Children of the Void

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. They must have been talking about acoustic screams though, because psychic ones seem to traverse the Void just fine.

The shriek assaulted all of my senses simultaneously. A blinding kaleidoscope of light in every conceivable color blasted away my vision while a skull-splitting, crystalline tone bounced around my mind, climbing far beyond my actual auditory range. My skin felt like it was being scoured away by the mother of all sandstorms, and my proprioception got blended into a meaningless mush of chimeric limbs and impossible orientations. A torrent of contrasting odors marched up my nose, each more pungent and sickening than the last. The salty, revolting stench of the slums where I grew up. The thick, oppressive fragrance of the company officers’ perfume. The miasma of charred flesh drifting down off the plague pyres. The tantalizing aroma always emanated from the xythien bakeries, taunting me with torturous nostalgia. The sticky, drug-laden musk of the wretch who had tried rape me years before. They kept coming, faster and faster, until I could no longer pick out individual scents, just the cacophonous reek of every garbage pile I had ever slept next to. When you couple that with every taste sector on my tongue firing off at maximum amplitude, I was rather surprised that I didn’t get to reexperience my dinner. I guess my brain was a little too scrambled to order the evacuation.

Thankfully, much like their acoustic siblings, psychic screams require considerable exertion. Most people can’t sustain them for very long. The visceral manifestation of terror faded from my mind almost as fast as it had arrived, and I struggled to recoalesce my physical awareness. It felt something like refocusing my eyes after zoning out, except there were more senses to calibrate, and it hurt like hell. I guess I forgot to mention what the scream did to my sense of pain, but I figure you can probably guess.

Once I had reasserted control over my mind and body, I straightened my spine with a painful wince, blinked my eyes a couple times, and took stock of my surroundings. The source of the scream became immediately apparent. Yiera was spinning away into the darkness, her face a picture of abject terror and her limbs pinwheeling uselessly against the Void. Her lips were moving, but she was outside my air bubble, so I had no idea what she was saying. I doubt it was intelligible anyway.

Considering the strength of Yiera’s mental gut-punch, I was a little surprised the bubble was even still there. I mean, I had always been naturally good with telekinesis, but subconsciously hanging onto a pocket of gas while my conscious awareness went for a ride in a meat grinder was a whole different level. Apparently my survival instincts were a lot more autonomic than I had ever imagined. I didn’t have time to marvel at it just then, though. If I didn’t act immediately, Yiera’s wailing might prove to be justified.

Worse, there was a high likelihood she would do it again.

I reached out with my mind and wrapped my awareness around her flailing body, preparing to draw her back in. Or rather, I tried to, but my mind was still reeling from her psychic blast, and I failed to condense my will around her. My mental reach stumbled through her and fizzled out, snapping back into my regular physical senses. I swallowed and shook my head, taking a deep breath to try and calm my heartrate some. I wasn’t scared. It was just elevated from the scream, that’s all. There was nothing to worry about. Yiera would be fine. This sort of telekinetic feat was literal child’s play; I bet I could have managed it when I was three. Just needed to focus.

I took another deep breath and pushed the lingering mental turbulence from her scream to the edges of my consciousness, forging a cold, dark core of focus at the center of my being. I closed my eyes as I gradually exhaled, letting that ball of stillness solidify and radiate across my mind. Then I opened my eyes and reached out for her again, gently and deliberately enveloping her in my will.

Right as she screamed again.

Maybe the vacuum of space is a problem for psychic communication after all, because her scream was much softer this time. Or maybe she was already starting to lose consciousness. Space isn’t exactly the most hospitable environment. Regardless, her softer scream still rattled through my mind with enough force to shatter my focus, dispersing my hold again.

“Stupid neurotic bitch,” I gritted out, as I beat back the waves of random qualia pushing against my awareness. “Keep quiet if you want me to save you.” Pretty sure I wouldn’t have been screaming like that if our places were reversed. I had composure, unlike her pampered little ass. I was just grumbling to myself though, I knew she couldn’t hear me. To be honest, I probably would have held my tongue if she could. Despite my reflexive disdain, I was actually quite fond of Yirea. She was open, and gentle, and kind. Innocent. I couldn’t remember the last time I met someone who seemed like a genuinely good person. I wasn’t certain I ever had.

Which is why I wasn’t about to let her die in the cold emptiness of the Void. Even if she did happen to be pummeling me with a psychic club just then.

I took another deep breath and repeated my focusing ritual before reaching out to her once again. She had drifted quite a ways out at this point, and it was a bit of a struggle to extend my awareness that far, but I still managed it. Once I had her in my mental grip, I began slowly pulling her back toward the ship. I couldn’t be too hasty. If I jerked her back too fast, I risked losing my grip and having to start over, or worse, imparting way too much force and splattering her against the hull. But I couldn’t be too careful either. I was getting worried about how long she’d been out there. I’m no healer; I wouldn’t be much good at resuscitating her if she succumbed to the effects of the vacuum. It was going to be ok though. I had ahold of her now and was accelerating her back towards me. Soon she’d be inside the air pocket, and I could drag her to the airlock. There should be emergency medical supplies there.

Just as I was about to relax, something hit her. I don’t know what it was, but it warped her appearance and shattered my mental hold. I felt a surge of panic as she went spinning away once more and did my best to shove it back down. I could tell she was screaming again, but it was weird this time: faint and distorted, like choppy comms. I tried to grab for her again, but something blocked my awareness. It was like a section of space had become twisted and turbulent somehow. Every time I tried to reach through it, my perception just swirled and scattered.

My breaths were coming quickly now and my heart was racing. No cocky pretenses anymore, I was scared as hell. Yiera was moving faster, and she was already further out than before. I wasn’t certain I could still reach her, even if I could figure out how to get through whatever was blocking me. I tried to gather my focus again, but I was losing the struggle against my rising panic.

I was not ready to lose the only friend I had ever had.

At the rate she was moving, she might not have time to succumb to the Void. If she reached the edge of the ship’s warp bubble, her death would be sudden and violent. I wasn’t sure exactly what would happen, but I knew there was no way she could survive passing into the spatial distortion of a superluminal shell.

Suddenly, without any explanation, the distortion between us was gone. I didn’t pause to wonder what the hell it had been, I just flung my awareness toward her, desperately hoping she wasn’t too far yet.

It fell short.

I let out a tiny cry of anguish and gathered my will yet again. I closed my eyes and launched outward with my mind, straining with every mote of mental energy I had. I drew in my torrent of emotions and poured them into my effort as well, focus be damned. I was operating on pure, concentrated Will now. And it was just barely enough.

I felt my awareness brush against her and tried to close my grip, but she was still moving so fast. She slipped back out of my reach before I could grab hold, and in a fresh surge of panic, I lost my concentration. My awareness slammed back into me like over-stressed elastic, knocking my breath out and dropping me to my knees. I felt tears welling up as a wave of despair crashed over me. I had failed. I couldn’t save her. The only friend I had ever known was about to be obliterated right in front of me, and there was nothing I could do.

This was all my fault. She would never have been out here if I hadn’t pressured her. Yiera was a wonderful person, but she was also quite the coward. The notion of a spacewalk without suits had utterly terrified her. It had taken considerable wheedling, but eventually I’d managed to convince her that we’d be fine. That it was worth the risk. All for some stupid sweets. I had gotten my friend killed over desserts.

No.

No.

It wasn’t going down like this. I couldn’t just sit there and watch her die.

I lurched to my feet and took the deepest breath I could. I only had one chance left, and boy was it a crazy one. Downright suicidal. I didn’t have time for hesitation though. Yiera had to be close to the edge of the warp bubble by now. If I couldn’t catch her in the next few moments, she was gone. So I did probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.

I clicked off my mag boots and launched myself out into the Void after my friend.

I wasn’t anxious to know what exploding lungs felt like, so I exhaled immediately, releasing my hold on the pocket of air at the same time. I couldn’t afford to spare any focus on bringing it with me, and the bubble’s sudden decompression helped propel me away from the ship. My skin and eyes instantly felt like they were on fire, even though my body temperature started plummeting. My ears were stabbing knives into the sides of my skull, and my lungs began spasming in my chest, clamoring for nonexistent oxygen.

I did my best to ignore all that. I was only going to get one shot at this, and if I screwed it up, we were both about to be very dead. Surprisingly, my panic was all but gone. There hadn’t been time for me to collect my focus before catapulting toward near certain doom, but despite my pain and fear, my heartrate had slowed and my mind was clear.

Those survival instincts again I guess.

I had given myself plenty of velocity when I left the ship, and the distance between Yiera and I was disappearing rapidly. Too rapidly. It wouldn’t do us much good if the ship was out of reach once I got to her. So I turned my head away from Yiera and back toward the ship. It was shrinking away from me at an alarming pace, and I quickly reached out for it with my mind. That’s when I realized I had made a slight miscalculation.

There was nothing sticking out of the ship for me to grab.

Telekinesis isn’t just magic, it's still at least somewhat bound by the physical laws of the universe. Without something to anchor my mental grasp too, I would literally be grabbing at empty space. I might as well have tried to just swim through the Void. My panic threatened to well up again, but I sidestepped it and concentrated on my predicament. The hull of the ship was completely sleek and smooth; there was nothing at all that I could latch on to. Even the airlock chamber was nestled into the surface without a single protrusion.

But what about something inside the airlock? Telekinesis wasn’t hindered by physical barriers, so the airlock door wouldn’t prevent me from reaching inside. My powers were limited by what I could see, though, and the airlock chamber wasn’t illuminated. Technically, line of sight isn’t a strict necessity; if you’re certain of an object’s shape and location, it's possible to exert telekinetic control without being able to see it. But I hadn’t had any reason to study the airlock on our way out, so I wasn’t even sure what all was in there, let alone where it might be.

My lungs were absolutely screaming now, and I was starting to have considerable trouble keeping my thoughts calm. Despair was seeping in, and my dying body was about to force its panic right through those silly, useless survival instincts. Well, at least I hadn’t abandoned my friend to die alone, right? What a comfort. My mind flashed back to the years of hatred I’d nursed for my father after the idiot got himself executed for “doing the right thing.” I guess stupid, suicidal altruism was genetic.

Then I had a minor epiphany. I knew exactly where there was something for me to hook onto. It was the very last thing I had mentally held, in fact.

Air.

The ship was full of air.

I can’t believe it took so long for that to occur to me. Maybe it was just the stupidity that was genetic. Now I just had to hope that I hadn’t wasted too much time being retarded and could still reach inside the ship. I flung out my awareness and plunged it through the airlock doors. It was a stretch, to be sure, but it wasn’t quite out of reach yet. With clumsy haste, I scooped up as much air as I could and pulled hard. I felt a brief moment of terror as my mental handfull of air collided with the inner hull and spread out across it without arresting my momentum at all. The splaying air pocket almost dissipated my hold, but I cried out in my mind and channeled my desperate desire to survive into my will, hardening and focusing it. I pulled the air pocket back together, compressing it into a dense gaseous net and lodged it against the airlock door, pulling against it with all my strength.

I felt a surge of irrational elation as my body jerked to a violent stop and then began accelerating back toward the airlock. I spun my head back toward Yiera and scooped her up as fast as I could, doing my best to ignore her appearance. She wasn’t moving anymore and her eyes were unfocused, staring at nothing. Her mouth had gone slack and her bloated skin was turning blue. My pessimistic mind started shouting that she was already dead, and that I would soon join her. I did my best to ignore that too.

I turned back toward the airlock and felt a new surge of anxiety. I hadn’t bothered to be deliberate about how forceful I was with my psychic lifeline, and the airlock was now rushing toward me at a rather unsettling speed. I frantically shoved my air pocket against the opposite wall, paring off as much velocity as I could, but we were still coming in way too hard.

Also, the airlock was still closed.

Shit.

We hadn’t bothered to bring an airlock remote on our little excursion; I had just planned on using my powers to open the door from the inside. Which would have worked fine if I had been standing still in a nice little air bubble, peering through the outer door. Not such a viable plan when I was hurtling toward the door at a bone shattering speed while quivering on the edge of hypoxic unconsciousness with no way to see the control panel.

I reflexively tried to curse, causing a fresh spasm of pain from my tortured lungs. There wasn’t time for a soft landing, and if we hit the door at this speed, we would bounce right back out into empty space with a fresh batch of broken bones. The icing on an already excruciating death. I was in a pretty full panic at this point, and I knew I only had moments of consciousness left. I released the air pocket and started smashing my consciousness against the inside of the airlock with blind abandon. I remembered which wall the panel was on. Maybe that would be enough.

Right as I was certain we were going to slam into it, it finally blurred open. In my blind fumbling at the panel, I had managed to press both of the door buttons, so the inner door slid open as well, blasting us with atmosphere as the air in the ship started to rush out. Why there wasn’t some kind of software failsafe to prevent both doors from opening at once, I have no idea, but I wasn’t about to complain. The outrushing pressurized air helped to slow our approach, and our trajectory carried us right through both open doors. It still hurt like hell when we crashed into the far wall, but I don’t think I broke anything. I was too busy gulping down lungfuls of delicious, wonderful life to care anyway. I did care that said life was vanishing out the still open airlock, however, gleefully abandoning us back to the lethal embrace of the Void. The nearby bulkheads had slammed shut, limiting the volume of the local atmosphere. It wouldn’t take long for all of it to escape out into space.

I tried to reach out for the airlock panel with my mind, but my focus was now thoroughly scrambled. I guess my survival instincts felt their job was finished. After a few short moments of trying to still my mind, I gave up and dragged myself to my feet, scrambling toward the panel. I stumbled into the wall and slapped at the button causing the inner door to whisk shut with a relieving woosh. As it did, the bulkhead doors hissed back open, letting air from the rest of the ship flood back into the chamber. I slumped against the wall and continued gasping in frantic, desperate breaths, struggling against the urge to collapse on the floor and sleep for a year. I couldn’t stop yet.

Yiera was still dying.

I forced myself back up and staggered toward where her body lay on the floor. Her face was a pale blue and her eyes were flooded with blood. She lay completely motionless, her empty eyes staring past me, and I started panicking again. She looked very dead. I fell to my knees beside her and grabbed her face, opening her mouth and pressing mine to hers. I forced a few hurried breaths into her lungs and then started crushing my hands into her chest. I winced at the immediate cracking sound of her ribs breaking, but I didn’t stop. Ribs could heal.

I went back and forth between filling her lungs and forcing her heart to pump, pleading with gods I didn’t believe in to let her wake up. Her body twitched with each compression of her chest, but she showed no signs of returning consciousness. I thought about running to the intercom and calling for help, but there was no point. The ship was asleep. Even if it hadn’t been, I doubted an emergency crew could have gotten there in time. She had been out there for so long.

“Dammit Yiera, come back,” I sobbed, slamming my fists against her chest. “Please just breathe. I’m sorry. Please come back.” She didn’t answer me. Part of me knew I should just give up. That she was already gone. But I couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t accept that I had killed the only person who had ever actually liked me. Why couldn’t I have been a healer? Even an untrained, half-ass healer probably could have resuscitated her without much trouble, but all I had was my stupid, useless telekinetics.

There were tears streaming down my face now, and my sobbing was making it difficult for me to breathe for her. My limbs were on fire, begging me to stop. To just let go and rest. I ignored them. I had to keep going. I had to bring her back. My mind had given up on any semblance of rationality and was running on pure denial. Just as my arm muscles were about to outright mutiny, I was flung backwards, slamming painfully into the wall and dangling a foot or so off the floor.

“What in the Void is this?” a furious voice demanded, and I looked up to see our recruiter, Arken, storming through one of the bulkheads.

“She’s not breathing. Save her. Please, you have to save her.” I begged, feeling a sudden surge of hope. Arken was a full-fledged member of the Directorate. He was proficient in all four of the primary magical dimensions and his powers utterly dwarfed mine. I was certain he had the skills to save her.

“Shut up,” He snarled, and flicked his hand at me. My jaw clacked shut with a painful jolt. Yiera’s body floated up into the air and her chest expanded to an unnatural volume before collapsing back down and repeating the process far faster than I could breathe for her. Arken’s face clouded in a look of intense concentration and he stretched his other hand out toward Yiera, his fingers flexing together in a rhythmic motion. My jaw dropped back open as I realized what he was doing.

He was using telekinesis to pump her heart. That hadn’t even occurred to me. It was probably good that it hadn’t, though. I’m sure I would have done a lot more damage than just a few broken ribs if I had tried anything like that.

After only a few moments, Yiera’s body lurched and she gasped in a ragged, sandpapery breath. She let out a pitiful moan on the exhale and collapsed to the ground in a heap as Arken released her. I felt a torrent of relief wash over me. She wasn’t dead. I hadn’t killed my friend.

No one said anything for a long moment as Arken’s gaze flicked back and forth between us. The only things I could hear were Yiera’s wheezing and my own racing heartbeat. I was still hanging a foot or so above the floor, suspended from Arken’s psychic grip, and I let myself sag against his hold. That was by far the most stressful situation I had ever experienced. My whole body ached worse than I could ever remember. My skin and lungs felt like they were on fire, my eyes wanted to pop out of my skull, and there was a horrendous ringing in one of my ears.

To my surprise, I broke the silence with an irrational, bubbling giggle. I was exhausted and in excruciating pain, but somehow I was also beyond elated. We were still alive. We had skipped off the surface of a brutal death at the last possible moment. I suddenly felt like shouting with joy.

Adrenaline is weird.

“Well, I’m glad you find your situation so amusing,” Arken said at last, his tone icy. “I can’t imagine what possible reason you had for being outside the hull during a warp jump without even wearing a suit, but I don’t care. Congratulations on your survival, you’re both expelled.”