The stars look very different today

by FearTheRaven

Summary:

Pearl has spent over a year in space with a crew of three under her command on an outdated space station. She’s tired, unsure, and knows she won’t be catching a break for at least another year. She is not expecting late additions to the crew.

Gem knows she’s an astronaut. Gem also knows she’s supposed to have a body. She knows she can see a space station. And a person in a space suit, untethered, careening towards it like an asteroid. She is not expecting that person to be her.

-

Gempearl split POV space fic strongly influenced by space fiction podcast Wolf 359, taking in fun details from Wild Life.
FEATURING: Space, women loving women, three guy best friends, shady corporations, cosmic beings beyond comprehension, out of date equipment, wildly inaccurate sci-fi very loosely based on fact, one (1) ghost, zero (???) aliens, and whatever’s being kept in deep storage...

Notes:

title from david bowie's space oddity

no tw.

Chapter 1: Am I sitting in a tin can

It’s been four hundred and sixty-six days, three hours and maybe – hmm, yeah, seven minutes – since Pearl last saw anyone who wasn’t Impulse, Skizz or Tango. Long enough for Impulse to have had two birthday celebrations, for the first re-supply drop to arrive four months late, and for a long-distance chess match to have developed between them and the radar technicians back on Earth. Alpha base, in rural Switzerland, is one move behind.

In four hundred and sixty-six days, three hours and seven minutes, Pearl has kept the station running and undertaken various long distance astrobiology experiments on the behalf of the mission sponsor’s multiple partnership groups. Skizz has manned the transmissions, logging daily signals emitted from the nearby star and dual running station maintenance with the two physicist come engineers, Impulse and Tango, whose projects span the confines of the station’s physics laboratory and an extensive exterior sensor array.

They run like a machine, well-oiled if somewhat janky. Pearl stocktakes, organises and runs internal admin. Skizz sends daily reports to and fields correspondence from Earth command. Tango runs his experiments. Impulse helps Tango, and cooks when they get tired of formulated nutrient packets from the crates in storage. Everyone becomes a mechanic or amateur engineer despite any formal training due to necessity.

Every two months, they each do a psychological assessment with follow-up over faster than light beacon hail. Once command requested their biometric data. Eight months in, command had them speak to medical personnel over FTL beacon hail to monitor their physical health. After a year of orbit, command sent a station system software update.

To celebrate, Tango defrosted a smuggled ice cream cake he pulled from deep freeze.

They celebrate each other’s birthdays when they occur. Movie night is once a month, with choices between some shitty straight to video children’s movie, The Princess Bride, or a box set of the first ten seasons of a European medical drama with English subtitles. Tango constructs elaborate games for them to play. They sleep in shifts, maintain the greenhouse, stare into the deep abyss of space through the observation deck’s immense windows.

It’s a fascinating, once in a lifetime occupation that Pearl has been incredibly fortunate to take part in. She has also never felt smaller than after four hundred and sixty-six days, three hours and seven minutes of living on a decaying space station too large for four people.

She feels smaller still now, in the middle of an unexpected flare from the star they’re orbiting.

She and the boys are currently huddled together in the transmissions room. Pearl wanted them all in the same place so no one has to rely on the station’s communication system, which she’s eighty percent sure will fail. The transmissions room was the most logical choice, it being integrated to the main body of the space station with less exterior surface to expose to radiation. It also has all necessary equipment to contact Earth if something goes wrong.

However, if something does happen their chances of contacting anyone in time are slim. Their signals are being distorted by the radiation from the flare, which has Impulse glued to the transmissions panel, cursing under his breath while Tango watches, hawklike, over his shoulder. Skizz exchanges pensive glances with her whenever sound of metal in the station groaning gets particularly loud.

Not that it should be concerning. The station makes loud groaning noises regularly without being bombarded with extreme heat and radiation. And the regular sounds of shifting metal are better than the stellar flare warning alarm – something which no one knew about until it started blaring in the middle of the 2am shift – which pealed for five minutes before mysteriously deactivating with the station’s comms systems.

Speaking of.

“Impulse. Any luck on contacting command?” Pearl asks. Skizz usually works this console, but Impulse is second in command and better with tech.

“Nope. The only readings I can get are from the star.” Impulse presses a few keys, swivels a dial, and a harsh static joins the cacophony.

“Well, that’s great isn’t it!” Tango says sarcastically, reaching over and turning a dial which quietens the static to something bearable. “The star is randomly explodificating and our computers don’t wanna play ball!”

“Well,” Pearl sighs, “you’re a computer guy, do you wanna try fixing it?”

“Sure! Not like there’s anything else to do while we’re holed up like this.”

Pearl tries not to roll her eyes at Tango’s sudden grin, shooing a grumbling Impulse away from the console.

Skizz harrumphs and Pearl watches him eye the console skeptically. “I bet neither of you can fix it, that thing has gotta be prehistoric! It’s a wonder I get any signals at all!”

“Hey, we’re the best at computers!” Impulse exclaims back, “We’ll get this fixed in no time!”

“Nuh uh!”

“Yeah!”

Pearl stays quiet, watching them. They argue like this all the time – not just Skizz and Impulse but all four of them. No one generally means anything by it, and it’s more entertaining to have useless fake arguments than otherwise. They hear plenty of silence up here already.

Fake arguing typically doesn’t occur in higher stakes situations though. Which, Pearl considers, maybe this could be. Nothing much is more higher stakes than experiencing unprecedented stellar flares in a glorified tin can.

As if to illustrate the point, the station’s structure groans. It reminds her that if the ramshackle construct begins to fail, they currently have no way to contact the closest ship capable to evacuate them.

“Hey Cap! Captain. Pearl. Pearlie-pop.”

“Yes, Skizz?” Pearl responds, letting more tiredness into her voice than she intends to. Skizz’s expression falters, easy grin sliding off his face as seriousness take over.

“You alright Cap? I was only joking about Impulse making the station go HAL-9000 on us.” Skizz looks earnest, soft blue eyes gazing at her with a surprising intensity. Their jumpsuits, also blue – technically cobalt, to be precise – make his eyes pop almost supernaturally. “Is something wrong? You’ve been all quiet back there.”

“Well–” she doesn’t mean for her voice to go as high pitched as it does, “nothing’s wrong yet.”

“But… you think it could be.”

“Yes. Well.” Tango is listening now, and Pearl can see Impulse look away from working on the computer to listen. “Maybe. We can’t be sure until something happens but something about this just doesn’t feel right.” Pearl looks between the men in the room, searching for agreement. “Right?”

Impulse’s brow furrows but he bites his lip and turns back to the console. Skizz is slowly nodding.

Tango tilts his head in confusion. “What do you mean, something doesn’t feel right about the computer? Or like, the station? Or this flare thingummyjig?”

“Uh… all of it.” She doesn’t miss the tiny, imperceptible glance Tango shoots to Skizz. “I don’t think this place is even flare certified. I didn’t even know we were going to get flares!”

“You’re telling me that you’re not double sure that this place is safe right now? They didn’t mention it in your training or anything?” Tango asks, eyebrows raised in confusion.

“Nope.”

“Is that – are you sure? Should I be more worried right now? Because I’ve been chill because I thought they trained you in how to deal with this!”

“Well yeah, they taught us to go about our business because most stations are reinforced and flare safe! I didn’t realise that we’d be up in this rusty shit bucket!” Pearl almost laughs in her own disbelief of the situation.

The boys are looking at her with wide eyes, and it occurs to her that she should probably be trying to keep her act together and look less rattled than she feels.

“So you’re saying–”

“Pearl…”

“Is this a 3am sleep deprivation moment or a genuine crew panic moment?”

“Well – hang on a second, we can’t freak out!” Pearl exclaims, trying to control the situation she’s created.

She’s interrupted before she can explain any further as the station’s structure groans yet again, like a mighty animal shifting its weight on weary bones. It’s loud and metallic, and accompanied by the lights flashing. Distantly, Pearl feels like her point about not panicking may have just been proven.

Something clangs quietly, far away in the depths of the station.

“Well, that’s reassuring.” Impulse says sarcastically, then gestures to the comms console. “In better news, I think I’ve configured the dishes, they should be able to transmit and receive properly now.”

Good news if Pearl’s ever heard any.

“Ooh, okay, can I get in there?” Skizz asks, barely waiting for Impulse to slide out of the chair at the console before situating himself there. “Maybe this flare thing is outputting some super cool readings!”

His enthusiasm is hardly restrained, as per usual, and Pearl can’t help but feel reassured. The systems are back. It’s the early hours of a shift when she should be sleeping. She’s paranoid because she’s tired.

Pearl allows herself to lean back against the wall as Skizz futzes with frequencies, closing her eyes as familiar static fills the room. It buzzes and hisses like usual, and everything is fine.

“Hang on – Skizz, can you turn the volume up?” Pearl hears Impulse exclaim, and she opens her eyes again. Of course something is different now.

“Uh… sure. Hang on.”

Skizz swivels the volume dial, and the typical crackle of signals from the star fills the room. Pearl can’t tell what’s changed with this signal compared to the others from before, and Tango doesn’t seem to either, judging by his shrug when she looks at him. He still walks over to crowd the console with Impulse and Skizz.

It takes a moment or so for the static to clarify, and then Pearl understands what the big fuss is about.

Music, a little staticky but otherwise coherent, echoes from the speaker. It’s beautiful. Pearl doesn’t recognise it, which isn’t the most meaningful observation because so much music exists in the world. The signal itself however is nothing less than a scientific marvel. Watcher corp. has had them scanning for signals since the beginning of the mission, so it must be important.

“Uh… guys? Something’s approaching on the radar!” Tango exclaims, turning around with a visible glint in his eyes Pearl isn’t sure how to interpret. It looks like concern, uncertainty, even some fear, but there is an unacknowledged intrigue there.

“What do you mean? How big?” Impulse says, moving over to stare at the display.

“Well computer’s down, so I’d have to guess… boulder sized!?”

Pearl moves too, eyes locked on the monitor. The station is a dot in the centre of the radar, and a blip on the display is approaching steadily with every new transmission. They can’t tell anything about whatever this might be. She mentally curses the twenty-five-year-old equipment onboard the station – what use is new AI if the potato hardware conks out the moment the station experiences any kind of adverse environmental conditions?

“Surely that’s not coming right at us.” Pearl says in disbelief, eyeballing the object’s trajectory on the radar. She doesn’t have a physics or maths doctorate like Tango and Impulse do – she’s just a xenobiologist with two years of extensive space training and one in command specifically in preparation for the mission. But it doesn’t take an idiot to follow the motion path of the object and connect the dots.

“Aw nuts, we’re screwed!” Skizz cries, and Pearl thinks his assessment might not be wrong. It’s probably the pessimist inside her, but small asteroid vs clunker space station doesn’t inspire hope.

“Hey, maybe it’s fine!” Tango exclaims, staring at the trajectory. “Maybe it passes us, and we ignore how it’s impact is imminent in like, the next ten seconds!”

“TEN SECONDS?!”

“Okay! Maybe we calm down!” Pearl yells, because she’s really goofed up as the leader this time – her crew is panicking in the dangerous situation instead of taking necessary actions. Luckily shouting seems to work, because Skizz stops mid-breath instead of continuing to scream. “Everyone needs to brace for impact, now!”

This she did learn. They all learnt what to do in case of collisions and have practised it. They’ll be fine. They’ll be fine. They’ll be fine…

A dull thud echoes from elsewhere in the station. The music stops playing.

The overhead lights flicker to a dim glow.  It’s quiet as everyone waits with bated breath for something to happen.

Nothing does.

Pearl is ready to tentatively assume everything is fine, until the computer in the comms console starts to beep, and a message plays over the comms system.

“Damage detected to exterior power array. Unknown object detected. Lighting impacted, requiring reconfiguration”

How their new, fancy AI is working now, Pearl doesn’t know. She’s not sure if she cares anymore. The whole space station is driving her crazy.

“Pearl. What do we do?” Tango asks, wincing when he looks at her. “You look rough Captain.”

She doesn’t blame him for wincing.

Pearl sighs. “I’m far too tired for this. But I guess we go look.”

Chapter 2: And I’m floating in a most peculiar way

Summary:

The star is way too cold; it shouldn’t be able to glow more than orange.

“Hey, transmissions?” Gem calls into her comms, staring at the light as it grows brighter and closer by the second. “The star is being weird.”

Notes:

chapter title from space oddity by david bowie :)

potential spoilers for wolf 359, read at own risk

tw: small blood mention, injury

When the flare hits, Gem is supposed to be inside the station with the others. But instead, she’s clinging to the side of the deep storage module fixing the solar panels.

They’ve been having issues with power for nearly a week now; lights flicker and die unexpectedly en masse, and non-essential but otherwise necessary systems shut down with no rhyme or reason. Showers and water heating aren’t essential in emergency situations but are otherwise crucial to ensure no one on the crew goes crazy. Gem has a vested interest in enjoying basic hygiene, so she’s fixing the problem.

It’s also not like it’s a difficult job, checking the panels’ wiring, configuration, and fixing some basic wear and tear. Doing a spacewalk to fix various antennas, sensor arrays, radar dishes and the like is standard practise for any member of the crew.

Nothing should be different this time.

She’s just finishing up the last coupling on a now repaired panel when her suit comms buzz and Etho’s voice calls over the radio. “Gem, you done out there? The asteroid shower’s going to hit in an hour.”

“Yeah, I’m almost done.” She responds. “I’ve just gotta tighten up a join on solar two and I’ll be back in.”

“Okay. Don’t take too long, you don’t wanna get squished out there!”

Gem rolls her eyes under her visor, sighing heavily to indicate this to Etho back inside. “Etho! I’ve got literally just one more bolt to tighten! I am absolutely not getting squished!”

“Hey, I don’t know! Spacewalks take ages, it could happen!”

“It could, but it will not.” Gem says as she pulls a spanner out. “I’ve got the spanner in my hand right now Etho, this will take three seconds!”

“Alright, alright!” Etho’s laugh comes through the comms. Gem can hear the smile on his face in his voice. “Well, we’re gonna keep an eye out for you, just in case the asteroids come by early. So you definitely won’t get squished. Let us know when you’re coming back in, Cleo and Ren said they’ll meet you at airlock.”

“I will, thanks Etho.”

The bolt is tightened easily in a minute or so, and she checks the others just for kicks. It can’t hurt to make sure they’re all tightened, saving another trip out when power fluctuations inevitably happen again. Luckily, she did her job well and every bolt is secured tightly. Gem’s confident the panels are not going to float away. She may not be an officially trained engineer by any means, but with the small number of people on the station everyone ends up being a little bit of everything.

She’s halfway through packing up the tools when she notices a flash of light out of the corner of her eye. Which is… unusual. Gem knows that the suit visors are reinforced and protected against radiation and flares, with the side effect of darkening bright light. So why there would be a bright flash is a mystery.

Turning, Gem looks away from the station towards the direction of the flash: the star. When she looks, however, the star is just as deep and red as usual. Nothing.

But then there’s… something. The glow of the light starts to change, first red, then orange, then yellow, then a bright blueish-white that she isn’t sure is real. The star is way too cold; it shouldn’t be able to glow more than orange.

“Hey, transmissions?” she calls into her comms, staring at the light as it grows brighter and closer by the second. “The star is being weird.”

The response from the unit is garbled chunks of speech. “Ge – wh – mean – ar’s bei – eird?”

“Um, tansmissions? Etho? Can you hear me? I repeat, the star is being weird!”

“G – come in – e can’t – r – ou!”

Gem clumsily reaches up with her massively gloved hands to try and adjust her comms unit. Nevermind that it’s integrated into her suit and the most she can do is mess with the antenna. “Transmissions? Something’s wrong, you’re cutting out! Can you hear me?”

“-m you need – ack – ide ri – ow! Th – ‘s goi – flar – ”

“Etho? Transmissions!? I can’t hear you!” she exclaims, glancing away from the light for a second to look at her comms. And when she looks back… “What the heck...?”

The star is alight.

Like fire reflected in the surface of water, plumes of reds and oranges dance across the surface of the star. Gem is reminded of plasma arcing when the yellows bloom from the orange, white unfurling from yellow, a fiery flower unfurling its petals and painting colour across an eternally dark canvas.

The colour blossoms into the infinite black, and only the white light remains. Only white, as the space around her is cloaked in brightness she couldn’t fathom in a million years. Despite her visor and radiation protection, she feels the warmth from the light on her face, and the light takes over her vision.

It’s so… bright. Has the light always been this beautiful? This radiant? This warm? Gem can’t remember the last time she had seen something and immediately felt seen and understood and possibly even loved. It felt like a warm embrace from a friend.

In the middle of the whiteness, Gem can swear she sees something. If she didn’t know any better, she’d say it’s the silhouette of a person.

But that’s ridiculous, because lone people can’t survive in space.

Her head throbs, before the sensation dulls with a wash of warmth. Vaguely she can hear the sound of sensors in her suit going off – in the back of her mind it registers that those sounds are the ones concerning massive decreases in internal air pressure and oxygen concentration. The station’s AI linked to her suit’s processing unit is calmly saying something. Is it… what…?

“Warning… Massive temperature fluctuation. Warning... Warning... Depleted oxygen, seek immediate aid.  Warning… Warning…”

Oh dear, something’s wrong–

Again, her head hurts… What was she thinking about?

Ah, yes. The silhouette.

Another wave of warmth pushes across her head and the pain dulls. Curiosity takes over her. In the infinite expanse of white, the silhouette looks more and more humanoid, and if she squints it looks familiar.

And she’s shaking. In the star’s light she can feel goosebumps and the hair stand up on the back of her neck. She shivers despite the warmth.

When a trickle gathers in the corners of her eyes and she tries to wipe it, Gem realises she’s crying. She’s crying and she doesn’t even know why. It makes her head hurt, aching with pain as the tears start to gather and block her vision. She can’t even wipe them away.

Then it's warm again, but the pain doesn’t leave. Something is wrong. It builds in her head to a sting and then an agony bursting at her temples. Her ears feel wet. As the pain builds to a throbbing crescendo, a droplet breaks away from what’s gathered near her eyelids.

It’s not tears. It’s a bright crimson red.

Huh.

Her helmet smells like sweat and copper.

The brightness is all encompassing, warmth snaking under her visor, into the suit beneath and surrounding her. Gem’s arms, legs, and torso feel cradled in warmth, which fizzes against her skin like bubbles in a hot tub until it works its way even deeper, into her veins and muscles. She thinks her body might be dissolving.

And then it’s dark.

So, so dark.

It feels like it’s been dark for decades, but maybe it’s just been a second. She was just fixing the… she was fixing something a second ago. She was doing something somewhere and the more she tries to remember the more her head fills with cotton wool, and it becomes too heavy and stuffed up to think.

Gem knows that she’s an astronaut. She’s been sent up to study the star. But…

How long has she been here?

Where did she come from?

What’s… happening?

The darkness breaks in front of Gem into a soft smattering of white specks, hazy pin pricks of light against a dark canvas. They spin and dance past her and it’s beautiful, like nothing she’s seen before. She realises after a moment that she’s moving. Moving fast, judging from the white specks streaking away into blurry lines.

And yet again, she feels fuzzy. Her head feels like a mass of radio static, and everything is fuzzy or numb.

Gem isn’t even sure if she has a body.

She must have one, right? Because she can see the blur of light then she must have eyes, and if she has eyes, she has to have a head and a body to go along with them. She rationalises to herself that she can’t see without eyes, and eyes don’t exist by themselves. Unless something has gone really, really, wrong.

But when she looks down to where her body should be, she just sees more specks of light flashing by. And now Gem’s panicking a little, because not only can she not see her body, but she also can’t feel anything either. She knows she should be able to, because of the usual solid human body she has, but she can’t.

She’s trying, and there’s nothing.

The panic mounts, unsettlingly so because she should be hyperventilating but she can’t because she doesn’t have lungs, and neither can her heartbeat race in her chest and pound in her head as she loses control to the feelings surging through her. It takes a few moments of losing herself to hysteria before the blurry stars around her shift, sharpening into focus.

In the midst of the darkness before her, more pinpricks of light sparkle into existence. Gem realises they’re stars when two non-star objects start to come into view, illuminated with an intense blue light. One of the objects is closer and much smaller than the other. It comes into clearer focus much more easily, and the smaller remains one a dab of shining white.

She moves closer and closer to the objects, closing immense distances rapidly, until she’s hovering above the first one. She’s sure it’s a person in a space suit as she hovers over them. They’re spinning quickly through space, limbs and body lax. Gem can barely make out the symbols printed on the front of their suit they’re moving so much.

Looking away from the body, Gem turns her attention to the object behind it. It’s a space station, an outpost of some sort, gargantuan compared to the person in the suit and perhaps even herself. She doesn’t really know how big she is – a little smaller than the suited person maybe – but she knows that the space station is further away but quickly getting closer as she watches the astronaut’s trajectory towards it.

The astronaut is going to hit the station, Gem notices as she follows the body. She has no reason to watch it happen, but there isn’t much more she can do. She’s just here, nothing but emotions and a point of view of the inevitable.

As she watches, she can’t help but wonder. Why is she here? What’s so important about this person that she needs to watch them? Who are they beneath the helmet?

Gem wills herself closer to the astronaut, close enough to be face to face with their mirrored visor. She maintains speed with them, moving ever so much closer from face to face to see eye to eye. Close enough to just be able to see beneath the one-way glass.

Inside, she sees the pale face of a red-haired young woman. One green right eye, unseeing and unblinking, while the left is milky and bloodshot, almost stained a deep, dark purple. She lurches back from it as the space station grows ever closer, a deep dread settling over her.

With horror, Gem realises that there might be a reason she can’t feel her body.

It’s because she’s watching as it hurtles towards the approaching space station.

Like witnessing a train accident, Gem cannot look away as her own body careers into an exterior wall covered in solar panels.

She doesn’t see the impact.

She feels it.

When Gem lurches back into her body white hot pain is racing through her nerves like lightening. Every part of her body feels numb from the impact in the way she knows will ache later. Gem’s bones feel like they’ve all been rattled against each other. It could be better – or could be worse, the adrenaline coursing through her veins alongside immediate dizziness and blurred vision makes it hard to tell.

While the immense pain ebbs through her, and she is blindsided by how much it hurts, a small part of Gem questions what and how just happened. Because a person moving at the same speed as a car, much less ten times the speed, should be grievously injured if not dead upon impact the same way she did.

Yes, everything hurts to a point it’s circling back around to numbness. But she doesn’t think the damage justifies the cause, let alone that she’s alive and breathing in the middle of space.

It begs the question: How is she not dead?

Gem tries to move to test the theory – just in case she has died and everything is numb because she’s experiencing the afterlife. She manages to get her fingers to touch the sweaty inside of the gloves of her space suit, and she can register the pressure of her suited body. It’s a good sign she is in fact alive – alongside a jolt of pain that flashes up through her arm to her shoulder the moment she moves her hand. She gasps at the pain, then hitches her breath when that too causes her ribs to burst into pain.

Everything still hurts, but that means she’s not dead. Which is odd, when her pain addled brain mulls it over. And it’s not like she escaped totally unscathed, Gem groggily thinks to herself as her vision begins to darken before her.

At the very least, something must be broken.

Notes:

gem is here!!! the other half of the split POV!!! rip everyone else mentioned on that first space station though, we won't be seeing them again.

...unless?

this chapter came out fast because of planning ahead - but also because sometimes you get comments and it inspires you to finish a half written chapter, write 2500 words of planning, and half write two more chapters :) [wow what a subtle plea for comments] big thanks to every one who commented you're all lovely <3

Chapter 3: Now it's time to leave the capsule if you dare

Summary:

“You’ve got to believe me, please.”

The line is quiet for a moment that seems to stretch far longer than the few seconds it takes before Impulse answers. “I do, I mean… I really want to. But you realise this sounds insane, right?”

Doesn’t she ever. There’s a good chance the astronaut is a fucked-up space mirage brought on by stress, or sleep deprivation.

“Trust me, I don’t think I’d believe myself if I wasn’t seeing it with my own eyes.”

Notes:

chapter title (still) from space oddity, by david bowie :)

tw: none

“Are you sure you don’t want me to go out?” Impulse asks for the third time, and Pearl isn’t sure whether to feel supported or irritated by now. He means well, obviously, but she’s already told him and the rest of the crew that she’s willing to go out and inspect the damage.

None of them seemed to like that idea. Yes, she doesn’t really want to go out and see what got wrecked either, but someone has to write up a report to send back to Watcher corp. about major structure damage, if it happens to be that severe. It’s the price she pays for being in charge, she supposes.

She managed to send Tango and Skizz off to lighting to find out what needed to be reconfigured, then on to the power control room to double check exactly which exterior power array was impacted. The AI said it was the solar panels on the station’s deep storage modules, but Pearl doesn’t really trust it.

Pearl doesn’t trust a lot of the station right now, and it’s influencing her crew’s uneasiness. Which in turn influences her own uneasiness. She’s distrustful of the station’s integrity, the boys are worried about her, and she in turn is worried about them being worried.

Not so deep down, she doesn’t really blame them for worrying. If their positions were reversed, she’d be offering herself up to inspect the damage in a heartbeat – which Impulse is still trying to do. But a part of her brain insists that she does the hard work so the boys can handle the technical difficulties and more complex engineering she doesn’t fully understand yet.

“Yeah nah, it’s alright Impulse.” Pearl says, “I’ll just do a preliminary survey for a report, if it’s critical we can keep that area locked down from the rest of the station and someone can try fixing it up next rotation.”

Voice slightly muffled behind two sets of glass – Pearl’s helmet and the outside of the airlock – Impulse still doesn’t seem quite convinced. “I could just go out now with some tools and you could stay all cozy in here,” he says sincerely, “we’re only halfway through locking out.”

“Well, glass half full. We’ve only got halfway left to go.” Pearl counters, before smiling and trying her best to be reassuring. “It’s alright ‘Pulse, really. I’ll be out and back in no time. And it doesn’t take that long to come back up to pressure anyway.”

“Hmm… okay. But you have to go back to sleep when you get back, the report can wait.”

Pearl can see the gravity of his request reflected in his expression, something she can only compare to real life puppy dog eyes. It tugs on her heartstrings a little to know that if anyone on board has her back, it’s her second in command.

She can’t dwell on that thought forever, so settles for exaggeratingly rolling her eyes with a scoff. “Geez, alright mum, I’ll do the report later.”

“Hey!” Impulse exclaims, “Don’t ‘mom’ me! I’m just saying that maybe you should rest before committing to something the overheads have to read!”

“I dunno, you sound like a regular mother hen to me…”

It doesn’t seem like Impulse can come up with a response beyond shaking his head and sighing, exasperated grin on his face. Pearl mentally congratulates herself on resolving his worry, when a tone sounds in the airlock and the station AI announces the airlock is fully depressurised.

“Well, since I’m such a mother hen let’s check you’ve got everything.” Impulse says, swapping to come in over Pearl’s radio. She wouldn’t hear him otherwise. “Is your suit at pressure?”

“Yep.”

“Not feeling any symptoms of decompression sickness?”

“None to report.”

“Okay…” Impulse messes with something before looking up again. “Alright Captain, opening airlock.”

Pearl waits for the characteristic hiss of the airlock’s pneumatics moving and the clanking of the heavy doors before the airlock is unsealed, but it doesn’t come. All sound is swallowed by the vacuum. All she can hear is her own breathing, and the quiet hums and whirs of her suit’s systems. It’s peaceful, albeit somewhat creepy. She can’t hear the groan and squeal of the airlock doors rattling the station, and neither could she hear Impulse shouting, even if he was screaming at the top of his lungs right next to here. She couldn’t hear if something was going wrong mere metres away.

Thankfully, radios and short-range communication systems were invented.

“Heading out now.” Pearl tells Impulse, sparing a look over her shoulder and throwing him a thumbs up through the glass.

He throws one back. “Affirmative. Keep comms active for me? I wanna make sure I’ll be able to tell if they drop out or if something goes wrong.”

“Sure thing mate.”

“Don’t you mean First Mate?”

“You know what I mean! This isn’t a pirate ship Impulse!”

His laughter echoes through the radio in her helmet as Pearl drifts carefully out of the airlock, staying close to the station and clipping her tethers into the first anchor point. It’s both freeing and restrictive to be out in space; movement feels like nothing, and the weightlessness of floating fills her with wonder every time, but the lack of restriction means everything floats a little too much, and she needs to keep keen focus on her limbs to stay coordinated.

Even with the assistance from in-suit propulsion, it takes about twenty minutes for Pearl to scale the outside of the station towards where the object impacted them, and she can’t fathom how early astronauts handled it. The suits were larger and less manoeuvrable, with even longer periods of decompression before even undertaking a walk. Even with Impulse talking to her and giving time updates, it feels like the journey takes an eternity.

Eventually, Pearl has tentatively made her way around the outside of the station, passing the transmissions array, the observation deck and the hull of the deep storage module. The site of impact is just over the adjacent side of the module, currently out of view.

From the sliver of the solar panels she can see from where she is, everything looks fine.

“Alright Impulse, I’ve reached the outside of deep storage, coming over to the other side now.” Pearl says, rounding the edge of the hull. A field of solar panels, one of their power arrays, are spread out like black carpets before her. “Can’t see anything yet… hold on. Might have found something.”

“Keep me posted.” Impulse’s voice crackles with static, and Pearl slowly moves forwards towards a hole in the otherwise uniform tiling of solar panels.

From afar, she can only see the void where the panels were, and not the impact crater beneath. It’s only when she gets closer that Pearl finally spies the object that caused it.

At first, she’s surprised. The object that hit them is still there, whereas she had fully anticipated it to have glanced off or left only rubble behind. She’s then shocked to see what the object actually is.

That’s when she blinks her eyes to make sure it’s real.

Is she dreaming? Pearl thinks she might be dreaming, but it’s undeniable when the object is still there after she blinks. It’s definitely not a figment of her imagination.

There’s a person in an older space suit caught between the wrecked solar panels that cover the outside of deep storage.

“Holy shit.” Pearl exclaims out loud to herself, never mind Impulse who’s listening in on the comms.

She’s not sure if she believes what she’s seeing.

Where could a person have come from? Watcher corporation bought out the whole surrounding region, prohibiting access from non-corporate crews. Hypothetically, if command have been giving her accurate information, they’re the only station, ship or colony in the sector. Which means that there are exactly zero places a random spaceperson can come from.

Unless the mystery astronaut came from a craft that’s been unaccounted for, Pearl has no reasonable explanation for why they’re out here, presumably crashed into their solar panels. Which itself is another problem. How can a person impact at speeds comparable to an aircraft and not be a mangled mess at the end of it?

And how is the station not damaged more?

“Pearl, report! What’s going on out there?” Impulse’s voice comes in over the radio at an intensity she hasn’t heard before, and Pearl blinks back to herself.

“There’s a person.” Pearl says, still dumbfounded, staring over at the figure caught in the solar panels.

“There’s a…what?”

“Impulse, there’s a person out here. In a spacesuit.” Silence stretches over the comms as Pearl continues to stare from afar. Impulse must think she’s going mad. “They crashed into the solar panels.”

The silence continues for several long moment before Impulse’s voice sounds over the suit comms. He sounds disconcertingly calm, but his voice does waver slightly as he speaks, “Pearl, stay where you are, I’m coming outside to get you.”

“Come to get me – why?”

“I – uh – we all think it’s been a minute since you slept, and you should probably come inside.”

“I’m not kidding, they’re right here!” Pearl exclaims, stepping closer to peer into the crater. “They’re in a white space suit, and they’ve taken out maybe… six panels?”

“Pearl…”

“I don’t know what else to tell you! There’s someone here!”

“Pearl, I – just hold on, I’m putting you on standby for a minute.” Impulse says, voice strained. “Don’t go anywhere, okay?”

“Wait, Impulse!” Pearl calls over the comms, “I know – I know this sounds crazy. But there’s a person who isn’t one of us right here.” She waits for a response, then frantically adds on, “you’ve got to believe me, please.”

The line is quiet for a moment that seems to stretch far longer than the few seconds it takes before Impulse answers. “I do, I mean… I really want to. But you realise this sounds insane, right?”

Doesn’t she ever. There’s a good chance the astronaut is a fucked-up space mirage brought on by stress, or sleep deprivation.

“Trust me, I don’t think I’d believe myself if I wasn’t seeing it with my own eyes.”

“Well. I’m still coming out there anyway.” Impulse says. “I’ll bring tools up for the power array. You’re still outside deep storage?”

“Yep.”

“Okay, alright. Okay! Like I said, stay put. I’m going to get Skizz and Tango, put one of them on comms.”

“Alrighty.”

“I’ll be out soon Pearl. Just need to get back up, get suited and depressurise…”

He’s probably talking to himself more than Pearl as he trails off, the radio crackling into fuzzy static before falling silent.

And like that, Pearl is left to the slight hum of the suit and her own steady breathing. Just herself, the unmoving figure of the astronaut, and the universe.

Like having a large spider in the house, Pearl finds herself unwilling to take her eyes off the figure. Something instinctual, where a part of her believes if she looks away the figure will disappear and be gone, which is worse than seeing it. Not that the astronaut, lying supine and looking similar to a large marshmallow, are intrinsically a threat and are making her uneasy – it’s more the fact that Pearl would bet money that the mysterious appearance of an astronaut is the opening to a horror movie.

Left with a considerable span of time to fill, Pearl carefully makes her way to the edge of the impact site, with intent to investigate. There’s little use in wasting time standing and staring, not with a limited oxygen supply.

She keeps an eye on the astronaut the whole time. They don’t move.

She navigates herself into the impact area carefully, being sure to avoid warped metal and glass shards where they stick out. The solar panels are crushed in, forming a shallow cone shaped crater where some have cracked and been pushed inwards. Those that shattered fully or had pieces break off have left holes where Pearl can see the metal frame the panels sit on. She uses one of these holes to pull on the frame and hoist herself down, getting into the guts of the destruction.

The damage to the actual hull of the station appears to be minimal, apart from a large dent beneath the twisted metal frame the solar panels are attached to. The damaged panels themselves are bent and shattered, with glassy fragments should be able to be disconnected from the array, leaving the rest operational. The station should be just fine, running on only slightly decreased power.

Satisfied in her appraisal of their power supply, Pearl turns her attention to the arguably larger problem on her hands.

Giving in to the uneasy feeling, she hasn’t let the astronaut leave her sight. They haven’t moved in the time Pearl has watched them, and closer inspection reveals they haven’t floated away because they’re conveniently hooked beneath some of the metal frame. Unlike Pearl, whose space suit is pale blue, thick but streamlined and formfitting, the astronaut’s suit is white and puffy. Glancing more thoroughly, she notices see a clear letter W encircled by a sort of rectangle - two right angles diagonally opposite each other, with two diagonally opposite square, disconnected from either right angle, forming the remaining corners - emblazoned on the left breast of the suit.

What the fuck?

It's the Watcher corporation logo, the exact same as the one on Pearl’s suit.

The detail is confusing and concerning for the most part – who is this person?

Pearl looks to the position of the star compared to the station to determine the risk of flipping up the stranger’s radiation visor to see their face properly. The hull of deep storage is in partial shadow, enough that it would be safe, so she decides to go ahead with it.

The figure remains unmoving as Pearl carefully reaches out to flip up their visor, and for a second as she does it, she entertains the horror movie thought that she might see the face of one of her crew there. It’s ridiculous, because the men she works with are far taller than the figure.

Nonetheless, she lets herself think it.

When she flips the visor and looks, however, she is still shocked and jumps back with a gasp. Not because the face she sees is one of her crew, but because she makes direct eye contact with them.

It’s only for a moment or two, but it’s enough time for Pearl to see the mystery astronaut blink one green and one darkly bloodshot, almost milky eye listlessly before they fall into unconsciousness. Their face appears deathly pale, painted red by the light of the star and blending with their hair – Pearl can’t tell whether the shock of hair falling out from under their cap is blonde painted red, or naturally orange. She also hopes they just look that pale, because the alternative is that the person found outside is now be a body, both a protocol nightmare to report back to command and a nightmare to deal with otherwise.

Pearl flips the figure’s visor back down and mentally pleads to any higher powers that be that they’re unconscious, not dead.

“Hey airlock? Or transmissions, come in either of you.”  Pearl calls over the comms. “Situation just changed!”

“What’s that Captain?” Skizz’s voice comes in. “The situation is what now?”

“Skizz – did Impulse tell you what’s out here?”

“He said you found someone.”

Pearl doesn’t believe she has time to raise an eyebrow and question this – Skizz is fine once directed, but initially flounders in even minor crises. “You’re like, really chill about that.”

“Well, I’m not,” Skizz says casually, “but he also said you’re sleep deprived and might be hallucinating, so I’m hinging on that being true – sorry.”

“Right. Can you tell Impulse that my very real hallucination is alive?”

“IT’S ALIVE?!” Aaaand there’s the floundering.

What else can she say? She doesn’t know for sure if the astronaut is alive, or if they’re injured badly. So, she settles for: “Yep.”

“Uhuh… okay, mystery guy is alive.” Skizz mutters to remind himself, before speaking again. “I can tell him. Dipple-dop’s setting up in the airlock, he’s going to have short range communication going soon.”

“Cool, thanks mate. Oh, and Skizz?”

“Yeah?”

“Ask him to bring spare tethers?”

Pearl sits in silence next to the unconscious astronaut for a while, partaking in occasional conversation with Skizz over the radio. Before too long Impulse joins in on his own suit comms, asking questions like ‘why the extra tethers’ and ‘how is the damage’ and ‘do you think they’ll send out a resupply for spare solar panels?’

Eventually, Impulse’s helmet appears over the edge of the crater, and Pearl sees him stare down at her before catching sight of the very real, definitely alive astronaut lying unconscious next to her.

She sees him startle, stopping in his tracks up on the intact panelling.

“Oh… gods! It’s real!”

“Yep.”

“And they’re alive.”

“Yep. That’s why I had you bring those extra tethers.”

She can’t see him with his visor down but is sure she’d see him blanche. “We’re bringing them inside?”

“Of course! You think I’d just leave them to die out here?!”

“No! Of course not!” Impulse splutters, before regaining his composure. “But we don’t even know who they are Pearl, or where they come from.”

“Impulse…” Pearl says, injecting as much seriousness into her voice as she can. “I think there’s something more going on here. Something that we’re not being told.”

“What? By who? You don’t mean–”

“I do mean. They’ve got Watcher corporation insignia.”

Pearl watches as even in his suit, Impulse tries to rub his face with his hands, sighing. “Well, shit.”

Notes:

poor pearl having woken up on like 2hrs sleep having to deal with multiple Situations while no one believes her. it's alright pearl, soon everyone will be paranoid and dealing with problems :)

longer chapter! personal preference is to write around 2500 words (preferably more), but at least over 2000 so everything is hopefully explained/described enough. i've also gone back and updated chapter 1 and 2 for various 2am typos + mistakes. if you saw grian mentioned last chapter - no you didn't.

not sure how long space oddity lyrics will remain chapter titles, i've been scouting for other space themed songs but none are quite perfect yet... perhaps for later chapters but not now lol :P

Chapter 4: Can you hear me Major Tom?

Summary:

But the expression isn’t the thing which catches Gem’s attention. Instead, it’s the woman’s blue eyes, which Gem finds herself staring back into as if she hasn’t seen the colour before.

"No luck Pearl?” The yellow haired man asks.

The woman looks up and away, grimacing. “Nah, doesn’t look like it… Maybe she doesn’t speak English.”

“You speak any other languages?”

“Nope.”

Notes:

chapter title still from space oddity by david bowie

strikethrough text indicated unintelligible speech. sincerest apologies in case anyone can't read strikethrough (strikethrough) text

tw: blood, non-descriptive syringe/needle use

When Gem stirs awake, she isn’t conscious for long.

The first time she blinks between awareness and unconsciousness, she’s aware of pain, the sprawling network of stars, and her cheek pressed into the side of her helmet. But not much else. When she opens her eyes, she can see stars and can’t tell whether it’s the sky or if she’s concussed. They dance and swim into a soupy blur, so she closes her eyes again. It feels like she’s woken up after a wild night out – everything is sore, feels generally bad, and she can’t remember much.

She knows the basics though, which is probably enough. Her name is Gem. She’s an astronaut. She was studying the star, and she crashed.

And… that’s it, right? There’s a sinking feeling in the back of her mind that there’s something else she’s missing. Something important. But what else is there to remember? Before she crashed, she was in space, and before that she isn’t sure.

Gem wracks her brain, trying her hardest to remember anything. Crashing into the station. Being in space. Darkness? Her name is Gem, and she’s studying the star.

Thinking takes too much energy, and she welcomes slipping back into the darkness.

The second time Gem awakens, it’s to a point of view which is not her own. She doesn’t even open her eyes, but she can see everything. Space is vast and all-encompassing from this vantage point, laid out like a biblically accurate arcade carpet. Away in the distance, a space station is far enough and small enough to look like a model on the horizon.

Gem doesn’t have enough time to consider the situation before her head throbs, and in a split second she’s back in her suit, opening her eyes to again see her vision swimming. She went from feeling nothing to pain dancing between a buzzing deep within her bone. Her body feels like it’s covered in radio static.

The change is dizzying, so she squeezes her eyes shut and lets herself get lost in the ebb and flow of the feeling.

On the third occasion, Gem isn’t just faced with blurry vision of the stars and deep pain. When she opens her eyes the horizon of stars is gone, replaced with another person in a strange space suit. It’s pale blue – probably, everything is bathed in red light which makes colours difficult – and form fitting. Gem doesn’t think she’s ever seen anything like it before.

Their arms are held out towards her and their mirrored visor is raised, allowing Gem to see a pale, slender feminine face with deep blue eyes behind the glass of their helmet. Some strands of brown hair are just barely escaping from under the figure’s helmet cap.

Gem can feel herself slipping away mere moments after she’s awoken, but she wants to see more of the person. Their face is set with concentration as they reach out to hold the reflective visor on Gem’s helmet, and Gem strains to stay awake as they open it and see her face.

The very last thing Gem sees is the stranger’s pretty blue eyes widen as they recoil in shock, before Gem blinks once, trying to fight it, but inevitably loses herself to the darkness.

Then it’s dark and quiet again, but her eyes hurt. She wants to stay asleep for millennia and open her eyes to see the pretty eyed stranger’s face again both at the same time.

Maybe she’ll see them in her dreams…

Gem doesn’t, because she drops somewhat roughly back into consciousness to immense pressure, bordering on pain, in her head. She tries to move, to reach up and hold her head, but finds that her right arm twinges in pain when she tries to move it, and the other one is just too heavy. No, not heavy. Something is weighing it down, holding it even.

She cracks her eyes open to see what’s happening, to find out who’s got a hold of her, only to be met with white and grey surfaces illuminated so brightly she instinctually closes her eyes again.

Amidst the pain, Gem tests moving a little to find where the boundaries of movement are, discovering both that moving is hard, and tiring, and that someone is holding her. Maybe more than one person, because she can feel tugging on her helmet and hear speech.

Wait. She can hear!? She doesn’t think she’s been able to hear sound beyond noises she made herself since… well, for some time. As long as she’s been outside, that’s for certain – she assumes she’s inside now, because that’s where the air is kept, where sound happens.

And what a soundscape it is. Robotic whirring, some hissing, something beeping far away, and what can only be speech.

“Hold on, I’ll hold them up, you work on getting their helmet.” A masculine voice exclaims, muffled slightly, followed by a higher one with an Australian accent.

“Maybe just lie them down, that might be easier.”

“Ok – steady, steady…”

Gem feels her back and shoulders touch the floor before her head is carefully placed down. She gasps and squeezes her eyes tighter when her arm bursts with pain, trying her best to breathe through it.

“Who even are they, dude?” Another deeper voice asks animatedly, and the first deep voice answers. Gem can hear rustling and feel something jostling her helmet. It hurts her head.

“I don’t know! All we know is that they’ve got our symbol on their suit, see?”

“Dude! Oh, shoot! They’re corporate!”

“You’re taking their helmet off?” Yet another deeper voice asks, their tone skeptical. Gem’s head spins with questions. Firstly, how many people are here? She thinks she’s heard four voices, but some of them sound similar and she can’t be sure. Also, where is she? Who are the people?

“Yep. Should we not?”

“I probably should have said so before but, uh, be very careful of their head and neck. I think we’ve got a collar in medbay, I’ll go grab that, but we don’t want their neck to be broke-ificated.” The rustling around Gem’s head doesn’t stop, but there’s very little extra movement. “Or broke-ificated more… Yout think they definitely crashed into the station?”

The higher voice speaks. “I found them in the crater so… it looks like it.”

“Fuck… Welp.” A sigh. “I may as well grab a board for spinal injuries, it’ll be a miracle if they haven’t broken their back and neck. I’ll be back.”

Footsteps start to tap away as the rustling noises around Gem’s helmet continue, and she hears the Australian sighing. “Shit, we absolutely broke their neck more moving them, didn’t we?”

The third deep voice jumps to placate. “Aw, Pearlie, no. Maybe they’re fine!”

“Aha! Got it!” The first deep voice suddenly celebrates, and then she hears a click, then the quiet grinding of metal moving against plastic, then–

“Ah!” Gem can’t help from crying out when she feels a rush of cool air and sudden, intense pain in her ears, accompanied by immediate dizziness.

She thinks they’ve taken her helmet off. Or maybe just unsealed it – she can still feel it cushioning her head – until that starts to slide out from under her. Nonetheless, she has bigger problems. The air feels too wide, pressing in on her head and bowing out all at the same time. It aches, like being on a landing aeroplane but so, so much worse.

She also can’t hear the people anymore. Sound is now muffled and near silent, like she’s listening from underwater. Her ears feel full, wet even, and clear language has turned into a smear of sound as heard from three rooms away. All in a new, frantic tone.

At the same moment, Gem opens her eyes to face the situation she’s found herself in. Or perhaps, where she’s found herself and who exactly have found her.

“TANGO!”

“What? I was just leaving – oh my god!” A muted exclamation comes from a man with blond, almost yellow, hair, who sprints over from somewhere beyond Gem’s peripheral vision. “Someone – uh, Pearl, hold her head!”

From the same direction, she hears unintelligible yelling from one of the voices she heard previously. “Why is she BLEEDING, dude?!!? And why are her eyes like that!?”

“She wasn’t like this when I found her!” A woman with brown hair exclaims, quickly setting a bulky white helmet aside with little regard for the object before placing cool hands on both sides of Gem’s head.

 “Whaddya mean? The eyes or the bleeding?” Gem watches the yellow haired man speak as he shoos away a man with brown hair and stubble before settling down next to Gem. The second man is wearing a strange, form-fitting, pale blue space suit, while the yellow haired man is in a deep blue flightsuit.

“Just the blood, her eyes were like that when I found her.”

“Great… good to know! Ah, shit – we’ve got no idea if she’s injured under this thing…” The yellow haired man’s tone is frustrated. “Pearl, see if she can talk to you. Impulse, help me try get this thing off. Skizz, I need the spinal board, the collar and the safety shears – shears are in the top drawer labelled ‘emergency’. Run!”

Once yellow haired guy stops speaking, everything moves, and no matter how hard she tries Gem cannot keep track of what each person is doing. Someone is running away, the sound of their footsteps quickly disappearing. The brown-haired man in the odd space suit kneels beside her while the yellow haired man begins to fiddle with Gem’s suit.

The woman with brown hair remains relatively still, static where everything else is not.

“Hi. My name’s Pearl, can you tell me who you are?” The woman says something, gently tapping the side of Gem’s head with her fingertips. She barely notices, too busy trying to watch everyone. “Hello? Can you tell me your name? Or what’s hurting? We can’t help you unless we know what’s wrong.”

Gem realises, as she darts her eyes between the two men and the woman knelt next to her, that the woman is probably speaking to her. She’s looking down at Gem with an unreadable expression on her face. It’s something between concern and expectation, judging by her eyebrows, both furrowed but simultaneously raised as high as possible on her forehead. But the expression isn’t the thing which catches Gem’s attention. Instead, it’s the woman’s blue eyes, which Gem finds herself staring back into as if she hasn’t seen the colour before.

“No luck Pearl?” The yellow haired man asks.

The woman looks up and away, grimacing. “Nah, doesn’t look like it… Maybe she doesn’t speak English.”

“You speak any other languages?”

“Nope.”

“Me neither – Impulse?”

The brown-haired man makes an uncertain noise, looking away from what he’s doing. “Eughh… Nothing helpful.”

Gem’s sure their unintelligible conversation continues, but the brown-haired man moves Gem’s bad arm and her vision flashes white, even when she squeezes her eyes closed tightly and tries not to cry out too loudly.

Then a familiar wave of warmth, albeit dulled, washes over her and everything goes black and fuzzy. It leaves Gem in slightly less pain but struggling to process her surroundings. Everything feels fine, actually, and suddenly the people surrounding her and even her head don’t really matter. The voices she already can’t understand blur together and fade into the background.

Faintly, she can hear music.

Gem thinks she can feel a thumb just barely stroking her hair, but she could be imagining things.

Under the influence of whatever power nulls her pain, time dilates strangely. It could be seconds or minutes that pass until a tall man in a singlet and blue flight suit tied up around his waist sprints back with scissors. She watches the ceiling as if in a trance as her space suit is cut away from her body, even when they nick the cooling system and leak cold water everywhere. It persists when she’s log rolled up and then back down onto a hard surface, and when they slip a brace carefully around her neck and strap it together so she’s secure.

Strangely, Gem does feel when the hands that were so careful in holding her head fall away.

Ten minutes or mere moments later – which one is true she can’t tell – Gem has been hoisted up and carried elsewhere. The yellow-haired man disappeared at some point, leaving the two brunette men carrying her. The woman with the blue eyes keeps pace alongside, awkwardly holding her hands in the air. They’re stained crimson.

Eventually the moving stops, and the new ceiling she’s looking up at is bright white. Hardly different, but when the other men leave and the yellow haired man enters her field of vision with a syringe, part of her brain which isn’t otherwise preoccupied informs her that she’s in an infirmary. Yellow Hair is probably a doctor.

Which is good, she thinks to herself as she feels a pinch in her arm, because being injected with unknown substances by someone who isn’t a doctor is not ideal. Not ideal at all.

Gem’s vision starts to blur in a way that’s alien to the fuzziness she’s recently gotten used to falling over her. It’s not the same when it’s not caused by… whatever causes it to happen. She doesn’t really know, and she can feel the chemicals making her drift down, down, down, but that’s not the point!

The point is…

And then she’s gone. It happens so fast that Gem doesn’t have time to finish thinking. As soon as she’s noticed what happened, she’s already waking up.

The final time Gem rouses to consciousness, everything is quiet. Quiet but not silent, because she can hear quiet, regular beeping, and the soft hum of machinery working. It feels peaceful rather than eerie, even though Gem can’t quite immediately pinpoint where she is.

She opens her eyes to a smallish room, white and grey with no windows and a blue stripe reaching about a metre up the wall. The walls are covered with shelves, laminated posters and various screens, only two of which are displaying anything. Around the room Gem can see three vacant beds, two across the way and one to her right, and a door at the end of the room labelled ‘scanners/surgery’.

Apart from her, the room is otherwise empty of personnel.

Gem spends a moment taking stock of her situation and what happened before she ended up in some kind of hospital. She remembers seeing space, waking up to hear people talking and glimpses of the people themselves. A man with yellow hair in a dark blue flight suit. Two men with brown hair, one in a pale blue space suit and the other incredibly tall with a white singlet and blue flight suit tied at the waist. A woman with blue eyes. So much blue, everywhere.

In terms of injuries, Gem looks down at herself and takes in what she can see. The most obvious change is the cast weighing on her right arm, which is wrapped in green. It stubbornly keeps her arm in its bent position even when she tries to move it just to test its boundaries, and her arm hurts just a little. The other changes are the line coming out of her arm and attached to a drip, the chunky clip on one finger, what seems like dozens of electrodes on her head and the loose-fitting blue scrubs she’s wearing.

Altogether, she seems to be okay. It’s nice even, she got free clothes!

It’s almost too good to be true.

A wave of uneasiness rushes over her as she considers the room before her. Déjà vu runs through her body, and Gem can feel her heartrate rocket in her chest. The monitor attached to her starts to go insane, emitting high pitched beeping alongside an alarm noise. She’d be bothered by the noise if it didn’t start to fade in the background, becoming dull and insignificant. It feels like everything is loose, like she’s loose, and could slip away at any moment.

Gem does fall away after a few seconds, vision swimming while the thumps of footsteps sprinting towards the medical bay dampen. One moment she’s sure she’s about to pass out and her connection to reality is fraying, before something clicks and Gem’s consciousness slides, fluid like, away from her body.

Although… not necessarily away. Gem – or maybe just her consciousness, unless she is her consciousness – can still see her body slumped loosely on the bed from a position hovering a slight distance away. In surprise, she leaps back further still, until she’s at the far wall, staring at her own body on the bed.

Whatever she’s doing is not supposed to be happening. Gem should not be able to see how pale she looks in the disposable scrubs, or the electrodes stuck to her head. Nor should she be able to see the two crew members who burst in through the door with panic painted across their faces without using her own two eyes – one green and milky purple – still open and staring blankly into the air ahead. And are also in her body, which is about a metre away.

Gem watches a brown-haired woman beeline immediately to Gem’s body, and a man with yellow hair makes towards a container labelled with ‘crash kit.’ She takes a second to remember she’s seen them both before – the woman holding up hands stained red with blood, the man drawing up liquid into a syringe – but it's different seeing them now, when she isn’t dizzy with pain and can commit their appearances to memory.

“Hey, are you alright?” The woman asks, taking Gem’s body by the shoulders and tapping Gem’s left upper arm, the one which isn’t in a cast. Gem should not be able to move near instantaneously to see the expression on the woman’s face screw up in concern when Gem’s body gives no answer. “Can you hear me?”

“What do we need Pearl?!” The yellow haired man exclaims. He looks stressed.

“I don’t know! I, uh, her heartrate’s through the floor? It’s crazy low right now Tango!”

Pearl and Tango. Huh, some names to put to their faces. Gem watches with fascination as Tango whips out a vial and a syringe, getting close enough to read ‘epinephrine | epinefrina | épinéphrine’ emblazoned on the label as he draws it up. She waits with bated breath as Tango moves over and injects the drug into one of the lines in her arm, and for a moment she and the crew share the same suspense.

Until she feels a colossal surge in her chest and is ripped away from thin air.

Gem jerks back into her body with a gasp, flailing wildly when she suddenly has control of her limbs again. Her heart beats wildly in her chest. She’s met with respective startled yelling and a yelp like a kicked animal from the two crew members, Pearl and Tango. Both of whom lurch back from leaning over her. Nearby, the previously sluggish heart rate monitor beeps at a quick staccato.

She considers the two and sits on the medbay bed and breathes, heart pounding, as they stare at her with wide eyes. Judging from their reactions, she is not expected or supposed to be awake yet.

Certainly not sitting bolt upright with no warning. Absolutely not like that.

Notes:

everyone's finally on the station together!!! yay! and congrats tango, due to short staffing you're also the medic now!

this was kind of a weird chapter to write, because the pov character is in altered states of consciousness for most of it. it's also hard to know if 'everything hurts wtf is going on' will be interesting to read! despite being initially difficult to write it got easier and now this chapter is over 3k words. rip the conversation after gem wakes up, you will be missed (it'll be in chapter 5 lol)

also, “author,” I hear you ask, “how come gem’s suddenly bleeding from the ears and can’t hear once everything is back at air pressure?” to which I’ll answer: for reasons yet for you to know she’s a-okay in the vacuum but wasn’t uh… acclimated to being at pressure – thus being introduced to a high air pressure environment has given her a severe case of ear barotrauma, AKA that thing that happens on airplanes :)

p.s: she probably wouldn’t be bleeding so severely, but only a little blood? where’s the fun in that?

Chapter 5: I could believe you're human

Summary:

“The back of her suit was shredded dude! Y’know how these old ones had the big air supply and the carbon scrubbers? Yeah? Well, those are GONE. So, how’d she survive?”

They all know there isn’t a good answer to that question. As outlandish as the theory is, Skizz might be right. Pearl can’t tell whether that makes the situation worse or not.

“You think she’s an alien?” Impulse asks, sounding slightly skeptical.

“YES! Alien! All day that’s an alien!”

Notes:

chapter title from 'another world' by the hoodoo gurus (banger song, and the music video is so stupid in a daggy late 80s dad humour way, i love it so much)

tw: procurement (off-screen) of blood samples from an unconscious person without their consent

Call it a hunch, but Pearl is decidedly sure that something is intrinsically wrong with their mission. It wasn’t any one factor that made her come to the decision, but several easily came to mind.

Firstly, the flare. Completely unprecedented, maybe impossible, and nothing she had ever been warned about in the months and months of preparation for the mission. They’d covered almost everything. Everything! From the more plausible reactor core meltdown and oxygen supply failure to less than likely spontaneous supernova or mutation of greenhouse plants into sentient beings. Pearl thought the last one was perhaps a little unnecessary, but you never knew.

But flares?

They were never covered. Zilch, nada, zero mention at all. And of course, of all of the incidents to suddenly occur, the star flared. Pearl isn’t sure if she should have been surprised or not.

Then, the sudden appearance of an astronaut wearing old company equipment, coinciding with the station being struck by a mysterious object. Suspicious much? Pearl certainly thinks so. It’s also what she thinks of their equipment breaking constantly, the fact they’re a four-person crew on a space station designed for at least double their number.

And it’s what she’s trying to explain to the rest of her crew, alongside her opinion that the last thing they should do is report their surprise guest to command. Because several hours dragging the astronaut in through the airlock and being confronted by the fact that the astronaut wasn’t dead and was instead bleeding, screaming and painfully alive, Pearl suddenly has an extra person onboard she needs to decide what to do with.

She decided she’d wait until a while after the whole airlock ordeal – blood, yelling, chaos – and the two hours of clean-up and waiting after that to gather everyone and come to a decision. Everyone onboard is tired or shaken by the experience in their own ways, and she doesn’t want to push them to make decisions they might regret in the future.

But the future can’t wait forever, and Pearl is going to have to update the mission log and send a report back to command regarding their power levels. This would be no issue if she didn’t have to try and mentally guess command’s reaction to finding an extra person in the middle of space, or eventually discovering she and the crew had been hiding their extra person from space.

Personally, neither option is particularly enticing. And call it a hunch, but Pearl doesn’t think that anything good can come from reporting the astronaut to command. Which brings Pearl to be defending her points in the middle of the rec space, a semi-circular area opposite from their kitchen where corporate was oh so kind enough to install couches and a viewing screen, back in the day. Usually, time spent here is filled with quick conversation, laughter, and comfortable silence as their pick of entertainment is playing.

Now, is almost feels claustrophobic.

“You’re telling me you don’t find it strange that a woman appears in the middle of a zone bought out by the corporation wearing corporate gear?” Pearl asks, pointing to the sliced remains of the astronaut’s suit to the men around her.

Skizz makes eye contact with her and shrugs, mumbling a quiet ‘I dunno, maybe!’ while Impulse puts his best diplomatic facial expression, and Tango just looks exhausted.

“But wouldn’t it make more sense to report her?” Impulse asks back. “She’s wearing our gear, so she’s one of us. Command will be able to know who to do with her.”

“What if they don’t? What if they’re hiding something?”

“Pearl, we can’t know that–”

“GUYS!” Skizz cuts in, eyes wide with epiphany.

Pearl isn’t sure he’s been fully listening to the meeting, and she doesn’t blame him. Tango had pulled him into medbay for assistance and Skizz had emerged half an hour later pale as a sheet with a haunted look in his eyes, and he had promptly thrown up in the corridor.

Impulse turns to Skizz now. “What?”

“She’s an alien. OBVIOUSLY she’s an alien!”

“Huh?”

“C’mon, look at this thing!” Skizz exclaims, leaping up to hold the remains of the astronaut’s space suit. “The back of her suit was shredded dude! Y’know how these old ones had the big air supply and the carbon scrubbers? Yeah? Well, those are GONE. So, how’d she survive?”

They all know there isn’t a good answer to that question. As outlandish as the theory is, Skizz might be right. Pearl can’t tell whether that makes the situation worse or not.

“You think she’s an alien?” Impulse asks, sounding slightly skeptical.

“YES! Alien! All day that’s an alien!”

“Are you sure dude? She looked like a human to me.”

“What if she looks human but she’s an alien? How about that!”

“Alien or not,” Pearl interjects, because Impulse and Skizz could be having this discussion for hours. “What’re we going to do with her? Like I said before, we don’t know who she is and what she has to do with corporate.”

“I don’t have any issues either way,” Impulse says, after another tense pause, “so I guess we keep her. Do we have any problems with that?”

Pearl looks around to Skizz shaking his head, but when she turns to Tango he still has a strange expression on his face. She can’t tell if it’s due to sheer exhaustion or something only he knows.

Tango, unfortunately for him, is their default medic due to a previous stint in bioengineering or biomechanics – Pearl can’t remember exactly which. All she knew was that if someone was badly injured in the event of emergency, his previous experience and extra last-minute medic training would apparently be sufficient to keep someone alive. He had before the mission, however, pulled everyone aside and made them promise not to get badly injured because the treatment experience would reportedly be, quote, ‘just as bad as getting the injury’.

Despite this sentiment, when faced with a legitimate emergency he had jumped into action, taking control of the situation in a way Pearl greatly appreciated, having little idea what to do herself. She was glad to be relegated to keeping the astronaut’s head steady, unsuccessfully asking questions when they were conscious and doing her best to comfort them. Tango on the other hand had set up medbay and worked for hours while everyone else waited. Pearl doesn’t know what he’s seen, or what he knows.

“Tango.” She asks. “What is it?”

Tango sighs, rubbing his face with his hands. “She’s not in a good way. Her right arm has multiple breaks, her ribs were cracked, she’s got two ruptured eardrums and that’s not accounting any brain damage she might have. I wouldn’t be surprised if she ends up in a coma.”

“…and?”

“And keeping someone who might not wake up onboard forever is drain for our resources and our workload.”

“So, what do you think we should do?”

“Well. I don’t think we’ve got the equipment to keep her long term, and if we don’t want to run ourselves through the ground taking care of someone in a coma, we report her, simple as that.” Tango says, turning to Pearl. “It’s up to you though, Captain.”

It’s up to her.

Pearl wants to make a selfish decision the second the power is put into her hands, but she has little justification for it. The astronaut is a resource sink, a stranger, and undeniably Watcher corp.’s problem to deal with. Keeping her around would not prioritise her crew, and lying and hiding them ultimately puts them all in a bad place with corporate. Whether she likes it or not, only one choice is fair to her crew.

“Alright...” Pearl says with finality, looking up to her crew. “We’re reporting her.”

“We are?” Impulse asks. “You seemed so sure to keep it from command just now.”

“Keeping her onboard is just making more work for ourselves. Like Tango said, what if she doesn’t wake up? We’re not trained to look after a coma patient for another year and a half, or until our contract lapses. It’s not fair on you guys.”

“What if she wakes up in the meantime, what do we do then?” Impulse asks. “Do we just let her hang out on the station? What if she’s a threat?”

“But what if she isn’t?” Pearl retaliates, suddenly defensive and wholly unsure why. “Sorry. I mean we shouldn’t just assume she’s dangerous!”

“Captain,” Tango cuts in, completely serious. “I mean this with the utmost respect, but a woman who survived the vacuum of space with no oxygen supply as well as crashificating into a space station at lethal force should absolutely be treated as a threat.”

Skizz adds to the mix: “And don’t forget she’s probably an alien. She could totally have a chest-burster in her dude!”

Pearl can tell the conversation is not going to quickly resolve itself and mentally gears up for at least another hour of discussion.

In the end, they’re cut short by the artificial gravity generator malfunctioning and can’t come to a concrete decision, instead quickly deciding upon a compromise while unrestrained objects start to float away. Pearl will report the truth to Watcher – that the star flared, and during so an unknown object which turned out to be a woman in a company space suit impacted the station and took out a small section of the solar panels. They have the astronaut onboard and will await advice from command.

If the astronaut happens to regain consciousness, she is to be treated as a potential threat until they can get more information. If she doesn’t, they request that a shuttle comes out to collect her.

While Tango and Impulse repair the artificial gravity, Pearl heads to transmissions with Skizz to record the report. When she finishes recording the report she heads straight to bed to sleep for six to eight hours.

Then, station life goes on.

For five days, Pearl goes about business as usual, for the most part. Data reports always need to be sent, testing needs to be done, and repairs are inevitable. But the whole time, Pearl can’t help but feel as if machinations are falling into place elsewhere – command says nothing about the astronaut yet continues to send requests for data and mission logs.

Between her usual tasks, Pearl also finds herself stopping in at the medbay periodically to look in at the astronaut and just… think. The redhead on the far side of the room doesn’t change at any point Pearl comes to visit, always appearing entirely unassuming, still small, pale, limp, and loosely strapped to the bed in case of mishaps with the gravity. If not for the subtle rise and fall of her chest, Pearl would hazard an assumption they were keeping a corpse on board.

On day four, Tango approaches her in the biology lab, where she’s analysing bacterial samples for one of Watcher’s partnership groups. Luckily, today’s samples aren’t anything dangerous, like the plague, because she’s so focused on the work that he scares her when she looks up to see him loitering by the door, and she nearly drops a petri dish.

“Gah! Tango!” she exclaims, startled. “Knock or something next time, you scared the shit out of me!”

“Ha ha! Oh I gotcha!” Tango laughs, mirth crinkling his eyes. “I’ve been here for three minutes; you didn’t even hear the door open!”

“That’s because I’m busy! You don’t see me barging into the astrophysics lab while you’re working. I use the comms like a normal person!”

“Well maybe you should walk in once in a while.”

“Yeah nah, I don’t want to get exploded.” Pearl says, thinking to the endless ‘explodificators’ and ‘ion pulse relays’ Tango and Impulse mention during mealtimes. “The only thing like that in here is the arc steriliser and that’s turned off by default.”

“Aww, only a little arc generator? I could make that explode for you if you want!”

“Nope! Nope, fine without it. Whaddya want Tango?”

“Well. To cut to the chase here, I want you to have a look at these.” Tango says, holding out an insulated box.

Pearl recognises it as a sample storage container, pointedly making eye contact with Tango to try and sus out why on Earth he’d have it. His expression remains neutral, betraying nothing. She puts the petri dish she was sampling back into storage, before stripping her gloves and protective gown and walking over to Tango to take the box.

The box is light, and when she cracks open the lid she’s faced with a few small vials, each filled with a familiar red substance.

“Don’t tell me this is what I think it is.” Pearl sighs, looking to Tango in disbelief.

“Then they’re one hundred percent definitely not blood samples from the astronaut in medbay.”

“You took blood samples?! Tango!”

Tango has the decency to look somewhat sheepish, meeting her astounded gaze with a sympathetic grimace. It doesn’t matter that the astronaut is in a coma, or that she’s a stranger. Heck, the astronaut could be a silicon-based life form, and it still wouldn’t matter.

“We can’t just take blood samples from someone like that! It’s–”

“Unethical? I know Pearl. But what do you think corporate is going to do with her?”

And that’s the crux of the issue. By reporting the astronaut, Pearl has inadvertently accepted that if the astronaut isn’t human, she’s going to run the gauntlet of scientific testing at the mercy of a corporation, likely with little to no advocacy. Tango’s blood samples and any tests Pearl can run may be the kindest treatment she gets.

“What did you want me to do?”

Tango shrugs. “Find out if she’s human. It shouldn’t be hard to get the AI to sequence her DNA.”

“What if she’s just human, what then?”

“Then we’ll know.”

“Are we really going to sequence her DNA just to satisfy our own curiosity?”

“If we don’t, will we ever know? Will she ever know?”

Pearl sighs, closes the box and walks it over to the fridge where she deposits it with her other samples. “If we find out it’s going to be later.”

“So, you’ll do the tests?” Tango asks.

“Maybe.” Pearl responds, shooting Tango a look she hopes translates to ‘leave it’. “I’ll think about it.”

And she does think about it.

Pearl considers it when she finishes her lab work, when she’s off duty and going to sleep, and when she visits the astronaut the next day between updating the storage manifesto. She’s thinking about it still in the middle of dinner, when she and the rest of the crew are tucking into nutrient packets, and a sudden beeping noise starts to issue from Tango’s direction.

Impulse’s narration of his repair job on the air conditioning ceases as Tango startles at the noise, pulling out his comm-pad and reading the information before his eyes widen in disbelief.

“What is it?” Pearl asks, watching him starts to scramble to his feet, alarm written across his face.

“She’s crashing!”

Pearl jumps to her feet as well to sprint after Tango out of the room, uncaring of Skizz and Impulse’s exclamations of confusion behind her. She hasn’t spent hours of her life agonising over scientific ethics and protocol and how a person simply materialises from the middle of space for the person who caused it all to die, dammit!

When she skids to a stop behind Tango, just in time for the medbay doors to open, however, Pearl’s heart sinks in her chest. The astronaut is upright but slumped sideways, eyes wide and glassy, alarms blaring from the heart rate monitor and the other equipment. Tango darts past her as she immediately moves to the astronaut’s side.

“Hey, are you alright? Can you hear me?” Pearl asks, employing the first thing she remembers from her first aid course. She wants to try and get a response from the astronaut and see if she’s aware of her surroundings, but it’s hard with a cast in the way. She resorts to tapping the astronaut’s uninjured arm instead.

“What do we need Pearl?!” Tango exclaims, rifling through the crash kit with the fervour of a man being threatened.

“I don’t know! I, uh, her heartrate’s through the floor? It’s crazy low right now Tango!”

That’s what the widely spaced peaks on the heart rate monitor mean, right? Pearl’s own heart hammers in her chest as Tango whips out a vial and a syringe, drawing some liquid up before darting over and injecting it into one of the astronaut’s IVs.

And then they wait.

The seconds after the drug has been administered stretch on for an eternity, and all Pearl can think is how she should not have been the person to read the heart rate monitor because she’s probably made a mistake, and oh god what if Pearl’s decision killed the astronaut…

Then the astronaut jerks, gasps, and sits bolt upright.

Pearl jumps back with a yell, Tango yelping and jumping back in tandem. The astronaut looks wildly around the medbay, before her gaze settles on Pearl and Tango, and for a moment everyone considers each other. The room is silent apart from the astronaut’s breathing and the beeping of the heart rate monitor until Pearl decides to speak.

“You alright?”

“Yeah!” The astronaut answers brightly, casually almost, as if it isn’t a medical miracle she’s alive. Her voice is rough from lack of use, and she clears her throat awkwardly, ducking her head and darting her eyes away, aware of Pearl’s staring. “Um… yeah, I’m good.”

“You’re… you’re supposed to have two ruptured eardrums!” Tango splutters, dumbfounded. “How are you hearing us right now!?”

“Uh, with my ears?” The astronaut says, tilting her head.

“Yeah but – oh my god – you should still be in a coma! You were going to have brain damage at the very least if not – ohhhhhh snap. You’re – Pearl, the tests – this is–”

Pearl decides that now is a good time to step forward and get some answers while Tango short circuits. Their guest appears, for the most part, human, and hasn’t tried to kill any of them yet. Thus, Pearl decides she needs to at least try making a good impression and moves her stance from standing back with cautions to something more casual, yet still guared. She’s standing tall, unbothered. Arms crossed. She almost manages to convince herself that she knows what she’s doing.

“So,” Pearl says, “you appeared here five days ago. Do you know where you are?”

“No clue. I mean this looks like a hospital…” The astronaut trails off, looking around the room before back to Pearl and Tango.

“It’s our medbay. You’re onboard the space station Secret Keeper, orbiting a star called L5TNR. Station and surrounding areas for lightyears are owned by Watcher corp. Ring any bells?”

“Nope!”

Great. Really great! Pearl genuinely can’t tell if the astronaut is lying or not, and she feels like she hasn’t learnt anything. The mystery person is still a mystery, even to herself! What a surprise!

“Okie dokie, good to know. Do you know your name? Remember anything?”

Pearl watches the sudden change of expression on astronaut’s face, moving from cheerful if confused, to a solemn conviction. She affixes an unblinking heterochromatic gaze upon Pearl when she speaks. “My name is Gem, and I’m an astronaut. I was sent up to study the star.”

Finally, a name. Gem.

The astronaut’s name is Gem. She knows she’s an astronaut, which is useful, and that she is in space to study the star. Pearl assumes she means the star they’re orbiting, but it could be any star. Maybe Gem’s come through a wormhole. Is that even possible? Either way, who sent her to study a star? How did she get up there? Why is she here?

“What’s the secret?” Gem asks, as Pearl’s head swims with questions to ask.

“Huh?”

“What’s the secret? You said the station is called the Secret Keeper, right? So, what’s the secret?”

“I – we don’t really know. Information, I guess?” Pearl answers, watching Gem’s reaction. She just hums an affirmative noise and nods, leaning back on the bed but keeping both Pearl and Tango in her view. “And you’re sure you’re feeling okay? Nothing hurts? Not seeing double?”

Pearl watches as Gem tilts her head again, as if checking a mental list, then shakes it. “No. I feel okay. My arm hurts, but I’ll live.”

“Well, that’s alright. Tango here can get you some pain medication if the arm hurts too much, right Tango?”

Tango just nods, now looking at Gem with a somewhat hesitant intrigue. “Uhuh. Yeah, sure. Totally! Gem, was it? Excuse us for a moment, I need to talk to the Captain here.”

Pearl lets herself be borderline pulled from the room by the sleeve of her flight suit, turning to give Gem her best official captain nod before she’s yanked through the medbay doors. They close with a swish behind her, and Tango pulls her another metre or two down the corridor before turning to her with wide eyes.

“Whoa!” Pearl exclaims. “What’s up? Something’s up, you’ve got that frenzied look about ya.”

“Did she seem fine to you?” Tango asks. “I don’t mean in comparison to anything, I’m talking just now. If you walked into a room and got talking with her, would you think that she’s okay?”

“Yeah?”

“But she shouldn’t be, right? Because she crashed into our space station five days ago and was in a coma literally this morning!”

“Well, maybe she woke up?”

Tango shakes his head. “With the level of brain injury she should have it’s a miracle she she’s awake at all, I’m serious. And her heart rate was low there before she woke up, but there was zero brain function. None! But now she’s awake and perfectly fine!”

Logically, Pearl knows that doesn’t make sense, and Tango is right. The astronaut – Gem – shouldn’t be as awake as she is.

“Your point being? I know it’s weird, Tango, everything is weird around here!”

“Hey, I don’t know about you, but this is more weird. The most weird, Pearl. Something’s up with her.” Tango says, nodding to the medbay doors. “You might want to do those tests, Cap. I’m going to do some. And you can ask her now!”

Pearl watches as her crewmate steps away back towards the medbay, before opening the doors and disappearing into the room, leaving her standing in the corridor not unlike five days ago, except under very different circumstances.

She doesn’t have blood on her hands now, the blood is in a fridge in the biology lab. The person the blood belongs to is awake and aware in the next room.

The station’s structure groans, and Pearl is reminded that apart from that, everything else is still the same. Corporate isn’t hunting them down for reporting Gem, and the station still creaks often. Nothing is radically different.

Pearl wonders how long it will take their AI to transcribe a genome.

Notes:

pearl and tango 🤝 being exhausted and considering the implications. lots of tango in this chapter anyways :)

well this chapter took a while to write! partially because i got distracted and wrote most of what will be chapter 16 or 18, partially because i re-wrote the chapter when it was basically done and reversed a plot decision. i was going to have pearl not report gem to command but apart from suspicion there isn't any reason to explicitly *not* trust corporate so... hmm. i wonder what the consequences of this could be! <- person who knows the consequences

also it got long because of that conversation at the end with pearl and gem and tango. i didn't want to end on exactly the same moment but from different POVs so i added a little more and it sort of got away from me!

some lore in this one that i was excited to put in, and there's also some foreshadowing somewhere. i wonder if anyone will be able to find it? :D

Chapter 6: You can't escape from gravity

Summary:

They reach a door with a thick glass window inset in it, a plaque above reading ‘observation deck’.

“Alright, this is it.” Impulse says, pressing a keycard in his hand to a card reader next to the door. “After you.”

Gem glances to Skizz and Impulse when the door hisses open. They look back placidly. Skizz gestures towards the door.

It’s weird, judging just from how little she knows them. But if she has to go first she will.

Notes:

chapter title from another world by the hoodoo gurus

tw: none

Gem stays in the medbay for about a day before she’s moved out.

It’s actually less than a day, because she wakes up near the end of the light cycle. She’s only up for an hour or so, undertaking a blood test and being given a prepackaged meal, water and pain medication, before the lights dim and Tango lets her know she should go back to sleep again.

He leaves the room with an instruction not to wander, and not to be alarmed if the door opens because someone will be checking in on her periodically. The door closes with a hiss, and like that Gem is alone in the medbay with her thoughts.

She does consider getting up and sneaking around, but in the end she decides not to, because she doesn’t know what the consequences would be if she’s caught out of the medbay. Sure, Pearl had been friendly, but Tango’s demeanour had been slightly odd – always polite yet maintaining a distance which didn’t match the intensity of his gaze when he looked at her test results. For all she knows, they might be space mercenaries who’ll take the next chance to kill her.

Instead, she spends the night in fitful transitions of sleeping to waking.

Sleeping in the medbay is like camping, at least the non-specific version of camping that Gem must have experienced once upon a time. She can identify that the feeling is the same, so it must have happened, right? Even if she doesn’t remember it? Either way – medbay, camping, one and the same: getting to sleep is an uncomfortable and lengthy process, and she wakes up several times in the night. The cast and her drip make it so she can’t curl up the way she usually does, and it doesn’t help that her ribs twinge with pain if she doesn’t lie perfectly still on her back. She rouses mostly just because she’s uncomfortable, feeling stiff and wondering if she’s been awake the whole time.

Only on two occasions does she wake up because the medbay doors open, spilling in light from the corridor and a silhouetting a figure in the door frame. They whisper from outside, “Sorry! Just checking!” before the doors hiss shut again and she’s left in silence to try and fall asleep again.

Eventually she does sleep and manages to get some amount of rest, because she wakes up to see the lights in the medbay ceiling are bright, and someone is moving about the room. Unsurprisingly, it’s Tango, as she sees when she raises her head to look at him. She blinks owlishly at him when he turns and notices her.

He startles minutely, then stops to peer at her from the other side of the room. “You awake over there?”

“Yup.” Gem answers thickly, before clearing her throat and rubbing her eyes, trying to be more awake. Funny how she couldn’t sleep all night, and now weariness clings to her like a heavy sheen of oil, slippery and not easily cleared. She wonders what time it is – despite time being pointless because day and night aren’t quite real in space. “What time is it?”

“Equivalent of 8am,” Tango says, offhanded, as if it isn’t very important, “but you’ve slept an hour into the lights being on.”

“That’s nice, I guess.”

“So… did you sleep well?” Tango asks from where he’s rummaging within the draws close to the ‘scanners/surgery’ room entrance, where there are benches and small boxy machines that she doesn’t recognise. He has an undecipherable tone to his voice. She can tell there’s a reason he’s asking, but she can’t quite tell what.

“Well, it’d be better without the tubes in the way.” She replies dryly, trying to give just as little information back. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason.”

“So, if I hypothetically slept badly, that wouldn’t be interesting to you at all.”

“Nope! Not at all! Very boring and nothing to do with your immune system or blood test results at all.”

“Right…”

“Yep.” Tango says, and for an awkward moment Gem just stares at him, waiting for the other shoe to drop. “Totally unrelated I am going to do another blood draw.”

Well, there’s the shoe.

It turns out not just to be another blood draw, but also a myriad of other tests Gem ends up being run through. The first is if she can walk or not – she can. The second and an unknown amount thereafter are her being put through the scanner, which turns out to hold a two-in-one operating table with manoeuvrable scanning apparatus, a ring-like structure which glides vertically over her emitting a blue light and a low humming noise while she lies stock still and stares at the ceiling. Before Tango ushers her quickly out for more tests she briefly manages to get a look at the rest of the room, dedicated to a singular sad lab bench and shelves and shelves of medical storage.

After that, she’s following lights with her eyes, then having blood drawn, then sitting down while Tango messes with his tablet computer, completely absorbed in the various results and looking more visibly baffled yet intrigued by the minute. Gem has no idea what he’s so interested in, because when she sees the results they all look rather standard to her. The scanner shows that her arm has three breaks – ouch – and two fractures. It explains why her arm hurts so much. Her ribs have a couple hairline fractures, while a quick analysis of her blood by the computer determines she’s O negative and that her white blood cells are elevated.

Whatever that means.

When he’s satisfied, buzzing with whatever knowledge he gleaned from the results, Tango takes her IV out and excuses himself from the room, saying something about ‘the captain has gotta hear about this’ and ‘I owe Skizz five bucks’ and ‘just wait here, I’ll get someone to come grab you’.

Just like that, Gem’s alone again. Left sitting on the edge of the medbay bed, awkwardly pressing a wound pad to her arm where the IV was removed. She removes it occasionally to study the bruising, which is starting to bloom red and purple.

Tango is interesting, she decides as she waits, from the little they’ve spoken. Yes, they had a few small conversations, but most of what he spoke about otherwise was restricted to testing and related questions. It doesn’t help that Gem gets the feeling Tango is restraining himself, holding himself back in favour of… maintaining distance? Remaining aloof?

She spends her time pondering as she waits. Whether they crew are allowed to talk to her or not, whatever their stance, she doesn’t know for sure. But she isn’t blind to the way Tango bites his tongue, veritably itching to ask questions and barely containing his fascination.

After a few minutes the doors open with a hiss, and Gem turns to see two people enter the room. She doesn’t recognise them even though she probably saw them when she was being rushed to the medbay, but she doesn’t remember a whole lot beyond her brain feeling like it was going to cave in and her broken arm aching.

Both men have brown hair, one tall with blue eyes and a little stubble growing in, the other several inches shorter with brown eyes. The tall man has his flight suit tied at his waist with a singlet on beneath, the shorter man wearing his flight suit zipped up.

“Here, we brought you a couple sizes.” The shorter of the two says politely, holding out a large stack of folded clothing. “If you’re after small or medium you’re in luck, we’ve got almost a full supply.”

“Thanks.” Gem replies, taking the stack of clothing from him. “Is everyone really tall here or…?”

“No, just me and the captain,” the taller man says nonchalantly, “Tango and Impulse are short like you are.” The shorter man – not Tango, he’s blond and she knows what he looks like, so she guesses he must be Impulse – elbows the tall man in the side. “OW! Hey!”

“We’re not short! You’re the outlier here!”

“No, I’m not!”

“Yes, you are! You’re the reason we’ve got size 3XL onboard dude! Its so your six foot plus tall butt can have a suit that isn’t short at the ankles!”

“Okay, okay! But you’re still short, like, relative to me and all!”

“Yeah, right…” Gem watches as Impulse sighs good naturedly, shaking his head in faux exasperation with a smile across his face before he seems to remember she’s here too. “Oh shoot, sorry, we’re supposed to be taking you to a different room. C’mon, let’s walk this way.”

Impulse gestures towards the medbay doors, waiting for Gem to start moving before walking further. As they do the taller man ribs, “Yeah Dippledop, quit yapping! We’ve gotta get the – uh…” He faces Gem, joke pushed aside for the moment. “What’s your name?”

“Gem.” She responds with a smile. She likes this guy, he’s got energy. Full of beans, as the saying goes.

“Gem. Gem, okay, got it. Well, I’m Skizz, and this is–”

“I’m Impulse.” Impulse says.

“ –and that’s Impulse.” Skizz continues. “And you know Tango? And the Captain? Pearl?”

“Yep.” Gem confirms, before automatically asking without thinking: “What about the rest of the crew?”

“Hm? What do you mean ‘rest of the crew’?” Impulse questions, cocking his head. “There’s only the four of us. Me, Skizz, Tango and Pearl.”

“Oh. Right.”

Gem doesn’t know why there being only four people onboard doesn’t sit well with her. Logistically four people feels like far too little people to run a whole space station, but even then, it’s something else. It feels like there’s a gap left unfilled.

Impulse and Skizz don’t seem bothered.

“Guess it must’ve felt like more people.” Impulse says sympathetically. “You’ve seen us before but didn’t know who we were, might’ve seemed like there were more of us.”

“Yeah, what do you remember?” Skizz asks.

Gem frowns, thinking back. She can remember pin pricks of light, stars twinkling in space. A space suit she doesn’t recognise. Blue eyes. Her arm hurting, her head hurting. Again, blue eyes. Brown hair. Music?

“Nothing much huh?” Impulse asks.

“Nope.” Gem says, shaking her head. “Just, uh, lying down, bright lights and my arm hurting.”

Skizz sighs. “Ah, typical. Well, can’t be helped.”

“And the station’s pretty big too, I guess.” Impulse adds on.

“Oh yeah!”

“And it all looks the same.”

“Dude, I got so lost when we were first onboard. Couldn’t find my way or anything! Just a complete labyrinth…” Gem watches Skizz trails off, looking aside at their surroundings. They’ve barely left medbay, hovering just outside the door. “Wait, dude. Augh! We got sidetracked man! We’re totally supposed to be taking Gem to her room!”

“Says the guy who was complaining about us talking.”

“Shut up! C’mon, let’s go for real this time.”

The corridors Gem’s taken through are plain and empty, vaguely hexagonal with repeating segments of matte chrome panelling on the walls and ceiling and gunmetal grey floor tiling. The repetitive strips of lighting in the ceiling flood the space with harsh white light, illuminating the hall to an almost sickening degree. Every panel in the wall or floor looks moveable, some through purpose-built latches and others through removal of screws, and Gem can only imagine the vast network of wiring and pipes beneath. She realises immediately how much she takes shoes for granted, because no one’s thought to give her any and the white socks she’s wearing offer zero insulation from the cold floor.

Skizz and Impulse lead her to some bathrooms, waiting outside as Gem makes use of the facilities and awkwardly changes into some of the clothes she was given. It’s a little hard to by herself, what with her right arm casted. She’s grateful that the spare flight suits and assorted plain clothes fit her. The hospital scrubs were fine, but there’s something familiar about a white cotton t-shirt and flight suit that she appreciates.

Once she’s done changing, she’s led back into the maze of corridors until they reach a door with a thick glass window inset in it, a plaque above reading ‘observation deck’.

“Alright, this is it.” Impulse says, pressing a keycard in his hand to a card reader next to the door. “After you.”

Gem glances to Skizz and Impulse when the door hisses open. They look back placidly. Skizz gestures towards the door.

It’s weird, judging just from how little she knows them. But if she has to go first she will.

Despite the immense viewing widow taking up the entirety of the back wall from floor to ceiling, and encroaching further still into the roof above, the first thing Gem clocks is that the room is strangely shaped. The back wall with the centre door is ovular, curving all the way around to meet straight sections, perhaps two metres long, which then join with the large glass window. Standing in the centre of the room feels like existing in the wide mouth of a funnel, with no choice but to view the wide expanse or shuffle out through the small exit.

Not that Gem feels she’ll have a choice to leave or not, because alongside one of the flat sections of wall a cot seems to have been hastily secured, alongside a box Gem is hopes is a storage locker.

But apart from that, the room is empty, very clearly not meant for long term human occupation. It’s hardly an upgrade compared to the medbay, because at least there she could study the medical equipment and slowly parse out their intended functionality. Here, her options to pass the time will be far less practical. Yes, she’ll be free to look out across the tapestry of stars which weave themselves into unfamiliar constellations, but she’ll also be able to write a thesis about the number of rivets in the back wall.

Outside the window the star is a bright round speck the size of a ping pong ball, a deep burning red ping pong ball which if she stares at it for too long, Gem sees an afterimage of it burned into her retinas.

“Wow, this is…” Gem pauses, trying to find the right word to describe the distinct feeling the room brings. Something unsettling she can’t quite place. “Roomy.”

Unlike a few moments ago, where she expects an answer immediately from next to her there is none. That’s the first sign that something isn’t quite right. The second is that when she turns around, Impulse is standing just aside from the open doorway, holding a tablet and fiddling with something next to the doorframe. The third is Skizz standing against the far wall of the corridor, neutral expression fixed on Gem and with something held in both hands.

“Guys?”

“Uh… yes?” Impulse offers, eyes flicking to the side of the doorframe.

Gem takes a step towards the door, noting how Impulse’s posture shifts away ever so slightly. Skizz twitches, ever so slightly raising whatever he’s brandishing. “Whatcha doing?”

“Erm… nothing you’ll need to worry about!”

“Are you sure?”

“Yep!”

Gem watches Impulse’s mild facial expression strains somewhat when she steps forward again, eyes narrowing and one eyebrow ticking upwards. Skizz raises his arms to point to object he’s holding at her, and that’s when she realises why it felt strange walking into the room. Skizz is holding up a stun gun – at least she hopes it’s a stun gun, a firearm in space would just be ridiculous – and the feeling was that of being escorted into a prison cell.

Gem wishes it would make sense when the pieces all start to fall together – the politeness, the subtle and the veiled nervousness. How all the crew have all seemed friendly upon first impression but have all showed some kind of confusion and unease. But it doesn’t make sense. Why are they uneasy? What do they have to be wary of? Surely not her, she’s just… here. Why on earth would he–

She barely has time to consider it before relief blooms on Impulse’s face and the observation deck door quickly shuts again with a characteristic swoosh.

“Hey!” She exclaims, baffled, walking quickly over to the door. Not running, not when she knows they’re apprehensive enough to be wielding electric weaponry. Through the thick glass she can see them both in the corridor. “What the fuck?”

“Well, uh, I’ll leave you to settle in. Skizz will bring you some breakfast and someone will come by with dinner for you.” Impulse says quickly, avoiding eye contact.

Skizz is slowly shuffling away down the corridor.

“That didn’t answer my question! What is this? Why is the–” she scans the interior for a something to release the door, finding a collection of buttons and pressing them all in sequence to no effect, “why isn’t the door opening?”

“Yeah… sorry. I can’t let you out.”

“What do you mean you can’t let me out?”

“We don’t know who you are, where you came from or what you’re capable of!”

“Capable of?!” Gem says incredulously and lifts her right arm in its green cast, letting her stack of clothing fall to the floor. “My arm’s broken in three places! What would I do?!”

“Well, that’s what we don’t know! I’m sorry, it’s not my decision.”

“Whose decision is it then?”

“All of ours, but Pearl signs off on it.”

Gem considers this. “And she’s the captain. Can she let me out then?”

Impulse looks conflicted as he backs away from the door, shrugging. “You’ll have to bring it up with the captain.”

“And when can I see her?” Gem asks but gets no response. “Hey!”

Gem stands of tiptoes and cranes her neck to look further out into the corridor, but Impulse and Skizz are gone. All that’s outside is a view of chrome panelled walls and tube lighting which continues as far as she can see in either direction. Nothing exciting really.

Neither is the inside of the room, she thinks to herself as she turns around to survey the space. It has the exact same colours – chrome walls, grey floor, tube lights – except in a different shape. And a window, she supposes, but the same view of space is going to get old soon.

She’ll be watching it a lot in the foreseeable future as she waits.

Notes:

rip gem i'm sure the observation deck won't be *that* mind numbingly boring...

so this might just be me, but to me this chapter is kind of a nothing burger. yes characterisation and a little hinting towards stuff in medical results but otherwise it's a bit... 'meh'. took longer to write because of this as well, i kept going to more exciting chapters and writing parts of them instead. original plan was to cover about a week and a bit's worth of time inside the observation deck this chapter - but i wrote some conversations and oops. 3000 words.

also if you're somewhat invested in science/medicine keep an eye on the blood test results for later :) im a science student (ecology major, chem + biochem minors) and by jove ofc ill try to give some kind of bullshit logic founded on actual fact to the fic. mostly pointing this out bc idk if anyone would notice otherwise, but also because it's all intentional!! there's thought and research into my fake science!! in the end it all makes sense!!!

Chapter 7: And all the science, I don't understand

Summary:

Thirty minutes of waiting and the results are identical down to the same eight errors laid out neatly by technology infinitely smarter than she is.

The third test is just as conclusive. A big win for the reliability of the lab equipment and computer, at least one thing on the station is consistent. Not so much a win for denial.

By now it’s around 1am in the dark cycle, and Pearl sits silently in the lab having an existential crisis. Everything has changed now and she’s the only person who truly knows it. No one else back on Earth would know if the station blew up this second.

Notes:

title from rocket man by elton john

tw: none

“Captain! Pearl. Hey, Pearl.”

“Little busy right now Tango…”

“Logging the station’s electrical levels? You can do that later.”

“Yeah, but I’m doing it now.”

Pearl hears Tango chuckle. “Orrrrr… You could hear something interesting.”

She glances over her shoulder towards Tango, who’s got a glint in his eyes she recognises from a project breakthrough or when he’s winning when they play cards. It’s a giddiness which has him rocking back and forth on his heels as he waits for an answer, purely due to the pursuit of knowledge! Or due to success, she’s seen both before.

“Interesting, is it?” Pearl concedes, turning away from the dials and putting her comm-pad down. Tango is right that the levels can be logged later. “Alright. Lay it on me.”

Tango takes a breath and settles a little, gearing up for an explanation. “So. Gem’s blood.”

Pearl nods, asks, “What about it?”

“Well, O negative for one thing.”

“And that’s… great, I guess?”

“Sure.” Tango says. “Universal donor, but that’s not what’s interesting. She’s got a high white blood cell count. Really high.”

Pearl remembers the basics off the top of her head. White blood cells fight infection. If there are a lot of them… “So, she’s sick?”

“No? It could probably be a lot of things - the triple broken arm, could be crashificating into the station, could be unfortunate and she’s got a bone marrow or blood disease. But it’s definitely not that.”

That catches Pearl’s attention. “What does that mean then?”

“It means everything apart from her injuries showed up fine on the scanner, and she’s got no outwards signs of infection - no temperature, no chills, no congestion, nothing. Something isn’t normal.”

“But she does have an infection, right?”

“Maybe, we’d have to get a nasal swab. But this is the crazier thing. Remember how hurt she was?” Tango produces his comm-pad and turns it on, swiping from what Pearl recognises as live monitoring of his physics experiment to an x-ray of a horribly broken arm. “This was when we brought her in. Five-ish breaks, arm practically unsalvageable, the best I could do was cast it.”

“Yikes.”

“Uh huh, but look at this. This was yesterday.”

Tango swipes again, and another x-ray appears on the screen. Pearl isn’t a radiologist, but no one would have to be to notice a very clear difference between the first image and this one. Where the first x-ray had multiple clear breaks, the second has only three, with two that seem to have reduced to hairline fractures. Which is… huh.

“I’m guessing that’s not normal.” She says, looking to Tango, who’s been staring intently to gauge her reaction in the same way she remembers showing friends her favourite movie back on Earth and waiting to see if they liked it or not.

“Yeah… this isn’t normal. Bones don’t heal like that, usually you can see a kind of, uh, scaffolding around the break and that’s after weeks of healing at least. But the bones just sealing right up? Humans don’t do that.”

“What do you mean - why’d you say it like that Tango?”

“Because this says that ET is in our medbay right now.” Tango sighs, then narrows his eyes. “Have you tested her blood yet?”

“Well…”

“Pearl!”

Pearl listens to Tango insist that it’s a good idea to do the testing sooner rather than later, for multiple reasons including the possibility that Gem is human, and Tango can get his five bucks back from Skizz for betting they’d be able to tell from the first test. When he’s finished she reassures him that she’ll do the testing after logging the electrical levels and sends Tango back to work.

It takes the whole day of agonising and mentally debating herself on the ethics of testing Gem’s dubiously acquired blood before Pearl bites the bullet and gives in to her own curiosity. She swears that she means to do it, but she gets distracted, alright? One report leads to another, and then Skizz comes running to her yelling about how Gem’s in the observation deck now. Then she has to sign off on that decision, and while she’s at it she may as well send another status report and the results of her last lot of testing.

Procrastination via other tasks takes up the rest of the day, and Pearl finally decides to walk herself over to the biology lab when it’s late at night.

She hesitates only once when pulling the little insulated box from cold storage. The vials of blood seem so innocuous if she considers them purely in the lab setting without the entrapments of implications and who they belong to. It could be anyone’s blood she carefully prepares for analysis – extracting the DNA, heating, cooling, adding primer – then carefully loads into the sequencer usually employed for the bacteria she studies.

Pearl hopes it can handle the far more complex DNA, presses the button to run the sample, then waits.

The machine lets out a soft hum as it starts working, and Pearl takes a moment to marvel in technology, and just how far it’s come. The human genome alone contains some three and a bit billion pairs of genetic building blocks, all which the sequencer, hooked up to their computer, chugs through and turns into a string of data. It takes half an hour in total. Newer AI might have been able to do it in less time, but for their outdated model to do it in thirty minutes? Pearl is impressed.

The resulting data set is immense, pages and pages of letters corresponding to genetic code. Pearl could never analyse it all herself, and has the computer begin to trawl through it instead, cross referencing for known mutations and normal gene variants. While the machine does the heavy lifting, she arbitrarily chooses a page of data to scroll through, taking in the overload of repeating symbols.

Adenine and thymine, cytosine and guanine string themselves out before her, meaningless when read alone but standard enough that Pearl concludes that Gem’s DNA is human, or at least normal for any carbon-based lifeform. She specialises in life in space, not human genetics. Her realm of expertise is the plants and microorganisms which have been grown in zero gravity or thrived in forgotten corners of remote spacecraft, or the microorganisms collected from Mars years and years ago.

She doesn’t have to be a geneticist however, to notice when the symbols in the DNA start to go wrong.

Pages and pages go by with no mistake, and the letters are so dense and repetitive that Pearl nearly misses when the symbol isn’t an A, C G or T. As the data scrolls Pearl notices variations of ‘Er’, error, appearing in the sequence.

What the fuck?

Sometimes there are only a few instances, other times whole strings of them. ‘Er1’, ‘Er2’, ‘Er3’, all the way up to ‘Er8’ litter Gem’s genome, a series of red flags in what should have been a sea of green. Reading the results feels like a punch in the gut, a shift in everything Pearl has ever known and understood about the universe.

Yes, life had been discovered beyond Earth. But it was bacteria and microorganisms that Pearl now studies in her lab. Nothing larger, nothing more complex, and Pearl wasn’t expecting that to change anytime soon.

It just might have changed split seconds ago, because Gem isn’t fully human.

Holy shit, they have an alien in the observation deck.

Pearl takes a deep breath as she stands alone in the middle of the biology lab, listening to the whirring of the air conditioning and considering all the possibilities. As much as Gem is an alien based on the results, most of her DNA is normal! And she looks and seems so human! It’s so easy for Pearl to immediately blame the computer and the outdated AI.

Oh, how easy it would be, for the AI to have made a mistake.

But to follow that line of thought she has to ignore the fact it noted eight distinct error cases and numbered them individually… it’s no matter. She can repeat the test again using a sample from a different vial. She’ll do it three times if she has to. Anything to reassure herself that she doesn’t have to drastically rework her understanding of the universe.

Unfortunately for reverting news that changes the course of history, the second test plays out the same as the first. Thirty minutes of waiting and the results are identical, down to the same eight errors laid out neatly by technology infinitely smarter than she is.

The third test is just as conclusive. A big win for the reliability of the lab equipment and computer, at least one thing on the station is consistent.

Not so much a win for denial.

By now it’s around 1am in the dark cycle, and Pearl sits silently in the lab having an existential crisis. Everything has changed now and she’s the only person who truly knows it. No one else back on Earth would know if the station blew up this second.

Further point from that: Gem might survive if the station blew up. If her broken arm and surviving crashing into the station is anything to go by. They have evidence now that something in Gem’s DNA is different, keeping her alive in the most adverse circumstances.

And dammit, Tango might be right. And he still owes Skizz five dollars, Skizz did call Gem being an alien from the very beginning… not that any of them should have been surprised, anyone surviving the vacuum of space and otherwise fatal injuries has to be an alien.

Maybe she owes Skizz money now? Well, no, actually. She never made a bet with him–

She’s thinking too hard.

Pearl decides she needs to go to bed. She’ll call an urgent meeting in the morning, once she’s had longer to think and had a solid few hours of rest.

Hopefully they’ll all figure out what they’re supposed to be doing.

The morning comes around uneventfully, and Pearl manages to wrangle the boys into the rec space after breakfast. Has it only been eight days since their last urgent meeting? It doesn’t feel like it, Pearl thinks as the crew settles down. She feels like she was standing here doing this just yesterday.

“What’s up this time Cap?” Skizz asks. “I don’t wanna rush or anything but I’ve been getting some crazy wild signals coming in and I really want to get at ‘em.”

“Not much on the agenda today huh?” Tango jokes. “Didn’t wanna join me and Impulse doing a comprehensive of engineering to try and find what’s making the air con system act up?”

“Top, I’d love to buddy, but I’m getting these like… fragments of noise dude. I want to find out what it means!”

“Alright, you listen to your funny noises then.”

“Oh, I will!” Skizz says with emphatic nodding before looking back to Pearl. “Pearlie, whaddya got?”

“Well… you know how Tango got those results back from Gem’s blood tests and scans the other day?” Pearl asks, checking to make sure that everyone is on the same page. “How they weren’t normal?”

“Yeah. She’s like… healing fast, right?” Impulse questions, looking to Tango.

He nods. “Yup. They’re sealing up real quick. It should be taking months, and it’s taken her a week.”

“Alien powers man.” Skizz mutters.

“Uh. Yeah, about that…” Pearl says, looking between the three men. “I had the computer run her blood through the genome sequencer last night. Did it three times, actually.”

Impulse is waiting with wide eyes. Skizz leans in like he’s about to hear a big secret. Tango looks like he isn’t breathing.

“All three weren’t normal. There are molecules in it the computer didn’t recognise.”

“No shot dude.” Skizz whispers.

Pearl nods at him. “Yes shot. She isn’t fully human.”

The crew’s reactions are quieter than she thinks they’d be. Tango takes a deep breath in, shaking his head. Skizz nods, looking between everyone present.

Impulse fixes his gaze on the floor before looking up. “Well. It’s not like we didn’t really know, right? She survived crashing into us at Mach five,” he says after a moment, “we should’ve been hauling a body into the airlock, if even that was left.”

“We’ve just got proof now.” Tango says. “X rays, blood tests, genome sequence.”

“Not like that does us much good, it doesn’t make any difference if we know up here or not.” Pearl sighs. “The only people we can tell are command and they haven’t even said anything about her being on board.”

“So, what do we do?” Impulse asks. “Do you want to keep her in the observation deck? Do we think that’s safe?”

“Yeah!” Skizz exclaims. “Because we don’t know if she’s just a person or a shapeshifter wearing some poor woman’s skin to get us to trust her so she can unhinge her jaw and rip our faces off!”

Okay. That’s a bit much.

“Well.” Pearl says calmly. They’re going to be calm now. No face ripping… Yuck. “I was going to go talk to her, try to figure out anything more about her.”

“Do you want me to come with you? Y’know, as back up?” Skizz asks. “Give her the old one-two if she like, starts using laser eyes on you or something?”

“Nah,” Pearl says, “I think I’ll be ‘right.”

She should be. She hopes she is. That doesn’t stop her from regretting Skizz’s offer later, when she’s stood outside of the observation deck, preparing herself to go inside.

It’s day three since Gem woke up. Day two of Gem being in the observation deck. Day eight of Pearl questioning how her life ended up this way. Gem doesn’t seem like a threat, despite the whole DNA thing. Even so, Pearl doesn’t think she’d know what to expect if Gem was one hundred percent human.

For all her expectations though, her alien chest-burster fears and anxieties are quenched when Pearl finally knocks on the door and moves into view of the window. She can’t even put on her scary ‘I’m the captain and you’re the alien threat!’ face because as soon as she’s been spotted Gem perks up, multi-coloured eyes widening and clambering to her feet with a smile.

The joy doesn’t last long though, because once she enters the room Gem immediately asks ‘can you let me out of here?’ and Pearl’s answer is ‘no’.

Pearl watches carefully as Gem’s face shifts, smile warping into an expression of contained irritation. She feels a spike of panic, considering just what Gem could be capable of. Even so, every part of her screams to let her guard down because Gem just looks so… normal. And it’s really, really hard to treat someone who’s exceedingly normal as a threat.

Worst case scenario Gem snaps and kills her. Best case, she’s somewhat agitated because she’s stuck inside the observation deck – for which Pearl doesn’t blame her. She’d be pretty grumpy if she was stuck in here too.

“Consider it like this,” Pearl sighs, standing tall close to the door and keeping an eye on Gem as she paces the length of the observation deck in front of the window, “we don’t know who you are. You appeared out of nowhere, in the middle of nowhere. What do you expect us to do?”

“Believe me when I say that I don’t know why I’m here either!” Gem exclaims. “I can tell you what I know again. My name is Gem, I’m an astronaut, I’m up here studying the star.”

“Alright. Do you know your last name?”

“Well. No.”

“How about where you trained? Or who contracted you?”

A pause while Gem considers, looking indignant now. “Also no.”

Pearl cocks her head, confident now that her point’s being made. It’s petty, but checkmate. “And I guess you wouldn’t happen to know which star you were studying?”

Gem looks pointedly out the window and back. “I’m guessing that one, but no. I don’t really. No.”

“Can you see why we’re being cautious and keeping you contained? We’ve contacted the higher ups and when they tell us what to do, we’ll let you out.” Pearl explains, before hastily tacking on. “Probably. We’ll probably let you out, if they say we can.”

It’s a bit of a lie, because Pearl is beginning trust corporate about as far as she can throw them, but right now she also can’t fully trust Gem.

No matter how much she wants to.

“Alright.” Gem drawls, raising one eyebrow to affix Pearl with a fed-up expression. “Why aren’t I in a cell? If I’m a prisoner–”

“Temporarily contained.”

“-prisoner, then why am I in up here in the observation deck?”

“Oh… uh… we don’t actually have a brig.” Pearl says, rubbing the back of her neck sheepishly, secretly confused why she’s embarrassed. She didn’t design the station! It’s not her fault if Gem will think it’s stupid or not! And why does she care if Gem thinks it’s designed badly at all?

Gem looks like she couldn’t be more unimpressed. “No brig? No cells?”

“Nope. We’re a research station.”

“But you have stun weaponry?!”

“How do you know that?”

“Your guy Skizz guarded the door while Impulse configured the keypad.”

“Ah, right. Well, then yes.” Pearl waits a beat before she remembers what else they have aboard. “And an armoury. More a weapon storage locker really.”

“WHY do you have weapons storage?!?”

It’s a good question that Pearl doesn’t have the answer to, and Gem’s right. Why do they have a collection of weapons aboard, as a scientific research station? She’d always considered it as just another part of the station – transmissions, greenhouse, docking bay, weapons storage locker. It’s just… there. Then again, they hadn’t quite had any reason to use them.

“It’s kind of just part of the station.” Pearl says, shrugging. “I didn’t put it there!”

“I swear to god, I’m just going to have to hack the keypad.” Gem mutters under her breath in exasperation, putting a hand to her forehead, closing her eyes and shaking her head. “No brig but a weapon storage locker…”

Pearl laughs slightly uncomfortably. Gem is not going to like what she says next. “No, you won’t. You can’t actually.”

Gem stops muttering her disapproval and looks up, frowning and slightly confused. “What do you mean? The other side of the keypad is right there.”

“But you’d need one of these.” Pearl pulls out her comm-pad from inside her flight suit, waving it once before stashing it away. “Impulse recoded the door and you need a connection to our AI to access the system.”

Gem’s eyes narrow. “You have an AI?”

“Well, a very outdated one, it’s built into our operating systems.”

“Station wide?”

“Yes.” Pearl answers, before baulking. “Wait! Why am I telling you this?”

“Well, I’ve got all the information I need, I think.” Gem says casually, all traces of malice gone bar a hint of smugness in just how chill she suddenly sounds. She’s smiling placidly now. “You can leave now if you like.”

“Oh? Um, alrighty then.” Pearl says, offput a little by the change in attitude and a feeling deep inside that she no longer has command of the situation. “I was going to ask if you needed anything…”

“I’m good. Out now please.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yep!” Gem reiterates, nodding her approval.

“Well… I guess–” Pearl starts, before she’s interrupted by a tone that rings loudly through the room. Gem startles a little, spinning around while looking at the ceiling to try and locate the source of the noise, but Pearl isn’t fazed. She’s heard it many times before.

“This is a station wide announcement – transmissions to Captain, you are required in engineering ASAP, I repeat, Pearl you are required in engineering ASAP.” Skizz’s voice rings out from the comms system.

“I do actually have to go now.” Pearl says, making her way over to the door. “Last chance if you need anything.”

Gem shakes her head. “Nope.”

“Okie dokie, don’t tell me I didn’t warn ya. Someone will come by with lunch.”

Then she opens the door, walks through, and makes sure to close it from the other side.

And that should be it. But something about how suddenly reassured Gem was, something about how easily she dismissed her keeps her lingering a few steps away from the door. Pearl makes sure to stay clear of the window, staying close to the wall and moving far enough away that even leaning at an angle to be seen outside would be impossible.

Then she waits.

Pearl doesn’t have to wait long before she overhears something, although it’s long enough that she starts to think that one, she’s a creep, and two, that nothing is going to happen. Instead, she hears Gem speaking with intention, loudly and clearly.

“AI! Open observation deck door!”

A pause. Nothing happens.

“Hey! Computer? Please open observation deck door. Hello? Hello?”

Pearl walks back the few steps to knock on the window. Gem’s now in the centre of the room, staring up at the ceiling, and looks over sharply at the noise.

“It’s not that fancy. You need one of these,” she holds up the comm-pad, “or an inbuilt or handheld intercom to interact with it.”

She catches the smallest glimpse of Gem’s face twisting in exasperation as she leaves to make her way to engineering, not looking back.

Pearl does however hear the muffled shout that follows: “God dammit!”

It’s funny, she thinks to herself as she walks, but something is almost endearing about Gem. Pearl can’t tell what it is, maybe the charm of seeing another person in the flesh after over a year of coexisting with the same three men. Or maybe it’s the way Gem fixed her eyes, one green and one purplish-red, upon Pearl and made her feel like she was taking up someone’s whole attention span.

She liked seeing Gem and liked Gem seeing her. Even if it came with the slight feeling that something else was looking over her. Something larger. Something Pearl wouldn’t quite understand no matter how hard she tried.

Maybe that was just the knowledge Gem has eight extra as-yet-unidentified molecules in her DNA.

Pearl puts it in the back of her mind. The station is falling apart again she needs to focus on what’s gone wrong now.

Notes:

ooooo lots to think about in this one! one blood test reveal and one *very fake* genome sequence! hmm that air conditioning (which also covers oxygen, carbon dioxide as well as temperature control in this setting) sounds like it's playing up too...

also yayyyyyy i love when the characters have their silly little arguments <3 bickering, my favourite. pearl is only slightly wet cat while speaking to gem right now, but i promise she will get worse! and i tried to channel wild life 'get out of my base' 'fed up with idiots' gem while writing observation deck gem

long chapter! they're all long, but istg the less i plan the longer they get. oops. ah well, more content for you wonderful readers :)

Notes:

first fic in a ~while~ and yikes it seems like I've planned myself a multi-chap... oops! while i think i'm cooking something up here it's possibly gonna take a while, so expect irregular updates

this fic is inspired by my love of space fics, the fiction pocast Wolf 359 and the superpowers session of wild life (plus a little watcher lore that i am co-opting with complete disregard for said lore).

sincerest apologies to canadians if i do not do gem justice. sincerest threats to everyone else - australianisms + the metric system + spelling in use here, aussies don't get to write aussies often

authors love comments :D