Bureaucracy really is a nightmare. We got back to the space station - which orbited around Halapatov by the way, pretty cool - and had to go through all sorts of protocols and stuff to even be let out of the teleport catchment room. Which made sense, war and all, gotta be safe, but still, it took so long. Then after being led down a bunch of hallways with some cool tech in the walls for me to stare at on the way (they had electromagnetic transmission relays in each section!) we had to wait in another room before being debriefed on our *mission*, and then as we sat there idly, my leg bobbing up and down, a Paladanian with very cool glasses told us we had to go through more testing before the board would see us.
"For this, we need to process you all separately, so I'll just divide you off to different examiners." he said nonchalantly, but Alexa glanced for a second at Jayken and then rose to protest, shaking like she was terrified.
"You want to take us all off one by one?" She stood firm and angry, but also scared, as she asked this. "I'm not okay with that. Do me and Jayken together."
Abi pierced me with her meaningful look and I shrugged. I didn't mind what way we were tested.
"We agree. Please complete your evaluation with us all together, not as individuals." Lexie looked at Abi for a moment with surprise and then crossed her arms. The guy hesitated.
"Let me just check with my superiors." He said eventually, then disappeared into the room behind him. I bobbed my head to an imaginary tune in the thick silence that followed, my eyes roving over Abigail's thoughtful profile. Mostly when I saw her it was in places of nature, like her hometown. She was striking against the backdrop of metal and technology. It highlighted something about her, that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Probably sensing me looking at her, she cast me a swift look and her lips tilted into a soft smirk. I grinned widely at her, before being jolted back to the situation by the dude coming back into the room.
"They have made a decision. We will process you as individuals, but you can all be present in the room while this occurs."
Jayken bobbed his head agreeably and Alexa nodded with her eyebrows turned down.
He seemed relieved with this response. "Come with me."
So then we were all led into a very tech heavy room, with thick metal walls and a few machines. It was quite scary actually; what were they going to do to us? There were two official looking people, scientists from the look of them (I'd been around more than a few in my life, haha), at a desk with a few bits of the equipment, and one chair in front of it. One of the scientist people, a Halapatovian man, said, "We simply have to go through some routine analysis before you are cleared for your mission debrief. One at a time you will be connected to our devices here and undergoing questioning. Who would like to go first?"
It didn't seem like the most exciting prospect but looking around at the others I could see a lot of fear reflected there, and I knew I could step up and make things easier for them by taking the plunge of having wires attached to me and being scanned. Besides, Abi was a lot more observant than me, and she'd be able to get a lot from watching me be tested first.
I volunteered myself and sat in the chair and let the scientist people put wires with suction cup things around my head, and clips on my fingers. I looked back to the wall where the others were standing and gave Abi another big grin while she shook her head, trying to hide a small smile. The scientists brought my attention back to them cos they were ready to interrogate me.
As they questioned me, I could feel some fun zaps in my head, and they kept consulting a screen, which was making me a little bit nervous. But after answering a lot of questions about my background and motive and skills and interests and allegiances and whatnot, I was disconnected from the whole monstrosity - I guess I'd passed - and then it was Abi's turn for the fun. We exchanged a look as we passed each other, and she took the seat I vacated.
"This doesn't seem shifty at all." Alexa mumbled as we watched Abi getting hooked up. I looked over at her and Jayken.
"It'll be okay guys." I tried to be reassuring but I mean, this was pretty invasive and scary, especially if you hadn't been through this sort of stuff before. My life as a space explorer and then an Alliance agent had meant I'd had plenty of experience with intense questioning and funky machines.
"Thanks Sophie." Jayken clapped a hand on my shoulder. "You and Abigail seem to be calm with it all, which is encouraging."
I followed his gaze to look at Abi. She was sitting through the process easily, her expression staying focussed the whole time. She was stunning to watch honestly; I could just imagine her eyes, like swirling fog behind glass, showing her racing mind.
Jayken and Alexa were a bit less calm as they went through it; their process took longer too. They were probably pretty scared. But finally after a while considering their responses, they were cleared and we were led into yet another room, hopefully, this time, for debrief. Please.
There was a counter with a technological surface on it that could probably project a holographic display. I admired it interestedly, and Abi sidled up beside me to have a closer look. We were directed into benches beside the counter. After taking apart and putting together in my brain the whole machination, I looked around the room some more and was surprised to see that there was someone else in the room with us, a Halapatovian with brown skin, curly hair and goggles over his eyes that probably were supposed to be glasses. I'd like to say he'd come in while I'd been absorbed, but I'm pretty sure I'm just completely brain dead and he was here when we entered. He glanced at us nervously. I tried to remember the other guy in our team I'd been told about. Was his name Gary? Choorvu? Tok? I racked my brain. Those sounded close, but not quite right.
Jayken introduced himself, extending a hand. "Hi, my name's Jayken. Nice to meet you."
The nameless man took his hand tentatively and responded, "I'm Rojjel." Drat, I was so sure it was Choorvu.
I scrambled over. Rojjel jumped a bit and put his hand to his goggles. "I'm Sophie! I heard you're good with machines, like me."
"Uh..." he said and then didn't get a chance to answer because more official people entered the room and directed us to sit down. I guess we could bond later.
One of the people from the meeting I was in when I first arrived did our debrief. I assumed she was some sort of big leader, overseeing the war probably.
"As you all have been made aware by now, we would like the five of you to be part of a reconnaissance team for a technological project, of great secrecy, which may be vital to defeating the Weraynian threat. There is some information that will be disclosed to you, but not all. It seems most likely that we will have use of you in assisting our technical team with the scouting of space stations, satellites and other such locations for installation of the technology being designed. Rojjel has been here for multiple weeks now helping test some of our software on some salvaged Weraynian equipment, and you may be able to assist with that, especially Sophie, who I believe has some engineering experience?" I excitedly nodded and waved at Rojjel, who raised a hand in response with wide eyes. I was keen to see some of this mysterious tech. "Also, Alexa, Abigail, Jayken, all of you have unique talents which can be used to serve our cause, and with your permission we'll undergo more training and study of you and your powers. As you are not trained or cleared for combat, your involvement in the actual war should be minimal, but these tasks we have for you are extremely valuable and we would like you to strive your hardest to achieve the best results. These are hard and dangerous times, and we currently have thousands of citizens of the Staarus system serving in various positions on ships and space stations around Werayne maintaining the blockade, as well as medical and technical staff as support, and civilians providing food and other supplies to be transported for our use. This project, the Sindro project as we like to call it, is another work vital to the war effort. Your orientation will be continued on the next shift; Rojjel can lead you to his workspace then. For now though, he'll take you to the quarters put aside for you."
We didn't get much of a chance to ask any questions before the leaders left and we were ushered to a completely new part of this space station. It was pretty big; nowhere near as big as Alliance base 17 though. From what I could gather this had mainly conference rooms, a few testing rooms, and living quarters, where we were heading now.
Rojjel led us awkwardly to an open space with a few doors coming off it. He gave us a basic orientation, then wrung his hands and made a hmm sound. "Ah, there is one thing. They've assigned us four rooms but there's five of us... I don't know what we want to do there."
"That's okay; Abi and I can just sleep together." I said brightly, grabbing Abi's hand, excited. Rojjel paused and blinked, and then Alexa coughed pointedly. I processed what I'd just said and how it sounded. "Uh, I mean..." I dropped Abi's hand immediately and tried to figure out how to make that sentence better. "We can share a room... because we're friends! So that solves the problem! Yeah!" Nailed it.
"Okay..." Rojjel said after a very long moment. "Uh, goodnight then." He immediately disappeared into the leftmost room, leaving me and Abi and Alexa and Jayken standing in the hallway.
"Which room you want Lexie?" Jayken turned to his friend, and she bit her lip as she surveyed the remaining three. She cocked her head. "Maybe one of the middle ones?"
"Cool." He turned to us. "Is it aight if I take the other middle one?"
"Yup!" I said and he nodded appreciatively.
"Well I guess we'll go drop our stuff then. See you in a bit, lads." He went into his room. Alexa waited until the door shut behind him and glanced at us furtively.
Abigail put a hand on my arm. I smiled at the touch. "Come on." she mumbled, and I followed her gladly into what was now our room, leaving Alexa behind. Though the context was very different, this reminded me of the good old days. Me and Abi sharing a room. It was so natural to me. Maybe some people wanted their privacy but I had never been particularly worried about that. Abi put me at ease anyway. I wanted to be around her every second possible.
The room wasn't very big, only a small bed built into the wall and a shelf. Amenities were in the shared space. We dumped our bags on the available surface and sat down on the bed.
Abi leant her head on my shoulder. I slid my eyes fondly over to her.
"What have we gotten into Sophie?" she murmured.
I kissed her forehead gently. "Everything's going to be okay. They'll beat the Weraynians soon. And we'll do whatever we can to help."
She held my hand tightly. "I know. I know. It's just... I'm really confused. This whole situation is really complex and I don't know how to act. Jayken and Alexa worry me. Why are they here? Why are any of us here? They presented tasks to us so innocently but I can't help but feel there's something... deeper... more sinister... going on. But there's good reason for information to be kept classified; this isn't exactly the safest scenario to be in. I just need to focus on what's happening right now and try not to worry."
"Yeah." I said. Sometimes Abigail didn't ask questions for any insight from me; just so she could get her thoughts out of her head. She thought so in depth about things. I can't say I did the same. We're alone together with downtime for the first time in ages and I was simply drinking in her presence. What she was saying did make my brain cells start to work a bit, for once, her words ticking over in my head. "This is a weird scenario. I've been in a few like, conflicts and stuff before, with the Alliance. Things are a lot more tense than I remember them being in those times. This is a bit different I guess, the Weraynians are brainwashed and angry and they've been building who knows what for a while now. But still. I trust your instincts more than any other official info they could give us. So if you think something's wrong, we can look into it. I'm very good at making trouble."
She chuckled, took her head off my shoulder and looked directly into my eyes. I sucked in a deep breath. "You really are the most incredible person in the universe. You understand me so well. I'm so glad we're together again."
"Me too."
Her eyes stopped sparkling briefly as she yawned. "This has been a weird day. We should probably get some sleep."
I nodded. For me it had been a realllllly long day. Beth had shown me the Weraynian stuff at the very end of one of our base's day cycles, and that had been like, forever ago. Also all the debrief and clearance things had taken ETERNITY. As much as I wanted to talk to Abi about anything and everything, we'd have time for that in the coming days. For now I was content just to curl up beside her and drift into sleepy times.
The next morning Rojjel led me to the workspace he'd been given to show me what he'd been working on, where a big slab of technology was on a desk in the very middle.
"This is so cool! They got this from Werayne?" I exclaimed gleefully, admiring the wiring done to the machine before me and poking the interface to make it glow on.
"Yes." Rojjel said, readjusting one of the parts I'd tugged on. He was way more gentle with machines than me. He was holding some files and flicked anxiously through them. "It's been quite a challenge trying to reconfigure the data they've given me for the Weraynian hardware."
"What do they want you to put on it?" I held out my hand for the files curiously and Rojjel opened them and showed me some elaborate coding for programs that seemed to be establishing a satellite network and using it to connect some kinds of machines to do... something. I couldn't quite tell. It seemed to have a sort of transmitting function but it wasn't clear. Anyway, it was written in the Paladanian format I recognised from years before, which would be interesting to try to install on a Weraynian device. Hmm, why did they want to do that anyway? Hijack enemy technology? For what?
Jayken and Lexie came into the room, back from their little tour around this section of the space station. "Where'd you get that? I've never seen anything like that before." Jayken said, looking curiously over the machine. Oh yeah, he was Weraynian. I kept forgetting.
"Apparently it's new, they salvaged it from the wreckage of one of the scout ships." Rojjel said, running a hand over the casing of the computer-like machine. "It seems they've upgraded a lot of their technology in the past few years in preparation for the break out. It's an impressive system."
"I'll say." I opened one of the under parts and poked around in the guts of the thing. "You had much luck?"
"A bit. Actually I was going to test out a new connection today, could you give me a hand?"
"Of course." I looked eagerly over the tools spread out around the room. I'd loved fiddling with machines my whole life, which had been useful when I'd been teleporting around the universe, and then even more helpful when I joined the Alliance and I had spaceships and data banks and space station maintenance to get my head around. As we were discussing the best way to go about our task, Abi entered the room as well. I looked up expectantly.
"Alexa," she addressed the Aandriggian instead of me, very rude of her. I pouted but she didn't see it because she was, as I said, not talking to me. "The Paladanian leader, Varys, requested you and I come to the training room in order to do some early experimentation regarding our abilities."
Alexa frowned. "Uh huh." she handed a satchel she had had on her shoulder to Jayken, who smiled and slipped it over his own shoulder. "Yeah, okay, let's go."
"See you later Abi!" I called to her and she finally looked at me and gave me a cute little wave as they left. I smiled gleefully. Jayken raised an eyebrow at me cheekily and I winked at him. He chuckled and moved over to join me and Rojjel.
"Any way I can help, guys?" he asked cheerily.
"Uh, yes actually." Rojjel popped his head up from where he'd been examining the wiring behind the interface and pointed to the messy tool desk. "If you could sort those modulator pieces by size and colour, that would be very useful."
"Yeah okay." Jayken moved over and picked up the different bits of tech, examining them before putting them in place.
The first few days went kind of like that. Every morning we went to the main conference room with everyone on the base to get an update on the warfront. The blockade seemed to be holding pretty well for now, though there had been some skirmishes and brief breeches, for the most part it was under control. Then me and Rojjel usually worked on either the machine or the data we'd been given. It was pretty fun honestly and we were making, uh, some progress. Abi and Lexie and sometimes Jayken were observed in the training room most days, and occasionally I joined them. Other times they wanted information from me about the Alliance forces which were coming to help soon, so that their arrival could be handled efficiently and they could be assigned where they were needed. In our downtime Abi and I shared about our days to each other, got deep about the whole war thing, and then distracted each other with stupid games and conversation topics. If it wasn't for the fact that like, this was a war and people were dying, it would be quite a nice time.
One morning - not that mornings are like, a thing, when you're on a space station, you're just assigning arbitrary time concepts to an existence among the bleakness of space... I mean it wasn't even that soon after I woke up why did I call it morning? Anyway - someone came and had a look at me and Rojjel's stuff and then told us they needed us to go on a recon to survey one of the force field generator space station things so Abi and all the gang were gathered together and we headed to the shipyard and were led to this absolutely beautiful ship, Halapatovian design I think (based on how shiny and cool it was compared to boring Paladanian design - lol just kidding). I was so used to the Alliance ship (the Assistance Impressing) which worked pretty well but looked garbage (but don't tell Steve I said that). I'm sure these ships worked well also but they looked damn nice. I guess they'd been preparing for war for a long time, so they had time and resources and stuff? I don't know. Either way I was immediately in love with this sleek, stylish, advanced piece of spacecraft and was keen to be inside it and see how it worked. Once we went through the entrance hatch I was completely absorbed in looking around that I completely zoned out the information about the ship that our pilot/chaperone lady (who was Halapatovian by the way) was telling us, which was definitely stuff I would have been extremely interested in. It took Abi nudging me in the ribs for me to even notice she was still talking, and that she was showing us the control hub of the ship, which had a... unique design. There were some traditional mechanics, buttons and screens and maneuvering equipment but there was also this, like, gel matrix thing, which I guess our hands were supposed to go into?
"This is one of the most important developments Staarus scientists have integrated into our technology for this war. One of the advantages the Halapatovians and Paladanians have over the Weraynians is our innate abilities that expand our senses and allow us to manipulate the environment, and this application allow us to fully connect our minds to our spacecraft, channelling our powers and greatly increasing our control of the technology. It assists me in piloting the ship, and even connects to the weaponry system. It makes everything a lot easier. I'm sure you'll all get a chance to have a go with it at some point. Alright, let's all get strapped in and ready to go."
I watched with interest from my seat as she manipulated the strange controls, hands embedded neatly in the gel. She twisted her hands delicately as the ship started up and left the docking bay, her face very focussed. It was cool to see new tech and how it worked. I turned to Abi, and immediately saw the eagerness in her eyes that she wanted to analyse and gush about it to me, so I smiled, leaned back and let her.
After a while, we were approaching a mish mash of ships. I could see Werayne behind it all, through the thick windows. It was unlike the images I'd seen of it back when I'd first been to Flauraan – because the force field was gone, obviously. You could see the lights from the cities and factories on the dark side - I assume, since I'd never been to Werayne, that makes the most sense - and the shapes of countries on the light side. It was really cool to see the different ways planets had continents form on them, and I was always awed to see planets from space, actually I don't know how many times I've even had that opportunity, considering all the teleporting and stuff. Oh well, it was a cool angle. Our ship drew closer to what I assumed was where we were going, one of the many orbiting bits of technology which the Halapatovians and Paladanians had put in place to make the force field all those years ago whenever it was. It could technically be described as a space station, but barely. It was like, the size of a small house, or a garage, or something. Space enough for people to be able to go in there and do maintenance on everything, but not too impressive beyond that. Purely functional. This one was on the edge of the blockade, so it was apparently safe for us to go into. I got the feeling they'd want us to check them all out eventually, but it made sense to start with one where we probably weren't going to get killed by Weraynians. Actually that brings up a question I've had on my mind for years, why didn't the Weraynian back on Flauraan kill me? Or at least leave my arm broken and let me bleed out? That was one of the weirdest things from that whole invasion scene; the Weraynian had been this ruthless killer and then he fixed my arm for some reason and I ended up being like, the reason he got defeated so like why. I don't know. It bothered me sometimes, when a twinge in my arm reminded me of having it broken, and the terror I felt as the Weraynian put his hand on it again, only to inject me with a medicine that helped it heal. It just didn't seem smart. What reason did he have for not killing me? I think he gave me a really creepy answer at the time but still. This thought scrolled listlessly in the back of my head as we got suited up and docked at the port of the space station. I made sure to walk as close to Abi as I could so I could brush my arm against hers because even though the place we were going wasn't that big I knew we had different tasks and I wanted as much contact with her as possible before we split up. Pretty pathetic, huh. Jayken, Abi and Alexa went one way to do an internal survey while me and Rojjel assessed the tech side of things, to figure out its compatibility with the machine we'd been tinkering with. I did wonder what this whole thing was for. It was probably part of some elaborate plot to remake the force field or something. Oh well. I poked and prodded at things while Rojjel did actual methodical work and we back and forthed and then once we were done we went back to the ship and he showed where in the ship we could input some data while we waited for the others. As I heard them approach, I looked up and smiled as Abi appeared in my line of vision. Having achieved what we came for, we strapped in and headed back to the base.
Schwoom (spaceship noise)
"So how did you enjoy your first mission?" I asked Abi over food later. She looked up from her portion and smirked at me.
"It was pretty good." she said, being playful for a moment but then went straight into serious mode. "It's still arduous to wrap my head around us being here and contributing to the war effort, but it was helpful to do something other than have my powers tested, even if it was just surveying a space station for who knows what purpose."
"Better than nothing right?"
She smiled, genuinely this time. "Yeah. We're so removed from the war here though. It's painful to imagine the Weraynians out there, and the people facing them, even with advanced technology and in spacecraft. None of this feels real. But I hope whatever they want us to do makes a difference."
"Yeah." We soon diverted back to regular conversation, but what she said struck me. It was so easy to detach myself from reality - I'd been doing it my whole life to cope - but she was right, there was a war on. The Weraynians were a real threat and people were dying every day to stop their advancing. We were safe here, for now, in these early stages of the war, far from the actual fighting. But that didn't mean we would be safe forever. It was so easy to assume that everything was just going to turn out okay, it was really the only way to get through each day.
But what if it didn't?