The Drift.

John Koenig was in Main Mission, but he was bewildered about why it was all so dark.

He looked around desperately, seeing that the usually bright interior lighting in the room was off. He wondered for a moment if the power systems had suffered a major failure, but he couldn't be sure. He quickly worked out he wasn't alone in the room, although he couldn't see the faces he was positive they were there.

"Launch Eagle 1!" the voice of Paul Morrow cut through his thoughts, and John swung around to Paul's station. The flight coordinator was sitting at his station as he normally did, but as John watched he couldn't see the figure move.

In fact, no-one was moving.

Koenig looked around the room, seeing that while Computer was working, the main viewing scanner was running on static, so he couldn't see what was happening, and there were no visual means of seeing the condition of the Eagle as it was launched. But what surprised him the most was the fact Main Mission personnel were conducting and supervising a launch without visual sensors active.

"Eagle 1 launching! Let's hope it gets through," the voice of Captain Alan Carter said.

"Paul? Alan?" John said, hoping to get answers.

To his surprise, the shadowy figures moved as one at the sound of his voice, and they turned in his direction slowly.

"I thought he was dead!" Sandra spat.

"Yes, Computer registered his loss. Shame," Kano observed.

Although he had not intended to, Koenig backed away, surprised to hear the two people whom he had come to know very well speak in such hateful tones.

"Why are you still alive, Koenig?" Paul asked, his voice not sounding emotional like Sandra's, but it sounded more dead than Kano's usually calm voice.

"What are you talking about?" John asked, wondering why his longtime friend and colleague would ask something like that. Another thing that worried him was how they were speaking to him in this manner and their lack of formality. But Kano and Sandra's feelings worried him the most; he had a good relationship with the pair, as far as he knew, he had never gotten any hint of insubordination from them before, especially not to this level.

"Why are you still alive when so many are dead, why we are dead?" Alan demanded in the same dead tone as Paul's, but the last word was finished with a shout before the figure that apparently represented Alan leaned forward.

John gasped in horror as he beheld the sight of a rotting corpse wearing the grimy, tattered remains of Alan's uniform. The corpse itself was missing an eye and the remaining eye looking like it was only just hanging inside the skull, and some of the flesh was black and decomposed.

Lights seemed to pinpoint the rest of the Main Mission crew, and John cried when he saw that Alan was not the only corpse of one of his friends in Main Mission. The only one who seemed more alive was Sandra, although she looked like she was on the point of becoming a rotten corpse, with how withered she appeared. Her body looked like it had been drained of all fluids in her body as if every drop of life in her body had been torn from her body.

"What's happened to you? Why are you launching an Eagle?" John asked.

"We are dead," Kano replied simply.

"We have been travelling through space without end for years," Alan said, now speaking in the same dead quality.

"What?" Koenig gaped at him.

"We are launching an Eagle, to get our children away from YOU!" Paul shouted.

Koenig jumped when he felt a hand on his shoulder, and he turned around and found himself looking at Victor. His friend was looking at him so solemnly John almost missed the clothes he was wearing. He was wearing the clothes of an undertaker.

"Come with me, John," he said, reaching out and dragging him….

XXX

John found himself in the sickbay, only it was as dark as Main Mission only it was a little bit brighter than Main Mission, so it didn't take him long to take in the surroundings of the room. He was surprised when Victor gently pulled him to the beds, and he gasped in horror. He was looking at a number of dead bodies of Alpha's personnel, all of them covered with thick cobwebs. John stepped back from them, but he couldn't take his eyes off of any of them. They looked like they had been drained of all life, much like Sandra, only they were not rotting like Paul or Alan.

"What happened to them?" he asked.

Victor didn't reply. He just stared solemnly at the bodies.

"Victor?" John pressed.

The base scientist took a deep breath and came back to life, although John wasn't sure if he was alive or dead. "They died, John," he replied in that quiet voice of his, but where Victor usually spoke with the air of one of those teachers who believed the best way to educate his students was through kindness and wisdom while making them realise they had to be aware of their own mistakes, while using his own excitement to learn as well.

"How?" John asked, looking horrified at the bodies.

"Because of you!"

John swung around and he found himself looking at Helena. The bases' chief medical officer was dressed in a long black dress. She looked like she was about to head to a funeral. "Helena-," he tried to say, but she waved her hand.

"No, you have nothing to say to me! This," she gestured at the bodies on the bed, "is all down to you! Never trying to colonise a planet, even when there are ways to circumvent the dangers. Everyone eventually realised you cared more for your own power, everyone realised you wanted us to keep on drifting endlessly through the vacuum of space on this pointless journey through outer space."

John didn't know what to say as the harangue went on. Ever since they had begun their journey into space, they had encountered several worlds that looked ideal for colonisation, only for them to discover there were unexpected dangers and hazards on the different worlds that made the prospect of colonisation impossible.

"Helena, none of that was my fault; we were always finding hazards we didn't understand!"

Helena sneered at him, and his eyes were drawn to the rotting skin of the gums. "Everyone started having children on Alpha because everyone had lost faith we would have a planet of our own again! We could have colonised a world like Retha, even if some of us were transformed into cavemen!"

"But if we did-!" John tried to say, but everything around him; Victor, the corpses on the beds, the walls, Helena, the instruments, all of them blended together into a vortex of colour….

XXX

"All your fault!"

"We are dying because of you!"

"The last of the human race, and yet we are dead with you around!"

John moaned as image after image swept through his mind….

XXX

….he came across a group of Alphans running through the corridors of the base, screaming as the walls and the ceiling exploded inwards, buckling under some terrific impact. The ground underneath John's feet buckled as well as the base rocked, but he managed to right his balance just in time before he was thrown off of his feet. He took off running with the base personnel instinctively, and he doubled his pace when he heard the alarms indicating explosive decompression was in progress.

The people who had designed and constructed Alpha had not been amateurs. The designers had taken every fact, every scrap of the dangers of space travel and space exploration, from meteor impacts which ranged in size from the size of a grain of sand to the impact from a football-sized impact to the mighty crater which was believed to have been caused when the dinosaurs had gone extinct. Alpha was designed to be constructed of a honeycomb of space plates that were reinforced with the spaces filled with kevlar, and a thick sponge-like material to soak up impacts while a number of lead linings protected them from solar flares.

But accidents could and did happen, but ever since Alpha had broken away from its Earth orbit, the dangers had grown more and more severe as the base encountered hazards beyond the comprehension of the best scientists of their time.

A whole section of wall came away, and Koenig grabbed a female crewmember. The woman screamed as she looked at him….

XXX

….this time he was inside an Eagle as he was flying through space, but the spacecraft was spinning out of control so it was hard to concentrate. Koenig took a deep breath as he tried to work out what was wrong with the Eagle as he tried desperately to regain control over the ship. But the controls were non-responsive, and the joystick would just not move. Smoke and the scent of burning plastic wafted up to his nose, and he coughed as his eyes began to sting while his ears were bombarded with the sound of the alarms.

He lifted his head, hoping to find something he could use to help him get out of his horror. But he stopped when he saw something he didn't expect through the cockpit windows.

It was Earth.

The planet didn't look all that different from the last time John had seen it around the time they'd broken away from their solar system. Everyone on Alpha had long since stopped speaking about Earth, knowing if they did they would all become homesick since there was no way they would return there since their random course made it impossible for them to predict their movements.

Suddenly the Earth exploded….

XXX

John woke up panting, and his eyes darted around the room desperately, fully expecting to see decomposed or half decomposed corpses lying around the room, or areas where it looked like decompression was about to take place, but there was none of that. There were no telltale signs of air hissing out although it was hard to be sure since he was breathing so hard, nor was there anyone in his quarters other than himself.

"John, are you alright?" He looked up and saw Helena's face looking at him over the communication screen. He smiled at her nervously, happy that the anger and rage she had seen in the face of her dream-self was not there.

"Just about, I had a nightmare," he panted as he tried to exorcise the images out of his mind, but it was virtually impossible. He had always considered the rest of the bases' personnel were angry with him for not finding a replacement home after they'd been blasted away thanks to Earth's careless nuclear waste dumping program. Oh, sure, he had been supported by the evidence, but it was always there in the back of his mind.

"Do you need a sedative?" Helena asked.

John considered it for a moment, but he shook his head. "No, I should be alright, hopefully by the morning. I'll see you then."

Helena smiled, although it was tinged with concern. "Okay, but give me a call if you can't get back to sleep."

John nodded and smiled, knowing Helena might ask him what the nightmare was about, but he would cross that bridge when he came to it.