Andromeda Rises Ch. 1
Andromeda Rising I
"It's her..." Matthew whispered at the window, his bony, white of whites hand on the hardened plastic material, fingers spread out. "I finally found you, my love."
Tak was simply watching the display with a certain shiver down his spine. He shifted in his seat, the aging leather piece creaking against his weight. "You ready to pull her in, captain?"
Matthew remained silent. He gently stroked at the plastic. His long red hair was pulled back in a pony tail that reached below the shoulder blades, and his thin frame barely seemed to be able to support the jacket and black pants the Eternal wore. Just outside the ship there floated the body of a woman. She floated like some terrible apparition, her long red hair flowing around her head, swept back from the force of the vacuum that drew her out of an airlock so many centuries ago.
"Captain?" Tak asked, wanting this creepy little moment to be over.
Finally, Matthew turned towards Tak. His hollow cheeks and sharply defined jaw bones were almost skeletal in nature. His red-iris eyes were terrible to look at, and yet his body had a youthful grace it had carried for nearly two millennia. "What is it, Tak?"
"Should we bring her in?"
"Her? Her name is Elizabeth," Matthew said in an odd little whisper, whipping around suddenly to stare at her. "Oh Lizzy, I have missed you so much," he said, his voice choking up. Matthew turned towards the back of the bridge, passing his chair at the head of the three seats and then between the navigation and pilot chair, the latter of which was filled with the hulking girth of Tak. He roughly twisted the wheel for the doorway and threw it open, shouting behind him, "Turn Persephone around!"
Tak turned in his chair towards the control panel, his belly rubbing against the edge of the countertop-style controls, and his pudgy furred fingers punched in the commands with a certain grace that seemed unusual for the obese rodent.
Matthew could feel the ship's gravity compensators reacting to the movement of his ship. He stopped by a hatch in the floor, kicking the foot plate beside it. The hatch opened with a hissing sound, and Matthew descended the ladder to Storage Deck 1. Once his feet hit the steel scaffolding that surrounded the outside rim of the cavernous cargo bay, the lights came on. The whole cargo bay filled with light. Above was the lower hull of the main part of the ship. Below, a huge expanse of space could be seen with steel walkways encircling it in an ever-narrowing pattern towards the bottom of the cargo bay. At the bottom, stacked perhaps three stories high, were the supplies for the Pelican-class cargo ship, named as such because the fuselage, or "beak," had a large, pregnant-belly shape cargo hold hanging beneath, reminiscent of a pelican's bill when viewed from the side.
Matthew began walking around the long walkway around the upper rim of the cargo hold towards the airlock at the rear. Hanging from the top of the hold were several cables and scaffolds of varying types and with differing kinds of straps specifically designed to carry planet-based vessels for trans-planet shipment.
Once Matthew was in the anteroom to the airlock, Tak had positioned the ship so that Lizzy was positioned right outside the airlock door. Matthew could see her as he entered the airlock, a small semicircle of windows revealing her frozen face of shock.
"Ready when you are, cap," Tak said over the intercom. Matthew hardly seemed to take notice of the disembodied and crackling voice. He took firm hold of a bar over the airlock door, slipped both feet into rings bolted on the floor for stability, then punched the emergency release button.
Wind raged around Matthew's ears, howling loudly as the lock opened up on empty space. His free hand whipped out, grabbed the woman by the shirt, and pulled her in quickly. The air had barely finished escaping the lock before he already had Lizzy on the floor and was hitting the emergency release once again, closing the hatch. The chamber refilled with fresh air immediately, and Matthew knelt beside the frozen corpse.
What happened next would have been a miracle of medical science when Matthew was a young boy. The color started coming back to Lizzy's cheeks, her body warmed, and suddenly her body jolted itself back to life. She drew in a long, sharp gasp, and then screamed.
"Where am I?" Lizzy croaked. She was just now waking up after over a day of being purposefully held in a drug-induced sleep. It felt like the mother of all hangovers was growing in her head.
"You're on board my ship, Elizabeth."
Lizzy tried to sit up, but as she did so, the pain that shot through her body was too excruciating.
"You've still got some damage to your body, you need to rest until the nanites have fully amassed their numbers again."
Lizzy didn't even know what the hell nanites were, much less who was talking to her. "Slight damage? I feel like I got hit by a truck."
"More like ejected from an airlock and forced to float in space for fifteen hundred years, but generally, you're going to be feeling it for a few hours more."
"Ejected? Into space?" Lizzy said. This time she did sit up, and fought the urge to puke as she did so. In a shadowed corner stood the man who was talking to her. Medical equipment surrounded her in a smallish infirmary. It all seemed so alien, however. The technology did not look familiar
"How much do you remember, Lizzy?" The man in the shadows asked.
Elizabeth thought about it. She couldn't quite put anything together. Scrambled images, vague thoughts came to mind. She remembered her grandmother catching her as she jumped into her arms. She remembered a boy from her school she was crushing on named Aaron. She remembered a college party. Anything after that was black. "I remember I was studying journalism at NYU."
The man sighed heavily. She could see his hand come up to his face, rubbing over his temples. "It seems your brain damage was far worse than I thought. Your scans showed significant synaptic damage in your memory center before the nanites could repair it.
"What's that mean?"
"It means you may not ever recover your memories, that's what," he said. His voice sounded a little snippy, and Lizzy found herself wondering who the hell this guy was and what her recovery meant to him.
"And you said fifteen hundred years... How is that possible?"
The man stepped forward into the light, and Lizzy gasped at the sight. His slightly open mouth showed up a set of pearly white fangs. She looked at this bony frame, his white skin, his red eyes and hair. She wanted to scream in fright, but felt like she would pass out from pain if she did. "What the hell are you?" she managed to choke out. "What is this?"
Matthew picked up a mirror and pointed it at Lizzy. This time, she did scream. The red-haired and eyed Eternal fainted and fell back onto her examination table.
Just then, Tak entered the room. Having heard the scream, he looked down at the passed out woman that had been floating like a chunk of ice outside the ship only a day ago. "Didn't take it too well?"
"She doesn't remember shit," Matthew half-growled, punching the wall hard. A huge dent formed where his hand it, but he also staggered back from the pain of the impact. His broken fingers reformed again, and the excruciating pain surged through him, finally abating after several minutes.
"What now?"
"Recap everything when she wakes up. Explain the history of Eternals and half-breeds. I'll be getting us home as soon as possible."
"You don't want to watch over her? I mean hell, cap, you've been obsessing over this woman for well over a thousand years."
"She's not the woman I knew when I lost her," Matthew sighed. Despite the youthfulness of his look, he looked like he had just aged fifty years. The defeat in his face was almost too hard to look at. Almost. Tak still got creeped out by the sight of him.
Matthew strode out, leaving Tak with the unconscious Elizabeth. A few minutes later, she came to. When she saw the fat half-human, half-rodent hybrid sitting on the examination chair, she screamed and passed out again. This was going to take a while, Tak realized.
In a system not very far from the so-called "north" end of the Horse Head Nebula, a planetary defenseman sat idly at his post, reviewing requests for dock between the only three or four ships that bothered to come out to this station. The young white lapine was seated at his planetary defense post, wearing a uniform that wasn't quite up to code. He routed them to their respective trajectories for landing at the one or two major cities on the planet, then leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes. The cadet did what he usually did at this point, and fantasized about what he would have been doing had he not joined the interplanetary defense forces. Or perhaps if he just could've avoided pissing off a certain high-ranking officer by screwing around with his daughter and then breaking her heart. He wouldn't be hovering over this lame excuse of a terraformed planet. He probably would be lounging back home on Hithos instead of being caretaker for a crappy mining planet.
It was just as he was dozing off that the station he was on suddenly rocked violently to one side, throwing him from his chair. The alarms were screaming immediately, and he rushed back up to the counter, his right shoulder dislocated, to see what the hell was going on.
A massive singularity was suddenly forming only a couple thousand miles to starboard. Just as the base started to strain from the effort of not getting drawn in, everything was suddenly thrown to port as another singularity formed, this one another couple thousand miles to the other side.
Then, by some mercy of the powers that be, the station stabilized, and the cadet managed to get back to his chair, his entire right arm aflame with agony. He used his left hand to pull up the monitoring systems. The cameras of the station kicked on, but all he could see to either side of the station were two solid gray walls. He scrambled to pull up the entire network of protective equipment, looking towards the phenomenon. It wasn't until he cycled through the images from observation equipment hovering over the planet's moon that any of the cameras were far enough away to see what was going on. Two massive ships had suddenly appeared to either side of him, both of them in the shape of tapered crosses. The cadet gasped, activating every defensive system he could. Before so much as one shot was fired off, however, the entire works, planet and defense networks were rendered ineffective by molecular disintegration.
Just as quickly as the two alien ships appeared, they disappeared. Fortunately enough, the cadet, along with the several hundreds of thousands of planet inhabitants, didn't feel a thing. Unfortunately for the moon that depended on the firm grip of its parent planet, it was flung towards the black spot in the heavens that marked the top of the horse's head of the Horse Head Nebula. Ultimately, it was doomed to emerge on the other side of the nebula, many eons later, diving into a hellacious quasar.