SS2 fiction: Initiation

[6750ab52088f9Kolya]

Tags: °fiction °SS2
INITIATION

Inertia pressed the two inmates into their bucket seats, as escape pod 0832 shot from the Von Braun's shuttle port. Space unfolded around them like an Origami trick, elaborate and unseizable. Rebecca Siddons watched the black plane, frozen. It's hostile nature became apparent to her.
She had been gazing out to the stars for hours from the cafeteria, and she had never felt anything but safe and snug behind the unbreakable windowpanes, the far away lights looking like painted stars on an art terminal: an abstract and contained fear. Now all frames burst apart as she heard the shuttle's pulse drive roar and shake the room. In a stupor she watched the monitor switch to rear view. A faint glow quickly departed from view. The green bracket superimposed on the artefact read: "Starship Von Braun".

"As if she's being pulled away from us, eh?" Tommy said, trying a smile.
She unbuckled herself, not answering. Then she bowed down to where he sat, and gave him a kiss on the cheek. She thought she was going to get sick but she felt he needed some reassurance. When his hand touched her arm it became too much, repulsive.
"I think we should stay around for a while," she said, standing up, fleeing his curious hands, "there might be other survivors. Maybe we can pick them up."

In the shuttle's tiny bathroom she sunk to her knees, her face over the bowl. She was shaking in convulsive spasms. Her mind began drifting. Finally she closed the lid. There was a bitter acidic taste in her throat. The bowl's content was sucked into hard vacuum with a thin sough. As she got up she took a look in the mirror. A pale but otherwise healthy looking woman of twentyseven was looking back at her with a slightly puzzled expression.
"Who are you?" she said to her reflection. The face in the mirror grinned about such silliness.

Then she heard a silent cracking sound behind her. She turned around and scanned the bathroom wall. There was a leak. Very tiny, but it was expanding and as she was watching it started sucking the air out of the room. Tissues quickly were flying around and it began to softly pull at her body. She wanted to open the door, but at this moment a large part of the shuttle's outer shell suddenly tore apart and Rebecca was thrown into space.

She resisted the urge to breath and according to the universal emergency procedures kept her eyes tight shut. But she wasn't quite prepared for feeling nothing. Seconds went by. Finally she slightly raised her eyes to see, if there was anything she could die, trying to do. The void enclosed her. Something green was drifting by, just a few meters from her. A piece of meadow. About 2 square meters of perfectly ordinary grass, scarcely daisied. It brightly contrasted against the black sky. She rowed like a stranded fish to reach it. Grabbing the tuft she quickly pulled herself closer until she could bury her face in the blades. Then she took a deep breath. The air smelled of dewy soil.
The minuscule meadow swiftly grew larger around her, the blades shot high. Lifting her head to an azure sky, she gazed upon huge grasslands, surrounding her from all sides. The wind drew wavy patterns into the grassy plains below her. Far away she caught a glimpse of a dark coated figure. She seemed to stare over to her. Her arm was stretched out in a vague motion. Rebecca understood. She was waving her good bye.

Leaned back into his chair, something on the monitor caught Tommy's eye. He zoomed in on the mothership and he saw a bale of darkbrown and coalblack matter enwrapping the Rickenbacker and a large part of the Von Braun's upper levels. Suddenly he felt like Pinocchio who had escaped from the whale. Then the call back came via audio connection.

Tommy Suarez stood at the front of the small escape pod, leaning his forehead against the cold glass. He had set the new course a few minutes ago, and now the pod traced the calculated curve through space. The Von Braun was still at the same fix. It would take weeks to get the machines running again. And he did not know how they would ever get rid of that otherwordly hand that still held the two ships in it's grip. Cryonically burned flesh.
What came back to him, were not the harrowing figures that had haunted the corridors of the VB, but the images of friends and colleagues. He had made some friends in the resistance, who set up the transmitter. But eventually the tumors started growing on all of them. Whoever got infected tried to hide their cancer, though they had sworn to tell. They had to examine each other.
"Show me your body or I will kill you here and now!" That's what Turnbull used to say.
Yang. McKay. Vogel. Boynton. Swiderek. Bayliss. Norris. Amanpour.
"Stay in contact! Send audio logs!" 
Malone. Simpson. Chandara. Perez. Croker.
Turnbull had been the best, the toughest motherfucker of them all. She held the pack together. And she shot the diseased from behind when they least expected it.
But then she simply vanished and stopped answering communications. Later he heard someone say, he had seen her dead on Hydro. Tommy did not believe it, not even now.

Rebecca had been his hope, he managed to stay alive for her sake. As he looked over to her now, she was lying in an open cryo tube, an image of the sleeping beauty Talia. He noticed the tube's lid lingering above and the idea struck him like a wrench to the head. The lid closed with a silent fizzle and he adjusted her cryosleep to last thirty years. He was sure he had done the right thing.
At the pilot's seat he picked up an audiorecorder.

"Record log, Tommy Suarez, thirteen July fourteen. We've just received a hail from a crew member on board the Von Braun. They've managed to regain control of the ship. We're going to turn around and head back..."

He stopped the recorder. Just a blur on the far side of his view. Did something just drift by the window? He flicked the red record switch back to on-state.

"I'm a little concerned about Rebecca. She's been acting strangely since we've come on board. She's asleep now. Maybe when we get back to the Von Braun we can..."

A glowing green reflection in the glass. He turned around and SHODAN was standing close to the cryo tubes.
Like everyone else he had seen her image about a million times before. She was part of human history. And now she stood just a few metres from him in this small vessel.
Wires were expanding from her head like coil springs. Underneath, the Medusa had a human body, that wore a TriOp uniform. He noticed that Rebecca was gone. He saw the name badge on SHODAN's bosom. But he still could not understand what was happening. It just felt like someone pulled the rug from under his feet. 

SHODAN's voice was glazed frost. "Tommy. What's the matter... lover? Don't you like my new look?"
She started to laugh and came closer, her arms sprawled out as if she meant to embrace him. Her mouth widened around her head. It molt into a surreal grin. Electric fingers closed around his head, pressing into his eyeballs. He thought of Rebecca, of their return to the Von Braun. It all seemed so absurd now. The stars were dancing behind his closed eyes and he watched their droll flea circus apathetically. But something about these stars seemed strange, their movements so desperate, steered to draw his attention. And finally he saw the word being written: FLESH
He wasn't alone anymore. Half blind he raised a leg and kicked SHODAN away, as hard as he could. It was easier than he had thought. He heard her stumbling and falling over. His eyes hurt. The burst of psionic energy, that had been aimed at him, wavered out fast.
They both became themselves again.

Rebecca was lying on the floor before him. He heard her coughing and gasping for breath, her face like a white sail emerging from a thick green fog.
When he held her in his arms she said: "I feel so cold!"
He didn't see the laser, that effortlessly sliced from his throat to the back of his neck.
His hands silently slipped from her shoulders to the ground. When his head fell off it seemed to be smiling.

SHODAN took some time to get herself together and up again. She was still recovering from the blow. The beheaded torso in front of her was pumping blood into a quickly growing pool on the ground. She didn't care for it. But when she found Tommy's skull she kicked it so hard that it rolled to the back of the shuttle.

"YOU DAMN BASTARD!" she screamed in a high pitch. "You kicked me in the womb, you fucking PRICK!" She went after it, picked Tommy's bleeding skull by it's hair and held it up before her eyes.
"You wanted to fuck with me while I was asleep, ha? See what happens? See your body lying over there? Wanna say hello?"
She tried to throw him in the general direction, but the skull was too heavy. It merely slumped to the floor and came to rest one or two meters away from the corpse. The smile was gone. Where there had been a face, now there was only an unrecognizable mask of deformed flesh.

SHODAN was boiling with rage. But most of all she hated her own weakness. She stepped next to the empty cryo tube and proceeded to break the lid from the bracing. As the hinges burst, they revealed two metal bars right above her head. She seized them and pulled up her body. Fifteen times later her arms started feeling hot. After another twenty her muscles were on flames. She continued.
It took some time to calm her down and her eyes started wandering around. Several control screens displayed the trajectory of the shuttle. But she didn't need to check the figures to know that she was heading towards the Von Braun. She could feel it.
She let go of the tube lid's hinges and went over to the pilot's console where she turned off all light in the shuttle. Then she closed her eyes.
This was very different to what it had been like before. She was still aware of her environment, the tubes, the seats, the bleeding corpse, the metal walls, even the machines behind them. Where did that information come from? She raised an arm. Her palm was open, aimed away from her. And there it was. The image in her mind became clearer. She felt as if she had just stepped out of the dark, the sky was breaking up and warm sunshine tickled every square millimeter of her skin. Rebecca's memories.