I knew something was off with my new job when I woke up from cryo-stasis and was told that the previous and original me had met with an unfortunate, freak accident while routinely scanning a sector of space for my new job. Not wanting to repeat history, I decided that the best course of action would be to get some experience under my belt with a more competent crew, which in this case consists entirely of mindless automatons that would unquestioningly obey my every questionable command. Unfortunately the hardware store only had two androids left in stock, so I had to settle with taking a clone of a member of my previous crew who goes by the name Kael Sandival, but will henceforth in this report be refereed to as Reginald.
I assigned to Reginald the tasks of Communications Officer and Chief of Security for our mission, though he also insisted on taking the title of Chief Engineer, even though all the engineering seemed to be done by me and the androids with no supervision or input on his part. I'm pretty sure Reginald took the title just because he liked the lightning bolt on the badge. I took the remaining jobs of Captain, Lieutenant(these two ranks I have combined into the title of Ship Lord), Tactical Officer and Science Officer. The only thing left to do was a launching ceremony for our new Sitting Duck class exploration vessel which I dubbed the UNSC-HMS-USS Coppelia's Casket.
The results of my preparation at the end of the day was quite pleasing, if a bit confusing to some degree. We ran a full five exploratory missions that very day and were constantly plagued by not only significant external threats, but also several surprising internal problems. While exploring the "safer" parts of the galaxy our ship was constantly assaulted from multiple threats, some of which were cosmic forces like asteroids and space amoeba, and some of which were hostile unknown life who seems to get their ship designs from 1930's science fiction novels, the oddest of which was a spinning buzz saw style flying saucer, of which we saw two; the first one we threw off course with a missile, while the second one we decided to deal with using a tactic Reginald liked to call "blowing the hell out of it".
The problems we experienced on the ship proper make me question Reginald's competence as chief of security as not only did saboteurs sneak on board our ship on multiple occasions, but an entire armed party of skirmishers also even managed to get on board our humble vessel. His skills as chief engineer seemed just as questionable(not that he was really doing the job to begin with) since we had multiple shield malfunctions while in flight as well as problems with the warheads on the missiles. Thankfully, the hard work of our androids, and Reginald sometimes in fairness, were able to overcome all of these problems mid flight, but I have to wonder why our ship's routine inspections didn't uncover these bluntly obvious problems.
As far as the individual missions are concerned, we took some damage to the ship on the first one, which can easily be attributed to learning on the job and shouldn't be subtracted from our paychecks, no matter how slow our crew of four were at reacting to a fighter that, in fairness, we did try to shoot down, even if it did leave the area a bit before we started firing. Due to a slight accounting error, we were sent to scan the same sector of space for missions two through four, and I think the experience got the better of Reginald, as several times on the third and fourth mission he used the communications systems to inform me that the communications system was down, which was an actual problem on all of our other missions as well(in space no one can hear you shout). The fifth mission thankfully went quite smoothly, which bolsters my confidence in my ship lording abilities enough that I may try to command more of my previous crew on a new mission to the depths of unexplored space.
Through my full 50 minutes of experience in deep space exploration I picked up specializations in data analysis, which primarily consists of a remote to keep the screen saver on the ships computer from coming on once which then explodes after one use in a pretty fireworks display of the corporation incorporated logo, and hyper-navigation, which taught me this neat trick that lets me use the ships warp drive to slow down time for everyone who isn't a member of our crew so I can take my lunch break while the androids deal with the external threats, though this also blows some unimportant life support circuits or something not really necessary for our mission. Reginald also picked up a couple of specializations, though his were in special operations, which seems to consist of an instruction manual for you to read before you try and operate one of the questionable systems on our ship, and Rocketeering, which comes with a remote similar to mine, except it launches a missile instead of managing with the computer system's needy nature, and it doesn't explode in anywhere near as pretty a manor. Programming our androids to use the specializations that we weren't using at the time was also quite nice as union rules prevent us from using more than one specialization per person/android per flight.
I sign off in hopes of not meeting my end in a future exploration mission in "peaceful" space before my five year contract expires, though If I do I wish my clone better luck; you'll need it.
Report for missions on 6/24/200013 AD by
Clone of Capable Tiberius Insworthy, Shiplord of The UNSC-HMS-USS Coppelia's Casket
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