Chapter Text
She’s in darkness.
Disoriented, she tries to move but finds she can’t. Something is pushing down on her, something heavy. She is being smothered.
She struggles to open her eyes; they are so heavy. There must be a drug in her system, she can feel it pulling her under. She fights it and manages to drag her eyes open.
Suddenly she is fully awake, and her eyes begin to adjust. She can see in in the darkness now, the shape of its head, its legs reaching out for her. She tries to scream but the threads holding her down tighten around her and she cannot breathe. Her eyes are wide open as the thing comes nearer, its jaws open, venom dripping... she manages a scream this time as its ovipositor extends, ready to strike…
Regina sits upright in bed, sweat streaming from her body as she tries to catch her breath. The nightmares are getting worse, more frequent.
She looks down at herself and sighs. She needs a shower, and probably a change of sheets. She drags her covers back and swings her legs off the bed, wiping sweat from her forehead.
Heading into the kitchen she pours herself a glass of water and pauses at the one window of her small apartment to drink it. The view is unchanged, darkness and the bright shape of Earth in the distance.
She wonders if she will ever actually get back home. After she was fired (they called it releasing her from her contract as if she asked for it) she had little choice but to remain here on the Atlas Space Station until she's earned enough to get home. The earth is large in her window today, and she supposes to some it might be a spectacular view, but to her it is little more than a tease. An empty promise.
She wonders what Daniel would think if he saw her now. The last thing he told her was that she was to live, to fight hard and to get home for them both. She made it most of the way, she just didn’t expect the homecoming she was given. In truth she hadn’t know what to think, or what to expect. She did not expect to be branded a liar and psychologically unstable, though she supposes the last part at least is partially correct.
Regina finishes her water and goes back to bed. Instead of changing her sheets and clothes she simply strips naked, letting the stale air cool her skin. She closes her eyes and prays for a dreamless sleep.
…
A few weeks later she finds herself staring into space. These days everything is far harder to focus on. She can barely get through her simple mind-numbing job without losing concentration or seeing things in the shadows. She’s had her latest psych evaluation and the results were not good. The court appointed psychiatrist wants to put her on some kind of mood stabilizer and muscle relaxant. She shakes her head. If she is this out of it now, she certainly doesn’t need anything to make it worse.
There is a knock on her door. Frowning, she puts down her now cold cup of coffee and goes to answer it. No one visits her, this must be a mistake.
“Who is it?” she calls, as she moves to unlock the door.
“Regina? It’s Robin Locksley.”
She stops. Why is Robin here? She thought she’d seen the last of him. “What are you doing here Locksley?” Her hand is still on the door, hesitant to open it for him.
“We need to speak with you.” His voice is urgent.
“We?” she questions.
“I uh, brought a friend.”
Regina sighs and opens the door.
Robin Locksley is well dressed as usual, ever the company representative in a sharp looking suit, perfect hair, and a boyish smile. Accompanying him is a man dressed in a military uniform carrying his hat under one arm. Regina prevents herself from smirking. He looks like one bad military cliché.
“Robin,” she nods in greeting, one arm barring the door, so he has no choice but to remain on the threshold. “And who is this? A friend?”
Robin gives her a sheepish smile, the one he gives when he is trying to placate her. “More of a work acquaintance.”
“I wasn’t aware the military and the company were in bed together” she says flatly.
Robin laughs, while the military man (a lieutenant by the looks of his uniform) simply frowns at her.
“We aren’t usually,” Robin says. “I’m typically a company man through and through but sometimes we have a situation that calls for military assistance.”
“Oh really?” Regina snorts, unable to help herself. “Seem to remember that the military weren’t needed in my case.”
“May we come in?” Robin asks patiently. “This is lieutenant Whale from marine squad Delta.”
Regina sighs again then pushes the door open completely and gestures for them to come in.
“It’s nice to meet you Ms. Mills,” Whale says, though he doesn’t offer his hand. “Nice, uh place you got here.”
Regina is well aware of how pathetic her tiny apartment is, and she does not appreciate it being thrown in her face by this idiot. She gestures to her small kitchen table. “Please sit. I don’t have coffee, you’ll have to make do with water.” She does have coffee, but it’s expensive and she has no desire to share with these two.
“Water is fine Regina, thank you,” Robin says with a smile.
She pours them each a glass of water, then stands to the side, preferring that to sitting alongside the two men. She wants to get rid of them as fast as possible. “So why are you here?”
Robin glances at Whale for a moment. “We need your help.”
“We may need your help,” Lieutenant Whale clarifies. Clearly, he is only here at Robins behest.
“With what exactly?” Regina frowns. “I can’t tell you anything I haven’t already said. And even if I could I'm not sure I would. Speaking the truth didn’t exactly do me any favors last time.”
“I realize that,” Robin says softly. “But you must understand Regina, the destruction of a ship such as the Orion carries serious consequences. The company can’t let that slide with no repercussions, especially without proof.”
Regina grits her teeth. “You know why there wasn’t proof. I blew the creature out of the goddamn airlock. After it had killed the entire crew and stowed away on the escape module.”
“I know that’s what you’ve said.”
“That’s what happened,” Regina grinds out. “And then you were stupid enough to go and colonize the planet we picked it up from. On company orders I might add.”
“I had nothing to do with that Regina. You know that. I told you, this was thirty years ago. No one who worked for the company then is even still around. We had no idea when we colonized planet BH657 that anyone had even visited before. That ship that you found the spider on may not even be there still. You said it had crashed there didn’t you, it wasn’t from that planet?” Robin sounds tired, and defensive.
Regina doesn’t care, her patience for this bullshit has run thin. “You know what I said. I’m not going into it again.”
Whale clears his throat. “Ms Mills.”
“Regina. Or Mills” she interrupts him. “No Ms.”
Whale continues. “Regina, perhaps you could lay your story out for me? I’ve not had the chance to read your file yet, and there are many facts I’m not aware of that might help with this mission. You said thirty years? You were out there for thirty years?”
Regina presses the tips of her fingers to the bridge of her nose. “Yes. This all happened thirty years ago. The escape module beacon was damaged by the... creature,” she will not call it a spider, it’s a stupid name for it. “I had hoped that I would be picked up once I reached the outer tracking stations, but I wasn’t that fortunate. Instead, I drifted through, right through to the other side. I was lucky that a deep space salvage team found me a few months ago and brought me back here." She shook her head. “I just can’t seem to get all the way home. Though I suppose there isn’t much left to go home to.”
“So if you don’t mind me asking,” Whale continues, oblivious to Regina’s irritation. “Why did you have to blow up the Orion? If the spider thing was on the escape module?”
“Are you a total idiot?” Regina snaps. “I didn’t know it was on the escape module, I thought it was still on the ship. Do you really think I would have set the ship to self-destruct if I’d thought there was another way?”
Whale shrugs. “Why not just kill it?”
Regina leans forward and slams both hands sharply down on the table. “We tried. It killed the entire crew one by one. Do you get it?”
“I uh, think you’d better start at the beginning,” Whale says.
This was what they came here for? To make her rehash the whole thing all over again? What’s the point exactly? Regina has no strength to tell her story again. She cannot find the words.
She supposes it began long ago, with her and her husband Daniel deciding that there was more money in deep space travel than there was anywhere else. They had both become Officers in the Enchanted Realms company (now it’s called Misthaven which is only slightly less ridiculous, but it has been always known and referred to by most as just The Company), and together they had travelled into the far reaches of space more times than they could count. This last time was supposed to be the end for a while, they were supposed to settle down somewhere on Earth, and start a family. Between them they had saved enough to keep them going for a good long while. The Company had promised that they could both take an extended leave of absence, after just one more job.
They were returning home when it had happened. They’d been woken up early, come out of hypersleep six months before they were supposed to. Their ship, the Orion, had intercepted some kind of distress call from a nearby planet, not much more than a large moon. They had been woken to investigate.
Dutifully following Company orders, they had dropped down to the planet and gone to check out the beacon. Daniel and Mal, and Leo (their captain) had gone out on the surface to find the source of the beacon, Regina had stayed behind to prepare their ship for takeoff. It had sustained a small amount of damage when they’d landed. Regina had kissed Daniel goodbye and told him to not take too long and to be careful.
He had done neither of those things.
Instead he was gone for hours. During this time Regina had managed to decode more of the distress beacon and was alarmed by what she’d found. It was more like a warning, an alarm to keep away rather than to come and rescue. She’d tried to get through to the three of them on the ground, but they didn’t respond.
Regina was waiting by the airlock for them impatiently when they’d finally returned. She had been relieved at first only to find to her horror that Daniel was unconscious.... He had been stabbed or stung by something. A spider... That’s what Mal had called it. Said it moved like one, but with more legs. It was smallish, about the size of a cat and had scuttled away once it had bitten Daniel, but it looked like it had transferred something to him.
Regina had been in two minds as to what to do next. Technically she shouldn’t have let them in, they needed to be quarantined, but her worry for Daniel made her question it. In the end the decision was taken out of her hands when Cora, the Science Officer, had remotely opened the door and let them in.
Regina did not get along with Cora. The woman was irritatingly superior, and technically was outside the scope of their mission, and thus their chain of command. The Company did not usually send along a Science Officer, but this time it was apparently needed though no one had told them why.
Cora had liked to make her own rules.
And so they were let in and Daniel was immediately transferred to the medical bay. A scan soon told them that there was a small nodule lodged inside his chest. The creature had bitten his neck, and whatever he had been injected with had obviously settled in his chest. He remained in a stable condition but unconscious for two days. Then he woke up. He had seemed fine at first, if a little tired. He had asked for her and she had sat by his bed and held his hands tightly. He’d assured her he was fine, he just needed rest and to get home. And a decent meal. Cora had checked him over and pronounced him healthy, said she would do a scan of him again the next morning once he’d had a chance to rest some.
It had happened when they were sitting down to dinner.
One moment they were talking and laughing, Daniel was smiling and joking like always. The next second he was choking, gasping for air and screaming in pain. They’d laid him on the floor and were trying to keep his airway clear when suddenly his chest erupted, blood spurting everywhere and spattering them all. There was so much blood... it took them a few moments to realize what had happened. A creature had torn its way free from inside his chest. Its body was small, no bigger than Regina’s fist, but it had ten long appendages coming from it; they looked like metal, silver and black and shining with blood. Daniel’s blood.
Jefferson was the first to react. He’d grabbed for his gun aiming it at the creature that was still disengaging from Daniel's chest.
“Don’t touch it!” Cora had shouted.
In her shock Regina had remained frozen, she could not stop looking at Daniel’s broken body. By this stage the creature had removed itself entirely and disappeared off into the corridor.
They were too shocked at first to know what to do. Numbly they had wrapped Daniel’s body and shot it off into space. Cora had wanted to do an autopsy, but Regina would not let her.
They’d then had to look for the creature. Assuming it was small they had taken nets, and boxes, containers that should have been large enough to hold it. They’d split up into groups and begun to search the ship from top to bottom. Jefferson and Marian had been partnered, but for some reason Regina still could not understand they had separated, and Jefferson had gone missing. Marian had heard nothing more than a shout, a scream... then nothing. From what they could tell from a search of the area it had not been a small creature that had taken him. There was no sign of his body, but there had been blood everywhere, all over the walls, the floor...
They’d stuck together after that, used their weapons and tried to flush the creature out of the ship. It was clear that it was using the air ducts to move around so they’d tried cornering it. That’s how they had lost Leo. No blood had been found this time. Nothing except his flame thrower.
It was at this point that Regina had found herself in command. She’d attempted to access the Captain’s files, convinced that the Company must have some kind of information in their database about this creature, but she kept getting thrown out of the system by an override. She eventually made it through the firewall only to discover that they had been sent there. The Company had sent them to this planet, to find this ship where they’d picked up the creature... Cora, their science officer had been assigned to them in order to ensure an organism was recovered and returned to Earth. They wanted it for their weapons division. The last sentence of this special order stated clearly that the crew was expendable.
Regina had just begun to process this news when Cora attacked her. Regina had managed to throw her off and with the help of Mal and Marian they’d killed Cora. Marian had executed the actual final blow to end Cora’s life, but Regina had felt equally if not more responsible. Regina told both women about the Company orders and how their lives were considered forfeit. They’d decided to blow the ship up and escape in the shuttle, but the creature had cornered both Mal and Marian and killed them. Regina had found their bodies only minutes before they were to escape. She entered the shuttle alone and watched as the Orion had exploded.
She’d been preparing for hypersleep when the creature had begun to extricate itself from the cooling unit. Regina had just enough time to climb into her space suit before she opened the airlock door and the creature had screamed, an awful alien sound she would never forget. Eventually it had been sucked into space and she had slammed the doors closed.
The creature had ended up in front of the shuttle engine and been killed. And that was it. She’d lost the love of her life, her entire crew... good people, good friends. And afterwards she had drifted right through the system and out the other side losing 30 years of her life.
It had been Robin who’d been by her bed when she first woke up. Angry at the Company she had lashed out, at both him and at the review board who heard her case, who asked her why she had destroyed their precious and expensive spaceship. They had not believed a word of her story, said there was no evidence of the creature on board the shuttle, no evidence of the special order to collect it. Robin assured her the Company had changed in the last thirty years. There was no weapons division, and they were only focused now on building better worlds and starting new colonies.
At her review she had shouted at the head of the board, a slimy and irritating man named Gold. Told him he was useless, and he should at least check the planet out, the one they had landed on that was apparently named BH657. That’s when he’d told her they had already colonized it. There were a hundred families living there, none had reported anything strange or any new life forms.
They had stripped her of her rank and set her a menial job in construction, loading supplies mostly. It was demeaning, but it was an income, and all she wanted now was to return to Earth and never leave again.
And now here was Robin, along with some bloody military lieutenant. And they still hadn’t told her why they needed her help.
“Why exactly are you here?” she asks sharply, losing her patience. “What do you need my help with? I’m not rehashing my story again. It’s on file, you can read it at any time.”
Whale looks to Robin, who sighs.
Robin looks her in the eye. “We’ve lost contact with the colony on BH657.”