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“So . . . you’re Nalen Kress, a member of the crew who evacuated, but somehow you’re still here?” Tred asked.
Kress nodded. “In a sense, I never left. I got on a ship, I boarded and flew home, but this station . . . or rather, this system, it keeps a hold of you. I don’t think the real me even knows that part of him is here. He . . . he may be just living the rest of his life like normal. While another copy of himself is here.”
Since he had grabbed Tred, the man had been trying to calm him. It took longer for him to go out of his panic than Tred cared to admit. But eventually, he had realized that this man wasn’t the one with the gun – and wasn’t out to harm him.
The man had his head buried in his hands. “And that stranger – I don’t know his name, or even how he got the pistol, he’s been here. He corrupted the others. I saw signs early on, but they ignored what I said. By the time the man appeared to them, they didn’t even question him. They just accepted him and he slowly turned them.”
“Turned them to what?” Tred asked.
“I don’t know. But they went mad. Three of them spaced themselves – and they smiled as they did it. I was asleep at the time, but . . . I saw the recordings.”
“So you’ve just been in an empty station with that gunman this whole time?” Tred asked.
“No. It’s like we’re repeating periods of time over and over again. I’ve identified at least three sections, each lasting just a few days. I can’t keep track of anything more specific than that. It starts the same, but it can end different. Sometimes I can even get a message out, but . . . no one ever responds.”
“We can get you out,” Tred told him. “We just have to get the generators back online so we can talk to our ship.”
The man looked unsure. “How do I know that if I get off, I won’t just wake back up here? How do you know you won’t?”
Tred blanched. “I . . . I guess I don’t. But if we don’t try . . . we have to try, right?”
His words sounded weak even in his own ears.
Kress nodded. “Okay. You’re right. We have to try. We have to try and get out of here . . .”
Tred stood up slowly, hoping the man wouldn’t tackle him again. He offered his hand. “Let’s head to the engineering department and try to get the generator started again, okay?”
Kress took his hand and rose, sniffing. A trickle of blood was still coming from his nostril.
“And, um, sorry again about hitting you in the face,” Tred mumbled.
“It’s all right,” Kress mumbled, adjusting his collar. There was an emblem there, and Tred had to squint to see it.
It was an engineer’s cog, like his.
*******
“Dr. Crube, how are you here?” Pirra asked. “You’ve . . . you’ve been working off this station for years!”
The woman wasn’t that old, she realized; at least, she was not abnormally aged compared to how she looked on the training films. But she was aged in the sense of worn down; her hair was broken and twisted, its color dull. Her face was a mess, covered in dirt and sweat. Her eyes were all that remained the same; brown, bright, and alert.
“So it’s as I guessed,” she said. “I did leave.”
“Yes, but if so – how did you get back here?”
The woman was studying her. “Who are you?”
“Lieutenant Pirra of the SUC Craton,” she said. “We’re in the Terris system on a special mission.”
“You should never have come here,” the woman said. “This area is forbidden, how and why did you come in?”
“We were ordered to under a special command,” Pirra said. “We knew the risks when we came in.”
“No, you did not,” Crube replied. “Because no one would wish for this. It is an endless hell, Lieutenant. You should leave – if you still can. At least part of you will escape.”
“If I can, I will – and we’ll take you with us. It might stick this time,” Pirra replied. “But I need to know what’s going on. I found the logs of another crew member, and he said in them that you had a theory about this.”
The woman was quiet again for a minute, her eyes unfocusing, gazing off into nothing. “It just happened again. Another shift. Did you feel it?”
Pirra blinked. She had felt nothing.
“Felt what?”
The woman raised a hand, holding it out flat. “We exist within a narrow boundary of space and time. But that is not all that exists. There are higher and lower spaces as well. We used to think we could calculate them mathematically, but we were wrong. Our concepts of reality only function within this narrow band and . . . outside it, they begin to behave differently.”
“By spaces, you mean dimensions?” Pirra asked.
“Yes. Do you know what happened to the Leviathan of Terris after the battle?” the doctor asked her.
“No, honestly I . . . they say it moved inwards towards the system, but not much else . . .”
“It entered into Terris Prime, the star of the system. We don’t know why – we don’t even know why it was not ripped apart in the nuclear fires. But it wasn’t. It went into the star. And that . . . that was what truly ended the Terris system.
“Its entrance into the star caused a series of rapidly-collapsing shockwaves in spacetime itself. These waves expended their energy in a way we could not calculate, but I believe now much of it went into higher and lower dimensional space. What effect it had, we don’t know.”
She locked eyes with Pirra. “This station was meant to be positioned outside the point of those waves being a danger. But our numbers were wrong. Everything that’s been happening here, the shifts and jumps, the collision of past and present – these are the result of the station being hit by those waves. Hit by . . . and altered. It is slowly becoming more and more in tune with the oscillations of these waves, if it is not already.”
“Then why does it appear fine on the outside? We saw no indication of any of this!” Pirra said. “And why only here?”
“Because they work how they will. In all honesty, the inner system is likely safer than the outer. It makes no sense, but I have begun to learn more through every cycle, and in the ways of the warping of spacetime it does make sense. Just as a black hole curves spacetime, these waves are curving higher and lower dimensions until this region has become a trap for them, oscillating back and forth, up and down.”
The woman smiled sadly. “The station you saw appeared normal because in our plane of existence it still is. But now that you’ve been here, you, too, are slowly being brought into alignment with the oscillations. That is what happened with me, with the other crew, and with this . . . stranger. If you come fully in line with the waves, then you will never leave.”
Pirra felt panic rise in her, threatening to overcome her senses, but she fought through it. “Who is this stranger? He seems key to all of this.”
“I don’t know,” the doctor replied. She seemed almost annoyed by the question. “He’s an echo in his own right. Less real and more real than we are. He carries between every cycle, he knows without trouble. And he’s desperate. For what, I don’t know. Even if he was a real man once, his insignia puts him as a member of a starship’s crew, not on a station like this.”
“How do you know all this?” Pirra asked. “I know you’re an expert in the topic, but you’re . . .” Pirra looked around the filthy room that had clearly been the woman’s abode for days if not weeks. “You stay in here.”
The woman reached up, slowly, and tapped her head. “Every time we go around I am less me and more something else. I am changing. Some day, I might even be more. It began with the eyes . . .”
Pirra puzzled over that, but the woman spoke again.
“It will soon be time. There’s a pattern, you see, and if certain things don’t occur then I won’t remember everything I’ve learned as well.”
“Things like what?” Pirra asked.
Dr. Crube smiled at her, and pulled a gun from under her blanket.
“Death,” she said. She put the gun to the side of her head and pulled the trigger.
Pirra tried to lunge and grab it, but the woman was too fast. The round punched out the other side of her head, splattering Pirra and the wall.
Dr. Crube’s body slumped to the floor.
Pirra let out a creak of shock, falling onto her back and scrambling away.
She was shivering uncontrollably, staring at the woman’s corpse that still had upon its lips a slight smile.
She couldn’t tear her eyes away.. She had seen the aftermath of suicides before, but never . . . up close. Or in real time.
Training, more than anything, let her push through the shock.
Crawling over, she checked the woman’s body for a pulse, as she knew she should. But there was no pulse, and frankly she’d have been terrified to find one.
The gun was still in the woman’s hand. Pirra knew that she was going to need it.
Taking it, she wiped off the blood and stood up.
She still didn’t know what was going on, not really. Just the words of a woman who might have been insane.
But she was more determined than ever to get the generator back online and get the hell out of here.
Other Terrestrial 