Jahenna gasped, suddenly awake.
There was no transitory period for her; the moment she awoke was the same that she began to assess the situation: she was alone, in a small, well lit room, presently in a state of free-fall, and injured. Her face felt bruised and she couldn’t feel her left arm. Flexing her right arm, she discovered she was not only velcroed against a surface of some sort, something jabbed inside her arm as she moved it—an IV of some sort, most likely.
The room evoked emotions from the ‘Dash just a few days ago, and she felt her skin crawl uncomfortably atop her bones as she twitched and shivered.
Jahenna twitched against her restraints, and something began beeping steadily from her right side. She tried to turn her head, and found it restrained just like the rest of her body.
Where am I? She managed to finally think, the mental words sounding disjointed and distant inside her. What was with that…dream? I was back…in training again…
Where was the forrest?
What happened to Rence?
Jahenna grunted in an effort to clear her throat, then realized a tube had been shoved down it.
A door she hadn’t noticed before opened, and a nearly bald man in tan scrubs drifted towards her with a look of deep concern in his face.
“Easy,” the man said, pulling himself to whatever it was that was beeping on her right. “Easy, Spacy. Easy. You’re safe; you’re alive. I’m going to adjust some of the management settings here, just hang on, all right? Just…hang on.”
Jahenna pulled sharply against her restraints, and another series of beeps began sounding above her—these sounding far more urgent and attention-grabbing.
You piece of shit, she thought, directing it at the man mentally, let me go! LET ME GO!
“Listen to my voice,” the man continued, oblivious to her thoughts as he moved himself directly in front of her face. “Listen to me; focus on my voice. You’re alright. You’re safe. You need to try to relax or you’re going to hurt yourself.”
She tried to shake her head.
I don’t care that I’m safe—I have to find Rence! I have to find him! He got hit by the trees and the blast—
Jahenna suddenly stopped resisting as she began to remember.
He…got hit by the…trees…
The last memories she had of her brother began swimming through her thoughts as she remembered. Cold, unsettling truths began filling in around her eyes, and she felt herself go numb to the world all at once.
“That’s it,” the man said to her softly as she began to weep. “You’re safe. It’s all right. Just rest, Spacy. Just rest.”
Her vision grew blurry as tears swelled and gathered around her eyes in the zero-g environment. The man applied a small piece of cloth to her eyes, clearing her vision almost instantly as tears were absorbed away.
Everything felt so wrong, right now.
Rence couldn’t be dead.
If she was alive, he had to be as well.
She hadn’t patched things up only for them to get torn down so…
No.
No, he was alive.
No body? No death.
Yes. That was it.
It didn’t have to be any more complicated than that.
Rence couldn’t be dead until she saw his body.
No body, no death.
Jahenna became aware of a cold, melancholic darkness that had begun devouring her from the inside-out, pulling her away from the well lit room, away from all the beeping, away from the balding man…
Away from everything; away from all of it.
That was fine by her.
She relaxed, letting whatever had grabbed her by her heart drag her away to lands unknown.
So long as it took her far away from here, Jahenna didn’t much care.
Maybe she’d find Rence there.
She hoped she’d find Rence there.
The darkness enveloped her.
* * *
When she woke up, she was still in the same white room…except this time there were two figures floating just off to the side.
One of them was the man from before, who she now presumed to be a nurse by his continued presence. The other was a woman with violently purple hair bound in a tight ball on the back of her head like a pin cushion. Unlike the nurses’ tan scrubs, she wore scrubs a shade of medical pink that almost clashed with her hair. A small holographic imager was suspended just above her right eye, and her forearms were covered in velcro sleeves littered with medical instruments like they were bracelet accessories.
“She’s coming around,” the man said, gesturing to Jahenna.
The purple haired woman looked over at her, and smiled warmly. “Hey there,” she said. “Can you tell me your name?”
Jahenna noticed her mouth felt more open than before.
She swallowed, and noticed she couldn’t feel the tube like she had earlier.
“Jah…hen—na,” she managed to breathe out. “Where…?”
“You’re onboard the PCMSD Unsparing Storm,” Purple Hair said slowly. “Are you in any pain? How do you feel?”
Jahenna blinked at her, struggling to find the right words.
How did she feel?
She felt groggy. Confused.
How long had she been there? When had she even arrived? How? Where was Ren—
…Oh.
Right.
“Where’s…my brother?” Jahenna asked anyway, her voice thick and slurred with uncooperative lips.
“How do you feel?” Purple Hair asked again.
“Groggy,” Jahenna said. “My head…hurts. Where is my brother?”
Purple Hair nodded her head at her as she shifted her attention back to a display Jahenna couldn’t see. “Adjust her saprezin levels by ten cc’s,” she said to the nurse before turning back to Jahenna. “Now, do you know where you are?”
“The…you just told me I was…on the…the Storm-whatever. Strormship. Unsparing Storm, thats it,” Jahenna slurred, confused.
“And your name?”
“Ja-hen-na,” she huffed out, a little more put together. “I just told you. Why are you asking me…again?”
“I’m monitoring the synapses in your brain as they fire,” Purple Hair said, glancing quickly at the display one final time. “Just making sure you’re good to go upstairs, Spacy. My name is Doctor Ferin-La. Do you remember what happened?”
“We were…camping,” Jahenna said slowly. “There was a…blast. Where is my brother? What happened to him?”
“We’ll talk about him in a little bit,” Ferin-La said. “Right now I want to focus on you. Can you remember anything else?”
“I remember waking up to Baldo over there,” she said, gesturing at the nearby floating nurse with her head. He didn’t react at her comment, and Ferin-La didn’t seem phased by it either. “I had a tube down my throat,” Jahenna continued. “What happened to me?”
“You were severely injured in one of several dozen blasts, as were millions more across the planet,” Ferin-La said. “We’ve spent the past three weeks rebuilding your left arm and both of your legs.”
“Three weeks?!” Jahenna asked. “What do you mean ‘three weeks’?! What happened? Where is my brother? What happ—”
“We were…attacked,” Ferin-La said carefully, pulling herself into a position so she could float closer to Jahenna’s face for the conversation. “Three weeks ago,” she began slowly, “Two hundred-plus ships emerged from Null-Jumps all across the system, the majority of which were concentrated around Faria. Within minutes of their emergence, the ships nearest Faria opened fire on the planet from orbit. We don’t know…what they hit it with, but initial reports suggest anti-matter tipped rail-gun impactors.”
Jahenna felt her stomach tighten.
Rail-gun impactors were bad enough for orbital bombardment, having the destructive energy equivalent to a nuclear strike but without any of the fallout—but strapping bits of anti-matter to the tips?
The resulting impact would make nuclear weapons seem like low-yield breaching charges.
“They hit—by accident or intention—the central power matrix core on the surface.” Ferin-La paused another moment, visibly working out how to summarize the events in a way that made sense. “The resulting…detonation, for lack of a better word, cracked the planet. It’s more of a debris field now, with several chunks of ejecta already having impacted on Prime…or at least what’s still standing on Prime.”
Jahenna felt herself go limp against her restraints on the wall.
She thought of the light she’d seen in the sky that day, of all the things she thought it could have been…
She thought of her brothers on-again, off-again girlfriend Gillory, who was going for a new promotion on Faria.
…she was dead now.
Among countless millions of others, all dead.
“The blast that hit you and your brother was from a more…local event,” Ferin-La went on to explain. “Ships nearest to Prime and Artigau engaged targets of opportunity, opening fire on infrastructure, military ships, facilities, and transportation hubs. The entire east coast of the continent is a marshland, now; they flash-vaporized the Comet Sea from orbit.”
“Dear God,” Jahenna whimpered, instantly thinking about Harrows Landing and the Recruitment Depot. “How…many?” She asked slowly, still processing the details.
How many of her friends and people she knew had died?
“Over two million so far,” Ferin-La said. “We can brief you on the details when you’re cleared to return to duty.”
“…return?” Jahenna asked, feeling a rage she’d never felt before swell inside her like a cresting wave. “What about my arm? A-and my legs? What happened? What happened to me? Where is my brother?!”
Ferin-La’s face became grim, but she didn’t say anything.
“Where?!” Jahenna repeated. “Where is he? Is he dead? Am I dead? What the hell happened to me?”
The doctor turned back to the nurse and mumbled something Jahenna didn’t catch.
“What did you say to him?!” She screamed. “TELL ME! TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED TO MY BROTHER!”
“Your brother is dead,” Ferin-La said curtly. “I’m sorry.”
The news cut Jahenna to the core, slashing through reality and into all the spaces in-between. She hung in her restraints against the wall, floating.
She knew. She already knew.
She refused to accept it, but she knew.
But now…
“He died instantly, from what we can tell,” Ferin-La said mercifully, giving Jahenna a pause to process the news. “He didn’t suffer.”
She felt cold inside, her spine and intestines transfigured into glacial comet ice.
“Your arm and legs were shattered in four different places each,” Ferin-La said after another pause, “you’ve been undergoing bone and muscle regrowth therapy here in the zero-g ward since we found you. Frankly, you’re lucky to be alive. We hardly found anyone still alive that close to the Sea, and the only reason we found you was because of the transmitter on your tablet.”
“…who?” Jahenna whispered. “Who would do this?”
“We don’t…actually know that yet,” Ferin-La said nervously. “We have a strong suspicion it’s Tau-Ceti, but it hasn’t been long enough to hear anything from Centerpoint. For all we know, they got hit too. We’ve received no recent, relevant flash traffic from messenger drones from Sol or any of the other colonies.”
“So we’re in the dark,” Jahenna said. “How…do we know it’s them? Tau-Ceti?”
“That’s above my pay-grade,” Ferin-La said. “But that’s all you’re getting out of me anyway, Spacy. At least for today.”
“Please,” Jahenna said. “Please, tell me. I need to know. Was this Tau-Ceti?”
“You need to rest.”
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead; I need to know. Please. Tell me.”
Ferin-La looked over to the nurse, who finally glanced away from the display he’d been reading during the entire exchange and looked at her. She nodded at him, and he moved back to the still open doorway, and floated out into the corridor beyond.
“I can bring a chaplain,” Ferin-La said, turning her attention back to Jahenna, “but you need to rest. I don’t know all the details myself. What I do know is I’m administering care to about fifty other critical cases much like your own, and that’s just in the zero-g ward. We’ve got wounded all over the ship.”
“I just…I need to know,” Jahenna repeated. “I feel like I don’t know how to process anything right now, and I don’t know what to do. I feel lost.”
Ferin-La looked at her, and put her hand gently on Jahenna’s arm. “I’ll get the chaplain,” she said. “For now, just rest…or try to. I know it’s hard. Everyone’s lost someone from this, and you’re not the only one feeling what you’re feeling right now.”
Jahenna said nothing, as tears—tears she’d been ignoring for the last few minutes—overwhelmed her. Her vision blurred and her eyes stung. Ferin-La wiped at her eyes for her with another waif of cloth, then adjusted a small breather fan to blow more air across Jahenna’s brow.
“Hang in there, Spacy,” the doctor said to her. “Rest easy. Help is already here. Whoever it was that did this to us, we are not going to take this lying down—of that, I can assure you.”
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