Frederique
Waking was like crawling through quicksand and praying for a path to safety. Every blink of my eyelids felt like sand in my eyes, my lids so heavy it was hard to even try again. Maybe I’d just lie here a while, get my bearings before I tried anything. My thoughts were all adrift, twirling through my head and clinging like cobwebs. Stasis, the mission, Earth’s last hope to find some way to resist the ultimate forming of the UAR. Human rights, something vital about that…
Faces flashed through my mind then—friends and colleagues: Kadri, Jones, the always-laughing, teasing faces of the Talacan foursome; the Terifin guy, Abbán, who’d been in charge of security; and of course Davidson, who had been one of the last I’d seen before Jones put me under. They needed me. If I was awake, that meant they needed me. The thought finally jarred me into full wakefulness, a jolt of adrenaline sizzling through my veins.
I was exactly where I’d been when I went to sleep, but everything was dark and dim. There was no sound of voices, no hum of the engines, and no sign of Jones. That was okay, I told myself, I was the one who was supposed to wake first and assess the situation. This was exactly as planned. My arms were shaking as I pulled myself upright by the edges of the pod, my eyes flicking around the room to gaze suspiciously at every dark corner. Something felt… off. There was an unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach that could simply be from being in stasis for two years, or perhaps it was something else.
When I hauled myself out of the pod, my legs shook worse than my arms. The floor was ice-cold against the bare soles of my feet, and I hissed. Why was it so cold in here? Shouldn’t the ship have heated these rooms in preparation for my waking? Had it malfunctioned? I stumbled toward the desk in the corner, where I’d stowed my clothing in drawers. I inhaled dust and… something else. I halted, shaking from the cold but arrested by this new scent.
Dark, sinful, I had no name to describe it, no words to give to the various notes I picked up. Just that it was sinfully attractive, so much so that heat washed through me and gathered low in my belly. Not worry. Arousal. What was that? I wanted to follow it, roll around in it, taste it. It conjured images of tangled sheets and tangled limbs, of a man I wanted to know in the most carnal of ways.
I huffed, shocked by the intense response to just a scent, and made myself focus on the drawers. It was easier to ignore it when I was yanking pants on and wriggling my toes into my military-issue boots. There was nothing special about any of my clothes, a uniform of dark gray, no insignias on them to denote who or where I was from. Only the stripes of my rank along my shoulders indicated I was the captain of this ship, theLancing Light.
As my jacket settled around my shoulders—over still-aching and aroused nipples—it felt like the weight of responsibility settling on me too. Captain of this mission, responsible for saving all of Earth from the oppression of the UAR. Not an easy burden. One I had accepted only because I believed how much we needed the help, and one I’d gladly have given to Jones if he’d made a fight of it. He hadn’t, so here I was: the first to wake.
Nervous because waking also meant that soon I’d be facing my first Kertinal official, I walked from the room and into the med bay. There was a fine layer of dust everywhere, and strange streaks had dried on the walls. Like there’d been moisture there for some time, but now the air treatment system had whisked it away. Was that an artifact of the ship preserving power by not heating the rooms as it traveled from the Alpha Quadrant to the Zeta Quadrant?
The first pod I reached was Davidson’s, but it was empty. I stared in confusion at the vacant interior and the layer of grime and dust that had settled on it. If he’d woken before me, then for how long? Why was his pod so dirty on the inside? It made no sense—no sense at all.
My eyes flicked from his pod to the next, but it was too dark here to really see. Dread clung to every step I took as I crossed the room to the control panel and raised the lights. They took a moment to warm up, glowing softly before turning brighter and brighter. I blinked at what I faced, then screamed, loud, high-pitched, utterly horrified. Scrambling backward, my back collided with the doorway, suddenly leaving me partially in and partially out of the room. I began to trip, my heel catching on the edge of the threshold. Arms pinwheeling, I went down hard. My butt struck the metal flooring, pain slicing up my spine, sharp and hard. I saw stars, bright bursts of light flickering across my vision. Kicking my legs, I scrambled back over the floor again, hit the hallway wall on the other side, and, panting, just sat there.
No, no way! I moaned in horror, my hands going to my face to press against my eyes, but that would never erase the image. The headscarf had been unmistakable, still tied around her prettybraids. Kadri, dead so long she was a mummy, a dried husk of her former vibrant self. I moaned again, the pain of that loss slicing through me so hard it made me gasp for breath. How long? When had her stasis pod failed? Two years was certainly enough to mummify a body under the right conditions… but there was a part of me—a very big part—that was certain it had been longer.
The clues were all there: the ship dark and cold, grime and dust on every surface, and Kadri—dead and gone. Not just her; I’d seen the other pods too, in that flash of light. All of them dead. Which meant our mission was over before it had ever begun. We’d failed.
My whole body ached from the grief that came with that knowledge. I shook as I forced myself to rise to my feet. This was awful—beyond awful—but I had to do something other than sit here and moan about it. Even alone, I had to try. Getting up and walking away from the med bay felt like trying to unstick the soles of my shoes, they seemed glued to the floor. When I turned, the back of my neck prickled, and that feeling of being watched grew and settled along my spine, sinking like a blade into the small of my back.
I craned my head around, but saw only a dark hallway stretching away from me toward Engineering. There was no one there. Why would there be? This was a fucking tomb. But that heavy rock of grief that sat on my chest and threatened to crush me seemed to lift, just a little. It swirled through my belly, sinking along my legs and out through my feet. I’d never been good at that whole meditating thing, but it felt like I’d finally done it right, except I hadn’t been trying.
“Who is there?” I asked, though I couldn’t believe there actually was anyone around. My voice sounded thin and reedy, so I firmed it as I called out a second time. No answer, of course not. I resumed my attempt to make it toward the bridge, boots thudding against the metal floor, the sound loud inside the dead ship. It felt wrong, all of this, like I was intruding. On the bridge, it was even worse, though there were no bodies of my friends here, no sign of their passing. We’d tidied everything up before we went to sleep so it would be waiting for us, fresh and clean. Ready for our important mission, ready to receive Kertinal officials. I huffed, laughing without mirth over that now, so hopeful we’d been, and now we were all dead. Except for me.
The lights on the bridge didn’t like waking, some of them had broken or died; perhaps they were covered by so much grime I couldn’t see them. The main console woke slowly, but it did power on. There was still a terminal open, a data query that had not been finished or closed out. Mission data had been recalled by someone—possibly Kadri or Davidson—before we’d gone into stasis.
I only had eyes for one awful piece of information: the time that glared at me from the corner of the screen. The day didn’t matter; it was the year that made me stare, horror slowly sinking into me. If that number was true… not only had our mission gone so awry that everyone but me was dead, we had missed our window of opportunity altogether. There was no way for me to salvage anything. I could not attempt a negotiation alone, because there was no point. I’d slept through the forming of the UAR, slumbered in stasis for more than seven hundred years.
“No,” I moaned, sinking to my knees on the floor and shaking my head. “No, this can’t be true. Please…” I might not have had anyimmediate family left to worry about, part of the reason I was chosen for this mission, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t left people behind: friends, acquaintances, and coworkers who had worked closely with my team to get this mission planned.
It was, as far as I knew, not anything I’d personally done that had caused this to fall apart so catastrophically, and yet it felt that way. I was the captain; I was the one in charge of this mission. Now there was no mission, and there were no people to be in charge of. This was my failure, and it sat like lead on my shoulders and churned like lava in my gut.
Only Davidson’s pod had been empty… The thought slid through my brain and made me jerk my head up abruptly. Had he woken when I had, and was he wandering the ship in shock and horror right now? I had to find him. At least, if I was not alone in this, it might be more bearable. I wiped tears from my cheeks—I hadn’t realized I’d been crying—and rose unsteadily to my still-trembling legs.
With a purpose in mind, to find any trace of Davidson, it was as if all that horror, failure, and self-blame slid away, too. I felt lighter, but also empty. My stomach was still a mess, but maybe that was the seven hundred-plus years in stasis rather than my sense of failure. After all, stasis sickness occurred in a small percentage, even after just a few days, and the odds increased rapidly the longer the stint.
My knees felt weak, too, as I spun to look around the bridge, indecision warring with the desire to simply grab a flashlight and search with my eyes. What controls and systems still worked? Should I try to find outwherethe ship had gone down before Isearched for Davidson, or after? He was the navigator; he’d have an easier time finding out.
I went to the control panel for the ship’s interior systems instead, air and heat, light, and engines. Most importantly, it would allow me to access the interior sensors. It would be the fastest way to find out who or what was aboard the ship and what its status was. Could it still fly?
The control unit took longer to wake than the other one had, and that had been slow. Every screen and button felt grimy, sticky with some kind of substance I had no name for—something that clung to my fingers. The screens were dim when they blinked on, and the readings were hard, almost impossible to read. I leaned in close, peering at the screen to try to make sense of the ship maps and the faint blips I could see.
If I was seeing this right, it appeared there was one solid blip for me on the bridge. But several faint ones stirred further in the ship, so faint they could just be interference. My eyes scanned the hallways, the rooms, and the obvious bridge area again, hoping to find another solid blip like mine. Nothing. But then, my eyes caught something on the edge of the bridge. Was that the same interference? Or was it something real?
I raised my head, stared into the dark corner where it was supposed to be, and saw absolutely nothing. Just darkness and streaks against the walls of dirt in swirling, organic patterns, as if moss or lichen had grown there. The longer I stared at it, the more confused I became. Did that bit there move, or was it the same as before—and were my eyes just playing tricks on me? A feeling crawled along my spine, the small hairs on the back of my neck rising. It felt like there were eyes on me, but that had to bea figment of my imagination. Davidson wasn’t here; nobody was here at all.
Lowering my eyes back to the sensor data, I checked the bridge again, certain I’d been mistaken about that faint signal. No, I wasn’t—it had gotten stronger. There was definitely someone here. My chin went up; my hand went to my belt by instinct, grabbing for a gun that wasn’t there. It was too little, and too late, anyway.
The black thing, all shadow and darkness, had detached itself from the wall, an oil slick that suddenly hurled itself through the room, right at me. Moving fast, it was a blur of darkness, and within it swirled pink and blue tentacles that grabbed for me. Then a face, pale, distorted, but somehow familiar.
I screamed in terror, that was all I really had time for. My body threw itself backward in reflex, still weak and slow from that long trip in stasis. I stumbled, and thatthingwould have struck me right as I hit the ground, but it didn’t. The snarling and growling reached my ears before my eyes started working. Stars danced through my vision, grayness edging in from the sides, while pain lanced sharp and harsh through the back of my skull. I’d hit the deck, and hard.
