there’s so much i could say about commander khalida. how she was part of special forces in planet harvesting to keep the miners safe from mercenaries, a top sniper, and how she lost it all when a plane went down above one of pluto’s moons and severed her limb. honorable discharge while in her sleep in mercury’s hospital. how her talent and her willingness to advance the species got her placed as commander on an elite set of missions. the ‘you may not come back, and if you do, no one will know or care about you’ missions. the ‘we’re going into unknown space and arriving when our family will be long dead because of the time it takes to go’ missions. how she was a brave member the Astraeus crew -- she led them all in successfully finding over four planets for use either for planetary colonization or resources.
and then the crash came. and she saved what crew she could after forcefully waking herself from hypersleep -- ripping tubes out of her throat, her spine, from her veins. almost drowning in the fluid that kept her alive and then falling out into a ship drowning from the ocean it had landed on. she met the alien species that was living and dying there. and god, how she dealt with a crisis of faith, of learning the history of the human race and the great unknown that was slowly but surely destroying the last of their makers. how there was a way of recovery, of survival for all of the makers of the humans... and how she had to decide to sacrifice her crew in order to recover it and carry it with her, smuggle it back home to earth.
commander khalida would become the new mother of so many species who were ancient in their origin. and she had to do so much, lose so much to see it all become.
