Chimera 🌈 [ONC 2024]

7: Arcadia

"The ship is called the Arcadia."

Leanne entered the cockpit, only to have her voice echo through an empty room. She paused, looking around at the soft blue console decks and the wide windows. Phaethon still lay on a table, innards unceremoniously dragged out. She took a careful step around it and tried to see if Ryan had taken a seat at the controls. The other woman was nowhere to be seen.

"Ryan?" she asked, realising she did not know her surname. "Are you there?"

When no reply was forthcoming, Leanne looked up at where she imagined Valkyrie to be located and asked, "Where is she? What has happened?"

"She is in the canteen, Miss Ziegler," Valkyrie said casually, with exactly the same tone as she had when telling Leanne of the ship's true name. She, Leanne thought. She had just considered Valkyrie as 'she'.

"The canteen? Where's that?"

The canteen turned out to be down one of the many spiralling corridors which Leanne had passed earlier. It was a small space, bathed in clinical white light, with a circular table in the centre and short kitchen islands surrounding the walls. Ryan was tinkering with one of the many machines as Leanne entered. Finally, here was something familiar. No matter this ship's origin and identity, it still had the same processed food as every other station Leanne had served on. She read identical labels to on Helios and Endymion and Wells: dried cereals, pastas, fruits and nuts, rice, pureed goods, anything long-lasting, easy to rehydrate, and able to store simply.

"I got the coffee machine working," Ryan announced with a smile. "I can't guarantee what it'll taste like but it's a start."

"I found the entry to the centrifuge," Leanne said, feeling as though that statement came across as trying to one-up Ryan.

"You did?"

"And the name of the ship. She's called the Arcadia."

"The Arcadia," Ryan repeated. "How very idyllic. It beats the BASE's nickname of the Chimera, for sure."

Leanne slowly came into the room and approached the coffee machine. Ryan indicated her to start it up and she did, realising suddenly how thirsty and hungry she was. The adrenaline of the past thirty hours or so had barely allowed her to think of more than her survival. The smell of fresh – or 'fresh' by space standards – coffee made her yearn to sit down and indulge some of her other needs and simply to get off her feet for a moment.

"You go sit," Ryan offered, as if reading her mind. "What do you want? Soup? Pasta? Rice? This dried meat-looking stuff?"

"I'm vegan," Leanne said, "so pasta would be good."

"I don't think it really is meat," Ryan replied.

Leanne took a seat at the central table and watched the Martian woman get to grips with the food and drink dispensers. She could not understand her and her kindness. Leanne had been nothing but abrasive to her and her culture but it barely seemed to unsettle Ryan at all. Instead, she brought her rich-scented coffee and a dish of pasta she had made with some kind of tomato-based sauce, or what looked like it, anyway. Regardless of aesthetic though, it was delicious. Leanne had never tasted space-made food so flavoursome. Perhaps that was Ryan's doing, or perhaps that was whatever technology this ship had.