Ch. 20 -- A Warm Place
#20 of The Oroyo Arc
Shannon and her grandmother finally have it out.
Shannon could almost feel the access to the ship's control circuits crumble under her touch, as her virtual claws raked through the subroutines in the ships core. She didn't have time to target any system in particular, she just tore wide sweeping gashes in the database while the lawyer's data pad was still within range. The ship's poor Class II AI never knew what hit it.
"You idiot!", shouted the doctor, pushing the lawyer out of the med-bay.
The door slammed shut and locked, leaving the two women alone inside the med-bay. The doctor and orderly staff began pounding on the door from the outside.
"I have already died twice because of you", chided Shannon, "Neither was a pleasant experience, but I'm more than willing to do it again if it means preventing you from gaining near immortality."
"You wouldn't dare!", the old woman spat.
"I already have," said Shannon.
Alarms began sounding, as the ship's AI announced, "Primary reactor failure imminent. Abandon ship. Life support failing on all decks. Emergency decompression in..". The message abruptly ended in a burst of digital static as the interior lights fell to half brightness. The sounds of feet tramping through the corridors and much confused yelling could be heard through the bulkhead.
Wymera hobbled to the door and began repeatedly pressing the door release. "Get us out!", she demanded, "I order you to cut this door."
Even as she spoke, the noises on the other side became fewer and fainter, their sources farther away.
"I gave you every chance to change your mind about this, but you refused every opportunity", said Shannon.
"I, am Wymera Oroyo, first daughter of Antonia, mother of Lucia", she called out again, pounding on the door.
"Nice lineage, but where are they now? Frankly, I am amazed you ever took the time to breed", Shannon spat. "Or found someone you considered worthy enough to put in you." Shannon was expelling literal decades of pent up anger at her grandmother, and it felt frighteningly good.
Wymera growled curses at Shannon while she searched frantically for any kind of override for the door.
"Who is left to give a damn about you?", continued Shannon. "Blood family rejected you long ago, and now even the company has abandoned you."
Wymera hobbled back to the exam table. "You fix this. You broke it, you can fix it. Fix this, and you can have whatever you like", she demanded with noticeable fear growing in her voice.
"I cannot fix it. The last thing I did was destroy all of the access ports into the system", explained Shannon. "Even if I wanted to, I cannot get back in to fix it. Nobody can."
"Evil, petulant child, you lie!", the old woman spat as she raised her cane and struck Shannon across the face with the heavy pommel.
The hallways were chaos, with people running in both directions, each convinced that they knew the fastest way off the ship. Lost in it all was a little Raccan lawyer, still clutching his tablet as he ran, the numbers on its display slowly decrementing.
Turning a corner, he found several people all fighting to be the first one through the door of an escape pod. His small stature allowed him to dodge past the flailing arms and dive under a pair of legs, until he fell backwards into the pod. Looking up, he saw the people had stopped fighting with each other, and were now all staring at him. Panicking, he smacked the largest red button he could find with his hand.
The double doors slammed shut forming an air tight seal, and the pod ejected itself from the ship. Not being strapped in, the little Raccan was thrown against the door, his face pressed into the window, where he could see the expanse of the flagship receding away from him. He could also see other pods taking similar paths away from the vessel all along its length, as well as a few small ships escaping from the shuttle bay.
A blinding flash from the aft end of the ship, and a burst of debris radiating away from it, told him that the primary reactor had gone up. The flagship then began a slow rotation away from that explosion, as it drifted, dead in space.
As the escape rockets flared out and acceleration ceased, the little lawyer was left to float in zero gravity. He was able to strap himself into one of the empty seats in the pod as it continued to drift away. He quickly set to work, coming up with a fiction he could tell his rescuers, to explain why he was alone in an escape pod built for ten. His tablet slowly floated across the cabin out of his reach, still displaying the last number it had received before the pod ejected. '5 1'
The deep thrumming boom from a distant explosion echoed through the ship, making the whole vessel shudder violently, and knocking the old crone to the floor.
"That will be the primary reactor", mumbled Shannon through bloodied teeth, as the artificial gravity failed.
The restraints holding Shannon to the table disengaged, but the drugs in her system kept her muscles from responding as they should. So instead of a graceful leap, her body lurched up from the table, tumbled through the air and crumpled against the ceiling, hands scrabbling for any purchase they could find. She managed to get her fingers into a circulation vent, and held herself there.
The old woman, already on the floor, began to float up. Grasping a rail on the under side of the operating table, she pulled herself under it and anchored herself there, using the table to shield herself from Shannon. Her other hand, still holding her cane, waved about trying to counter her slow rotation.
Pulling herself to the edge of the bed frame, she peeked her head out to keep an eye on Shannon. "You have always been a curse to me", Wymera rasped.
"If I am a curse, it is of your own making. Imagine if you had cared, if you had been at my bedside to comfort me. I would still have died, but that would have been the end of it. Instead, it was the love of another that filled the void left by your disinterest and scorn, and gave me the strength and reason to live on."
'A love that I have repeatedly failed to appreciate or be worthy of', she thought to herself.
"It is YOU that has been a curse to my life. Despite my repeated attempts to separate myself from 'the family', to avoid having anything to do with you, or the guild. You or one of your underlings always found a way to stick your noses into my life. All culminating to this moment, at the end of your life, where you attempt to steal my body. The body you once called an abomination, and have it as your own. Effectively killing me again, though this time it would be murder rather than simple neglect."
"You cannot kill what is already dead", said her grandmother.
"Is that what you told my mother, while I was still breathing?" asked Shannon. "Since I was going to die anyway.. Is that how you convinced her to abandon my father?"
"Your mother did what she had to do, to continue the family line."
"On your orders", spat Shannon.
"Of course. I arranged the pairing of her and Weston, pity he didn't like girls, but he fulfilled his obligations as well."
"And then mother died, from the same genetic disorder that killed me", said Shannon.
"But not before she produced and heir", said Wymera as though that justified everything.
"That's all your daughter was to you wasn't it. Another contract fulfilled, another deal signed", seethed Shannon. "Peoples lives and feelings be damned, and you with absolutely no guilt."
"Everything I have done, I did for the family", her grandmother recited.
"Everything you did, you did for the company", admonished Shannon.
"The company IS family", Wymera intoned.
"No. Family is family. People make sacrifices FOR family. You have repeatedly sacrificed family for the company."
"You will never understand..." said the old crone.
"You never gave me much of an opportunity to find out, did you? And what about Dolan, did he understand? He certainly wanted nothing to do with the family, and did everything he could to get away from it."
"Dolan was a loss, I admit. He was the last hope for the family line", said Wymera somberly, as if she really cared.
"I suppose you feel bad for the crew you sent to retrieve him too", said Shannon. "All those company assets destroyed, and Weston too."
"Yes, that little bitch he married blew herself and them up when they arrived, and all with Dolan already dead. Such a waste," she said, shaking her head.
Shannon bit her tongue. At least she now knew that part of her deception was still intact.
The lights continued to dim as the emergency backup batteries were depleted. It had been six hours since any sound had been heard from outside the med-bay. Shannon wondered if that indicated a hard vacuum on the other side of the door.
The two women continued to stare at each other across the room with their bodies tucked in close to conserve heat. Holding onto whatever they could to prevent floating around the room. A race had begun the moment the auxiliary power failed. A race to see which would kill them first, the cold, or the lack of oxygen. So far, the cold was leading by a few laps, with the both of them violently shivering and their teeth chattering. The clouds of moisture from their exhaled breath, rapidly turning into ice crystals in the air.
"So after my mother died, did you ever bother to apologize to my father?", asked Shannon, her throat sore from the cold air, and from screaming at her grandmother.
"Apologize? For what?", replied a rasping whisper.
"For what? How about for forcing them to divorce, all because you blamed him for my genetic defect! Then mother died of it as well. She obviously didn't catch it from him, did she?", said Shannon accusingly.
Wymera ignored that inconvenient fact as though it did not exist. "Your father was doing everything he could to keep you alive, in the hopes that I would die, and he could install you as heir."
"You are insane. My father never wanted any of that," growled Shannon.
"You have no idea what your father wanted, or how deceitful he could be. The things he did before you were born!" said Wymera accusingly.
"I was there!" shouted Shannon. "He even offered to sign away my inheritance rights in order to pursue treatment."
"Yes, until he started talking with that dragon friend of yours," the old woman hissed.
"What? You think it was all some clandestine attempt by the draconians to usurp the Oroyo?" asked Shannon.
"It would not have been the first time they had attempted to shut us down, and with your mother giving birth to a male, that left the direct line still open for the taking," her grandmother explained. "Either way, the possibility had to be nullified."
Shannon had never considered it before, but now all of the pieces were falling perfectly into place. Shannon could barely feel the cold anymore, her body was going numb, but now an even colder feeling was creeping through her chest. The cold of unbridled hatred that threatened to freeze and shatter ones soul. "It wasn't an accident was it? You... you killed my father!"
"I most certainly did not", her grandmother replied smugly. "Weston did."
Something inside Shannon snapped. Thoughts suddenly leapt into her mind, dark images of the things she was going to do. Ideas she had never dared to entertain before, even to herself, were now front and center, fueled by her hatred and need for revenge.
Shannon screamed with rage, as she released her hold on the air vent, leaving patches of frozen skin on the metal grille. Pushing off the ceiling with both feet, she launched herself at the old woman, claws out.
She was going to tear the old woman's tail off while she lived. Then listen to her scream in pain and humiliation, until she begged for her life. Then she would take that icon of the families power, wrap it around her neck, and strangle her to death with it.
Somewhere in the back of Shannon's mind, a frightened little girl was curled up in a ball. Her eyes shut tight and her hands cupped over her ears, as she screamed for it all to just stop.
Then something struck her shoulder, and sent her tumbling through the room into the far wall. At first Shannon thought she had misjudged the angle and had impacted the edge of the operating table as she passed, but once the room stopped spinning, or she stopped spinning in it, the actual cause became apparent.
Her grandmother had been ready for her, and now half a meter of the old woman's cane protruded from Shannon's shoulder above her right breast. Its well worn silver pommel with the Oroyo crest glinting in what remained of the emergency lights.
Shannon was going into shock, her body was trying to shut down, and she had to force herself to stay awake. The handle of the cane rose and fell with each labored breath, and its sharpened tip, protruding from her back below her shoulder blade, periodically scraped against the wall. It no longer hurt, but Shannon knew better than to remove it, or she would likely suffer a collapsed lung, or simply bleed to death in a matter of seconds.
The shivering had stopped, she no longer felt the cold, only its icy bite in her lungs remained. It would be so easy to just close her eyes, hold her breath a few seconds too long, and sleep. 'Not yet', she admonished herself, not while her grandmother still lived.
Her grandmother, barely visible in the faint glow of the red emergency lights, was still moving. Either from labored breathing or the involuntary twitching of major muscle groups as dying nerves gave out. Shannon could hear her wheezing, and could see her eyes staring blankly ahead at nothing. The race was nearly over, and the lack of oxygen was rapidly catching up to the freezing cold.
"Hey", she tried to call out, but it came out as a hoarse whisper. She swallowed hard and tried again, "HEY!", she said with a slight giggle, the shock and hypoxia making her giddy.
Her grandmother turned her unblinking eyes toward Shannon slowly.
"I thought... that you should know...", she said between giggles. "That Miranda didn't blow anybody up..."
Wymera continued to stare, with only the slightest sign of confusion registering on her face.
"It was me", she said, now finding it difficult to breathe. "I beat you there... I blew it up... All of it."
Her grandmother blinked a couple times, the information and its implications slowly sinking in.
"When you see me in hell... be sure to ask me...", she said between gasps, "About Dolan's daughter."
The look of confusion on Wymera's face suddenly gave way to abject hatred, followed by a deep rasping gasp which sent her body into a fit of sputtered coughing. After taking a second gasp of air, the old woman managed a low growl which escalated into a ragged crackling scream of rage directed at Shannon. She began to cough again, her body convulsing as it tried to find the any remaining oxygen in the frozen room. Then her eyes snapped open in a look of surprised shock, her lips moved as though trying to form words, but there was no sound, and no escaping cloud of breath. Her lips slowed to a barely perceptible quiver, and then it all stopped. She was dead.
Shannon fought her own body for a few minutes longer, just to be sure. The look of shock and rage would soon be literally frozen upon her grandmother's face. When ice crystals began to frost the old woman's eyes, she knew it was truly over. 'Goodbye, Grandmother. I hope you are in a much warmer place now,' thought Shannon.
Her lips formed a weak smile as she thought of Miranda and Merissa, knowing that wherever and whoever they were now, they would be safe. Then her thoughts turned to Dro. "I'm sorry," she whispered into the darkness, as tears began to form, then she closed her eyes, and slept.