The Price of Winning: Chapter 2
"Hurry up!"
Captain Beka Valentine sighed resignedly, then turned toward the ugly Nightsider. "Look. You hired me because I’m the only one desperate enough to try this and slick enough to pull it off. Now back off, and let me do my job." She shifted again to face front. "I’ve got a screaming ship to bring in."
Gerentex snorted- a sound decidedly silly, and fairly disgusting. "The ship screams? That’s just an old myth," he scoffed.
Beka had thought so, too, before arriving near the black hole. Of course, she had no intention of telling her annoying employer that.
She raised an eyebrow. "Really?" With her left hand, she pressed a series of small buttons, and an open link came over the comm. "Then...what’s that?"
Seamus Harper, Trance Gemini, and Rev Bem all stepped forward, drawn by the sound coming through the link. It was hauntingly tragic, a low, continuous wail. Probably, it was just a red alert that had been blaring when the ship had been trapped, but few had ever disagreed that it sounded like someone weeping. People of all species had avoided this area of space for three centuries, unnerved by the sound.
They were all a little uneasy. "That," Beka said, trying to answer her own, earlier question lightly, "is the sound that every being on Saraglia will make when you get there, Harper."
"It does sound like a woman crying," Gerentex sneered, irritated at having been proved wrong. "And you’ll all sound the same if I can’t get this ship to my buyer on time. Get back to work." He stormed from the Maru’s small bridge, but none of them rushed to follow their absent employee’s orders. They remained still, listening to the vessel that three hundred years of exploring space-men had dubbed the Screaming Ship. Then Trance spoke.
"I wonder what happened to her," she whispered. No one questioned the usage of the word her, as opposed to it.
"She carries a great sorrow," Rev answered, his somber, gravely voice oddly soothing. "But we have no way of knowing it."
"We could always ask her," Harper cut in. The others looked at him in surprise, and he began to explain. "When people say, they don’t make ‘em like they use to anymore, they’re talking about ships like the Andromeda. So let me tell you about the screaming ship..."
* * *
Commander Rhade flinched, and knew that the time distortion had occurred. He had a feeling- call it a hunch- that it had been about three-hundred years since last he’d had the opportunity to blink. Still, he wanted to confirm it.
"Andromeda? Name approximate date."
The ship kept on weeping.
"Andromeda! The date!"
Without warning, the gravity where he stood grew so great that he collapsed to the floor. He attempted to scold the Andromeda, but even his jaw was too heavy to move, so he just lay there.
At long last, she released the unnatural gravity, and he lifted his head.
The Andromeda’s hologram stood above the deceased captain, her eyes red, but not wet. Gradually, her ship-wide weeping faded, too, until the entire vessel was utterly, completely quiet. The sound of silence was as unnerving as her earlier weeping had been. Andromeda knelt down.
Her hand reached out slowly, almost tentatively, in a motion ready to close Hunt’s unseeing eyes. Her fingers, however, passed clear through him. Andromeda’s holographic head bowed over the dead body, her arms wrapped around her stomach, as if trying to withhold fresh tears.
Suddenly, the sensors came out of the stillness that her systems were slowly emerging from, and she could detect that more life-forms were on-board. She tried to move her grief aside, and analyze them.
They weren’t crew-members who, for some reason, hadn’t taken escape pods. They were strangers.
Andromeda knew, then, that they were the ones who had brought her from the black hole. And they probably hadn’t done it for sweet, old-fashioned, Good Samaritan reasons. They were probably a threat.
Andromeda smiled. It was not a nice smile.
She wouldn’t tell the commander about their...visitors. Rhade could deal with them on his own. She stood up, her holographic back ramrod-straight, her odd, humorless smile still in place, and her expression coldly proud. Rhade, on the floor, watched her as she slowly allowed her hologram to disappear.
He rose, and stood on his conquered bridge, alone.
Onward To Chapter 3!
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