Chapter Text
Imogen runs as shouts echo behind her. The voices in her head press closer, threatening to overwhelm her in their intensity, and she can't block them out today, can't make them stop, no matter how hard she tries.
How did she do that?
Is anyone hurt?
I can’t feel my arm!
Her fingertips spark with purple light, and even though her hands are hidden by gloves, she can feel the energy crawling up the scars. She doesn't know for sure that she's being chased, because the voices all sound so close. They always sound too close.
Someone help!
She's getting away!
Stop her!
She grits her teeth against the intruding voices, drives her legs faster as she leaves the cluster of buildings in the town center and Master Faramore's workshop comes into view. The "stables'' he calls the building, but only with Imogen, because she understands his work. The things he builds in there are creatures more than ships, and Imogen has a way with them that no one else does.
Faramore is one of the few off-worlders on Gelvaan, other than the Stratos Throne soldiers stationed here. Faramore crafts living bio-ships, sentient but non-sapient. And Imogen is good with them. Good at taking care of them, keeping them safe, keeping them calm, keeping them happy. Imogen doesn’t question Master Faramore’s strange hobby. Because Imogen understands all too well what it's like to be different. Besides, these are gentle creatures — flighty, but undemanding. Imogen feels connected to them in a way she never has with people.
So it’s Flora that she pets as she enters the stables. Flora's her favourite. “We’re going for a ride, ok? Just one last time.”
Imogen keys in the code to open the rooftop of the hangar and climbs aboard the living ship. As the organic airlock seals itself, her eyes adjust to the faint light from the bioluminescent walls. The cabin of the ship is tiny, enough space for one person, but it would be cramped with two. The controls are minimalistic, a few screens embedded into the walls, and two consoles in front of a seat-like protrusion. Flying one of Faramore's ships is more like guiding an animal rather than piloting a mechanical craft. But Imogen is good at this, especially with Flora, the most temperamental of the fleet.
The ship rumbles as Imogen passes a hand over the console, sends out calming thoughts that she herself doesn't feel. “Just a short trip, then I’ll send you back. Don’t worry.”
Flora’s cadenced pulsing is more like a heartbeat than an engine, increasing in intensity as she picks up speed. Obediently, the ship rises into the sky, and through her screens, Imogen can see people milling about on the ground outside the stables. She imagines her father down there among the crowd, even though she’s already too high to make out faces. "Goodbye Dad," she whispers into the empty ship as the buildings below get smaller and the air above gets thinner. The thoughts of the crowd grow quiet as she accelerates upwards, and soon the low thrum of the ship is the only thing Imogen can hear.
Finally, some peace.
No thoughts but her own. Imogen lets out a long sigh and wipes the tears from her face.
Flora shudders with the exertion of escaping the planet's gravity, but once they break into the quiet of space the ship settles into a steady rhythm. Gradually, Imogen aligns her breathing to Flora’s rhythm, calming herself and guiding them further away from the planet and its star.
The orbital defense stations of the Stratos Throne pay no heed to the tiny ship. No patrol ships are launched after her. Imogen’s not sure that anyone's even told them what's going on. She's not sure they would care. A local woman getting into a fight and bruising some other inhabitants of a backwater planet isn't what the soldiers are here to deal with. This is a frontier system on the periphery of the galaxy. A border province within the Stratos Throne, itself already far from the densely populated empires nearer the core. Had it not been for the relatively recent Apex War and the need to defend the wormhole link to the rest of the Throne, there probably wouldn’t even be a garrison on Gelvaan.
Flora turns towards the outer reaches of the system and speeds up. The wormhole transit station is in the other direction, nearer to the sun and its prodigious amounts of power. The military wouldn’t allow an unauthorized ship there. But the outer system contains only a single gas giant and its handful of moons, all poor enough in resources such that industrial mining stations had never been built.
Imogen imagines that Flora enjoys this sensation, racing across the void into the starlight, and Imogen wonders what it would be like to feel that. She glances to the rear of the ship, confirms that the emergency space suit is there in its storage pod, and she thinks that maybe this will be her chance. This will be her last ride. She's not going back.
Gelvaan hasn't felt like home in a long time.
So she steers the ship towards the red gas giant in the distance, and kicks Flora up to relativistic speeds. It’ll only take a few hours to get there. Imogen has heard of the gigantic red storms swirling across the planet's face, watched them intently from telescopes on Gelvaan. She doesn’t know if these are the storms from her nightmares, but maybe that doesn’t matter anymore either. Because in the dream, Imogen’s mother always tells her to run, but Imogen’s done running. “We’ll just fly by and then I’ll send you back to Faramore, Flora. You won’t miss me.”
“Oi! Someone’s coming.”
Laudna stops humming to herself and looks up at the screen. There's a small ship approaching, one of the biological ones she's seen circling Gelvaan before. None have ever ventured away from the planet in the time she’s been hiding behind this moon with Pâté.
“Did they see us?” Laudna double-checks all the instruments. Her ship is running at minimum power and on strict emission control, with a rocky moon in between herself and the inhabited planet to boot. Her drone sensor net is out, but passive scanning only, and the drones are far too small to detect at this distance from Gelvaan.
“Headed straight for us boss, but we’re orbiting the only planet out here.” Pate's voice feels like it's echoing directly in her mind. Sometimes, Laudna isn't sure if he really speaks, or she has some sort of mental link with her ship AI. He has a fun accent though. Laudna quite likes it. There aren't many friends to be made out in the void of the periphery.
Laudna traces a long fingernail across the blip on her screen. “It’s a bio-ship. A tiny one. Not military. No visible weapons, and not equipped for interplanetary travel. Their course will take them on a close approach with the gas giant if they start a braking maneuver soon. I think they’re headed to the planet, in a pleasure craft.”
“So we stay hidden?”
“Yes. As long as they don’t see us and call the soldiers, we’ll be fine. We just need one more day to fill up the storage tanks with raw materials.” Reflexively, Laudna slows her breathing and heart rate further, even alone inside her ship. A few button presses kill the onboard lights, leaving only the glow of the screens and the controls. The temperature inside drops as well, bringing Pâté closer to the cold dark vastness of space. On the outside of the hull, the nanobot swarm embedded in Pâté reconfigures itself to minimize the emissions profile in the direction of the approaching ship.
Then they watch the sensors as the bio-ship flips over and begins braking. On the screen, the wide band of possible courses shrinks as the interloper slows, until Laudna is sure they are passing within a few hundred kilometers of the gas giant’s atmosphere.
"Gonna skim right over the planet,” Pâté agrees. “Do you want to talk to them?”
Laudna hesitates at the question. Because Pâté knows her all too well. Laudna is lonely. And she would love to talk to somebody who isn’t a ship AI infested with the same nanobot swarm as herself. But talking to people can be dangerous. Especially if they find out you’re carrying a Briarwood variant virus. “No. We don’t even know if there’s anyone on that ship.”
“Eh, that’s too bad. I’m quite horny you see.”
Laudna swats at the controls in mock indignation.
Imogen stands in the airlock and watches the gas giant grow larger in the viewport. The red storms seem contemplative at this distance. She wonders if there’s lightning down there like in her dreams.
With a sigh she runs her bare fingertips over the walls of Flora, feeling the pulse of life one last time. “You leave me and go, ok? Don’t look back, Flora.”
She puts on the gloves of the space suit and seals the helmet around her head. An alarm in her suit beeps to warn her that she has no tether attached, but Imogen silences it. She watches the speed indicator on the ship drop to near zero, then she cycles the airlock and opens the door.
One deep breath, followed by a thruster assisted leap, and Imogen is alone in the vastness of space, surrounded only by the glimmer of millions of stars thousands of light-years away. Behind her, Flora powers away as requested, headed right back towards home. But up ahead looms the planet Gelvaan III, a large red gas giant riddled with large storms. Inside Imogen’s helmet, the display shows her approaching the atmosphere quickly, mere minutes away.
“Goodbye, Flora,” she whispers. And then, “I’m coming, Mama.”
“The ship is leaving,” Pâté says, “but someone jumped out.”
Laudna’s hands dance over the controls as she directs the sensor drones closer. “What are they doing?”
“Standard configuration emergency space suit, civilian model. Should be able to withstand vacuum for several days. However this person is diving into the gas giant atmosphere and the suit won’t survive that.”
Laudna pushes a button and the ship comes to life with a shudder. The lights turn on, the air circulation starts, and the bridge shakes as the engines start. She knows the military outposts might see if she leaves her hiding spot with her engines on, but someone’s out there. Alone. Someone needs help.
Imogen watches in awe as the planet’s gravity pulls her in. Slowly, the darkness of space is replaced by wispy trails of gas in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Her vision gets redder and redder as the gas gets denser, and the rushing of atmosphere around her becomes deafening. There are flashes in the distance, far below her, and Imogen thinks that they must be lightning. She doesn’t know whether to expect thunder here, doesn’t know how these things work on other planets. Imogen has never set foot on any planet other than her homeworld.
Soon, she can see nothing but roiling red clouds, and her space suit flashes warnings of increasing temperature and pressure outside. Imogen ignores them. It won’t be long now. She allows herself to relax into the free fall, and her mind opens up fully. And even though the physical sound of her body hurtling into the gas giant is bone rattling, she expects to hear nothing from her mind.
But there’s music.
Somewhere in this storm, amidst the raging clouds, there is music carried to her mind, like windchimes playing in the distance.
Imogen thinks it might be lack of oxygen playing tricks on her mind. Or the gravity is getting too much as she falls further and further. But maybe it doesn’t even matter. The music is nice. Fitting even. As her last conscious act, Imogen powers off the space suit and lets herself go.
Imogen wakes in the darkness. The dim light shows only long shadows moving around her. It’s cold. It smells like autumn somehow, like damp earth and dead leaves. But the music is still playing, the music that she remembers from before. It’s clearer now, closer.
Is this what it’s like to be dead? Imogen shivers.
There’s a mind nearby all of sudden, overlaid with the music. There is fear and trepidation and worry and concern. There is a face moving into view, pale and gaunt, with big blinking eyes and dark lips formed into an uncertain line. “Are you all right?” The woman speaks.
Imogen hears the voice of her mother. Run! And she fights the urge to scream. Instead, she sits up and pulls her knees to her chest. “I… I think so.”
The woman is tall and thin, dark hair with a single white streak through it. Her mouth smiles, a little too big, a little too wide, the teeth a little too long. An ashen hand is offered, fingernails a solid black in contrast. “I’m Laudna.” But the music grows stronger, and Imogen is sure it comes from this person — this Laudna, whose thoughts are musical instead of painful somehow.
So she takes the outstretched hand in her own, “Imogen.” The skin is cool to the touch, and Imogen shivers again.
Laudna releases the hand as soon as that happens, retreats into the shadows once more. “Are you sure you’re all right?” And Imogen can sense the nervousness rolling off Laudna, the music growing a little more frenetic.
“Yes. I think—" Imogen sits up straight, shakes her head as if to clear it, and tries her best to smile. "I think you saved me.”