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Everybody has to eat, even super serious Spartan-II's.

The Chief's in the mess hall, sitting by himself and working his way through a ration of tasteless nutrient mush while working on something on his omnicomm. The Chief's never been one to really take refuge in the sensoriums to make food taste better, he's gotten used to it and doesn't even think about it much.

He's not unaware of what's going on around him, but he has most of the comings and goings of the room basically tuned out.

This means someone should bother him, y/n?

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"The way you're plowing through that goo," he sighed.

The Chief's not a very expressive guy, but he quirks an eyebrow a little as he swallows.

"Gotta eat something," he replies.

"Helps if you don't think about it," he adds after a second.

"Great advice," he said dryly. "Thinking about being stuck on a barvy worldship and the destruction of the universe is definitely easier than thinking about sucking down nutrislime."

"You get used to it," the Chief replies. "Or you find ways to distract yourself, things to keep you busy."

"...Or you go insane, but nobody's taken the third option yet."

"Probably someone would make you eat the food even if you went insane," he pointed out.

"Most likely the ship," the Chief agrees. "Maybe intravenously."

She's awful protective of them for an alien worldship.

"You are...?" the Chief asks finally.

"Ben Skywalker." He offered a hand across the table.

The Chief accepts it. His own hand is big and covered by a worn black and green gauntlet.

"Master Chief Petty Officer SPARTAN-117. Just call me "Chief"," he replies in kind.

"Either my memory's blanking out or I haven't met you."

And his memory (usually) doesn't blank out.

"You're the commander," Ben said, surprised. He'd expected that finding more members of the command staff would be difficult, or at least involve sneaking onto the bridge. "And yeah, I got the de-goo treatment a few days ago."

"I am," he confirms with a small nod. "You seem surprised. Why?"

The Chief tends to be one of the less visible members of the command crew. He isn't as much a face as Kirk or Leon, he's more comfortable staying aside and watching backs.

Ben shrugged. "Because I've been here a week and only met the internal comms officer. So what do you do?"

"Officially, I'm in charge of combat training and I'm part of ship security," he says. "Kennedy and the Captain deal with the crew more."

"I also fight, and occasionally get sent on errands by the ship. But that's most of us," he adds.

Ben couldn't see the point in being subtle here. "I want to get involved in ship security," he said.

"That you'll have to take up with Kennedy."

He sizes Ben up. "How old are you, Skywalker?"

"Sixteen," he said, and decided to preempt the inevitable. "I know it's young for a human to be doing security work -- I used to get it a lot. Still do, sometimes. But the Jedi Order doesn't work like most branches of the military. I had a commission on a black ops squad when I was thirteen. I know what I'm doing, and I'm not a risk to other guys on a team."

"It's not in my hands," says the Chief. He himself was in the field at Ben's age, though. He doesn't tend to write off as many of the young crew members as he used to, there are a surprising number with similar experiences. And it'd be hypocritical.

"I'm not the head of the department anymore, I don't set the policies. Last I heard, Kennedy's barred anyone under eighteen. You'll have to convince him."

"I'm planning on it," he shrugged, "but you still might be able to help me out. Do you have access to the ship's logs?"

"No. All we have is what we've recorded and remembered since the first of us woke up."

"Stacy's previous crew was killed, and she's been damaged. We can't access her older logs, and she can't even give us a list of the people in the pods."

This bothers him. He hates feeling in the dark, but there's nothing he can do about it.

"What did you have in mind though?"

"Not much," he offered casually. "Just trying to figure out if the ship's lying about the supposedly super-powerful destroyers of worlds who never attack the ship and have only been seen by one person on the crew."

"Supposedly there's been a hybrid Ohm aboard the ship, but that was before my time. The rest of the crew had to kill it," says the Chief.

"I was on the first shore team the ship sent down a couple of months ago. We found remnants of a distress signal, and my team located a spent nanite bomb."

He doesn't like thinking about that mission much. Between one member almost getting killed and Samus striking out on her own, things on his team went Rather Awry.

"We've also been in the Bleed most of the time, and if that works anything like Slipspace, you can't fight in it."

This has bothered him too, though. Mostly because he suspects that if all of this is true, their survival so far is mostly due to luck and going unnoticed.

"Before your time. That's convenient." He frowned. "What did the distress signal say? Are the Ohm the only ones who can make nanite bombs? If they destroy dimensions, why was there even a distress signal or bomb residue left?"

The Chief can't argue with the convenience of that. Or that the ship couldn't have altered the others' memories, she seems to have no problems doing that besides.

"They don't kill dimensions. Just worlds," he says. "They hunt down and destroy sentient life. That's why they used a nanite bomb. Set it to target humans and let it loose, problem solved."

He sounds rather grim. The Chief's not one to soften the truth, or what he's fairly certain is the truth. Ben's obviously not a little kid, so he'll be level with him.

"As for the message... I think I still have that. It was a warning."

The Chief's made a habit of keeping dumps of his helmet's logs to his omnicomm. He was wearing his suit during that mission, even though he hadn't been given full time access back. He pushes the current file aside and flicks through his archive.

"Here. Comm audio's not great, I'd take it to media if you want it clearer."

A message plays. It's in even worse "condition" than it already was, due to the omnicomm's very meager audio capacity. It sounds heavily digitized with an odd, blearing effect to the sound.

"--last log of Captain Amadeus Privost. I've volunteered to stay behind in my fighter to coordinate the last of the evacuation efforts and to transmit this to every operating communications outpost on every planet still in communication with the Alliance, so that they broadcast this warning as long as they're functional. -kssh- They came from nowhere. The Black, the outskirts, the sectors of the Multiverse that are mapped as uninhabited. They came without warning, they attacked without mercy. -kssh- were warned by our interdimensional allies the Da-krssh-g but we barely had time to evacuate. Millions. Millions gone in just hours. -kssh- Nanite device in Pleirdes Swamp--they were biological in nature, we couldn't stop them with EMPs, with anything. -kssshck- Swept through the world in a gray cloud. Targeted the major cities first--only targeted humanoid beings, instead of all organic life. People just...disappeared. The cloud swept over them and they were gone. Just...gone. We've gotten word that the colony on Mars has been attacked and destroyed the same way, the other planets in the Alliance, all -kssssh-. The Vespar managed to destroy the nanites but were nuked from orbit with point-singularity weapons. The -kssh- have offered us refuge, helped the survivors of our worlds evacuate from this dimension."

The voice is desperate.

"-ksssh- this is not -kssh- SOS or a request for aid. this is a warning. If you have landed on our world, evacuate immediately, to the nearest parallel dimension. This entire universe is now classified an interdimensional hot zone, charted as dangerous on all interdimensional maps. They've found it. They've found it and just like every other dimension they've found, they won't tolerate any sentient life besides themselves. If your universe has interdimensional defenses, keep them ready. If they're breached, evacuate your worlds before it's too late. -kssh-y won't stop. The Ohm won't stop until they're the last ones left in the Multiverse. They -kssh-"

That's all there is. All the static is lost data.

"The system this was on was pretty degraded. I'm surprised we got that much out of it."

Ben sat back as the audio dissolved into static. So it wasn't that the whole galaxy was gone, just the thousands of sentient species in it -- well, if the whole thing hadn't been faked.

Is that why I'm so calm about thousands of trillions of sentients dying? Because I'm still suspicious of the whole thing? Or is it something the ship did? If it can mind-rub the crew... He shook that thought away. His goal was to find out facts.

"And no one knows why they feel that way," he frowned. "The Ohm, I mean."

"The Daligig told us they've always been warlike, but they don't know a whole lot either. I have a log of that in here too."

This is why the Chief does things like this. They're useful. He goes looking for the file, it's lumped in with the events surrounding the push to the bridge of the ship, so it'll take him a moment to clear all of that out. It's also a comparatively long log, too.

In the meantime, he talks. "We don't know their reasons, and the Daligig at least claim not to. I can believe it, though. Before my universe got stripped, we'd just come out of a war with a religious coalition of about eight or so different alien species that decided humanity needed wiped out."

The war. It seemed so small in comparison to all of this, so very very small and so much more solvable... Okay, he's found the start of it. He starts clipping out the relevant section, stripping off unnecessary parts. His own vitals... motion tracker data... weapons and shield monitoring... He'll leave the video on this one, though. Bad for size, but pretty necessary in this.

"You'll probably have to take this one to media," he remarks.

Ben nodded. "I was born in the middle of the Yuuzhan Vong War. They destroyed their galaxy and came to wipe out and enslave the sentients in ours. Three hundred sixty-five trillion people died. But there was a reason they were warlike -- and knowing that helped negotiate the peace. That's why I want to find out about the Ohm." Well, that and the possibility of finding something interesting about the ship along the way.

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