Silence was all-encompassing. There was nothing but void, and in that void there was, finally, peace. Here, his thoughts were contained. They were ethereal, fading in and out of whatever tiny glimmer of true consciousness remained within him. Nothing besides remained.
And then a klaxon tore through his meditation, ripping open the void to allow a red light in from the outside. The waves broke into his world and bounced around within its walls, shattering his attention like a fragile cup that had been dropped, sending the pieces of him tumbling to the cold concrete in the cell around.
Pythius only just managed to get his arms out to prevent his face from impacting the floor. They were fleshless, being mere abstract constructs vaguely resembling bones, the black unlight scattered by their impossible angles creating incomprehensible shadows across the ground. Though without any eyes, he turned to his sides, sensing his skeletal arms, and the shards of black stone that laid all around the containment chamber, and stilled his mind.
He rejected the void.
One by one, the shards began to move, first twitching as if in response to a powerful magnetic field pulsing through them, and then each became a projectile, firing across the room to impale him. The shards didn’t hurt - he didn’t even have a nervous system yet - but he knew it would soon. They molded to his body, becoming crystalline bones, and then muscles, and then skin, still emanating that unnatural light, before the skin quickly became paler, a mixed complexion, and his reformed eyes took on their usual grey hue.
He stood up, straightening the signature black-and-purple coat rapidly forming from the excess material making up his form, and checked his hands. Ten digits, good to go. With his right palm, he tried drawing from the material in his arm, reducing it back to an inhuman skeletal substructure but forming a curved blade in his hand, glimmering anomalously in his grip.
“Still got it,” he said to himself, his voice much quieter than he was used to; that was always the issue with waking up this way. He coughed to essentially “reboot” his vocal cords, just as one of the walls swung open like a vault door.
In the spartan corridor outside stood a woman with flowing brown hair tied in a messy bun, and the ceramic parts of a face mask matching the colour of her skin covering her lower left face, all three pieces slotted in such a way as to allow the ruined jaw underneath to still move naturally. “Good morning, Pythius. Sorry to say but you’re required again.”
“That’s the longest you’ve let me sleep since the crash. How long has it been?” He smirked. He had known Brooke Warrington for almost 20 years, and she hadn’t aged one bit throughout the entire time. It helped to be in control of the latest iteration of the Fountain of Youth, and it wasn’t more obvious on anybody than the Director of Division Five herself.
“A little over two years.”
“Then this better be important. Who’s dying?”
“Nobody this time, actually. We need your help photographing something.”
“You revived me for photography? Don’t you people have drones that do that?”
“The comets we’re trying to get a picture of are highly anomalous, and coming in on short notice. Most of our sensors can’t make sense of it. A drone going that close would get fried.”
“So you woke up the only mostly anomaly-immune thing in your collection?”
“Seemed as good a time as any.”
With a flick of his wrist, he turned the blade in his hand back into the rest of the flesh of his arm. “Fine. Just tell me you can put me back to sleep. I can feel the Engine isn’t nearby.”
“There’s a way. Though, I’ll have to urge you to reconsider.”
He brushed past her, going towards the cargo lift. “Just do it right after.”
Brooke stomped after him, her footsteps audibly irritated, but Pythius just laughed it off in his head. He quickly hopped into the lift platform and grabbed the industrial-looking control box that hung from the ceiling, mulling over the two rows of buttons. “Where are we going?”
“Level eight airlock. Sforza’s team has your gear there.”
He hit the button for the eighth floor, and the lift began to ascend. “Airlock? You want to punt me out into space? What if I get caught by the gravity well down there?” he asked, referring to the planetoid their facility was currently orbiting.
“There’ll be a cable. And thrusters. A whole chair for you, really?”
Pythius made a face. “I’m still seriously questioning waking me of all people up for this. Doesn’t one of Sforza’s make remote puppets? That stuff can be shielded like with the diner and the devourer.”
“Marlowe’s puppetry only works at very close distances. He's going to have to be out there too, and there’s a good chance his life support will fail. And he’s busy.”
“Doing what? Doesn’t Delta-3 sit around all day praying that one of your teams somewhere will fuck up really bad? And Sforza’s here so it can’t be that terrible out there. Hell, I’m still alive.”
Brooke scowled. “You’re cranky today.”
“I was having a nice nap and you had to tell me I’m about to be launched into the cold, endless void of space.”
“By your own report, it’s a meditative trance, not actually sleeping, and it’s not too far off from space. Can’t have been that good.”
“I hate starlight, which makes it even better than actually sleeping.”
“So those dreams haven’t gone away, then?”
He went quiet, feeling a pressure building up in his chest. He locked his jaw as the lift stopped, and he was thankful for the way out of that conversation. “Yeah, you can say that.”
Brooke didn’t seem to have any intention of continuing that discussion either, because she walked out ahead of him, and unsealed a heavy door - of of many in a row - in order to gain access to the small reinforced room that separated the airlock from the rest of the station’s hull, as a buffer zone. There indeed was a chair here: a partially disassembled office chair with its wheels removed and what looked like a restraint from a roller coaster installed at the top, mounted onto the inside of a thruster-laden frame composed of multiple rings, allowing navigation in any direction. A long, thick cable was tied to one end of the ring, and ended in a very thick spooling mechanism that had been bolted to the floor within the airlock.
“You want me to get into that?” Pythius did a double take.
“It’s perfectly safe!” Manuel Sforza, in all his bearded glory, poked his head out from inside the airlock. He hadn’t known the captain of Delta-3 for long, but at least he did age naturally. “I made it myself. Well, technically me and Sima made it.”
“Isn’t Sima like a civil engineer? This is a glorified ejection seat.”
“It was mostly Sima,” Brooke added.
“It's not like you’re going to die, right?” Sforza asked
“I’m far more worried it’s going to come apart with me still strapped to it. There’s three possibilities and none of them are good: either I fly off into space due to the chair’s momentum, I get dangerous close to the local star and get sucked in, or somehow worst of all, I get caught by the planet and from what I remember you telling me, nobody has made it out of the anomaly on the surface. Hell no.” Pythius shook his head.
“Couldn’t you literally eject pieces of yourself to propel your mass in open space?” Brooke asked, patting the chair. “Bits of you can suddenly gain energy to return to you, so you can just keep ejecting them over and over. So even if the chair breaks down-”
He waved her away. “Okay, I get it. I’m just being a little bitch by not doing this already. What do I take pictures with?”
“Oh, this!” Sforza held out a small box of thick, transparent plastic and metal framing, containing a small, antique camera. A button on the outside was strapped to the photography button on the shielded device, but over all it appeared and probably was extremely clunky. “Film camera. Won’t be much for the comets to disrupt.”
“Am I on like some kind of roadshow?”
“You know what a roadshow is?” Brooke asked.
“Of course I do, Onari used to really be into- look, let’s just get this over with, okay?” He climbed into the chair, lowering the restraining device to lock himself into it. “Gimme.”
Sforza happily handed him the box with the camera, something Pythius found to be awfully cumbersome and annoying, but he was going to see it through.
It took Sforza and Brooke less than a minute to push him into the airlock, and seal the door behind him.
“Sima’s in the control centre, and she’s going to pilot you. Get a lot of photos!” Sforza shouted through the door, before hitting the button to cycle his airlock.
The decompression was slow, but Pythius still found it profoundly unpleasant to have all the has drained from him. Luckily, his eyes weren’t wet in the slightest, so he was spared the potential horror of having his eyeballs dehydrated by the merciless vacuum of space, and he took some comfort in that it might not be so bad.
And then he was launched out of the station by the thrusters’ sudden activation, propelling him clear of the close-tie sensor modules. An instinct within him tried to scream in shock, but then he remembered he had no air to do that with, causing his mouth to just gape open with not even the slightest of sound. He didn’t know how he held onto the camera box, but he wasn’t going to start second-guessing everything at this stage.
The reverse thrusters finally engaged, and he came to a slow stop, the cable behind him almost taut when he gave it a glance. High Command looked disproportionately far away, and even further beyond, the unnamed dwarf planet on which the Unification War had ended loomed. But being this far away…Brooke had been right. He would never admit it, but the quiet was surprisingly pleasant, just not in the same way as hibernation had been. He felt detached, and not in a bad way. Out here, he felt like a king.
Maybe he should’ve done this earlier. He raised the camera box and pointed it in the general direction of the endless sea of stars. Several hundred kilometres away, he could see the intense blue glow of the Dragon Comets, rocketing at reckless speeds unimpeded through the vastness of it all. He took aim, and hoping Sforza had the foresight to zoom in as much as the camera was capable, started taking pictures. It was impossible to tell how much film was left, but Pythius kept clicking until the swarm of comets had passed by, becoming obscured by a large, red gas giant further out. Then he turned around, and tugged repeatedly at the cable.
As the reverse thrusters burned to accelerate him back into the station, he closed his eyes, and took the time to bask in the light of the nearby white dwarf star. Perhaps nothingness was really overrated. Now that was a dangerous undertaking.
The seat decelerated in no time at all - not that the momentum affected any of Pythius’ incomplete set of innards - and he was skillfully guided back into the airlock, which repressurised soon after.
He took a deep breath, ripped the restraint off the seat with his bare hands, and dropped the camera box from his lap onto the ground. “Done!” he exclaimed, exasperated.
Brooke pulled open the airlock door, now alone on the other side. “Was it nice?”
“Reminded me of sleeping,” he replied, dusting himself off. “There I did it. Can I go back now?”
“Sure.” She stepped aside.
Pythius wasted no time returning the lift, only pausing momentarily for Brooke to carry the box in before hitting the button for the lower containment level. “How’d you reverse engineer the Engine’s function?”
“Bit of help from Vermillion. There’s been a few information trade deals by D3. You sure you want to go back in there?”
“Absolutely.”
Brooke gave him a sad look. “Isolation isn’t good. For anyone.”
“I know. But it’s the only place I can stop thinking about her.”
“I see.”
The lift stopped, and Pythius noticed his cell was still open. Soon, all of this would be another distant dream, and he would be reduced to nothing again. It was for the best. He turned the corner into his cell and-
“Merry Christmas!” Sforza shouted, letting loose a streamer directly into Pythius’ solemn face.
Though still essentially a concrete cube, a metal table had been set up and covered with a pure white cloth, and upon its top surface sat a variety of food, from lush puddings to vegetable casseroles to a large bird of some kind, plucked and roasted until darkly delicious-smelling. There were seven chairs in all, one for each member of Delta-3, plus Brooke and Pythius himself. In the corner was a sparsely decorated and relatively tacky Christmas tree, its crappy fairy lights blinking on and off in sequence.
“Look at him, he’s fucking floored!” Knopp exclaimed, looking up from the texts on her phone. “You ever seen him gobsmacked?”
“Nah,” Sforza said, tossing the empty streamer tube over his shoulder, causing Marlowe to duck in his seat to avoid being hit by it, taking the half-finished puppet in the seat next to him down as well as if it were alive and of great importance to him.
“Watch it, asshole,” Marlowe snarled, and then his expression softened as he pointed at the new man-sized puppet.
Still somewhat dazed, Pythius took the seat opposite Marlowe. “What is that supposed to be?”
“You.”
“Looks nothing like me.”
“Yeah, but it’s supposed to be a female you. Like theoretically, you could arrange yourself into a female form, right? Like I’m not gay, but…”
“No,” Pythius said curtly. “You can piss all the way off with that.” Though he didn’t realise it at first, he found he was grinning.
A served blade popped out from under Brooke’s sleeve, and with her other hand, she grabbed a skewer. “Who wants chicken? Knopp and Marlowe worked so hard for this.”
All eyes turned to Pythius, and he sighed. “Okay, I’ll have some.”
She expertly carved into the bird, slicing the breast into thin pieces and heaping some of that plus stuffing a paper plate for Pythius. “Can I say something you might not like?”
Pythius grabbed a plastic fork from a plastic bag in the middle of the table. "Yeah?"
“We don’t want you to forget Katia.”
He put his fork down next to his plate, saying nothing.
“I know how much you loved her. We loved her too. She was one of the best of us. But I think what you’re really afraid of is having and then losing a connection like that again. So she might be gone, Pythius, but we can always be your family.”
He licked his lips. “Okay..."
“Take it from me,” Sforza said. “I was orphaned at six, and I spent years being so scared of people who I needed most at the time.You don’t want to be alone, man. It kills you in more than one way.”
Pythius chuckled. “Yeah, I can see that right now.”
“Please don’t go back,” Brooke added.
He exhaled sharply, mulling it over.
Knopp cleared her throat. “Uh, guys?" She waved her phone. "Kinda emergency. Sima was tidying upstairs and she said the comets just vanished. All hands on deck.”
Marlowe threw up his arms. “Great timing. Now the roast will go cold.”
“I don’t mind if we keep it heated.” Pythius stood up. “Can’t believe I’m saying this but…who wants to pilot me in the chair this time?”
Comments (0)
See all