what a situation

I told that damn fool that we were pushing on into a region that wasn't safe.....but a Commodore of a Fleet Battle Group with her head up her ass doesn't listen very well to a civilian "analyst" foisted off on her by the politicians sitting in their offices back home.....back in Treaty space. I had been out here before, when she was still a Cadet at Academy, and I had been scared shitless that time, with us almost blowing the engines on the old Respect as we powered away from the hostile ambush......And here we were again, chasing after "pirates and hijackers" at the whim of the "important commercial interests "......

Trouble is, these "criminal elements and interstellar terrorists" are better armed than we are.....and they are on their home turf this far in from the frontier, almost to Machine Space.....The idiot bitch did one thing right, as far as I'm concerned anyway....she tried to get rid of me and my "paranoid fantasies" by ordering me to stand off from Fleet while she "punished" the enemy....she stuck me in a little Fifth Class with a junior crew she thought she could do without, and told me to go ahead and perform my analysis of the situation to my heart's content, just keep out of the way of the professionals.....

So the unknowns came out of nowhere and wiped out her Command.....and here I am, in a little tin can with a bunch of kids to babysit, with only a vague idea of how to get back to where any other humans are......