“Can’t help it. In order to bring this room back to its status quo, we have to pull them up. They’ll come back down if they need to, but there’s not going to be any reason to. Right, guys?”
“If you say so,” Ciangi answered with a shrug. “I prefer not to jinx things, so I will just say that our preparations should be adequate.”
“That’s a fantastic assurance,” I remarked before crossing over to Mimic’s chair and unbuckling her. “You ready to go home?”
“Yes, very much so,” she said, voice low and warbling, as if she was a sim that’s memory crystal had been corrupted.
“Then let’s go to the bridge,” Gonzales said, coming up on the opposite side and draping one of Mimic’s arms over her shoulders. “We’ve got a wormhole to jump.”
We made our way down the hall and sat ourselves right back into our flight formation. Mimi and I in the back, Gonzales at the helm, Ciangi on the scanners and Bahn on the navigation array. We were silent yet again as we prepared to put our work to the test, and I gripped Mimic’s hand tightly.
“Here goes nothing,” Gonzales muttered, putting in the engine codes and gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles.
Like usual, there was a beat of quiet while we waited for the mechanic parts of the ship to catch up. That second seemed to stretch on forever, containing both our salvation or our deaths at the head of a pin.
And then…the engines hummed to life and we were gliding forward, whipping through space like we hadn’t just been floating listlessly for over a week.
“Woohoo!” Gonzales yelled, kicking her feet against the underside of the console. “We did it!”
“I wouldn’t celebrate just yet,” Bahn countered. “We still have to make it through the wormhole itself.”
“Don’t worry about it,” the weapons engineer said with a manic grin. “I’ve got a good feeling about this. But just in case, everyone should hold on real tight.”
I didn’t need a second warning, bracing my feet and clasping the armrest with my free hand as we burst through the horizon of the fold in space.
Just like before, we were enveloped in an acid-induced collection of colors and lights, all winding around us like a child’s finger-painting that had radiated with neon and some other nuclear material. The swirling brightness of it all hurt my eyes, and I turned my head away only to see Mimi struggling in her chair.
Her face was shifting and warping before my eyes, bones rearranging themselves around her face in real time. It was certainly startling, but most of all, it was worrying. Was she okay? I couldn’t read her expression through the quickly changing landscape of her face and she wasn’t making any sound to indicate whether she was in pain or not.
I tried to open my mouth to call to her, but I couldn’t get my jaw muscles to cooperate. There was too much force exerting itself on my face. I could feel my skin pulling back and my eyelids struggling to even blink.
My whole world was reduced to trying to keep my skull from batting back and forth on my headrest, and my neck was screaming in protest. It did not appreciate the sudden and intense workout, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.
And then it stopped.
There was no warning, no automated voice from the computer to tell us that we were about to have a reprieve, just one moment we were in the most realistic rollercoaster sim of our lives, and then we were being shot into the unnatural calm of space.
Granted, that lasted all of ten seconds before we had to dodge an asteroid.
Gonzales set out a string of curses that I hadn’t ever imagined before, gripping the controls of the ship and piloting us through the suddenly very crowded sector of space we had shot into.
We probably should have remembered how close our little wrinkle in the fabric of reality was to a potentially lethal asteroid field, but we all make mistakes from time to time.
Hopefully this one wouldn’t kill us.
However, compared to the violent, nerve-wracking experience that was wormhole jumping without the appropriate tethering technology, the field passed quickly and easily, only one managing to lightly score one of our sides. Gonzales killed the power when we were on the other side and let out a long breath.
“That was fun,” she said, shooting a shaky smile to the rest of us.
“Yes, it was,” I replied. “Now let’s go get Mimic something to eat.”
Bon Appetite, it’s Dinner and a Show
It didn’t take us long to get back to a bit of space that had chunks of what had once been Mimic’s home floating through it. Seeing the bits and bobs of people-sized chunks of rock reminded me just how much we had chewed up and processed what might have been a flourishing civilization. Sure, they were primitive in the fact that they didn’t seem to have a concept of time, or aging, or technology, or tools, but they definitely knew they were alive, and they had a community enough for Mimic to say we had killed her family.
They were a people and we had basically drilled them to bits for our own greed.
“Get me to the airlock,” Mimic whimpered, her voice a lilting sigh.
I obeyed instantly, unbuckling her from the safety restraints and helping her to her feet. I could feel her shaking through my grip as I guided her to the airlock at the back of the ship. By the time we reached it, she was practically vibrating in my arms, not unlike our ship going through the wormhole.
“Stand back,” she murmured, trying to press me to the wall. “I’ll be all right.”
I wanted to tell her that I could protect her, but I needed to trust that she knew how to take care of herself. I stepped to the side, wrapping my arm through one of the safety straps attached to the wall.
With a strength I could never fathom, Mimi slowly peeled her enviro-suit off, placing it in one of the lockers before walking to the edge of the lock. With a pale, trembling hand, she pressed the button that opened the seal and she was yanked into space.
I had to bite back a shout of worry. She knew what she was doing. She knew what she was doing.
But as much as I repeated that mantra to myself, the five or so seconds it took the cabin to completely depressurize had me riddled with worry about whether she was safe or not. As soon as the insistent yanking ceased and I was returned to my feet once more, I walked to the edge of the lock and peered out.
She was in one piece, thank goodness, albeit not a human piece. I watched her, black, spikey and shifting, jump from rock to rock, boring into the celestial objects and taking out whatever nourishment she needed.
I could almost see her regaining strength with every passing moment. Her angles grew more angular, her edges sharper, her inky, depthless blackness more and more black. And suddenly, all the pain, all the fear, all the running for our lives was worth it.
Mimic was safe. Mimic had food. We could continue on our journey to find the rest of her peop—
“Uh, Higgens, where’s Mimi?”
“Out in space, feeding. Why?”
“Get her back on the ship right now.”
“What? Why? She’s hardly had enough time to feed.”
“Yeah, I get that might be the case, but guess what’s big and bad and just showed up on our scanner’s screen?”
“Giomatti?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Are you serious? So he just kept the whole crew floating in space for a whole week without calling in backup?”
“Well…now that I look at the readings, according to this solar calendar, we’ve been gone a day and a half.”
“What? How’s that possible?”
“I dunno. Folds in space, time is relative, the unexpected repercussions of untethered wormhole travel, you tell me. Point being, we lucked out that he hasn’t had enough time for backup to get here, but we’re going to be decidedly unlucky if he catches us with our airlock open and Mimic out playing with the rocks.”