The Price of Winning
by Calliope
Author's Note: This is a 'what if?' story. It stems around the question, 'What would have happened if Rahde had won the fight in the first episode, instead of Dylan?' I think you need to have seen the first episode, to understand this.
Enjoy!
Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me, and I'm not writing this for any gain, financial or otherwise.
The Price of Winning
Part One: Inside a Single Second
I am Rahde, and I am about to die.
Even as he thought the words, the Andromeda's traitorous second-in-command could feel himself fading away. It infuriated him. He was a winner, an alpha. True, he had many wives, who had already given him many children, but he still had leagues of future offspring he had yet to sire. He couldn't die now. His DNA was simply too important to be eliminated so prematurely.
Rahde watched his captain with his last gaze. Despite the Nietzchean's anger at death, he had never before been more proud of Captain Dylan Hunt. It was rather perverse, for a final emotion.
Then, his captain froze.
Something was happening. The entire universe had simply halted. Or perhaps it was only that he was thinking, and being, faster than the entire universe.
Rahde mentally shrugged the thought away, right before the truth hit him; they were in a black hole. Time had stopped! But then- why wasn't he frozen? Why could he still think, still experience?
And why wasn't he dead?
But of course, that answer was so obvious. Time. Had. Stopped. His very last breath was being held in his body by the anomaly- and it would take him over three-hundred years to die.
He might have dwelled on that dismal notion for a small eternity, but his thoughts stalled. How had he known it would be three-hundred years until they escaped the black hole?
Then, he felt them: strings of time.
They were everywhere, like scattered, tangled threads of every different era, but he couldn't see them. It was more that he could sense them. He was trapped within a single second, but the very relative nature of time meant that one second could seem like infinity.
Rahde's mind grasped one of the loose yarns that seemed to be everywhere, and suddenly, the future was open to him. A future that, for Rahde, wouldn't continue for three more centuries. And, once it proceeded, it would end, and he would die. But Hunt would live on. Oh, how it rankled!
But- if the future was open to him, then...so was the past.
Rahde watched the fight he'd just lost- the only one he'd ever lost. It was he and Dylan, jumping from each others' shots, preparing to shoot again.
And suddenly, they were there, again, in that moment. In that fight. Rahde didn't have the luxury of time to marvel that he'd time-traveled- he was too busy surviving.
Captain Hunt shot at him, and Commander Rahde shot at Hunt, and they leapt to avoid the crossfire. But this time- this time- Rahde didn't leap quite as far, and the bolt harmlessly passed his arm. No lethal hit.
Not this time.
When Rahde shot his weapon, he leveled his aim so that the blast would go lower than he wanted it to, remembering that, in another time, it had sailed over the top of the High Guard Captain.
And now, Captain Hunt was hit in the heart, and he crumpled to the ground.
The bridge fell silent. The sounds of automatic repair, and of alarms, suddenly halted. The flashing lights froze. And then, a low, keening sound, like a bitersweet siren, echoed across the entire ship. Commander Rahde frowned. What the...?
Then he realized- Andromeda. She was grieving, in shock, and this was her anguish.
Rahde didn't understand it. Why did she care? She was just a ship.
Then, they were firmly caught in the black hole, and time froze. He didn't feel time, moving around him, not again. He didn't feel anything at all. He was held in the anomaly, just the same as the ship and her scream.
So, for three hundred years, Andromeda and her sole occupant perched frozen in space, the ship emitting a sound that, if picked up on the sensors of passing vessels, sounded oddly like a woman's sobs.
And outside the black hole, time, as it must, moved on.
TBC...