Lieutenant Commander Ames Defacto is the Second Officer of SS Charm Quark, Quasar 15A bomber.(Editor note : this was written before the raising of the alert status to RED and has been cleansed by the DDS Censor Office for operational security reasons)
Its been some time since my last posting (late October in fact), there are a couple of reasons for that. Following our successful training deployment in September Sunrise SS Charm Quark went into space dock for some heavy maintenance in November and early December. Following that, and a week long test voyage (to make sure everything was back in the right place!) CQ (as we call her) was allocated to the 1st Attack Squadron and thus was one of the three ships that remain armed and on very short notice to deploy.
In late January there was a rotation of ships and we became the "spare Quasar". The DDS try to maintain 2 attack squadrons, each of 3 ships. Obviously as there are only 8 Quasars often there will be a couple spare. In practice a number of ships will be unavailable at any one time due to maintenance or training and we have in the past only had 5 Quasars available and had to draw in a Panther to fill the gap in the 2nd Attack Squadron.
However this time there was a ship spare. We are available for general duties in the vicinity of GHQ. As we may be called upon at any time to replace a ship in the ready squadron that develops a fault we tend to stay within a day or so of GHQ. We were scheduled to do a patrol along the DDS-DTA border however the HCS-Molab tensions have changed those plans and recalled us back to GHQ (a Starsystem will do our duty instead).
Although we remain a spare ship we are ready to join any deployment. It would be similar to our training mission only this time with live targets that can fire back. Most of our crew have seen service in the ABBO War and some in earlier conflicts so we know what might happen and are ready for it. We train to a high degree of professionalism just for these scenarios. Whatever might happen over the next few weeks and months SS Charm Quark is ready!
