by Narrator » Fri Nov 13, 2020 8:22 pm
It started with a vibration barely sensed. There was a musical chime and ship's computer interrupted to announce, "Exiting hyperspace in ten min-min-min-"
The android stiffened and broke the glass he had been cleaning. The vibration began to sing throughout the structure of the ship.
"-min... five eight six six sixsixsix two thir-ten nine eiiiight."
The haywire system message abruptly cut out and all other sound was drowned out by the deafening screech of a tortured hull. All became a negative image rendered in crimson. And then...
... they slept
And they dreamed. They dreamed of loss and of trauma... and of terror. And, eventually, they woke. "
The musician woke not on stage but behind the bar, surrounded by broken bottles and the smell of liquor. The android stood there, unmoving.
The warrior woke in a heap against one wall as if thrown there.
Others woke in similar situations, either hiding or tossed aside. A few bodies weren't even moving.
But the ship had changed. The lounge was nearly deserted and the lights unusually dim, allowing the eerily luminous vein-like growths on the walls to bathe the room in pulses of light of a color hard definitively identify as blue. But perhaps more troubling was the distinct lack of the soft engine sounds that spacefaring folk were largely desensitized to.