Chapter 4 (Tobias)
The One was gone.
Ax was gone.
((Ax!)) I screamed, refusing to believe that he couldn't hear me. That he might never hear me again.
He couldn't be gone. He just couldn't be. After all these years we spent fighting Yeerks together, it was inconceivable that he might be dead. Inconceivable! Impossible!
Especially now. Now that the war was long since over, now that I was finally just beginning to think I could be free from the pain of war and violence. The terrible knowledge of my own weakness. The weight of so much death on my shoulders.
Stupid of me to think I could ever be free from all that. To make believe that, now that the war was finally over, all the pain and despair and death would end.
Had I actually begun to think that I could ever find peace?
My name is Tobias.
Hawk. Human. I'm sure you already know the story. I'm sure you've heard the tragic tale about the boy who gave up his humanity in exchange for a set of wings. Who spent more than two hours as a red-tailed hawk and then was a hawk forever. Who made this terrible sacrifice so he could fight a war, fight for the freedom of the world and for the memory of his father. To keep fighting, never to accept the surrender that was to be human again.
Or maybe he'd never made a sacrifice. Maybe he wanted to be a hawk, wanted to run away from his human life, even if he could never quite admit it, even to himself. Maybe he never became human again, not simply so that he could stay in the fight, but because that had never been the life he wanted.
Nobody really knows for sure.
Neither do I. And I doubt I ever will.
All I knew was that I'd suddenly lost another one of the tenuous threads tying me to humanity. Someone who had not even been human. Yet, who had in some strange way been far more human than I was.
I felt a cold wave of fury at Jake. He had given the orders that had killed the only two people I had ever really cared about. First Rachel. Now Ax.
And his decision could still prove responsible for the death of the rest of us, before long.
SCREEEEEE!
A screech of metal against metal penetrated my thoughts. The groan of bending steel was accompanied by a whistle of wind, rising and rising until it was an overpowering hurricane.
WeeeooooOOOOSH!
The air was escaping from our wrecked ship!
The Blade Ship and the Rachel, their huge masses now rebounding from their catastrophic collision, were pulling away from each other. Pulling away from the crumpled, entangled mass they had become.
And in doing so, they would tear each other apart!
Jake instantly snapped into action. "Marco! Jeanne! Try to use the weapons to seal the Rachel's hull. Menderash and Santorelli, see what you can do to get some power to the engines and weapons. Tobias, come with me. We're finding the emergency air tanks," he yelled over the din of tearing metal, already having to gasp for air against the dwindling wind.
But Jake's orders were soon rendered useless. As the two ships powerlessly drifted apart, something must have snagged. The battle-ax end of the Blade Ship, the part that had remained undamaged by the collision, suddenly swung around. It seemed to move in slow motion, gracefully sweeping towards us until its blade-like wing buried itself into the Rachel's metal skin.
BOOM! SCREEEEEECH!
The familiar scream of twisting steel was accompanied by another hiss of escaping air and a crackle of electricity. Suddenly the artificial gravity was gone. With it, the last of our air.
I was floating, helpless, my lungs crying out for precious oxygen. I couldn't breathe! The air was being sucked out of my throat every time I tried to draw a breath. Air! I flapped my wings uselessly, panicking but going nowhere. There was nothing for my wings to push against. I could see a computer panel not more than a foot from my beak, but I could not reach it.
((Ax!)) I screamed again. As if he could hear me. As if he could help us.
Already my vision was clouding over, the lack of oxygen and the paralyzing cold quickly sapping my strength. It was already too late to morph. It was already too late to do anything.
I looked out the window, past the struggling bodies of Jeanne and Santorelli, both screaming soundlessly in the vacuum, and thought I saw a glint of silver outside. A flicker of hope. Was it another ship? Would they save us?
Was it even really there, or was my dying mind just making up another pathetic false hope for me to hang on to? Trying to keep me safe from reality right up until the very moment I died?
No. It was gone. If it had even been there in the first place.
This was it, I realized. The end.
This realization filled me, not with fear, but with an unexpected sense of calm. There was nothing left to fight for. Nothing left to fight. No reason I had to go on being strong.
I could finally surrender to my own weakness. No one was left to judge me for it.
Sweet, sweet surrender.
I closed my eyes and peacefully waited for my life to end.
Note: As usual, everything belongs to K.A.A. But I also want to give a little credit to John Denver. The second to last line of this chapter is taken from the lyrics of one of his songs.
