Broken Worlds: The Awakening (A Sci-Fi Mystery)

by Jasper T. Scott

  Darius nodded, and looked away, down to his food. He spooned out some mashed potatoes and looked back up just in time to see Lisa send Dyara a warning look. He frowned, wondering what that was about. Then he remembered how Lisa had grabbed his hand after he’d said goodbye to Cassandra, and he noted her proximity now—standing at the table beside him, physically between him and the only other human woman at the table. Coincidence?

  Maybe. Maybe not.

  Maybe she was jealous, or at least guarding her interests, but he couldn’t bring himself to care one way or the other. He’d never had much luck with women. Cassandra’s mother, Claire, was testament to that. She’d abandoned them soon after Cass had been born, and when Cassandra had been diagnosed with cancer, she hadn’t even bothered to visit, or call. Claire had always been easier to define by what she wasn’t than what she was—an absence, not a presence.

  The only woman in Darius’s life who’d ever stuck around or mattered was Cassandra, and that wasn’t about to change.

  Darius shook his head to clear away those thoughts. Lisa and Ra took turns introducing the people Darius had already met, but when they were done, there was still one stranger left at the table.

  “What about Flipper?” Blake asked, jerking his chin to the one who hadn’t been introduced.

  It was another of the willowy, hairless amphibians from Walros. Darius winced at the memory of the Dol Walin guardian of the Grotto. Tita was probably dead now.

  No. Darus shook his head. She wasn’t dead. She would have found a way to get the kids closest to her to safety. Especially Cassandra, who was supposed to be sleeping beside her.

  Darius missed hearing the Dol Walin’s name, but Blake didn’t. He paused in mid-chew of a piece of bread. “Kithy-a-what?”

  “Kithisiosakata,” he said in a watery voice. “Kithisios for short.”

  “You call that short? Let’s stick with Flipper.”

  “You are referring to my hands?” Kithisios asked, and fluttered three broad, flipper-like fingers.

  “Hey what do you know, your name is Flipper and you’ve got flippers for fingers. That’s some kind of coincidence.”

  “My name is not, Flipper,” Kithisios said.

  Blake nodded agreeably. “Whatever you say, Gills.”

  “I do not possess gills. You are an annoying person, Blake. I do not like you.”

  “That’s a shame, Flip, and here I was hoping we could be friends.”

  “Enough,” Tanik growled. “You will respect my crew or you will leave this table.”

  “I’m done, anyway,” Blake said, and left the table.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Dyara asked.

  Lisa shook her head. “He’s bitter because he woke up from cryo a lot later than he expected to. He thought they’d find a cure for his cancer in time for him to see his grandkids get married and maybe even say goodbye to his wife. Instead, he woke up a thousand years late, and now everyone he ever knew or cared about is long dead.”

  “And what about you?” Tanik asked as he reached into one of the vacuum packs floating in front of him. He withdrew a glistening cob of corn. “Didn’t you lose everyone too?”

  Lisa hesitated. “I didn’t have anyone to lose.”

  “I am sorry. Solitude can be an even heavier burden than loss. It is a testament to your character that you bear it so well.”

  Lisa smiled wanly and looked away.

  Darius glanced sideways at her. “I didn’t know that,” he whispered.

  She shrugged. “You never asked.”

  “Well, we haven’t really had time to get to know each other,” he said.

  Lisa reached for his hand and gave it a squeeze. “I know. It’s okay.”

  Dyara watched them with obvious interest, and her gaze lingered on their hands.

  “Unfortunately, time is not something we are going to have much of,” Tanik said, proving that he’d heard their whispers. Everyone looked at him, even Captain Riker, who looked up from his food with red, puffy eyes. He’d spent the entire meal locked in a private world of grief.

  “Why is that?” Ra asked carefully.

  “Because I have a mission for us,” Tanik replied, while gnawing on his cob of corn. He released the corn and left it floating beside him; then he reached for a napkin from a dispenser in the center of the table and used it to wipe the grease from his hands and face. When he was done, he left it drifting beside him with the corn.

  “What mission?” Riker asked in a hoarse whisper.

  “A target of opportunity,” Tanik said with a snarling grin.

  “Yesss?” Ra hissed. “Stop tiptoeing around the slivath.”

  “We’re going to destroy the Crucible and stop the Phantoms from ever taking any of our children again.”

  Chapter 32

  Maintenance drones floated down from compartments in the walls and ceiling to take care of the mess after they finished eating. Empty vacuum packs and flasks floated around the table with dirty spoons and scissors.

  Darius watched the drones flitting about. They plucked garbage and utensils from the air with grasping arms and carried them off to dish washing machines and nanite recyclers in the far wall of the mess hall.

  “We’d better go,” a pleasant voice prompted, and Darius turned to see Dyara standing beside him. She held out a hand to him. “Tanik is going to assign us sleeping quarters.”

  Lisa, who was standing beside him and gawking at the maintenance bots, snapped out of it and grabbed his hand before he could consider taking Dyara’s.

  Dyara eyed their hands and lowered hers, but she didn’t take the hint, either, and chose to walk on the other side of Darius.

  “How do you two know each other?” she asked as they followed Tanik and the others out of the mess hall.

  “We woke up together on this ship,” Darius explained.

  “Oh, I see. I thought maybe you had some history together.”

  “No,” Darius replied, and withdrew his hand from Lisa’s. She flashed him a hurt look, but he pretended not to notice. He didn’t like the proprietary way she was treating him. They weren’t together, but she was making it look and feel like they were.

  They reached the still-broken doors to the mess hall and walked into the corridor beyond. The ship was well-lit now, and there were no signs of the dead crew. Darius absently wondered if they’d been dropped into recyclers too. Nano machines were the perfect way to recycle just about any kind of waste and turn it into something useful, but Darius wasn’t sure he wanted to know what all those dead people might have been recycled into.

  “Did you have someone you left behind in your time? Or are you single?” Dyara asked.

  “Seriously?” Lisa burst out. “What are you, a vix in heat?”

  “What are you, his wife?” Dyara countered.

  Darius held up his hands. “I’m going to save you both some time. I am single, but I’m not looking.”

  Having said that, he walked purposely faster to get by both Dyara and Lisa. He felt a pang of guilt over his rudeness, but he immediately squashed it. He didn’t have time for regrets, much less for romance. Finding a way back to Hades to rescue Cassandra was all he could think about.

  After a few minutes of walking, they came to the sleeping quarters that Darius had initially found upon waking from his cryo tank. This was where he’d found jumpsuits and underwear for Cassandra and the others. The doors to those rooms remained bent and pried open. Darius frowned. He’d half-hoped the ship’s maintenance bots would have found a way to fix them by now. It was going to be hard to sleep with the door open, especially now that they knew what kind of monsters might be lurking in the dark.

  At the front of the group Tanik stopped and turned to address them. “Pick a room. You’ll find sleeping bags inside the lockers. Clip them or strap them down to whatever surface you like, and get as much sleep as you can. We have eleven hours before we drop out of FTL.”

  “Shouldn’t we set up a night watch system? In case there
are more Phantoms on board?” Lisa asked.

  Tanik shook his head. “That won’t be necessary. I was able to verify from the bridge that there are no lifeforms unaccounted for on board the Deliverance.”

  “I thought they can mask their thermal signatures?” Blake asked.

  “Yes, but Gatticus and I ran an in-depth computer analysis of the ships surveillance recordings, and we found nothing. The Cygnians are not invisible, just hard to spot. They cannot elude computer detection algorithms.”

  “Hey speaking of Slick, where is he, anyhow?” Blake asked.

  “Since he does not need to sleep as we do, he is likely on the Bridge,” Tanik said. “It is where I would be if I were him.”

  Heads bobbed and people muttered among themselves about androids, Ra and Riker the loudest of all.

  “If there are no further questions, I suggest you choose your quarters and get some sleep,” Tanik said.

  People began filing off into nearby rooms, and Tanik stood waiting for them to pick their quarters. Darius waited, too, unsettled by the idea of sleeping in one of these rooms with their broken doors.

  When almost everyone had chosen their sleeping quarters, Tanik turned and strode down the corridor. Veekara started after him, but he turned and held up a hand to stop her. “I sleep alone,” he said, to which Veekara muttered something and scowled. Tanik walked on to a room at least ten doors down from the ones the others had picked, while Veekara spent a moment looking around, as if unsure what to do next.

  Then her solid white eyes met Darius’s, and she smiled. Before she could do or say anything, Dyara stepped in front of Darius and blocked Veekara from sight.

  “Darius,” she said.

  He raised one eyebrow. “Yes?”

  “After what you said—”

  “Yeah, hey, about that—I’m sorry.”

  It was Dyara’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “Why?”

  “I didn’t mean to be so rude. You’re beautiful, and you seem nice, but the only thing I can think about right now is—” Darius stopped himself before he could reveal his plan to go back and find Cassandra. “Revenge,” He finished, and cleared his throat.

  “It’s okay. I just thought, life is short—at least in the Coalition it is—and I figured maybe we could find some solace in each other, but if you’re not interested, then neither am I.”

  “I get it.” Darius wanted to say more, but he wasn’t sure what else to say. He shook his head, feeling suddenly confused about who had rejected who. “Was there something else you wanted to say?”

  “Yes.” She looked around quickly and then hugged her shoulders. “I can’t stand the thought of sleeping alone, with the door open, and the thought of all those people who died on board....”

  “Yeah,” Darius nodded. “I can understand that.”

  “Do you mind if we sleep together?”

  For a second Darius’s mind jumped in a different direction, and he caught himself imagining Dyara naked.

  “I mean, literally sleep, together,” Dyara said, smiling knowingly and giving his arm a playful squeeze.

  Darius felt his cheeks warm and he cleared his throat. “Ah, sure. That’s fine with me.” He turned in a quick circle, looking for a room that hadn’t been taken yet. All of the nearest ones were already full, so he nodded down the corridor in the direction that Tanik had gone, and they walked down there together. Finding an empty room right beside Tik, the Murciago, Darius walked in. “How’s this?” he asked.

  “It’s fine,” Dyara said. She walked over to a nearby locker and opened it to reveal a closet with four shiny silver sleeping bags clipped to bars running along the top and bottom of the closet.

  She unclipped two of them, and sent one of them floating down to him. It wrapped itself around his legs, and he peeled it away to find that it was as long as he was tall. He held it up, looking for the zipper. Dyara already had hers clipped to sturdy metal loops at the top and bottom of one of the walls. She waved him over, and he joined her there.

  “Like this,” she said, and helped him clip his sleeping bag to the wall beside hers. She used a third clip that he hadn’t seen to fasten the middle too.

  “What’s that for?” Darius asked.

  “Emergency maneuvers,” Dyara said. “Without the lumbar anchors attached, if someone fires the thrusters in full reverse, or any direction other than forward, it could break our backs.”

  “Ouch.”

  Dyara nodded. “Yeah, ouch.” She unzipped her sleeping bag, turned, and walked toward a shut door inside the room. She waved it open as she approached and walked through. The door promptly slid shut behind her. A moment later, Darius heard a hissing sound, almost like water, but maybe it was air instead.

  He walked up to the door and knocked on it. “Dyara?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you okay? What are you doing?”

  “Using the facilities,” she said. “Be out in a minute!”

  Suddenly he felt stupid for knocking. Obviously, she was in the bathroom. He’d knocked on the door because he was curious about how the facilities worked, and because he needed to use them too.

  How do you take a shower in space? He wondered. Or pee? Or...

  Darius waited for at least five minutes, with nothing better to do than stare at the ceiling. He tried not to think about his bursting bladder.

  For the last two minutes before the door slid open he heard a roaring sound, like a vacuum cleaner; then the door slid open and warm, humid air rolled out. Through the steam, he saw Dyara floating there, completely naked.

  “Sorry,” he said, and quickly looked away.

  “For what?” she asked.

  He glanced back in her direction, but kept his eyes on her feet. She pulled herself down using handrails on the walls and planted her bare feet back inside her mag boots; then she walked right by him.

  He stared open-mouthed at her naked backside as she walked over to one of the lockers. She opened it to reveal fresh jumpsuits and removed one for herself. Darius looked away again, back into the bathroom. Where were the clothes she’d been wearing? They were nowhere to be seen.

  “Where did you...” he turned back to see Dyara floating free of her boots once more, holding to a handrail beside one of the lockers as she pulled on a pair of unisex underwear, followed by a bra.

  “Where did I, what?”

  “Your clothes,” he said, staring stupidly at her.

  “Oh, there’s a laundry chute in every shower,” Dyara said. “You put dirty clothes in there, and the ship’s service bots take care of them for you.”

  “Nice.”

  “Want me to show you how it all works?”

  “Please,” Darius said, and cleared his throat.

  Not bothering to put on a jumpsuit first, Dyara brushed by him in her underwear. She gave his arm a squeeze as she passed by, and he joined her inside the bathroom. He listened carefully as she spent the next few minutes explaining everything.

  There was a hose with a funnel attached. Dyara turned it on, revealing that it was a suction hose for urine collection. A rack above the collector had a few different funnel attachments, and Dyara pointed out the different ones for men and women. Then she showed him the toilet. It had two footrests with straps and two handles to hold onto, as well as a hole for solid waste to drop into. Except that nothing would be dropping anywhere without gravity. Dyara explained that the toilet used airflow to carry waste down; then she pointed to a camera inside the toilet and to a monitoring screen between the two footrests that would help him to aim. If he missed the hole, he could clog the air vents and effectively block the toilet, which would be an extremely unpleasant experience in zero-G.

  After that, Dyara showed him the alcohol-based gel dispenser that he could use to wash his hands, along with some kind of paper to dry them, which she dispensed and then disposed of inside a vacuum-powered trash receptacle.

  Finally, she showed him the laundry chute and shower. The shower was entirely automatic.
He had to close the door to lock himself inside the small cubicle; then wash his face with water and soap dispensed from two different hoses. As soon as he finished that, he would have to put on a breathing mask, and then float there inside the shower while it blasted him with jets of hot water and soap from the walls, floor, and ceiling. After a few seconds the soap would stop and water would keep blasting him until all the suds were washed away, or at least sufficiently diluted. After that, air intakes on one side of the shower would suck away all the floating droplets of water and soap, while hot air would blast him from the other side. Dyara told him he had to slowly turn his body inside the shower using the handrails so that the hot air could dry him on both sides.

  “Easy, right?” she asked.

  “I guess so,” Darius replied. “You want me to stick around in case you get into trouble?” she asked.

  He imagined having to use the toilet and shower with her watching, and gave his head a quick shake. “Ah, no, that’s okay. I think I’ve got it.”

  “Oh, I get it. You’re shy,” she said.

  Darius’s cheeks burned and she smiled, glancing down at herself. She was still half-naked. “Sorry, I forgot, you come from a different time. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I’ll be more careful in the future.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. Dyara left the bathroom and waved the door shut behind her. Darius attended to his bladder first using the suction hose, followed by his bowels. It wasn’t really any more complicated than using a regular toilet on Earth, except for the part about using the camera and screen to watch his aim and having to hold himself in position with the handrails. When he was done, however, he realized there was one thing Dyara hadn’t explained: how to wipe. To his surprise he found a roll of actual toilet paper beside the toilet, and he used that, disposing of it in the vacuum powered trash receptacle. He hoped that was the right place for it. The vacuum-powered toilet that could get blocked just by bad aim didn’t seem like a good place to throw toilet paper.

  Finally, he unstrapped his boots, stripped naked, and climbed into the shower. He found the laundry chute and dumped his clothes inside. He shut the door and washed his face with the dispenser tubes as Dyara had indicated. When done, he slipped on the breathing mask and activated the shower with a wave of his hand. Hot water and soap immediately blasted him on all sides, and he used his hands to smear it all over himself like he would in a shower on Earth.