Entity [ONC 2024]

18

Consciousness came and went. Vision faded, brightened and faded once more. Hands caught hold of her and she tried to fight but she had no energy left. Nothing more to give. Until those self-same hands tried to take the laser welder and the alien data core from her and she found reserves of strength she never could have found at any other time. Consciousness left her once more and Porter accepted oblivion.

When her eyes opened once again, she felt a rumble pass through her. Heard the sounds of heavy, complaining metal grating against itself, and then silence once more. The straps of the chair held her in place as she tried to snap upright, head twisting in every direction. She no longer wore her helmet, but blessed air filled her lungs. She was on the bridge and, in the navigator's chair, she saw a familiar head of hair. Black, short and tousled. Chen. As Porter moved, Chen spun the chair around.

"Awake, then?" Chen pointed at Porter's hands. "I couldn't get the EV suit off. You wouldn't let go of those. I did the best I could."

Porter looked down at her hands and saw the EV suit glove on one hand cut open, an IV line piercing her skin, the tube trailing up to a saline bag. The back of her hand had a number of punctures and small bruises where Chen had tried to find a vein. It could have been worse. Then her eyes rose to the windows, where Chen had opened the shields, revealing the expanse of space outside.

"How long?" Porter didn't like the way Chen's eyes lingered on the welder and the device and she cuddled them both to her chest. "Did it ... did I ...?"

"Only a few minutes." Chen turned her chair and adjusted some controls. The sense of movement, of the whole bridge moving, came to Porter. "Yeah. You did it. You killed them all. And ... I'm pretty certain you did something else, too. The ship was heading Earthward, but now its course is changing incrementally. What did you do?"

"There was no way I was letting them get back to Earth." The ship hove into view outside the window, coasting away, engines a bright, white blaze. "I set the thrusters on one side to fire every so often and then run out of fuel. That ship will be in interstellar space before anyone else can find it."

Little changes. A degree, here or there, and a ship could miss an entire planet by billions of miles. Or, in this case, could turn a ship to cruise out into the nothing that awaited it, beyond the Solar System. It was yet another thing she couldn't tell anyone about. If she had told Ndara, then, when infected, he would have told Mats and she could have stopped it. Porter allowed herself an uneasy smile.

Four people dead, but she had stopped any chance of those entities, those parasites, from ever reaching Earth. She had won. At a cost, but she had won. As relief set in, she could feel her chest jerking and realised that she now sobbed. Not through fear, or terror, or pain, but through joy of knowing that she had beaten the odds. No-one, not her tutors, not her crew mates, not even her parents would have ever expected that.

"Just a little adjustment. Set a course and have the computer make regular bursts of thrust and we should be back to the nearest Wheel station within two weeks." The bridge lifeboat moved again and the ship slipped out of sight. "Then back to Earth. I can't wait."

Chen sat back in the chair, her hands moving to support her head, fingers interlocking. That sounded good. It sounded nice. Except something didn't feel quite right. Porter didn't feel altogether herself, not yet, and she wasn't certain she ever would again, but something tickled the back of her mind. She couldn't quite place what.

"You sound eager to get back to Earth." Her hand moved to the release catch on the seat straps, fingers tightening upon the laser welder. "And you haven't mentioned Mats once."

Again, Chen spun her chair around, eyes narrowing. She saw the released catches, the welder laid upon Porter's thigh, pointing at her. She said nothing for a long while before turning in her seat, showing her back. Then, with a slight struggle, she shrugged her coveralls over her shoulders, revealing a sweat-soaked tank top. Porter couldn't see any bruising on the back of the Ops officer's neck.