Soraya | Salacia

By Lucas Lex DeJong

The crew of the colony ship Soraya swim between the stars in frozen stasis. When they are awoken years before their destination, they learn that the inhospitable void of space outside the hulls is second only to the danger trapped inside with them.

The scientists of Salacia Station live, work, and sleep deep beneath the surface of the ocean planet Cerulos. But here it is they who are the aliens, and the black depths of the oceans hide monsters beyond reckoning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Dec 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543406160

Lucas Lex DeJong

No author bio.

Book preview

Copyright © 2018 by Lucas Lex DeJong.

ISBN:       Softcover       978-1-5434-0617-7

                 eBook             978-1-5434-0616-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 12/21/2017

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Contents

SORAYA

File 00 Data Corrupted

File 01

File 02

File 03

File 04

File 05

File ## Data Corrupted

File 06

File 07

File 08

File 09

File 10

File 11

Hadley Station Elder Ridge System Colonial Enquiry Room

SALACIA

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Epilogue

Time: Unknown Location: The Dark Between the Stars

Afterword Scientific Note

These stories would not be possible without those brilliant creators

who brought our fears to the stars.

H.P. Lovecraft

Scott, Cameron, Carpenter, Anderson

O’Bannon, Campbell, Romero & Carmack

Cover art by Simon Bubner

SORAYA

What follows is the transcript from the recovered Solipsis

memory database of Corporal Michael John ‘Mick’ Eden,

Chief Engineer of private-military colony vessel

"SORAYA"

Subject is listed officially MIA.

File 00

Data Corrupted

The snow was soft underfoot. With each step I could feel a hundred thousand tiny crystals shudder, snap and melt beneath me. Together, it was but a gentle vibration. I raised each step higher than the last. The crunch the snow made was both satisfying and unable to be satisfied. Like tiny frozen bubble wrap, when Mom let me help unwrap deliveries. Like last week.

Was it last week?

<was it last we->

I looked down. My legs seemed so tiny – so skinny. Thick woollen socks were tucked over the base of my pants to keep my feet dry. I hated it. It made me look like a dork, and some of the other kids would point at them and make snide remarks.

<but I don’t know why> Everyone else in the corps did the same during the ten mile runs. Sarge would bark at us, but this far into our training we could outrun that old bastard any which w->

A gust picked up. There comes a point when your nose gets so cold that you can’t tell if it’s blocked or just frozen shut. It feels swollen to thrice its normal size, and it tingles when you rub it.

I pulled my parka tighter around me. It was a brand new one, bright red, with almost a dozen pockets to keep stuff in. I looked up. The sky, flawless blue, was deepening in hue. The snow started to look almost purple from the way the fading sunlight would streak across it. It was getting late. Mom didn’t want me to be out after sundown. She said that until I was thirteen, I couldn’t stay out after dark.

<Until I was thirteen…>

But I moved out years ago, didn’t I? I can’t even remember the last time I called home. That’s right; I sent a coded wire from Mons on Mom’s birthday. Except I think it got there late; I didn’t look up the time difference between home and-

<Was this still snow? Why was the earth red and brittle?>

I quickened my pace, hugging myself tightly against the cold, laughing as I did. Crunchcrunchcrunchcrunch. I imagined how gigantic I must be to a snowflake. What happens to them? Does a shattered snowflake have halves? Or do they just melt back into water? Crunchcrunchcrunchtaptaptap.

Something had changed. I looked down. And I felt cold. Truly cold.

I could see the swirl and churn of the river below me. It bubbled gently beneath the surface of the ice. So near. Like a hand gently waving me over. Join us.

The wind died. The only movement was of my chest, heaving up and down, delivering less and less oxygen with every breath. I couldn’t remember feeling this scared.>

What? I said, looking up. But I saw only the white of winter. The white of a space suit.

<Pay attention.>

I looked down again at the control panel. Focus. It didn’t matter that it was my first space-walk. If I screwed it up, there wouldn’t be a second. There was debris coming. And it was a looong way down.

But it wasn’t a long way down. There was barely an inch between myself and the unrelenting, unforgiving cold of… <space?> …the river.

I took a step back, hoping to retrace a safe path along ice that had already held me. The helmeted face looked up at me. There was panic in her eyes.

CRACK.

I froze.

<I couldn’t afford to freeze.>

But I had already weakened the surface.

<The second wave of debris was inbound.>

Everything moves slowly underwater.

<In space, even a tiny particle can move fast enough to puncture-

CRACK.

I turned and ran, stumbling awkwardly though the breaking sheets of ice <in the low gravity?>

<I turned and ran.> Mick, where are you- A thousand tiny particles of dust, travelling a hundred thousand kilometres an hour passed through Angelina like tissue paper. She held there for a moment, eyes wide with shock, as air and blood and life leaked from a thousand tiny-

NO!

The cracking followed me.

<In space there is only silence.>

I was so close.

<I could just reach out and…>

CRACK.

Instantly, my body was on fire. My lungs seized, my nerves screamed, my fists clenched and my body doubled over in shock. The cold burned so brightly I could see it behind my eyelids. My skull felt like it was going to implode; being pressed upon from all corners of the known universe. Pressing… pressing… until my eyes felt swollen in their sockets and I tried to spit my tongue out. Like the very hands of God were pressing in on my head, threatening to pull my face back over my skull, revealing the façade of death which had always hidden there.

Space. Winter. Space. Winter.

Deep enough into either, and there is only darkness.

File 01

I turned myself over on the bed, unable to stand its heated surface against my frozen skin. Gravity takes me, and I have long enough to curse all existence before I collapse against the floor, vomiting what feels like my entire insides out. My brain is starting to wake, and through the rusty sparks my neurons connect and I watch as my projected bile makes waves in the air, before pooling on the floor. It may have felt like I had crashed into the ground at a monumental velocity, but we must still be at no more than half Earth gravity. Probably less. It should feel like home, really.

But nothing feels like home. It feels like Hell, and I can feel the half-frozen fluids in my joints cracking and popping. Synovial and joint fluid isn’t kept liquid, like the rest. It freezes, expands, and I can feel the ice shards scratching against the bone. God, why did I ever agree to this?

As soon as my fingers could move without popping and snapping, I ran my hands over my body. It was like running sandpaper against burnt flesh, but eventually the nerves overstimulated and I couldn’t feel anything; except for the sloughs of skin coming away in my hands. As cells are replaced with fibrous keratin, there’s nothing that can be preserved. As you thaw, it all has to go, and we all come out looking like raw pink babies, and usually screaming like them, too.

One would think – one would hope – that this process would get easier. Y’know, a huge shock when you wake up, but then you get slowly acclimatised? No such luck. As soon as normal feeling began returning to my hands, I felt my heart rate slow. And I knew what was coming next. Cardiac arrest has always been an issue; like an engine stalling after turning over a few times. I was only just able to process this before I felt the temperature in the room rise, and right on cue, a sharp current passed right through me, sending me careening into a far corner. Doesn’t take much of a kick in this gravity to go a long way, and these jolts fire your muscles at maximum capacity. Everywhere I bounced, I saw myself leaving trails of sticky lost skin, floating softly through the air before adhering to some sorry surface.

Five shocks down, and I braced myself for the last one. Gritting my teeth together. Clenching my fists. But it never came. I waited. I sweated. I slowly opened my eyes, bracing myself. The sixth shock never came. I scanned my memory – even that was painful. Yes, six shocks. Did I miscount? No. Then it dawned on me, and I laughed, sickly. They tell you six shocks. They drill it into you. And after five shocks, you’re well awake, and the bracing for the sixth is what really brings all your functions online. Adrenal response, muscle tension, cognitive abilities. Clever. I would have to remember that for next time.

Except for the fact that I swear to God there will never be a next time. I will never leave my new home. Not after all that. No way. I’m staying put.

The temperature began to lower. The sweltering mid forties, having thoroughly defrosted all my cells, was now lowering to a comfortable twenty one. I still felt an uncomfortable chill at the memory of her voice in my head. I blinked away the last few remnants of the cryo-dream. I had no idea why it should seem so vivid, but some superstitious part of me thought that whatever messed up dreams I may have started to have were frozen in place for hundreds of years, imprinting their image more resiliently on my mind. But I was now at enough peace to begin to take in my surroundings. Not that there was much to take in. A small room, maybe eight feet from its widest points. Industrial matted grey, which contrasts nicely with the optical display screen and sterile white pod behind me. It looked more like a sarcophagus. No; like a large white Xanax pill, actually. My own personal womb for the last…

Already I was looking for something else to distract me. Time is a scary concept out in the black. From the time of Galileo, we spent the next five hundred years figuring out how the hell gravity, space and time work. And our conclusions don’t match our intuition, but why should it? We’re apes. We evolved to understand time as a line, and space as a fixed construct. So when I stop and think that I may have been frozen on this ship for a few hundred years, that’s already scary. Then when I think that if I were to magically teleport back to Earth, it could be hundreds of thousands of years in the future…my mind goes blank.

And what of our destination? We’re not the first colony ship to leave for KOI-400-whatever (God, I hope they’ve named the planet something catchy). We left eighteen years after the first colony ship bound for that rock, and seven years after the second. How does that translate when you’re travelling near the speed of light? Will we arrive there orderly; seven years after our last group? Or does it not work that way? Will we arrive hundreds of years in their future? Thousands? What if the terraforming failed and we arrive to the ruins of our brothers? What if we were faster and we arrive before them? I thought I said I was going to think about something else…

A small yellow light to my left flashed twice and a sealed tray emerged from a hidden compartment. Sugar water and protein-rich gruel. A welcome distraction given how my purged stomach now growled with hunger.

I’m touched, I murmured. And I thought it was the gentleman who was supposed to buy dinner.

Good morning, Michael, a cool, gentle voice replied. I hated her voice.

Is it? It hasn’t really been very good so far. I pulled the plastic back from the tray, grimacing. My fingers ached at the effort. "Or morning, for that matter, I suppose. Or is it? What time is it planet-side? I suppose that depends on which side of the planet we land on. Right?" There was only silence in response. Logically, I knew not to expect anything better, but some prescient part of the back of my mind knew how long it had been since I last heard a human voice. I shovelled a few spoonfuls of gruel into my mouth and kicked open my storage chest.

You’re to report to the flight deck within twenty minutes.

I smirked darkly. You want to see me that badly? I paused. That wasn’t right. Protocol gives us a proper meal in the mess hall an hour after waking. Silence, only. No response. What changed? I shovelled another load of gruel into my mouth, trying to keep calm. "What changed?"

You are to report to the flight deck within twenty minutes.

"God damn it!" I hissed in frustration, throwing the tray down. It bounced sharply, before spinning wildly in the air in forms impossible on Earth. I pulled my overalls out of the storage chest and began shoving a leg into them, wincing at the rough fabric against my pink, unprotected skin. The last thing I needed after the pain of waking up was to be grilled by the Captain for some malfunction I probably can’t do dick about anyway.

Michael, her voice emerged again.

What? I grunted. I hated the way she sounded. I reached for the door to slide it open, but it didn’t budge.

You’re to sync your Solipsis unit before leaving.

Now that was enough to get my attention.

* * *

I pumped my fists in the low gravity to keep the adrenaline stable. I wanted to be aware; fully aware, when it happened. They tell you that you can’t notice. They tell you that you can’t feel it. I say that’s worse. The older models had to be manually and individually activated, and I still bore a tiny white scar in the nape of my neck from where the insertion point was. At least you could feel that. At least you knew. Telling you that you can’t feel it is the same as telling you that it can happen without your knowledge. Or permission. That a tiny conical implant in your brain can turn on at any given moment, and everything you see, hear and feel is stored locally and later transmitted to a central server.

Privacy doesn’t mean squat in the corps, and even less in the Colonial Corps, where information on environment, dangers, and even crew relations was valuable data for risk-assessment on multi-trillion dollar ventures like these. The composition of the atmosphere, local wildlife and disease, and colonist psychology and sociology was all critical information used to ‘build better worlds’; meaning to mitigate risk and loss margins. Dying isn’t a good enough excuse to miss a report, and there’s no better post-mortem than a Solipsis download. They packaged the information up and sent it on a tight-beam back to Earth. Sure, it wouldn’t arrive there for a few hundred years; nothing can travel faster than light can. But the Colonial Corps are in this for the long game.

They’re expensive as hell, though. But they’ll shell out the dime for the crew members at least, so long as they own the raw data pulled. Imagine that. They own your experiences. What you see is their property. What you discover is their discovery. Refuse and they’ll find someone else. It seriously monopolised colonisation of the old System, and the Corps aren’t about to break trend.

Sync complete, I heard, whilst my neurons were busy debating the injustice of it all, and I never felt a damn thing.

The first thing I noticed when I stepped out of my dorm was the cold. Chilling, biting. My room had fluctuated and settled in the low twenties. It couldn’t be more than ten degrees Celsius out here. It didn’t make any sense, until I noticed the second thing. Silence. A dull, heavy silence that seemed to stretch on for miles. The occasional groan as the metal of the hull warped and bellowed throughout the ship until it became nothing more than a dull rumble. Last were the lights. The large illumination screens which comprised the thin flat roof of the bulging hallway walls were black. What little light illuminated the deep hallways was granted only by the dim LED standby lights framing each doorway, and bestowing only a dull coloured glow, barely reaching into the hallways, barely even enough light to cast a shadow.

The air felt sick and stagnant here. Recycling the air always leaves it with this dank, foul smell that betrays the ages it had been locked aboard. There would be no breeze, no refreshing gust of air until someone opened a blast door to a new deck, and what little homeostasis this ship had would be restored.

I looked to my left. The corridor, matte grey like my dorm, with dim yellow lines denoting restriction levels and direction, stretched on until the two parallel lines seemed to meet in the distance. The steel grate of the floor shrieked as I shifted my weight on it, and the distant walls shrieked back in echoed reply.

It began to sink in what was so wrong.

We weren’t there yet.

If certain circumstances should arise, key crew members are woken to address the situation. I looked back to my left. Damn-near a mile of bodies still frozen in their sterile-white Xanax capsules. Countless more on other decks. Twenty thousand eyes sealed shut with ice, and no intention of waking them for a long time.

How long? How far were we? What had happened?

This deck was as quiet as a tomb with about as many heartbeats. We were supposed to be woken up together, a week or so out from arrival. The thousand or so crew members were dispersed evenly throughout the ship decks to coordinate passenger movement, but in each direction only the dull, yawning passageways arose to greet me. I hurried towards the nearest freight elevator, trying to ignore the thundering clapping of the steel grates, irrationally fearful that I might wake the hundreds of frozen crew members in their capsule crypts.

* * *

Captain, can I complain to the concierge about the complimentary wake-up call?

I crept onto the flight deck slowly. I recognised the captain’s towering silhouette instantly, as well as those of four other crew members.

No, three. Since you can’t really count her.

The seemingly unnatural length of her neck was accentuated against the bright silhouette, a dark crop of hair falling to one side. She sat perched in perfect posture in her chair, surrounded by a hundred optic control panels. Her flight uniform was positioned slightly asymmetrically; the curve of her neck meeting her shoulder visible on the left side.

I ascended the last few steps and stopped in absolute awe at the cause of silhouette.

Why anybody would put viewing windows on an interstellar craft, I have no idea. Unless you’re close to a star system, you can’t see jack anyway, and all that infinite darkness has messed with more than a few minds on these kinds of trips. Perilous navigating; the kind that would normally require visual cues, is best handled by the ship AI, and even if you need a human set of eyes, infra-red displays can provide a wider and more accurate picture. The visible spectrum is a callous lover.

That said… This was quite the view.

S-System? I stammered across the room, announcing my presence.

White dwarf, Erik Roinestad replied, unusually accented. Four planets and a dozen satellites. He paused. And a heck of a lot of debris.

I took another few steps towards the front of the ship. Sure enough, there was the blinding blue intensity of a white dwarf star; a large sun that had blown up into a nuclear red giant, before collapsing to the size of a small rocky planet, but with a brightness and density rarely rivalled in the galaxy. What was immediately obvious about this star was the large ring of dust and debris which circled it, wide enough that the few remaining planets traced permanent vacant lines through the clouds of dust. Any that could-

They’re all out of the habitable zone of the dwarf, and the preceding red giant had stripped the crust of most of them.

Mr Roinestad, I drawled slyly. What happened to your vibrant American accent?

Erik turned a slight shade of red, noticeable even against his raw pink. Prolonged cryo-sleep, I presume, he said slowly, annunciating each word carefully through his Norwegian accent. I suppose my native tongue was only…dormant.

Or you were faking it, I winked.

Don’t tease my husband. I turned to see Renalyn inclined against a control board at the far left of the bridge. She had her thick, dark hair pulled back behind her ears, and even pink and raw from cryo, she still had that dark, smoky look to her eyes. I haven’t had any coffee in a century or two, and I’d be more than happy to take my anger out on you.

You scare me, Renny. You know that? She screwed up her nose at me. I had a long history with Renalyn, in what sometimes seemed like another life. I could read her like a book, and knew how far I could push her. I was well in the safety zone. I turned to the captain. Nice view. You woke us up for this? I sneered at him, hoping to get a rise out of him.

He turned slowly to me, his dark brows furrowing, but he said nothing.

Two planets would be in the habitable zone of a class G star. Her voice pierced the silence as everyone turned to her. Everyone…but me.

But, Erik started, It’s not a-

Data suggests its development to white dwarf classification is recent. Radiation emitted is roughly ten to the seventh Kelvin, which suggests it has only recently formed from a red giant. There was a moment silence. Recent, she continued, on a cosmic scale.

No one second guessed her calculations. No one contradicted her. It was easy to be tempted to, but after a while it sinks in. She doesn’t make mistakes. That would be too human of her.

So what do you suggest, oh wise one? I drawled.

Soraya turned to me, and I watched the bright lights of cryptic data pass through her glass eyes.

Soraya was the technical marvel of the ship. Soraya was the ship; her letters carved into the front of the steel-ceramic hull. A high-functioning ship AI is necessary for navigation whilst the crew is asleep; I can accept that. I can also accept that the AI is named for the ship, and with complete control of the ship, the distinction between the two becomes moot. But I’ll never understand why they had to build her a body. They’ll tell you it helps to communicate. It helps to build trust in a solid entity. It helps to have someone to speak to, rather than an omnipresent alien entity. But she’s not human. Created from the ground up by international teams of professionals, she resembled everyone and no one on Earth. Skin that held a rich Mediterranean tan. The long, slender neck of a Maasai warrior. Dark, elongated eyes out of some Persian tapestry. Soft, thin Caucasian lips, and the petite bone structure of East Asia. Her sharply carved features were cropped with raven-black hair, shorter around the back and sides, with a fringe reaching down to an elongated style on the left of her face, the tails of which were clear microfilaments, and changed from blue to red seemingly at random. Maybe in association with her emotions, if I had believed that she had any.

If the human race were destined to breed out all its genetic imperfections, running them through a crucible of generations, sheering together only the best qualities, Soraya would be the result. And whilst most of the crew have become familiar with her, she will always be alien to be. How much time has passed on Earth? If we were to return, would it be to a planet of these terrifyingly perfect creatures?

She stared up at me, and through me, seeing through her glass eyes, seeing through my eyes via Solipsis, and through every sensor on the ship. I’m getting strange readings from one of the exoplanets.

"Strange readings? I asked. You pour through thousands of terabytes of data every minute and you can’t be any more specific than strange? Why were we woken up?"

Stop teasing the toys, Eden. Captain Heine’s voice was thunderous. It seemed a few hundred years in a frozen pod had diminished none of his vigour. Each of the other crew straightened to attention at his commanding voice, thick with generations of German military discipline. Soraya doesn’t directly control the pod wake-up protocols. The system was detected, the data was gathered and when the conclusions were drawn, we were woken up to investigate. The captain stared me down. It’s a triggered subroutine. So don’t blame the robot, Eden. He turned to the rest of the group to address us collectively. Gentlemen and ladies, we were woken up to investigate this star system. As you know, long journeys put a strain on resources, particularly water, air and fuel. Interstellar ships run by momentum. We reach speed velocity, and with nothing to resist us, we continue until we begin deceleration.

Sir, I raised my hand. I already did my homework. Can I have an early minute? It’s a good thing that I’m considered ‘essential crew’, and Abraham Heine can’t fire me out of an airlock, because I’m positive that the thought had just crossed his mind.

This ship is programmed to scan nearby systems we pass for certain conditions. We cannot afford to make large detours, and we cannot afford the cost of deceleration and re-acceleration unless the strictest conditions are met.

And those conditions are? Renalyn asked for us, wondering why she, as a medical officer, was painfully woken up for this.

Readily available water, oxygen and organic carbon molecules, Soraya spoke up. This system likely once held three habitable planets which contained water. When the sun turned red dwarf, this material was vaporised into space, making collection relatively easy. However…

Yes? Captain Heine and I asked simultaneously. I think he almost smiled. Somewhere; beneath that frown.

There is another factor.

I spoke up before Abe had a chance. Would that be the reason why you thawed out several crew members for a job which would not require us? Collection of matter could have been done without disturbing my sweet dreams.

Soraya ignored my smarm; if she even understood it. Calculations suggest more water and oxygen than should correlate to the number of habitable planets. I believe that several moons in this system were terraformed.

There was a powerful silence on the deck, as we all slowly shifted our gaze out to the ruined and dead system in front of us. Terraformed? By who? It’s hard to tell what to expect from interstellar travel. No one back on Earth had ever heard of contact with another sentient life form, but as colony ships left for every known habitable planet we could reach, they took their mysteries with them. You can’t communicate easily back over that gulf of space, save for the centuries between data packages. Once they leave, they’re gone. If they meet alien life, we’d never know, unless they pointed them in our direction.

But another, more poignant question had to be raised. Could it be human?

It’s not impossible. Time dilation could allow entire civilisations to populate a world whilst we were travelling at relativistic speeds. We could live a few hundred years in cold storage whilst they colonise a planet and terraform a whole system.

Procedure dictates that key crew members, a first-response team, be woken in the event of possible contact with extra-terrestrial life. Sentient or not.

At her apparently silent command, the ship began to effortlessly veer to the subjective left. Though the distance was huge, I could see the tiny round speck carving its way through the cosmic dust. So that was to be our destination.

I turned to the figure standing at the far right of the ship, silently watching our dialogue unfold. And I suppose, I announced, addressing the Sergeant Major, that this is why the cavalry was called in?

I had rarely met Hyeon Lee Kim, and still less frequently had the pleasure of her conversation, but her eyes tightened as she was clearly trying to discern derision in my words. Derision above my baseline anyway. She was incredibly diminutive on the surface, with her black hair cut tightly around her scalp. But if the leanness of the partially revealed forearm under the fatigues was any indication, she hid a deceptive strength honed by more than a decade of elite training.

I pressed her further. If there’s no life, what’s the danger?

Even a terrain seemingly inhospitable to life requires at least one military detachment for security, she replied slowly and evenly, adding Especially when crew members may have impaired judgement in a crisis.

And since my Captainship is Naval, Heine commanded, we will have at least two military officers.

Erik’s nervous gaze darted between Soraya and the Captain. "We’re going down there?!"

I turned to Heine. "You’re going down there?!"

Damn right I am, Eden. And so are you.

I turned to Soraya. Why do we need to go planet-side? Can’t you perform a surface scan?

I can, she replied in her infuriating monotone. But it would reveal little more than topography and atmospheric composition. Even from this range, I have identified complex structures on the surface.

Artificial? the Korean woman asked.

Unknown, Major Hyeon. But it seems likely. She turned back to her illuminating displays. All things considered.

"This is bullshit. Fy fæn!" Erik Roinestad paced back and forth in the corridor, hissing vulgarities in Norwegian under his breath to keep from Heine hearing.

Erik, calm down, roe seg ned. Renalyn kept trying to intersect him at every turn, but the normally mild mannered navigator was too flustered to respond.

Can we sedate him? Please? I knew I wasn’t helping, but I scarcely think they were paying attention to me. If I get permission to tackle him, I’ll do it.

Erik glared a chilling, ferocious stare on his next turn, and I actually needed to keep myself from stepping backwards. The usually gentle lad has some fire in him. "I don’t want to go out there, he muttered. I took this job to stay inside a ship. What use is a navigator out there?!"

Well I have a terrible sense of direction. Once I ended up, entirely by accident mind you, in the red light district of-

Mick, for Christ’s sake, Renalyn interjected.

Hey. Levity. It worked. I pointed to Erik, who was staring at me quizzically, until his jowls arched up in desperate, near-hysterical laughter.

Renalyn and I traded glances; a mixture of concern and puzzlement. Okay, so hers was mostly concern. I noticed her gaze become sterile and impassive, as she was no doubt running through a series of possible diagnosis. Being woken up from stasis is traumatic as hell, and it was possible that his brain chemistry hadn’t yet quite balanced out the dopamine levels. Synching one’s Solipsis unit with Soraya is no picnic, either, and you never really lose this vague paranoid feeling that someone is always watching you, from inside your own mind. It made the privacy of this corridor a little less profound.

But I think we both knew it was more than that. There was a fear that existed in