fifteen
Kat woke with hunger clawing at her belly. Blinking open eyes crusted with the salt of dried tears, lashes gummy with fatigue and stress, Kat looked sideways at the lower edge of the HUD that hovered inside the skin of her helmet. Twelve hours since she'd been shocked, nearly twenty hours since she'd eaten. Several of the indicators glowed amber instead of green, the dull light anything but soothing. The entity—not the octopus of doom, the other one—had saved her and doomed her. It seemed as confused about their situation as she was. Though, in retrospect, she hadn't given it much chance to explain. She'd pretty much done the incoherent thing after that stupid damned nickname appeared over her wrist, made radiant by the orange glow of her tool's display. Made real, somehow, and so completely tragic.
She'd cried herself to a stupor, imaginary fingers stroking her cheeks, and then she'd drifted to the sound of a soft hum. Had the entity sung to her?
"Hello?" she croaked.
The display above her arm lit up. Hello.
God, she had so many questions. "Are we stuck here?"
She waited for motes of light to form two letters, each millisecond feeling like a minute.
No.
"Then why are we here?" Heh, if that wasn't the question.
Entity advancing. Must… Pulse ticking over more quickly, she waited out a pause. Interpret.
"Interpret? What the fuck does that mean?"
Unknown.
What was unknown? The answer to her question, or the nature of the thing swallowing space next to the asteroid.
Kat tried a different tack. "What are you?"
Her skin crawled through the answering pause. Phantom itches had her shrugging and shifting. She'd pissed twice in her suit now, and had sweated into it for close to twenty hours, on shift and off. She'd puked and bitten her tongue. She was a walking biological cocktail of terror and response. And she itched, damn it.
No name. Used to be a man.
Kat blinked at the letters imprinted in the air over her wrist. Astonishment trickled across her skin like a cool bead of sweat, at once soothing and reigniting the itch.
"Used to be? What happened to you?"
Silence answered her again. Then: I died.
No kidding. "How?"
War.
The last human war had been two centuries ago. Since then, they'd been the peacekeepers of the galaxy. Rebuilding cities and squashing rebellion. Arbitrating disputes between fractious neighbours.
"Were you human?"
The oddness of talking to an entity that might not be human, but still identified as male, poked. A thin sliver of fear stabbed through her chest.
Yes.
"Which war?"
He—the entity had described itself as a man—hesitated again. Kat began to think of the pauses as thoughtful. She hadn't decided if they were sinister, yet.
An answer glowed above her wrist: The Reaper War.
Ah. Well. Shit. The last war, then, which had ended in a mysterious flare of blue light two hundred and eleven years ago. Toss in a handful of days. Kat wasn't a walking encyclopedia of historical fact, but everyone knew the anniversary of the day the Reapers turned away from Earth and set to repairing the destruction they had caused.
A lot of men died in that war. Women, too. All the races of the galaxy had suffered catastrophic casualties.
"I'm sorry," Kat said, the words rasping uneasily against her dry throat.
A new string of words replaced the last: I have delivered water to your suit.
Kat angled her chin toward the water tube, hesitated for a fraction of a second, and then closed her lips around the soft plastic and sucked. The fluid had no discernible taste. Didn't even carry the slightly odd flavour of plastic. She moaned as it flowed down her throat, soothing and slaking, and shuddered as she felt the cool trickle move through her chest. It might kill her, but fuck if she cared. She'd die almost happy.
Small nutrients in the water. No food. Sorry. Working on a solution.
"Getting us off this rock would work."
Not sure I can carry you through a mass relay.
So, the bubble had limits.
Kat looked around her, then, wondering if he was close by, if the bubble had contracted into a smaller…something. "Where are you?"
Everywhere.
"Not the answer I was looking for," she murmured.
Around you. Still.
Kat looked up and the walls of the cavern flickered. Well, what do ya know. The bubble was still intact. It had just expanded.
"Can I release my helmet?"
Yes.
She lifted her hand and froze in place as warmth wrapped around her gloved fingers. "Is that you?"
Yes. A pause, then: Trying to help.
"I can push the button."
Okay.
The single word pulled a giggle from her throat. The entity had said something so unutterably human and in doing so, had become less alien. And it had tried to help her. He. He had tried to help her. He had pulled her away from that thing in space, buried her somewhere inside Rocky and had provided water with a small amount of sustenance.
Soft air currents caressed her newly exposed cheeks. Kat sighed and closed her eyes. She felt tired again. It was hunger, she knew, and her body racing to collect what it could from the small amount of water. Residual stress would also slow her down.
God, what she wouldn't give for a bath. Hell, even a sonic scrub would do.
"Any word on when we'll get out of here?" They were in this together, right?
Did he understand how much more confident and hopeful she felt with someone to talk to?
Working.
"Want me to stop talking so you can do…whatever?"
A pause, then: No.
"You sure about that?"
Can do both at the same time. Slowly, more words rolled out of the air: Can do many things at once. Be anywhere, see and hear the much of the galaxy.
"But you can't take me with you."
No. Then: Wish I could.
The words plucked something in the centre of her chest. Anxiety still coursed through her limbs, a dull burn that could easily be confused with fatigue. Even after her rescue and the water and the air and the effort to communicate, she remained wary. She had to for reasons she could not articulate. But that simple phrase, the fact he had used the word 'wish', stirred another connection. He cared. He wanted to save her. He was sad…no, disturbed that he could not, not beyond carrying her away from the more immediate danger.
"You'll figure something out," she said, vaguely amused by the encouraging note in her voice.
Will try, he answered.