Personal Log, Noemi Laporte

'If you are Fedayeen, you've always been Fedayeen.' 

That was all I got. Postflight, medical, debrief, damage assessment on the convoy hit, strategic ram assessment, initial projections on Steele's countermove (there's always a countermove), and then while I'm showering, this scarred Indo-Polish brute cuffs me on the shoulder and says it. "If you are Fedayeen, you've always been Fedayeen." Then he ducks out and leaves, still dripping.

I turned to Kovacs and asked who the hell that was. "That was Al-Da'wa," he said. "Welcome to the lion cage. I guess we've been waiting for you." 

So I'm in now, part of their psychopathically utilitarian meritocracy. No ribbons, no ceremony, just a punch on the shoulder and that gem of a benediction. Maybe the ceremony was the part where I did nothing to stop the murder of three of my own people.

Shit happens, right? Like that joke: what's the difference between the ship's surgeon and the mortician? Well, they're both going to get blood on the deck, but one of them doesn't have to worry about getting it off his hands before he starts on the next guy. When there aren't going to be any survivors it stops feeling like murder. Just a transaction. Spend lives, obtain goal. There's a certain Admiral who understands that logic.

Felt good to get back in the cockpit. The Ainsarii handles well. Stealth capability is remarkable. Riding on a few tons of antimatter ordnance, that's also remarkable. I could remark on that at great length.

Al-Da'wa? How can it have been Al-Da'wa? He was a little plumber guy, not a sumo star with acid burns. He keeps changing. It doesn't make any sense, unless he's some kind of master of disguise, but it wouldn't be the first time I've felt that way on this ship. Sometimes it feels like their dreamscape is bleeding into reality here. Uniform discipline is nonexistent, the operators barbecue lamb in the aft environmental trunk, and Thorn and her fellow analysts vanish into their Frame 16 fortress for hours at a time, communing with CASSANDRA - the simulator mainframe we never get to see and which is, for reasons unknown, guarded by a platoon of combat armor. 

Going to take a piss. Pause log.

Resume.

Bellwether 4.12. Pretty name. A civilization of philosophers, artists, and scholars, huh? That's what we wanted to be, too. We should have been on the same side of this war, but reality got in the way and now they're just a new kind of chemistry in the blast spectrum. If they ever find out what really happened out there it'll mean the end of the Federation, but hell, that's basically status quo these days.

Going to build some rapport with K, Falconer and Vidaura. Weird chemistry between them, like sharks cruising together because they're after something they can't take down alone. Vidaura keeps trying to open me up and though I know I'm tempted I can already tell she's the most dangerous of the bunch.

That's what this whole place is like. A federation of sharks.