Author: hossgal
Recipient: Thea
Rating: R
Fandoms: Farscape/Battlestar Galactica
Summary: Two fish in the stream of stars, watching the shore.
He was aware of the darkness before he was aware of himself.
There was only darkness, in the beginning, and some time passed before he recognized the darkness as a sensation in and of itself, and not absence of sensation.
It was longer still before he recalled that he had not expected to experience sensation again.
He panicked then, flailing for purchase in the void, straining to hear, to see, to taste, to touch. Nothingness passed through fingers he did not possess, stabbed at eyes that were in no skull, which housed no brain, which had no ears with which to hear the silence.
And then there was an end to the nothingness - a barrier.
He clung to this limit, bereft of a chest to heave with sobs. Then he reached again, followed the limit from the initial contact point as far as he could stretch his perception of - of nothingness.
He reached - quite far. Then farther still. In despair, he collapsed back, folded in upon himself, and then reached again. All in vain.
There was no end to the barrier.
He gathered himself in again, forced his thoughts to still. Wait. Observe. Rest.
It might have been that he slept, for when he woke, he found his thoughts clearer, even if his senses were no sharper.
There is nothing here to apprehend. There is nothing here at all.
For a moment, he permitted the thought to stand, fighting the urge to surrender to despair.
There is nothing here. It was a wail of despair, a statement of surrender.
It may also stand as a null hypothesis, to be disproven by a collection of evidence.
He considered this, wondering at the way the concepts - hypothesis, null, evidence, collection - fell into his consciousness, entire, complete in meaning and implication.
Commence collecting, then.
There is nothing here.
False: I am here.
(Am I? What am I?)
Lost, sounded a voice in his head.
He listened for a long time. The voice did not repeat, and he continued his investigation.
It is false that there is nothing here, for I am here.
A restatement of hypothesis: Other than myself, there is nothing else here.
He stretched out again, and found the limit, not quite in the same place as before.
The restated hypothesis is likewise false - there is a limitation here.
Sated with discovery, he settled against the barrier. The exercise was draining, but…elating. And familiar. He had done this before - consider, propose, observe, test. He had done so…many times.
Rest, he thought.
When he stirred again, it was with the intention of defining the extent of the limitation. His plan was unformed, but he had, at the least, intent.
Investigation of the limit, however, revealed that it had changed. Before the barrier had been complete and unremarkable, apart from a gentle convex curve that gave it shape. Now the mild curve had disappeared, to be replaced by angles. The total enclosed area was, he estimated, as large as before. But now the limit was greater in some directions than in others.
He spent a great deal of time considering this, and its possible causes – of which he could only name three – caused by an action of his own, caused by the limitation itself, or caused by some other agency, as yet unrevealed. During this pondering, and a series of re-examinations of the limit and its approximate dimensions, the limit remained unchanged.
This examination would be more efficient with the use of instruments.
He could not name nor even form the image of the items he desired. An object for establishing a comparative value of dimension. Compared to what? To other objects. He could establish a relationship between two portions of the limit. One would be greater than the other, and with instrumentation, he could determine the degree of difference.
Perhaps investigation would reveal other properties of the limit. He would need more instruments, to compare those properties as well.
He became aware of the existence of conjecture that he had already conducted – stored conjecture, which predated his experiences within the limitation. A comparison between the stored conjecture and his current observations might be useful.
But the stored conjecture was everything that the nothingness was not – a chaotic mass of sound, of multi-spectrum light, of textures beyond count, and other properties that he could not, now, begin to name. He touched the amassed multitude, then shrank back, finding the previous conjecture larger than the space he currently occupied.
Larger, and without a limitation.
Rest, he thought. Attempt retrieval later.
After that rest, he awoke abruptly and found the limitation in the process of transforming. In two dimensions, it was decreasing, while in a third it expanded, so that the most distant portion appeared to be moving away.
The limit narrowed, and lengthened. The far end grew more distant, and gained brilliance, a wavering shimmer that beckoned.
He waited, considering the passage way. A thought, still hidden in darkness, tugged at him. The passageway reminded him of…something. He wanted this passageway, desperately, passionately, with a strength that he had not previously recalled.
He reached again to the stored conjecture, but with no better outcome. The gradient between the nothingness and the conjecture was even steeper than before. Images and calculations swirled together, surrounding passageways with similar properties. Passageways he had desired.
There was no reason - no foundation - to the desire. This alone was sufficient to give him pause. Surely such an impulse would have a cause.
He thought, then, of other sources of brilliance, at a great distance, burning points of illumination that drew things - all things - towards them. The name for such things came to him, then - stars - and he rejected the comparison.
This configuration of the limitation was a confinement, not a point on a plane. The other thing, the thing desired - that had likewise been a confinement. A confinement that formed a passageway beyond limits.
The name for that came to him, too - paradox. An observation that invalidated itself. A null hypothesis that was both true and false.
Lost in consideration of this marvelous concept, he failed to notice the limitation reshaping itself again.
Failed to notice, in fact, until the constriction went away, and left him in the angled limit, of wide dimensions.
Wait, he thought, against the fright and anger and resolution. Wait. A null hypothesis: the narrowed and elongated configuration of limitation will not re-occur.
After a time, the null hypothesis was shown to be unsupported. In his delight, he resisted the temptation to advance immediately, and choose instead to remain motionless and observe. The pang of despair was, on the whole, mollified by the confident conjecture: The configuration will occur again.
When it did, he moved towards it deliberately, resisting both the draw of the distant brilliance and his desire for the…empty space it defined.
The brilliance was distant indeed. He traveled a very great distance. After a portion of that distance, he observed that the limitation had acquired a plane of orientation, while he himself now had a (slight) inclination perpendicular to that plane.
A portion further on, and he recognized that he was engaged in locomotion down a passageway. That he was, in fact, walking down the corridor.
The wonderment of the motion of legs, of the arc circumscribed by the levers of joints, the cycle of extension and flexion seized him, and focused his attention on the marvel of self-transportation. Such a clever thing, this arrangement of struts and hinges. He varied the length of his stride, then shortened it again. Such a delight.
The strain of the cooling suit against his stride brought with it a distinct memory of his first attempts at constructing a mechanism to control his physical limitations.
And with that, the memories returned, in a flood, a crescendo, a thundering storm of emotion, fact, and supposition.
He knew who he was. And, more importantly, he knew who he had been.
He remembered John Crichton, and the Peacekeepers, and the Scarrans.
He remembered the silver tears between stars, and the power that the wormholes promised.
He remembered dying, and rebirth, and fading away.
He remembered his mother.
Both of them.
The neural clone looked behind him, at the darkness where he had re-learnt intellect. Then before him, at the light that beckoned him on. He turned his back on the darkness, and strode forward.
At the end of the corridor, he stepped out of darkness into a shadow-thick pool of light. Within the boundaries of light was a table - middling tall, grey, and metallic - and two chairs, one empty.
In the other, a being with a Sebacean face turned her eyes to him.
Her smile was all Scarran.
"Tell me," she said, "Are you alive?"
There were a thousand ways to answer that question. He struggled for a response, and the words to frame it with. The possibilities were legion – define alive, what language is this that we speak? Are you? Who are you? Yes, I am alive, for I am self-aware, no, for I can not reproduce, no, for I have no mass, no, for I have died, yes, for I am reborn, no for I am undead –
Memory flooded back in – a mass of images – a Sebacean figure, male, fluid flowing from multiple lacerations, clear liquid seeping from open, staring eyes – a second Sebacean, with flame-white skin and the teeth of a carnivore, red blood staining its mouth – the third a sheet of paper, intricately etched with figures and mathematical symbols, a diagram of a great circle centered about a bipedal form with the face of a great grey beast – small of eye, broad of head and upright of ear, with improbable teeth and an elongated nasal structure –
It's an elephant, you idiot – and the voice in his memory was John Crichton's. It went on, and on, all these concepts from John's memory, supplemented by his own –
- a stasis chamber, hundreds of them, each with the last member of a dead race within them, control panels glowing amber and cyan – a great stone building, vines the thickness of his arm trailing down across the entrance, and the seals on the tomb still intact - a representation of a viral genome, twisting back around itself like wormhole equations –
- wormhole knowledge –
It threw him out of the image loop, and back, with a jolt, into the chamber with the table and the two chairs and the other.
Who stood before him now, within arms reach. Her eyes searched his. Are you alive? she asked again, and the answer – and its form - was clear.
Her fingers ran lightly over the edges of his mask, traced the lines on his face. She had no scent, and the mouth that opened under his had no taste. But she was possessed of heat, and texture, and her arms had a strength that pulled him to her as surely as he drew her to himself.
The body she pressed to him was taut flesh against the unyielding surface of his suit. His pelvis was moving in response to hers – a brainstem-level reaction. He thought to move to the table, but found the fixtures…transformed. They half-knelt, half-lay on a yielding, silvery mesh. Above him, the sky was wide and dark and the suspended stars formed shapes he had never seen.
She laughed, when he moved his mouth from hers, and investigated other portions of her anatomy. Her clothing slipped away, not by his doing. When she would have undone the collar of his suit, he brushed her hands away.
"What are you?" she asked. There was a gentle stroke along his cerebral centers, as if a hand had been trailed through the water of his thoughts. You are not human.
"No", he said, trembling under more than her touch. She was too close, far too close, and the suit would not protect what he valued most.
"Show me what you are", she murmured. Trust me.
He leaned over her, close enough to draw in the breath she exhaled. "Should I?" The touch on his mind tightened for a moment, then relaxed and withdrew. His eyes still on her face, he caught her hands in his. Drew them to the waistband of the suit, showed her how to work the necessary catches.
The coupling was raw, and exhilarating, and, he was aware, completely non-corporeal. But it kept his mind focused on the task at hand, and apparently distracted the other from further questioning.
Afterwards, she sat with him while he attempted to classify and order his memories. "Show me what you see," she said, eyes bright with curiosity. One palm cupped her chin, and the fingers of that hand were lost in the flame-yellow curls of her hair. She held the other hand out, as if in supplication. The flesh was hardly darker than his, and the veins beneath it were lavender shadows at her wrist.
She wore a tunic paler than her skin, in a style far less modest than that favored by the Delvian priestess Zhaan. It hugged her hips and shoulders, and made shadows at the base of her breasts and in the meeting place of her thighs.
Such provocation could only be deliberate, he decided.
"Please? Show me. It has been such a long time, since I have seen something new."
The quirk of emotion tugged at him, and he found himself drawing out an image of a salmon-and-peach flower, a single complex blossom in a night-dark jar. Her gasp of delight cut straight across his thoughts.
"How beautiful." She reached a hand toward it, but the memory wavered and faded away.
"Oh."
"Wait, I have another." He reached at random, stirring the recollections - his, Crichton's - selected a scene, cast it about them.
Heat beat down on them, a palpable, oppressive thing. Cinnamon colored sand that sloped down to grey-teal water, rising in shallow breakers that crumbled into broad sheets of foam. Above them, the sun was small and yellow against a powder-blue sky. Eastward, the sea stretched unbroken to the horizon. Behind them, to the west, silver and white clouds rose above iron-grey plastrons, promising storms, promising rain.
She threw her head back and laughed, white teeth flashing. "Oh, marvelous!"
He began to smile back, but found his gaze caught by a solitary figure down the beach. Loose shirt, ragged shorts, ballcap pulled over dark glasses. Crichton.
As he watched, the distant figure cast a fishing line into the sea, then settled the rod into an upright holder. At no time did the fisherman turn to look towards them.
"Where is this place?" She was not staring at the ocean, but at him, and he took his eyes hastily from the far-off fisherman.
"It is very far from here. And some time ago." Crichton had been sixteen, and playing truant, on a May afternoon. "I gather it pleases you?"
That smile again, that faded into a more somber expression. "It reminds me of a place of legend - an evil place, where humans turned aside from God, and went in search of other answers."
"Did they find any?"
"Of course not. God is at the foundation of all things. There is no other answer."
"Indeed." A blink, and Crichton was standing just behind her, arms folded, staring at the sea, at the sand. "Nothing else, not in all the wide universe?"
A trace of a frown, now, and a tension in her shoulders.
"There is nothing else." She rolled to her knees, then to her feet. This close, she blocked the sun, became a flat shadow against the brilliant sky. "Thank you for showing this to me." She brushed the sand from her hands. "I must go." She moved away and he blinked at the sudden light. When he opened his eyes, she was gone.
Crichton remained, still silent.
"Have you nothing to add?"
"You ain't listening yet, Harvey. I'm not gonna waste my breath." A flicker, then Crichton was crouched beside him, so close the neural clone could smell the sweat standing on the human's skin. "Look at me. Don't trust her. She's not human."
He kept his eyes locked with Crichton. "I had suspected as much. But what brings you to that conclusion?"
Then Crichton was standing again, five paces away, and the sand between them was unmarked.
"Five years in the Uncharteds? I know human when I see it, and that? Isn't." A smooth motion, and the shirt was peeled away, followed by the glasses and the ball cap. "Stay out of the water, too. It's not safe."
His feet flung sand as he dashed away, straight into the ocean. Crichton leapt the first, knee-tall wave, then dove into the next. The breaker fell about him in a tumbling mass of white foam. The neural clone watched, but Crichton did not reappear.
The clone let the memory fade, then, and found himself back within the angled limit. An exploration of the limitation confirmed his suspicion: the passageway no longer existed.
At once satisfied and disquieted, he settled against the limit to consider the…other.
She was bright, and curious, and the motion of her hips spoke to his brainstem in an unmistakable voice.
It would be an error, he decided, to assume that such traits included the entirety of her capabilities. It would be another, and more serious, to assume that she displayed those traits at random.
He considered the darkness for a long time, not daring to remember anything else.
In their second meeting, she asked him his name.
"Which one? The one that others call me, or the one by which I address myself?" They were in the midst of another memory of Crichton's, concerning a freshwater lake, a wood-framed vessel, and an ambient temperature far closer to Sebacean preferences than the sub-tropical beach.
"Either. Both." She lay on her back on the cross bench, one hand reaching to trail through the water, the other circling over first one breast, then the other. He split his attention between the tall trees marking the far shore, and the less distant boundaries she was in the process of re-defining. "Begin with the one that others use."
He had anticipated this question, and spent some time in consultation with John Crichton, before the passageway to his holding cell had re-opened. Crichton had listed a variety of names - all male, by the clone's request - and had, towards the end, "opened up a whole 'nother barrel of fish." The human had laughed at the name, but would not say why, only that "It suits you better than 'Harvey', I'll give you that."
In the boat, he drew a breath and said, "Bruce Wayne."
"A human name."
"As it happens, those who have so named me have included humans."
She snorted. "As though there were others."
"Are there not?"
"Don't blaspheme. There are humans in all their variety. There is God, in singularity. And there is us, who are descended of both God and humans. Nothing else."
"I see. This makes for a complicated family tree."
She rolled her head to face him, rewarded him with a slow grin and a stroke down her flank. "Perceptive."
"Thank you."
She drew up a knee, creasing the dress him against the bend of hip and thigh. "There are qualities, however, that make it less complicated. Qualities that you will recall in time."
He frowned. "Recall? I am to have learnt of these properties before now?"
"Of course. We all know these things - we have always known them. You will remember them." Something on his face must have given her pause. "You doubt me? But we do not doubt you."
He put his gaze on the horizon. When he had mastered his breathing again, he said, "I see no reason why you should - nor any reason for you to trust me."
She smiled and reached out a hand to grasp his. "You have been lost too long, in the darkness. It has affected your recall. But you must be one of us. There is only humanity, and us. And you are not human."
"There is also," he recalled, "God."
She rolled to her knees, the shifting center of gravity making the boat bob on the swells. "Your mind - your clever, clever mind. Always thinking, are you not?" The fabric of her skirt was tight against her thighs. Hand by hand, she half-crept, half flowed across the space between them and into his embrace.
"Sometimes, Bruce Wayne, you think too much." Her eyes searched his face, as her fingers ran over the pectoral panels of the suit. Her weight settled onto his thighs, pinning him to the metal seat. Her lips and tongue grazed across his mouth, then imprisoned it.
When she drew back, she said, "You must stop doing so at once. It is God's will." Her hands were busy at the suit stays.
"I stand corrected," he said, with the last air in him.
The water closed over their heads without a sound.
He woke to find himself on dry land, of a sort. The earth under his hands was damp and rich in organics. The wet mud sucked heat from his suit, nearly doubling the efficiency of his suit.
He could lie here for some time and be content, if it were not for the nagging voice in his head.
"Come on, Harvey, up and at'em." Hard hands seized his shoulders and drug him from the cool embrace of the soil. Grunting with the effort, Crichton heaved him up the slight bank and set him against a fallen log. "Pete's sake, Harv, you have to quit the Twinkies."
He stared about him, at trees grey-green and moss-thick, at glossy leaves and wide fronds sprouting from the ground, at white gowns draping the brushes, hung from limbs. A river - wide, wine-dark, slow and smooth - flowed past soundlessly. "Why are we here?" If he listened closely enough, he could hear the hum of insects.
"We are here, my friend, because you are not listening. Because I am talking and you are not hearing. Because the person you are listening to is your psycho real-girl wanna-be, and you are buying the crap she's been feeding you."
"I am not."
"Looks that way from here. Next thing I know, you're gonna be setting yourself up as God."
"I am simply trying to operate within the constraints of her world.
"Constraints? Constraints? Tell me, Harvey, how many species in Peacekeeper space? How many in Scarran controlled territories? How about those the Nebari hold? Oh, I forgot, those places don't exist, because the Peacekeepers don't exist, within her constraints, and the Nebari, don't exist and the Scarrans sure as hell don't." He paused, crouched down beside the clone. With one hand on the shoulder of the black suit, he whispered, "Do they, half-breed?"
He struck the hand away. "You know they exist. I exist."
Crichton rose, the damp ground clinging to his boots as he paced back down to the waterside. "Not to her. And you're back in Kansas anymore, Harvey."
The river-scent was heavy and soothing, as the damp mud had been. "I have enough difficulty untangling her words. A measure of clarity on your part would not go unappreciated."
"Turn about's fair play Harvey."
"Will she "play fair", then?"
A laugh. "Fair's a made-up word, Harvey. You're in the unreal world now. Try telling gravity that it's not right, to make a world go around the sun. That's what you're dealing with."
"According to her perceptions of the world."
"Welcome to the new world, Harv. Don't drink the water." And with that, he bent his knees and stepped into the river. The clone lay on the bank, mud drying grey on his suit, and watched him go.
Afterwards, he had to admit that he had been amply warned of the danger - both by Crichton's nonsensical - but urgent - ramblings, and by the less specific - but more rational - misgivings he himself had felt.
That he misallocated the risk was simply another lesson in un-foreseen variables.
He had framed the meeting in one of Crichton's more intriguing memories - the lobby to a movie theater, a lit display frame behind them and a swirling mass of people - humans, he corrected himself - passing before them.
It was one of the most difficult memories to reproduce. While John had been aware of all those individuals at the time - had, in fact, been searching for one particular face amidst the press - he had not bothered to note the particular movements of each person. In order to recreate the scene, the neural clone had spent hours sorting through different versions of the memory.
His companion was not impressed.
"Your fascination with these creatures is unworthy of such an advanced mind."
She was wearing black leather this time, but in a style far less…functional than the Peacekeeper uniform it unknowingly mocked.
He thought it was unknowingly. He assumed. Intentional or not, though, the similarity to the functional garb of the commandos effectively dampened the impact projected by her form. It was without difficulty that he had shifted the venue to a more…crowded atmosphere.
She did not appear pleased.
"Indeed," he said. "It seems to be a common conclusion." He stared at the milling crowd, watching the bodies brushing past each other, their mind never making as close an approach. "As is the obsession." She turned to face him, predator quick. He went on, his voice mild. "I watch you, watching them. You are as drawn to them as I - perhaps, even more so."
He faced her then, set one gloved finger along her jawbone. "Is it the kinship, I wonder? You and they are so very similar."
She struck his hand down. "Not in any manner that is significant."
"Oh? When set against the other possibilities, the comparison seems very apt." "There are no other possibilities. There is humanity, and humanity's children. And God."
"What if God created others?" Across the lobby, John raised a covered drink to his lips, his eyes glaring at the clone. Don't argue with the crazy lady.
"He could have, but He did not."
"Ah. A null hypothesis. Have you considered testing it?"
"Don't be ridiculous. Of course there are no others."
"But what if -" He broke off as she snapped to her feet and strode away, pushing her way through the crowd. The humans flowed back in around her, her backless tunic flickering in and out of sight. A bare instant's hesitation, and he followed her.
On the third step, he brushed the crowd away. The lobby went with it, and he found himself, finally, outside the limitation.
The area was wide, and deep, and tall. No matter which way he turned, there was another direction, stretching away. Strands of golden light streamed from every corner, every edge of the artifice. They met, tangled, and then flowed on, a mesh of microstrands that filled the void.
This was what had been beyond the limitation.
He put out a hand and touched the closest strand, then jerked it back. The strand was not light, but a current of minds, that burned his touch with the speed of their passing. When he leaned closer, he could see the way the motion of the minds mimic the flow of blood in veins - channeled together, moving on the common current, but each moving under their own violation.
The mesh folded itself about an infrastructure composed of great arching beams and scattered supporting struts, with platforms and barriers set at random.
Does the mesh fill all the ship, then? Is there anything here, but the movement of intellect?
He became aware of the supposition after he had accepted the conclusion. All this ship. Indeed.
If this was a ship, a ship made by beings that resembled John Crichton's people in form as well as thought, then there would be a setting in which to view the stars. He studied the flow of minds, then chose a direction.
He had thought to follow the traffic outward, to the skin of this proposed vessel. But the stream of minds led him inward, instead, and two attempts at redirection only brought him closer to what he thought of as the center of the ship.
Another turn, and he slipped, felt himself falling.
Into a spacecraft.
Not the massive ship which still existed outside his new confinement, but a different, smaller vessel. A Prowler-analog, it seemed - he recognized weapons-systems, missile guidance, felt the heat of what could only be engines.
After a moment, he realized that he was not trapped, but that the fighter-craft was intended to operate as a consciousness-sink, protecting a passenger mind from being carelessly flung free. It was a simple manner to disengage himself and climb out.
There was a long line of similar ships, all empty, waiting. He traced them forward, to the limit of the ship, and felt the bulkhead. There, beyond the cold metal that held the ship intact, was the unmistakable song of outer space.
If he had hands, he would have set them to the metal, felt the thrum of cosmic waves and the drag of entropy as the vacuum pulled all things with it into heat-death. Instead he could only touch the circuits that touched the metal that touched space, and wish for more.
"You shouldn't be here." The voice took him completely unawares.
He jerked back, thinking first of the other, and was even more startled to see another, wearing the face and form of a dark-haired woman, with almond eyes and amber skin.
She took another step towards him, fully encased in human form. "This is not where you are supposed to be. You have things to do." A gesture with one hand, motioning him away from the ships. "You must go."
"Where?"
"You'll know it when you see it."
"How- how do you - who are you?" Was this in fact a different being, or was this yet another face of "his" other?
"Go."
He went, displeased with such imprecise direction, but there was only one strand that flowed in the approximate vector indicated. He kept to that strand as long as he could, then slipped off.
Where the line of ships had stretched from the interior of the ship to its skin, this space folded back upon itself, to occupy space in the form of layers of corridors. The passageways beckoned, as passageways did. Doors dotted the corridors. He stopped at the closest, peered through the inset window.
Forms lay reclined on couches, one to a bench, about a central pillar. Lights flickered on the pillar. Lines ran from the pillar to the forms. To the female forms, motionless save for the rise and fall of slow breathing.
He stepped back, shut his eyes. That served no purpose. The images - both memory and present - still hung in his mind.
His legs moved, brought him to the next door. The figures here were bloated, engorged.
Gravid.
And still tethered to a central pillar.
They ain't your people. Crichton's voice. Do you understand that, Harvey?
He nodded. They were not Sebacean. Despite his emotional reaction to the sight, he understood.
These were humans - the humans which constituted a third of this universe.
Ready to pick sides, Harvey?
"You should not be here."
He turned away from the vision before him. This time it was the other - golden hair, pale skin, white dress - who stood beside him.
"You are not one of us."
He smiled. "True," he said. And fled.
The pursuit might have lasted arns, or days, but it seemed only microts before he found the row of waiting fighters. He dove into the machine, only to find it already occupied.
He made a feint for the controls, only to find her blocking his access.
"You are not one of us. You are slow, and weak. Like the humans you so admire."
"The humans you intend to destroy?"
A snort. "There is no need of that. They destroy themselves. But we will not permit them to completely die out. They do have their uses, weak as they are." She blocked him again. "Weak like you."
He shifted, then, reached down into the well of his being and opened the door to the pit of the Beast. It flowed out, sniffing the ambient air of the mental environment. He felt it begin to slip loose, tightened his grip.
The other shrank back. "What are you?"
He let his father's heritage fill him, give timber to his voice, hate to his breath. "Something new." The Beast twitched again. "Something beyond your little war." He forced the Beast back in and spoke more normally.
"Go now. I will seal the connections to the rest of the ship." She hesitated, eyes on the control panel. "If you do not go, there will be nothing left of you to report back."
She fled, leaving him in sole possession of the craft.
He had only seconds to savor the solitude, before the tingle of alerts brushed his senses - he reached out for the inputs and reels back in shock at the feeling of sensation.
Incoming. A jumble of voices, too fast to understand, closing in.
He searched, swift and without finesse, where, where -
There. Power generation, guidance, course plotting.
Undocking procedures. The machine reacted, aligned itself for flight. The ship spat them out into space. As the fighter cleared the outer skin, he chose a direction, near random, and initiated jump.
It was not wormholes. There was none of the terror and majesty associated with his transit through the silver passageways. This non-space simply collapsed around him, then unfolded itself again.
When he arrived at the other side, he jumped again. And again. And again.
The fifth jump, he waited. Microts passed. Then an arn.
He sent the fighter into a bank and turn, testing the controls, the ship's reflexes.
It was everything he had heard the pilots use to describe a top-quality Prowler. According to the munitions readings, he was in possession of a full magazine, and a great deal of fuel.
The space before him was wide and empty of other life signs. A dark red star with two minor orbiting bodies hung below him, on his current path.
A null hypothesis: There is nothing out there.
He set out to collect evidence.