FALAHA'S JOURNEY: A Spacegirl's Account in Three Movements

Episode #20

Uncle Orewen is the one with whom I spent most of my childhood. He usually watched over me and Eyuran when everyone else was away. If Orewen was out on emergencies, we had his dad to babysit us. Yaren was long past his fifth century, so we spent most of the time playing physically-undemanding strategy, logic or math games with him. Grandfather was so sharp we had to use all our brain capacities to hold out against him. Staying with those three was my favorite; they were always so much fun. Orewen is the youngest child. Regrettably, his and Anika's two older brothers went missing during the Hunter Encounter, long before Orewen's birth.

Mom wasn't good at anything except machines; Father and Aunt Rifa were always busy, so we had to rely on Orewen's skills, especially at cooking. Everyone suspected Mom of being a slacker in the kitchen just so she could eat plenty of Uncle's delicious food. In any case, she always brought me things back from her trips and told lots of stories. She was like a summer thunderstorm. Even during her short visits, I interacted with Mom to the fullest. And when the whole household gathered, we regularly traveled to different places all around Dannan.

All of them worked hard so we could leave our home world safely.

Now Mom was lying motionless on the scanning platform. Orewen, who carried on albeit in terrible shape himself, was about to examine her body. She had several gunshot wounds to the chest and abdomen and, with her fragile soma overloaded, had probably bled to death with no one there to help her. After selflessly covering Eyuran's mom with her body, Aunt Rifa was forced to watch her die.

Eyuran, already wearing an eye patch and with his wounds tended, was helping his dad in the infirmary, treating the wounded ex-enemy. Baro, along with a few other Medans, was waiting for his turn. Tarry and the rest were taking care of the corpses. Unfortunately, all of our killed people had been thrown into the escape vessel, so we didn't know exactly who else had died. Silence filled the room. Nobody talked, having a hard time finding any words. Never before had Quennah been this gloomy and sad.

Fear and despair make people do the craziest things. Eyu, Orewen... What am I going to tell Father?

I took Mom's hand into mine. It was ice-cold. However, when Uncle Orewen touched her skin, he declared, "She is not dead yet!"

Normally, had she been dead, her temperature would not have dropped to near the freezing point of water. It would have declined progressively instead until it was the same temperature as the surroundings. But Mom hadn't been dead long enough for the temperature to even reach that! And something else added to my shock. Though she wasn't breathing, Mom had a pulse. A faint one, around two beats per minute.

"Eyuran! Quick! Give me a hand here! Avila's Node has died, but her brain is still alive."

Aunt Rifa remained on the Bridge. Her eyes were red from tears, but she had finally found her heart's peace after learning about our discovery. She persistently continued to work on the retrieval of the escape vessel, while Orewen and Eyuran tried to resuscitate Mom.

[2.44.7.15.11].267.8.2 - 26.2.8.[9]

Twenty-seventh hour of second day of ninth week, year 267.

We returned to the drop-off region not far from the outermost planet of the Medan stellar system, Klia. The whole system resembled a huge boneyard of stations and ships, big and small, and loads of debris floated everywhere. But it would not be a major task to find something here, not for Quennah, even if we had to analyze every object. The siSystem, fully functional again, was searching for Nodes, if any remained alive. We had our connections open, waiting for any response. Anything, a heartbeat, a heat signature, a brainwave...

However, we found nothing at the expected coordinates.