It’s a familiar scene. She sits in front of a holographic telescreen. Fingers tap anxiously on her thigh as she waits, and waits, and waits for the one she so desperately wants to talk to. Finally, a message pops up.
“Message received.”
She smiles widely as a woman’s image appears on screen, wearing an identical smile.
“Hi, Mom!”
“Hey, sweetie!”
Her mother pauses, then asks, “Where’s your father?”
“He’s still at work. I didn’t have school today.”
“Do you guys even do anything? Maybe I should take you out of that school, put you in one where you get a ruler to the hand and have to write write your name on the board a hundred times.”
“I don’t think schools like that have existed since the 1900s, mom. Unless you were actually there...”
“Are you calling me old?”
“Yes.”
A red light illuminates her mother’s face, and before she can blink her mother is being engulfed in flames. The last thing she sees are her mother’s golden brown eyes. A piercing scream fills the house. The telescreen is just static.
Sasha shot up in her bed, heart pounding, sweat running down her forehead. Her loud gasps for air filled the room, and after what seemed like hours, she was finally able to breathe again. Tremors shook her body and a stinging pain registered in the palms of her hands as she finally recognized her surroundings. Her nails had cut into her skin again and had drawn blood. Sasha hadn’t hurt herself in her sleep since her mom’s death a little over a year ago, and it was strange that she had started having the nightmare again.
Sasha rose from her bed, carefully avoiding irritating the cuts on her hands, and rushed down the hall to the bathroom, feeling an overwhelming feeling of emptiness the whole time. Opening the compartment that held the salve proved to be harder than it seemed; somehow grasping that handle irritated her wounds and Sasha might have gotten blood all over the place. How, she didn’t know. She didn’t remember her hands ever bleeding so much, but she finally washed her hands with warm water and had applied the salve.
Sasha sighed in relief as the fast-acting agents began to do their work. Now that her life fluids weren’t seeping from her hands, Sasha decided to go back to sleep for a few hours, even though she probably wouldn’t go back to sleep for one or two Earth-days.
“Can I assist with anything?” Ellen asked.
“No,” she replied. “I’m just going back to sleep.”
Ellen didn’t say anything. Maybe she realized that Sasha was too exhausted to have a therapy session right now. Or maybe she realized that this was a battle that she couldn’t win. Either way, Ellen remained quiet.
Sasha crawled into her bed, not before grabbing her mom’s jacket and wrappng her arms around it.
It still smells like her, she thought.
Her body began to shake with sobs until she fell into a dreamless sleep.
Sasha woke up a few hours later, feeling just as tired as she did before she went to bed, but didn’t feel like crying. It was a start.
What she did feel like doing though, was eating. Her stomach growled angrily as if trying to say, “How dare you ignore me!”
Sasha wasn’t one to ignore the demands of her stomach, so she went over to the kitchen, grabbed a strawberry breakfast pastry, and headed up to the bridge.
“Good morning, Sasha.” Ellen said. “Another breakfast pastry?”
“In my defense, it’s like these are crafted by the gods.”
“They are massed produced in a factory in the Orion System.”
“Your negativity isn’t needed, Ellen.”
“I am only being realistic.”
Sasha briefly wondered how she had come to program such a sassy AI. She surely wasn’t that sarcastic, was she?
They sat in silence for awhile, Sasha pondering the fragility of life, thinking of whether Han really shot first, and trying to come up with ways to defend the honor of her beloved pastries. (While also trying not to think of the nightmare, which was still so fresh on her mind.) Ellen was off monitoring Ludrien’s health and probably doing secret computer things.
“Your future husband is awake,” Ellen said, snapping Sasha out of her reverie.
“Isn’t it a little early to be calling him my husband? I’ve known him for like ten minutes,” she said as she rose from her chair.
“Are you ever going to stop?”
“No.”
Ludrien was sat up in the healing chamber, blue eyes alert. He grinned as she walked in.
“Good day,” he said.
“Hey. Feeling better?”
“Yes! Much better.” His smile faltered. “You don’t look so good though.”
She probably looked awful, with the bags under her eyes making her look like the human equivalent of a raccoon, except with dark skin. The dried tear streaks on her face probably didn’t help. Still, she put a smile on her face to give the illusion that she was in control.
“I’m okay. Um, do you want something to eat?”
Ludrien didn’t look convinced at all, but he nodded and stood up before Sasha could even offer to help. His quick recovery was unexpected, and Sasha wondered what was in his biology to make him heal so fast.
They took the lift to the ship’s middle level, because secretly Sasha really wanted another pastry. The whole time, Ludrien’s eyes darted around trying to interpret his surroundings. It was strange to see someone so amazed over the most mundane things.
He was especially fascinated with the strawberry pastries.
“What are those?”
“They’re pastries.”
Ludrien’s head tilted slightly as if he were learning physics for the first time.
“...pastries?”
“Yeah. They’re, um, an Earth dessert. They’re usually made out of some kind of... dough, I guess. And then they’re filled with a kind of fruit preservative. I’m pretty sure they’re made by the gods themselves.”
Ellen chose this moment to interrupt.
“They are actually mass produced in the Orion system.”
“That’s irrelevant information. Please take your false claims elsewhere.”
Their banter seemed to confuse Ludrien more, who looked all he wanted to do was try some of these seemingly wonderful concoctions of mankind.
“...may I try one?”
Needless to say, he enjoyed them. Maybe a little much. Sasha was almost afraid that her pastry stash would be gone in a few hours. She also realized that Ludrien was practically an overgrown child despite being taller than her, being made of pure muscle, and looking like he could kill a grown man with his thumb.
“You two are perfect for each other,” Ellen said.
“Shut up,” Sasha replied.
After eating about a fourth of her pastry stash (a figurative tear fell down Sasha’s face), they decided it would be a good idea to try to figure out where Ludrien could go in order be to stay under the radar.
“I can’t go there,” Ludrien said after searching through, pointing to an area fairly populated with planets. “They have a military outpost there.”
“A military outpost? And who are ‘they’?”
“Just some friends.”
“Some powerful friends that want you dead.”
“Yes.”
Sasha tried her hardest not to pull at her hair. She wasn’t going to get involved. She was just going to help this guy get to where he needed to go and that would be it. She wasn’t going to get involved with crazy people.
“Sasha, there is an object coming out of warp dead ahead,” Ellen said.
And there was, but it wasn’t just any object. It was a giant ship that looked at least a mile long and about that wide. It was large enough to block the sun from her view, and it certainly didn’t originate from Earth.
“Are these some of your friends?”
“Maybe. I just can’t tell if they’re the nice ones or the not so nice ones.”
“Great.”
ns 15.158.61.42da2
