Regarding Telemachus
"Some men are stronger at the broken places, and some aren't. I am reminded of those old sayings at infrequent and damn inconveient times, Dylan muttered to any attendant ghosts who chose to listen to his midnight musings.
There are some things that endure the test of time: love, loyalty, commitment to a cause. Its not this man feels any nostalgia for the good old days, despite his stated goal of bringing those good old days back.
Maybe the others that made up the crew of the Andromeda believe that Dylan Hunt carries his ghosts around like a solider hiking with a back pack loaded down with everything except the kitchen sink? "I guess they do," Dylan griped, grunting from the effort of moving his still healing arm where a Magog grunt soldier had bitten upper forearm and broken through the skin.
Dylan rubbed the scab and tried to block out the memories. His attention was momentarily distracted by the glowing readout of the digital clock standing at attention on his night stand table informing that it was time for the skeleton watch at 4:00 hours.
There are nights when the scars from his battles overlap themeselves, there are times when he stands the night watch and he can swear that at least one ghost that haunts his dreams can be identified.
It's his old second in command, Gaheris Rhade. His best friend, his confidant, and finally his betrayer, on the eve that the original Commonwealth fell. 'Where are you now, old friend?" Dylan mused in the back of his mind. 'The funny thing about ghosts, they only manifest at night, and the harsh light of day dispels them back into the netherworld. I never believed in spectral manifestations of any kind. Gaheris had reasons behind his actions, and I doubt it could be chocked up to his simply being a Nietzchean, no matter how Dylan may have wanted to simplfy the matter.
A little mocking voice in the back of his mind reminded him, that he'd been too blind to read the signs, that Gaheris had dropped hints right up until the instant he had shown up on the command deck with a knife in his hand, and they had battled it out. If he had believed in ghosts, spooks or things that went bump in the night, Dylan speculated that in whatever afterlife Nietzcheans believed, Gaheris would probably be laughing at his old friend's night time hangups. "Well, more power to him." Dylan thought and got out of bed.
He dragged his uniform of the back of a chair where he'd laid out and put it on. The simple act of buttoning up the peral buttons over the black fabric helped drive off some off the more painful memories from the past.
The here and now was all that mattered and how he wished to shape the future should be his top priority.
Fully dressed in his High Guard uniform, Dylan picked up a floppy hard copy and perused the comminque he had recieved earlier that evening.
Dylan read the text and thought about how much he had already achieved in his bid to restore the Commonwealth, when a line leapt out at him. He reread it several times before the gist finally registered in the foggy parts of his brain. "Telemachus Rhade' direct descedant of Gaheris Rhade' It couldn't be was Dylan's first reaction. His second was to laugh it off, as some one's s not very good attempt at a practical joke. But then he could count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who knew about Gaheris. So what did it all mean?
"One crisis at a time, "Dylan thought and tossed the floppy onto the floor in a slick wadded up ball. "Priororities, remember, those darn priorities."