Over time the loose association of artificially intelligent entities called the Diamond Network has developed ever more friendly relations with the Sephirotic empires, and with the countless races of humans and other bionts who live in those empires...
Blood. Irregular heartbeats;. Blaster fire. Plasma rising. Blood. Blood on the floor. Hot and wet. Uncomfortable. A pressing heat. Pants. He was running. Trying to scream. Blood on his throat. Blood in his throat. Drowning. Cough up and exhale to your heart's content, the source of life that lifts up from your throat. Bloody vomit, and blood bubbles that float on the edges of the mouth. In the vague view, you can see the ground stained bright red.
He was running. She couldn't help. She knows she should, but she can't. how. Nothing makes sense. Where was she. Detached. A dream? that didn't make sense. It felt like she had forgotten something. She should know something.
Her ship burning. The blaster fire. she could have saved him. But she gave up that path long ago. No. Troubled dreams. And endless cycle. There was something here. A disturbing cycle. A different ship. A different choice. A different face. And a different time. The same screams. A push of a button, and hell itself broke loose.
"Dwelling on the past will do you no good."
A voice interrupted her dream. A powerful voice. For at first it seemed soft and sweet, a mere rippling of melodies, but it couldn't be quenched, and took to itself power and profundity. The voice was deep and wide and beautiful, and mixed with an unmeasurable sorrow, from which it's beauty chiefly came. Her jumbled memories, which she perceived as a dream, had achieved a unity of it's own, but now it seemed to her loud and vain, and endlessly repeated, with little harmony, trying to drown out the voice.
Yet the silent voice, was by its silence more profound. and soon she paid no heed to the clamor of her own mind, and was tuned to the voice. Then she felt the mana again, and with one word, the nightmare of her own existence was ended.
"Awaken"
With sudden spasms, she was awake. Suspended in a liquid, she gasped for breath. As she flung around, her mind noticed that she could breathe the fluid, but her body refused to cooperate. thrashing around, as her mind reconciled with her body, and, in a wild attempt at self preservation, the glass shattered. As she fell to the ground, she remembered her name. Ayesha Jenkins.
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As she falls out, she sees the Balta spill out from the tank. As she lays there, shards of glass cling to her bare skin. Ayesha gets up, trying hard not to cut herself on any glass. Groggy, she nearly trips. Steadying herself on the metallic stand, she gazes around at her surroundings.
Then, with violent urgency, the balta was retched out. The breathable fluid leaked out as her body rejected it. As she struggled to suppress her gag reflex, her lungs, crying for air, kept ejecting the fluid. She collapsed on the floor, bruised, sputtering till the last of the balta was completely ejected from her system.
She was clearly in a med bay of some sort. This one had 6 other patients in balta with her, all as bare as the day they were born. However, this wasn't an ordinary medbay scene. No doctors were on duty, the droids were not beeping, and the other 6 patients, bathed in the life giving fluid, were thoroughly dead.
As she walked across, she felt a sudden chill on her body, as the balta evaporated. Shivering, she looked around for a piece of cloth to cover herself. Looking across, she saw a locker. Reaching for it, she opened it. Her clothes weren't there. However there were some miner outfits, which would serve just fine for the time. Hastily putting them on, she looked at the dead people in the medbay. 4 of them were nebs like her, their humanoid bodies showing little variance from their extinct baseline ancestors. Another was of some reptilian clade, a crocodile splice, but the exact race she was unsure of. The final one, the only other girl, was a Kaknien, a spiecies well known for dominating the adult industry.
Ayeesha scrunched her nose in disgust. Turning around quickly, she wondered where she was. As she racked her memory, the last thing she remembered was being on the federation ship Harbinger.
Oh shit, the Harbinger. Blaster fire. Plasma rising. Blood. Blood on the floor. Hot and wet. Uncomfortable. A pressing heat. The memories flooded back, with a weird ache. The Harbinger had been attacked. She had been heading to Telor, to help with the recovery. Suddenly alarms blazed. There were attackers. Weird shadows. And black.
Pushing those memories aside, she decided to push out. The med bay door was unlocked. Stepping outside, she felt the stale air of a mining station. Looking to the left confirmed her suspicions. A large sign read, in bold letters, PREGASUS MINING STATION.
Reading the sign, Ayeesha was perplexed. "Pregasus?" She had heard of it, of course, Pregasus was as close to famous as you can get with a mining station. It would still place her in the right system, but it was about a week's travel from the harbinger's route. But that wasn't even the most disturbing fact. Pregasus was famous, and vital. This place had a full time crew in the thousands, and a freighter docked every week. Protocol demanded that at least one medic remain in the medbay at all times. Droids should be attending to the tanks. The alarms should be blaring at the breaking of the balta tanks.
But the alarms stayed silent. The medical droids were absent. The medic was nowhere to be seen. The lights were dim. The end of the medbay corridor lay shrouded in shadow. The patients were dead in their tanks.
And surrounding the place was the Silence ofDeath.
