Heads
09 Jun 2022User319792
Coral, Orion, and I spent the time following my tritium run for the Galcondans taking briefings on the potential connections between Mr. Rackham, now Presidential candidate Rackham, the funding from which the tritium payouts were paid, and whether or not they could be connected to Mr. Rackham’s connections to the Kumo Crew. It all seemed plausible, but there was nothing with any robustness required to legitimate any further action on our part and we’d sat twiddling our thumbs.When I’d first returned to N.O.S., and stepped foot in my quarters, I felt the expansive solitude for the first time since Coral returned from Los. I’d noticed that the blinds in Coral’s lab were closed when passing the lab on the way from the hangar bay but, initially, thought nothing of it. With the man in the black suit on leave, chasing Captain Green in some childish lovelorn fever dream, and Orion busying himself with his own projects, the space in my quarters came to take up more of my attention with every new inch I’d never before seen. Freed from Coral’s constant presence and the compulsion to attend to her needs, I now had to attend to a growing emptiness.
I continued with the tritium haul from Vesalius City, hoping to convince Orion that the trip to Rackham’s Peak would be in the better interests of our current project. He lent me his ear for the briefest moment, before dismissing me and returning to his own work. With no further leads to follow-up on, nor any real need to conduct any current operations outside of buffering N.O.S’. carrier balance, I suggested that he speak to Coral about possibly looking into the research of Ram Tah. He asked me a couple of questions about the engineer, about which I had no real answers beyond the second hand information I’d accumulated from others, and did so.
When I’d returned to N.O.S. after another tritium run, my father was seated just outside the hangar bay. His eyes were wild and he let me know that he’d been listening in on some of the conversations of the new crew. He wasn’t sure about their angles and wanted permission to begin speaking to them about the organization and I gave him a wave with my hand, accepting his offer to do so. We’d spoken very little about what Coral had done and I’d immediately brush aside any hint of concern. It seemed to please him and he’d look away, with the faintest hint of a smile, before carrying on with his various duties aboard.
The man in the black suit had returned and he was in the briefing room with Orion. I entered and they two seemed displeased with one another. Orion speaking in hushed, but cold, tones and the man in the black suit’s jugular vein straining to reach toward the former to slit Orion’s throat.
“Hey, guys.” I managed to squeak. It seemed to break the tension, each turning their attention toward me. As they stared in my direction, each man but a meter from me, I could feel the shattered pieces of their prior tension reconstituting into a far deeper tension that I draped me like lengths of chain.
“Cadence, what is it?” The man in the black suit was staring as Orion, unusually terse, waited on an answer. I swallowed my spit, my eyes darting to the right before returning Orion’s gaze after a brief respite,
“I was thinking we might head toward Rackham’s Peak.” The man in the black suit turned to Orion, who was still staring at me. He shook his head as the man in the black suit turned back toward me. In unison, they began,
“No.”
“Something came up, Cadence,” The man in the black suit looked hard at me before continuing, “and we’ll need to put our operations and collections on hold for a moment. Coral’s going to make The Run.” Orion looked at the man in the black suit, anticipating my question.
“What’s ‘The Run’?”
The man in the black suit lifted his head, his lips puckering outward from his face like he was kissing the sky. Orion’s chest trembled slightly and he answered,
“It’s the end-phase of Coral’s Realignment,” I was still unsure of what that was, and my eyes darted left before returning to Orion, who stared back. We stood in silence for a moment, before the man in the black suit turned to me,
“There’s a run of stars just outside the California Sector Nebula that we’ve used since the beginnings of the organization for this process. It’s just the end of Realignment, Cadence. You don’t need to know any more than that, but we do need to get Coral to the nebula.”
I was a little confused at why Coral couldn’t just do so on her own, but I kept it to myself and headed to the bridge to make preparations with Michelle. It was a short trip of a thousand light-years, barely more than the distance from Cubeo to Maia and back, but the photos I’d seen in the Pilot’s Federation archives promised, at the very least, a nice place to rest while we looked further into the situation with Mr. Rackham, maybe even seeing if there might be a connection between Salvation and The Galileo Incident.
As we settled in, I passed Jazleen’s office and saw Coral going over the final preparations, and decided to do some exploring in the nebula. I boarded Tzu for short time before returning to N.O.S. a couple of times for refits and deciding to go aboard Galileo instead. The pictures, in hindsight, were extremely disappointing when compared to the sights that lay before me. There were extremely high-levels of xeno-activity in the nebula, which I hadn’t expected, and I thought to take Thucydides and Nemesis out, at some point. I began dozing off and woke up in my Scarab. The malachite paint job shone in a strange way from my limpet camera against the lights in the nebula.
I landed at the first biological site that appeared on my HUD, having to fly around the craggy terrain for a while before finding a reasonably safe landing area. I looked around, having remembered waking up in my Scarab just seconds before, before switching to my role panel and deploying my Scarab. Having scanned the bark mounds in the area, I decided to stay surface-bound, dismissing Galileo and looking for ramps. I came close to nailing what I think might have been a deca-octagonal backflip, landing the Scarab right on the cockpit. I could feel the safety harnesses cutting into my shoulders and I was reminded of my run in with Atlas Corporation.
I continued on my way, watching myself from the camera on my limpet, only to see my Scarab explode. I immediately awoke back on Galileo. I’ve survived an SRV’s destruction before, being immediately encapsulated in the tracking pod that rejoins our ship, but I hadn’t felt the same skin-crawling envelopment that usually occurs. I just woke up in the cockpit. I was a little confused, and made my way back to N.O.S. to refit my surface-vehicle hangar with another Scarab before heading back out.
I decided to head right back, settling on the second site of the biological signals, which was a far wider range of landing sites. The nebula was at rest above the horizon, a slightly deeper, redder mist in the dimming starlight, and I settled in for a drive, dismissing Galileo. I, again dozed off, briefly, before waking, with my Scarab floating over the terrain. I stopped for a second, looking at the view from my limpet camera, before starting up again.
I recalled talking to Coral, once, about the various effects of space travel on the human brain and she said something about how our perceptions are inextricably tied to the material conditions of the universal laws of physics, which didn’t mean anything to me at all.
“Basically, because our bodies are aggregated accumulations of biological, non-biological, and chemicals, they’re going to react in specific ways to specific stimuli. Our perception is directly related to those hard-wired rules of the universe. Soooooooooo,” she dragged it out in her tiny 14 year-old voice, “if the physical laws surrounding us are changed, if something interacts with the standard laws gravity, or if there’s an increased level of one of the radiations, it’ll alter our perception of the world around us.”
“I don’t know what that means, Coral.”
“It means you’re not going to feel me slap you.”
She then slapped me, and I squealed, “OW!!”
“Did you feel that?”
“YES!”
“Well then we’re not currently an area of space-time that would result in the alteration of our perceptions.”
I continued driving, laughing about the memory, seeing the entirety of the terrain enter my Scarab, and seeing myself disappear under the terrain before climbing the invisible crest of the hill. I shook it off, before calling Galileo back, and boarding. I woke up again in Galileo’s cockpit, more confused than ever, trying to figure out if I’d really just experienced what I thought I’d just experienced, before shaking the whole thing off and deciding to watch the starset. I’d had lucid dreams in the past and I expected this was just my imagination getting the better of me and I’d wake up on N.O.S. just outside of Beta Hydri, on the way to California Sector Nebula for Coral’s Realignment. And then I woke up in Galileo.