Aratas, Celzi Heavy Cruiser
The feelings of depression and anxiety returned like the ocean reclaimed the shore, shifting her mood so suddenly and so violently that Jen couldn’t help but notice how unnatural the change was. What had earlier crept upon her with dangerous subtlety had returned all at once, sweeping her along with emotions she now knew as alien.
That was the worst part of foreign emotions; you got all of the fun of experiencing them, all of the effects on your thoughts and decisions, and absolutely none of the sense.
The wall was there to support her, however, and Jen stopped to lean heavily on it as the realisations shook her.
“Askit,” she gasped, her fingers wrapping tight around the internal bulkhead, “what’s wrong with me?!”
The little Corti studied her, his inky black eyes scanning over her. “I’m no doctor, but I’d say you’re sick.”
“That’s not exactly helpful,” she replied, but he was right that she shouldn’t expect a medical diagnosis from a computer hacker. But it was also true that there wasn’t anyone on board that she could trust to give her an accurate diagnosis. Askit, for his part, did not seem to be suffering anything apart from his usual case of cynicism, although from what she had seen that was more or less a racial attribute.
“Jen,” he said warily, “if you’re not feeling up to this, you do not have to do it.”
She wasn’t sure if she had a choice in that; if Adrian was suffering from the same effects there was no telling what he might do. From what Askit told her he was already shooting at, or around, people, and actual deaths were only a matter of time.
That left the question of what had happened to them. Could it have been some kind of weapon intended to send them crazy, and if so who would have done it? It couldn’t have been the robo-spider, if that was what it was, since she hadn’t even seen it and yet she was still suffering from these effects.
She supposed it might have been the Celzi, some sort of trick intended to set the two humans against each other! Fleet Master Big Bird would be sitting somewhere, laughing at them as they turned on each other, ridding his vessel of the human scourge.
She looked up and down the corridor to ensure they were alone, then conspiratorially leaned in towards the Corti. “Askit,” she whispered urgently, “I think the Fleet Master is trying to kill us, so I do!”
“Are you alright, Jen?” the little Corti asked, taking a step back. He looked worried, and he didn’t look as though he believed her. Could it be that he was in on it? She had wondered about him being the traitor on the space station, and if he had betrayed them once then why not again? He was supposedly some sort of hardened criminal, after all!
She swallowed back her horror at the realisation. It all made so much sense! “You!” she accused as she backed away from him, moving in the direction that Adrian had gone. “You can’t be trusted! None of you can be trusted!”
“Jen-” he began.
“No!” she interrupted, close to shouting. “No more lies! I have to tell him… I have to!”
He didn’t try to move again, but looked at her with incomprehension and fear. Good, he was right to fear her! They all should fear the humans! There was no hiding their plans with such clever humans aboard, and if they knew what would be good for them they’d beg for forgiveness, so they would!
“You’ll be sorry!” she shouted as she turned and began to run away. “Do you hear me? You’ll all be sorry!”
+++++
There wasn’t any doubt in Askit’s mind that humans were strange, and that when using the word strange to describe them the word took on a new level of meaning. What he had witnessed here – and he had yet to figure out exactly what it was that he had witnessed here – had been completely bizarre and more than slightly terrifying.
Assessing the situation, he had determined that it was ‘not good’. It had in fact achieved a level of ‘not good’ that Askit had previously attributed to being ejected from a space station into low orbit of an enemy planet. He had hoped to get Jen’s help with Adrian, who was currently barricading himself in an uninteresting storage room and, from the reports feeding through the ship communication system he was hacked into, the crazed human was randomly firing an anti-tank gun and shouting an incoherent torrent of abuse and accusations.
Knowing that Adrian was currently all kinds of crazy, Askit had made the unfortunate assumption that Jen’s state was his doing. Askit had imagined she’d want to help bring Adrian under control, to get him to stand down, or at the very least to stop scaring the complete shit out of everyone.
That now seemed to have been a critical error of significant magnitude.
“Hrbrd,” he said, opening a communicator link back to the Councillor hiding away in the room they shared. A room that had proven to be a point of contention between two Corti who were not accustomed to sharing anything. “Hrbrd, I’m afraid I’ve made a mistake.”
“I show Jen moving towards Adrian’s position,” Hrbrd replied. He was keeping track of the situation from the more expansive console in their room. “You are not with her.”
“I’ve just seen a human female transform from piqued to raving mad person,” Askit replied. “I had thought that keeping my distance was the better course of action.”
“Our only other human has also gone crazy?” Hrbrd asked, sounding angry. “Any sign of what might be causing this?”
“None,” Askit replied bluntly. It was a frustrating admission, but as far as Askit could determine the source of the problem was likely to be either the Dominion or the Hierarchy, and despite the presence of one of a Hierarchy machine aboard it didn’t seem as though that would be a delivery system. For that matter there wasn’t even a delivery system he could identify.
“Not many people benefit from a pair of psychotic humans running around unrestrained on a Celzi vessel,” Hrbrd observed, apparently thinking along the same lines. “Hierarchy or the Dominion are the most likely, but our next course of action is now the same regardless of who is responsible.”
“They need to be contained,” Askit replied, guessing at what was coming next. He wasn’t pleased by the idea, but few items of necessity were pleasant. “That will be difficult, they are extremely unstable.”
“Do you think that they will subdue each other?” Hrbrd asked, not sounding particularly hopeful.
Askit was forced to share his pessimism. “I doubt we’re that fortunate.”
“Then we’ll need to elevate our response,” Hrbrd replied. “If they start to kill everyone on board, you and I will be up to our eyeballs in shit.”
That was a human expression, Askit observed. Their sayings, as nonsensical as they were, had a tendency to stick, and Askit himself had adopted many into his own speech. It was not something he would have expected of a Councillor, but he supposed that Hrbrd no longer needed to put on airs of importance.
“Then I have a plan,” Askit told him, already unhappy with it. It was a very ‘Adrian’ plan, and that was the problem. “I’ll need you to get everyone out of the area.”
“What are you intending?” Hrbrd asked, rightfully concerned. “The Fleet Master won’t budge without a reason.”
“The same kind of trick we used on the space station that used to orbit Cavaras,” Askit replied. “I’m going to vent their atmosphere.”
+++++
There was absolutely no way for Adrian to tell how long he’d been waiting in his little sanctuary; he had no watch, no data pad, and no reference, and the poison that still acted on him had robbed him of his sense of time as well.
It was not a big room; just a small storage area from what he could tell through his blurry vision and the heavy fugue that fogged his mind. He crouched in it like an animal poised to strike, his body operating on the shreds of instinct and training that stood up against the onslaught of shifting emotional extremes. He only knew that he was dangerous, and that he needed everyone to keep their distance until he had figured out what to do next.
He had even told them as much, although his precise words may have been to endlessly repeat a command that they all just fuck off. This had not proven as successful as he had hoped, and he had been forced to supplement this order with random bursts of suppressive gunfire.
The room itself was longer than it was wide, and he had positioned himself at the end of it, partly so that nothing could get behind him, but mostly because his sense of balance was all over the fucking shop, and he needed a nearby wall to keep himself upright. In the centre of the room lay the twisted remains of his fusion blade, nothing but broken metal after his bout with a robo-spider and two doors. He hadn’t been in much of a state to use the thing properly, but the pile of cooling slag that included both robo-spider and door were evidence enough that it had hardly mattered.
Things were getting blurry, getting dark as he sat there waiting, so once again he employed his successful tactic of making a lot of noise and shooting his gun. “RAAARGH!” he screamed meaninglessly as he shot the already ruined shelving that lined both sides of the room. It seemed to work, and so he rested his voice once it had grown hoarse and started to wait again; he knew that it was very important that he keep everyone out of the room, since he might be dangerous.
There had been voices, a long time ago, who had been shouting something at him. He hadn’t been sure of what they’d been shouting, or if they were shouting anything to be understood. He wasn’t entirely sure they’d been shouting at him, but had seemed likely as they’d politely waited for him to scream a response each time.
But now they were gone, and that was good, because this room was dangerous with him in it and so they shouldn’t be there.
A rush of shadow and sudden movement caught his eye, flashing through the entrance in a blur too fast for him to see. He peeled off a pair of shots with his usual accuracy, destroying another section of shelving in the process.
That would show it!
“What the fuck are you doing, you Australian lunatic!?” the blurry shape shouted out. It did such an excellent imitation of Jen that he began to giggle, but that was before he realised that giggling must be what it was counting on!
How dare it pretend to be her! Being her was her job, and as far as Adrian was concerned she was very good at it! The position of Jen was already filled, and he certainly didn’t need some alien trying to get the job!
He rose in a surge of furious anger, swaying as the rectangular room decided to become a spiral. He began shooting randomly, assuming that one of the shots must hit the imposter, and shouted at the top of his lungs. “I WON’T LET YOU BE HER!”
The blur was too fast! Way too fast to be a natural thing, and within moments – or at least certainly within thirty shots – something hard had hit him in the side of the head. Some kind of secret Hierarchy weapon no doubt…
It hit him again, and the blinding flash of pain behind his eyes was soon followed by dark oblivion.
+++++
The sprawling mass of Adrian had mostly slumped to the floor, although part of him was still upright against the back wall of the room. Jen punched him in the face a third time for good measure, fully appreciating the secondary thud of the back of his head striking the bulkhead.
She did not consider herself to be a vindictive woman – she was religious, after all – but she did wish to properly convey how little she appreciated being shot at. One of the wildly aimed blasts had actually winged her, and while her arm did not actually seem to be broken, it did regularly throb with powerful spikes of pain. Putting her hand onto it did not seem to help very much, and quite frankly she felt like she could use a barrel of whiskey to get her through today.
“Bastard,” she slurred, inches away from the unconscious man’s bruising face. “You’re lucky I dinnae stab you! Do you hear me, Adrian?”
He didn’t answer, which was a wee bit rude of him! She hit him again before remembering that unconscious people were often noted by their poor conversational manner. Then she rubbed her head violently, spilling her red hair into a wild mess, trying to get her head straight.
“What… what have those bastards done to us, Adrian?” she wondered aloud. It felt like a cloud was forcing its way into her mind, sweeping aside her sense of reason along with any further resistance to the strange emotions that plagued her.
Adrian continued to lay there, and she decided that perhaps he had the right idea after all. Within moments she had sunk to the floor and cuddled up to his motionless body. It was less comfortable on the floor than standing, but it stopped the room from trying to turn itself upside down or inside-out. Putting her head against his chest also proved to be helpful, as the calm rhythm of his heartbeat soothed the tumult of emotions.
Being pressed against his bare flesh did return a curious mixture of exhaustion and animal arousal, however, and now that they were finally alone… he was still unconscious.
Damn.
She didn’t have the energy to be angry anymore, or even particularly frustrated, and staying where she was seemed to be the most agreeable outcome. Here she could smell him, here she could kiss him gently, and here she could rake his bared skin with her fingernails for no other reason than a sudden urge to do so.
He was too unconscious to resist!
She giggled to herself, but stopped as she became aware of a faint rushing of air. It sounded like the gentle winds of home, blowing through the streets on a spring day and carrying with it the scent of new life. So fresh that it was making her lightheaded just thinking about it.
This delusion was quickly ended with the addition of a red light that bathed the room in its crimson glow.
That was the atmosphere alert, she recalled groggily. It activated to show when the atmosphere had reached dangerous levels.
The surge of adrenaline woke her fully, and she stared at the light in slow-dawning horror. “That’s the atmosphere alert!” she exclaimed in shock. “The atmosphere… Oh god!”
She looked down at Adrian. “Oh shite!”
The sound was coming from the vents that normally cycled the air. They were venting the air on purpose, now that their plans with the poison had clearly failed. No doubt they felt they couldn’t risk Jen and Adrian coming after them, but as far as Jen was concerned they were about to be in for a rude shock.
Staying in the room was not an option; Jen knew that she had to get out of there, but she didn’t know how to do the same for Adrian. He didn’t seem to respond to a firm shaking, and he was so big, so heavy… so big! There was no way a small woman like here could ever hope to move him, let alone escape with him.
A choice had to be made, so she made it.
“I’m sorry,” she said as she knelt down and kissed him. She stroked his face sadly, her fingers tracing its many lines. “I don’t know if I loved you, or if I would have loved you,” she admitted to the unconscious man, “but I’m just… I wish we’d had the chance to find out.”
One last kiss, and she left him there. He would never feel the slow onset of death by suffocation, but she still needed to live! She ran, looking for places to hide or places to escape from the ever thinning air, and it wasn’t long before her lungs were burning from the effort of struggling for air that simply wasn’t there.
There wasn’t a doubt in her mind that she was going to die if she stayed on the ship, that they were trying to kill her as they were killing Adrian, but she was smarter than they knew, and more experienced as well. She wasn’t new to Celzi cruisers – the Hodgepodge was dated but it still fit the design – and Jen knew exactly where she could find what she wanted.
Not a section on each vessel was missing one, a small life pod capable of holding several beings in stasis if they needed it to, prepared with an FTL drive pre-charged for a single push and kinetics ready for a landing. All they needed was a set of coordinates, and the automated systems would do the rest.
She had a set of coordinates. The only set of coordinates she’d ever bothered to memorise in her entire time amongst the stars. That would let her escape, and would get her somewhere where she could plot enough vengeance to serve Adrian as well as herself.
The life pod she found was helpfully marked with such clear indications that even in her oxygen deprived state she could find one. The door swung open easily against her desperate strength, and sealed after her as she stumbled inside. The cabin began to fill with much needed air, but she didn’t have time to enjoy it – there couldn’t be long before they realised their oversight and put an end to her escape attempt.
Within moments she’d keyed in the numbers on the navigation console, and the life pod was humming with power as it readied for launch.
It took three heartbeats, and then all at once it was gone.