Posted by Ensign Elemirre Serinde (Engineering Officer) in Engineering - El Finally is Aboard
Snip

They were away now. Far from Earth. Warp 3.8 she heard – and cruising at that speed no less! It was an awareness that was just coming to her that each ship had a different feel while at warp. The Vigilance was old and was noticeably shaky while she was at warp. Well, warp 1.3 and was always there. It was a feeling that El had likened to the swaying of the old sailing ships. Always in motion, it took only days before it was background and not even noticed. The Bonaventure was different. While she was still old it had a ‘buzzy’ sensation like that of a bee not far off. Sometimes it was annoying and other times El simply imagined herself in a filed with them about her. Better than a mosquito sound! And now the third ship El had been on. The Sojourner. This feeling was a low vibration that started at the soles of her feet. She wondered whether ships could be identified by those sensory signals alone. Perhaps she would know this in time. But Warp 3.8! It almost made her feel giddy thinking of it, merging these two things – the vibrations and the speed. It was almost erotic. Or she was just tired.

El came to her cabin. F3. It wasn’t a long trip; she was close to her engines but away from the ‘power’, the department heads and executive officers. Perhaps someday she would be up there but for now, certainly right now, she didn’t care. Two days without sleep was catching up to her. Was Liz still her bunkmate? She hadn’t even looked when she came aboard and literally tossed her sea bag in and ran to the galley. Pressing the entry button, the door slid open. The Vigilance had older style doors. More bulkhead in style that hinged inward. Hers had creaked no matter how she had tried to fix it. That ship felt like she was aboard an old submarine. She wasn’t sure what the Sojourner felt like yet. Turning as she entered, El pressed the switch to close the door and turn on the lights. “Liz?” she asked. She had no idea who was assigned with her yet but hoped it was Liz.

Then El turned. The Vigilance bunked four. The Bonaventure two, but still it was four sharing a single head. Could this be right? There was no bunk. Her sea bag lay where it had landed. She stepped over it and peered around a narrow entry. A shower and facilities. For her? No bunkmate? El was stunned. Just her? A muddled euphoria battled with uncertain hope. It was something she had never considered, having a cabin to herself. Elation mixed with sudden loneliness, insecurity with possibility. A timid giggle echoed in the sparse, empty room. She was too tired to think further. Unpacking could wait for tomorrow before her shift. She would get up, meditate, go to the gym, eat and then unpack. Right now? El stank. Stripping out of her coveralls and separating herself from whatever disgusting thing clung to her like a bad date, she took a quick, exultant, three-minute cold shower. It felt wonderful. El studied the bed as she toweled her hair dry. If there was something that really didn’t change from ship to ship it was this. Reaching out, El pulled the thin mattress off. It sank to the deck in a heap next to her sea bag. She kept only the pillow and a single sheet. Wrapping herself in that as she lay on the cool, metal surface, El was almost immediately asleep.

Thus ended El’s first day on the Sojourner.

El, Eng

My earliest memory was when I was around three. I remember opening my eyes to absolutely nothing. No light. No sound. No, that’s wrong. I could hear myself. My rapid breathing. My wailing cries. They were very loud. Echoing. Everywhere I reached, I felt a smooth, cold surface. I felt cold. I was hungry. I felt trapped, and it lasted forever as I flailed futilely against what confined me.

I sit on the hard bed, 18 years later, hugging my knees with the single bedsheet around me, now damp with sweat, and staring at a blank screen with the exact same sensations coursing through me. My medallion presses against my thigh, a cool comfort as my heart races on. I’m trapped in a spaceship hurtling at impossible speeds through space to destinations unknown with about 60 other souls. And I am alone.

Earlier I had awoken, alerted by a flash of light behind my eyelids. They flickered open in the darkness of my cabin. Had the door just slid silently shut and the bright light was the twinkling of the corridor light just before it sealed? I blinked and listened. Nothing but my heart and the thin hiss of the air circulator. I could still feel the almost undiscernible vibration of the ship at warp, more evident without the mattress. My nostrils curled smelling the acrid, sweet odor of whatever had clung to me from the worker bee, and yet present on my discarded coveralls cast somewhere on the floor next to the sea bag keeping company next to the mattress. Apart from that, the cabin had a ‘new car’ smell as Uncle Mar used to say. Uncle Mar.

I fumbled for the light switch. Having had only used it once the night before in my exhaustion, it took some time, then blinked as the lights suddenly flooded the room. Sparse. Stoic. There were no memories here, yet. There had been no emotions here, yet. There was no life here. It would be a Buddhist’s dream. It was not her Buddhist dream. The sea bag sagged drunkenly against the wall where she had tossed it. The mattress had joined it in a kind of khaki tryst. Her coveralls were a blue rumpled stain in the corner. Nothing else seemed changed, but, given the perfect example of chaos theory that was currently her room, would she even know? With the way she had left things, anyone coming into her room would more than likely be laying on the deck unconscious and bleeding from tripping over literally everything she owned.

Uncurling herself, El’s feet touched the deck, then rose again quickly. She peered down, surprised. There was carpet, of a sort. That was different from the bare, mottled decking she had known before from past ships. It was thin with no give, but it was carpet. She let her toes brush the thin, coarse, grey, surface. Nice. Letting the sheet fall away from her, El stepped over the twisted mattress. It too was thin but looked of a quality much better than she was used to – if she used it. She had no use for it. She felt the gentle weight of the gold medallion around her neck; El had been too tired to remove it the night before.

She peered around to the head. It was empty. Still, the hairs at the back of her neck rose and her senses reached out. Had someone actually been here? Or was it her imagination, a latent dream before waking, a flicker of something on the workstation. The workstation. El turned to that. Bare. A metal top, a space for the holographic keyboard to display. A single overhead shelf waited to be populated. And the screen. In the lower right corner of it a muted, yellow light flashed. She had a message. Probably from the Chief or something about assignments, or the shift roster, or her ‘remedial’ security course she had to do. If it had been anything important it would have sounded and woken her.

Curious, El touched the display to make it come alive. The message was six words, all in bold, white caps that crossed the length of the dark screen. Then, a second later, they vanished. “No, wait!” she called out in Cantonese as her fingers flew forward to bring back the message. It was gone. Inbox – nothing. Transmission – nothing. Had it even been there!? Had she imagined it? There was nothing to say there ever had been a message. What was going on? Suddenly, El realized, there was a memory here now, and an emotion.

She pushed away from the workstation and stumbled backward onto the bed, unconsciously pulling the sheet up around her while whispering ‘No’ over and over. Her eyes never left the blank, now featureless, screen. The time said 4:04am. She was three again. It felt claustrophobic and chilled in her cabin, the walls closing in as she read and re-read the message in her head.

THERE IS A WARDEN ON BOARD

El, Eng

For a time, El sat on the edge of the bed staring at the spare, dull wall in front of her. Sure, it held the small workspace and spare shelf above. The slim chair fixed to the deck looked more like an ergonomic stool with a backing, a pauper’s barber chair. To her right was the small passage to the lavatory and shower, and to her left a locker and some shelving for her personal effects. Idly she wondered if she could roll up the mattress and stuff it away. Minutes ticked away and by clinging to the mental disciplines she had learned through the years she, as her drill sergeant often told the squad, ‘got a grip’. What snapped her out of her state of fear was the wandering thought ‘what am I going to do?’ It was a question she had once asked herself, and her old Master, whose reply was, ‘If you don’t know what to do, then begin with what you do know to do. In that, your question may be answered.’

That was two days ago. In that time, El had learned that the gym was sparsely used at 4:15am and that she still had time meditate, eat her breakfast – she found the porridge that was served to be yummy – and time yet remained to study up on the ship. The remedial security course would keep for now; engineering was her priority, and she was behind the curve. The new shifts were longer, but they were nothing compared to her upbringing or even the military academy, which she found to be … lax. After her shift was over and a simple supper taken, it was back for some more meditation and study or running in the gym. She missed being able to swim. Bedtime was 11 and waking was at 4. El found her routines to be her ‘fortress of solitude’ to quote an old romance she had read.

The machine shop was her sanctuary where she could work and keep to herself; solitude was not alien to her. It was a space that she was resolutely bringing order to, even if minimal use of. Being on service support she had been called out on a few small issues. The laundry had been blowing cold air in the drying unit. A vacuum’s power cell had not been seated correctly and had worked intermittently. One toilet had opted to simply do nothing. It worked but, well, nothing was removed. El had found the vacuum tube to be faulty. Evidently it had not been tested in practice. One thing she had avoided was deliberate interaction with others. It was not hard to do. The ship was new and people were more excited about that than seeking out new people. Another thing she had not done was unpack apart from finding a home for the mattress. She still didn’t know what to do but, for now, that was okay.

The message had not returned. It had also not been forgotten.
El, Eng

El smoothed the flattened, now empty sea bag with her hand against a persistent fold at the top, then unceremoniously stuffed it into a cramped shelf in her locker. It was a small locker where the hanger portion barely fit her one dress and more formal uniform. The remainder of her sparse clothes and more bulky engineering jump suits were folded and put onto adjoining shelves in the locker. All her life she had made do with little. Her eyes glanced to where her socks were stuffed. Four pair of socks and she couldn’t arrange them. What was with that?

The room was austere. Lifeless. There was no window into space but four metal walls of a dull gunmetal shade. She had added to it, to bring some life to her space. The aged, beaded curtain hung at the gap between the room and the facilities. Her few books were piled on the shelf over the workspace. Tolkien. Heinlein. Philip Dick. Huxley. Underneath were the photos.

Closing the locker, El moved to sit on the single chair and looked at the pictures looking back at her. The simple frames did not do them justice, she thought, but it was the photographs that counted. One, in a scarred, thin wooden frame, had her beside her sister, Meiling. They carried similar features in the eyes and oval face. This was taken outside of an ancient temple whose worn stone front and carved lion was only partially obscured by the two of them. It had been a good day, and so shown by the way they held hands and leaned in, laughing. Another was her graduation photo – El with her graduating class. She smiled at the shot, the commanding officer Major Gruneau there with his Labrador retriever, Lady, sitting there, tongue lolling. The third, too, was from the Academy, taken on one of their exercises in Scotland. A still, dark loch was behind them next to heather covered hills that bent in the wind. El, with the others, were dressed in fatigues, her hair whipping in the wind. If not for their camouflage outfits and plasma rifles slung over their backs they could have looked to be on a holiday. It was hard to imagine that they were mere hours away from a very realistic rescue exercise attending a crashed transport. Still, it was a good memory with these, her friends. Where were they now? It had been a year now since they had graduated and been all assigned to different things.

Next to the photos was a plain metal cylinder that looked like nothing more than a length of pipe some eight inches long and one around. To either side of a smooth middle section were concentric ridges. It was, at this time, being no more than a paperweight to the manila envelope that held the sheets and ‘game’ that Meiling had given her before she boarded. Given her necessity to learn how the ship ticked which involved a lot of reading, El had not yet looked at it. That, however, was not entirely true. El used the study as an excuse to not yet look at it. Now, two weeks out from Earth, it might soon be time.

Still, El was usure how to proceed with … life. If the message was correct and there was a Warden on board then her life was at risk. If a Warden was certain of its quarry, then why not simply cause an accident on the ship? At the same time, who sent that message? Had she an unknown ally aboard? Should she be looking out for both god and the devil? Or, given her beliefs, neither? El could not hide forever but she had hoped that, out here in the vastness of space, that she would be irrelevant. She just wanted to live her life.
El, Eng