Yellow Submarine's History

(Or, What Happened between the Last Flight and the Registration of the Yellow Submarine.)

I’ve taken Sata’s “Last Flight” to mean that he flew the future Yellow Submarine down to Hera and that it was the last non-Alliance space craft to leave the planet with any passengers and get away. Everyone else (who didn’t board the f.Y.S. or surrender) either died or were captured as POWs to be tried/amnestied etc.

Sata then flew the future Yellow Submarine to Beaumonde, which was in the mostly pro-Independent Kalidasa system. Thus making it a safer place to hide out than somewhere in Georgia and much friendlier than White Sun. Plus, Beaumonde had been taken by blockade so its cities were intact and it still had a good base of industries where a bunch of newly unemployed soldiers could find jobs and start new lives. It was here that most of Sata’s passengers, including Lennon, disembarked. Lennon had always talked about settling down on the rim to live the quiet life of a local country doctor, so he set about to do just that.

Sata decided to keep the now abandoned Osprey and Wilks, who having lost his lover and his homeworld had nowhere better to go, stayed on as a reliable and capable second officer. For a short while the two of them flew around Cowboy Bebop style with a ship much larger than they needed and too little cash. Eventually it became obvious that they needed a larger crew.

Meanwhile, Lennon remained on Beaumonde where he attempted to find and keep a job as a doctor. He quickly found work as a staff surgeon at New Dunsmuir General (the planet’s largest and most prestigious hospital) and was let go just as quickly. He worked in successively shadier hospitals and clinics, always being fired for the same offenses: unreliability, insubordination, and repeatedly missing pages because he was wearing headphones. Despite his plan to stay on the rim, he was bored and frustrated by the slow pace of civilian life and medicine. Despite his skill and experience as a surgeon, Lennon discovered that he was absolutely unable to function outside the military. He rarely stayed in a position longer than a few weeks (Lennon may have made a poor impression on his employers, but he made a very good impression on his patients. Lennon’s mobile clinic has its largest patient base on Beaumonde for this reason with many of them willing to pay for his services).

Sata’s captaining endeavor was going only slightly better. He and Wilks worked well together, but reliable crew was hard to find and they couldn’t seem to keep the same crew on the Osprey for more than a job or two. Discipline was poor and morale was low. Fights occasionally broke out between crew members unused to both living in the black and working with each other. Mechanical breakdowns were another issue and soon they both agreed that what their ship needed was a medic and a mechanic. Preferably ones who were hard to kill since they were running out of both warm bodies willing to work and running engine parts to keep the Osprey working. Not to mention, the ship was getting a bad reputation for it's high turnover.

It all might have ended there had Sata and Wilks not accepted a load of cargo bound for Beaumonde towards the end of 2511. It really hadn’t been a good year for either of them and the ship suffered her first personnel loss due to an on-board skirmish between to greenhorns while out in the black. After off loading the cargo and the corpses of their last two crew members (an on-board duel, both died of blood loss from wounds that would have been survivable had there been a doctor on board), they made a decision: either fill their two key crew member positions on Beaumonde or cut their losses, sell the Osprey, and part ways.

Wilks had long since made it his custom to spend his evenings sampling the local beers, bars, and women at each new port so he stopped into a hole in the wall saloon that looked like it might have interesting atmosphere (bar fights, a game of fish, or both). It wasn’t as interesting as he hoped. It was nearly empty, but Wilks was fairly certain that that was because some asshole had taken over the jukebox and was playing nothing but Beatles songs.

The date was December 8th, and Lennon, who had been fired from his most recent clinic that day was quickly running out of money. His options were down to wiring his family for the funds to pay for a return flight to Londinium or working as a mercenary doctor for the I.P.F.L. After considering the option of spending the anniversary of John Lennon’s death alone and miserable in his one room apartment, he’d chosen to take his final paycheck to a bar and make everyone else miserable instead.

Wilks was overjoyed to see his old friend, not so much because he missed him or because finding Lennon solved the one of the Osprey’s crew shortages, but because there were few people in the ‘Verse capable of creating the kind of chaos he craved that evening. And Wilks knew that of those few people, no one was better at it than Lennon on December 8th. Wilks did what he did best that night and redirected Lennon’s energies from annoyance towards destruction. They are both fairly certain it was a very good night.

After bailing them both out of jail the next morning, Sata realized that Wilks had found a doctor who had not only survived the entire Unification war, but had actually thrived during it. Certainly they had found the one doctor who could survive their bad luck Osprey. They offered Lennon the job of ship’s doctor, but since his and Wilks’ combined bail had killed nearly all the funds from the job, Sata and Wilks paid him with a share of the ship itself. Lennon had, after all, left Serenity Valley on the Osprey just like they had. He deserved an equal stake.

Sata felt, however, that as the Osprey was an entirely new endeavor from the war and that Wilks had spent more time on board. Lennon, as the most recent addition, would be third in command. Lennon agreed as he was just happy to see some old friends and have a way off Beaumonde that didn’t involve fish or his family. The first few jobs were rough and some of the initial frictions between the three crew members were solved when Sata realized that Lennon couldn’t seem to take Wilks’ orders seriously and Wilks didn’t seem to be able to issue them convincingly. He changed to chain of command so that Lennon was his second (mimicking, he realized later, the 42nd’s command structure) and things fell neatly into place.

Though they still lacked a capable mechanic, they at last had a ship with a stable crew and Lennon set out to solve the problem that he felt the Osprey had all along: a ship without a name is bad luck.