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RP Mementos

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Floodwaters

Inactive Member
Stateroom aboard the private cargo ship "Tourmaline"

Other than the omnipresent hum of the engines to which the young woman had grown so accustomed to that she barely noticed it anymore, the only sound she heard was the muted, intermittent ruckus coming from the wardroom some distance aft, undoubtedly from some game of chance that the ship's crew engaged in when not otherwise occupied by their regular duties. It sounded like good-natured jeers and laughter for the most part, but the occasional sharp word or threat drifted through the bulkheads from time to time.

She lay on her back in the bunk provided for her, fingers interlaced across her washboard-flat abdomen, long auburn hair splayed out across the pillow around her head, her unfocused gaze pointed in the general direction of the flickering, failing light tube in the ceiling of her cabin. They were two days out of the Occhestia system, but with the ship's CFS on the fritz, it would likely be another day or two before they arrived at Dawn Station at the very least, and that was assuming nothing went wrong. Still, the slower transit time was the primary reason she'd been able to secure passage for so little, so she figured she at least had that to be grateful for. Janelle didn't have a lot to her name, and what little she did have she guarded jealously.

In truth, Janelle Jacobs had even less than that; she barely remembered much of her life further back than one or two years, and even that was spotty in some places. Somehow, she had always known that Occhestia III was not her homeworld, but the buzzing streets of its decaying inner city slums were the only part of her life of which she had solid recollection.

Without conscious thought her head turned, eyes settling on the empty syringe lying on the spartan metal table next to her bed, and flexed the fingers of her right hand open and closed a few times. She was certain that her terrible habit had something to do with the gaps in her memory, as when she got overzealous with her injections she was quite prone to extended bouts of euphoria and hallucinations of which she could only recall hazy snapshots.

She was certainly not blind to the gravity of such an addiction, and the weight of its proverbial albatross around her neck seemed to grow heavier each day. She could recall at least a handful of times when she had resolved to distance herself from the substance, only to feel her determination slowly erode as the shakes and nausea gradually invaded her body again, and in the end she crawled, always crawled, quaking and trembling back to the sweet sensation of stability that only the needle could bring her.

A sudden BANG resounded from the wardroom, causing Janelle to sit bolt upright with a convulsive start, sweat instantly beading on her forehead as the breath caught in her throat as if some invisible hand had clamped down on her trachea and begun to throttle her.



City lights, the sound of buzzing traffic and the murmur of a million voices around her. Hazy outlines of the crowds flitted in and out of view as she felt herself walk ever onward beneath a black sky, the stars above rendered invisible by the lights of the towering skyscrapers.

Then she was alone. An out-of-place shuffling sound from her left, her nerves suddenly jumping to life with the unmistakable alarm of her instincts.

A metal bar across her neck, choking her. A shift of her weight and a twist of her torso as a huge, lumbering form was thrown across her hip, but the bar brought her down on top of it. A flurry of fists as she felt bone and flesh start to yield beneath her brutal attacks.

Fire. The pain of a thousand flaming blades lancing through her ribs, causing her neck and arms to spasm violently. The baton connected with her cheek, wrenching her head to the side.

Dancing lights flashed across her vision. Vertigo overtook her as the world spun.

Darkness.




Janelle's chest heaved up and down as she fought to regain the breath that stubbornly persisted in eluding her, her long shoulder-length hair flung across her face and clinging to the sweat on her forehead and the bridge of her nose. Angry voices drifted into her cabin from the wardroom as an argument over their game turned sour, followed by a series of clatters as furniture was overturned.

Another voice roared over the din, barking authoritatively for order, and the chaos died down as quickly as it had begun. Clearing her throat, Janelle reprimanded herself for being so jumpy, but the adrenaline continued to course through her system, heart pounding like a pneumatic hammer in her chest, blood coursing so fast through her body that she could feel her pulse in her fingers, in her feet, behind her eyes.

Sitting there in a half-reclined position against the bulkhead on her bunk, knees elevated, she tugged on the tail of her snug-fitting, simple white T-shirt, smoothing it back down over her torso. Looking down as she did so, her eyes suddenly became involuntarily fixated on the metal buckle of the belt cinched about her waist.



The only thing that took shape in her blurry, formless field of vision was the square, tarnished metal belt buckle below her navel.

She could feel herself restrained to a worn wooden chair, ankles and wrists bound to it with thin wire almost to the point of cutting through her skin, her head thick and buzzing, too heavy for her neck to lift even an inch.

A bass voice rumbled nearby, and she felt the hot breath on her ear, but it sounded muted and far away, almost as if she were deep underwater. She couldn't understand much of it, but she remembered the mention of a place called "Dawn," and that the voice repeatedly addressed her by a name that wasn't hers.

It didn't matter how many times she tried to explain that they had the wrong person. She wasn't sure if it was because her captor was simply too loyal to be dissuaded, or if it was because her mouth was so numb and caked with dried blood that she could barely form a coherent sentence.

She had no way of knowing where she was, or why she was there. She hadn't welched on any debts recently, at least not on anyone dangerous enough to explain her situation.

Had she?

And if she had, why would they keep calling her by a stranger's name?




Once again Janelle found herself in near silence, with only the droning hum of the engines and the flickering of the light tube. Brushing the long hair from her eyes, she swung her legs back onto the floor and made her way over to the mirror set above the panel in the wall opposite the bunk. Pushing firmly on the top of the panel, she heard a soft "thunk" as a latch disengaged, and the panel swung down to reveal a yellowed ceramic washbasin.

As she turned on the water, she glanced at her reflection. A slender face gazed back at her with distant, greenish brown eyes, its understated, angular features almost elegant, even attractive, despite the yellowish bruise that was healing on the side of her cheek and temple and the remains of a black eye fading away beneath the left iris.. Yet, beneath the understated attractiveness the face was cold, hollow, and distant. Even though this was the face that Janelle always remembered seeing in the mirror, she could not shake the sensation that a stranger was looking back at her from the other side of the glass.

A shiver ran up her spine, and she tore her eyes away from the haunting visage to splash some cool water on her forehead and cheeks. She ran her fingers through her long hair, combing it out of her face and coaxing it to lay back flat against her head, allowing the straight locks to cascade over her shoulders. In the middle of the act she slowed and stopped, frozen in place as she noticed the scabs encircling her hands again.



A horrible, wet gurgling noise and the splatter of hot, running blood were the only sounds she could hear as she strained, her boot planted firmly between the hulking figure's shoulder blades, her bloody hands wrapped in the wire with which she was garroting him. His massive arms flailed as he desperately struggled to free himself in vain, swinging to the full extent of his joints' allowance with sickening cracking sounds, intent on crushing her in any way he could.

The wire dug into her palms, hot blood oozing out from beneath them as she pulled with all of her might, the tendons in her neck taut and her jaw clenched beneath closed, resolute lips. Though cold, unfeeling eyes she watched his struggle slowly subside, and after several slow, agonizing seconds he went limp and crumpled forward into an expanding red pool of his own blood.

Swallowing her revulsion, her heart racing, she released the wire, a soft whimper of pain escaping from her lips as she looked at the mixture of their blood on her hands. Panting, her sweat cutting rivulets through the caked-on grime and dirt on her skin, she ran for the door and out into a dingy hallway framed only by wooden rafters and steel beams, aging incandescent bulbs casting a dim, eerie yellow light. She picked a direction and ran.

She ran until she came to a rickety staircase, at the top of which she saw light pouring through the outline of a door, like some kind of otherworldly portal out of this nightmarish realm.




She blinked and snapped herself out of the waking dream. Longingly she gazed back at the empty syringe on the end table, then finished smoothing her hair and clothing before shoving the washbasin back into the wall. She moved back across the room, picking up the backpack that lay slumped against the wall next to the bed. Sitting down, she opened the pack and rummaged through its meager contents, everything that she owned.

It wasn't much, and part of her worried that she wouldn't remember or recognize any of its contents even though she had no reason to believe anyone had been into it since she lasted opened it. A few changes of clothes, two or three dwindling toiletry items, her PHC... and a datapad.



In her frantic race to escape from the building, she ran through a dingy room, permeated with the stink of mold and wet wood, the steady drip of a leaking water pipe echoing between the concrete walls. Overlapping graffiti adorned the walls, coupled with unintelligible splatters of red and black paint, or possibly even blood. A dirty mattress was in the corner, surrounded by detritus; empty liquor bottles, burnt cigarette butts, and discarded personal items.

She spotted her backpack among the clutter, several of its contents spilled out next to the mattress. If it hadn't been everything that she owned, she'd have ignored it, writing it off as an acceptable loss, but in a mad rush she sprinted towards it, every bleeding cut and aching bruise on her body screaming for her to stop.

Skidding to a halt she scooped up everything nearby, shoving it indiscriminately into the bag, conscious of the fact that an inactive datapad was among the effects but in too much of a hurry to care. She looked up at the mattress and noticed several of her undergarments lying twisted in the sheets, covered in a filth as to whose nature she could only guess at.

Swallowing a touch of vomit that rose to the back of her throat at the possible implications, she ignored the smallclothes and yanked the backpack from the floor, struggling to her feet and ran to find the exit, not bothering to close it.




She wrenched her eyes closed, trying to stave off the sense of panic as she realized that her hands had already begun to shake again. So soon...? she thought in angry desperation. Controlling her breathing, she rummaged through the backpack and found the length of elastic banding that was looped back on itself, and after a few clumsy efforts managed to snake her trembling hand through the loop, shoving it to her upper arm and pulled it taut. She flexed the fingers on her hand several times so that the vein on the inside of her elbow protruded through the skin, and held the strap in her teeth as she reached into the backpack, withdrawing a nearly-empty vial of a clear liquid.

Just one more...

The sense of calming serenity was immediate as the drug coursed into her blood, quelling the growing sense of dread and terror that always lurked just beneath the surface of her consciousness. The nightmare visions slowly subsided, and the color in the world seemed to return as her heart rate slowed to a steady drumming rhythm, and faded back into unnoticed obscurity.

Janelle sighed in quiet relief, but that barely-acknowledged sense of self-loathing returned as she withdrew her arm from the tourniquet. Doing her best to ignore it, she withdrew the datapad and thumbed the "on" switch. She didn't know why she was looking again. She'd done everything she knew to restore the files, which she had realized in another unsettling epiphany was much more than she thought she should, but it was no use. Except for a handful of lewd video recordings and a single bounty voucher, everything on the hard drive was hopelessly corrupted, undoubtedly by some kind of cut-rate security cypher that had nuked its storage when she had attempted to access the wrong thing.

She knew she couldn't go back to Occhestia III, not after what she'd done. Even if the man she'd killed was a convicted felon, and it had been in perfectly justifiable self-defense, whoever had sent him wouldn't be content to rest on their laurels and let her alone.

Pulling up the bounty voucher, she pulled up her feet and sat cross-legged against the wall on her mattress, reading over the text for what must have been the fortieth time. She still didn't understand what was happening to her, but whatever it was, it was linked in some way to the woman in this bounty, and to Dawn Station. Perhaps she'd be able to find out why she was being pinned as her fall girl. It wasn't as if there wasn't much more she had to lose.

==TRANSMISSION RECEIVED==

Origin: Urtullan Colony, HX-24 System
Re: Bounty - Violation of Indenture
Sender: Office of the Magistrate - Reisor District

Be it known that SIENNA AUDREY SHELTON has unlawfully departed the planet in violation of his/her indenture with contract holder OLAF EDMOND PANGRE. She was last seen boarding a military shuttle with a Star Army of Yamatai crew after assisting in the murder of a lawful agent sent to collect her. Orbital trackers detected the shuttle docking with a Plumeria-class gunship and jumping away. Current whereabouts unknown, presumed to have fled to Yamatai space.

A description of the fugitive is listed below. Other crimes include MURDER, THEFT OF PERSONAL PROPERTY, DESTRUCTION OF GOVERNMENT RESOURCES, RECKLESS DISREGARD FOR PUBLIC SAFETY. She should be considered armed and dangerous.

A bounty of 3000 KS (or equivalent) is offered for her return ALIVE and in GOOD HEALTH. No payment will be awarded if the fugitive is critically harmed in any way, including but not limited to dismembered limbs, missing organs, brain trauma, paralysis, etc. Relatively minor injuries such as moderate bone fractures may or may not void the bounty, depending on circumstances.

Height: 175.26 cm
Weight: 60.78 kg
Eyes: Green
Hair: Lt. Brown
Age: Early 20s

((Two photos appear to be attached to the bounty, but they are corrupted and distorted beyond recognition))
==TRANSMISSION ENDS==


Personal Notes:
dam luky brake for me didn't expect nothin like this to jus drop in my back yard
the bounty's old and i don know how id get her to Urtullan to dam far away
the boss mite be able to tho and he mite cut me in on the reward for findin her two
not like nobody wud miss her no way
 
Dawn Station - Sector Six

The station was huge. Impossibly huge for something in permanent freefall, far removed from any planetary body. So much so, in fact, that if Janelle never looked up, it was easy to forget that she was moving about inside of a floating megastructure, and not planetside.

Oddly enough, however, she couldn't shake the strangest feeling of deja vu. Though she didn't recognize a thing about the bustling interior of what had to be only a miniscule fraction of the station's enormous size, like the faintest tickle deep inside her head she felt somehow vaguely familiar with the place. She couldn't piece any of it together, of course; it was mostly just passing sensations or blurred, indistinct pseudo-images, like the remnants of a fading dream that began to dissipate only a moment after waking.

The masses milling about the maze of streets and pathways paid her little mind as she shouldered her way through them, swimming inexorably against the rushing current of people going about their lives. It had been a few days since the Tourmaline had docked, letting her off before continuing on to who-knew-where, and she had spent that time here in the spaceport canvassing the locals wherever she could. She considered herself lucky if someone she approached didn't take one look at her and immediately move to avoid her, but even the ones that didn't always seemed to stiffen slightly. Occasionally one would dismiss her brusquely, but while it was rare that most folks who did bother to talk to her exercised at least the minimum amount of courtesy that social norms demanded, she always caught one or two of the telltale signs: a sideways glance, the unconscious move of a hand to cover their wallet protectively, the slow, tiny steps backing away from her as if they were looking for the first excuse to get as far away from the dissheveled young woman as they could. And not a single person had the slightest clue as to who this "Sienna Shelton" was, anyhow.

Still, however, she pressed on, panhandling for her meals and sleeping on benches whenever she could until some "concerned citizen" took exception to her, and security inevitably shook her down and sent her on her way.

But by the fourth day (or fifth, she wasn't quite sure), she was getting nearly to the point of desperation. What meager supply of Qualen she'd had left was dwindling, and the security forces here had gotten wise to her presence, making her rounds all the more difficult. And what did she have to show for it, coming here on a whim, looking for an answer to a question she didn't even know, all based on nothing more than a nearly five year old bounty on a stranger's head. She didn't have the money to go back to the Occhestia system, although she wasn't entirely sure if she even wanted to. On the one hand, she was in no hurry to go back to a place where she might again be assaulted and held hostage, even tortured, mistaken identity or not. But then again, even if her memories were gone, Occhestia III was still the only home she ever knew, and at least there she knew her way around. Here, she had nothing.

More out of necessity than conscious decision, as spaceport security had basically all but run her out, she had found herself in the industrial areas of the titanic station, and whether by fate or dumb chance, she had at last found someone who recognized the name of her ghost.

It was a bartender at a place called Klimmeck's Hole, a seedy little establishment in a back alleyway. Again, Janelle had to force her way through that weird sense of vapor memory, and it was further exacerbated by the odd looks that the middle-aged woman had kept giving her when she asked, as if she all the while wanted to say something that she didn't quite know how to put into words. She didn't like it at all - she felt as though she was being sized up, or perhaps it was that the bartender didn't believe she was quite right in the head.

For all she knew, she may very well have been right. She didn't quite know what she was doing, or why, but she was in too deep to stop now.

Her conversation had taught her that Shelton had captained a small vessel called the Concordia Veil, along with a ragtag crew - "assorted nuts," she'd called them - and that there had been some ruckus some years back when a couple of them had been there in that very establishment. Eventually the well of information (and weird looks) had dried up, and after thanking her for her time she made her way back here to the spaceport. She took care to keep an air of purpose around her so as not to attract more attention from the security guards again, hoping against hope that even if no one here remembered Sienna's name, maybe someone would recognize the name of the vessel, and where it had gone.

Her questions had led her, to her astonishment, to this sad little impound yard, far off the main thoroughfares.

The overweight man at the desk had a face that was so bulging round and cratered with pockmarks it looked like the surface of some meteor-battered moon. He didn't even bother to look up as she entered the tiny reception room of the dilapidated, rusty metal outbuilding sitting next to a chain link gate that, although it appeared big enough to accommodate a ten-axle truck, didn't look like it had been opened in months. She approached the counter, resting her dirt-and-dried-blood-covered hands on its surface, and still he sat half-melted into his reclining chair, a vacant look in his eyes as he watched some trashy vidcast through an ocular impant, shovelling fried chips into the appallingly tiny orifice in his fat face, not appearing to even notice her.

She cleared her throat sharply to get his attention, and his eyes suddenly focused on her, as if seeing her for the first time. An annoyed look creased his greasy features, but with an audible straining grunt he sat up in his chair, wiping the crumbs and oil from his afternoon snack on a yellowed, unwashed T-shirt stretched across his girth.

"Yeah?" the man groaned at her in a wheezy, suprisingly high-pitched voice.

Janelle gave him her best impression of an apologetic smile, though even she doubted its genuity, and she couldn't even see it. "I'm, uh, I'm looking for information on a Jinsoku cargo runner that was here some time back," she said hesitantly.

The man answered her with a flat, vacant expression. "Lotsa those come through here," he replied, uninterested and clearly already ready to be rid of her. "You got a hull number?"

Janelle's heart sank a bit. "No," she replied, "but I have a name..."

With an impatient snort the man leaned forward, sweeping a pile of junk food wrappers and scattered papers from a dusty keyboard. He said nothing, but looked up at her from beneath his bushy eyebrows, wordlessly prodding her to continue.

"Concordia Veil."

The man typed the name into the console and waited for a few seconds as an unseen, outdated computer whirred and clicked. "It's here," he said, and sputtered a bit as he coughed suddenly, spraying spittle and crumbs across the desk. Casually he wiped some of the remained from his chins with the back of a meaty hand, looking back up at her. "You here to get 'er out? Record says she been here almost two years. Like as not she don't run no more, even if nobody's stripped 'er for parts."

She felt her forehead fold up in bewilderment. The Veil was here? In an impound? That seemed to imply that Shelton had never left, but if she had, why would she abandon her ship? "I--" she began, unsure of how to continue. "I'm not..."

"Swipe there," the man interrupted, pointing to a small wired scanning pad on the end of the counter. When Janelle only looked at him quizzically, the man rolled his eyes and shoved his thick finger at the device strapped to her left wrist. "Your PHC, sugar lips. Swipe that there."

Janelle looked at the computer on her arm, puzzled. She didn't remember getting the thing, but she'd known it was there all along. There was nothing on it, really; she'd played with a few times in the past, but if anything of import was stored on it at one point, it had long since been deleted. "I don't-- well, all right," she stammered, then shrugged and moved her arm down to the terminal. The black box on the counter chirped once as she passed the device over it, feeding unseen information to archaic databases somewhere nearby.

After a few seconds, the man grunted again and tapped out a few more keystrokes. "The fines and fees'll be deducted from your account," he said as he typed. "You'll prolly wanna go down and look it over, make sure she's spaceworthy. Once I haul 'er outta here and back to the pads it ain't my problem no more."

"Wait, what?" Janelle almost snapped. "My account?"

The fat man looked at her through those eyebrows again, pausing in his typing. "Yeah, your account," he said, not bothering to hide the sardonic drone in his voice. "Didn't think you'd get the thing out free after lettin' it take up space here for so long, did ya?"

"No, that's not--" she began, but cut herself off. If she wasn't confused before, she was positively flummoxed now. As far as she knew, she didn't have a single credit to her name aside from what she managed to squeeze out of passers-by via appeals to charity or pity. However she'd gotten this PHC, apparently it was still linked to a bank account somewhere, and if there was enough money in there to get her a ship, let alone the very ship that belonged to the woman she was pursuing, who was she to argue? She cleared her throat, trying the smile again. "'Course not," she said whimsically. "Sorry, long day."

The man rolled his eyes and continued typing. "Sign here and here," he told her with a sigh, placing a datapad and a stylus on the countertop. On the display was a barrage of paragraphs in tiny legalese font, punctuated near the bottom by a couple of blank spaces, clearly for a signature.

Again, Janelle hesitated. She was already in over her head, and now it seemed like she was about to step into a potentially incriminating paper trail. What if the owner of the funds came looking for her? As if she didn't have enough people after her already? Her hand hovered over the stylus for a second, until another impatient grunt from the fat man at the counter wrenched it free from its apparent stasis.

She picked up the stylus and leaned in closer to the digital document. Just as she was frantically wondering whose name she was expected to sign, she saw something that made her heart turn to ice.

"Lady, it's a release form, not a fuckin' shark," the man said, even more impatiently. "Jus' sign it so you can get your ship outta my yard."

Janelle looked up at him, and evidently her face looked as drained and white as it felt to her, because the man across the counter obviously saw it.. "Can I--" she said, swallowing to get her voice unstuck from her throat. "Can I just take a look at your screen back there, real quick?"

"Why?" the man asked pointedly.

"Just humor me, please," she practically begged.

With another irritated sigh, the man turned his monitor around for her to see.

In the upper right corner of the screen was a box with flashing text.

>IDENT CONFIRMED
>SHELTON, SIENNA A
 
Concordia Veil - Cockpit
Somewhere in deep space...

The stars outside of the old ship's nerve center viewport shone steadily through the shimmering blue veil that enveloped the ship as it silently screamed through the void at thousands of times the speed of light. Other than the dim light from the display screens that flickered erratically on occasion, as if they were on the verge of failing at any moment, and the eerie glow from outside, the cockpit was dark and still, with only the quiet, almost subsonic rumble of the ship's engines and Janelle's steady breathing, condensing into wispy clouds in the cold air in front of her keeping it above total silence.

Another empty syringe lay on the empty seat to her left, her only companion on this lonely journey. Before she'd left she'd managed to secure another decent supply of Qualen from a seedy-looking pusher in the spaceport as well as a few freeze-dried meals, deducing that since she'd already used stolen funds once to procure the Veil, it hardly made a difference to spend what little remained to keep herself fixed and fed for a while longer.

The ship had been spaceworthy, but only just when she'd found it. From the moment she had laid eyes on the forlorn, forgotten vessel amidst the row of derelict hulls near the fenceline of the scrap yard, that nagging feeling of deja vu had exploded into an overwhelming sense of familiarity. She knew this ship, and she didn't know why. Or perhaps, just perhaps, her mind simply didn't want to understand why.

Every line, every bulkhead, every valve and switch and access panel she knew as if she'd been there before. Without conscious thought, as if in a daze, she'd boarded the ship, running her hands over dirty, corroded metal piping as she walked the empty corridors. Everywhere she looked, distant memories flashed into view and then evaporated, like that persistent, nagging spot in the corner of one's vision that vanished the moment you looked directly at it. The derelict was empty and silent, but Janelle could swear she heard the sounds of activity with every clunk of her boots on the metal flooring, ethereal voices speaking to her from another place and time that were at the same time an unintelligible cacaphony and a smattering of hushed whispers.

It was as if she were walking the halls of an old haunted house, in a way, one that was trying to tell her a story that she didn't yet fully understand.

Most of the storage cabinets had been stripped bare by this point, any personal effects long since removed by their owners or stolen by sticky fingers. Thankfully, however, all of the vital ship's components were still present and mostly intact, although the power supply had long since been drained completely.

The ship had been transhauled back to the main starport where it had been placed on a vacant landing pad. It had only taken her a few adjustments and a rather massive jump-start at the port facility to get the ship's systems online again, and from there it was all hull and airlock integrity tests, system diagnostics, and running what ship's records she could find that weren't hopelessly corrupted.

She had deduced that the last port that the ship had been to before coming to its temporary grave on Dawn Station had been a place called the Black Moon, in a star system called Halna. Again the pang of familiarity had struck her, this time with the force of a battering ram. With a certainty she still didn't understand, she had come to the conclusion that the next pieces of her puzzle would be found there, and resolved to go without hesitation.

And somehow, she'd been able to do it all herself. Moreover, she realized without a doubt that she actually already knew how to fly the old pile of scrap herself.

She didn't know how she knew how to do any of this, of course - what little of her memory she retained gave her few clues as to from where her mechanical expertise originated - but that only made her present situation all the more troubling.

How had she come to possess Sienna Shelton's PHC? Why did her captor on Occhestia III somehow feel that her detainment would lead to his quarry? And why did all of this - Dawn Station and the Veil - seem so utterly, maddeningly familiar to her? The two women were obviously connected in some fashion, but how? Every time she tried to ponder these questions, she simply locked up, as if her mind just hit an invisible wall. Once or twice she had tried to force her way through, but it only gave her a headache. Her psyche simply refused to travel past a certain point. On some subconscious level, she somehow felt that she didn't want to know the answer. And yet, here she was, still chasing ghosts nevertheless, furiously struggling against the prison that her mind had erected around itself for reasons still yet alien to her.

She shivered, huddled there in the cramped pilot's seat as she tried to draw her knees to her chest, but again realized the futility of doing so when they clunked against the instrument panel before her for what must have been the fifth time. Instead she pulled the threadbare blanket she'd found shoved carelessly behind one of the mattress-less beds in a cabin higher on her shoulders, hugging herself beneath it for warmth. She watched the endless data feeds scrolling across display screens in front of her, their twitchy, twinkling light dancing across her dirty, matted long hair and the vacant, haunted expression on her grease-stained face. The ship's climate control system was still acting up, leaving the interior in bitter, frigid cold for unpredictable bursts of time before suddenly deciding to kick on again. She had no idea what she hoped to find on the Black Moon, or precisely how she'd hoped to find it. But then, she'd had similar doubts about Dawn Station, and something had guided her where she needed to be.

It was at that moment, as if the ship had read her thoughts and subsequently decided to mock them, that the endlessly scrolling lines of data on the cockpit displays suddenly all died at once, leaving her bathed in nothing more than the ghostly blue glow from outside the viewport. Janelle's heart skipped a beat as she suddenly sat bolt upright, looking with frantic puzzlement at the dead cockpit. She tried a few switches and knobs, her systematic approach quickly eroding into growing alarm and eventually to near-panic as she desperately attempted to bring the ship's systems back online.

In the seconds before she allowed the animal scream of anguished frustration to escape her lips, she closed her eyes and drew in a long, measured breath through her nose, mentally willing her heartrate to drop to a level where she no longer felt it like a hammer behind her face. Okay, she thought, opening her eyes and doing her best to keep herself in control. I can do this.

The ship's CDD was obviously still active, otherwise the ship would have dropped back into realspace as the bubble collapsed, leaving her adrift in the starry void. She was still moving at least, so there was power. For all she knew, astrogation and sensors were still online as well, and it was only the power feed to the cockpit that had failed. But was she willing to take that chance?

Just as she reached up to hoist herself out of the depressed couch and head back to the computer core, the displays flickered back to life, continuing their scrolling as if nothing had happened. Furthermore, she heard (or rather, felt) the dull thunk of the climate control system suddenly kick back on somewhere aft of her, and immediately she felt a draft of warm air billowing in. She waited for a few tense seconds, watching the displays as if expecting them to suddenly shut down on her again, but allowed herself to slowly relax when they stayed on, throwing their lines of data for anyone who cared enough to read them.

Her relief was short-lived, however.

The very instant she settled back into her seat, a warning tone split the silence with a startling buzz. The scrolling lines of data winked out of existence, replaced by large, flashing red letters on every screen.

WARNING!

>CRITICAL FAULT - ASTROGATION<
>CDD FAILURE<

>ABORT JUMP<​

Immediately Janelle grabbed the control yoke with one hand, her other dextrously flying over keyboards and control panels as she desperately attempted to shut down non-vital systems and reroute power. The alarm continued its dire screeching, however, and she felt the ship lurch inside of the little pocket dimension as the blue field outside began to waver unsteadily.

"Come on, god damn it!" she screamed at the panels, barely audible over the deafening alarm, but her pleading demand went unheeded as the ship's trajectory became increasingly erratic, beginning to bounce and toss her from side to side in her seat. "Don't frackin' die on me now!"

Seemingly in an act of spiteful defiance, the curtain of blue light wavered one final time and collapsed. A sudden, sharp BANG reverberated throughout the ship, and Janelle was thrown violently forward against the control yoke, her forehead colliding against it with a sickening crack, then consciousness left her.
 
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