Control Lost Part 1
You find yourself, again, in the desert. This desert has haunted you for months now.
You walk through the sandstorm that seems to follow you as you walk. You didn't used to dream of the desert. There used to be genuine nightmares, the haunting images of a tortured mind let lose while you tried, desperately, to find rest. But now, every night, without fail, you find yourself in this same desert.
The wind whips your skin with harsh sands.
There are whispers on the air, like there are people all around you, hiding in the obscuring sands.
Sometimes you can tell who is speaking to you, they're always dead.
This time the whispers are that of your old boss, the one you don't like to think about, the one who put the path before you, the path that led you to the nightmares and this desert.
You hear that deep, gravelly voice whisper to you from the sands.
You try to ignore it. You try to walk forward, to press on, to find a way out of this place.
Still the whispers follow you, never getting closer, never getting farther away.
"Submit," Hyperion tells you.
"Submit," Hyperion commands you.
You're not sure whether or not you obey because-
You wake up in the cold, empty, tiny room aboard the freighter you managed to book passage on.
Despite the cardboard thin mattress, the bone-deep cold, and utter lifelessness of the ship, this still doesn't rank among the worst places you've ever slept.
You can't help but groan as you sit up.
You're sore, like you've been walking all night, nonstop. Your skin hurts, burned slightly by allegedly imaginary sands.
You sweep the sand that followed you from your dreams to the floor where it joins its siblings from the nights previous. A small pile, almost enough to qualify as a tiny dune, encompasses part of your floor, the only piece of color in the entire ship.
Part of you wishes you could go back to sleep, to rest, but the other part of you dreads what you'd hear in the desert this time. Instead, you get up and out of bed.
You put on your worn and sandblasted armor, grab your shitty pistol, and the only memento of who you were before.
Keeping your dog tags from your time in Hyperion is not a smart idea. If someone sees them they're going to be just as likely to kill you as they are if they ever found out what you were. They were a big neon sign saying, "I am a traitor and war criminal, the galaxy would be better off without me." But you can't discard them or throw them away. They are your cross, your burden, and you can't just put them down and pretend that the last seven years didn't happen.
You tuck them away in the inner lining of your piecemeal armor. They'd be safe there. For now.
Most people aren't paranoid enough to walk around on a ship in deep space in full combat armor, but most people hadn't gone through what you did.
The bathroom is nearby but almost as sad as your room. Really, you're just thankful it has a lock on it.
You wash your face, trying to rid yourself of the sand dust that you tell yourself can't possibly be there, but itches all the same.
The face that looks back at you in the mirror isn't your own. It belongs to someone else. They seem to have your face, but thinner, hollowed out. You know that you lost a lot of weight and muscle mass when you were not yourself, and in the utter chaos and destruction that the galaxy is still in, even after the war, food has been hard to come by so the sunken and sad look isn't going away any time soon. They also changed your eyes. There's something wrong about them, but you haven't seen yourself in so long that you don't know what they are supposed to look like.
You jump.
Then there's the forceful knock at the door.
"Hurry up in there!" yells a voice.
Quickly, you finish up, dry yourself off, and then open the door.
You're not surprised to see someone else there. A rosenan stands there. Their round but strangely flat head and blue skin glares at you. Their antenna twitch at you, and you can sense what is about to come out of their mouth. You noticed it right away too after all.
"You're... too?" they ask.
You don't respond, just try to push passed them. You notice the sand burn on their own thick skin.
"The water helps with the sand," you mutter.
"But-" the rosenan tries to say but you walk quickly away.
Another one on this ship. On this very ship. What were the chances? They must have been astronomical. You'll have to transfer ships the second you get a chance, but you already burned all of your available money to get passage on this ship. You don't have anything else you could possibly sell, and there's no one out there that will hire some one like you.
Maybe you should just kill them. It would solve your problems, and you could take all of their stuff to sell.
No.
You don't want to be that person any more.
These thoughts rattle around in your brain amid the paranoia and the guilt. You try to silence them a little by going through the routine of looking for something to eat.
All that is available on this mostly empty freighter is some nutrient paste, barely edible, lacking of any flavor or substance, and the barest minimum requirements for nutrition.
You stare at the technically food and are not at all surprised when the rosenan sat down across from you.
"I can't believe there's another here on the ship," they say.
You don't even bother to grumble a response.
"What are you doing all the way out here?" she asks, and you know it is a 'she' as a quirk of the translation software finally had enough information on the weird rosenan language and their gendered words.
"Vacationing," you say flippantly. "I heard the space debris was really quite lovely this time of year."
The rosenan's antenna twitch in what you suspect is annoyance. It has been a very long time since you were yourself and around any rosenans and even then they were almost always in their own little hierarchical packs.
"I'm getting out of here, getting away, staying moving," you finally respond. "Isn't that what you are doing?"
Reading a rosenan's facial expressions is always hard, since it requires you know a lot about how they move their antenna and the translation software requires a yearly subscription of entirely too much money to translate body language. Still, you're fairly sure that she's not happy with you or your sarcasm.
"I just haven't met another one of us," she says. "At least not in a long time."
"And I will be changing ships and the earliest opportunity."
"Why?"
You feel the anger come up quick and hot. The only emotion that seems to come to you anymore. "Because I don't want to find out what happens if or when our pilots find out that they have two indoctrinated people aboard. It's easier to hide when there's just me I have to worry about, and I don't know you, I don't trust you, and I'd much rather be on my own without another indoctrinated breathing down my neck."
The rosenan looks... disappointed, maybe? Or maybe she's resigned to the inevitable.
"Yeah, yeah you're right. But I do have a question for you," she asks, turning suddenly very serious.
"What?" you ask as you push the nutrient paste away from you, you've given up on the pretense of even trying to eat.
"The desert... you are dreaming about it, aren't you?"
Briefly you consider lying, but something tickles your mind, drawing your attention away from the other betrayer in front of you.
"Yeah. It started almost a year ago," you mutter.
You turn to look at the door that leads out of the small and cramped mess hall. You could feel something there, but what it was you couldn't fathom.
"What is the desert? What's it about? Why do I dream about it? Why do I carry the sand back? Where is it?" the rosenan asks a bunch of questions, but you're only dimly listening.
You stand up and your hand rests on your cheap pistol.
"What are you doing?" the rosenan asks as she stands up behind you. She's suddenly tense seeing you ready yourself.
"I don't-"
Before you could finish the entire ship is rocked. Your feet lose their footing and you are slammed into the floor hard. Your gun is gone, your head is pounding as you slam into the ground.
Alarms start going off in time with the pulsing pain in your head.
You pull yourself up from the floor as someone enters the room.
The man has sandblasted armor that you recognize. The oranges and yellows, despite being faded, are the exact colors of Hyperion.
"My siblings!" he calls out. "We have come to take you home!"
You don't like the sound of that.
The rosenan picked herself up off the floor behind you. She sounds like she's still dazed as she says, "Yeah. Home sounds good."
You can't look past the Hyperion armor, the logo. That organization took everything from you. They took your life, your will, your mind. They stole yourself from you.
The rage burns up so easily again.
Whoever this man is, he wears the badge of Hyperion.
Fuck Hyperion.
You sold all of your gear, all of your combat grade hardware, a long time ago. You needed passage off of the dead planet you were on. That means you don't have your astrolabe, but you can still access The Bridge. It's dangerous and barely controllable, but fuck this whole goddamn situation.
You look around for something, anything.
On the floor, right next to your foot is your spoon, from when you were trying to eat.
You reach out and access The Bridge. It's always there, just beyond reach. Without proper tools it's so much harder than it should be, but rage is a hell of a fuel.
You tie the spoon to The Bridge and then make an exit somewhere in the vicinity of the Hyperion agent's skull.
The spoon is accelerated suddenly to within a fraction of a percent of lightspeed.
You got lucky. Extremely lucky.
The spoon managed to skip through the Hyperion agent's shields and lodge in the armor around his throat. It didn't go deep enough to kill, so maybe not so lucky. But you did hit your target and didn't accidentally blow a hole in the ship.
The Hyperion agent gasped and recoiled in pain.
That gave you enough time to act.
You rush to your pistol, the second it is in your hand you are firing.
The first few rounds are stopped by Hyperion's shields, but the next half dozen rounds tear through the armor and flesh.
The Hyperion agent falls dead at your feet.
A moment later the rosenan behind you reacts, pulling her own gun and pointing it at you.
"What the fuck was that?" she demands.
You spin around and point your own gun at her. "This man wanted to bring us home apparently. He's wearing Hyperion colors. That means one of two things: he's here to take us to the desert, or he was here to kill us. I'm not going to the desert."
The rosenan hesitates. "No. Yeah. No," she says as she's clearly trying to work through what happened. "Fuck that. I'm not going to that desert either."
She lowers her gun, and after a few moments so do you.
"What now?"
"I think that there's about seven more indoctrinated that just docked with our ship. We need to figure out how they got aboard and get them out of here and escape," you say.
"How do you know that there's seven of them?"
"Can't you feel them?"
She pauses and after a moment, "I guess I can."
You quickly search the dead body for anything useful, but you only manage to find another pistol and a few credits.
"Uh... that's not good," the rosenan says.
"What?" you ask.
"The bridge is gone," she responds as she studies her personal holographic computer.
"What?"
"I think they blew up the bridge of our ship."
"Then we need to take their ship," you say. "Simple."
"It's not that simple."
"If the choices are: die, go to that desert, or kill some indoctrinated and steal their ship. I know what my choice is," you say.
It really is the easiest choice that you could make. Two of the options result in the total obliteration of who you are.
The rosenan takes a longer time to answer, but finally she says, "Yeah. Yeah fuck that and fuck them. Let's take their ship."
You nod. You can't trust her. She's indoctrinated, just like you were. You are both betrayers and criminals and you should both be dead.
But better the devil you know.
"The name is Kasyn," she says. Then after you don't respond right away continues, "And I just have to say, you are incredibly lucky and also stupid as shit. You threw a spoon at the guy and managed to hit him! You could have blown up the whole ship!"
"I sold my astrolabe a long time ago," you mutter.
"Fuck you! That's even stupider than I thought! You could have killed us all!"
"I needed the cash."
"I did too, but I kept mine!"
"Are we going to go, or are we going to stand here while the ship goes down?" you ask tersely as the ship rocks violently.
"Yeah, yeah, let's go," Kasyn says.
You move through the ship, the empty freighter now full of alarms and sirens. Once or twice you come across a dead body of one of the crew that was transporting you.
These attacking indoctrinated clearly have no use for someone not like them.
That thought disturbs you.
What disturbs you even more is the fact that you can almost tell where the rest of the enemies are. You can sense how far away they are, where they are in the room. If Kasyn feels the same thing as you, she doesn't share.
But you open the door to the next room anyway.
The indoctrinated are not surprised to see you. They are surprised when you shoot at them.
Your pistol does little against their shields.
And you dare not risk accessing the Bridge again because there is a very decent chance that you'd tear a hole in the ship and you'd die in the vacuum of space before the ship went down.
Kasyn, however, had no qualms about accessing the Bridge since she had her astrolabe still. And, of course, the rosenan uses it with reckless abandon. She uses the Bridge to jump herself across the room. Even the hardiest of shields have a hard time stopping a fully grown rosenan from jumping across the room and tearing into the nearest person.
The best you could do was support her. You even sold your upgraded holo. You don't have the processing power to take down the enemy shields or bombard their weapons with viruses. The best you can do is shoot at them with your crappy pistol and try to blind one or more of them with a flashbang.
The rosenan does all the hard work.
She uses her admittedly deadly looking claws to tear into the small group of indoctrinated. With her claws and ready access to the Bridge, the whole fight is over pretty quickly.
The second the last of the enemy indoctrinated fell to the ground at Kasyn's feet, she turned to you, expectantly.
"Yeah, good job."
"Catch," Kasyn says a moment later.
You catch the object that she threw at you. It is all silver and tarnished brass. The object is small, fit in the palm of your hand.
It is an astrolabe, two spears of tarnished brass connected in the middle among the specific silver circuitry to allow you access to the Bridge.
The astrolabe twitches in your right hand, as if it is a skittish creature, trying to escape your grip.
You switch it to your left and the object seems to settle against the much more soothing warmth of your left hand.
"Come on, we should get out of here," Kasyn says as the whole ship groans horrifyingly.
You rush forward, towards the last few indoctrinated you can feel on the ship. Hoping that they were stationed somewhere near the other ship.
Sure enough the four of them stood guarding the pirate way, an illegal ship boarding device that attaches to another ship and cuts open a hole.
Now that you have an astrolabe, you feel eager to use it. And maybe to show off a little bit.
You create a Bridge between two of the indoctrinated and slam them together. Then the moment that they are in each other's space you do the one other thing you can do with the Bridge. You unleashed a pure, unrestricted piece of the Bridge right behind the two indoctrinated.
The energy and speed of the inter-dimensional space was unbothered by the shields, armor, or flesh of the indoctrinated that occupied the space just beyond it.
Their armor was ripped apart by molecules, and that left them easily picked off by you.
While you were showing off your precision control of the Bridge, Kasyn had taken care of the other two.
The ship groans again.
"Time to go," you say.
The lights have dimmed. Or maybe your perception of them has.
There's no more indoctrinated left, so it's time you left the ship you came in on.
Kasyn is already halfway through the pirate way when you climb in after her.
The way is a shoddily made piece of metal that seems to be held together with hopes and tape.
You climb faster.
Kasyn breathes heavily as she gets out of the tunnel.
You climb out after her and slap the console to retract the tunnel. But it buzzes awkwardly with an error message.
"Those fucking idiots!" you yell.
They hijacked your ship with no planning and no care.
"What?" Kasyn asks, the panic in her voice is real.
"They didn't set this ship up on a parallel path," you say. "The ships are pulling away from each other, and the tunnel is bent so it can't detach itself."
"What does that mean?"
"We have to figure out how to get it off or we'll have a nice hole in this ship too."
"Ok! How are we going to do that?" Kasyn demands.
You only have one idea.
You reach out with your left hand and unleash the Bridge on the far side of the tunnel. If it works against indoctrinated people, it should be just as effective against metal and bolts.
Sure enough after only a few seconds the pirate way suddenly uncouples itself, and closes.
"Wow," Kasyn says with a the strange smile of a rosenan, "I thought we were dead for sure."
You don't say anything in response, you just walk forward, trying to find the bridge of this ship so that you can find out where you're going.
"You never gave me your name," Kasyn points out.
She's right. You never did.
"Do you have one? I figure I have to call you something if we're going to be hunted by these guys again."
She's not wrong. But at the same time you can't be who you were. Your old name, that person, they should have died.
When you open the door to the bridge you find a name there.
"Cass," you say. Like Cassandra, the one that was cursed to be forever ignored. Or like Cassius, one of the most famous betrayers.
"Sure. Cass," Kasyn says, sounding unconvinced.
You ignore the quip and sit in the Pilot's seat. You can access and control the Bridge, but you're no Pilot. You don't have that kind of skill, nor do you want to test it, as there is an extremely high chance that you would just kill the two of you.
The ship's navigation was locked down, and likely the key or passcode or whatever was on a dead body on the other ship.
"Those idiot assholes," you mutter. "They couldn't leave someone behind to pilot this thing? They all wanted to jump on a ship that they blew the front off of and couldn't be bothered to anchor properly?"
"I'm grateful," Kasyn says, "if they were smarter we might be dead. Or worse."
With your holo not being combat ready, you'd need like three days to hack the console. In the meantime the only thing that you can do is find out where you're going.
"Oh, fun," you say sarcastically.
"What?"
"We're going to Station Zed."
"Well if you want to get lost in the crowd, there we go."
There's a silence that grows between you, like an infected wound seeping and spreading until-
"I got stuck behind enemy lines," Kasyn says starring out the window. "I was part of a scouting and extraction team. But we were caught behind the Usmarus. I only remember being in one of the camps for a few days before I was turned."
She's saying this to build trust, to build a relationship with you. The last thing you want.
But you did fight together. You could have been forced to kill her.
But she's also indoctrinated. Just like you.
You can't trust her. You can't trust you.
You owe her. Don't you?
"I was at the First Battle of Sentinel," you say.
The first appearance of the Usmarus, above the Galactic Senate's homeworld. The first victory for The Pilot.
Your right arm twitches uncomfortably.
"My dreadnought took a direct hit. We went down. I tried to save someone, but the bulkhead closed. I lost my right arm. After that I was discharged from the service."
Kasyn shifts uncomfortably. You can tell she's in a strange spot because your story is not simple and clean. You can't just say what happened to you. There had to be context. Without the context well...
"But I saw what the Usmarus were capable of. I knew what was coming, I wanted to do something. And I was offered the chance to help. By Hyperion. I took it."
"Oh, fuck you," Kasyn says. "I didn't think I was teaming up with some pro-human fascist."
"I'm not!" you snap at her. Your right arm clenches, the synthetic fibers straining against your rage, your left hand has a white knuckle grip on your astrolabe. "I didn't join for that! I was lied to! I was told I could get my arm and life back! In turn I would fight the Usmarus! Instead they sold me out! They betrayed me first!"
Kasyn has shifted away from you. "Ok. I believe you."
You stand up. There's nothing more you can do on the bridge.
"I'm going to take stock of the rest of the ship. Call me when we get close to Zed."
i have a kofi
