The Last Space Opera

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say, but by the time I jumped to the Moras Trio, barely ahead of the party of bounty hunters on my tail and a cacophony of wailing alarms vaticinating my ship’s imminent demise, I thought that perhaps I would soon test that theory.

Here now, at the blurry edge of the civilized galaxy, I steered as close as I could manage in the direction of an insignificant moon of Azas. Luck was on my side: my trajectory pointed near enough in the direction I needed to go. The Vagabond was officially trash. My little cruiser and I careened towards 926AZ-04, a chunk of rock with no official name and no record.

As a precaution, I’d erased every official trace of it.

My only hope of getting out of this mess alive lay in a favor someone owed me, from long ago. I let loose a pilfered military distress beacon and a prayer -- a prayer that the message I was sending would reach its intended recipient. It was a long shot. And until I got a response, I needed a place to hide.

Automatic sequences prepared the cockpit for ejection. The computer Core advised me to prepare for emergency procedures as it shod off the pieces of the Vagabond unnecessary for our atmospheric entry. Physical harnesses sprang up from my seat, strapping down my body in case the inertial controls went the way of the rest of the ship’s systems. I crossed my arms. The situation was officially out of my control. A distress mantra assumed control of audio output.

“Remain calm; everything is going to be alright,” a maternal voice soothed. The harsh emergency lights and scrolling ribbons of information on my heads-up dimmed as the cockpit began to shake violently. “Take a deep breath now. Breathe down deep into your belly and repeat after me: Things may seem bad, but I’m going to be alright.”

I couldn’t help but let loose a sharp, strangled guffaw.

“I am going to be alright,” the automated voice insisted. “Repeat after me: everything is going to be alright.”

Lightheadedness and nausea set in as the ship’s Core prioritized my survival over my comfort. The unending strings of calculations in my mind began to jumble and twist. For the last time, the computer reassured me that everything was going to be alright.

*

I came to consciousness with the sensation of pain in my neck and where the safety harnesses met my shoulders, chest, and the insides of my thighs. It wasn’t anything more than a dull ache. Inertial controls must have stuck it through to the bitter end. I stretched my neck from side to side, opened and closed my jaw. Not bad.

“Good baby.” I brushed the dark dashboard with my fingertips. The weight of real gravity made my arm feel too heavy and I stretched it out, opening and closing my hand. I’d landed rightside-up. My poor little ship had done a good job of protecting me.

But it had clearly used the last of whatever it’d had to do so. Around me, everything was unsettlingly still. The displays were blank. The only light came from a dim emergency strip ringing the floor. My ears were plugged with complete silence.

Bringing my hands up in front of my face, some part of me registered surprise at how steady they were. I shook out my left hand, blinking the thick black band encircling my wrist to life. A soft blue display sprung up above my arm.

<NO SIGNAL>

The simple readout took a long moment to sink in. I didn’t think anyone had followed me here, but I didn’t have any way of confirming it. My Vagabond was completely trashed. I again felt grateful to have not been crushed into pulp against the dashboard and that my ship had used its last gasp of life to ensure its living cargo survived its catastrophic landing.

I closed my eyes and mentally reached out with my signal for any semblance of a connection. There was nothing. A small bubble of panic threatened to rise upward from my gut but I forced it back down. The fact that there were no access points or signal casting entities in range was a good thing. This is a good thing, I insisted to myself. The panic subsided, but left me feeling off-balance, as though I’d had a limb amputated. I took a deep breath and opened my eyes again. In that breath I tasted the bitter twang of metal. And sweat. It was too warm in here. With all systems down, there was no air circulation. I needed to get out.

Azas Satellite 926-04 was, no matter where you were coming from, a dozen jumps from the Friday sector ring, over-qualifying it to be the armpit of the anus of the universe. It had once been a classified Alliance base and was now deleted from the small cache of files that had recorded any information about it. I’d selected it a few years ago as a hideout in case I’d someday need it, without really seriously considering the possible futures in which I would.

And yet, here I was.

Gritting my teeth, I clumsily yanked at the restraints until they loosened and I could push myself out of the chair. Stumbling to the emergency locker made me feel sick. I fumbled in changing into the skintight emergency biosuit. It was a little too small, but it would do. I yanked the soft hood on over my mess of curls but opted to leave the full helmet because the environment here had been more-or-less Standardized. The moon’s full terraforming had happened a long time ago, but the rock still fell reasonably within Standard parameters. The suit would be enough to compensate in lieu of any proper acclimation.

Prying my way out of the cockpit showed me just how screwed I was. The escape hatch had warped and had to micro-detonate itself open, admitting me to a full view of a living nightmare.

The Vagabond’s Core had managed to calculate the best crash-landing among a million worse sites to crash-land: a thin strip of bog clinging to 926AZ-04’s equator that revealed the rock’s degrading environment. I mean, there were definitely worse places in this galaxy. This moon had breathable air. Reasonably consistent temperature. Water. Life, even. A marshy environment in its dying throes, sustained by the last of whatever its long-forgotten terra-generators could provide. A high layer of bent, brittle trees provided faint protection from the worst of the radiation for the undergrowth, which consisted of mostly different types of fungus. Where whole acres of trees had fallen, the plant life had turned to vast plains of brownish, purplish sludge. I’d chosen it for an emergency hideout for being both survivable and forgotten, but seeing it in person revealed just how much of a piece of garbage it truly was. I allowed myself to send another prayer that the message I’d encrypted in that beacon would be answered. And quickly.

My first order of business was to see if I could get the Vagabond’s emergency antenna fired up. Not for casting out -- that would be suicide -- but for me to check to see if anyone had followed me here. The emergency antenna wouldn’t reach very far, but it could, at least, give me a little warning if anyone was in orbit.

But the antenna, like everything else, was dead.

Slumped against the still-cooling outer hull of the cockpit, I mentally reviewed my situation. If anyone had been close enough to follow me here, they would have already pinpointed the crash site and come down to drag me off. So, I had at least that much going for me. I had rations. Enough for several months. There was no way I was getting myself off this miserable moon, but I could probably make something of the antenna, given time. And it seemed like I was going to have time, hiding out here until Emilie Fyn Marinas got my message. The thought sunk in. Would she get my message? Would she understand it?

Would she answer it?

Oh, stars, I thought. This wasn’t hiding at all. I was marooned.

*

I fell into a routine of waking, eating, surveying, tinkering, sitting listlessly in deep depressions, eating, and sleeping. Without really thinking about it, I pulled away from the Standard-keeper in my wristy and lived by the roughly twenty-six-hour rotation of 926AZ-04.

Three and a half weeks was long enough to convince me that this was less an epilogue to my story and more the dull sequel to what had been a pretty decent first installment. Waking, survival, sleeping. Reduced to the most human parts of myself, I had never been so mechanical.

I worked on the emergency antenna here and there, to keep my brain from melting in the monotony. Eventually, I managed to jury-rig a power conduit to get it working again. I activated it in short bursts. Not long enough to give away my position, but enough to rest assured that there were no entities in orbit. Enough to underscore just how far away I was from ever connecting to any access points to the Connect. I was alone. Safely, forsakenly alone.

On day twenty-three precisely, by the Standard, I found myself trudging through the marsh searching for a particular species of fungus amidst the general muck and putrid decay. I’d discovered that massive quantities could be cooked down into a mild solvent. Soap. It worked well enough to clean the gunk off my boots and my tools. The venture was relatively mindless. I was long past the point of having thought every thought I could ever possibly think about this place. Falling back into the worn track of my anxieties had become tedious.

That was until my signal self -- the part of me that had been silent all these weeks, as if she had never existed -- manifested at my side. Whether she was a fantasy or hallucination, I never knew, but she was harmless enough. I stopped walking and froze, my arms full of fungus. She stared back: impersonal, eternally unspeaking.

There was a signal source nearby. Time slowed almost to a stop.

She tilted her face upward and I followed, this invisible part of me searching for the broadcasting entity. And something pinged back.

A surface scanning beacon?

My heart skipped a beat. Emilie Fyn Marinas was making good on the favor she owed me.

Mushrooms forgotten, I started running as fast as I could, leaping over fallen trees and skirting around pools of heavy goop. I skated down the short wall of the crater to the crash site, half-sprinting, half-stumbling through the swampy water, to the sullied wreckage of the Vagabond.

I grabbed the ragged edge of the opening and threw myself into the rear compartment, sliding to a stop before the behemoth of wires and salvaged transistors. The hatch to the main power switch was caked with mud and stuck as though glued. I roared and braced both feet against either side of it, yanking it open and launching myself painfully into the opposing bulkhead. But it opened. I ignored the throbbing in my back and shoulder and threw on the switch.

It was with a very consternating groan and too many flickers, but the Vagabond awoke.

I stormed into the cockpit.

For a moment I hesitated, listening to my haggard breathing in the small space. I thought about the small amount of fungal reagent in my possession and how long it would take to make it strong enough to dissolve my entire body. There were other things that came to mind, too, such as the fact that while dying might be an easy way out for me, it would be a very bad thing for a great number of other people. I weighed the pros and cons for a moment before gesturing on my comms and sending out a distress signal.

I knew better than to feel relieved. As thrilled as I was to know my stay on 926AZ-04 was finally coming to an end, I thought back to the message I had sent Captain Emilie Fyn Marinas on the beacon I’d flung out before crashing here. I’d sent it out of desperation, in hopes that she’d remember me and the one and only conversation we’d had almost twelve years ago. If she had followed my beacon to this remote system, she clearly had. Which meant she was going to want an explanation.

She was going to want me to explain how I’d gotten her caught up in an interstellar war.

*

“You should lie down before the reacclimation cycle starts.”

From the other side of the transparent wall of the acclimation chamber, one of the Irata’s medical attendants frowned at me. He looked barely old enough to staff a training clinic and was trying his hardest to subdue me with a steely glare. Not being much older than him, I frowned back. Wild, tangled hair floating about my face and garbed in my filthy, overly-tight biosuit, I refused to sit on the bed in the middle of the room. I stood head-on to meet his scrutiny.

Stepping off that moon into the claustrophobic interior of the Irata’s rescue capsule marked the end of one disastrous chapter and the beginning of a new, hopefully-less disastrous chapter of my existence. When the capsule had opened, I found myself stepping out of it into an acclimation chamber of the legendary flagship of the Ixiaan empire. A small, perfectly cube room, it had large vents on the top of it and one wall of transparaglass. Immediately, the contrast between the filth of my biosuit and the sleek, clean interior of the ship made those three and a half weeks on the moon seem even longer. The capsule shot out through an opening in the ceiling that slammed shut behind it. This was it. I was in now. My pulse raced.

The attendant on the other side of the glass watched me. The sound of an authoritative voice-clearing came through an I/O in the top of the room. “You should really lie down.”

I crossed my arms. “Is the captain coming to see me or not?”

The boy gave me an elaborate shrug. The obvious answer was no. As far as he knew, there was no reason for the captain of any warship to personally welcome a rescue case.

“You can lie down on that bed over there. Most people get dizzy.”

He had that indistinguishable mishmash of genetic traits that placed him in the comfortable average of the intermixed galaxy. A little taller than me, skin a little darker in color. His hair was closely cropped in a military style that had come into fashion during the War.

“Your wristy,” he said, tilting his chin at my wrist companion. “Take it off and put it on the tray by the door.”

I followed his gaze to the door, next to which a small, squat table stood waiting for my wrist companion and all the data they would try to harvest from it while my body reacclimated to Standard gravity, pressure, and temperature. My scowl deepened. “Hells no.”

“It’s protocol.”

“Where’s Marinas?” I demanded.

He sighed, likely reasoning that they’d pry the band off my wrist at some point and it wouldn’t be his problem. “Fine. But you should lie down. Now.”

A low beep rang out from somewhere in the room and the temperature began to chill. The faint smell of chemicals slowly permeated the air. I let my crossed arms fall to my sides.

“Poisoning me now?”

“The reacclimation cycle’s beginning,” the kid explained. He was getting exasperated. “It’s an accelerated system and it’s not nice.”

The tang of iron filled my mouth. I’d been through this before, but instead of moving to the medbed in the middle of the room, I stepped closer to the clear wall that separated me from the young attendant.

“You want to know something?”

He just stared at me.

“You want to know something?” I repeated, trying to hide how desperately I needed him to be interested in what I was about to say.

“No, I want you to lie down before you fall and hurt yourself.”

I gritted my teeth. “Hear me out and I’ll lie down.”

He kept staring. I rested my hand against the transparaglass. It immediately warmed to the temperature of my skin and even though I knew it was impossible -- absolutely impossible -- to break glass like this, all I really wanted was to smash the wall and crush the kid and run out of this place. To take over the whole ship to hide forever in the deep of blackspace.

That, unfortunately, was not possible. Well, not immediately. And I had more than my own skin to save, unfortunately. I clenched my hand into a fist but gave him a disarming smile.

“I can predict the future.”

The expression on his face told me just how much he bought that.

“I mean it,” I insisted. I had to breathe a little deeper then. My ears started to ring. “I warned your captain her life was in danger and saved her from getting blown up. She owes me.” Maybe this kid didn’t even report to his captain. Perhaps he was the bottom link of a whole chain of command. I glanced about the room, trying to pinpoint the visual input, but my own vision was already starting to blur. “I’m here to tell her the War’s not over. She can’t give the Alliance her ship.”

The calculations in my mind fractured then, grasping at irrelevant stored memory. I braced myself against the wall.

“Look,” said the kid, “You’re going to fall if you --”

“Will you just tell her?!”

“Lower yourself to the floor!”

This could all have been an elaborate hallucination. Maybe I’d succeeded in making enough solvent from that fungus to dissolve my way into hell. An eternity of being trapped in the acclimation chamber of one of the most well-known ships in the universe.

Everything was going dark and I watched myself tumble to the floor as if from a distance. From the other side of the glass the assistant was swearing colorfully. I was completely numb. I didn’t feel a thing.

*

The blackness eventually gave to a dim half-light, fuzzy shapes, and a throbbing headache. I blinked. It didn’t help. Nothing in my field of vision made sense, so I closed my eyes again. Nothing made sense with my eyes closed, either.

I was incorporeal and fragmented, out of synch with time. Vague images of people I’d known flitted past my eyelids, then a display from the Vagabond that flickered between a forged registration and a systems failure readout. There were the ghosts of physical sensations. The stench of a dying swamp. The breezy caress of a full-skirted dress. Sour gestation gel. The dull, ambient hum of the City in the Stars. Saltwater on my skin. None of these things belonged in the same temporal space and I thought that maybe this was the afterlife.

You’re not dead.

There was enough of me to think that thought and I rallied around it. I tried a deep breath and felt the coolness of it enter my lungs. I was in the physical world. I was alive.

I stretched out my mind to the signal world and, as if stepping backward out of an airlock untethered, I felt nothing. The lack of sensation made my stomach lurch. Gasping, I was thrown into sudden, uncomfortable wakefulness.

With some exclamation I sat up. The blurry world around me spun. There was a hand nudging me back to a reclined position -- gently, but firmly -- and a voice telling me to remain calm.

“Where am I?” I asked through the dryness in my mouth, blinking up at what I was pretty sure was a ceiling. I felt too heavy, and disturbingly naked swimming inside a medical gown. “What is this?”

“You completed a reacclimation cycle approximately two hours ago.”

Reacclimation. That explained why I felt like flaming garbage. Once more I pushed myself up, but more slowly, squinting at the figure sitting at the side of the medbed. She fought for a second to push me down again but relented when I pushed back. I sat up properly and turned to face the serious young woman. She rested her hands in her lap.

“I am Captain Emilie Fyn Marinas, High Commander of Ixiaa.” As if I didn’t know who she was. Even if we hadn’t met twelve years ago, even if I was ignorant enough to not recognize the High Commander of all of Ixiaa, I’d have to have been unconscious for the past five years to miss the fact that she was the venerated hero who had essentially single-handedly ended a pan-galactic war. Everything about her was intangibly sharp. Her dark eyes, short, thick hair, and scrutinizing expression: all somehow sharp. She sat very solidly, in a way that suggested she could hold her own in a fight. The thick black eyeliner surrounding her eyes confirmed, as was the custom of the captains of Ixiaa, that she was lord and commander of every living being aboard her ship. Her thin green collar marked her as emperor. The last of the Fyn dynasty. “You are on the Irata.”

I blinked hard, everything coming back to me. Right. The Irata. Marinas had picked up my call for help and came to save me. I reached over to my left arm and felt that my wrist companion had been left undisturbed. The numbers and strings of calculations in my head began to sort themselves out again.

Rubbing my face with both hands, I looked back up to take in the two other figures standing by the bed.

One was a lanky young man, pale-skinned and tall enough to stand with the tell-tale hunch of someone uncomfortable with his height. Wispy, yellow hair grew down into eyes greener than I’d ever seen. Everything about him was distinctly Earthy -- the proportions of his limbs, the shape of his ears -- all tell-tale traits that gave away his origins as a native of our protected Motherworld.

The other regarded me with clear mistrust. She took after her captain in solidness, but with more muscle, height, and several years in age. The way she carried that muscle and height narrowed her heritage down to one of the Solarian planets. I knew which one. I suppressed old memories and the wave emotions that threatened to follow them. You knew she would be here, my heart told me. I told my heart to shut up. The melanin of the young woman’s skin was nearly as dark as the backdrop of the stars.

All three of them wore black jumpsuits with a heptagonal patch on the shoulder: the silver chevrons of the legendary battleship Irata.

The captain was watching me steadily, waiting for my response.

“I guess I should thank you?” My voice came out rough and I coughed a little to clear it. The captain glanced back at the blond one and then back to me. Convinced that I had gathered enough of my wits about me, she got right to business.

“Koleos Station.”

“Ah, yes,” I replied, thoughtful. She waited. I cleared my throat again. “You know, you still haven’t thanked me.”

I’d said as much in the encrypted message I’d intended for her. You still haven’t thanked me for dock nine. Thank the stars it had been enough to draw her to the thin edge of the civilized galaxy.

A strange look crossed her face. “Thanked you? Thanked you for what?”

“Well, you’re alive, aren’t you?”

“Koleos. How did you do it?” she demanded.

“I told you. I predict the future. I saw it was going to happen, and it did.”

She wasn’t satisfied. “No, how did you blow up the station?”

Point of order: It hadn’t been the entire station. Not even the entire dock; just a storage locker. Just over twelve years ago, the first and last time I’d talked to her, I’d warned a fourteen-year-old Emilie Fyn Marinas of the imminent destruction of a storage locker on Koleos Station’s ninth deck -- in addition to several other items of concern. She hadn’t entirely believed me then, and now, with everything that I’d told her having come to pass, clearly wasn’t convinced that I’d been a passive prognosticator.

“I didn’t blow up anything,” I told her. “I predicted it.” I looked at the two other occupants of the room again. “Who’re they?”

Marinas ignored my question. “You assassinated Ambassador Olyez.”

I sighed. “They said it was some kind of freak accident, didn’t they?”

She narrowed her eyes. Every investigator who had looked into the incident had come to no other conclusion. Yet my words to her from so long ago had haunted her. She wouldn’t have come out all this way to fetch me otherwise.

“How did you do it?”

“I didn’t do anything,” I insisted, “Again, I merely --”

Now she snorted. “No one can predict the future.”

It was an aspect of my skillset not advertised in the many bulletins calling for my capture, which was really for the best. Otherwise she might have guessed that the fugitive with an exorbitant price on her head and the shipwrecked fortune-teller in her acclimation chamber were one and the same. I pouted.

“Well, I can.”

Marinas was still unconvinced. “You must have done something. If you weren’t working for a faction of the Coalition, were you…?” The captain’s jaw hardened. “The War. You knew.”

“Everybody knew there was a war coming,” I retorted. She harrumphed, recalling her own words, mirrored back to her from our twelve-years-back conversation. Everyone had known there was a war coming. But not everyone had known the details I’d told her. No one else could have told her how it would end before it had even begun.

“Not like that,” she rumbled. “And I don’t believe you had nothing to do with what happened at Koleos.”

Which was fair. In fact, I’d both forestalled and lessened the severity of the War in assassinating the ambassador.

“I did tell you to stay away from dock nine. I saved your life.”

The briefest shadow of a smile passed her face. It was not the reaction I expected from someone remembering being within spitting distance of being blown to pieces, but it gave me hope that my half-cocked plan might work out after all.

“Adina,” she said, remembering, leaning back in her chair. “Adina the chronicler.” It was who I’d been, back when we’d met. I was uneasy, linking that past version of myself to the present, but I nodded my affirmation. “Adina the chronicler...who managed to encode an encrypted message on an Alliance-model distress beacon. Where did you get it?”

“It was on sale.”

“Of course.” She regarded me as one might inspect a troublesome puzzle. “Tell me, how does a chronicler come to be on an uncharted moon at the dead end of the Friday sector?”

There was a long answer for that one, enough to fill a book. I couldn’t help but eye the other two again. They had barely moved.

“The Azas moon…” the captain prompted, dragging my attention back to her.

“Did it look like a planned landing?” I returned. My poor Vagabond had been in pieces at the bottom of a small crater.

“Fine. I’m sure you can recount whatever tale you have to Galactic Standard authorities when we make port.” The captain nodded at the blonde, as if to leave.

This conversation was about to come to a quick, unsatisfying end. The calculations buzzing in my brain pointed to a version of the immediate future I needed and I jumped for it.

“No, wait…”

Marinas lifted herself from the chair, so I grabbed her arm.

It was a stupid move, and one I knew in the moment was stupid because as soon as my palm touched her skin she was in motion, her thumb hooking mine and yanking my hand backwards so the backs of my fingertips were touching my wrist. The breath went out of me and my whole body collapsed inward.

I looked up to her face and her eyebrows rose sardonically, as if to affirm, Yes, that was a stupid move. She let me go and I retreated into a painful little ball.

But she remained standing over me, watching. She didn’t leave.

“I need protection,” I wheezed into the silence. When I could compel myself to take in the reaction of the small group surrounding the bed, they seemed to be exchanging a conversation in glances. “Please.”

The captain lowered herself back to the chair. “And why would I do that? Protect you?”

There was a certain emphasis on the you.

“Because you need me.”

She didn’t respond right away, which told me what I needed to know. The protostar of belief that I’d fused within her twelve years ago, which had heated over the years as things she hadn’t believed would happen had happened, was now enough of a star to have piqued her curiosity. Enough for her to follow the coordinates in my beacon. Enough for her to stay now and listen to why I, a desperate stranger, would tell the great Emilie Fyn Marinas, High Commander of the great fleet of Ixiaa and Peacebroker of the Treaty of Ganymede, that she needed me.

“I have no need for demolitions at this time.” Her words were sarcastic, but her tone of voice betrayed her uncertainty. I drew upon every ounce of training I had to convey sincerity.

“The War’s not over, Marinas.”