The ship was quiet, not in the normal sense of the word, but a strange stillness that bespoke of something terribly wrong.
Leon walked to a nearby door, the portal opening silently to an empty room with a window to the dark void without. He blinked in alarm, that shouldn’t have been there. He felt himself moving towards it however, almost as if his body was not under his own control.
He shook his head, this wasn’t real, it couldn't be.. He looked outside.
His mounting horror shattered any growing perception of the falseness of his current observation. He couldn't think, his feet felt rooted on the spot and his eyes were fixated on the object of his trepidation. The stars were the wrong color. No, not the wrong color. Instead they were colorless, the entire expanse of the universe lit up in a sickly grey light. Then across the expanse of the universe darkness seemed to descend, a shadow that quickly consumed all.
Slowly a burning orange line split the cosmos, he felt his blood freeze in his veins as the remembered panic flooded his system once more. But he was still immobile. Slowly, agonisingly slowly the line thickened till it became a burning orange eye as wide as the universe.
Leon couldn't physically comprehend its vastness, instead he felt a crushing feeling of puniness. As if everything he had ever known and thought of were next to nothing, no more important than the base quantum fluctuations of the void.
The eye opened and then seemed to look at him. A consciousness more vast that he could give words to scrutinised him and seemed displeased. What would it do to him, this power that could shatter stars to dust and smite galaxies without thought?
He shook violently, his sheer terror melting his bones as he collapsed.
Leon awoke with a strangled yell. He flailed about as he felt hands on his chest, one of his wildly flailing arms making solid contact with something.
“Ouch! Fuck.. Leon, wake the fuck up!” A voice shouted in his ear before something pinned him down on the bed.
He took a deep breath, a slight floral scent driving its way up his nose and piercing the veil of confusion that had muffled his mind.
He stopped moving, his breath coming in great shuddering gasps. “Nat.. Nat is that you?” he asked breathlessly.
The weight pinning him lifted and he rose to a sitting position to see Natalia kneeling next to him. He frowned as he saw her lip was bleeding, a small bruise slowly spreading across her left cheek. Without further thought of himself he reached out to her, hands caressing her face gently as she tucked her chin at the contact.
He pulled her close, wrapping her in an intense hug. “Oh Nat, I am so sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just, it was just… I can’t remember..” Leon spoke, his voice frail and breaking at the lingering horror in his mind.
He felt her squeeze him back. Her voice whispered in his ear, “I’m alright. I was so worried that you wouldn't wake up again, what is happening to you Leon?”
He just slumped back into the sheets, drawing her with him to lie by his side. She laid her head on his shoulder as he tried to relax. But it wasn’t coming to him easily, he had a flash of something, a burning orange eye as big as creation.
Leon screwed his eyes shut as if that could dispel the images of torment that haunted him. “I had another nightmare. That’s all.”
“From the war? Or something else..” she asked, her voice trailing off as he shook his head.
“No, not the war. This was something else, it felt too real. There was..” He stopped. He couldn't tell her about the darkness, could he? What would she say if she knew he was just as crazy as Aden, maybe more as he hadn’t had the chance to sit about for a few months like the other man.
“It was horrible, but I can’t remember exactly why.” he lied. It hurt him to do it, but she needed to be protected from the truth. He hated it the instant he said it, but she just nodded and let it go. If she had felt the lie then she didn’t say, but she was very good at hiding her emotions too.
After a few minutes of silence she sighed. “Well. Try to get back to sleep Leon, we are coming out of warp tomorrow. I need to be well rested to monitor the ship’s systems to my best ability. And you do too. So, sleep.. now.” He smiled at her as he closed his eyes again.
He planted a smooch onto the top of her head. “I love you Nat, I don’t think I would have made it this far without you.”
She just giggled quietly. “Oh you know you wouldn't have.” with that she turned over and left him alone once more.
Without her looking he allowed himself to frown. What had he seen, and why was it so familiar? He put the thoughts aside, Natalia was right. He needed to get to sleep, tomorrow was another new system to explore. Leon closed his eyes and drifted off the edge of that dark shore in his mind, his breathing slowing as he fell into a fitful sleep.
**********
Leon stared at the console he was sitting next to, his gaze locked on the screen but his attention elsewhere. He jerked, startled as something touched his shoulder.
Joice withdrew her hand, a mildly annoyed look on her face. “Earth to Leon, you in there?”
He shrugged his shoulders, trying to relax a bit as he responded. “Yes, I was a bit distracted. I'm sorry.”
He turned back to his console, he was distracted alright. Something he remembered from a dream, something terrible. He had a bad feeling, but he decided not to say anything. It was just his imagination getting the better of him. Instead he decided to focus on the task at hand, making sure nothing went wrong as they dropped out of warp into the new star system.
Terry and Taylor were seated in front of him with Samuel to the front and Sabine sitting at the far right of the bridge. Leon glanced at Joice, she was looking intently at some form of technical readout. He couldn't read it from his angle, but it looked like telescopic data.
Whatever it was she seemed intently intrigued. Leon looked across to Samuel. “Samuel, what’s our course looking like?”
Samuel gave him a small wave before he projected his console to one of the side viewscreens to the front of the bridge. The digital readout showed their supposed position in approximation to the nearest detected celestial objects. They seemed to be standing still, but he knew that they were actually moving several hundred times faster than light itself.
“We are set to exit warp roughly twenty-four light hours from the center of the system dubbed six-five-six-Gamma-Upsilon. We are right on schedule, forty-seven minutes till warp transition.” The younger man said a bit too cheerfully.
Leon shook his head in mild amusement, Samuel was far too happy giving standard reports. He checked his own screens, the information was indeed accurate. Nearly three quarters of an hour till they reached their destination. There wasn’t much left for him to do so he pulled up the crew roster.
Leon amused himself for the next fifteen minutes as he arranged the next two weeks of tasks such as cooking and dish duties. But after a short while he was done and back to the strange worrying sensation in his middle. He tried to ignore it, but it was persistent.
He looked at their position, twenty-one minutes left. ‘Great..’ he thought to himself silently. He had to just sit there in his void suit, stinking up the place as he sweated inside the heavy insulated garment nervously.
Joice glanced at him. “What’s wrong Leon?” She asked, she had picked up on his paranoia it seemed.
He shook his head quickly. “Nothing, I was just looking over the crew assignments and.. Well, I think I scheduled Oliver to cook twice in the same week without noticing.”
Joice winced slightly. “Well, can you change it? Please?”
Leon shrugged. “Not without moving a lot of other things around. I’m sorry, but I think we are just going to have to bear it, I have Kimathi helping him at least one of those days though.”
Joice sighed. Oliver wasn’t exactly known for his cooking ability. Leon chuckled a little, the idea of the entire crew realising his mistake was a little funny to him for some reason. As if he had accidentally pulled some childish prank on the others.
He shook his head and leaned back into his chair, contemplating a variety of things. He would need to make sure their water was stocked in the next few systems, and the radiation shielding on the second ring had been damaged by a meteorite impact sometime in the last few months. The polymer-metal laminate plates to repair it were set aside already, it just hadn’t been done yet. Going outside the ship while in transit was strictly forbidden however, the gravitational influence of the drives became more chaotic the closer to the edge of the warp field one traveled. And the bubble itself wasn’t terribly larger than the Leif Erikson itself. Barely two hundred and fifty meters across.
He jerked as the lights on the bridge turned a solid yellow, they were nearing their destination. He shifted in his seat, he hated warp transitions. The glimpses of something else that he kept seeing tore at the corners of his memory. He blamed them for the horrific nightmares he had been experiencing ever since the mission started. He blamed them for the constant mental degradation of the crew’s morale. Of course it was high enough now, some good food and interesting news brought smiles to everyone’s faces. But Leon paid attention, he saw the haggard looks on the other’s faces when they thought they were not being observed. The tired way people seemed to eat breakfast each morning before they had fully woken from their disturbed slumbers.
This mission had taken more than two and a half years of their lives already, the prospect of another seventeen or so years of this was beginning to wear on them heavily. And Leon couldn't blame them, he felt it too. The deep void of space was never meant for mankind to tread, and yet here they were. Uninvited and unwanted.
A voice echoed through his mind unbidden, “You are not the one..”
Leon recoiled slightly right as Samuel announced, “Warp exit in three, two, one..”
It was if the universe had suddenly lost meaning to him, he could see but nothing was recognisable. Shapes and colors he couldn't understand floated around him for an instant, then it was gone. Replaced by the same sterile white bridge and familiar crew. But something was still wrong, he looked around, but could not find it at first.
Terry was the first to speak, “Are you alright honey?” she leaned up from comforting Taylor, the young signals and communications specialist shaking his head and coughing. He seemed to have had another bad reaction to the…
Leon jerked as his body tried to stand up but his restraints held him in place. His thoughts had been completely derailed by the strangely familiar sight before him. Almost at the same time he heard a few sporadic clicks from his suit’s internal geiger counter. The radiation levels in the ship climbed slightly all across the board.
“What.. the.. What am I looking at?” he managed to choke out. The primary view screen was showing a picture from the ship’s telescope array, but it was wrong. The star they had been aiming for had not seemed interesting outside from their observations that it might have several terrestrial class planets orbiting it, their telescope and Henry being able to process the data in a matter of hours that used to take months and complex supercomputers back home on Earth.
Instead of the yellow dwarf G–type star they had been expecting, the strange somewhat bloated looking stellar object that hung in front of them seemed somehow wrong. Where he would have expected a gentle yellow light to be emanating, the star’s light was instead a harsh white.
“No, not white…” he muttered aloud.
Sabine had noticed it too by that point and her slightly confused voice asked the question that had been on the edge of his brain already. “Wait, why is it grey?”
Indeed, that was the question on Leon’s mind as well. “Terry, get me an expanded view of that, STAT!”
As she hurried to comply, Leon turned to Joice who was staring at the screen in mild confusion. “Joice, get me a status update on the rest of the crew. I want them to be apprised of anything that changes. If something goes wrong they need to be aware of it immediately.” he gave her a sharp nod as she looked at him and she turned to her console.
Turning towards Sabine he gestured to her, “And please keep an eye on these radiation levels, I want to know the instant they change and by how much.” She nodded to him, her eyes a bit wide at the serious tone he was projecting.
Terry spoke up suddenly. “I have a close up, where do you want it?”
“Main screen please.” Leon tried to say more calmly. For some reason he shivered, this whole thing was reminding him of something, something on the edge of his mind. He swore under his breath and pushed the dread aside. This wasn’t the time to be feeding his paranoia.
The main screen flickered for a moment as it switched feeds. Suddenly it showed a bloated grey sphere. The massive dark spots that covered its surface looked like the decayed fetid body of a drowned corpse, large portions of the star’s surface were uneven and somehow lumpy looking. The sickly ropes of enormous flares arcing off its unhealthy-looking surface made him think of strings of mucus for some reason. He shuddered.
“What in god's name is that?” Samuel said, his voice thick with agitation.
Leon saw Terry push herself back into her chair as she spoke in a small voice. “That is a star. Or at least it is supposed to be.”
Leon wasn’t sure what the problem was. “Why is it grey, are we looking at this through a filter of some kind?” He mused aloud.
Again it was Terry that spoke, she reached out and tapped at her console before answering. “No, not that I can see. It is coming at us in the full spectrum including all known visible wavelengths.. Wait, no.” she peered at her screen closer.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“Taylor, I want you to look for signals. If there isn’t a natural explanation for this then that leaves only one viable alternative. And I do not want to be caught unawares this time.” Leon watched as Taylor nodded grimly. “Get it done.”
As there wasn’t much for him to do at the moment he made sure to keep an eye on the bridge crew as they went about the tasks he had given them. Sabine looked a bit anxious though and he decided to give her something else to do.
He gestured to her, grabbing her attention. “Yes Leon, what?” She seemed more than a little agitated all right.
He nodded towards her console. “Can you link me the ship’s status reports?” She nodded sharply.
He frowned. The reports came quickly though and he used the opportunity to look at the ship’s radiation levels. Radiation all over the star side of the ship seemed to be higher than would be expected, given their distance to the target.
He was about to comment on it when Terry wiggled in her seat and motioned to get his attention while at the same time speaking rapidly. “There are planets, just like we had originally picked up.”
Leon looked towards the main screens, the ship’s blast doors sealed tightly closed as they had not yet verified the safety of the star’s output. “Well, put them on screen.” Joice muttered loudly.
The astrophysicist did as she was instructed, the screen showing the shadowed pale dot of what looked like a barren moon. “This is the planet? It looks dead, are you sure it was showing traces of habitability?” Leon scrutinised the image again. It looked like a vision of hell, dark grey volcanic deltas hundreds of kilometers across and plumes of volcanic fog coated the airless surface of the world. Large patches of even darker rock seemed to exhibit themselves across its surface, especially near the planet’s poles.
Terry didn’t speak, instead she pressed several keys on her console, pulling up another series of images. These ones were grainier and a bit less defined, but no less dreadful. The new planet was black, covered in vast plains of dry radioactive dust and deep canyons where it seemed water may once have flowed. The image seemed strangely washed out too, as if all the color had been sapped from the image. Leon felt a twisting sensation in his gut once more, as if there was something very wrong. There were large parts of the planet that were blacker than the void behind it, looking simultaneously out of place and like they belonged.
Joice looked at him sharply, her face suddenly going a bit pale as she gestured to him to check her message.
Leon tore his gaze from the strange vision below and looked at the message she had sent him silently. “You need to look at the live feed from the observation deck, the inside of it.”
He frowned, the message was cryptic. But what else did he have to do but feel that same strange feeling as he looked at dead worlds and that unwell star.
Leon did as he had been suggested to, pulling up the live feed from the observation deck and giving it a look. At first he didn’t see anything wrong with the image, the room looked as it had been left. The observation deck was clear and the chairs that ringed it were empty. Nothing seemed overtly amiss in the grey room as he looked at it except..
He looked again, this time focusing not on the physical but the visual. The room was a range of deep grey tones and blacks. The colors were missing, the walls should have been a light blue, the chairs a deep red. The walls had a few posters on them that somebody had brought from Earth. Each of them were greyed out as well, their colors missing like they were some ancient black and white film.
Leon looked at Joice and shook his head just slightly. “What is that? The star?” he asked her quietly.
She shrugged. “How should I know, but it does seem out of the ordinary. And I am starting to get a pretty bad vibe from that.. thing.” She nodded towards the side viewscreen, the one that still showed the image of the rotted looking star as it sputtered fitfully twenty-four light hours away.
Leon agreed. “I’m going to take a look. Samuel!” He called out to the pilot who jerked, ripping his eyes from the main screens. “Come with me, I want to check on something.”
Samuel nodded but seemed to hesitate just before undoing his straps. “What? What are you checking on?”
Leon motioned for him to follow as he undid his own restraints and floated free in the microgravity. “I’ll brief you as we go, it’s nothing too strenuous, I assure you.”
Joice gave him a cautionary look but he ignored it, the burning fear in his gut wouldn't define his actions. He would face the threat head on like he had been trained to by the UN peacekeepers.
Leon reached down and grabbed his helmet, no sense in forgetting precaution. He drifted up for a moment before he caught hold of one of the ceiling rungs, the handholds placed to aid in maneuvering around in microgravity. He used it to send himself towards the bridge airlock, his aim true as he reached it with little effort.
He checked the seals on his gloves as Samuel drifted over to him. “Okay, we are on the way, what the hell is happening here?” the man said a little too loudly causing at least one pair of eyes from the rest of the bridge crew to flick over in their direction.
Leon raised both hands in an easing gesture, keeping himself steady with a single foot. “Calm it down, we are just checking an anomaly on the observation deck. There shouldn't be any danger, but it isn’t something I wanted to do alone. Safety is important after all.” he finished with what he hoped was a reassuring smile.
It seemed to do the trick as Samuel just sighed. “Okay. Let's get it over with. What anomaly by the way?”
Leon held his comment as he cycled the bridge airlock, the large metal doors hissing open silently. He drifted inside, followed closely by Samuel. “I'll ask again as it seems you didn’t hear me, what anomaly?” the man asked with a bit more verbal pressure. His emphasis on the last word was clear in its intent.
Leon waved it away as the doors to the airlock sealed. “We are looking into a potential unknown phenomenon. The observation deck is being directly affected by light from the inner system. It seems to have no color, I wanted to see for myself. See?” he raised his arms in a placating gesture.
Samuel shook his head slowly, his hands gripping the collar of his helmet that he held. “I don’t know. Something about this system is really rubbing me the wrong way Leon, the more I think about it the more my instincts are telling me to get us the hell out of here.”
“Our mission is to explore and look for potential life.” Samuel looked utterly unconvinced. Leon shrugged mentally. It had been worth a shot anyways.
“Yeah, but our mission also involves us avoiding dangerous situations.” The outer doors opened and they pulled themselves into the core, the airlock to the observation deck situated directly below those of the bridge as the two were stacked atop each other. Samuel continued as they entered the airlock. “So I think we should get out of here Leon. I can’t explain it, it's as if there’s a voice in my head telling me to run. Run as fast as I can.”
Leon was about to respond with something deeply profound and entirely view changing, but before he could utter his sage words of wisdom the inner airlock opened.
He jerked as his suit’s geiger counter immediately began screaming at him, the clicks going from a few sporadic muted notes every second to an angry fizzing hiss.
“Shit!” was all he could think to say as the doors ground open, then his eyes looked further into the now opened room.
He felt a sinking sensation as he noticed that the entire room was indeed washed out, the colors gone and the very atmosphere drab and depressing. Samuel tapped him frantically on the shoulder, trying to get his attention. But as he looked at the man he recoiled in surprise.
Samuel’s face and suit were the same bleached color, the light’s inside the airlock were on but seemed unable to dispel the dreadful un-light. “What the fuck is going on?!” Samuel cried out over their screeching geiger counters.
Leon smashed his fist into the airlock door control, his haste to close the door robbing him of any coherent thoughts with which to respond. The doors sealed and Leon continued to stare at Samuel with wide eyes, the fear in his belly growing. The man was still grey, his skin, his hair, even the normally colorful patches on his suit.
“What is..” He tried to say before changing tact. Instead he mashed the emergency quarantine alert button on the wall panel and pulled up a link to the bridge. Joice answered as Samuel gave him an alarmed look.
Joice started to ask what was going on but he cut her off. “No, Joice listen to me. Get us out of this system immediately. I don’t care where, get us the fuck out of here now!” he said as he looked at the still mortified Samuel.
He severed the link. Samuel looked him up and down, his mouth moving a few times without sound before he managed to croak, “Y.. you’re still grey..”
Leon nodded, their geiger counters were still hissing angrily, not nearly as badly as before but clearly several orders of magnitude above the standard background level. “I know. Something is deeply wrong with this place, I am afraid we are going to be stuck in here till they get a quarantine room set up Samuel…” he trailed off as the other man looked set to break down.
Leon reached out and placed both hands on the other man’s shoulders. “Samuel! Look at me.” the younger man fixed his muted grey eyes on his. “We are going to be fine, I can’t promise you any solution, but there has to be some sort of explanation for this. And if we can understand it then we can fix it, do you trust me on that?” he nodded to Samuel who nodded back.
The younger man swallowed heavily. “Yes Leon. But that was a dumbass thing to do. What were you thinking?”
Leon just nodded, his head hanging in minor shame as he let go of Samuel. “Yes. I should have been more careful, but what was I to think? Have you ever seen anything like this, has anyone? As far as I know this may be the first-time humans have ever laid eyes on a.. grey star. We had no protocol for this kind of situation, but we do now.” He added with a strong nod, his fists bunching.
Samuel seemed to shiver slightly, the man’s helmet floating free of his belt as he put his head in his hands. “What’s going to happen to us?”
Leon listened to the insistent chirps of his geiger counter, the small lock still entirely shades of black and grey. He didn’t know, he had no answer. “Well, first things first, we need to get checked out.” He hooked both his feet into one of the grip rungs along the floor and tapped the suit’s interface on his wrist. He pulled up a link to Dr. Kimathi, the line rang a few seconds before the Chaddian woman’s voice answered him.
“What is it Leon? I heard that something happened on the bridge? Is somebody hurt, what’s that noise?” the wavering tone of her concerned voice told him that she was likely already on her way towards the bridge. She continued, seeming a little out of breath as the sound of something banging could be heard in the background. “I’m on.. damn it. Oliver, be careful with that, we can’t help anyone if you scatter my equipment over half the core.”
Leon glanced towards Samuel again. He looked a bit less startled than before, though Leon would not be surprised if he wasn't at least a little frightened. After all, so was he.
He spoke into the link clearly. “Kimathi, this is important. Me and Samuel have been irradiated with.. well. We aren't exactly sure what it was. But the noise you are hearing is our geiger counters going off still. We are going to need a quarantine station, full hazmat.” He waited a second, his breath paused as he added, “Oh and Kimathi? Please hurry.”
With that he cut the link and tried to ignore his own heightened heart rate. Samuel was anchored on the other side of the lock, the normally orange light from the quarantine alert was a deep muted grey. The colors seemingly sapped away by the strange radiation the star had been emitting.
The light flashed another lighter shade of grey and Leon cocked his head. After another moment the speaker piped up, “Emergency warp translation in thirty seconds. Please brace yourselves, we are performing a blind jump.” He felt the ship shudder slightly as its massive maneuvering thrusters fired. Likely orienting the ship out of the system.
Leon tensed and looked at Samuel, the other man nodding as he gripped onto as many of the support bars as he could. Leon did the same, the sudden entrance into a disconnected realm when they jumped into warp always seemed to shock their systems.
Another few seconds, and then it happened. The ship’s gravity drive fired, surrounding the ship in an impenetrable event horizon, the gravitational field so intense it severed the ship from the effects of relativity and catapulted them away from the dying star at three-hundred-and-eighty times the speed of light.
Leon felt things shift strangely, but was unaffected by the reality bending effects of a warp translation. He cocked his head and looked at Samuel. Samuel shook his head, “Did you feel.. anything?” the younger man asked.
Leon replied slowly. “No, I didn’t feel anything.”
Samuel nodded hesitantly. “Neither did I.”
Time passed, Leon and Samuel waiting for their rescue, the only sound that of their radiation counters chirping angrily. The sounds seemed to be slowing slightly, but it could have just been his imagination too, at this point he wasn’t sure.
He was about to speak when another noise caused him to stop. A creaking followed by a loud bang on the outside of the airlock that led farther into the ship. Leon’s radio flickered with static as a voice spoke, it sounded like Joice but it was hard to be sure.
“Leon, Samuel. We have a containment room set up, please deactivate the quarantine from your side and exit into the sterile chamber. It has been lined with radiation blockers so we should be safe, but we need to get you out of that room and your suits immediately.”
Leon reached for the panel and entered his ident code to shut off the orange alert. The second it was switched off Samuel released the lock on the doors and they began to open slowly. The other room was surrounded by dark blue sheets of radar absorbent panels, these slowly faded to a dark grey blue as the radiation from the room leaked into the new space.
Samuel and Leon pushed through the open doors quickly and shut them before any further radiation could leak through. The walls remained tainted, but the color that had remained stayed. It was another moment’s work to strip out of his contaminated suit, he kicked free of it, his undergarments a lighter shade of grey than the suit had been. He wasn’t sure if that meant anything, but just for safety’s sake he stripped out of that as well.
Samuel and him, now in just their smallclothes, pulled themselves into the next chamber through some elastic door panels that would help to cordon off their contaminated clothing from their new holding area.
Leon and Samuel looked around. “Well, what now?” Samuel asked, a bit annoyed sounding.
Leon shugged. “I’m not sure, but if they are following protocol then they will likely be coming in to hit us with some anti-rad in a minute.”
Sure enough, a pair of bright orange hazmat suited figures drifted in a minute later. One of them came straight up to him and then halted a few feet away before he could make out who it was. A voice emanated from small speakers in the neck of the suit, it sounded like Dr. Kimathi to him.
She looked him up and down, her suited head giving no emotion away. “I have no idea what you did, but I can’t say I understand this condition. It’s like your color was washed away in hot water.”
Leon shrugged and took the small container she was offering to him. “I have no explanation for it either, but you should have seen what caused it.” He opened the container to see a bottle of water and a small container with some pills inside. He took them with a long drink of the water.
He frowned as the orange of her hazmat suit seemed to fade slowly, its color becoming minutely faded. Not like his, but enough to be noticeable. He was about to point it out when the other suited figure handed him a heavy blue robe. It was a lead lined hospital gown.
He glanced at Samuel, seeing the other man was already wearing one he slipped into his as well. It wouldn't do anything to help him but it would prevent him from irradiating other parts of the ship as they were transferred to medical.
He realised that he wasn’t feeling sick at all. Surely after the amount of radiation they received they should feel something off? He wasn’t sure, after all, he had gotten the doors closed in seconds of opening them.
Dr. Kimathi drifted to his side. “Okay, we are going to get you to medical. Can you manage that?”
He nodded and moved towards the exit. Samuel and the other two were right behind him as he exited it into the ship proper. A little ways away he could see many of the bridge crew as well as Chris and Chad. The two men looking curiously mortified at his grey pallid skin, he gave them a little wave before he was pulled towards the second ring’s hub.
The trip to medical was uneventful and a bit more tiring than usual. He just attributed it to his current medical situation, looking around as he lay upon a bed of soft white sheets. The monitor next to him was beeping slowly, his vitals apparently fine for the most part.
The room he and Samuel were in was one of the biological quarantine suites, the window double reinforced and coated internally to help block things like radiation and biological contaminants. Leon sat up in the bed, his surroundings lit by bright lights that did nothing to take the strange grey pallor from his skin. As he looked up towards the window he smiled, Natalia was there watching him.
He waved to her a bit weakly, his muscles now seeming to feel some effects of the anti-radiation treatment. She looked truly distraught, her face a mask of emotional pain, her beautiful hazel eyes red and her cheeks tear stained.
He wanted to get up and go to her, he wanted to embrace and comfort her. But he could do nothing as he was confined to the room. He could do nothing as she put her head in her hands and sobbed again, his heart sunk in his chest as he hung his head. The consequences of his reckless actions shown in stark relief, he had done more than harm himself. No, he had dragged the whole crew with him to his torment.
Leon felt the shame build in him and he turned away from the window, unable to watch any more of his hubris made manifest.
He closed his eyes and tried to block out the world. But no matter how hard he tried, all he could hear was the echoing shame in his mind. The repeating mantra that fueled his internal rage, the words that haunted him across a trillion kilometers of space through his dreams and waking hours alike. ‘You are not the one.’