It’s T-minus one hour until take-off.

One hour until Louise can leave this awful, backwater colony planet and not have to come back for ten long years, if ever.

As the pilot, Louise has access to nearly all of the Dominion’s internal systems. She’s able to know the status of all relevant systems, as well as access all of the non-restricted system logs, which means that she has access to information about her new crew members. There are six of them, all but one of them career rather than indentured bonds-women, like herself. They’re all younger than her, and all of the professionals are straight from the military academy, which means that she’s very likely to dislike them. It’s nice to be able to know these things in advance, but it’s not so nice that access to all of this information means that all of her own communications are now, by definition, classified. She’s not going to be able to speak to another living soul outside of the Empyreal military for another ten years, under penalty of things that she’d really rather not think about.

The launch keeps her busy, at least. Pilots are primarily for tricky maneuvering through debris fields and encounters with the enemy, rather than routine operations like launching and deorbiting, but they find something for her to do anyway, of course. She’s in charge of double-checking the crew’s work and keeping tabs on all relevant systems, including the vitals of all of the crew members, so that she can report back to launch control if anything is amiss, not that that’s actually very likely.

In reality, most of what she’s doing now is preparing herself, mentally speaking. A pilot has to be, as much as possible, one with their ship. In a very real way, she is now the brain of the E.S.S. Dominion, or at least its prefrontal cortex. That’s what the Lieutenant told her, anyway, and she’s trying to take that advice to heart, despite herself. To think of the Dominion as an extension of her body and mind, and let her physical form melt away into a background noise of muted sensation.

Belatedly, she mentally chastises herself for referring to Denilah as ‘the Lieutenant’. She won’t, and shouldn’t, give the Empyreal military that kind of legitimacy in her mind. This is just a stepping stone, a trial that she has to get through before she can get out of here with a commission big enough to get her life back on track. This isn’t an especially dangerous assignment, and she did very well in training. She just has to stay the course, and everything is going to turn out alright in the end. Louise doesn’t really believe that, of course, but she has to believe in something, and there’s not a lot else left, so she clings to the thought like it’s a buoy keeping her afloat. Just stay the course, Louise, and everything will be fine.

Just stay the course.

As she focuses her mind back on the task at hand, she re-adjusts to the constant influx of sensory input. She processes visual information from every camera on the ship, as well as several on the launch platform, all now feeding her information well into the infrared and ultraviolet as well as the visible spectrum. She processes a dozen different radio feeds, as well, and the discordant chatter of the launch sequence is a song that numbs her to everything except for the work in front of her. She imagines herself perched like a watchful bird of prey, watching intently for any kind of error or problem with the launch like they’re small, fuzzy rodents running through underbrush. It’s a self-aggrandizing thought, but she allows herself that, after all she’s been through to get to this point.

Even though she can tell which of her crew members is speaking in a given audio channel at a given time by the metadata that comes along with the audio, she still wishes that she’d had more time with them before this, to be able to match voices to faces to names to jobs. It’s all a blur, right now, and she doesn’t feel ready. Their lives are in her hands, and she barely knows their names and ranks.

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Just stay the course.

Everything goes exactly as planned. The Empyreal military has this down to an exact science, so it’s really quite rare when things don’t go according to plan, but that doesn’t stop Louise from worrying right up until the moment she can feel the vibrations of the ship’s chemical engines in the respiration fluid around her. It’s a primitive, vulgar technology, but a necessary evil for orbiting and deorbiting a ship of even fairly modest size, like the Dominion.

It’s really, actually happening. She doesn’t fully believe it until she can see the enormous, sprawling housing shell that she spent nearly the entirety of her life in across the horizon from one of the camera feeds on the outside of the ship. It seems so small, from all the way up here. Too small, she thinks, for all of the pain that fits inside.

She watches her home disappear under a swirling mist of blue-tinged clouds, and she smiles as wide as the liquid respirator allows her to.

Just stay the course.

-

With the deed done, Louise lies raw, bruised, and nude from the waist up on Declan’s surgical table, waiting for the local anesthesia and paralytics to wear off enough for her to stand up and leave. Despite the fact that Declan used a variety of expensive wound sealants on her, she still feels like she’s been disassembled and then put back together with no real artistry. There’s several pounds of metal missing from her body, and her muscles scream at her that something is deeply, fundamentally wrong every time she breathes or moves her neck. She has what she came here for, though–a data card with enough money to pay for her housing unit for the next two quarters. She squeezes it so hard that the rigid plastic bites into her hand, and she doesn’t care.

Declan sits in the opposite corner of the room at his desk, doing her a kindness by pretending she doesn’t exist. From what her one remaining eye can see, he seems to be toying with her removed cybernetics, testing them for quality and function. Those parts of her belong to him now, and the thought makes hot, acid vomit rise in her throat. She chokes it back down, immediately, mostly to avoid getting any more attention from the man, and it leaves her mouth and throat feeling burnt and awful.

He said that she should really rest here for at least the next hour, but enough is enough. Despite the cold, icy grip of panic from her abused adrenal gland trying to tell her that she’ll hurt herself, that she’s missing parts that she desperately needs to get back, she manages to haul herself to a sitting position, and begin re-wrapping her chest. If Declan notices her movement, he doesn’t acknowledge it in any way, which is about the most that she could realistically hope for at this point. She feels sealant gel oozing out of the wound on the back of her neck, and she ignores it. The concrete floor of the room feels like it sucks all of the remaining warmth from her body when she stands, even through the soles of her shoes. Or maybe that’s just the cortisol, just the tangled rat king of self-loathing growing somewhere below where her cardio-vascular implants used to be a few hours ago, where they should be now. Her empty eye socket aches, and the absence of her lost eye’s whirring motors makes her ears ring.

Louise doesn’t forget what happens next, per se, but all sense of time is sucked away by the icy, bone-dry air of the sub-basement. She’s putting her jumpsuit all the way back on, she’s walking out the door, she’s going up multiple flights of stairs, she’s walking back to her unit, and she’s peeling off her jumpsuit and underclothes all at more-or-less the same time. Every part of her aches. She feels impossibly tiny, like her skin is a suit and she’s suddenly five sizes too small. A nasty, animal part of her wishes she had teeth like Declan’s so she could sink them into her skin; peel herself like a molting reptile. She settles for cramming her naked, bruised, body into what passes for her bathroom, and making absolutely certain that it’s locked before turning on her shower as hot as it will go. It’s not the scalding, suffocating heat that she really wanted, but it will have to do. She steps into the shower, yanks the sliding door closed behind her, and tries to let the water warm her from the outside. This is, of course, in direct opposition to Declan’s wound recovery suggestions, but why should she listen to anything that man has to say?

Mercifully, by the time the unit’s automatic control system automatically shuts off the water, she’s dizzy and nauseous from heat and entirely too out of her own head to notice, let alone care.