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She must have dozed off, despite her marathon sleep. Had the not-quite-potatoes been drugged? Had she been gassed? Who knew? It was either still light, or light again. The packaging was gone and it wasn't quiet any more. Quite possibly the most annoying sound she had ever heard was repeating arrhythmically. That had to be some kind of alarm, and it wasn't one she had any control over. She watched the door, expecting it to open. But it didn't. The alarm went on. And on. And on. After a while, her panic subsided (ha! she thought, subsided. I crushed it like a cockroach in a cheap hotel), and she started counting heartbeats.
After about 1400, the alarm went off. The lighting dimmed but not to black. And a panel opened next to the door. She got off her bench and went over to investigate. After some fiddling, the door opened and she scuttled out into an empty, drastically shortened hallway.
That seemed bad. She had a hard time getting out of a tight loop where she'd look where the hallway used to be, see a lot of black with flashing lights, freak out and go back to looking at the part of the hallway which was still there. Which, she noticed, no longer included the facilities, but did include the food panel.
She was trying to either accept the idea she was in a disintegrating spaceship or really and truly deny that fact completely, when she floated up from the floor. That overwhelmed the possibility of denial, but did force her to accept that her situation had gotten even worse.
Although not quite as bad as being slammed back down to the floor, which happened next.
At the missing end of the hallway, where the facilities had once been, a person, a bipedal, might-be-her-kind-of-person-person, appeared. He turned around, did something, and the black with flashing lights mercifully went away. The person was wearing a suit that covered absolutely everything, so it was a little hard to tell who or what it might be. Whoever it was picked her up, tossed her back into her cupboard, crawled in with her, and shut the door. Where she floated up again, and would have been slammed down again, except the other person had fiddled with the control panel and there were handles, and that helped a lot.
She wasn't really in any kind of mental or emotional shape to be counting her heartbeats, besides which, the up-down thing meant no way could she guess at time based on that clock. Once she had the hang of bracing herself in a corner with the handles, the person-in-a-suit fiddled with the control panel some more. A cubby-hole opened up on the other side of the door, and the person pulled out a cheap knock-off of the one they were wearing and started working the legs of it onto her. That she could help with; it was a little like getting into a dry suit. Between the two of them, she got entirely into it, in the course of which process the suit did things to her that made the facilities seem shy and retiring.
She figured it was safe to assume she wouldn't have to worry about peeing while she was wearing this thing. Or anything else for that matter. Like, for example, why there was still air in the hallway with a big hole at one end where you could see black and flashing lights. Didn't spaceship hull breaches usually end with everything whooshing out and people explosively decompressing? Those were the thoughts she'd been vigorously suppressing. It was much easier to think them once she was in a space suit. Dry suits might be a whole lot better if they'd had that overly-friendly feature, too. Maybe.
Also, once she was in the suit, she had a lot less trouble maintaining contact with the floor, and the waves pulling her down – or up, or sideways – seemed greatly reduced. At least, they seemed greatly reduced until they seemed worse than ever, which made her wonder what would have happened to her if she hadn't gotten in to that suit.
Abraham Maslow should have included a basic need involving gravity. How did everyone miss how important that was? Maybe because on Earth, it wasn't really ever in doubt.
At least she was being rescued. It sure would be nice if she could figure out what the hell she had needed to be rescued from, what she was being rescued to, and what the relative merits of the two situations were. While it seemed a no-brainer, what with the not-a-casket becoming ever more compromised (wow, thinking of the not-a-casket as a once-safe place meant her standards had really dropped fast), she couldn't help but think that there was no way any of this was going to get her any closer to home. Really nothing quite like waking up captured on a disintegrating space ship to make the crappy DC apartment seem like home.
Then the lights dimmed further, at which point she could see on the bubble in front of her face a diagram of the room and the other person in the room. And for the first time, she could see an outline of his face. His face. Her kind of person. And for a wire-frame diagram kinda hot. Maybe she should chalk that up to stress of the moment. It was a much happier thought than anything she'd had flitting through her addled brain before.
He did a double-take, then reached over and fiddled with something under her chin. The pale, wire-frame diagram was replaced with a full-color, real as life image.
And he really was hot.
Also, he was rolling his eyes.
A little more fiddling, and she could hear him talking. Muttering, more like, but in a language she couldn't understand at all. Then there were a series of increasingly impatient questions, with shorter and shorter pauses in between. More eye-rolling. More fiddling. Then something she was willing to bet was profanity, followed by a shrug. After that, he started trying to communicate with gestures. She was usually good at charades, but she thought maybe he was trying to get her to do something with the suit but she had no idea what it was. Well, duh. But it was probably something that his-people would think was obvious, like stop-drop-and-roll obvious, only she had no idea, because she'd never been on a spaceship before and therefore had no idea what the emergency procedures were. I mean, obviously, being in a small space would limit how far you got bounced when the gravity fluctuated. Equally obviously, when systems failed, they should fail in a way that gave you access to, save, the life preserving space suit. And it made sense the suit would be set up to auto-connect to, er, those bits down there, so to speak. But come on. She'd had trouble getting the fry wrapper open. She had no mortal clue what the next step was. Shouldn't he be directing her to his ride? She really, really, really hoped he wasn't self-rescuing himself from the same situation she was in. Just knowing shit wasn't going to be the same as having your own space ship to evacuate in. Even thinking what-if-he-has-no-space-ship made her sweat more heavily. At least she was hydrated, right? Leia wondered idly whether it was possible to take this stay-calm-no-matter-what-thing too far, but tried hard to focus on what he was trying to communicate.
Eventually, he gave up, opened the door and pushed her out into the corridor. Ah, a method of communication with which she was, unfortunately, familiar.
She did her best to cooperate, right up until they stepped through the opened end of the hallway out into open space. He'd undone whatever he'd done to make the black go away. Out of the no-longer-lit hallway, she could clearly see stars, ship debris, etc. She remembered starting to scream. Then she felt him touch the back of her neck, and the lights went out. Again.
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2012.
Created: July 9, 2012 Updated: July 10, 2012