I shivered as I sat on the medical bed, refusing to let Doc touch me or even dry myself off. It was too much. The sensation of touch just from my limbs touching anything at all felt like something foreign. Something overwhelming. Sitting on the bed itself was already such a strange sensation to me.
Close to 48 hours. That had been the longest that I’d ever consecutively stayed inside of the core module. I stared at it, wanting to jump back in immediately, but my hunger was almost unbearable now that my physical senses were waking up again. I knew that at the very least, I had to eat something before I returned to the comfort of the void. And to do that, I had to regain at least some semblance of my tolerance for any of my senses.
It felt surreal to look around with my eyes and see the same layout as I did with my eyes closed again instead of the emptiness my mind had come to expect. Hearing things without the aid of sensor arrays was odd too. It was always overwhelming for a short time after I was expelled from the core module, but this was another level.
I flinched when I heard Doc’s voice, the sound piercing my ears “This is why we do it every day.” He scolded. It definitely wasn’t helping that the data stream had suddenly gotten busier than usual, flooding my mental vision with scanner data. I’d told Aisling to warn me when she was doing a long range scan, but I supposed that this was payback for the disobedient AI gag I pulled.
“Shut up.” I muttered as quietly as I could manage, pushing the data aside. If Aisling wanted to see what was going on at Luna, she could be the one to look it over. I was trying, but it seemed that coming back down to physical reality after spending so long in the void was a difficult endeavor, especially distracted as I was now.
He set down a towel next to me, giving me a pitying look as he stepped back and sat down. He spoke again, but in a mercifully softer tone “We can’t do this every time. I’m going to have to insist on a regimen to acclimate you back to reality. Maybe I can ease the transfer a little bit better.”
I closed my eyes, checking in on the prisoner. Thankfully he seemed to be cooperating, so I returned to my bed in reality “How are we going to do that?” I asked quietly.
“For one, you have room in there to stretch your body. I’ll have to give you some exercises you can do in zero gravity. I might be able to install some hardware for activating your physical senses. Maybe some earbuds. Nothing permanent or invasive.” He started clicking away at his terminal “I’ll think about how to do it. There is some coding I won’t be able to do on my end that I need you to do though.”
“What you mean?” I asked, slowly beginning to acclimate to sound again after listening to Doc’s gentle words for a bit.
“I mean I had an idea. It’s the psionic damper.” He said slowly. I really didn’t want to think about the damper right then. I could tell by his look that just the mention of it had increased my heart rate. “Now I’m not saying you have to use it at all, that’s on you. But I think that a lot of your apprehension about it comes from the fact that you have very little control over it. I don’t exactly understand the structure of it since I can’t just look at your brain as if it were a computer, but what if you built an escape sequence? Might that be possible?”
I hadn’t considered it before. I was locked out of controlling anything while I was under the damper’s influence, but if I had an internal killswitch… if I could end it whenever I pleased, then he was right. It wouldn’t have to be as scary then. It would be a compromise on the security it guarded against, since I would have to make sure I didn’t end it prematurely, before the deadly psionic shock had passed in the case of its intended use, but it would give me the option to end it before its full programmed duration had expired. I nodded slowly to Doc “I’ll… try to figure it out. Thanks for the idea.”
He nodded and watched as I reached a hand out for the towel, flinching as the cloth brushed my skin. It was still too much. “Take it easy. You got time until dinner.” He reassured me. I nodded and closed my eyes to check on the prisoner again.
—
Fifteen minutes passed, and I was almost beginning to feel like a human being again. I’d managed to dry myself off with some careful effort, and I’d put on my leggings. The shirt was giving me trouble since it was so loose and the feeling of it fluttering against my skin was more than a little irritating “I’m going clothes shopping with my share of this job.” I muttered.
“Doubt there’s gonna be much to go around. Because of how long we were idle, I know that we had to go through most of our emergency fund resupplying, fixing the ship, and well… frankly, outfitting you. So this is catch-up work. Not much is going into our personal funds from this. You’ll probably have to wait till we finish the next one before you can start making luxury purchases.”
If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
I groaned. I supposed it was worth it, given the high end parts I’d gotten, but it was still disappointing to hear I wouldn’t be getting much of a paycheck out of this. “How’s the pay under normal circumstances?”
Doc gave a quick laugh “There is absolutely never anything normal about crewing Theseus. But yeah, usually she’s quite generous. Captain’s not in this to make money.”
I had to wonder what he meant by that “Does she not take a cut?” I asked, surprised.
“Well, yeah, course she does. Just it’s not any bigger than anyone else’s. Long as the ship’s outfitted and she’s got a bit set aside for when we run into trouble, she’s perfectly fine to take as much as the rest of us for herself.”
It was a little hard to believe that. In many ways, she was competent, if not fantastic, in most facets of this life. She had charisma and knew how to handle herself in combat. She understood her ship very well, and understood the people she interacted with. Sure, she was surrounded by people that were arguably more skilled in much narrower fields than she was. I knew I couldn’t ask her to perform complex computer management tasks like I could, for instance. But being the owner of the ship and the handler of our contracts, it was hard to imagine that she wouldn’t at least try to claim a greater portion of the funds. I wouldn’t even have blamed her for it if she did. “So what does she do this for then?” I asked.
“Careful where you tread on that topic.” Doc warned “Aisling doesn’t take kindly to people poking around about it. I only know that she and Ray started this whole business together, before I learned better than to keep my nose out of places it doesn’t belong. Captain’s a closed book and she very much wants to keep it that way. Respect her privacy on it.”
I nodded “I guess if it’s that important she keep it secret…” I said reluctantly. If anything, my curiosity was piqued, but Aisling was a really good captain who’d earned my respect and the respect of the rest of the crew very easily. She treated us as equals, and she knew how to lead. I supposed that was all I really needed to know, but it was still going to nag at me.
I felt brave enough to put my shirt back on and try my hand at standing up after that. With some help from the bed and the wall, I was able to get to my feet. Doc came to help me walk toward the door, and soon, he was guiding me down the stairs. I couldn’t lie to myself, actually moving around did make me feel a little bit better. My body celebrated actually being used as it was intended, even though I was exhausted by the time I was in my seat at the table.
Ray turned from her cooking to look at us coming down the stairs and frowned "Mm… Meryll, you're not looking so great."
"Not feeling so great either if I'm being honest,” I said as I rested my back against the chair, feeling a tingle up my spine from contacting it "How do you stand something like hibernation for a week and you're perfectly fine? And fuck, is that stirfry? Oh my god i love you."
"Because I take the time to stretch coming out of it, and I take care of my body otherwise." She smiled, taking the praise for her cooking in stride “I’m glad you’re starting to get an appreciation for home cooking.”
Joel walked in from the stairway and gave Ray a nod "Smells good." And then he turned to me "You enjoy the show earlier?" He asked.
I was too disoriented for Joel’s shit right then. "What do you want from me? Should I have plowed Theseus into the ground so I could shoot at them with starship cannons in atmosphere? I gave you intel." I was honestly starting to get tired of his jabs.
“You did fine.” Joel admitted, getting a surprised nod from me “Just didn’t really do much to prove yourself.”
“Feel like that’s about as close to a compliment as I’m ever gonna get from you.” I muttered “We know I was probably never actually a corpo anything now, you know. You can quit it with the hate.”
“Maybe not.” He shrugged “But you still had the mindset of one. You’re not as bad as I thought you could be, but I still don’t trust you.”
“Easy about digging up the past, Joel.” Aisling called as she came down the steps. My eyes shot to her tablet and with a little bit of concentration, I pinged it ‘Why do you keep him around?’ She raised an eyebrow and picked up the terminal, quickly typing back ‘Easy about digging up the past, Meryll.’ She typed back. That caught me off guard. What kind of history did those two have, I had to wonder. The captain briefly showed a look of irritation on her face, but she leaned up to take a look at the pan “Is that steak? Damn, what’s the occasion?” she asked, trying to ignore what I’d just asked. I knew better now than to pick at it further.
“A gift from our homeworld.” Ray answered. It must have been something she’d picked up from the village the previous night. “It won’t keep forever, and I figured we could use a victory meal.”
Aisling nodded, satisfied with the meal before she let out a sigh and her tone turned more serious “We gotta take a longer route around Luna.” Aisling declared suddenly, making everyone look up at her in surprise. “There’s a foundation patrol coming through.” She turned to me specifically to elaborate “They never stick around more than a day, and I’m not risking running into them, so we’ll take our time swinging around. Prisoner’s not going anywhere, and frankly, Doc’s let me know that our core could use a bit of a break.”
I glared daggers at Doc, who was trying to look away from me and pretend disinterested in the conversation. It must have been a message on their terminals I’d been too distracted to see. Doc was pretty good at getting messages around me, it seemed. “Fine. I think I’d rather not run into them myself.” I conceded “But I’ll only stay out of the core module for the night.”