✅ Project SETI Trilogy

Chapter Two - Part XXXI: For the Needs of Many

          Temet emitted a brief shrill squeak and her beak trembled. The Daxut ships that had been pursuing them were close to catching up with them—too close, and she knew it. When she couldn't afford to wait a second longer, she felt several tethering mechanisms locking onto the vessel in rapid succession, and it immediately started to pull them toward the fleet that was still moving in on them.

          "Ahh...! Fuck!" Novala's echoing voice reverberated throughout the engine room and crackled loudly through the device still perched on her shoulder. "Just fucking go, Temet!"

          "No!" she still spoke in her native tongue; she didn't have it in her to speak a second language right now. On the rudimentary battery-powered back-up display, she could see the six dots representing the other ships were steadily closing the distance, and she knew it wouldn't be long before they attempted to board. She held her shaking fingers over the controls that would turn the engine back on again and prayed that the twenty or thirty seconds he still had was enough for him to climb back out.

          "Please," Novala begged softly. She could hear him grunting as he attempted to pull himself back onto the relative safety of the inner ring. "That was them, wasn't it?"

          "There's—there's still time before they try to board! It's only a tether! We'll be able to break free and lose them with the—"

          "Do you want to get recaptured?" Novala exclaimed. His voice trembled and threatened to break, but he tried to sound brave. "You know what will happen! They'll make sure something like this can never happen again! And no one will ever know what they've been doing and what they will do! Do you want that?! Do you want it all to be for nothing?!"

          "I—"

          "Do it!" He yelled in a grinding, strained voice. He heaved in a sharp breath to stifle a sob. "Even if I pulled myself up from here somehow... there's just no time—please, Temet! I'm just a fucking clone, anyway! Do it!"

          Temet screeched loudly and activated one of the two switches that would activate the gyroscopic contraption again. "You were never just a clone, Novala... and your life is not expendable... b—but I won't let this be in vain... I promise...!"

          Her entire body vibrated with grief as she pushed the second switch forward. The engine rumbled somewhere above and behind her as it started up again, and all the lights and other systems immediately flickered to life. The communicator on her shoulder emitted an unbearably loud and intense ringing sound as the energy overwhelmed Novala's device, and she batted it off with a pained shriek. She could hear the rings speeding up, far beyond their normal limit with the additional energy cell Novala had installed. With the momentum of the rings around it and the sheer energy running beneath and through it, it started to move along the grooves on the energy core extremely quickly. Along with an initial much-needed boost, this allowed even more energy to be generated at a near-instantaneous pace.

          Temet interfaced with the piloting console as fast as she could to set the destination to Earth and spooled the energy that was being generated until it was slightly beyond the capacity needed to lightwarp. Just before it reached that threshold, there was a cluster of loud metallic clunks on the hull, and she cursed upon realizing that they were already preparing to board. She violently jerked the ship forward to break the tethers, which severed the relatively weak magnetic connections as well, and then she let loose the engine at its maximum capacity.

          She squawked loudly as the vessel reached lightspeed, and she heard both Nova and Gabriel cry out at the same time. They were quickly muffled along with every other sound as an intense pressurized sensation overwhelmed her. Through the windowed hull, space rapidly twisted and contorted around the vessel until it looked like nothing but a swirling void of shimmering black. Everything was completely and utterly silent for a moment, and then it was over, as if nothing had happened at all.

          It was still weirdly silent as reality normalized completely. A view of Earth and its many orbiting objects could now be seen through the hull, but Temet was still too numb to be relieved. She urgently searched for an inconspicuous but easy-to-land-on space to land on the surface and found a suitable section of arctic tundra in the Northern Sector that had no settlements near it for several hundred miles. She set the autopilot to take them there via the fastest and most effective route and enabled the stealth mechanism just in case the Temetor One was already tailing them.

          After that, she meant to get up and check on Nova and Gabriel, but found herself rooted to the chair. She wanted to cry and scream, and she held onto the hope that she could burst into the room and find that Novala had somehow survived, but... she was acutely aware of how the engine worked, and knew, deep down, ...

          "... Temet?"

          She clumsily shot to her feet and whirled around when she heard Nova's voice, but her feathers shrunk when she saw that it was him and not miraculously Novala, somehow. "Oh... hey."

          Nova looked immensely relieved when he saw Earth's surface fast approaching, but he could also feel that something was wrong, just from the way she was holding herself and her tone of voice. Her entire body was vibrating and she wouldn't look at him directly. "Are you... okay? Where's—?"

          Temet opened her beak to say something, but all that came out at first was a jarring squeak. "I... I—I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry..."

          Nova moved over to her when she curled into herself and kept apologizing. He had a gnawing feeling that something had happened to Novala, but he didn't quite have the heart to ask yet. Unsure of what else to do, he pulled her into a hug, and he was surprised at how quickly she leaned into it. She rested her beak on his shoulder for a few long moments, careful not to press the hooked part into his skin and instead let it hang off the other side. She was still shaking and vibrating, but after a few moments, it receded, and she pulled away when it got to a more manageable level. She silently turned around to watch the autopilot land the vessel, and as soon as they were securely on the ground a few seconds later, she abruptly reached up and pulled the emergency shutdown switch again, then bolted for the ladder in the corridor.

          "What are you doing...?" Nova called after her as most of the ship powered down. He watched as she took the steps of the ladder three at a time and spun open the hatch that had been electronically closed as the engine powered up.

          "I don't know," she whispered in her native language as she flew through the door and stepped to the edge of the platform. The light emitted by the core was bright to her too, but it wasn't as blinding to her as it was to humans. She desperately looked around on the rings, on the floor, on the platform—but there was nothing in the room but the engine itself and the new energy cell that had been installed. "I don't know what I'm doing anymore."