What the Stars May Bring

It was all a Test

Four days later, Cooper underwent surgery for her injured shoulder. As she regained consciousness, she felt like the past few days were just a dream. 'A test! It was only a test! I can't believe it!' she thought as she drifted in and out of awareness.

'When I read that one of the Explorer class ships was no longer in service I thought they had scuttled it, not that it was being used for training,' she mused. 'I have to admit that it was a very realistic scenario.'

It turned out that they had gassed the six candidates while they were sleeping and transferred them over to the other heavily damaged Explorer class ship. They had also set things on a timer so that everything went haywire all at once. From the sideways thrust, to when the alarms sounded everything had all been carefully planned and orchestrated.

The one thing that had not been planned was someone getting badly injured. That was the reason that they had cut the test short.

Under the original plan, the candidates were meant to spend a week before the Lexington reached out to them and told them it was all a simulation. It was all thanks to her dislocated shoulder they had been let off the hook seven days early.

'The good news was that Simmons and I both scored very well,' Cooper thought. 'We won't know the actual scores until I'm out of med bay.'

---

There had been some minor complications with Cooper's arm, but she could finally leave sick bay after another few days. All the other candidates, except for Johnson, had visited her regularly now that the mandatory double shifts were a thing of the past.

'I'm glad to hear that,' Cooper thought as she made her way to her berth to wash herself off and to put on a new jump suit. Then her belly growled, and she decided to go to the mess hall for a bite to eat.

For a change, Simmons met Cooper in the hallway as they both made their way to the mess hall. There they met up with Anderson and Watanabe who were just finishing their meal.

"I just heard the most wonderful news," Anderson said as Cooper and Simmons sat down across from the two female officers.

"What's that?" Cooper replied.

"I heard that the brass have come to a consensus and that Captain Wilson will announce our new ranks to us sometime today," Anderson said with a conspiratorial wink.

"That is good news," Cooper said as she took a bite of her food and a drink from her cup.

"I'm so excited!" Anderson exclaimed. "I can't wait to see who get's to be captain."

Watanabe chimed in, "I am sure that you will score highly, Cooper. I, on the other hand, I did not do so well."

"Watanabe, don't put yourself down," Cooper said. "It was an extremely stressful situation, and you had never been in an emergency like that."

"Neither had you," Watanabe responded. "You still performed a lot better than I did."

"Our training included very realistic drills," Simmons said as he ate a fork full of meatloaf smothered in catsup. After he swallowed, he continued, "Therefore it was pretty easy to fall into leadership roles."

"If Simmons hadn't taken charge I would have," Cooper admitted. "They grilled that into both of us. Always take charge of a situation if there is no other qualified leader."

"That true," Watanabe admitted. "You both did wonderfully."

"So Anderson," Watanabe asked, "How did things go with Johnson in main engineering?"

"It was a disaster," Anderson admitted. "Not only was he a pain to work with, he tried to micromanage everything. We didn't even make it to engineering by the time that you had stopped the lateral spin."