A Broken Clock Is Wrong 1438 Times A Day (pt 1)
24 Aug 2022User319792
In the days following Imperial Senator Bluecrash’s gallery exhibit, I’d made myself scarce to both the man in the black suit and to Orion. Conducting various trading hauls between stations and N.O.S. when the numbers looked good and mapping out systems in the California Sector Nebula gave me some room to breathe, away from Orion’s continuous and increasingly dejected monitoring of Coral’s progress. The Thargoids were still in control of the nebula, and their numbers hadn’t diminished just prior to, and in the aftermath of, the Proteus Wave disaster.We’d received our last direct correspondence from Coral the same day of Salvation’s futile, and entirely salvific, gesture. Having spent the night docked in Musashi, I’d been unable to speak with Orion about Coral’s comm and, like everyone else, awaited the results of the Proteus Wave deployment. Drifting through the wreckage that became of HIP 22460 in the immediate aftermath, I received a reminder from my shipboard calendar that it was Coral’s birthday, and made my way back to N.O.S.
Coral had come out of her trance, and had begun making further progress on The Run. Orion was still far less chipper than he’d been prior to Coral’s having begun, but from his cleanly shaved and showered appearance, I surmised he was feeling slightly better. He called me into the briefing room from N.O.S’. ship-wide intercom and by the time I’d arrived he’d had three more translations of the binary text included in her comms and a video loaded onto the holofac.
“She’s just come to.”
I watched as Coral put down her tablet, stood up, shaking her fists at the potato, which had sprouted 5-6 other potatoes, and exited the Keystone’s captain’s quarters. She strode with purpose and focus toward the cockpit and initiated her frame-shift drive. The remainder of the video was a high-speed compilation of her planetary mapping from inside the cockpit and the fulfillment of her daily subsistence needs until the very end, at which point she stood from her cockpit.
“What’s the timestamp on this footage?” Orion pressed a button on the base of the holofac and the video repeated with the timeline, which showed that the entirety of her progress had occurred in the days prior to the Proteus Wave disaster. She’d finally come to on her birthday, “So she’s just been a zombie since she started on the binary communications?”
“That does appear to be the case.”
We watched as she reentered Keystone’s captain’s quarters, again, this time looking slightly confused. I glanced toward the man in the black suit, and his breath was caught in his throat. She looked around and, as her eyes settled on the potato, which she’d transferred into a larger container that looked to have been fashioned from an old packaging container for animal meats, a slight curl appeared at the corner of her mouth. Orion had the volume turned down so I could barely hear her words, but I caught the faintest whisper,
“…until my birthday? We’ve been out here for almost sixteen years…”
My eyes darted toward Orion, who looked away from the screen, his mouth twisting at the corners. He swallowed, and the man in the black suit immediately offered,
“uh…”
We three stood, our eyes darting back and forth at one another. There was an old Earth term for situations like this: Mexican stand-off. As we stood, none willing to venture any further about what we’d just been made aware, Coral’s voice continued,
“I’m only a quarter-ways through, so a full century will have passed by the time I complete The Run. Will Novus Ordo Siderum be prepared for my extraction upon completion?”
Orion’s eyes bulged from his skull, and the man in the black suit looked away, gritting his teeth. We watched as Coral stood, still staring intently at the potato and, after a minute or so, she began to look around as if her eyes were chasing an invisible Thargon. She seemed to grow increasingly disoriented before spitting out,
“I’m about 10 systems from the Nebula. I’ll have to assess for repairs planetside.”
She seemed to relax, her eyes never once leaving the potato. I glanced toward my galactic map, taking note of the NGC 1333 nebula, before turning back toward the holofac to watch her slowly nod her head and exit her captain’s quarters.