An alarm sounded.
In her stateroom, Alexis Kimball-Styrling rolled over and smacked it neatly off the ledge where she’d put it. It bounced a few times, and came to a stop near the door. Then, she covered her silvery blonde head up, curled tighter into a ball with the covers nestled around her, and went back to sleep. On the table next to where the offending sounding thing had been, her mechanical arm, something she wore only during the daytime, didn’t even twitch.
This was how her days had gone: Initially, she had of course been up with the sun and down with the idea of having a regular underway schedule. She had happily sorted through seemingly miles of guns and ammunition, organized all of it by grade, and then picked out her own weapons and attachments and done her test-shoots right along with Art. Afterwards, however, she had become bored. It had taken two weeks or so, but yes, it had happened. If she stood on the bridge, she would get suggestive looks from the crew standing the helm and lee helmsman, the navigators and the other people who made ships do whatever they did; that was on a good day. On a bad day, they would simply ignore her, and after a while all the blue and red lights, the sound of sonar pinging and then the resulting silence, would get on Ally’s nerves. If she went aft, she could hear the ever-present whirring of the submarine’s atomic engines pounding away near-silently, but the people who worked back there had even less patience for her wandering. So eventually, she had simply gone back to her room to read or clean her guns.
Now, Ally’s sleep schedule was completely on its head, and it wasn’t going to be switched back quite so easily now that she’d gotten herself into it. Completely ignored, the alarm clock tick-tocked away in its corner, and Alexis remained in her bed, warm and comfortable and content, dreaming fuzzily.
This was as opposed to actually waking up.