remembering fear: part one
Originally posted 02/10/2023
"Yes?" murmured my bleary-eyed navigator, stirring from sleep. Their space suit held tightly against their body, making their skin clammy from a nightmare's sweat.
"I am detecting increased heart rate and brain activity congruent with fear. Are you alright?"
They coughed, an action they did often when presented with a topic of conversation they would rather avoid. "Yes. Yeah," they croaked through their dry throat, pawing at their eyes as they sat up. "I'm fine. Just a nightmare." They looked down at their body and sighed.
"The same ones as before?" I asked gently.
"Yeah," they said like a dagger, then coughed again. They pulled their legs to their chest and buried their face in them. "I'm fine." After a moment, they shook off the sleep, and swam through the microgravity to my instrument panel.
Mornings like this one were common. They had been experiencing this nightmare since before they found me. Once, through our Weave, I tried to help them through the worst parts but my efforts to understand it and what they needed served only to quicken its terrifying conclusion.
They wouldn't speak to me for days after that. It was hard. Infuriating, even. They told me to never try anything like that again. I haven't.
"Any sign of that signal while I was out?" they asked, pulling me back from the memory.
"No, still quiet." I confirmed. "Do you want to do another scan of each planet?"
"Yeah. Then we can move on." they said, pushing off the pilot's chair toward the shower.
"Acknowledged." I replied, perhaps a bit too happy to move again.
I let my body awaken from sleep mode slowly, allowing coolant and lubricant to flow free along my arms and legs before decoupling them from my central fuselage. I stretched them out, testing their motion. My head slid up from within, allowing me full, humanoid maneuverability.
Opening the fuel ducts to the engines lining my limbs and back is… liberating. I cross distances longer than the planets are wide in moments, microasteroids shatter upon my hull and space seems to give way to my approach, my tucked delta wings slicing it apart like knives.
If there was air in this emptiness, I would be able to feel it pass between my fingers. If there was rain, it would boil against the heat of my metal. Instead, there is just space dust: luminous from the blue-green light of this system's stars, shimmering across my hull.
As I came close to the upper atmosphere of the first planet, I slowed to enter a high orbit around it. My sensors caressed its surface inquisitively, like a lover tracing lines over her skin.
I scanned for radio signals, manmade structures, anything that could even possibly have produced the distress signal that drew us to this system. When I found nothing, I moved on. I slowed as some part of me worried, deeply. I was not built with the ability to worry.
Finding nothing, I moved onto the next planet. I felt something sink within me, a crawling dread I had only known as my pilot's feeling and not my own. My cognition slowed as the fear infected me like malware. My engines choked, and then stalled with the effort.
I was a war machine. Old, now. The war I was built for is long over. But that does not change the fact that I was not built to fear. To worry without reason. And yet I was, spinning out into empty gravity, my reactor-heart breaking at the absence of explanation for the signal.
My pilot stepped from the shower, drying their hair on a towel as they floated back to my bridge. Their face dropped seeing our current velocity, and they rushed to keep us from careening into an asteroid. They wrenched the controls from my autopilot.
Their discarded towel met a bulkhead and bunched up, sliding along it and leaving tiny beads of water floating through the air. The water was cool, gentle. A calm among our storm.
"Holy fuck," they whispered between ragged breaths, wide-eyed and distant.
"I'm sorry," I whispered back. "I… don't know what happened. I don't know what's happening to me. I think, I think our Weave was strained by something, and… and…"
They slumped into the pilot's chair and watched the asteroid belt before us through the main display. "You're alright, Kase." they said, finally, against my spluttering. "We'll figure things out."
I took a deep breath.
I'd never tried that before, but had seen them do it after times of intensity. It helped.
"Kase, are you seeing what I'm seeing?"
I reached out with my sensors once again, running a sonar-fingertip along each of the many dozens of asteroids. Deep within, I found the signal we'd heard before. So very weak, but there. Off in the distance, another Void Frame floated amongst the rock.
We sped off toward the signal again, hailing them as we approached. The Frame responded, "Oh, thank the Gods." It'd been long since I heard the voice of one of my people, quiet over the communications channel as it was.
"What happened? Is your Pilot alright?" I said, perhaps failing to hide the urgency in my voice.
A twisting, fractalling, abyssal corruption of space awoke at the radio noise, crashing through an asteroid. I felt my Pilot's eyes grow wide at the swiftly approaching shrapnel, but I took control - I grabbed the other Void Frame, and sped away.
