Personal Log
Ensign Noemi Laporte
UED Solaris

Kassim's bravado peaked in a singularly pitiful combustion of alcohol and ego last night. When the shouting and the vomiting was done, he cried into my flight suit while I dragged him back to his bunk. 

We had been debriefed and given a few hours of downtime after the Nauticus incident. He drank to Major Prathanya and the bomb crew, he drank to the Nauticus' blundering captain, he drank to the Gefs and 'killing for what we believe in', and then he went off like a magazine breach. There was a lot of yelling. It never got very close to making sense.

He swaggers and brags but inside he is helpless. He has seen death on a scale he never expected - thousands of lives snuffed out in an instant aboard the Akula, the Ranvir. I think, in the end, that all his bravado over the past few days was only a shield against something inside him, some terrible unanswered question that has been tearing him apart. 'What's the point?', maybe, or 'why does this hurt so much?' 

He tried to tell himself that he didn't need a reason to fight, but when all his sound and fury was burnt away, he had nothing left to keep him going, and no way to justify the daily necessity of murder. You could see it in him - he talked big before every fight, but afterwards, he was the one fraying at the seams.

They detoxed him in sickbay and he's still on the roster as a backup pilot if we need to go all out. But somehow I don't think he'll ever sit in a cockpit again.

I wish I could say that I understand his collapse, but somehow I feel nothing but...scorn.



