Incident 6: The Hell Stars

"You're awake at last. You had us worried."

I squinted at the bright lights overhead. The vague silhouette and the voice I'd heard many times over the comms prior to any docking at the SOE station told me of Sister Gabe's presence hovering overhead. I didn't remember exiting my capsule. But then again I was almost accustomed to losing my past.

"What happened?" I managed to say through the sand in my throat.

"You tell me. I don't have a lot of experience in capsuleer medicine."

As usual, the light hurt my eyes, and I felt at my side in vain.

"Oh, sorry." I felt the touch of flesh and foam and saw a welcome shadow pass over my eyes. "Is that better? We needed to remove your goggles in the course of our examination," she said. I nodded wordlessly as I adjusted my eyewear. Strange how increasingly naked I felt without them.

I finally saw her clearly, white lab coat and blonde dreadlocks done up in a ponytail making her painfully bright to look at even without the fluorescent lighting. "How long was I out?"

She shrugged. "Hard to say with any certainty. Capsuleers are such a new form of life that we can never tell. When a medical clone is activated, we naturally assume your previous clone is destroyed. The good news is that though we saw some relatively minor electroencephalographic irregularities, I can't find any glaring organic or electronic dysfunction."

I sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the couch, the back of my mind registering belatedly that I was sans clothing. "Medical clone? What are you talking about? I docked here in an Astero class yesterday."

The sister looked genuinely sorry for me, her lips turned down in a frown and her eyebrows knit upward. "According to our records, you last docked three days ago, Michael. Are you saying you're experiencing actual cognitive fragmentation?"

A sudden flash of something red and hungry gashed its way through my hindbrain.

Without any condescending chides, she caught me before I toppled over and steadied me while my center of balance finally found its way home. "Are you sure you want to be moving around?"

"I'm fine," I lied.

The ships scream as they die.

"What was that?" she said.

Hadn't I only thought those words? "Nothing. I don't suppose you have a spare Astero in-station."

Now it was the sister's turn to blink in confusion. "I... I'm sure I don't know. I'm a med tech, not a quartermaster."

"I have to get out of here. I have work to do."

I started to stagger toward the door, trying and failing not to lean on her when the door to the medical bay hissed open on pneumatic rails and another sister entered, complete with her own scrubs and white jacket. But this one had close-cropped black hair and a much more severe expression than her colleague. "So he's awake at last. Sister Gabe, do you make a habit carrying your patients around in the buff?"

I saw Gabe blush even through my darkened optics. "I'm sorry, Sister Runford. I was in the middle of my examination and - "

"Yes, I'm sure you were." Then her eyes turned to me. "You're obviously in no condition to be moved."

I decided I didn't like Sister Runford. I felt my voice take on its customary clipped tone when addressing harridans and morons. "I'm leaving. If you want to stop me, shoot me. You'd be doing me a favor."

"It's not that simple, Mister Dray," came the equally contemptuous tones. "Your EEG was abnormal and you were babbling during the preliminary scans. Yulai Convention be damned, I can't have a brain-injured capsuleer wandering around, putting everyone on this station at risk. You'll stay with us for at least twenty-four more hours of observation before I let you anywhere near your capsule.

"Sister Gabe, help him to a proper bed."

Gabe bowed her head demurely. "Yes, Sister Runford." She led me toward the door once again.

"And for pity's sake, get him a robe!"

Gabe's cheeks looked like a matched pair of Amarrian blood beets. "Yes, Sister Runford."

Hours later, in my room, I sat in a chair facing a porthole that looked out across the docking bay entrance. I watched the monotonous comings and goings of frigates, freighters and blockade runners against the endless blackness. Bees to a black hive.

Something was chewing. Burning.

"Out there."

Sister Gabe's voice interrupted my thoughts. "I'm sorry?"

I turned my face away from the window. "You still hovering?"

She was standing near the door with a datapad in her hand, fingers flying as she divided her gaze between the machine and me. "I'm observing you."

"It's actually called staring." I was becoming rather fond of making her blush. "You're new at this, aren't you?"

She averted her eyes. "I'm actually kind of an intern."

"The Sisters of Eve have interns?"

"Novitiates. It's sort of the same thing, at least when it comes to medicine."

I nodded and smiled for the first time I can remember. Gabe couldn't have been older than twenty-three. For some reason, she reminded me of my kid sister. If I'd actually had one. "You're better off then."

Her fingers stopped moving, and she looked at me again. "What do you mean?"

"I'm starting to remember what happened."

She took two steps forward, her eyes taking on the eager look of a born scientist. "Really? You're actually defragmenting your own memories? That's amazing! Tell me, what do you remember?"

Whispers. Cries for help. Something at the edge of experience.

"Asteroid collision. My own fault."

"Oh." She looked understandably disappointed when I didn't volunteer more. But better to dash her hopes for a scientific paper rather than threaten to dash her sanity against the rocks.

I remembered the escape, my ship shattered. A flash of red and yellow before the system crash. Something looming over me, bodied or un-bodied, black against a dying star field. Lights on its hull blinking like palsied eyelids.  And those within were no longer human. Or maybe had never been human.

They stared at me, the damned looking out.

"Michael? Mister Dray? Are you all right?" Sister Gabe's voice broke the vision into a thousand howling shards that settled like acid snow in my imagination.

"I'll be fine."

She didn't look convinced. "You're only human, you know."

I would have laughed if I'd had the strength. "Not anymore..."

I spent a few minutes feeling sorry for the sister after she left to make her rounds. But curiosity killed more than one cat, and I wouldn't add her to the list of victims. I sent a mental command to my implanted Neocom and started preparations for launch. I'd found that Astero and fitted it for deep space.

There would be no rest for me after what I'd seen. But had it only been a vision, a nightmare reaction to all the death and darkness I'd had to absorb? Or had it been something too damnably real?

I still had Stiletto. That name at least hadn't been taken from me. What scanty evidence there was still remained to burn my mind. I'd been charged with a mission, and I needed to act on what I knew before time ran out.

Before what was out there came calling.