Kassandra Thytos: Not The Federation's Sweetheart

Posted on Dec 20, 2016 @ 6:54am by Captain Kassandra Thytos
Edited on on Dec 20, 2016 @ 6:55am

Mission: Aftermath

“Kassandra Thytos: Not the Federation’s Sweetheart” - by Aleksey Nikitin

(cont. "Her New Home")

Gentle readers, it is my great pleasure to finally present to you an interview with the indomitable Captain Thytos (hereafter referred to as “Major” as is convention to avoid confusing her with the Captain of the Phoenix, Michael Turlogh Kane). This interview was conducted before the horrific events of the past few weeks, and so we will not discuss the subject, for those of my readers who do not wish to be reminded of The Event. I had wished to do it sooner, however I was barred by Starfleet, who requested that I not publish any material while her case was under review. However since she has recently been acquitted of Neo-Essentialist involvement, I felt this would be a fortuitous time to release this interview.

To my great surprise, I survived this encounter more or less intact, asides from a rather horrific hangover the likes of which I haven’t had the misfortune to experience since my much younger days.

I had begun to despair of ever catching the Major for an interview - when she is not working, she tends to be down in the gym either beating up, and being beaten up by all comers, holographic and flesh and blood, or chiseling away at her already sculpted physique - entirely unconducive to an interview. I almost thought the woman did nothing else but work, work out, and sleep, when to my surprise, late one night, I found her in the lounge, nursing a glass in front of her, making idle conversation with the Daemon bartender John Doe.

I made my way over to her, and sat down next to her.

“D’ya think I’m illiterate, ‘cos a’ the way I talk?” She demanded without preamble, her eyes never straying from the glass in front of her.

I must stop my narration here for a moment, and explain that after much consideration, I have chosen to preserve Kassandra Thytos’ accent in this piece, as I feel that transferring it into standard dialect would erase many of the subtleties and would, necessarily, cause me to misrepresent of her words. I have, however, decided to remove the profanities from her speech, so as not to shock my more sensitive readers.

“I beg your pardon?” I asked, unsure why she had ambushed me with the question.

“Do. You. Think. I. Am. Illiterate?” she said this slowly and deliberately, choking back her accent. She slowly turned to face me, her lip curling up in annoyance.

“No…” I answered, as it seemed the only answer that would not incite her rage further.

“Then ‘splain to me why you think I’m gonna talk to you after ya basically called me an ugly redneck?” She glowered at me, and it became plain to me that she had taken umbrage at my initial characterization. I confess I thought for a moment about apologizing, but I had a feeling that she wouldn’t respect me, nor talk to me further if I proved to be someone she could push around.

“Are you saying you think I lied? Because from where I’m sitting now...” I said with a smile. She stared with venom at me for a moment and then began to laugh. She has a nice laugh: it’s warm, unrestrained, and there’s no artifice in it. She aimed a light punch to my shoulder and clapped me on the back.

“Naw. Guess I can’t say you lied,” she chuckled. “But then again ya are a second rate journalist with a propensity for purple prose, so I guess ya can’t help an uneducated uggo like me bein’ offended by readin’ your drivel. Alright Amanda Ros, I guess you can stay.” She leaned over the bar and grabbed a bottle from underneath it. She slid it across the bar to me. “I don’t talk war stories with anyone but drinkin’ buddies. You ask me a question, you gotta take a shot. Interview’s over once you’re too drunk to keep goin’.”

“What makes you think I’m going to ask you for war stories?” I asked with curiosity as I pulled out a pen and a pad of paper, an anachronistic conceit of mine, and poised my pen over the pages, waiting.

“Because those are the only stories of mine people ever want to hear.” She stared back at me evenly over the rim of her glass as she took a sip, and I was struck by both their color and the blank glassiness of them. I wondered how long she’d been drinking to be that deep in her cups.

“So why don’t we start with something different; Tell me about the Kassandra Thytos who isn’t a Marine,” I said, and set the pen to the paper.

“The Kassandra Thytos who ain’t a Marine is a sadsack sittin’ in the Vulgar Tribble at midnight, bribin’ a complete stranger so she don’t gotta drink alone. Ain’t nunna yer reader’s gonna wanna hear ‘bout that.” This was said with a self deprecating smile, chuckle, and I fancied, a bit of wistful sadness. I had no sooner penned that thought then she sat up straight and glared at me. “That was a joke, Scoop. Weren’t no self deprecatin’ wistfulness about it. Fer tha love of… You scratch that last bit out. Wouldn’t want people gettin’ the wrong impression. Also, I’m blind, not blind drunk. You trynna get me in trouble with the Cap'n?”

I looked back up to her face and scrutinized her more closely. The lights had dimmed since we’d started talking, and I could now see points of light glimmering under her skin.

“Those lights have to do with how you see?” I asked, reaching forward with the intent to bring her hand closer so I could see it. She slapped my hand away sharply, then recanted, and rolled up her sleeve turning her wrist over for me to take a look.

“Yeah. Over a thousand meters of nanofilaments connected to miniature sensor arrays threaded just under my skin, all leadin’ to a processin’ unit that’s wired directly inta the cognitive processin’ centers of my brain.” She tilted her head to the side and pulled her ear forward and loosened a piece of synthskin to reveal a metal plate. “I got what they call cortical blindness, my eyes work just fine, but my visual cortex is shot. Got a parasite on one a the planets we was stationed, got inta my brain and chewed it up. Docs said it looked like swiss cheese. Thought I wasn’t gonna be able to see again, but then I guess some brain trust at one a’ the universities wanted t’ try usin’ Borg implants, an’ I got volunteered.”

“What’s it like to see with your sensor net?”

“I don’t. Think of it like this- You take a look at this bottle, right? First thing your mind has to do is translate what you’re seeing into an image, and then analyze that image to decide what you’re seeing, right? The sensor nets skip that middle step, and are wired right into the part of the brain which processes the information. So you see a bottle, I *know* it’s a bottle. I know it’s made of blue glass, I know the glass is replicated, I know the shape, that it is exactly 30 cm tall, and slightly lopsided, prolly to make it look more rustic, that it’s half fulla vodka, an’ a bit more besides. Fer instance, someone, prolly Sneekum, has watered it down. So it ain’t seein’ really, when I meet people I gotta kinda imagine them in my head to get an idea of what they actually look like. Not to mention they’ve got limited range. If we were planetside, I’d not be able to see further than about a kilometer. But I guess they got some advantages.”

“Like?” I pressed, more to keep her talking than anything else. I had no idea how long her candor would continue, and I’ve been in this job to know that letting someone stop talking gives them time to reconsider talking to you in the first place.

“Like givin’ me an edge in hand-to-hand, an’ in close range firefights. The sensor nets are much more accurate than eyeballin’ things, and I’m able to anticipate people’s moves almost ‘fore they decide to do it. I kin sense the muscles fibers beginnin’ a’ more and anticipate where n’ when they’re gonna attack. Means I kin fight against much bigger opponents than I used ta, since I’m much less likely to get hit.” She ran her finger around the rim of her glass and took a slow, almost loving sip from it.

“Bigger opponents like Lieutenant Barton?” I asked her. She shrugged with what I can only describe as humble cockiness. “So which of you would win in a fight?”

She choked on her drink and chuckled, then reached out and filled my shot glass, evidently deciding that I was out of free questions.

“I think I like you a little bit more since you ain’t automatically assumin’ it’s Barton. Everyone else thinks he’s the one who’d win. Depends what type a fight are you talkin’ about. Are we talkin’ a fair fight? That would probably favor Barton. Unfair fight, it’d depend on if we’re talking firefight, bare knuckle fight, or melee weapon fight. Barton would win the firefight. He knows my limits and would stay out of range. Bare knuckle fight, that’d be a long, drawn out affair, and it’d basically come down to if Barton got in a few lucky shots, since he’s got enough power to cream me into the floor. I’m strong, but I ain’t got the strength to seriously damage that rhino, so I’d have to rely on breaking limbs and hittin’ nerves. Now, melee weapon fight with bladed weapons, I think I’d likely make out better. Blades require more precision. I’m a much smaller target than Barton, an’ he’d have a hard time gettin’ through my defenses, while his will be like giant gapin’ holes for someone as small as me. Plus it don’t take much pressure to cut someone so the strength differential is a lot less. So, fists, draw, phasers, my loss, bladed weapons, my win.”

“Fair enough. You know I’m going to ask Barton the same question, right?”

“Yeah well, he’s going to tell you he’d win everything,” she said with a slightly sour expression on her face, and didn’t elaborate.

“So why did you join the Marines?” I changed topic before she could start brooding. Her eyes flicked back to me, a habit, a remembered response, they remained unfocused and glassy.

“It was either that or being a farmer on Sherman’s planet. I ain’t intellectual enough ta get inta Starfleet, I ain’t much with words, nor art neither. So even if I left Sherman’s Planet, what was there for me? Nothin’. But I was brave enough, athletic enough, and just dumb enough to be good at fightin’. Got in a little scrap with some Klingons, my Second, Horatio saved my butt, and the rest is history.”

“Must have been tough for someone of your… I mean, people...-” I hastily poured another shot, and downed it. She looked at me with a sardonic slyness in her eyes.

“You mean ‘musta been hard gettin respect, what with you bein’ so short and all,’ am I right? I’m not a big woman, I know it. An’ yeah, it was hard, an’ still is to get people to take me seriously. Ain’t bein’ a woman or nothin’, not gonna play that card, but when you’re real small like me, you quickly learn that you gotta be twice as tough, an’ not take an inch of nonsense from noone nohow.” She shook her head hard and narrowed her eyes, poking emphatically at my chest with her finger to emphasize her point. She seemed deadly serious. “You gotta prove you’re the toughest person in the room, or else you’ll get walked all over.”


“I guess that’s what I meant. I guess I’m still trying to figure out why you wanted all of that. Why any of your Marines want all of that. I’ve been around them on occasion, and the one thing I keep hearing is pride and love for the Federation and everything it stands for. I guess I don’t understand how you can feel that way, and yet, still choose a path that’s the antithesis of all the Federation’s ideals, all of Humanity’s ideals.”

“You say that because you’re from the Core Worlds. Listen, go talk to all my Marines, most of them come from the colonies- planets on the fringes. Think about in the last two decades, all the things that have happened. The Locusta Regime, the Kem d’neel, all the little wars and conflicts that‘ve happened. Every single time, the colony worlds have been in the firin’ line first. Ain’t a single one of my Marines that don’t remember practicin’ drills to hide in bunkers, or bein’ glued to the ‘nets, watching some sort of invadin’ force movin into Federation space, prayin’ and hopin’ they would go some other direction. So no, ain’t no dissonance with us. We’re protectin’ the Federation, hopin’ to make it possible for other generations on our home planets to live the same life as the core worlds.”

“But sometimes you aren’t.” I said quietly. She was relaxed enough with me, her words flowing easily enough that I knew it was time to go in for the kill and ask her the question I really wanted. “What about Barbossa?”

She was silent for so long that I glanced up and looked at her, fearful for a moment that she was fighting her notorious anger. Instead she had a slightly stunned expression on her face, and I realized with surprise that I’d actually managed to put her at a loss for words. She frowned down at her hands the distance in her eyes finally matching the expression on her face. She licked her lips and then swiped at them with the back of her hand to remove the spittle and swallowed hard.

“Barbossa.” It might have been my imagination, but (here she snatched my notebook from my hands and crossed out might and replaced it with ‘was’) she seemed to choke it out like the word hurt her. “Crew been talking?”

“A starship is like a small town, you can only avoid gossip if you actively try. You know, you should tell me about it.”

“Why bother?” She poured a shot of liquor into her glass until it threatened to overflow, and then slammed it back. “You already know what happened. Everyone already knows what happened.”

“Why bother? So people will know what actually happened, why what happened happened. I’m a good judge of character, and I don’t think you’re the sort of person who kills for fun, or out of malice. The genie is out of the bottle now, so you might as well help people understand what you did.”

“Ain’t sure anything I say is gonna stop the whispers, but you’re right. Ain’t gonna be able to hide from that name no more, and it ain’t like the government that ordered me to remain silent on the issue’s around anymore. So why not. If they’re gonna hate me, might as well hate me for the facts.” She poured another glass, not quite as full as the last, and drained it. She sat in silence for a long while, staring at her hands. I got the sense that she was organizing her thoughts, putting it together, choosing words, and I also got the sense that I was seeing a side of her that not many people ever did. For a moment her brash bluster fell away, and I knew that she was thinking the deep thoughts most thought her incapable of. She took a deep breath, and her chin fell towards her chest, resting for a moment as she decided where to start. “I guess I oughta start by tellin’ you about Barbossa.”

* * *=/\=* * *

For the sake of clarity, gentle readers, I have taken the liberty of condensing her history of the planet into the most cogent points, if only to make it more concise, and because her rather colorful descriptions and choices of words might shock some of you.

Barbossa sits just on the edge of the Triangle, a few light years from the Federation borders. Situated so near our borders the planet escaped the fate of piracy, pillage, and slavery that so many of the pre-warp cultures within the triangle have been subjected to. Teams of Federation Anthropologists had been regularly observing the culture of Barbossa for several decades because it was an anomaly in that a relatively uniform global culture had been reached when the technology levels were medieval at best. Three decades ago advanced technologies began to spring up seemingly out of nowhere, and within five years they had achieved warp. The archeologists were forced to make an impromptu first contact.

During that first contact, they found out the surprising truth about Barbossa: It actually reached the cusp of warp technology nearly two millennia ago during a brutal war between several planetary ruling families. During that time, technology proliferated faster than society could change to encompass the ever growing power it had available, and much like Humans, they turned their thoughts to the destruction of their fellow man. The arms race culminated in the detonation of an antimatter bomb in one of the largest cities on the planet, and a revolution.

Horrified by the atrocity, the common people of Barbossa rose up and destroyed their ruling class in a brutal, bloody civil war. At the end of it, they decided that they were better off without technology, and united their planet under a repressive religious theocracy that strictly forbade science and technology, and sought to cultivate the virtues that the people of Barbossa wished they could embody.

The cognoscenti of Barbossa couldn’t bear to see the good thrown out with the bad, and so they hid caches of information and technology around the planet, and secretly passed the forbidden knowledge down a long line of those they trusted. Two millennia later, their carefully planted seeds bore fruit, and their descendants found one of their caches and began to release benevolent technologies: medicines, things to make the harvest more productive, things to allow the disabled more freedom in society (“You know, the good stuff!” as Kassandra put it). This began to sway the public sentiment in favor of science, and the religious theocracy began to crumble around the edges.

The death knell of the religious hegemony was the simultaneous achievement of spaceflight and warp. Once it was proven that they were not alone in the galaxy, and furthermore that all the religious explanations of the structure of the universe were wrong, it all came tumbling down. But of course, things are never that easy. Although society transitioned amazingly well by deciding to keep the religious ethics and social structure, and applying them to their pursuits of the sciences, small extremist religious sects began to spring up around the planet, preaching that the acceptance of science was a sign of the end of times.

Only one of them, the Covenant of Tanis, posed any sort of real threat. The Covenant’s zealotism was only parallelled by their twisted use of science to their own ends- bringing about a cleansing fire, in this case obliterating the planet using those weapons buried and forgotten two millennia ago. They scoured the planet in secret, before announcing to the horrified planet that they had found weapons caches from the old times, and worse than that, that they had used genetic engineering technology to engineer a child using the DNA from ancient tombs, a child who could be used to access and control the ancient antimatter weapons.

The newly formed democratic government of Barbossa did the only thing they could- They begged the Federation for help, and the Federation sent in the Second Batallion, 4th Marines, “the Magnificent Bastards” which had, in its ranks, a squad lead by one Sergeant Kassandra Thytos.

* * *=(/\)=* * *

“We’d been trackin’ the zealots for more’n three months, keepin’ them on their toes, rootin’ out their labs, securin’ old tombs and destroyin’ em, lookin’ for old antimatter missile silos, disarmin’ them, securin’ them, we thought things were goin’ well, but then we get intelligence- not only have they got hold of a silo, but they got their Child Prophet’ en route to the silo. Only we can’t figure out where the hell the damn thing is, but we do get credible intelligence that the kid would be in this one village, Menai. So I get sent there to stop the Covenant, get the kid, end the threat.” The Major’s brow creased, disquiet on her face as she got to this point in her story. I thought she was going to stop, but instead she took a giant gulp from her bottle, finding her ability to continue in the dregs that remained in the bottom. She leaned over and grabbed another bottle from under the counter, then filled my glass again. “Only… Only we get there, and it ain’t just the Child Prophet and her keeper, it’s a whole entourage. Three hundred and six people.”

She rested her forehead in her hand and took a breath. Her face betrayed no emotion, but her eyes looked watery. half expected her next words to be said through tears, but they were crisp, matter-of-fact, cold.

“I just wanted the child prophet. That’s all I wanted. I figured that these people’d scare easy, so I grabbed their head elder. I took him out in front of them, I put a phaser to his head, told them that I’d kill him if they didn’t tell me which one of them was the Child Prophet an’ its keeper. Only I didn’t figure that all these people were fanatics, that they were members of the Covenant of Tanis. So no one said anything. Funny thing about threats, you gotta follow through on them, else they become worthless. So I had to- you know. Then I pulled a young girl, thinkin’ surely her ma’d break. But to no avail. I tried, I bargained, I threatened, I killed, an nothin’ I said or did gave me any sort of traction. An’ then I just got to thinkin’: If my twelve Marines did round up and march these people back to civilization, what next? We take them back, they’re imprisoned, and the capturin’ of their Child Prophet only emboldens the Covenant of Tanis, they fight, they try to get the Child Prophet back, the already burgeoning civil war erupts for real. They have a symbol, a cause to rally around, an’ this doesn’t end. We’re there, fightin’ this civil war for months, years. Innocent people dyin’, my Marines dyin’. Then it just kinda… Came to me. That I could end everything there, that moment, that I could stop the war, and all it would take would be sacrificin’ three hundred and six souls that were bent on self destruction anyway.”

“So you gave the order and had them killed,” my breath hissed between my teeth, I was somewhere between horror and sympathy.

“It was the only thing that made sense. Way I saw it, if I didn’t, all the deaths that came afterwards would be on my hands.” She topped up my glass. “And that, my disappointed lookin’ friend, is the anticlimactic tale of the Butcher of Barbossa. Not a tale of great evil, not a tale of heroics misunderstood. Just the tale of someone who made the decision they felt they could live with, even if it was the wrong one in a lotta people’s eyes.” She paused, then turned to look at me, the side of her head propped up on one fist. “Not that it makes what I did better, mind, but the universe balanced the scales pretty damn quick. Next mission, I lost my sight due to a parasite I picked up on Barbossa, all my men, the ones that had been at Menai, they were killed in an ambush, I only survived on account of they thought I was dead already. Then my sister was murdered. I lost everything, an’ I can’t help thinkin’ that I wouldn’t have, if it weren’t for what I did at Manai. We wouldn’ta been on that planet, I woulda been somewhere people woulda recognized my symptoms before I lost my sight, my sister wouldn’ta been on Luna with her scumbag husband if she weren’t there to try to nurse me back to health. Anyway, enough maudeline crap for the night. You’re drunk. We better get you back to your quarters.”

“I’m not-” I protested, but when I got off my stool, the world spun.

“Yeah, you are. Come on Ruskie, I’ll get you back to your quarters. Gotta lotta experience gettin’ drunks home.” She slung my arm over her shoulders, and we both staggered to the door.

“You know, they got a statue of me in the capital of Barbossa,” she said diffidently, as we swayed towards the turbolift. “I’m all winged and shit, dressed up in this ridiculous historic costume, with a giant ass sword in someone’s chest, while a bunch of demons are pullin’ my robes to drag me ta hell… Actually, that sounds like it’s awful, but it’s meant to be nice, see. To the Barbossans, killin’ is the worst thing a person can do, so me killin’ those people, was savin’ their souls by sacrificin’ mine. Statue’s called The Price of Peace, or somesuch wank. Hey, you still awake, Ruskie? You need to lay off the pierogies, you’re heavy to carry.”

And that, gentle readers, is the story of Kassandra Thytos, the woman who saved your asses (Editor’s note: After my initial copy of this article, the Major was very insistent that I include that last line. She’s very persuasive.)


* * *=(/\)=* * *

NRPG: And that is the anticlimactic answer to "what happened on Barbossa"