She avoided him for the next few days, and by extension Ali too. Actually, she pretty much avoided everyone but Dax. And Fix too, she supposed, although she wasn't exactly going out of her way to visit the combat android in any case.
Now that she had a better understanding of Dax's situation, she tried even harder to break him out of his ascetic lifestyle and provide him with enjoyable experiences. She continued insisting that he eat her food, and even managed to convince him to pick out the things he preferred. She also spoke to Aiden exactly once, to essentially browbeat him into giving the weapons officer the same time off as everyone else.
She didn't exactly accuse the man of treating Dax like a slave, but she was sure at least some of that showed in her tone. For his part, the captain didn't even try to argue, and looked as relieved as she felt to get away from the conversation.
Dax didn't seem to know what to do with free time, aside from focus more on Lana's training. And while she didn't mind that at all, it also didn't do much to help either of them relax. So she convinced him to join her on more full immersion dives.
If she'd thought scenic tours of Homeworld and embarrassingly sweltering romantic engagements were the best the full immersion rigs had to offer, she was in for a pleasant surprise. The young man had a whole variety of more interesting and challenging games and other media for her to explore. Although, something she wasn't surprised to discover was that Dax's interest to weapons extended to his dives as well.
Specifically, combat simulations with settings ranging from any sort of terrain to be found on colony worlds, to barren moons, to deep space combat, and missions to board and repel boarders on every ship that had ever been built, as well as military facilities and other strategic targets.
Her friend had been hesitant to introduce her to those simulations, afraid she'd find them too overwhelming. But Lana had insisted, and discovered to her surprise that nightmarish life and death struggles could be kind of fun when the possibility of death was taken out of them. And she had a sneaking suspicion that, even though the young man took the missions as seriously as he ever took anything else, he also had fun with them.
But much as she enjoyed doing activities Dax enjoyed, those weren't her favorite dives. He also had dives that allowed her to pilot ships, including in combat, which she insisted they spend most of their time on. In the back of her mind, he had the idea that she'd train enough in simulations that Aiden would eventually let her actually fly the Last Stand.
Maybe even without him standing over her shoulder.
When they weren't flying spaceships or fighting in combat scenarios, her friend also had dives where they could drive land vehicles in various exhilarating off-road terrains. There were even racing simulations that tested even Dax's incredible abilities, and left her in the dust until he lowered the difficulty.
Lana had a feeling that Dax used all those dives mostly for training, even though he seemed to enjoy them as well. And they were useful for that. His limited memory space on the computers didn't hold much besides combat and piloting simulations, aside from the dives that took her to beautiful planets like Homeworld, and to explore breathtaking phenomena all throughout the cosmos.
And that exploration took them through an incomprehensibly vast amount of universe, so much so that Lana was stunned humanity had managed to explore and colonize so many galaxies in it, even after fifty thousand years in space. The Last Stand's records showed that there were thousands of officially recognized worlds settled by humans, and probably hundreds more that hadn't been reported, either because they were occupied by criminals or isolationists.
Callous was one of the latter, although Dax predicted that with the Deconstructionist Movement grinding their boot down on humanity, more and more people would begin terraforming and colonizing new worlds to escape their control.
“It might even spark a new age of human exploration and expansion,” he said, sounding almost wistful. “I'll admit, if I had a choice of what I could do, venturing out beyond the explored universe would be it.”
That made Lana think of a question. “Is there anything out there? Some of your goofier combat simulations have us fighting aliens, but when I checked the ship's records there was no sign of humanity ever having discovered intelligent aliens, or any signs they'd ever existed like ancient ruins or abandoned worlds.”
Actually, from what she'd read no explorers had even found any life in the universe more complex than single-celled or simple multi-celled organisms. Before humanity left Homeworld, and in the early years of exploration, scientists had been convinced that the universe was a vast enough place that other intelligent life had to exist. Might already have discovered humans, in fact, and was choosing to leave them alone.
If that was the case, there'd never been any sign of it. As humanity spread throughout their own galaxy, then on to neighboring ones, it began to seem more and more like the complex life on Homeworld, and sapient humans, were a cosmic fluke. Which was why planets with existing life, or the potential to be habitable for humans, were terraformed using organisms from Homeworld, because that was all that was available. Aside from genetically modified creatures, of course.
Dax gave her a thoughtful look. “Most people are convinced there isn't. But the universe is such an unimaginably vast place that even if we've explored entire galaxies, that's barely scratching the surface. Somewhere out there, there has to be alien life we haven't discovered. Maybe even civilizations as ancient and technologically advanced as our own.”
Lana made a face. “If so, I
