WHAT REMAINS Chapter 5: Pink Mist
Now she found herself on a ghost of the Omacatl, watching stupid action-grindhouse flicks in an old-lady sweater and slipper socks… with Jase freaking Novak, who she hadn’t seen in seven years flat.
When Sora got out of the shower, Novak sat alone on his bunk with his ward-issued tablet in one hand. He looked up when she entered, back in her scrubs and sweater, toweling her hair dry.
“Find anything good on the ward-approved list of entertainments?” Sora kept confidence in her voice; she could tell from his relaxed plodding on his tablet that he’d calmed down. She remembered from school that Novak could be a moody guy—though back then, he’d never turned his wild rollercoaster of directly on her. Post death and a bunch of PTSD, after seven years without speaking, Novak had Sora in his line of fire. “Anything they’ve decided might not be too traumatizing for us?”
Novak offered the ghost of a smile. “I was hoping I could send my dad a message, but I can’t get anything out of the ward network. You think we gotta ask permission, maybe have messages screened or something?”
“That’s what I was wondering,” Sora admitted, sitting down and examining him. “You okay, man?”
“No.” Novak spook simply, tone firm but weirdly pleasant again. Someone had taken a think. “But like I said, we’re not buddies anymore. Maybe you’ve got no right to keep me out of a brawl, but I have no right to take anything out on you. And I really have no right to talk to you that way, especially after… after you probably saved my ass and my career. So I’m sorry.”
Sora shook her head, wishing she could just punch him in the arm and declare the fight over; she had no idea how Novak would take it anymore, given the way he swung wildly from calm and mature to launching himself at NCOs over some crude come-ons.
“It’s okay, man. This shit would be a lot easier if we had a bottle of bourbon or something.” She uneasily edged onto the bulkhead side of her bunk and leaned her back up against it. As in the ensign bunks on an actual Destroyer, she and Novak had already quietly agreed to keep the lights dim, like there might be someone sleeping on a top bunk. Sora sure didn’t want to see the bunkroom in all its meticulous detail, that was for sure—just the notion of it and the shapes of things was more than enough.
“You mean trying to sleep in this godforsaken hellhole?” Novak asked a little baldly, looking around with what Sora had to call helplessness. “I keep thinking Ensign Hu or Lieutenant Casey’s gonna look down from a bunk and tell us to quiet the fuck down.”
Sora swallowed bile. She didn’t want to say any of the crazy-ass things lancing around in her unhinged dumpster fire of a brain these days, but one of them eked out.
“I’m pretty sure if I look in the bunk above me, I’m gonna see Ensign Wallace’s exploded corpse,” she said miserably, feeling nuts even as she said it. “I don’t even know why. I’m pretty sure they respawned me wrong.”
Novak stared at her for practically for a subjective eternity. Finally, he did something that Sora found unbelievably weird: he just nodded in acceptance, like he found her complete insanity reasonable enough, once he thought about it for a while.
Total nutcase. Had to be. No other way.
“Respawned, huh?” He sounded tentative. “So, what do you play these days?”
Sora sat blinking for a few seconds, not expecting the question. Novak was a real-ass XO now, on the flag no less; it had been years since they’d dominated the top of the VRcade leaderboards together.
“Uh. With the marines? Some Battleknight, and Starcross Simulator 5000 since it came out—joystick only, no goddamn VR—”
“The VR on that thing sucks ass,” Novak agreed immediately, with dark conviction. “Makes me yak. The flyboys tell me it’s because I haven’t had enough cockpit experience, but if that’s what it takes, they can keep the damn thing for themselves.”
“Seriously!” Sora pointed a finger at him to acknowledge that very good and excellent point. “What, you have to get your ass chewed on by drones for six months at least, or you can’t play the VR version? What even is that crap? I took old-school dimenhydrinate and an anti-emetic like I was riding a ferry in a hurricane, and that shit didn’t even make a difference.”
“Made for flyboys, by flyboys.” Novak rolled his eyes. “You kicked ass at the older versions, back in the day. What’s your score on Starcross 5000?”
“6700, triple diamond, as of last week. Gonna lose my ranking though, at this rate.” Sora gestured broadly at the room and their predicament along with it. “Once they drop the new battlefront especially, and that’s in nine days. Goddamn jarheads are gonna smoke me and laugh their asses off when I get back to Fenris.”
Not that they’d want to play games with me anymore, would they?
She pressed the thought down like stacks of hard pulp for recycling, using a mental heel.
Novak scowled. “Triple diamond, fuck me—I haven’t had a score like that since I was an ensign,” he muttered, glaring at the hull-ward wall. “You’ve got too much time on your hands, Kuromoto.”
“It’s a ‘morale-boosting activity’,” Sora told him with air quotes, grinning and knowing she had him stinging from jealousy. Novak had always given her a run for her tokens on older versions of Starcross. “And like I said, I don’t read briefings if I can help it. I make Hayden tell me what they say.”
“You should probably call him ‘Lieutenant-Commander Barca’ around me, if you don’t want me referring to him as your manwhore friend,” Novak corrected her with a brief grin. “Don’t you owe me a punch in the arm?”
“I figure we’re square after I pancaked us both in front of the NCOs.” Sora looked away, squirming with embarrassment. Pancaking her former senior at Academy made her want to sink through the fake decking below her bunk. “And I’m not using that long-ass title. Too many fucking syllables. You know who I’m talking about, Novak.” She started scouring her ward-issued tablet for something that could pass muster as decently entertaining. “What the hell is Penguin Planet?”
“Edutainment vids for babies,” Novak muttered, still fiddling with his tablet. “Rory’s daughter worships it, I guess. She’s a toddler.”
Sora groaned. “Penguin Planet in the Omacatl bunkroom. That’s goddamn haunted in the worst way.” She paused, thinking about Novak’s old roommate, Rory Ardelean, with a warm burst of memory. “Man, Rory has a kid now. Still seems bizarre. Makes me feel old.”
Novak chuckled like he couldn’t help himself, running a hand over his face and that trimmed beard—looking so much like Misha Novak that it made Sora feel even older.
“Yeah, freaks me out too. Like who the fuck said Rory could be a father? Shouldn’t that shit be illegal?” He did something on his tablet, eyes getting intrigued. “Hey… I think I found the nurses’ network on here. Wonder if I can force my way past the firewall…”
“Give it to me.” Sora held out a cyber hand.
Novak looked at her doubtfully. “If you could break out of the network, wouldn’t you have done it by now?”
“Not on my tablet,” Sora said, smiling. “I’ll try it on yours though. You don’t have my history—bet your security settings are different.”
Novak stared at her for a few seconds, then, one side of his mouth twitching with curiosity, he handed it over. Sora took the thing and realized Novak’s tablet did indeed have less stringent security blocking than her own. He had a lot more options visible in the UI which were invisible on her tablet. She could find Settings, for instance, and from there she could find the volume control, and all the available networks. Her own tablet didn’t have Settings visible, opting instead only to give her control over the headphone volume and brightness. She could break in easily to see Settings on her own tablet, but if they had any kind of logger present, they would be able to see her brute-forcing the thing.
“I wonder if they’re monitoring your tablet as some indication of how much we’re working together.” Sora selected the Nurses’ network and tried a set of common institutional password models for Indoc 4, as she’d been taught to do in basic training over at SNI—a chapter she definitely didn’t want Novak asking about, especially not right after the pancaking and marine-joystick comments.
It only took her twelve tries before she found the right one, got Novak safely onto the network, and handed the thing back to him.
“There we go. Think you can find us an action movie or something?”
Novak received the tablet and flipped through some options, like he didn’t believe her.
“Holy shit, Kuromoto,” he muttered. “I thought you were a console jockey. How’d you end-run the thing so fast?”
“I can rock a joystick and a keyboard, turns out,” Sora told him mysteriously, flipping through more worthless approved entertainment. “What the fuck is this? Contribute and Shine? Is this some kind of self-help shit?”
“It would be. They swear by that crap at Indoc.” Novak appeared to be taking care of housekeeping on his tablet at an efficient pace. “Some has-been commander from PR asked me to write one of those—a jingoistic self-help memoir or something, to inspire people. Hard to fucking explain that there’s nothing about getting res’d here that’s gonna inspire people. What am I gonna write about? Pissing into a bag for a month?”
Sora grunted in dark, sympathetic glee, and there was something cathartic in that. “Yeah, seriously. Oh, or you could write about the burn protocol. Nothin’ says ‘join the navy’ like smelling your own barbequed flesh and thinking, ‘hm… something smells tasty in here’.”
Novak let out a positively sinister belly laugh, but she enjoyed it. “How about this for a title? Shitting Dead Blood and Puking My Lungs Out: The Jase Novak Story. Think that’ll help Murphy-Meilin get more funding?”
Sora fell sideways on her bunk laughing helplessly. “Hey, I’d read the shit out of that—but I have unusual tastes, as you fuckin’ know.” She studied the list of self-help books, wishing there was at least one military action thriller or crime drama. Anything to pass the time and ignore the alarms. “Oh, fuck me, seriously? Someone wrote an unauthorized biography about my dad, calling him a freaking giant among men. Kill me.”
“Stop torturing yourself over there,” Novak said, grinning. “I sent my message and found Forward Action Force. You still like grindhouse and stupid action flicks these days, or did you grow up on me?”
“Oh, man, thank hell and everything.” Sora sighed in relief, tossing her tablet onto the mattress and sitting up… then thinking for a sec on how to do this. “How’d you and your bunkroom used to watch movies, man?”
“On the floor with Lieutenant Casey’s huge-ass workpad propped on a lower bunk,” Novak admitted, smiling to himself. “What about Omacatl’s?”
“We were all girls, so we used to pile onto Ensign Kim’s bunk,” Sora said quietly, pointing briefly to Novak’s bunk as she said it. “That would be yours. I like Fomorian’s idea too, though.”
It crossed her brain to ask him if he was comfortable sitting on the floor for a whole movie with his hip acting up, but she figured she’d let it be his choice.
He considered her, then the floor. “These things have tiny screens. But um… I think Fomorian’s way is probably the best idea.”
Sora nodded. “Fine by me. You gonna be okay on the floor though?”
“I’ll be fine. Shot in the hip’s doing its thing.” Novak eyed her for a second.
Sora wondered if the crack about her being a slut for jarheads and all the shit about the Omacatl’s XO made him professionally nervous. Irony of fucking ironies, as far as she was concerned—she and Novak had both been easygoing, fairly slutty water polo players together in school, casually flirtatious, always being themselves. They’d been relaxed with each other, in the locker room, with each other’s bodies, content watching movies together… safe.
It hurt to remember how much she’d liked that about him—about herself at Academy—now knowing how it had come to bite her on the ass in the service. She’d once been so damn comfortable with herself. Novak had been like that too; now he slowly lowered himself to the floor, moving slowly, dragging those new legs around like heavy drunken strangers, uneasy in his own skin. It hurt to watch… too much like a mirror, like when she’d woken up with her cybernetic arm, like when she’d seen Cassidy for the first time after getting blown up, saw her face, saw her realize how much Sora had changed.
She wondered suddenly if this experience was like that for Novak, being seen by Sora in this new body for the first time, only months after his death and resurrection. She remembered that feeling, the rawness… that special hell.
“Alright—you know what you can handle, man,” Sora said agreeably, pushing the thoughts from her head for now as she slid down onto the floor. She watched Novak set up, using his pillow to get the angle right on the screen, adjusting it a few times, before he started the movie.
“You’ve seen this one?” Novak asked, sitting back with a little more ease, now the movie sounds dampened the recordings from some damned bridge during the Praezorian Wars. He propped his back against the edge of her bunk, with Sora sitting cross-legged beside him, careful not to accidentally touch his legs or something. She didn’t want to assume their old closeness, assume anything was okay, recalling with pain the rough feeling of having new cybernetics. It had seemed that everyone touching her felt like an examination, some exploration, like curious people trying to feel out the cybernetics or figure out what they could do… like the chrome wasn’t attached to her body. She’d fucking die before she did that to him, made him feel that way.
“Oh yeah—a dozen times probably, with the jarheads.” Sora leaned back against her bunk a little. “Stupidest gorefest of 2155. Gotta admire it, honestly—edged out LT Ramsey and Blood Oath by a millimeter.”
“I really like Blood Oath.” Novak propped an elbow up on the edge of her bunk like he’d always done during movies, his chest angled towards her some, body language familiar, open—welcoming. “It’s not as stupid, but Mira Tiernov is a goddamn bombshell.”
“Those tits should be illegal,” Sora said in total agreement, hugging one knee to her chest, feeling like she was in the shade of a tree next to him; he’d always been tall and solid, like a big oak. “How dare she be so goddamn beautiful? I can’t look at all the flying viscera with her tits in the way.”
Novak shot her a real smile, his eyes twinkling, wonderfully familiar and taking her right back to school.
“I worried maybe you stopped being like that after Academy, but you still swing in every direction, huh? Just like me.” He spoke warmly. “God… you were so fun to hang out with—checking guys out from a booth or people watching, drinking and partying and playing video games. Watching stupid movies and talking about tits. You really don’t find folks like us as often as you’d think, especially as you get older. Everyone gets so damn serious, and you start to feel like all your friends are dying inside.”
Sora chuffed, looking down for a second. “Ayla Kim told me a year or so ago that she’s just sapphic these days, and she’s serious as a heart attack about it, probably getting married and having kids soon. Said she gave up on men… told me she’s waiting for me to do the same. She acts like I’m just being fucking defiant or something.” She shook her head. “Ha… maybe I am. Sapphic bars and dance clubs’ve always been hard on me, anyways, so it’s hard to know.”
Novak nodded, watching the movie; this had always been easy for them, tracking a stupid action movie while chatting, especially late at night at the Joyplex. They’d like it best when the place emptied out, abandoned as an irradiated town in the southwest, raiding the popcorn kiosk for a pseudo-dinner like tittering mutant rats.
“I stopped going to masc bars years ago,” he said lowly. “Not for lack of interest… I just feel weird sometimes. It’s a lot of pressure. Of course, now… that’s not really an issue.” He chose to be mysterious, voice deep and dark, not explaining. Sora hadn’t jumped into bed with anyone for years after getting cybernetics, feeling absolutely grossed out and depressed about her new body and the ugly-ass contact sites, and the scarring, and all the rest of it. She’d felt monstrous. With both his legs replaced… Novak probably felt a lot worse, and it had only been months for him. Her heart sank for the guy.
“Yeah… I get that. I haven’t been to any kind of bar in forever. I miss dance clubs. Tank tops especially.”
Novak nodded in tight-lipped, understanding sympathy, eyes flickering toward her, then back to the movie.
They sat on the floor watching Forward Action Force deliver its long, insane opening action scene—these things never stopped long enough to let anyone think, thank god—while angled toward each other, not touching. Sora gave him a bubble of space, letting him acclimatize to sharing the room and the floor with her. Novak turned the sound up loud enough so they couldn’t even remotely hear the goddamn ambient noise system recorded on some godforsaken Daimajin-class in 2152 or earlier—like that hellish soundscape needed preserving instead of its proper burial, left floating in space like a bloated corpse.
Sora’s brain began to wander about halfway through. She’d started the day on the Fenris, with an early final shift straddling breakfast time, beginning during the graveyard hours and ending mid-morning, so she could pack her shit and make her transport. A dinghy of an escort had come to get her, and the CO of the thing was a twenty-five-year-old hard-ass, who’d told her to sit in their cozy kitchenette and one-table excuse for a mess until arrival, like he thought of Sora as a pain-in-the-ass civilian he’d picked up on a milk run. From his perspective, she wasn’t a damn sight better than that.
Before her last shift, Sora slept on the floor of Hayden’s stateroom. He’d run graveyard and let her camp out on a corner of deck while he took command of the bridge, all without telling Nell; Sora really owed him for that, damn it. She’d hit the lowest, deepest depths of completely indecipherable crazy that she’d ever thrown at her oldest friend’s pretty head. He knew about the thing with Wyn, and that was more than enough to realize Sora was 1.) In trouble, and 2.) Totally nuts.
Thankfully, Hayden never said so.
Sora felt grateful for that, much as she’d also felt like the worst friend in the goddamn galaxy at this point. The shit going on with his sister Cassidy was hard enough on him, without Sora throwing random flares of garden-variety soldier crazy and camping out on his floor.
Now she found herself on a ghost of the Omacatl, watching stupid action-grindhouse flicks in an old-lady sweater and slipper socks… with Jase freaking Novak, who she hadn’t seen in seven years flat. The thought of trying to sleep here, even with an old buddy watching her back, felt flat-out unbearable, but she was so fucking tired.
Just under the sounds of the movie, she heard the Omacatl’s bridge alerts blaring. She knew that one—known enemy contact on DAISS. She remembered when they’d cracked the encoding on the Praezorian transponders and started logging their ship names. Mind of Death, Sweet Suicide… just the craziest shit names that Sora used to laugh at, until she saw the names over and over, no matter how many times they destroyed Praezorian warships with those names. Back in 2150, she’d started to feel like the Omacatl was stuck in some kind of miserable shit time loop, a hell dimension, fighting the same Praezorians for a miserable eternity. Did the bugs do it on purpose, as some kind of psychological warfare? Or were they stuck in the hell dimension too?
The sounds of boots on metal above, feet moving quickly between consoles, alerts from the scanner system. Terajoules of damage bypassing the warp shields, shivering over the ship systems, trembling through the decks.
Then she heard it again, Commander Loren’s voice as if from the other side of the curtain of Death, on the opposite end of an eternal bulkhead.
“Wallace, turn off that fucking alert! Someone go wake up the captain and Ensign Kuromoto, before the roaches fire again.”
Hadn’t she gone to bed in her boots? She felt strangely unprepared to run to the bridge—after days and weeks and months on the blade’s edge of readiness, always prepared, always half-awake, catlike, napping with one eye open, afraid to eat dinner or take a shower.
I have to wake up and get to the helm. She couldn’t be caught sleeping when the mind weapons hit. It had happened to her only once before, caught totally disarmed and mentally defenseless in Commander Loren’s stateroom, sleeping beside him. The sickening sensation of falling, of being yanked inside out, of an invisible hand squeezing and stretching her brain, that immense and awful pressure…. Then, abrupt and cold, standing in the middle of Loren’s stateroom, her sidearm pressed flush and hard to his skull. He knelt beside her, grasping tight to his head as if holding it together, fighting back an explosion—screaming at the top of his lungs.
Had the screaming woken her up? Had she gained some consciousness of standing on the brink?
And if so… why had she stopped? Hadn’t she wanted him dead? Didn’t she fucking hate him, down to the last cell in his body?
“Kuromoto.” For a second, she thought the voice belonged to Commander Loren, but something felt off. It sounded low and insistent, fighting for precedence with a long and pitiful wail, the dying squeaking whine of a prey animal. “Kuromoto! Sora! Come on, you’re freaking me out here.”
Sora forced her eyes open. She immediately realized the sound—that awful, pitiable whine that made her want to kill something—had come from her. She tamped it down immediately, making out a vaguely familiar face in the dark bunkroom. Someone had come in to wake her up, following Loren’s orders.
“I know,” she muttered into her mattress. “Getting up. Gotta get to the bridge. D’you see my boots?”
“Sora—you’re okay,” the guy urged in a quiet, close voice. “You don’t have to get to the bridge. There’s no attack, no bridge to run to. Okay? You’re safe.”
No bridge. How can there be no bridge? What happened?
He pressed a hand into her shoulder—huge, solid, warm, an anchor to some parallel reality she needed to rejoin… maybe a dream. She slept on one arm, and it felt strange… heavy yet floaty, off, bulky, connecting awkwardly and stiffly back into her ribs and upper spine. She felt no sensations drifting over the skin, no softness from the fabric of her shirt, no irritation or itching or pain or… anything. Only pressure, weight, a vague sense of the arm’s presence, its essential arm-ness, but no pleasure or discomfort. This inert thing, a cold and jagged stone rammed through her flesh, latched onto her by bolts and grappling hooks, dragging and pulling and hanging and clicking and clacking unnaturally.
That stony presence and its heaviness dragged her down through the deeps, back to the present, to the fake ensign bunkroom and its recorded sounds… and the lifeless hunk of chrome beneath her.
Right. It’s gone. They’re all gone.
Pink mist.
“Sorry, man.” Sora slowly pulled her shit together, too embarrassed to look at him. “Um. Early shift on the bridge this morning. Just, like… overtired, I guess.”
“Get into bed and get some sleep,” he told her lowly, hand still on her shoulder. Novak spoke softly and gently, like a man soothing a spooked animal. “I’ll keep the movie going, okay? I’ll be right here on the floor. I’m not going anywhere.”
Sora just nodded into her mattress, already levering herself onto it from the floor, slinking onto it like a black cat in a service alley, all lowered tail and shadows.
“I’m sorry, man.” She rolled onto her pillow and buried her face in it. “I know I’m fucking crazy. You’ll get used to it. At least we’re not buddies anymore, and you don’t have to deal with me forever.”
She felt his hand again on her shoulder, holding tight for just for a couple seconds, before the sounds of the movie swamped the Omacatl’s bridge alerts. His presence remained just there, at the edge of her consciousness, less than half a meter away: a warm solidness in the darkness. The idea that the darkness wasn’t all emptiness and cold helped her to sink down into real sleep.