HMS Valediction

Chapter 10.3

I slide back to lean against the wall.

"You remember, Dean, right?" I play with the fringe of my cotton-blend gown. "He's the one you scared the shit out of that first time we met. He didn't do anything stupid to piss you off. That was me. But you remember him, right?"

John shudders down into passive resting.

"You'd like him. Most people do. I did. I still do. I really like him." We fall into silence as I remember the favorite parts of Dean that I like the most.

"I was so jealous," I say to the room again. "It's unfair that getting out of trouble was so easy for him. So easy, he made a job out of it. I wonder how he's going to get out of this one." I rest my hand on my belly.

There's nothing else to do but try and sleep. The ground, though being bare, is soft. It's as if it cushions me just slightly as I lay my hand on an arm and stare at my cellmate. "Is there anyone you love back at home?"

A bubble forms across John's open mouth. It expands more and more until it pops, dripping more orange slime on the ground. Little nuggets of his drool covered in dust litter our cell.

I close my eyes and hope that my dreams are filled with something other than the anxieties swimming around just beyond my peripherals.

The Crust—are they getting worse? What will happen if they all escape again?

The shipment—are we receiving everything we needed? It seems as though our acquisitions will be done before my incarceration is done. I'll be holding us back. Whether it's by a few hours, a few days, or a few years, I don't want to be the reason for our sluggish crawl across the galaxy. 

I groan. This was never part of the brackets – no one put their hard-earned credits on "Incarceration" when it came to the "How Will ARC10 Fare" game. Hell, it wasn't even on the board. For a second, I'm glad that that at least the winning ticket wasn't "black hole".

I close my eyes, but my brain rises with activity as if switched on by the darkness. Dreams don't appear, but scenarios I know are possible. The same ones from before launch when I thought of ARC10 on fire, Dean's retreat, NOHA's questionable existence—they all return as they do a normal part of my week. On schedule, they're never late. But this one is new.

It's ARC10, old, decayed, a mausoleum in memoriam of the people of Earth who were never able to get off the ground again. In my dream, the pieces of my ship fall off when winds rock the shell too hard. The wind sounds oddly familiar.

With a quick crack of a single eyelid, I notice John in the same place he was when I had first closed them. The irritating whizzing that I thought was inhospitable wind is his. It rattles from under him.

"Can you keep it down? Some of us aren't battery operated. We need sleep." When I try to turn over and put my ear to the ground to drone out his irritating hissing, I can still hear it beat against the ground. I hit my head against it, hoping to knock myself out enough to pass out and finally get some peace.

Nothing. Hours wheeze by with the incessant racket.

"Have you always been this annoying?" I scream at John. As I lie on the ground, my arms over my head with my biceps squeezing my head, I mourn the fact that I can still hear the noise through my own skin and muscles.

"Commander Lorn, you are the one who has been shouting at the Xani who cannot speak in return. It is not the Xani that is acting as an irritant," comes the forced, monotone voice from behind the rock wall.

I try to adjust again. The noise doesn't stop.

"Don't tell me you don't hear that too. It's deafening."