None of them had spoken in the last few minutes. I didn't mind as I steered the ship through space, my companion sitting next to me, sulking. Maren thought I had merely allowed myself a joke with her, but it wasn't quite true. Granted, I was never privy to the exact details of what I predict like this, but I knew that it wasn't a failure. However, what I hadn't expected was that the little devil had actually snuck on the ship. Not that I knew that at the time, however.
I would soon learn, though, as the power of the ship suddenly cut out and switched to emergency reserves in the middle of a trade lane, the automated system ejecting us from the transit sequence automatically to prevent us from uncontrolably veering forward upon exit. "Great," my companion intoned, looking at me. "What'd you do now?"
"Nothing at all," I answered honestly, checking the computer for any signs of damage. Maybe we had been ambushed in the trade lane? But what did that have to do with our power supply? "Seems like our power core powered down because it got too hot." If that was the case, then we'd likely need to repair this before moving again. If the power core overheated, that'd be pretty bad, mostly because everything could explode. "I guess I will take a look at that."
"Well, you're my host here anyway."
"Still angry for Cambridge?" I asked, wondering just how long one could sulk because of something like that. She hadn't even wanted her to explain what I had had her do, so it came across as quite childish to me.
"Yep."
I rolled my eyes and exited the cockpit to take a look at the engine room. I really hoped it was just the coolant having run out or something. Reaching my destination fairly quickly, as it was a small ship, I was greeted with the perplexing sight of a makeshift kitchen. Apparently, someone had stolen our kitchen supplies from the living area and hoarded them here in this secluded room. The air smelled of charcoal. Something was definitely burnt. Stepping into the room proper, I inspected the lid of the power core. Someone had tried to make fried eggs on the surface. They hadn't even used oil or something, so naturally, it had been burnt to a crisp on the surface. Did I mention that the lid usually was pretty hot?
"This really is amateurish," I murmured, picking up a slice of black bread, which had a bite mark in it. Fairly small. A woman? Someone had probably broken in here while we were on the planet. They probably had left, though, right? If they had wanted to rob us, wouldn't they have done it already? Or taken the ship, at least. Why bring this stuff here, even?
The lingering smell of charcoal in the air tickled my nose and I pinched the bridge of it to fight the feeling of needing to sneeze. Looking around, I saw a few pans, ketchup, mayo, and frozen food, which was most likely not frozen anymore, judging by the small puddles of water that had formed underneath them. I sneezed thrice in succession as I appraised the surroundings.
"Yipp!"
"What?" I asked, dumbfounded at the sudden noise.
"What?" answered the engine room.
I screamed, they screamed, and Maren came bursting into the room a few moments after. "What the hell is wrong with-" Then she saw what was going on, "you." On an elevated ventiallation pipe sat Dinah, wearing the way too large duster that Maren had worn during the encounter on Cambridge. Given its size, the pockets it had were even deeper, and Dinah apparently had made good use of them. From where I stood, I could guess that the PAD, the various food items, the... fluffy blanket (?) and the other indistinguishable items actually didn't belong to the girl. "Hey, that's my duster!" Maren exclaimed from where she stood by the door, and I almost laughed at the absurdity of it all. Also, why'd she call out the duster of all things when the PAD clearly had costed at least thrice as well.
"Nu-uh, it has large pockets!" Dinah replied from where she had hunkered down, getting to her feet and nimbly climbing along the pipes to a more elevated position. "Get your own one!"
"I paid for that!" Maren protested, watching as a frying pan fell out of Dinah's huge pockets and hit the ground with a resounding bang. "The hell are you even doing here, brat!" Maren made a move to try and climb after Dinah, but given that she was almost twice her size, she didn't get far and soon found her bottom firmly planet on the ground. "Give that back!"
By now Dinah had climbed pretty much as far up as she could. I had to put my head back quite a bit to spot her now, perched on top of a large pipe like an overgrown magpie. "I heard you cussing under your breath when you put it off! You can't fool me!"
I felt like I didn't really need to intervene. This was actually better than I thought it'd turn out to be. Assuming the position by the door Maren had vacated when she had tried to climb after the little devil, I crossed my arms, contenting myself to merely observing. There was quite a bit of bickering back and forth, the kind which could make you think the two knew each other for quite a while. As I watched, I spotted at least two methods of getting Dinah down from there. She still wasn't wearing shoes, so if we turned on the ventiallation, the pipe would slowly turn hot. Not so fast that she couldn't climb down, of course, which was the entire point. The other would be to wait until she had no water up there anymore, but that would take a few hours.
That reminded me, actually, that I needed to fix the power core. Stepping forward again, I ignored the two for a while and appraised what Dinah had done here. Tentatively touching the lid, I noticed that it had cooled down enough so I could open it and look inside. It seemed like some of the egg had seeped into the machinery and dirtied the Deuterium pumps. Taking one of the napkins on the ground, I tentatively reached in and scraped off the substance and closed the lid, being rewarded with the familiar hum of the pumps sucking in Deuterium to perform their duty.
Standing up, I saw that Maren had managed to get Dinah off the pipe and was now holding her in a headlock. "Uhm, Maren," I asked, keeping my distance as both Dinah and Maren were thrashing around quite a bit. "Hello," I tried again, still to no avail. "Hey!" I exclaimed, this time bordering on shouting, and that at least shut both of them up for a small while. "How about we all sit down in the main room and talk this out?"
Dinah and Maren looked at each other for a good while and I could swear both of them were considering just how much more worth it would be to simply continue scuffling but then they both said "Fine!" at the same time, then giving each other a sour look. They disentangled and I half-shoved them into the main room where we could sit, which had the additional effect of Dinah not being able to run off with me behind them. We were in space anyway. Running was wasting everybody's time. After I managed to seat them all, I plopped down myself. Dinah was sitting in the middle of the rounded table, with both of us preventing her from just standing up. Then again, she could just run under the table at her size, but I didn't voice that thought. She was still wearing that ridiculous duster.
"Dinah, is that correct?" I asked, merely to make sure I hadn't misheard it. The girl didn't seem like the type to take it personally to ask for a name.
"Yep."
"You're quite brave climbing all those pipes like that. Didn't you reckon you could fall off?" Maybe not the best small talk I had ever started but it was something. I didn't want to start interrogating her right away.
When Dinah answered, I could see that apparently nobody was keeping a finger on her brushing her teeth regularly. I would need to replace them. Not that they were unuseable, but I preferred to hand over my handiwork in mint condition. "It's easy when you're small." She wiggled her toes under the table, which nobody saw. "Shoes also get in the way."
"Wouldn't the duster get in the way too?" Maren inquired quasi-sardonically. I had to admit, Maren had a point.
Dinah shrugged. "Not really. It's a small problem but I'm good enough to not mind." Maren's PAD buzzed as her subscription to Angry Pigs informed her of a new bundle on offer for only 900 credits! Dinah eyed her pocket suspiciously.
"Is that why you came aboard? To test your climbing?" I asked, knowing that the answer was no, but it was a better question to ask than 'why'd you sneak in here?'. It conveyed interest and was less intrusive. I felt like this was necessary when dealing with the girl.
"Pff," she intoned in reply, blowing away a strand of black hair that had fallen into her face as her ponytail had become loose. "If I wanted to test my climbing, I'd climb up a building or something." I had to admit, that was pretty dangerous. Or at least it sounded that way.
Maren eyed me with narrowed eyes as I continued. "Well, we're in space right now, as you probably noticed." Dinah bobbed her head in reply. "That puts us in a bit of a bad spot."
"I know," she sighed.
"How do you think we should proceed here?" If everything worked as I thought it would, the question would catch Dinah offguard, as she probably didn't expect to have a say in any of the happenings here. She'd give no answer while I could seem like I cared. I mean, I did care. But this was business.
"Dunno." She shrugged with her shoulders. Clever girl. She was quite used to not showing what she thought. I couldn't read her body language at all. "Guess you could bring me back?"
"Back where?"
The topic apparently wasn't really comfortable for her. Guilt? No, this little devil didn't regret sneaking in here and trying to steal. She was ashamed of telling about herself. "The Saint Lucy Foster Home, I guess."
"You don't sound too enthusiastic."
The girl gave me a flat look. "Well, it is sorta rancid to live among the orphans of the war with Gallia. There's way too many people so nobody is particularly well cared for." Ah, that was right. The war. It was quite possible that this girl's parents were killed in service. At least the father anyway. What about the mother?
"I see." Humming, I drummed my fingers on the table demonstratively. "See, I think we would help each other, Dinah." The girl gave me a doubtful look. Maren tried her best to top Dinah's. I couldn't help but smile.
Have I mentioned how much I love it when things go my way?
My heart was racing as I stood in front of the door that led to the house that Maren and I lived in now. Baden-Baden was warmer than Cambridge. A lot, actually. I often felt like the heat was slowly seeping into me and slowing me down. In chemistry, I had learned that warm things have faster moving molecules. So why did I feel less like moving? This made no sense.
I clutched the letter that I had been given in my hands. Maren really wouldn’t like reading this. It was Friday, so at least I wouldn’t need to go back to school for a while still. Letting out a breath, I rang the bell. I’d asked for a key but Maren had always forgotten to give me one. It took a couple of moment before I heard footsteps on the other side of the door. To my surprise, the person opening it wasn’t my adoptive mother.
“Well hello, Dinah,” spoke a woman with bound together brown hair and skin. I knew this woman. She had been the one who’d discovered my in the orphanage first.
“Uhm, hi,” I replied lamely, trying to peek past the woman. “What’re you doing here?”
Teresa Martinez gestured with a hand to signal that I was supposed to come in, which I did. “Just a check-in,” the Doctor replied. “Your mother is in the living room waiting. I suppose you have something to tell her?”
A check in? But the Doctor had already looked me over after I had left Cambridge. Something about my teeth having been bad. I did brush them though. Occasionally. “Maren?” I called out, and sure enough, she was sitting on the sofa, mulling over something on her PAD. Looking up, she stood up and approached me, giving me a hug. I sort of felt bad given what I was supposed to be telling her. I waited until she let go of me. “I got this here for you.” I held out the opened letter for her. I shouldn’t have opened it, but I wanted to know what they said about me. Maren’s brows furrowed and she took the letter out of my hands and read through the contents. Once she was done, she let out a loud sigh.
“And you couldn’t have resolved that argument without breaking his arm?” she asked me with a disappointed look. Actually, I probably could’ve resolved it without violence, but there was something about the entire situation that had ticked me off beyond belief. The Doctor entered the room but stayed back, merely observing.
“What am I supposed to do if he falls over from being pushed? Fat people do that,” I responded, figuring that was a fair approximation of what she had thought during the encounter.
“He’s been spitting paper wads at me the entire day and I swear I would’ve bitten off his fingers if he’d not been such a wimp.”
Maren sighed. “Okay.” She put the letter on the kitchen counter for now and turned to face the Doctor. “You were just about to tell me what you actually wanted.”
Martinez raised an eyebrow and came a bit closer. She wouldn’t sit down, as I knew her, figuring that she was way too polite for that. “Why, I just wanted to check on Dinah’s health. She’s still growing, after all.”
I hadn’t grown at all since I’d come here. Or at least, I hadn’t noticed it. My hair had gotten longer, though. It curled slightly the longer it became. I really hated wearing it open most of the time because it would start sticking to my face. That is what the older girls in the orphanage had meant when they’d told me to always have a hair band on my person. “Riiight,” Maren replied, giving her a flat look.
Martinez held out her hands in a way that almost seemed defensive. “I put a lot of work into her, so call it an artisan taking interest in the treatment of their work.”
What’s an artisan anyway? I tilted my head questioningly, but nobody seemed to really mind me right now. Wasn’t Maren supposed to be angry about me getting suspended from school?
Slowly, Maren gestured towards Dinah. “Theeen, what’s keeping you?”
That seemed to get a reaction out of Martinez. Nodding, the woman gestured for Dinah to sit down on the couch. “This won’t take long.” There was a small box she’d brought with her and from it, the Doctor produced a weird looking machine. She withdrew a small part from it that looked like a pen judging by its shape, but she used it to point it at me and shoot little cones of light at different parts of my body. I didn’t feel a thing. “Have you been eating properly, Dinah?” the Doctor sounded while looking at the display of her machine.
“Well, yeah, I guess,” I replied, wondering what exact kind of response the other woman was looking for. “I eat three times a day.” I looked at Maren, figuring that it was not likely that she would not give me something with enough calories to eat.
The Doctor hummed in response and continued looking at her display, brows furrowed. The last beam of light was directed at my face and it blinded me briefly. Blinking, I rubbed my eyes. “That it?” I asked, maybe a bit too tersely as I hadn’t reckoned she’d blind me.
“Yes, thank you, Dinah.” The Doctor put the little pen back into her device and the device back into its case.
“So, since that is done, uh,” Maren sounded from behind the kitchen counter, looking at the two. “Want something to drink, or?” I could tell she was just trying to be polite.
The Doctor looked at her watch. “Sure, I think I can spare a few moments.” She sat down on the counter and just like that, nobody was paying attention to me anymore. Brilliant. I figured it was better than getting yelled at for violating a boy in school. Picking up my PAD, I began scrolling to the newest videos in my subscription feed. Hell yeee, my favourite band uploaded a new song. Life was good. If only I had my headphones right now. With my PAD in hand, I began to search the room. Where had I put them. Were they upstairs? No, I’d listened to music before I’d gone to school, which I’d done downstairs.
As I searched, I couldn’t help but listen to some of the things that the Doctor and Maren talked about. “…not the youngest anymore, but I do like a bit of archaeology.”
“That not dangerous?”
“Not if you know what you’re doing. This isn’t really dangerous though. If you’re interested in these things, you could tag along. Seems like you’ll have a bit of free time now after all.”
“You’re awfully chipper about Dinah’s suspension.”
“I’m not, but I figured that it’d be better than you two sitting here for the next weeks doing nothing and ending up fighting along the way. Also, it’s not like you ever asked questions when I told you how to find Dinah by dressing up like a B tier cowboy.”
“Shit, you right.”
Aha! There they were! I had put the headphones on top of the TV set for whatever reason. Taking the headphones, I put them on, drowning out the voices of my mother and the Doctor. Noise cancelling really was handy. Sitting down again, I began listening to music, closing my eyes. At some point, I must have fallen asleep, as I the album I was listening to had come to an end. Opening my eyes, I looked at Maren, who was poking my arm. “You okay?” she asked me, and I nodded.
Yawning, I sat up. “Where’s the Doctor at?” I asked, looking around and wondering whether she was here somewhere.
“She left,” Maren replied, sitting down next to me.
“You not mad?” I asked, figuring I could ask. If she was going to be mad, then she might as well be so now.
“Not really. Mostly disappointed,” she replied. I felt weird hearing that. I shuffled slightly. “You could’ve resolved it differently. You could’ve embarrassed him or something. If he’s fat, I’m sure you could’ve used your smarts to be cleverer.”
“I guess.” Thinking about it, I could’ve been more clever. I could’ve peed in a bottle and sprayed the contents on his sports clothes and make it seem like he pissed himself at some point and tried to hide it. “So, uh, what now?”
Maren shrugged. “The Doctor wants to take a closer look at you in her laboratory. Said she’d found something that worried her.”
Cocking my head, I looked down, fiddling with the cord of my headphones that were handing around my neck now. “Am I sick?”
Giving me a look, Maren shook her head. “She didn’t seem to think it’d be harmful, but I didn’t understand the technical babble, so I guess it would be best to go along with what she was saying.”
Nodding slowly, I let go of the cord. “So when do we go there?”
Looking at the clock, Maren scratched her cheek. “In two hours.”
I really hated the insides of this ship. Compared to the Apahanta, this one was as stylish as a concrete block. Pretty brutalist. I rolled to the side on the bed that I had been given on the ship. Maren had left me here alone, saying that she’d check in with the Doctor and see what they were going to do with me.
Even the wall was uninteresting. Sitting up, I stretched my back. Was there something wrong with me again? The Doctor had said that something worried her. I didn’t think she was capable of that emotion, to be honest. Getting off the bed, I headed for the door, wanting to check if it was open. Apparently not. Damn. “Ugh,” I complained, making a beeline for the bathroom instead. There were drawers there, so maybe there was something interesting there. Ten minutes later, I found myself holding a squirt gun. It wasn’t that big, but it was at least colourful. “Aww yiss,” I said as I filled in water from the sink. The question why there was a squirt gun in the first place didn’t really occur to me. Who cared anyway? This was awesome.
“Freeze!” I shouted at the empty room as I kicked open the bathroom door and blindly squirted into the room. One of the tiny rays of water hit the console next to the door and it gave a sizzling sound. “Oops.” Approaching, I appraised the squirt impact. Humming, I saw that the door was now open. Just a tiny bit. But it would do. “Nnnnoice,” I muttered while I holstered my squirt gun in my jeans and tried my best at opening the door with my hands. Surprisingly, it was rather easy to pry it open wide enough so I could slip through. I truly was the strongest one on this ship. Suppressing the urge to gloat, I squeezed outside. My nose grazed past the door and my squirt gun was a little too big, so I rotated it in my pocket slightly.
Looking around on the other side, I saw that I was on a simple corridor. I’d come past here before as Maren and I had entered the ship. There were a lot of crates simply put here and there but at least it was clean. I didn’t see anything moving though. I didn’t really know where to go, too. I hadn’t thought this far ahead. Okay, to the left, there were the airlocks somewhere, so it would be logical to go right. So I did. I tried opening some doors, but they were all locked. I squired at them and their consoles as well but it didn’t work this time. Damn, and I was halfway out of ammo too! I needed to find a squirt gun supply cache!
As I progressed through the ship, I started playing a special agent on a special sneaky mission, hushing from corner to corner, squirt gun at the ready. I came to another cross section and turned left this time, only to scramble back behind the corner as I heard one of the doors open. Peeking around the corner, I saw a blonde man exiting one of the rooms and heading my way. Starting to sweat, I wondered what I should do. If I ran now, he’d hear me. Closing my eyes, I shifted farther away from the corner, hoping that if I held still, he’d not see me from the corner of his eyes in passing. I was in luck. When he passed, he headed straight forward, not sparing a glance to the sides. Even after he’d left my view, though, I still held still until his steps had weren’t audible anymore.
Letting out a breath that I didn’t know I’d held, I wondered why I’d been this agitated in the first place. I was a little girl running around on the ship. We were guests here and I doubted they’d do anything to us. They’d had way too many chances for that already. Peeking around the corner, I confirmed that the blonde man was gone. Looking the other way, I started walking to where he’d been coming from. It was a door just like any other one. I squinted at it. “You won’t open on your own, will you?” I asked the door. It did nothing, as expected. Faster than the cowboys at high noon, I whipped out my squirt gun and squirted at the control console at the side. It did nothing, but I noticed something. “Huh, this is green,” I muttered as I noticed that the light coming from the console was different than from the other ones. I put my finger on the light on the console and started slightly as I got a small chiming sound in response. And just like that, the door opened.
I wasn’t really sure what I had expected. Maybe some weird machinery that I didn’t understand, but definitely not this. Standing in the doorway, I looked at something that looked like the room of a young teenager. The floor actually had a light blue carpet, and the interior was different. The furniture was made of wood. Drawers, closets and a bed seemed to be arranged to give a lot of place in the middle of the room. Sitting there cross-legged was someone who looked slightly out of place for the environment they were in. Long, red hair was obstructing the face of what I presumed was a woman. There was a sketchbook on her lap and she was holding a pen. “Uh,” I sounded, and that seemed to wake the person up. Raising her head, I could see that it belonged to a young woman who gave me a piercing look with her blue eyes, saying nothing. “Sorry, I was just, uh, playing?” I noticed that I was still holding the squirt gun and quickly put it back into my pocket so at least I wouldn’t look completely moronic.
The woman gave no answer, simply staring. “Uhm, are you well?” I asked confusedly, slightly unsettled by the demeanour of that person. Had I done something wrong? However, as I stood there, more and more details of the room came into view for me. There were board games on the shelves and the drawers probably contained clothes? Involuntarily, I made a step into the room. My boredom had brought me so far as to consider playing a board game, how about that? Noticing that I was still being watched, I stopped. The door slid shut behind me. “Uh,” I intoned eloquently. “I’ll just, uh, take a look there okay?” Still no answer. It started to irritate me. Still, no answer meant no denial, so I figured that I was golden in going ahead. Turning away, I began sifting through the games that were assorted on the shelves. Some of them were pretty generic. I even spotted a rubrics cube. However, some of this was pretty eldritch and I had no idea what to do with these. Just to check, I opened one of the drawers and found clothes there, as expected. Boring.
Rummaging through things that didn’t belong to me, I kind of lost track of time. There were a lot of interesting things that I could occupy myself with, so it was rather easy. Since my attention had been this devoted, I started as I felt someone standing behind me, and snapped my head back around to see who it was. In doing so, I smacked the side of my head against the chins of the red haired woman, who gave a half-yelp in response. “Shit, sorry!” I exclaimed, holding up my hands as I had no idea if that woman even spoke my language.
Rubbing her chin, she looked at me with something like annoyance. “Look, you shouldn’t sneak up to me like that.”
Now this close, I could see that there didn’t appear to be anything wrong with the woman physically. She seemed to also eye me down intensely before narrowing her eyes. She returned to where she had put the sketchbook before and began leafing through it before showing me one of the drawings.
Confused, I looked first at her, then at the sketchbook and then back at the woman. She seemed to want me to look at the picture and so I sighed and did so. “Uhm,” I intoned as I couldn’t discern what I was supposed to see there. I could tell that the woman wasn’t bad at drawing, but I had no idea what was depicted. It was a simple pencil drawing of a room with a kind of bubbly tube and there were wires everywhere. Someone was standing in front of the tube and looking up at it. The wavy hair reminded me of the woman in front of me, although the depiction seemed smaller. I tilted my head slightly. “Is that you?” I asked, then pointing at the person in the drawing, then at the woman in front of me.
That seemed to do the trick, as she gestured from me to the tube, then at the person in the picture, then back at herself. Then she drew a circle in the air, pointed at the clock hanging above the door of the room we were standing in, then at herself, then at the tube again. It made my head reel. “Sorry, but I don’t really understand what you’re saying.” I focused on the picture again. There seemed to be something in the tube, suspended. It wasn’t much more than a smudge on the page. I looked up at her and tried my best to look questioning since words didn’t seem to work. The woman sighed and closed the sketchbook. “So, yeah,” I replied, mulling the encounter over before coming to the conclusion that this woman was probably like one of the special children I had once seen at the orphanage. She probably just wanted to show me how well she could draw. That was good, right? That means she liked me. “Want to play something?” I thought for a moment before pulling out a deck of simply playing cards.
To visualize what I was asking, I held out the cards in front of me and pointed at the woman, then at myself, then at the cards. The woman seemed to understand and nodded. I figured we could just sit down in the centre of the room. The carpet was pretty nice, after all.
Before we could sit down, though, the door opened and the Doctor stepped in. “Dinah,” she stated, looking at me sitting on the ground with the deck of cards while the red woman was still standing. “You shouldn’t run around like that. A lot of the rooms here still haven’t been cleaned up. What if you’d run into one of these?”
For a moment, my heart had sunk so much that I could’ve sworn it was somewhere in my left leg, but hearing as the Doctor wasn’t yelling at me, I figured she wasn’t buttmad. “Uhm,” was all I really managed to bring out.
The Doctor gestured for me. “Please come. We need to get to your check up.” Nodding dumbly, I slowly stood up and made a step towards the door, leaving the playing cards on the ground. The red woman was simply standing there, looking at me. I couldn’t see much more of her, however, before we’d left the room and her behind.
“Ouch,” I intoned for the third time as yet another syringe was jammed into my arm. “Why is this necessary? I know for a fact that there a hyperdermal things.” I watched as the white substance slowly disappeared from the device and into me. I felt weird about that. I didn’t like sharp objects.
“These things make sure that there is no loss, so to say. With the devices that you mean, your skin prevents some of the substances getting into your blood stream.” The Doctor gave me a tissue to push onto the spot where the syringe had poked me. “That’s all, Dinah.”
I tilted my head. It had barely taken fifteen minutes. “That’s all?”
“That was all,” the Doctor confirmed.
“Uhm, I have a question,” I started, and the Doctor looked at me, apparently wanting me to continue. I scratched my arm. It had started itching. “Who was the woman in that room?” It seemed so out of place.
The Doctor looked at the small table by my side, where she’d put the three syringes, before continuing. “We don’t know her name. She is one of my patients as well. We are trying to figure out a way to help her?”
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked, figuring that I had been right in assuming that she had been like the special kids back home. “She seemed pretty normal. She just couldn’t speak.”
The Doctor hummed quietly. “Her brain is damaged. It is difficult for her to establish causality between certain things, which is also why she can’t string words together because that would require needing to think ahead to construct the sentence.”
I didn’t understand what she meant, but nodded. “Uhm, okay.” I had the impression that asking wouldn’t really help me understand anyway. “Where is Maren, by the way?” I hadn’t seen her since I had gotten here. Usually, she wasn’t that far away.
The Doctor tidied up her instruments and prepared to clean up. “She should be in your room.” It looked like she was about to be done, which probably meant that I was supposed to leave. I still had a question, though.
“So what was wrong with me?” I asked, wanting to get to the bottom of this. Why’d I needed to come here of all places. I shuffled a bit where I sat. The itching in my arm was gone, thankfully.
“The count of white blood cells in your blood was pretty low, which usually is an indicator for leukemia. You shouldn’t worry so much,” came the reply. What was leukemia anyway? Still, hearing that I was supposed to relax, I did.
“Okay,” I gave back, slipping off the bed I’d sat on. “I’ll just, uh, head back to my room then. When will we leave?” Since that was done, I figured that we would leave again soon.
“You go do that. I’ll have another talk with your mother and then you’ll be on your way again,” the Doctor sounded in reply, but by eyes were mostly fixated on that which was poking out of her coat pocket. A PAD. Man, I mine was currently out of battery and I hadn’t brought a cord.
“Uh, yeah.” I made a step forward and deliberately made it seem as though I’d tripped, holding onto the Doctor for support.
“Is there a feeling of vertigo? I can give you something for that,” the Doctor said, appearing slightly startled by me suddenly grabbing her. I shook my head.
“N- no, I’m fine. I’ll just, uh, go now.” I quickly made my way to the door, feeling the eyes of the Doctor lingering on my back until the door had slid shut behind me. I turned to the right to head to my room, looking at the PAD I had pilfered from her pocket. Sometimes, having been a street urchin also guarantees that you know what to do in case boredom hit.
Upon returning to my room, I dropped onto the bed. Strange. Maren wasn’t here. Hadn’t the Doctor said that she’d be here? If they wanted to talk, surely she would’ve walked past me on the way to the Doctor? Shrugging, I started playing with the device I had pilfered.
---Maren---
When I first opened my eyes, I could swear the light was trying to fry my eyeballs. Groaning, I rolled to the side… and fell down. Yelping, I tried cushioning the fall with my arms but I wasn’t fast enough. The impact wasn’t all that hard, but it still knocked the wind out of me. That was also a way to wake up, I guess.
Holding up a hand to my eyes, I tried looking around and noticed that I was in what I could only describe as a prison cell. A rudimentary one, likely on a ship. A ship… Memories flooded back to me and I remembered where I was, why I’d come here. Just when I was about to swear, I could hear the telltale sound of a door and footsteps approaching my cell. Into view stepped the Doctor, hands in the pockets of her coat. “Good morning,” she greeted me as though I wasn’t being held in a cage right now. Well, there were no bars. I could tell by the slight glimmering in the air that the exit was being barred by a force field.
“Good go fuck yourself,” I groaned, rubbing my side where I’d fallen. “Awfully convenient of you to come in here just when I woke up, isn’t it?”
“Not actually. I can calculate how much tranquilizer I need to put you down for an amount of time. I tried being precise, but it seems biology always has this slight margin of error. I can never go below plus minus fifteen seconds, it seems,” she deadpanned, looking me over. I was still wearing the same clothes I had when I’d arrived here. Not that it really mattered, but it made me wonder how much time had actually passed. It couldn’t have been that much, right?
“What is this here, Martinez?” I finally asked, not appreciating this talking around the issue the Doctor was doing. “Why the fu-fu-fuck am I in here?”
“I told you about archaeology, right?” the Doctor asked in turn, making me sigh.
“Come on, can you just for one moment not try to be cryptic?”
“I am trying to explain it to you, if you’d let me finish,” the Doctor offered, giving me the same kind of grin my dentist back on Planet Nuremberg gave me just before he accidentally ripped open my skin with his pointy thing that they use to poke the flesh between teeth. Anyway, since I wasn’t talking, the Doctor continued. “My team and I recently discovered a stray planet. It was likely ejected from the Omicron Sigma system a long time ago when the dark hole there formed. There are ruins that we want to get inside of, and we believe that it requires someone like you to open it.”
“Like me?” I asked, trying to play it cool but hearing her say these words in this context really was unsettling. It was the primordial fear of an infected: Detection.
“Like you,” the Doctor confirmed, nodding. “Travelling there will be a pain, but the way back, we can perform a hyperspace jump. It is about two light years away from the Epsilon dark hole.
“Are you really proposing that we travel there with sublightspeed?” I asked the Doctor, giving her a deadpan look. “There’s a reason why humanity and even the Nomads congregate around places where there are convenient jump hole or jump gate connections.”
“You’re right, if we were using cruise engines, we’d be travelling for about fifteen years,” the Doctor confirmed, looking ponderous for a moment. Did she really just do a rough calculation of how long that’d take? “If we were doing that. We aren’t. If I did my maths right, then I have created an Alcubierre-White-Drive that’ll take us there in about ten hours.”
“A what drive?” I tilted my head, looking at her as though she’d just proposed using beer to fuel the engine.
The Doctor chuckled. “A very unstable FTL drive. If it works, then we’ll probably arrive there being a little beat up. If I miscalculated, then we’ll probably die of gravitational tidal waves.”
“Brilliant.”
“Isn’t it?” The Doctor looked at me. “I guess I can give you something like a monitor or whatever so you can see us fly in here. It does seem awfully boring.”
“What even makes you think I’ll do jack for you?” I asked, sounding a little more annoyed than I had wanted to, clenching my fists. “You’ve done nothing but lie to me.”
The Doctor raised a hand and wagged a finger at me. “Nah, nah, I swear on my scientific reputation that I never outright lied to you. It’s just a sad fact that some people do not need to be told everything. Omission is not lying. If it were, then everything that might potentially interest your partner and you’ve never told him is also a lie, no?”
Taking a deep breath, I sat down on the corner of the bed I’d fallen down from. “You’re going to hurt Dinah if I don’t do what you say, right?”
“Hurt her?” The Doctor seemed honestly confused. “Where’d you get that idea? I’d never harm a child. As I said, as an artisan in my field, I take great pride in her.”
“Then I won’t do anything.” I felt pretty confident in that. What was she going to do anyway?
The Doctor just hummed. “I’ll see to it that you get a monitor so you can watch our approach. Until then.”
I raised an eyebrow. “What, you gonna carry it in here yourself?” Somehow, the thought really amused me.
“No, I think Adrian might be better at doing that.”
“What is he even thinking of all this?” I wondered, throwing up my arms, mostly out of frustration. “It’s not like it is easy getting people to do all your dirty work.”
“You really shouldn’t overthink everything,” the Doctor replied, already on her way out. Lying down again, I wondered what Dinah was doing right now.
---Dinah---
Who knew the Doctor would be this boring? There were literally no games on this PAD, only weird official looking things and science. I didn’t really understand any of it, so I went straight to the neural net and started downloading Angry Pigs™. The download bar almost reached 95% as the a tremor went through the ship and the download started showing an error. “Oh come on!” I exclaimed in annoyance, trying to restart it but for some reason, there was no neural net connection. I furrowed my brow. What the hell was going on? Neural net was always available. With nothing else to do, I looked up and through my rooms window and saw something funky.
Getting up, I walked towards the window to get a better look. Outside, the light of the starts seemed to squeeze at the front and reappear on the back as though one was looking through a warped pane of glass with magnifying properties. I didn’t get it. “Uh,” I intoned, after the initial awe had worn off. Looking at this effect actually was quite straining for the eyes. I returned to bed and looked at the PAD. “You really are a tough nut,” I told it, giving it an accusing stare. Picking it up again, I wondered if I should get out with my squirt gun again, but having been found like this the last time really had put me out of the mood to go and explore.
Opening the PAD again, I started opening random things in the hopes of finding something interesting. Oh, there was a folder with my name. Opening it, I found a lot of files that were all named funny things I couldn’t read. Probably codes or something? Or maybe this was medicine talk? Oh, there was something I could understand. Opening it, I was faced with something that looked like a profile, or medical profile.
In reaction to the unforeseen failure that was Contessa, there is a need for exploring the possibility of memory transplantation. The quick growth process deprives the subject of the natural way in which a human learns to develop a personality and how to behave in social interactions, and therefore, the result is a shell with little more than basic locomotive skills. Curiously enough, there appears to be something of a base intelligence within Contessa, leading me to believe that it is possible to let her develop without our help, although she will never learn language.
Essential skills such as speech are necessary, however, and so I began my work into the Prometheus formula. If it is true that human memory is merely a physical property within the brain, then it should be possible to manually rewire it to produce a desired result. To this end, I would need a second specimen, however, one that is not yet treated with the Deus formula. It will be created from the same genetic material as Contessa, as to reduce the risk of unforeseen variables that would arise from using different genetic material. If all goes according to plan, the first tests can commence in two months.
July, 824 AS.
The specimen is developing splendidly. Her sister seems quite fascinated with her. I recently discovered Contessa simply staring at the incubation vat. Another reason why I believe the girl is not stupid. She does realize that this is where she came from. This might become a problem with this specimen later. I should take note and see whether we can do something about that.
Having thought through Prometheus a bit more, I believe that it is also possible to use to in the reverse way to erase memories. I think I should explore this possibility.
November 824 AS.
I believe the biggest flaw about Contessa was that I let her get so old before inoculating her with the Deus formula. The older people get, the less open and willing to learn they become. I aborted the growth process for this specimen at about eleven or twelve years of biological age. Curiously enough, she learned to walk in just a couple of months. The first treatment with my experimental Prometheus prototype will begin today. From now on, I will monitor her progress in video as well where appropriate.
Having read through the first few paragraphs, I didn’t really know what to make of this. I looked outside the window and still saw this weird warped perspective. Putting the PAD aside, I lay down on my bed and closed my eyes. Reading this had been really boring and I felt like I needed a quick nap to regenerate. Still, there was a nagging feeling at the back of my skull. What did all of this mean? This ‘specimen’ could only really refer to me, right? The context was that this all was in a folder with my name.
I was born on Cambridge, though. I remembered my parents. I remembered elementary school. My teacher there had been a real ass. When we played secret Santa, I was supposed to gift something to her but I refused because she’d let me fail in maths. So mean of her.
With this swirling through my head, I didn’t notice dozing off, only really coming to my senses again, when the PAD slid down the bed and to the ground. I’d lost grip on it. Groaning, I fished for it blindly until I held it in front of my face again. Curiosity had gripped me and I began scrolling through my folder again. There were quite a lot of video files. I opened the very first one.
From a static perspective, I could see myself. I was sitting on a chair, looking up at someone curiously. I looked younger, though not much. My cheeks were rosier. A voice began to speak. “I am going to show you letters and you will tell me the sound they make, right?” the voice asked, and a myriad of different emotions went over my face in the video feed.
A clacking sound and I squinted. “A,” finally came the answer after almost half a minute. My voice sounded strange, as though I was not used to using it to speak. It continued like this, apparently. The voice belonging to the Doctor would sometimes correct me on pronounciation, but otherwise, I seemed to only be learning the alphabet. I skipped ahead a couple of times before switching to another video recording a couple days ahead.
Again, I was sitting in the chair, though this time, I was actually speaking. I wasn’t speaking well, so to say, but it worked. I quickly turned that off because it was embarrassing. Skipping about thirty days worth of recordings, I looked at another one. This time, I wasn’t in the same room as before. My eyes widened as I recognized some of the furniture from the room of the red haired woman I’d stumbled upon before. We were both sitting there and I was holding up cards with pictures on them, talking nonsense related to them while the red woman was drawing the picture.
Putting down the PAD again, I wondered if I should continue. These recordings shouldn’t exist. I did not remember any of it. But this was me. I…
An uneasy feeling was spreading in my stomach. Back in the orphanage, we had had regular appointments with therapists, and I remember how to approach an issue if it unnerved me. Did it change anything? So what if I was not born naturally? I still had everything I have right now, no? But when did my real memories begin? Surely it must be before I met Maren, right? Yeah, it must have been. I skipped forward until I arrived at the last entry. If this was all true, then my real memories must start somewhere after this point.
July, 825 AS.
I was standing in front of a white board, facing people that were not on the feed. There were mathematical equations on it and I was talking and drawing on the white board as though I knew what I was doing. I skipped through the video but this seemed to be all I was doing. At the end, I had wiped the written on the boad many times.
“Very well done,” I heard a familiar voice congratulate me and I bowed slightly.
“Thank you, Doctor. I wouldn’t have thought that I’d be able to explain basic quantum field theory this easily. My notes are all over the place.” Past me shuffled some papers together that were lying on a small table in front of me. “I believe I can do better, though. If you give me a few days, I’ll probably know just as much as you do.”
There was a small pause. “I don’t think that’ll be necessary. You did very well. No need to prove yourself to me. How about you get some rest? You must be tired.”
I shook my head. “No, not really. I have barely been sleeping the last week but I feel wide awake.” I stood there on the podium, looking at what I assumed was the Doctor.
“Very well, then, if you want that,” came the answer after another small delay.
I sat there on the bed, being more confused than anything. Why’d I known math back then but not now anymore? It would’ve helped in elementary school. All in all, the revelations didn’t affect me as much as I would’ve thought they would. So what now? “I should find Maren,” I whispered to myself and got off the bed, looking between the door and the PAD. I decided to take it with me, just in case someone came in here.
The door was still open from the last time I had left. Taking the first steps outside, I looked around, half expecting someone to see me, even though I knew this ship was hardly populated. It came like it had to. “Hey, stop!” I heard a male voice call behind me and I whipped my head around. It was the same blonde man who I’d spotted coming out of Contessa’s room.
The bridge of the Titanic was, funnily enough, one of the least well kept parts of the ship. The Doctor had always insisted that more vital parts be prioritized. There was only so much money to go around, she had said. Adrian found that hard to believe considering the tremendous amounts of cash the Doctor’s work was siphoning off the pockets of some of the most wealthy people in Sirius.
He knew he’d find the Doctor here. She was sitting on a chair, watching through the sloped window pane as the Alcubierre-White-Drive distorted space in front of them, causing light to warp around them as well. It was funky to look at. “Teresa,” Adrian said, announcing his presence to the older woman. He knew that it was easy to startle the Doctor when she was in one of her reveries.
The reply came in the form of a nondescript hum. “The kid left her room and is now roaming the ship. She’s small enough to crawl through the ventilation shafts but probably doesn’t know how dangerous that is. I deactivated the ventilation around the ship to make sure she doesn’t hurt herself.”
“Very thoughtful of you,” the Doctor replied, turning her head and looking at him. “You need to make sure that the girl doesn’t become suspicious. If she notices that we’re helping her, then she might become suspicious of our motives. The formula I gave her should begin its work shortly and if it does. Well, you’ve seen her before.”
“It was scary to see a child talk the way you do,” Adrian admitted, coming a step closer, his arms crossed. “How long till we’re there?”
“Little less than ninety minutes,” the Doctor gave back and looked through the window. In the distance, there was a tiny speck. Their destination. Cosmically speaking, they were moving laughably slow, but even so, they ever so slowly approached the solar object. “Funnily enough, it is still moving at a speed of some three hundred kilometres per second. We would reach it some two seconds earlier if it wouldn’t move.”
“And this is relevant?”
The Doctor grimaced. “I suppose not.” She sighed, turning around in earnest. “You know, I promised our other guest a monitor. I believe you should do that and accidentally give her a means to escape her cell. It’s tricky to do with her because she can be incredibly dense.”
“I think I can do it in a way that doesn’t make her suspicious and is seen by her as well.” Adrian nodded, taking a deep breath. “You know, to an onlooker like me, this all seems like magic.”
The Doctor raised an eyebrow. “Of all the people who could say that, I would have thought I had taught you better.”
“How can you know this will all work out? It is so convoluted,” he said, throwing up a hand in frustration. “It’s annoying to me because I have no idea what we’re actually aiming towards at any given moment and it makes me feel dumb for now seeing the connections like you do.”
Looking at him for a few moments, the Doctor opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again. “I don’t know if things work out the way they are supposed to,” she admitted, making Adrian raise his eyebrows even further. “I make a play and assume that the other party will act in the way I assume they will, and mostly, they do. Humans are pretty predictable, especially when you made them.”
“I guess I should chase the girl around the ship a little after I gave the other guest a means to escape?” Adrian asked, looking at the door he’d come from.
“Please do. It will distract her from the changes. Also, make sure that when the right time comes, Skyhook works.” A small silence. “Ah, and, well, you shouldn’t actually catch her.”
“Figures,” Adrian merely replied and left the bridge, leaving the Doctor alone with her thoughts again.
Sweat was dripping down my forehead and onto the metal bars below. My back ached from having drawled this much, and my elbows and kneecaps weren’t faring much better. It was times like these where I wished I’d wear things with long sleeves more often.
The telltale sound of the device beeping could be heard and I scrambled forward again, being as quiet as I possibly could. Reaching a junction, I took the ladder up to another level of the ship. Since the moment I had left my quarters, the blonde man followed me. He had a device in his hand which he was continuously looking at. It probably connected with the internal sensors or something to find me.
Poking my head out of the ventilation a deck above, I knew I had a small breather. It would take the man some four minutes to get up here, enough for me to rest a little bit. Leaning against the wall, I enjoyed how cold the metal felt against my back. I tried breathing more slowly but it didn’t really work. Even now, I was already looking for a way to proceed.
What was I even trying to do? I needed some kind of plan. I needed to find Maren. She’d been gone for so long now, something must have happened. They had probably detained her and put her somewhere. Did this ship have prison cells? I needed to find out, but where could I do that? My breathing slowed down somewhat and I stood up again, continuing down the hallway. I began to look into the rooms I could access to figure out something or hopefully simply run into Maren. Then again, I figured that if she was being held captive, her prison would be locked. She might have been there somewhere, but I likely couldn’t enter it.
Where should I go? The only real answer I could come up with was Contessa’s room. I knew where it was, and if I did it right, I could ask her if there were cells here. If only I could draw that quickly enough. Sighing, I looked for the next vent to crawl through to get down two levels.
Just when I had disappeared again, I could hear the steps of the blonde man outside the wall. I quickly scurried away from it. The quicker I was downstairs, the more time I would have to try and convey what I wanted to Contessa. First level. Second level. When I was on the right one, by limbs were on fire and I had to bite my tongue not to whimper. I felt like I was in the ceiling, judging by the grates that allowed me a top down view of the rooms below. Now, one of these was probably the right one. Two rooms further, I hit my mark, as I saw the familiar red hair below. “Ay, watch your head!” I called down to alert her to my existence, and it worked. The red head looked up confusedly and the woman backed away slightly. With my legs I began kicking the grate in the hopes to knock it loose but it didn’t work. The sweat that was clinging to me was starting to become cold. My entire plan had hinged on this working. If I couldn’t get to Contessa, how was I supposed to get her to tell me something?
After a couple attempts, I had to admit that I was too weak to break open a thick steel grate with by legs. Frustrated, I looked down at Contessa, and she looked up to me. “Can’t you help me?” I asked, more out of desperation than anything else. Of course, there was no answer. However, Contessa did begin to move slowly, approaching her sketchbook. “Oh no, I really can’t look at your drawings right now.” This was surreal. If I was right, then the blonde man would arrive here in little less than four minutes.
I knew I should probably be going so he doesn’t see that I had purposefully come here. Starting to move down the vent again, I was once again stopped when I heard Contessa’s voice for the first time. It wasn’t a word or anything I would classify as language, but I knew what she wanted off me. I stopped and looked down at her again. She was holding a torn out page of her sketchbook and tip toed so she could slide it through the grate for me. I took it. In the dim light of the shaft, I could see that it was a quick sketch of this level of the ship. The doors were all marked with different symbols, a crate, a broom. Contessa’s room was marked with something that looked like a lowercase C. However, there was one room at the far end of this level that was marked with something that looked like bars.
I peered down at Contessa, who was giving me something like an encouraging nod. “You’re not nearly as dumb as you act like, are you?” I asked, squinting down at the red woman who was continuing to look at me with no sign of having understood. Well, perhaps she couldn’t understand me, but she had anticipated what I would want in the future. Clever girl. “Thank you,” I added after a while before continuing to crawl down the vent. I would need to somehow get to the other side of this level. The door was probably locked but if I could crawl through the vents, I could likely just… wait, no. If I hadn’t been able to break the grate in Contessa’s room, then I also wouldn’t be able to do that there. Annoying.
Looking down at myself, I noticed that I still had my squirt gun. Perhaps opening the door would work using this again? Emerging on the floor again, I looked around. It would be some two minutes until the blonde man would arrive. Crossing the distance, I was faced with the door that I hoped would lead to the prison. Of course, the console would read red, meaning that I couldn’t just open the door. I tried squirting the controls, but all that achieved was that the next person touching it would feel mildly uncomfortable. Damnit!
“Ugh,” I groused, putting my hands to my head and squeezing as though I could squeeze out a good idea of how to proceed now. While looking at the console, I noticed a little indent on the bottom. Pressing it, I noticed that I could remove the front of it and reveal the electronics behind it. “Wow, this is like some scifi movie,” I whispered to myself before squirting the shit out of the electronics. They gave a satisfying sizzling sound and smoke rose from those wires that I had fried. “Brilliant,” I commented my masterpiece as the door unlocked so I could pry it open. This better be worth it. Putting away my squirt gun, I squeezed into the room.
It was lit, which was a good start. And yes, there were cells. There was also a TV set mounted on one of the walls which showed some weird feed of space. “Dinah?” I heard a familiar voice say and I knew I was at the right place.
“Yup,” I replied in the best cool rescuer voice I could muster. Maren was sitting inside one of the cells and I was about to approach her when she spoke up sharply.
“Don’t! There’s a force field!”
I stopped, looking at the cell. There was a slight flimmering. “Hey, they brought you lunch?” I commented as I saw the tray next to Maren, which had exclusively healthy things on it in well portioned quantities. “Is that tea?”
“Yeah,” Maren commented, pointing at the tea bag which she had placed at the side. “It’s pretty garbage, though. I don’t suppose you got a plan?”
That was a good point. My entire thinking had been focused on simply getting here. I looked at my squirt gun, then at the energy field. I tried squirting the shit out of that too but there was only enough water for a single, sad gush of water. As soon as it hit the energy field, though, a loud pop could be heard and the lights went out entirely. “Brilliant,” I could hear Maren state from inside the cell. “I now feel dumb for not having thrown the tea at the force field.” I could hear Maren exiting the cell.
Just when she did, a cone of light flooded into the room again when the door opened and the blonde man stepped in. “Wha-“ I began speaking but Maren was faster. The tea cup flew across the room and decked the blonde man across the head. He, in turn, keeled over, bleeding. “Okay.”
“Let’s get to the bridge,” Maren said as she stepped over the man. I hesitantly followed. I noticed that the tea cup wasn’t broken. We made our way through halfway of the level before we were stopped by the sound of footsteps coming our way. Not just one pair of feet, but multiple. Rounding a corner came the Doctor and two armed security bots.
“Yield,” the Doctor said, looking at Maren. I heroically hid behind Maren. “I have my plans for you and I won’t have you interfere with them.” Just as the Doctor said that, a tremor went through the ship as we arrived at our destination. The robots began to advance, requiring us to back down. Slowly, we were pushed into one of the rooms. Had the door been open before? It was almost completely dark inside. I could see the Doctor standing outside the room, looking as we were slowly herded onto a kind of dais in the middle of the room. I noticed that the Doctor closed her eyes and a moment later, I knew why that was.
The last thing I saw before I lost consciousness was a flash of white light.
The first thing that I noticed was that I, well, wasn’t dead. In fact, I felt quite fine. The ground was a little hard, but otherwise, I wouldn’t mind sleeping a little longer. If only this insipid dripping would stop.
Drip, drip, drip.
I groaned, sitting up and opening my eyes. I was inside something that looked like a cave. Well, not really, as the walls and everything looked artificial. The colors were pretty cave-y though. Wait, I was missing something here. Where was…?
“Maren?” I called out and my voice carried through the cavernous extend of the complex. Why was I breathing? Like, why was there air here? Going cross-legged, I looked around, only to find rubble. I think this once was something like a plaza or so, because there were broken pillars and arches littering the ground, and something that looked like stone pathways wound through it all. I assume some patches here had also been simply earth at one point, but whether there had been plants, I couldn’t tell. It was all dried up. Didn’t plants need light anyway?
There was no answer? Where was Maren? I couldn’t really see everything around here, as rubble was blocking a lot of my view. Getting up to my feet, I started climbing up one of the bigger piles of debris to look around for something like a speck of color.
Oh, another thing. Why could I see? Following the source of light, I noticed there was a dim source of it above me. I couldn’t really tell how high the ceiling was. Proportions seemed to not really work here. It reminded me of an evening’s afterglow. Standing atop the rubble, I turned my head to take in the surroundings. I was half expecting to not find her, but I saw Maren, lying next to another pile of rubble some distance away. “Hey!” I called out, getting off my pile as quickly as possible and running over to my adoptive mother, kneeling next to her and starting to shake her. “Hello?” I intoned while becoming more and more forceful.
She didn’t budge, but she was breathing. “Don’t play me like that,” I said, starting to become slightly annoyed. Maren wasn’t moving. Of course she wasn’t. Lazy ass never wants to get up in the morning either. “Ugh, of course,” I muttered, looking around for a moment. I knew how to grab someone in order to pull someone twice as heavy as yourself. I slapped her face. She jerked awake.
“Gah!” Maren intoned, flailing her arms around briefly. “What the-?” She tried to sit up but something was preventing her from doing that. She sucked in a breath of air as though she was in pain. “Dinah?” she asked, looking up at me. I didn’t really know how to respond.
“Uhm, everything alright?” I asked dumbly, figuring that something wasn’t right with Maren.
She shook her head. “Can’t move.”
“How do you mean you can’t move?”
“I think I broke my back.”
I flinched slightly. That was harsh. “*****,” I muttered, not really thinking about just how much pain that must cause. “What should we do now?” I asked, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in my gut.
Maren gave up trying to move on her lonesome. “Dunno.” Her head was facing the ceiling. “Have you looked around?” I shook my head. I hadn’t really paid attention to the rest of the room since I had been trying to find her. “Maybe you should do that. If there is some kind of path, I guess taking that would be better than lying around here.”
Getting to my feet slowly, I nodded. Maybe Maren was just trying to make the best out of our situation. Maybe she was just as helpless as me right now. But she was an adult and having someone tell you what to do was actually comforting right now.
Sound.
Most of it made no sense to it. It had never really had the ability to conceptualize it in a way that’d make sense. It could hear it, but it was hard to deduce any meaning from it. Sight, on the other hand, was more reliable. It had watched the altercation between the Doctor and Dinah. With the flash having disappeared, it lurked, watching, remembering the hand movements on the console that had caused the flash.
“That would be that,” the Doctor commented, sighing. “You return to your storage,” she told the robots that had accompanied her while she herself began to move away, away from sight. It could no longer see her. The words were meaningless. Only sight could help it. Slowly, it stalked forward, just in time to see the Doctor enter the room that Maren and Dinah had left from. “Oh Adrian. I told you to not enter the room,” the Doctor muttered while she inspected the body of her unconscious comrade. It expected the man to hurt a lot. It could smell the scent of hot tea mixed with something metallic in the air. After a couple of minutes, a male groaning could be heard. “Easy,” the Doctor told the reawakening man.
“Easy my ass,” he muttered. It couldn’t see the man, but the voice was a different one, so that meant he was awake. It growled slightly. It disliked his voice. Luckily, the Doctor hadn’t heard it. “Did it work?”
“Yes. I told you not to go into the room. Miss von Westefeld has a history of violence, after all.” The two of them stood up together, the Doctor stabilizing the man somewhat. “Come, I can fix your head if we bring you to my lab.”
The man muttered something that wouldn’t have been intelligible even if one knew language. Together, they began to move. It hushed behind a corner silently, listening to them gaining distance before it began to move, not after them but towards the room the others had disappeared in. Just when it looked at the console that had executed the command that had seen the others disappear in a flash did it realize just how complex it was. Slowly, it entered the same commands as the Doctor had and a slow hum could be heard from the machine, rapidly gaining in intensity. Dumbfounded, it stood there for a moment before it heard footsteps rapidly approaching from the corridor.
But all the Doctor would see after the second flash had whisked it away was the empty room.
“There,” the Doctor said, putting the device that she had used to regenerate Adrian’s head aside. She had brought him to her lab and laid him down so he could rest a little. “I think it’d be best if you stayed here for the rest of the day. Our work is pretty much done and all we need to do is wait.”
Adrian looked at her flatly. “I don’t suppose there’s TV here?” he asked and she shook her head.
“Not quite. The signal from the neural net doesn’t travel this far. We do have a bunch of stuff in our database that you can watch if you want.” What did they have, even? She had never really taken the time to take a look at it. Adrian seemed content enough with this explanation.
“Then do me a favour and move that monitor over there so it faces me, kay?” He could have done it himself, but he didn’t really feel like moving right now. The Doctor knew this but she moved the monitor for him anyway.
“Anything else?” she asked, trying not to sound as though it was a rhetorical question.
“I guess I’ll scream if I need anything,” he gave back, shaking his head briefly. The Doctor handed him a PAD that he could use to access the monitor. “Thanks.” With that, the Doctor turned around and headed for the door, leaving him alone for now. The door didn’t shut. It was probably something that the Doctor had arranged because there was hardly a need to keep it shut when she was working.
With a sigh, he began browsing through the meagre amount of stuff he had available right now. Most of it was either some kind of thriller or science fiction. Was the Doctor a fan of science fiction? He didn’t really know. Sometimes, it was hard to tell fact from fiction when it came to her. Usually, he would not have believed someone when they’d say that they found a way to travel faster than light. Hell, nobody besides these damn money sharks from Ageira knew how the trade lanes worked, even.
Grumbling, he settled for one of the weird thrillers, figuring that if nothing else, it would lull him to sleep. Turning down the sound so it wouldn’t allow him, he rolled to the side and began watching, and sure enough, over the course of the next minutes, his eyelids would become heavy and a yawn escaped his throat. Moments later, he was sound asleep and helpless.
A creature crawled into the room. It was slow, not adjusted to moving like this. It needed to hurry, as any moment exposed to the air like this was a liability. I had followed the scent of Adrian and slowly approached him soundlessly, ascending the legs of the bed and slithering towards his head. When the creature was atop him, the movement woke up Adrian and his eyes widened with horror, but the scream never escaped his throat before the creature entered his body through it.
“My arms are tired.”
“Don’t be a girl,” I gave back through clenched teeth as I pulled Maren through what I presumed was a way out. Time had done a number on the place and it hardly looked like more than a crevice in the wall. It was also black as pitch here, so I had tasked Maren with holding the PAD that I had pilfered from the Doctor to light the way. Apparently, Maren could use her arms but not her legs. Her back must have been broken further down, then, I guessed.
“Them’s fighting words coming from a twelve year old,” Maren deadpanned, sounding just as strained as myself, likely because I wasn’t improving her back situation by pulling her along slowly in a stone cavern.
“I’m thirteen,” I gave back as flatly as I could. Sweat was making my hair stick to my face. I really hated having them that long.
“Right.” Maren could slap herself for getting that wrong again.
For a couple of minutes, we didn’t speak. I simply pulled her along while she shone the way. The only sounds that could be heard were either natural or caused by us. Then there was a loud bang that reverberated through the cavern before dissipating. Both of us froze, listening as if expecting something to happen.
And it did.
The roiling sound alerted us to the distinct possibility of a cave in. “*****,” I hissed, redoubling my efforts in pulling Maren along. We could hear the telltale sound of debris falling from the ceiling. Dust was raining down on both myself and Maren so I had to close my eyes, blindly stumbling backwards in the hopes to escape the debris. Suddenly, Maren used the remaining strength in her upper body to push me away from her as hard as she could and I stumbled backwards, letting go of her in the process. I fell on my ass and narrowly avoided a sizeable chunk of ceiling. Maren was crawling away from where it had landed as more and more debris rained down and blocked my vision of her.
With a start, Contessa awoke after having used the opportunity to escape from the Titanic. She had taken a long time, but eventually she had learned how to open the door that locked her into her room without needing the blonde man. She had gotten good at remembering patterns. By the fact she was not dead, she deduced that she must have entered the correct pattern of commands into the transporter.
Looking up, she saw the same glow that Maren and Dinah had seen at the ceiling of the anterior chamber before. It blinded her, causing her to look away. Now, where to go? Like Dinah before her, Contessa climbed atop the debris in order to take a look around. She found the same crevice that Maren and Dinah had entered, but after a couple of meters, in which she needed to proceed in total darkness, she came upon a blockade of rubble and she wasn’t strong enough to get it out of the way. Once or twice she thought she heard something on the other side but it was too faint, so she dismissed it as her imagination.
Slowly proceeding back to where she had come from, she started looking around for something like another exit. Her immediate aim had been to flee from the Titanic. She wanted to find the surface, because she figured this was her best bet when trying to find water. However, given the sheer size of this chamber, it could take a while, especially with the rubble blocking a lot of her view.
She hoped she’d find a source of water soon.
When the dust had settled, I was alone. Debris separated me from Maren. Standing up, coughing, I stumbled towards the rubble, trying to claw it aside, but to no avail. “Maren!” I called out, but there was no reply from the other side. I remained still, waiting for my voice to dissipate in the distance, but there was no reply. “Maren!” I called out again, this time more erratically, giving up on trying to clear the debris, instead more hammering against it with my hands. I had had enough. I could take a lot of things. I didn’t mind my life being a lie and having been born in a vat, but this was too much. A sob escaped my throat as the situation dawned on me for the first time. “No,” I whimpered, taking a step back and sinking to my knees, assuming a fetal position on the ground.
I probably should be quiet as to not cause another cave in, but I was beyond caring. I sobbed into my arms until my throat hurt and my eyes were red. I hadn’t done that in a long time. Crying made you a target for bullying in the orphanage, so I had quickly learned to hide things like this or confine them to my room. It was still black as pitch, so nobody could see me anyway. Worse still, Maren had had the PAD, so I didn’t even have a source of light on me, so even if I proceeded down this path, I could just slip somewhere and break my neck by accident. So what was the point in moving if I could just wait here?
Minutes creeped by and I started to become acutely aware that the sharper rocks underneath me were poking my sides painfully. Stone really didn’t make a comfortable bed. Grumbling, I got to my feet eventually. My throat was dry and I was really thirsty. I needed something to drink.
So I started moving along the cave again, navigating the darkness by going along the wall, touching it with both hands to feel the way. I especially paid close attention to not slip on something. For what felt like hours, I moved like this, trying not to think too much about what I was doing. I’d just break down again. Eventually, the air became colder. That was a good sign, right? I really didn’t know.
Just when I was wondering whether there actually was an end to this path, I saw something. At first, I wasn’t sure whether it was real because I hadn’t used my eyes in so long, but eventually, it dawned on me that it was light. There was a source of dim light ahead. I crossed the rest of the distance in record time, slowing down when I reached the exit.
There was another cavern. I assumed this was how the one before this one was supposed to look. Well, to some degree at least. There were traces of something like moss covering everything, but the pillars and arches were intact. They flanked three stone paths that met in the middle at ninety degree angles, leaving open one path that led to the far side of the cavern. There, I could see something, but it was too far to make out, especially in this light. It was just enough to see contours.
Men were weird. While the incubus wiggled around in the blonde man and tried to get comfortable, it couldn’t help but appreciate the differences to its former host. While Maren had her perks, strength was surely not one of them. Adrian might not work out actively, but his sex merited more muscle mass by default. It would come in handy.
It took a good while before it had nested in enough in order to use Adrian’s legs for locomotion. With each passing second, it subsumed more of his will over his body until finally, it could sit up.
Using a hand, it opened and closed it slowly, appreciating how the muscle contractions responded to its demands. Standing up, it took a few experimental steps with the new host before taking a look around. The monitor was still prattling on about the movie that Adrian had been watching as it had entered. Besides that, though, there wasn’t really anything interesting here.
It began rummaging through the drawers, trying to find something that could be used as a weapon. If it were to run across these combat robots again, it needed to be prepared. Needles and all sorts of medicine wouldn’t help, however. Well, unless it could mix together something caustic, but it doubted that the necessary components would be found here for something that would work faster than their weapons.
Opening another drawer, it came across an array of sweets, from popsicles to Kinder Eggs. It blinked. Why was that here? It looked at the rest of the room, then at the sweets. Oh, right. Dinah had been here for a good while probably. Maybe that red haired woman, too. Bribing children with sweets, eh, Doctor?
It straightened up again, Adrian’s spine giving a satisfying popping sound as it stretched his body. Nothing useful here. If only the Doctor had human guards instead of these tin cans. It’d be easier to avoid them, as the incubus would be able to sense their approach. Robots were invisble to its natural senses.
If it couldn’t be helped, it would need to sneak, and so it left the medical room. From corner to corner it hushed, peeking around the edges in order to see whether there was a threat on the corridors. It was all empty. The layout of the ship was almost maze-like, but it could make use of the small portion of muscle memory it could access from Adrian. For the rest, it would take more time.
The closer it came to the bridge, where she felt the presence of the Doctor, the more suspicious the situation became. Was the Doctor feeling so secure that she didn’t need the robots? Why not simply have them patrol? It wasn’t like that would be causing any inconvenience or extra cost.
Completely without impedance, it reached the elevator that would bring it to the bridge. Raising its hand to call it, it hesitated, then pressed the button. If this was a trap, then there wasn’t really any way around it. If anything, it could bank on Adrian being enough of a familiar face to prevent any outright hostilities. Then again, the Doctor had never appeared to be the type to be especially sentimental or caring for the man it was inhabiting.
The door slid shut after it had entered and the lift started moving. It was a short ride. Only a couple seconds later, the doors slid open again, revealing the bridge.
The Titanic was a Bustard class civilian carrier, so quite a big ship. The bridge perfectly mirrored this fact. A large panorama window was at the far side of the room, a row of work stations in lowered position in front of it. Connected with stairs on a kind of dais, there was the command level, where the executive offers took place during operations. However, from what I could read off Adrian’s memories, these seats had never once all been taken at the same time. The planet they were visiting was visible through the window, a barren, arid world without any visible bodies of water or vegetation. Blocking part of the view from where it stood, the Doctor sat in the captain’s chair, legs crossed and hands folded in her lap, looking at the new arrival.
“I thought it would take longer,” the Doctor spoke up, eyeing the new arrival in a scrutinizing way.
“Beg your pardon?” it spoke using Adrian’s vocal chords, the sound of his voice unfamiliar, as it was only used to one host.
“Well.” The Doctor made a hand motion as if pointing at all parts of Adrian’s body. “I would have assumed that taking over all of it would take longer. I had assumed that, since most parts of the brain would be especially hard to access, it would take about four hours more.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” it replied, taking a step into the room. It was trying not to let it show that it was surprised that the Doctor just seemed to know what was going on.
“Ah, of course,” she cooed, looking to the side, humming. “Only partial control suffices. I think that makes sense considering your kind might need to sometimes change hosts on the fly.”
I stopped only three paces away from the lift. There was about five meters of space between it and the Doctor. “You lost,” it just said, feeling like that much was obvious.
“Hmm, you’ll kill me, I know.”
“Kill you?” It cocked its head slightly.
“Well, if I were any other person, you would infect me. However, I can promise you that you will not have a fun time trying that. Or at least your offspring won’t.” The Doctor gave me something that looked like the professional smile of a dentist after having diagnosed periodontitis.
“You’re a Psionic,” it concluded, arching an eyebrow as if expecting confirmation.
The Doctor made a grimace. She absolutely disliked it if people reduced complex issues to simple concepts like that. “Not quite, but it is comparable.”
“Explain.”
“No.”
It balled its fists. “Why should I believe you? I would be able to feel it if you were a Psionic.”
“You see,” the Doctor began to explain, giving the creature masquerading as Adrian a pitying look. “I’ve read a lot of trivial literature, and it is an ongoing trope that the bad guy spills the beans on his great plans and thus ruins it. This isn’t a dime novel.”
“Very well,” it stated, starting to cross the distance between it and the Doctor but the Doctor’s hand pulled out a gun that had been hidden inside the pocket of her jacket. “You’d shoot Adrian?” it asked, considering just how much damage the weapon could do to it before it could get to the Doctor. There were two meters between them.
“Adrian is dead, at least this one,” the Doctor answered, and there was something that was almost sadness in her voice. “You killed him when you possessed him.” The Doctor sighed. “See, I can’t allow you to take me prisoner either.”
It grit its teeth, considering whether to simply lunge at the Doctor and try to knock the gun out of her hands. Just when it was about to do that, however, the Doctor’s hand moved. A single shot rang through the bridge and a body hit the floor.
But it wasn’t Adrian’s.
It had felt like a small eternity in which I had simply stood here and looked at the shape that was sitting some three hundred meters away from me in the shadow. I couldn’t really describe it better than that. It seemed vaguely humanoid, but the shape seemed… off. Perhaps it was just the general gloominess of this cavern, but I wasn’t sure whether it was a skeleton or not.
Tentatively, I made a step forward, half expecting something to happen but it didn’t. Heh, of course. I mean, if nothing had happened when I had entered here, chances were that a single step wouldn’t change much about that.
Should I approach? There wasn’t really much else to do here. There were two other caverns, one to the left and one to right right, but if I were to guess, all three, including the one that I had come from would lead back. This seemed to be as far as this tunnel system would go. Well, unless there were cross sections in the other tunnel that I hadn’t taken into account because, well, I hadn’t seen them.
I coughed slightly. My throat was dry as parchment now and the cool, dry air didn’t help. Taking a deep breath, I began walking, slowly, steadily, approaching the far end of the room. One hundred and fifty meters.
I could recognize now that the shape was sitting on some kind of elevated stone chair. Not quite a throne, but definitely bigger than was strictly necessary for the shape that was sitting on it limply.
One hundred meters.
The shape was now more easily visible. I had been right, it was vaguely humanoid, but it didn’t appear to have… skin. Bare, red flesh and sinew was clearly visible. Plates of bone were protruding from its body, the chest, legs and arms especially. Its face was completely obstructed by an almost comically large plate of bone that rested on its head that reached outwards and down, almost as long as its arms.
Fifty meters.
The ground around it. It seemed to… move. Just now I realized that the creature was grown into the very earth that surrounded the chair. Veins, organs and gestating flesh covered a radius of about two meters around where it rested. The closer I got, the more I could see of it.
Just when I thought that, perhaps it was dead, it moved. Slowly, as though trying not to fall apart from old age, it raised its head. A hand followed until it rested against the side of its face, seeming as though the creature was looking at me questioningly even though I could not see its eyes beneath the bone plate. Did it even have eyes?
“Uhm, hi?” I began to speak, feeling incredibly awkward and apprehensive, but this couldn’t be worse than what had happened before today. Don’t think about it, Dinah. Just concentrate on the now. “I’ve, uhm, I’ve gotten lost and I was wondering if you could maybe help me.”
The creature looked at me for a while after I had stopped speaking, doing nothing. I began sweating. “If it’s not too… inconvenient for you? I know we don’t know each other and, uh,” I looked at the gestating flesh that bound the creature to where it was sitting right now. “It might be a little hard for you to move, but I’d be really grateful if you could help me.”
Again, there was no reply, yet I was absolutely sure that the creature was very well aware that I was trying to communicate with it. I could even see the muscle tissue on its belly contract as it breathed slowly and evenly. “Uhm, no?” I suddenly got the feeling to retreat. This wasn’t a good idea. I had no idea what this thing was. For all I knew, this could be a kind of predator. The fact that it had survived when everything else on this planet seemed dead wasn’t a good omen. Slowly, I made a step back, not turning away from it, however. “Okay then.” Another step. “I’ll just, uh, be on my way then.” Another step and another. The creature moved its head slightly as I moved. So it was very well able to see somehow.
Just when I had thought nothing would happen anymore, I heard a voice. Its voice. It was difficult to describe, but if I had to do it, I would say that it was the kind of voice a heavy smoker would have after fifty years of smoking. “Halt.”
I froze. I didn’t just stop moving, I even stopped breathing. It felt like the creature’s attention was weighing on me heavily. “Come,” it commanded, beckoning with one hand and my legs moved on their own. One step, two steps, three steps, I began walking towards the stony throne of the creature until I actually stepped over some of the flesh that seemed to have grown into the ground. I grimaced inwardly, imagining how it would be to accidentally step on that. Would it hurt the creature? I walked until I stood directly in front of the creature.
It wasn’t particularly big. Since it was sitting, I was actually towering over it by half a head in height. It moved its hand and my head moved to the side. The creature continued scrutinizing me like that, as though it wanted to find out what kind of species I was. At one point, it even used its bony hand to check my teeth, whatever good that would do. “Your kind could not have come here alone. Who brought you here?”
The question confused me. I felt the pressure on my body lessening around my head and I was able to speak again. Sweat was running down my forehead and my heart was beating wildly. I shivered in the cold air. “I- I was abducted by someone. I don’t know what they want here, I sweat. They have this transport thingy and made us come down here.” I tried to move the rest of my body but couldn’t. “I mean no harm, please.”
The creature’s head was pointed towards me and so I was pretty sure it was appraising me for quite some time. Then the pressure disappeared and I lost footing, falling on my ass. “I believe you,” it croaked, lowering its hand to rest on the armrest of its chair. “You should not be here.”
“I’m sorry,” I replied for lack of anything else to say. I didn’t get up from where I sat, for fear of being gripped like that again.
“You spoke of others?”
I nodded, eager to please the creature so it wouldn’t try to do me harm. “M- my mother is in the tunnel there.” I pointed at it. “It caved in and I think she is hurt. I-“ I swallowed, trying not to tear up again. “I wanted to help her but I was too weak. You’re strong, right? You could help her.”
The creature followed my finger. “There is not just one presence.” It raised its hand in the direction I had pointed at and the ground started to shake again. I gave a surprised yelp as I feared that rocks would crush my skull any time now but nothing came. Instead, dust rose from the cavern I had come from and a while later, the limp body of Maren came floating out of the cave. I averted my eyes as she floated closer as I could see various deformities from the cave in having broken her limbs. From the shadow it cast on the ground, I knew it came to a halt just next to me, but I didn’t want to look. A sob escaped my throat as the image of her broken body didn’t want to leave my consciousness. There were no tears, though. I felt like I would need to drink an entire well before I could emit fluids again.
My head snapped back up as I heard a series of cracking sounds. One after another, the weirdly angled limbs snapped back in place. The creature rotated Maren’s body and one after another, the damages disappeared. I watched in horrified awe as a wide gash on her chest just closed. Thirty seconds later, her body was placed on the ground, apparently whole. “Maren?” I intoned, slowly moving over to her until I sat above her. “Maren!” I shook her, trying to wake her up. It didn’t work, but I could feel her breathing. Elation washed over me and I buried my head in her chest. My face was smeared with the dried remains of my tantrum before but I didn’t care. Maren’s clothes were ruined anyways.
Eventually, I noticed that I still wasn’t alone and I looked up to the creature that throned above and looked at me expressionlessly. “Thank you,” I said, feeling like a heavy weight had been lifted from my chest. “Wh- what is this place?”
The creature seemed to consider the question for a moment. “A temporal observatory. The Gate Builders came to this world an unfathomably long time ago and found primitive life here. With their vast knowledge, they elevated the most promising species to sapience in return for their loyal servitude.”
“And you are one of them.” I rested a hand on Maren’s chest, as if I wanted to keep reminding myself that she was alive.
“No.”
“Then why are you here?” It seemed strange that a creature of such power would simply live here for no reason.
The creature looked at Maren. “After the elevation of this planet’s species, they served the Gate Builders for a long time. But their home world could not survive the death of the star that gave it life. The Gate Builders wanted them to let it be destroyed by the sun. A natural death. However, they were sentimental and protected it with the technology they had gained from the Gate Builders. They found out of course, and as punishment, the Gate Builders desolated their world to restore the natural order of things before sending their former servants through their gates into exile.”
“Okay,” I responded. This still didn’t answer my question. “But-“
“I guard my creator’s magnum opus. The pinnacle of their technological pursuit. The knowledge of all things past, present and future.”
Well, okay. That made sense. “Uhm, we don’t want any of that. We just want to get home.”
The creature looked at me. “Very well. There is one problem, however.”
“Yes?”
“Bring me your sister.”
“I-“ I blinked again. What did he- Oh. “She is here?”
“I know she is. The tortured existence wanted to flee its captivity. It is too far away for me to summon it the way I did with your custodian.” I looked down at the body as though wanting to say something but decided otherwise. “Find your sister and bring her to me. Then you may leave.”
Exhausted, Contessa collapsed against the stone wall of the cavern she had stumbled into. The air here was cool but she was still sweating. That was not good. It couldn’t be good, given that she already felt like she could drink up an entire lake.
It was because of her panting that she didn’t hear the sound of footsteps approaching. In the pitch black, it was impossible to see who it was, so she got to her feet and started retreating, trying to be as silent as possible. That, however, was easier said than done and only a few steps in, she tripped and fell onto her back painfully.
If the person hadn’t heard her fall, they had definitely heard her yelp of pain as she impacted the ground. The other steps stopped. “Hey?” they sounded, but Contessa didn’t understand the words. “Is that you? You know my voice, don’t you?”
Groaning slightly, Contessa rubbed her back, still on the ground. Some of the tension left her as she recognized the voice. That was right, they were trapped down here as well. Had it really been such a good idea to try and run away from the Doctor even though she had had no idea what would be on the other side of the transporter?
“You alright?” the voice sounded again and Contessa could feel that they were very close. They knelt down in front of her. “I know a way out of here. Want to come with me?” She knew they were directly facing her, probably looking into her face expecting an answer, but the words didn’t make sense in her head.
She gave a helpless noise. By now she had sat up properly, seeing no point in standing. She felt them reaching for one of her hands and tugging as if wanting to pull her somewhere. She was tired. She’d much rather just lie down. The ground was cold. It distracted her from the thirst. “No, stop being such a knob. Come on now.”
There was a firm quality to the voice, as if the speaker knew what they were doing. Contessa sighed and stood up, letting herself be pulled after them. Even though it was dark, they seemed to know where they were going. The way took them what felt to Contessa like half an eternity, but eventually, her sore eyes were greeted with the subdued light of the chamber of the entity.
They stumbled into the dim light and Contessa had to cough in the dusty air. The girl who’d brought her here was watching. “Come, this way.”
Contessa followed, looking around. She only noticed the entity on its dais when she was about seventy meters from it and she froze. There was something deeply unsettling about the creature that made her shudder. From afar, she could see it raise a hand and perform a hand motion that demanded her to approach, and so she did as if directed by puppeteers’ strings. Eventually, Contessa knelt in front of the entity and it looked down at her from its seat.
“A synthetic creature like you,” the entity croaked, though the words were directed at the one who’d directed me here, my sister.
“I know,” Dinah replied, having sat down two paces behind Contessa. “Does it matter?”
“No,” the creature replied, appraising the woman in front of it. “I know why she is here. Her master was unable to repair her cognitive damages and hopes that I would do what she couldn’t.”
Dinah looked back. “The Doctor knows you?” she asked incredulously.
“No.” With a hand motion again, Contessa was raised up slightly, suspended in the air. Curiously enough, there was no struggling from her. “Hers is a primitive precognition. She would much rather nobody knew about it.” Floating in the air, Contessa went limp and floated back onto the ground, sound asleep.
The entity turned to Dinah. “I will return you. Never speak about this place or what happened here or my blessings on your companions are void. Never return to this place and dissuade anyone who tries from doing so. This is my price.”
Dinah blinked. Now the creature was making demands? She mulled over what it had said. After a moment Dinah asked, “What if the others talk? Did you remove their memories?”
“Only of this place.”
“Then why not remove mine too?”
There was something like a scowl on the creature’s face, but only for a brief moment. “The Doctor injected you with nanites that continuously alter your memories. It would kill you if I did.”
“You can’t kill?” Wasn’t this entity supposed to be a guardian? Which guardian couldn’t use lethal force if necessary? Well, perhaps these two things were completely different.
The entity, however, didn’t humour my question. “I can let you thirst to death here if you do not agree to the terms.”
Dinah sighed. “Very well. I agree. I want to know what the Doctor did with these na-“
But before I could finish the question, the entity snapped its fingers and a feeling as though I had jumped off a building filled me before everything went dark.
In the time since it had killed the Doctor, the incubus who’d taken over Adrian had been hard at work trying to make sense of the Titanic’s avionics systems. With the collective knowledge of its kin, one would think that it would be easy, but this was all over the place. After hours of searching and with the help of Adrian’s memories, it finally managed to figure out where the hyperdrive controls were.
Its initial plan was to return to Sirius and contact its kin to salvage the planet. The Titanic had taken automatic hyperspace coordinates of the place, so returning would be easy. After much trial and error, it was finally able to set the Titanic on an automatic path where it would perform a jump to Omicron Psi and send a distress signal from there. The telltale sounds of the jump drive spooling up told it that it had been successful.
The console gave a shrill signal and indicated that three new life forms had simply… appeared on the ship. It blinked, trying to access something like a camera to show what had happened. Three people were lying on the floor of the ship, and it knew who they were.
The sirens began blaring as the ship’s jump drive kicked off and displaced them in space. However, there was something wrong. Instead of being instantaneous, the jump seemed to stretch on. A terrible pulling feeling in the back of its mind made itself known, growing in intensity until Adrian’s body sank to the ground, unconscious.
When the Titanic emerged in real space again, it was not in Omicron Psi. The ruined surface of Toledo was clearly visible through the bridge window.
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