Against the Tide - A New Elysium Story [Complete]

10. Adrift

Images whirred through her side of the mind, vague pictures and ideas of horrific scientific experiments, drawn from a wild mixture of memories of the Butcher's lab and even worse places they had been to, and fictitious tales. It was an exaggeration, he knew, but it didn't really make it any less terrifying. The kind of horrors she could conjure up in the blink of an eye never failed to take him by surprise.

They would take us apart, just to see how we work. And then they'd kill us, like any other aug.

What about our friends on New Elysium then? He asked. Why not tell them? It's a place for people just like us...

Friends? She repeated the word, turning it over in their mind like an alien artifact of an impossible geometrical shape.

She scraped her fork through he leftovers on her plate in silence. Lars tried to peer behind the veil, but he was hesitant to do anything that might upset her. After their talk last night, he could sense that she was better, but she still wasn't exactly well. There were too many chasms on her side of their mind to bury them all in a single night.

New Elysium is a place for outcasts, she said. Misfits. A sanctuary for the persecuted, yes. We'd fit there perfectly, except... it is a place for anybody who has nowhere else left to go. So we're not like them. We don't really belong to New Elysium.

She stood up, patted Rutherford on the smooth hull of his body and muttered a thank you before she left and made for the bridge.

We don't belong in a place like that, she continued, but that's okay. Because we still have places to go. We have a whole universe left to go. And I won't let myself be locked in a cage and spend the rest of my days licking Mad Jack's boots so he will graciously allow me to fly a ship for the fleet. Oh no.

Places to go? Hm... Lars mused. So where would you like to go now? I take it you don't want to return to that cage yet, even only for a visit.

She shook her head almost imperceptibly. No.

She didn't elaborate, but he sensed that she continued to move around ideas on her side of the mind.

They found the bridge empty, Heisenberg was probably somewhere in the ship's armory tending to his massive collection of weapons. He could feel Null relish in the silence for a moment. Rutherford hadn't connected back to the system yet. The engines were on low thrust and except for their quiet and soft hum it was as calm on the bridge as in the dead of space outside.

She plopped down into the captain's chair and crossed her legs and arms, staring at the view outside as if it held the answer to an unspoken question. Lars could feel her thoughts whirl about around him, but they were strangely illegible to him. He felt a pang of a strange, incorporeal pain at the thought that despite their long talk last night, she still was withdrawn into her own space. If he had been in control of the body, he suspected he would have felt it close to the human heart.

Null, I think we should talk, he began.

We're talking now, aren't we?

I mean we should talk more seriously, he said.

Using the sight of the stars outside the window as a starting point, he conjured up images of other views of space that they had shared in the past months. They had traveled so far together, he didn't even have to show her any of his old memories to evoke a response in her any longer. He preferred their shared memories now, as seen through human eyes. He called upon a specific one now, a curious system they had passed by once, with two stars orbited by just a single smaller planet.