Innes in Command
Copyright© 2026 by Lumpy
Chapter 26
As was becoming a habit lately, at the end of his shift, Innes didn’t want to go back to his room; he needed to talk to a friendly face. Instead of trying to hunt her down or barge into her room again, he messaged Sage to see if she could meet him in the observation lounge.
Thankfully, she agreed quickly.
She was already there when he got to the lounge, having picked her normal table by the viewport where she could see the planet spinning outside of it.
She loved watching planets and stars.
“What happened?” she asked when she looked up at him as he approached the table. “You look upset.”
That stopped Innes in his tracks. The one thing she’d made clear early on in their conversation, and repeated several times since, was that she wasn’t great at reading social cues or body language, which made it surprising that she could look at him and figure out he was upset.
“That obvious?” he asked, settling into the chair across from her.
“Well, the message you sent made it sound like you wanted someone to talk to, since normally you message with specific plans like getting dinner. But you also look sad.”
In spite of his mood, that made him smile a little. Trust Sage to work out the clues from his message. She was good at that.
“I’ll be leaving the station soon.”
“Your ship is coming back?”
“Yes, but that’s not ... I’m being relieved of my position for insubordination, and they’re putting someone else in charge of the detachment.”
“When?”
“In seven days. The Illustrious is already on its way here from Hokkaido.”
“The ship is coming all the way back just to pick you up?”
“No. The official reason is the ship is going to run anti-piracy operations along the belt, but the captain made it clear she was doing that so they’d be close when I get recalled to Nord for a court-martial.”
“Oh,” she said in a way that indicated even she understood how bad that was. She was quiet for a moment and then asked, “Do you regret what you did?”
Innes had thought about that a lot since receiving the captain’s message that morning. It wasn’t an easy question to answer.
“I regret that this is how the world works, and I regret that the Navy puts politics above its duty, but do I regret doing what I did?” He said, and paused, examining his feelings once more. “No, I don’t regret that.”
“Why not?”
“Because this is all linked to the piracy. I’ve already seen what it’s costing, the lives it’s taking. Those people on the Andomaru deserved better than what they got, and so did everyone else who’s died out here because someone decided their profits mattered more than people’s lives. I take my oath seriously, Sage. I was charged with defending the Republic up to and including with my life, and that’s what I was trying to do.”
“But?”
“But it’s made me feel like joining the Navy was a mistake, like maybe I was naive to think any of those words meant anything.”
Sage didn’t say anything right away; she just stared at him. Or rather, into him, like he was a problem she was working on.
Finally, she said, “I don’t think it was a mistake.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s clear even to me that you care about people and your responsibility. From how you’ve talked about other officers, like your Lieutenant Wexler, not all of them do. Some of them are just...” She made a small gesture with her hand, searching for the right word. “Occupying space until they see a benefit they can get from something or are told something specific to do.”
“That doesn’t seem to matter much when you’re facing a court-martial.”
“It matters to the people here. It matters to the civilians on that ship you saved. More importantly, it means something to you, which means you should fight for it. Instead of letting the Navy change you, you should change the Navy.”
Innes laughed and said, “I’m not sure that’s possible.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m one ensign who can’t even manage to not get court-martialed before his first year of service is over. The Navy has been around for over two thousand years. It has admirals and ministers and noble Houses all invested in keeping things exactly the way they are. What am I supposed to do against that?”
Sage tilted her head, that particular gesture she made when she was about to say something she considered obvious but knew others might not see it the same way.
“You know, I’ve studied the universe my entire adult life, and the one thing it has taught me is that anything is possible, though some things are just more ... improbable than others.”
“That’s not exactly comforting.”
“I’m not trying to comfort you. I’m trying to show you that the universe doesn’t care about your preconceived notions. The human race escaped a dying Earth and reached the stars. We’ve colonized over one hundred star systems since then. We’ve looked to the core of the galaxy and studied stars that formed back to the dawn of the universe, and in all of that, in all those billions of years of light we’ve examined, we’ve found no other sign of life aside from ourselves.”
Innes frowned slightly. “Okay.”
“Look at how improbable life is. In the hundreds of thousands of planets we’ve studied, in the millions of bodies we’ve surveyed, ours is the only one to spring forth not just intelligent life, but life at all. At least, greater than microbiological. Do you know the odds of that? And yet here we are having this conversation. If the universe can do that, then you can change the way a Republic behaves. You can make it follow its higher ideals, if you really want to.”
Innes didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t expected sympathy since she’d always been clear that wasn’t what she was good at, but he’d expected some kind of recognition of the position he was in. An acknowledgment of his frustration.
What he hadn’t even considered was her advising him to fight back. He wasn’t sure he agreed with her, but it certainly was a different way of looking at things.
“I didn’t know you were into philosophy,” he said.
Sage looked at him like he was confused and said, “It’s not philosophy. It’s math.”
That got another laugh out of him.
“My mistake. Still, I appreciate it. You really do have an amazing way of looking at the world. It gives me a lot to think about.”
Sage shrugged, “What are friends for?”
Jayden Tan was going through reports. He hated reports. He hadn’t considered, when tasked with this mission, that a cover came with some of the actual work that the false position would actually have.
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