Against the Tide - A New Elysium Story [Complete]

Wish Upon A Blackstar

Twelve pairs of eyes were boring into Major Clarke. They seemed to cut through the air, stale after hours of being confined into this room, and tense with anticipation.

Finally, they were willing to listen to him. One blurry, pixelated picture had made all the difference. Part of him felt offended that his word alone seemed to be worth so little. After all, that image could have been tampered with too. The council had no way of telling if he was lying when he claimed that this woman was the culprit.

Beads of sweat began to form on his forehead, and he curled his shaking hands into tight fists. He could see the frustration on their faces, as well as a hint of lingering doubt. It mirrored his own. Maybe he had been lying. Maybe he had forgotten something, due to the hypoxia. Maybe he was not a witness – was he the culprit?

He didn't know.

All he knew was that this woman had taken control of the ship. But he didn't know how. He remembered her grin, her uncanny two-colored gaze, and that look in her eyes. She had said something to him, something important. But he couldn't remember.

He could remember how he had woken up after the woman had knocked him out. He closed his eyes and tried to recall what had happened after that.

He remembered getting to his feet, legs shaking and head spinning, and there had been this loud, drumming noise assaulting his ear drums. But it had not been the blood rushing through his veins. The hum of the vibration had not matched his own heart bit. It had been the ship. The Aphelion had been moving.

He had turned around to look out of the nearest window. Outside, he had not been greeted by the glowing guiding lights of the space port of Essandrie. There had only been the light of the stars, sparkling against the dark canopy of space, pitch black like the augmented eye of the woman who had captured the Aphelion.

~ ~ ~

Heisenberg made his way up to the bridge with quick strides.

He had no trouble finding his way. He had once served aboard a ship like this one – a Leviathan class vessel. He couldn't recall its name now, like so many other things from the time before the Purge. But that mattered little. A lot had changed since then. Most notably, his allegiance. Heisenberg had little to give other than his loyalty, and it bound him to the person who had paid for the repairs to his body. But as he walked along the corridors of the military vessel, he found a strange thought process occur somewhere within his circuits.

He wouldn't want to be anywhere else in the universe right now. And he realized, strange enough, that he had rarely before pondered about what he wanted at all.

Coming around another corner, he found Ensign Darwin sitting in the middle of the hallway, licking his paw without a worry in the world. The cat was still carrying that small harness with miscellaneous hardware strapped to it. It looked very odd to Heisenberg's sensors. Almost funny.

"I see you made it back aboard in time, Ensign," Heisenberg addressed the cat. "Very well done. The Pontifex will be pleased."

The cat looked up at him with his mismatched eyes as Heisenberg picked him up to bring him along on his way. His silent contemplation was accompanied by the cat's purr, the low hum of the ship's engines and the occasional quite clicking of a Legion droid, hidden in the nooks and crannies of the ship all around them.

As the door to the bridge slid open, he realized that something was wrong right away.

He spotted a black-and-white figure, huddled against one of the control panels, with her head hanging down and her face covered by her hair. Ensign Darwin struggled free from his grip and jumped down to run over to her, nudging her with his head. But she didn't respond to the cat's presence, or his agitated yowls like she usually did. Darwin looked back at Heisenberg and let out a meow that even in absence of any words sounded like a question.