.
There were contingency plans; there were plans of plans radiating to everything in sight.
He wondered how his actions could have been different- if, in the future, in a similar situation, he could do something even more effective towards that implementation.
He thought about his actions of the last half hour in the light of his basic strategy, which, at the moment, consisted mainly of an avoidance of pain and/or death. He reasoned that even without any conscious effort, there was always some sort of basic strategy, even if it was "run away from this fucking heat!"
He wondered what he could do to prevent the same kind of horrible events from occurring again, but he didn't seem to have possessed any control over these events while they were occurring.
He must get to the eyebrary and there was only one access point- in the Chasm.
How he was going to get down there he had no fucking idea.
Just then brilliant light flashed off the cooling fins of his magnificent gold Art Deco helmet, creating a jerking striped pattern that momentarily dominated the entire virtual cockpit.
It had begun again.
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