Scene Transit

Posted on Fri May 3rd, 2019 @ 11:45am by The Narrator

Mission: S1E3: Moments Of Consolidation
Location: Gastarox's Ship
Timeline: MD9 11.00AM

Two days rolled past for the purloined away team within the bowels of Gastarox’s ship.

Food was provided by the ‘good Reka’, as was water in the form of little electrostatically contained cubes. No cups, no bottles, just a little cube of water with a confused surface tension binding it into a ‘solid’. The taste wasn’t bad. Of course, curious people poking the little water cubes tended to make them pop with predictable results.

The Good Reka had also brought in a portable UV lamp from somewhere within the ship, setting it up outside the cage so that a narrow beam of high-intensity light shone through to ward off the increasingly irrational Birch.

Gasatrox made no more appearances, but Varken’s voice did speak every so often to them. For the most part, he was a pleasant counterpoint to their confinement and spoke of the ship they were on: The Wind Queen. A small light freighter of the Carcosian Merchant Marine, something of a retirement gift from the Navy when he mustered out. He had been set upon by Gastarox a year previously and had since then been an unwilling partner in his confinement.

How this confinement was enforced, or his cooperation assured, drew only silence from the vent.

Over the two days of travel, Rollin’s did not regain consciousness. The water cubes were fed to him, and he seemed to drink them, but a prickly sweat of fever clung to him. Somewhere within the medkit was a shot or dermal patch that would break the fever, but there was an equal chance whatever they gave the crew chief would kill him.

Calhoon tried his best to keep the mood from sliding into the darkness of their situation. He regaled people with stories he and Rollin’s had shared in during their careers. From Starfleet Academy to their first postings. ‘Always the Calhoon Maid, never the Calhoon,’ he had joked somberly.

But all kidding aside, things looked grim in Mudville.

And then the stolen freighter and its purloined cargo dropped out of warp. Without a porthole or sensors to see what was outside, it was only the tone of the engines that spoke the tale. And then the whispers began. Unlike the telepathic bickering of the Reka, throwing back stolen words plucked from the minds they fought, these were wholly original. They seemed to seep from the walls, slipping into the ears of all or one at a time.

Free us and we will reward the worthy…
Power beyond your imagining, but only if you free us…
DEATH AND PAIN AND PAIN AND DEATH AND PAIN AND DEATH…
The faithful will be rewarded when the Sleeper Awakens…

It was over quickly, like a squall on the sea throwing up a spray of delusional spectres. Varken offered no aid at this moment, short-lived though it was. And then came the sound of attitude jets firing, sputtering out streams of reaction mass to tilt and roll the cargo ship until-

THUNK.

They had docked.
They had arrived.