( Read the previous episodes of Journey to Centauri.) |
Journey to Centauri : Episode 31 Captain Garland awakened in his bed, a converted cryocell, breathless and terrified. the nightmare again, stronger this time...that feeling of being swallowed, infinitely, down a dark and narrow throat, sliding forever into an abyss... His hand lashed out involuntarily and struck glass. The sides of his cryocell were now foggy from his own heat, and the pain of his knuckles on glass set his heart pounding. He looked up. The lid to cryocell...closed! He struck out so hard he thought he might crack the lid into fragments, forcing it open with a rush of adrenaline-powered strength, and jumped as the lid crashed into the side of the cell. I never close that. Something was wrong. He heard voices shouting in the distance, and the wail of distant alarms, but his own dark quarters remained strangely muffled. He felt apart from everything, disconnected, even as he awakened again from sleep into chaos. And why was my cryocell closed? He looked to his quicklink for notification of the trouble, and found it nonfunctioning, a dead flexible gray patch on his sleeve, his connection to the command center severed. He rose quickly and crossed to his desk-mounted console, dialing up a status report. The ship was on full alert and Alpha Centauri was only a cosmic stone-throw away, even as the Unity finally shook itself apart, torn apart from the inside by its damaged reactor. Got to get this under control. There will be panic. He reached over to punch up the command center, and then stopped as he saw the tiny scrolling slipmessage in its yellow box on the screen. A series of numbers...timecode? And a letter-number combination. Video from the matrix. A time and a place, left for him. Which first? Command center, or unravel this mystery. He paused and the dreams caught at him, returning to haunt him. Voices, ghosts, floating above him as he awakened. It will only take a moment. He dialed up the matrix. |
