bags and unhooked seat webbing from their place. The smaller items were instantly torn through the hole, left to drift free in space. Larger items, like the heavy weapons bag that Adam had left behind, jerked against the metal hooks holding them in place like a rabid animal.
In the cockpit, Keryn was nearly pulled from her seat as the rounds struck. The sudden vacuum pulled her taunt against the padded seat, her silver hair hanging rigidly behind her. She could feel the strong tug at her scalp as she feared the vacuum would pull her hair straight from her head. Hanging at her sides, Keryn’s arms felt like lead weights, pulled invariably toward the rear of the ship.
Fear lodged in Keryn’s chest. With her arms held at her sides and the suction drawing her body further from the ship’s controls, the
Keryn couldn’t manage a retort, even had she wanted to. The pull of the vacuum felt as though an Oterian were kneeling on her sternum, collapsing the ribcage and making it impossible to draw more than a painfully shallow breath. She could feel her heart pounding in her temples as it tried to keep blood flowing to her extremities. Despite the driving beat of her heart, Keryn’s limbs began to grow cold as the veins were constricted, cutting off a clear flow of blood. Her tanned skin was taunt and paled and her pupils widely dilated. Along the edges of her vision, darkness began to creep. As she gasped for air against the weight, the console in front of her began to waver unsteadily. She was losing consciousness and no matter how much she cursed at herself, Keryn was unable to raise a hand to close off the cockpit from the rest of the ship.
Over the roaring of escaping oxygen, Keryn heard the soft rattling as the larger items in the crew compartment strained against their restraints, pulling inexorably toward the gaping holes above them. Consciousness was ebbing quickly for Keryn. Even the Voice sounded distant as it continued to berate her; it grew murky and unclear as more flashes of light danced in Keryn’s vision. From what sounded like a million miles away, Keryn heard a sharp snap. Adam’s weapons bag broke from its mooring and was launched toward the roof. Slamming into two separate bullet holes, the contents of the bag were pulled into both. Inflexible, they jammed the punctures, temporarily blocking the vacuum and the escaping oxygen.
Feeling as though a thousand pound had been lifted from her body, Keryn took a sharp breath. The dancing lights receded and the darkness slid uncomfortably back toward her periphery. As blood poured back into her body, her extremities tingles as a painful headache spread behind her eyes. Though not completely clear of the pulling vacuum, Keryn was able to reach up weakly and push the command button on the console. Behind her, the heavy door slid shut, cutting off the crew compartment from the cockpit. With the door in place, the rest of the weight left Keryn’s body. She nearly pitched forward from the exertion and relief. Leaning forward, however, she could see the pursuing Terran fighters, sweeping back around for another pass of gunfire and missile launches.
Keryn’s thoughts came slowly, as though being passed through a thick mud before reaching her limbs for action. The Terrans would be on her in a second and the
Keryn noted the hint of hysteria creeping into the edges of the Voice’s tone. She knew the Voice was tied to the same fate as Keryn. Should Keryn die, the Voice died with her. Even in her stupor, Keryn shook her head, refusing to give in to the Voice’s demands.
Keryn shook her head again, her lungs burning badly enough that she still didn’t trust herself to speak. Was she really just trying to spite the Voice? Was her stubbornness really born out of a pettiness to be right? Difficult answers slipped away as the pounding in her temples and behind her eyes worsened.
On the monitor before her, the red dots grew closer. From the larger red dots of the Terran fighters, small missile launches were detected. Keryn bit back the tears of frustration. She had worked so hard to be separated from the Voice only to find herself in a position of helplessness, faced with the real choice of merging or dying.
Tears slid from the corners of Keryn’s eyes. “Yes,” she whispered. Taking a deep breath, she screamed into the empty cockpit. “Yes!”
The console before her blurred and twisted as the floor beneath her pitched wildly. Keryn focused on a single star, glowing in the far distance. Slowly, the white light of the star grew, expanding until it filled her vision. The brilliant, blinding white light of the star passed into the cockpit before washing over Keryn and washing away her consciousness.
All around Keryn, the world was a dusty brown rock quarry. Narrow fissures split the rock beneath her feet into tall spires of isolated stone, cutting like open sores over the landscape as far as she could see. Between the towers, the fissures dropped away into dark nothingness. Having been enveloped moments before by the imminent impact siren of the radar and the blaring warning claxon, the world in which Keryn found herself was a stark contrast. The silence was deafening. Her ragged breath sounded like a charging train as it passed her ears.
Turning in place, Keryn found herself utterly alone. The world didn’t curve slightly away on the horizon. The new world was flat and infinite, leaving only a blurred line where the split landscape met the dull tan of the midday sky. No rock formation broke the monotony of the landscape, save the narrow fissures that dropped implausibly deep into the core of the alien world.
“Hello?” Keryn yelled, cupping her hands around her mouth. The words fell from her lips, swollen with the dense air, and carried barely any distance from her before dissipating away into silence. No echo rolled back to her ears, nor was there a sound of other life on the desolate plain.
Frustrated, Keryn began walking in a random direction. She found that it didn’t matter which way she walked. There were no identifying markers that told her north from south or east from west. At first, her steps were slow and cautious, moving carefully from one stone spire to another, though the fissures were much too small for her to fall through. Slowly, though, she began picking up her pace as panic settled into her awareness. There was nothing to be found in this world. No person to whom she could talk and ask questions. No distinct markings that explained why she was here. She only remembered giving into the Voice and then finding herself here in the broken desert. Keryn feared that she had been right all along; that merging with the Voice stole your own personality and replaced it with one of the Voice’s devising. Unable to accept such defeat, Keryn began running, searching wildly for a way to escape the desert and retract her decision to merge.
“I was wrong,” Keryn yelled as she ran, her lungs once again burning for air. “I don’t want this!”
Her quick run became a sprint, her feet kicking up clouds of acrid brown dust behind her. Sweat beaded on her brow but quickly evaporated in the dry, stagnant air. Tears were already burning in her eyes as Keryn was overwhelmed with fear and anger.
“Take it back! I made a mistake!”
Keryn’s foot caught on a protruding rock spire and the pitched forward, catching herself with her hands. She slid to a stop on the stone, her knees skinned and her palms bruised from her fall. She let her head hang down, her hair cascading over her face, as she sobbed quietly.
“I didn’t want this,” Keryn whispered between her large tears.
