Cohost writing prompt: @make-up-a-starship-pilot — Starship pilot who’s over here! No, over there. Nope, over here, sucker.
"I've been in this brig for forty-five hours, Admiral," Alkane Hirst says, grinning. "You've got three more to actually charge me with something."
"That's right," the admiral says dryly. "I do. And the lab boys just finished their ship identity analysis on the sensor dump."
"Oh, now," Hirst says. "You arrested me when you didn't even have that. Sounds like an abuse of process."
"Somebody buzzed the fleet's new flagship with an unidentified lockstep-warped hundred-vessel formation out of nowhere," the admiral says. "And then they all lockstep-warped back out into thin air. Makes people nervous. Makes people reach for unaccountable detention anti-terror laws."
"I happen to know you're a vocal opponent of those," Hirst says.
"I'm not the case investigation team," the admiral says. "Who have three hours to pull a ship ident out of the sensor data and match it to your vessel."
"I don't have a hundred ships," Hirst says.
"You've been agitating for years for the Navy to include officer training on hybrid sublight-warp battlefield information effects," the admiral says. "And if the investigation team deem their evidence sufficient to charge you, they'll be able to pull your drive logs. Look for a series of ninety-nine thirty-light-second jumps, half a minute apart."
"On the strength of what?" Hirst says, still grinning. "A nepo captain's embarrassment, and my passion for pedagogy?"
"Your point's been made, Hirst," the admiral says, dryer still. "It's being reiterated loudly in the Navy's conference chambers and classrooms as we speak. I'm not here to debate you, or give you a platform to be smug; I'm asking, off the record, whether you want to survive this. Because if being right was enough to get you through, you'd never have had to pull this stunt to start with, and the thing about nepo babies is that they have might on their side."
There's a silence.
"Well, then," the admiral says, more quietly. "Now shall we talk?"