Call To Arms

We have received the command.

As commander of record of the Eldership de-Intimidator, you are requested and required to assemble your crew for departure star date 20160928. Your mission, should you chose to accept it (understanding that you really don't have any choice at all in agreeing to accept it) will be a part exploration and part showing the ElderFleet Command flag to existing contacts. Details forth coming.

As is the case with all our missions, ElderFleet Command does not actually ever provide a full ship's compliment. Command staff is expected to recruit, or in extreme cases use a press gang, to find staff. First Officer Wife and I, knowing that ElderFleet Command provides no money for staffing, gave up on trying to recruit staff long ago. Sadly, our efforts to press people onto our ship also have not worked well. I suspect this may be due to the fact that either 1) the desirable potential crew are substantially younger and faster than us and pretty much laugh at our efforts to catch them, or 2) the crew that we could catch is even older and more decrepit than ourselves and would require taking care of them rather than take care of us.

The answer of course is for First Officer Wife and I to fill all the jobs on the Eldership ourselves (something we've become quite adept at), put various versions of our names in each of the positions, and collect all the pay that accrues to those positions. Thank goodness Wife is a top notch accountant and can make all these moves look pretty opaque. It does allow us to run a kitchen on the Eldership that meets my culinary standards.

We are running around taking care of all our provisioning and expect to be ready on time for our scheduled departure.