A Fever of Herself
08 Aug 2017Evgeniya Asimova
When she came to, Evgeniya felt sick and dizzy, as if she was waking in the middle of the night after a heavy drinking session. Her mouth was dry and her ship was stopped dead in space. She was in the middle of nowhere. She was not in any solar system, just somewhere in the reaches of the Pleiades, light years from any star. Her feverish mind was running like a murky waterfall down into a whirlpool of mud, and she refused to accept the shady memories that flitted around her like bats. Her armpits were moist and her hands were shivering faintly. Her mind was sludge. She shot herself with a dose of tranquillisers from the kit beside her pilot's chair, and then the first thing she did was to check her computer flight logs. She craned her head to the right, and her eyes scanned quickly over the holographic screen.* Data discovered – Wake signature – anomaly – UNKNOWN *
* Data discovered – Ship signature – anomaly – UNKNOWN *
* System re-boot initiated *
* System auto-stabilisation *
* System power down * * *
* Frame-shift Drive malfunction *
* Hyperspace trajectory lost *
* Ship alert: Hyperspace conduit unstable *
Images oozed through her shattered brain, images that she would have rejected as being utterly outlandish if they have not been given substance by what was recorded on her flight log. She tried to piece it all back together, but it was hard. She remembered spinning out of the jump. That's right, she remembered that, and that she was expecting to see Khypraze in his ship. She assumed he had acquired some new technology that could pull a ship from Witchspace. But it was not Khypraze. But what it was she did not know. It was big, incredibly big. And she was spinning, spinning in darkness as it passed over her and turned back toward her, like a shark swirling in the deep.
Was it a ship? An inhumanly colossal eye? A tremendous flower? Some kind of creature that hunted in the bowels of Withspace? It was no machine, certainly nothing man-made. It was huge. Beautiful. Beautiful perhaps. But huge and powerful. And she was lucky to be alive. It had probed her – perhaps deciding if she was edible – and left her. Yes it had scanned her as she had scanned the heavens these last few weeks looking for profit. Like some god, it had turned its attention to her and then discarded her as if she was of no importance.
She slapped herself across the face, but still she could not deny the reality of what she had seen. But it did not make sense. She had thought that these 'Thargs' had been an hysterical epidemic, probably planted and fostered by the powers-that-be to hide something far more sinister. Even when the Prince, who she trusted completely, had told her of his (now obviously corresponding) experience in the Pleiades, she had not really believed him. Not totally. There was no doubt that he seriously believed what he was saying. But it had seemed absurd to her. She had wondered if they whole thing was a projection of a human need to feel a higher power, a power that would help them in their time of need. A great power in the cosmos.
A great power in the cosmos.
She was shaking like a shadow of herself, herself a flickering candle blown by a gale.
She had to get out of there. She wanted nothing more than to be in the shielded stockade of a space-station, to be around people, to feel once more the illusion that things were safe and that the universe was small and within the realms of the human mind to understand and master. That she had at least some importance as a human being, some strength.
Her ship seemed to be working fine, with no more damage than it had been carrying these past 102-and-a-half jumps.
+
“You look white as a sheet, Commander,” the mechanic commented as Evgeniya left Diamond Light for the first time in weeks.
She raised an eyebrow at him as if to say 'I'm always this pale, buster'. But this was not her turf. She otherwise ignored the comment and stood there silently stretching for several minutes. Evgeniya was almost a tee-total, it had been many months since she had last touched a drop of alcohol. But when she finally walked on into the depths of Obsidian Orbital it was to search herself a bar.