Overseer | Mateo & Cheikhou
Space. The final frontier. An area so massive that one solitary person couldn't hope to see it all in their lifetime. A sight so beautiful that even a man of discipline and poise, a man like Cheikhou Sauvage, couldn't help but stare into it and question the very existence of humanity. Question his faith. Doubt his importance. And yet, despite the heaviness of the subject, he couldn't stop himself from doing it. It was part hobby, part obsession, and entirely a bad decision.
Each time passed a window -- structural weakness -- he stopped to gaze out the portholes. Didn't matter if all he saw was the unending vacuum, the unyielding nothingness. There was something about seeing for hundreds of thousand of miles that comforted him, while unsettling him all at once. He found no better place to do that than the cockpit. Its wide windows were conducive to sightseeing, as unprofessional as it was. The easiest way, as Cheik had learned over the past year, was to place himself at the head of the charge. Typically that meant putting himself on guard duty -- or, rather, relieving his soldiers from it. While he only did it on days he felt the need to clear his head, those days were becoming more and more frequent as time went on.
Today was one of those days.
"You're dismissed early, Johnson," he said to the young woman standing way outside the door. He watched her entire body relax when she realized he wasn't there for a spot check. "Get some rest. I'll see you at training tonight." She left with a salute, and he padded in the clearance numbers required to enter the bridge. Another soldier awaited him inside: same deal, given early leave. As a rule, he liked to keep two people to a post, as one job was typically easier than the other -- not much trouble happened inside of the bridge, unless the navigators were squabbling over where to chart courses.
Cheik stepped into the cockpit with his hands clasped firmly behind his back, eyes scanning around the room. He wasn't quite sure what he was looking for, a familiar face or something at which to turn up his nose. He only found the former, though whom he found was certainly more known by reputation, not association. He did his damnedest to learn the names of everybody serving on the ship -- you can't defend without purpose, and the crew and vacationers aboard the Horizon was that purpose -- but there were people he gravitated to more than others. Those working the main bay, while competent and certainly qualified, were lost in their own little world. The medical crew saw his people as an obstacle, SI treated them like brutes, the fighter pilots were hellraisers, and the navigation crew, at least in Cheik's mind, we so far removed from the politics of the ship at large, blasting down orders from cushy chairs and computer systems, that they rarely saw eye to eye.
Still, he couldn't just ignore them. If nothing else, they required a touch more supervision -- better supervision. He'd found there weren't many fights a private, even an armed one, could break up -- they didn't command (or, some would say, deserve) the same respect he'd been working for his entire life. "Afternoon, Officer Navarre," he said, stepping up to the seat occupied by the co-pilot. "Everything on course, or has the A.I. finally decided to fly us into the neartest star?"