Chapter 4
Karath stared for a few seconds with her mouth open at the figure standing in the doorway. A million thoughts hit her at once; the realization that this person standing bloodied before her was the only close friend she'd ever known weighed the heaviest in her mind. It dragged her down, pulled her jaw to the floor of the ship. She'd seen suffering pirates and poor paupers in her life, nobody she knew, and watched them starve, loot, steal, harm, choke, bleed, die. Though he stood up, regally, with color in his face, an unseen weight pointed Manne's head towards the floor, pushed his shoulders down, curled his back over. He was obviously, absolutely, a broken mirror reinforcing her own pain and dark horrors back at her. She had no comfy cushion of distanced empathy to separate her from the truth, no castle wall to stand upon to witness the vague horrors below: Manne was her castle, and he was crumbling before her eyes, brick by brick.
Karath sat, frozen in the pilot's chair, thoughts of denial swirling about her mind, until Manne blew the storm away with his voice.
"Karath," he said. "Listen to me."
She blinked and pulled away embarrassingly from her trance. "Yes, Manne?"
"Get out of the pilot chair, and let me sit in it."
She complied and stepped slowly out of the chair, watching Manne stumble one step before her body willed itself over to him to help him walk. She noticed he'd already bandaged himself, wrapped med-cloths around his wounds, which meant he'd most likely already taken the adrenaline shot from the medpack. Even through the bandages she could see how much he'd already bled, and the adrenaline was making his hands twitch and shake as he pressed buttons on the console, focusing in on the warp target.
"Strap in," he said, lighting a stim.
"Y-yes, sir," she replied, and quickly sat in the co-pilot's chair, nervously searching the board for something to do. The ship activated its warp, and as they came out a dozen kilometers from a repair station just preceding Vega Belt Alpha, Manne turned and eyed her direction.
"I have a first name, Kay."
At this she broke into tears. "Ecklestein," she weeped. "Ecklestein, what's happening? We need to get you to a medic."
"It's too late for that, Karath." Lights blipped on the ship's radar. "I need to get you as far into the belt as I can, they can't know that you're headed to Bremen."
"Bremen?" The tears paused. "What do you mean?"
"My," he said flinching, feeling the effects of both his physical affliction, and hopeless mental yearning sparked by nostalgia. "My home. There's something waiting for you there, something that I hoped I'd have more time to give you, to hand to you myself."
"What are you talking about?" she replied frantically. "What is it?"
"It belonged to your mother, bundled with you when I found you, hidden and warm. I never opened it, it was obviously special and I wanted to eventually give you something that I had nothing to do with, something untouched. Inside is something undoubtedly linking you to your past, maybe your father."
Flashes of energy blasts began to shoot across the bridge window, finding their way into the asteroid field beyond, and sparked the continuation of tear streams down Karath's face.
"You'll give it to me yourself, Ecklestein," she said. "You'll get us out of here, you'll give me that thing and we'll both find out, together." She held her head, gripping at her head-feathers. "No, Ecklestein, TOGETHER!" she screamed.
Seeing her denial forced tears and whimpers out of Manne for two seconds, before he shook it off and forced himself up out of the captain's chair to do what he knew he had to.
"C'mon, Kay!" he desperately whispered, and pulled her out of the chair, taking her kicking and screaming down the corridor to her room. Her feet dragged against the walls, she yelled no, don't, many equivalents and some incoherence, and gripped at Manne's arm like she was grasping at a dream she knew in her heart was once reality not too long ago. Manne moved with such vigor that for a moment she forgot his impending mortality, only to be reminded by the stickiness of his blood soaked garments, his constant wheezing.
When they got to her room she only protested more, but was helpless as Manne locked her into her bed, strapping her in with braces she never knew existed. She clawed at them wildly but it was no use, there were no buttons on the harness: They were remotely controlled. She gave up, hyperventilating, looking up at Manne through a tear-soaked face which begged for none of it to be true.
"You gotta be smart, you gotta be strong," Manne huskily voiced. "And don't trust anyone." He turned before the tears came and shuffled towards the door, wishing he had just one more day to spend with Karath, one more hour, one more minute. He looked back and thought about all the missed opportunities, all the things he ever wanted to tell her, ever wanted to teach her, ever wanted to see her experience, but the dreams he had hoped to turn into memories began to cement themselves into a dark walkway of regret, and the sounds of the ship's shields failing forced it to fade. He pushed the door control, and as it slid closed he and Karath locked eyes past the moving panel until they were looking at each other through its window, and said more to each other gazing through it than they ever had through anything else.
Manne punched a long series of numbers on the lock next to Karath's door, a combination she was unfamiliar with, and with a final gaze through the window he hit the last number. Almost immediately the ship rocked, with shockwaves from explosions shaking the walls harder and harder as the explosions got nearer. As the final one went off, Karath closed her eyes, saving her from seeing Manne becoming vaporized by a bright flame, which quickly faded to a storm of debris, and then darkness, and she passed out from the sustained g-force.
The ship broke apart into large sectional pieces, scattering metal, plastic, and glass, in every direction. Manne had designed the ship to break apart in this fashion to mask the release of the escape pods. Karath's bedroom shot away from the wreckage as the ship blew apart, sending itself away into space, initiating its launch at a risky but survivable 100 meters per second. The pod was pressurized and possessed the complex electronics and controls on-board to float on an uninterrupted trajectory into deep space for a month, with a system of thrusters and sensors that would keep it spatially safe from potentially threatening objects moving towards it. After thrusting for a few seconds, the pod exposed controls from within a shelf Karath had decorated with knick-knacks, and went into stand-by, waiting for its inhabitant to activate its distress beacon.
The pirates dropped away in every direction to peer at the debris, looking for signs of life, but there was too much to follow. The troupe stayed out there in space for a while, filling it with radio chatter, sending out notices to the relays that they were looking for a human and a young tevarin, before losing interest and heading back to Selene to convene at a local pirate den.
Hundreds of kilometers in the distance, a pod floated into the Vega Belt, Karath inside of it, and a faint glow from Vega's reflection against the large floating rocks distanced around her, shining over her just barely as she lay nestled inside the darkness that was once just her bedroom.
Karath woke to a start, panicking, making attempts to rip off the harness binding her to the bed, frantically searching out the window for anything other than the deep dark of rock-dotted space around her. She looked around her bedroom at the walls and shelves she no longer recognized, as they had morphed into the impressive control console of the escape pod. Tiny blinking lights lay speckled all over the room, and for a moment she stared out of her window at the asteroids slowly crawling by in the far distance.
She shut her eyes, again, remembering the recent past, remembering who she had just lost, resorting to crying silently against her pillow, still strapped to her bed which had bent around the contours of her body to form something resembling a deeply reclined pilot's chair.
It was all too fast, too quick, she thought; it was like the rug covering a trap door had been pulled out from underneath her, and what she landed in was a deep empty well with soggy bricks, and too lonesome to be real. She wished it was over; she wished he had just let her stay with him on the bridge, as Tee's pirates whittled the ship's shields down until the blasts ripped open holes in its hull, melting the metal away, sending whirlwinds of debris out and about the ship. She dreamed of suffocating next to Ecklestein, dying in his co-pilot's chair, where she belonged, next to the only thing she'd ever known. She imagined a thousand deaths as her pod creeped through the asteroids, and she lay unmoving, solemn, depressed, broken, sunken down into a dreamstate, never awake, never asleep, never moving, for days.
Eventually, hunger and thirst stirred heavily within her, mixing together, and her will to live and move drank it, causing it to climb out from the depths of her depression, scaling the cold steep shards of the black ice that her soul had frozen into, and as she lapped her crusted beak, her dry eyes creaked opened to search over the tiny lights in the room and the reflections of Vega off the passing asteroids, the same view that had sustained for days from within the pod.
She weakly struggled against the belts which bound her to her chair, and a slight panic gave her a certain energy and kick-started her mind.
What is this? She thought. There had to be a way to unbind these braces. After fiddling with them some more, she looked out at the panel, at the lights blinking against the dashboard.
"Ecklestein," she whispered. He had designed the pod, the ship, all of it. There had to be a way to get out of the bindings and she knew that he would have expected her to be able to figure it out.
It's not a button, she thought to herself, and quit reaching for hidden panels and grooves.
"C—" Her voice was rusted over. She grimaced and squirmed as she cleared her throat and swallowed, finally finding the ability to say the word.
"Computer."
On the console, a small solid red light appeared, beckoning for instructions. "Harness." she managed to say, and a beep sounded as the locks clicked, prompting the fall of the belts off the side of the chair. Karath halfway-smirked a sigh of relief, and moved her head against the chair as its pieces shifted and transformed to an upright position. She slid her legs over and knelt on the ground, leaning up against the chair, with her head in her arms on the seat which was warm partly from her living on it for days, mostly from the biowaste which travelled through her suit's excreta system.
"Computer," she said, and the inviting red light on the dash lit up again.
"Food," she croaked. "Water."
The sound of the panel's hydraulics startled her, and two chambers against her wall slid open, revealing bottling tech and a pocket of rations. She weakly grasped a prepared water bottle, and alternately gulped and rested until she was ready to eat. When she was finished eating she sat on the floor of the pod for several minutes, dazed as the blood moved into her digestive tract, and stared off through a window in the wall behind her bed that she never knew was there, entranced by the passing of large, slow-moving asteroids, eventually falling into a restful sleep for several hours.
She awoke confused, looking around, realizations once again crushing her as she remembered what happened to Ecklestein, and where she was now. "Ecklestein," she called out. "Ecklestein," she would whisper. Over and over again she repeated his name, hopelessly wishing that in doing so she would balance out all the times she would call him Manne, when she knew he preferred the other. It was too late, and the regret, the loneliness, the lostness now her only possession as she floated through the big dark, it weighed on her all at once and crushed her as she felt truly empty inside.
She found herself awakening again, hungered, and felt around the dimly lit ration chamber for more food. The sustenance gave her the energy to feel a little bit better, a little more hopeful; she finally began to feel the will to live, though it was still a tiny flame in the huge empty shadow that enshrouded her heart.
She decided to fiddle around with the console, and in the ship's memory she found a digital message, typed up by Ecklestein. She was drawn aback, frightened at first, but eventually opened it, reading it through tears.
Karath. If you're reading this, it means I'm gone. I'm sorry I can no longer protect you. I just hope I've taught you enough, and that you have the strength to carry on, because life is so much bigger than what I've shown you.
What I really need to apologize for though, is lying to you.
As we cross through Elysium, and I peer down at Jalan, admiring its beauty, I feel disappointment in my species, that we weren't able to figure out how to come to a peaceful resolute between us and the tevarin. Jalan, or Kaleeth, as your people called it...your people deserved to keep it.
You have been robbed of your past, your culture, and I feel like I could never measure up to what you deserved to have. All I can offer is the best I have, this mediocre representation of my people's culture.
I've watched you grow and progress, learning faster than I ever could about the world you've been born into. I'm already running out of things to teach you, and I feel like all I have left are the stories of my travels.
There's just one more thing that I, now, as you read this, am sorry for, that I could not give to you myself. I pity myself, for some major part of me doesn't want to see you grow up, doesn't want you to know where you came from, but I pray that by the time you read this, I've already told you the story of how we came to be together.
Buried deep in the beautifully woven blankets I found you in was a case, no bigger than a book. I kept it, key in, laying in my house on Rytif, hoping one day I'd come up with the courage to show you. I don't know what it holds, but I know that when you find it, when you see it, you'll be forever lost to me. It'll be at that time that you're ready to begin your journey through life, without me. The contents of that case will be a seed, planted inside your heart, one day sprouted and grown until you can no longer keep it in, and it will push you away from me, to find your own way in life.
No, it isn't right for me to keep it from you, and I'm sorry. But I hope you can forgive me, and understand that I didn't do it to hurt you, I did it so as not to hurt myself.
Embedded in this console is a digital fingerprint that will give you access to my home, along with its coordinates on the planet. When you get there, this code will open the compartment where the case is hidden, and you'll also find something that belonged to your mother. 1437.
As we cross over the horizon of your people's homeworld, I look back and see you asleep in that bed of yours, peaceful and innocent, and though you will grow to be something more, I will always see you in my mind the way that I do now.
I'm sorry I couldn't protect you.
Be smart. Be strong. I love you.
~Ecklestein
Karath let the message stay posted on the screen as she went back to her chair and laid in it. Curled up, she was too far to read the words, but gazed at them like she was looking directly at Ecklestein, as if he were there in the pod with her.
For a time, she rested, and thought of the times they spent together, all the worlds they saw, all the systems they travelled. As each moment passed, the power of the now—of living in this pod, dancing around a ring of uncertainty—gained a stronger foothold in her body.
She began to think more and more of this case that her mother had left her.
She eventually found the will not only to stand, but to look out at the universe before her, past the pod's window, past the slow-spinning asteroids, past the outskirts of the Vega system, and into the great beyond; she looked out into the forever that held her destiny, her past, and most importantly, her future. When she thought about that future, something stirred within her: Ecklestein's spirit. It was that which had imprinted itself onto her heart, and she knew now that she not only possessed the will to go on, but the capability to reach out into the universe, grasp her destiny, and rip it out from the stars.
Be smart; be strong. "I will." she replied, and motioned over to the computer to activate the pod's short-range distress signal. Walking up to the viewing window, she stopped with her face inches from it, scouring at the boulders outside, her warm breath fogging up the glass.
"Come on."