Chapter Text
Balan Sector Epsilon IV
The yawning void of deep space, its velvety blackness peppered with a billion points of twinkling light, swims past the viewscreen of the tiny vessel cruising at impulse speed through its expanse. A trivial entity rendered humble and insignificant in its bosom.
Amelle Exx, pilot and lone occupant of the ship relieves the inertia by immersing herself in the collection of ancient Terran music she has curated and labelled Maverick ETLU.
“Explorational, timeless, loyal and unique,” she reminds herself obliquely.
It’s designed to represent her diverse and varying moods and experiences. Although she has never been to Terra she knows music as a functioning artform ceased to exist there long ago, in 2034 to be exact. Retro popular genres and classical forms still survive as a body of completed work – the former for mass market and the latter aimed at more highbrow tastes - but she concedes it is all moot as she appreciates both.
Taking a sip from a tumbler of rare aged Vogelian liquor she kicks back, closing her eyes fully, allowing the lilting melody of a soft and smoky club hit from the mid twentieth century to infiltrate and cleanse her cynical mindset.
“I love the nightlife…I love to boogie…on the disco rou-ound oh yeah…”
Amelle doesn’t really understand the archaic terminology of the lyric but it sounds optimistic and uplifting. Briefly and naïvely she visualises night life on Terra back then as being joyous and carefree, but deep down knows it probably wasn't. Nevertheless it had to be better than the present, where the twin sceptres of violence and crime surfaced nightly on the streets of almost every city on every world she'd visited in the quadrant.
Her thoughts are so absorbed in idealistic imaginings that she dismisses the subtle lurch of the ship’s hull. The vessel is fairly old and has its idiosyncrasies, besides she is used to flying through patches of turbulence or small anomalies.
“I wanna go where the people dance I want AC-TION I wanna live…”
As the defiant verse of the song fervently builds, another heavy rumble reverberates through the ship. This time Amelle is pulled out of her careless reverie and snapped into full alert. She kills the music and heads for the viewscreen. For a few moments the boundless expanse of black space seems to ripple like a pebble dropped into a pool, and then out of this distortion a craft emerges.
“Must have been cloaked,” she mutters, “Slimy assholes!”
The ship now pauses ahead of her, hovering like a raptor, its muted gleam in the blackness of space hinting of menace. Even from this aspect Amelle can see it’s larger than her own vessel. She swallows uneasily knowing what is coming.
“Darn! I must have drifted into rogue territory…” frantically her fingers dance over the virtual computer screen in an effort to establish the ship’s specifications. She lets out a reflexive gasp as she absorbs the data flashing up in front of her.
“SHIT!”
Inadvertently she has strayed into a domain grabbed from the Confederation by Zammon rebels. She curses herself for not studying her co-ordinates more carefully.
As per protocol Amelle hails the vessel but predictably is met by radio silence.
“Bastard fish-faced shogers…” she snarls under her breath.
She checks her weapons array, satisfied it’s in working order but knowing she is almost certainly outgunned. It perturbs her of course but that only increases the adrenaline. She’s done this many times before, she knows the form, only lately it’s been getting harder and harder to stay ahead of the game. Her mental agility and her reflexes are not what they were.
As her antagonist manoeuvres into attack mode Amelle’s brain quickly switches to her well-rehearsed defence tactics.
‘Outwit and outfly…’ Doug Wyman’s sage words race through her psyche even now after four decades.
Her fingers stab the control panels with curtailed velocity and she jumps to warp. The graceful disc outline of her craft slices through the vacuum with practised alacrity, but her enemy is already in tight pursuit.
She banks sharp left, momentarily dummying her chaser but as elegantly as a ballet dancer the other craft mirrors her move for move.
This precarious game of warpspeed cat and mouse endures for several minutes, punishing Amelle’s body through unrelenting G force as her inertial dampeners are faltering. Yet despite the pain and the sweat, her pounding heartbeat and her dragging breath, she persists and doesn’t flinch.
The gleaming tail of a photon shell screams towards her, but her lightning-fast evasive moves send it careening past her hull, where it detonates harmlessly into oblivion.
As the rogue vessel barrels her way once more Amelle detects the wicked blinking eye of another torpedo sensor coming online.
“Fuck…”
Even though Amelle only has a limited weapons spread she knows she has no alternative. Activating her holographic target optical, she prepares one of her own torpedoes to lock onto and counteract the enemy assault.
“Engage!”
The weapon snakes out of its starboard tube in a linear ribbon of green light, connecting elegantly with its opposite number in a blinding flash of fluorescent green. It causes a formidable shock wave to reverberate through the fabric of her vessel.
Her opposition however remains resolutely defiant.
“Enough already!”
With anger coursing through her veins Amelle now toggles all her systems to maximum output. She is pushing the ship to its absolute limits, sending warning lights and alarms into a burst of chaotic bedlam. If she gets this wrong the whole thing will erupt and vaporise her to atoms.
“Here goes…”
With gritted teeth and an almost uncanny sleight of hand she deploys her Galaxy Fleet ex-lover’s death-defying manoeuvre – the warp engines screech furiously beyond their zenith as the ship’s form momentarily blurs into an array of kaleidoscopic repetition.
It works.
Her assailant is predictably caught off guard by the warp stream trick-spectacle and with this tiny window of opportunity Amelle fires her last weapon.
As she powers down and brings the craft away from its perilous brink of destruction, the torpedo finds its target. She watches the hostile ship implode before her, erupting into a spectacular blaze of white-green plasma fire which fleetingly lights up the vast blackness of infinity. Like an aftershock, seismic pulses shudder violently through her own craft once more, then finally die away until the cosmos regains it's soporific tranquillity.
“Now let’s get the fuck out of here before others come gunning for me…”
With her cortisol levels still running at optimum, Amelle swiftly sets the co-ordinates to take her out of the danger zone and into the safe confines of Confederation Space, dropping to warp two she initiates a full maintenance scan.
“Systems running at normal parameters,” the computer chirps – almost fondly, and as Amelle begins to simmer down the gravity of the incident hits her full on.
Drained and emotionally wrung out, she slumps forward over the control console, her eyes screwed tightly shut. She exhales deeply as if to expel the noxious adrenaline from her lungs and her entire being.
In that brief moment of clarity all Amelle’s past regrets and calamities gush unbidden into her vacant headspace. Bittersweet vignettes of her glamorous Galaxy Fleet ex-lover mingle with the toxic memories of those before and since who betrayed or defrauded her. On top of this a crushing litany of other personal failures and disappointments line up to mock and entomb her within the relentless agony of brutal loneliness.
‘He was too unique and too precious to knock around with common rubes like you…’ the cutting remark – one of many – aimed at her association with Commander Sage sears into her like a brand. Only she knows the real truth.
Despite her desperate fight to hold her emotions back she begins to weep. She knows it is pathetically weak but also cathartic.
She catches sight of herself reflected in a gleaming steel panel of the cockpit, wide face marred with tears. Sometimes she loathes her half-breed state, ‘Too little to be one and not enough to be the other…’ she philosophises bitterly.
Her thick-set short physique, spine nodules, four toes on each foot and the nictitating membranes which lubricate her eyes in place of blinking are a sharp reminder of her Gaiian heritage. Yet juxtaposed with this are the unmistakable curves of a Human female and fine, unmistakably Caucasian ash brown hair.
“Not much to recommend you, old girl…” She huffs, fighting back the resent tainting her normally obdurate resolve and she hastily searches for something to quash this pointless pity party.
“You’re feisty, determined, and real bright – you can fight, you’ll go far…” she remembers those words of praise from Doug Whyman on Gaiia Prime. It should placate her as it has done before but instead it cuts through her like a Drinian sword. All those hopes and dreams now reduced to dust.
She never made it into a Galaxy Fleet uniform. She tried everything but just couldn’t make the cut.
‘Always so near yet so far. Always the bloody bridesmaid. Darned dyscalculia…’ the neuro diverse condition inherited from her Human father blighted her like an ugly birth mark.
Maybe a career in Space wasn’t meant to be but it would have given her a more comfortable life than what she had been dealt. Always living on her wits, blagging, ducking and diving. Profiting but never finding any long-term personal satisfaction. That had always eluded her.
The searing rancour peaks and subsides. As calm settles within her Amelle tames her life-demons into acceptance once more. Though she has never held much faith in religion she posits that the Ziell’s grand plan was for her to wind up here.
The skirmish however has exhausted her more than usual. She leans back in the cockpit, limbs dangling almost boneless over the moulded seat. Flying solo since leaving the crew of the Pegasus has been a high octane cortisol-pumping nightmare.
‘I’m too old for this,’ she mutters archly and getting up from the seat, stretches and heads for the sleeping area.
Once ensconced in the tiny bunk she lies back and stares at the featureless canopy above her, reflecting on the events as they unfold over and over again, like a perpetually blooming flower. Finally she gives a long, frustrated sigh and decides that ongoing things must change. This latest scrape with death is definitely, absolutely going to be her last.
Two Days Later – Isca Bravo Terminal
Amelle hails the control centre, hoping for a break, if this goes wrong and she is refused passage she’ll be well pissed.
“Minuet, you have clearance to proceed…”
She sighs with relief and prepares to engage her ship at the docking station on Isca Bravo, a satellite clearance terminal orbiting Sol Prime – Terra.
Long hours of travelling through the often isolated warp highway to the Sol System from Epsilon and the Balan sector had given Amelle time to kill and the opportunity to suss out this planet – the founding home of the Confederation – along with its myriad and diverse customs, habitat and climate. After intense deliberation she has decided this is where she wants to make her home. Put down roots without any outside interference and try to solve a long standing mystery to lay a ghost to rest (though that part can wait).
She is confident that her half Human heritage will allow her trouble free entry but right now she desperately needs money. There was an experiment a couple of centuries back to run a post-scarcity society in the Confederation but it hadn’t worked. Currency was too important to just junk and phase out so here is where the bartering begins. She knows what she has to do.
Stepping out of the airlock and onto the floorplate she is bombarded with the clamour of voices and frantic activity. It is quite the culture shock after spending so much time alone on the ship. She pulls the elaborately woven shawl tighter around her person. A gift from the B’zeyals, made from the thread of giant furry Pran grubs. More durable than traditional or more commonplace yarns.
Amelle is aware she hasn’t eaten properly for days so she heads for the small cantina located on the Gamma facing arm of the station.
‘Can’t bargain on an empty stomach…’
The food on offer is better than she anticipated, Terran vegetables cooked and presented in a pleasing and most appealing way to the eye and the stomach. Amelle orders fennel infused potatoes and juicy phallic looking oyster mushrooms. Their appearance stirs a fleeting, primeval surge of longing for intimate contact which she quickly dismisses before finding a table tucked away from the main drag to consume her meal in peace.
The taste of flavoursome food is a delight to her palate and she savours every mouthful. The only blight is an annoying humanoid maintenance bot cleaning the floor near her table, its bland anonymous countenance and featureless face gives her the creeps. Automatons and robots have never really been her thing and if she had her way they would all be vaporised out of existence.
“Get out of my space, freak! Can’t you see I’m eating? You’re ruining my appetite.”
The bot of course is insentient and doesn’t respond, so in the end she takes it upon herself to get up and shove it forcefully away to a different part of the cantina where there is actually some litter to clean up.
“Can’t get the bloody staff…” she huffs belligerently to herself as she returns to her seat.
Out of the corner of her eye she catches sight of a procession of ethnic Gaiians and Ortigans passing the smoky glass partition of the cantina. Brandishing banners and beating drums, clearly in a gesture of protest. Amelle waves and gives them the hand salute of unity which they obligingly return.
“That wasn’t the way to treat that poor bot you know, the ban is over now.”
“And what business is it of yours?” Amelle turns to face the figure standing over her, a look of spiky indignance painting her features. “Would be better to use a Roomba…”
“No, the punters would trip over it.”
The alien stranger introduces themselves. “I am Rama. You sent me a comms?”
Her contact has arrived but just her luck it has to be one of those snide and devious Felidans. Their whole being drips with archetypical cat-like haughtiness and their long stripy tail swishes in pure arrogance. Amelle screws her lips in barely supressed distaste.
“You’re early,” she notes with a hint of sarcasm, as she finishes the last forkful of her meal.
“Better early than late sweetie,” they purr and without invitation take a seat opposite Amelle.
“So before we start, what’s this hate thing against synthetics?”
“Hate? Ha! That’s an understatement. I loathe them. Fake skins - they are so creepy and ghoulish - who needs them really? What’s wrong with using real people?”
“Real people have moved on from this shit,” Rama states, gesturing to the bot still busy cleaning the floors. “Besides a couple of those fake skins as you call them were apparently sentient and deemed so special they had the same rights as organics like you or I. In fact they were treated like celebrities by the Confederation.”
Amelle’s ears prick up, “Uh?”
Then the shoe drops. She had forgotten about the newsfeeds peddled out to the general public for propaganda and entertainment. How the masses had lapped up the glamorized bullshit documenting the lives of the only two sentient humandroids in existence.
“Oh you mean Sage Lyric and Loren. Yeah I remember them well. Active around 15 years ago...” she answers, confidently masking her oversight. ”But they were in a different ballpark to this mass-produced junk.”
“Yup. Looked so Human, you wouldn’t know the difference. Lyric was a Galaxy Fleet, career officer, awarded medals, dated beautiful women, but rumour has it that Loren was more the one for the ladies.…” Rama gives a bawdy chuckle, and Amelle resists the urge to eye-roll at the way he recites the Confederation publicity fodder word for word.
She knows the truth of course but no one is ever going to believe her. It was a long time ago - before both were lost and the synth ban was imposed. Nevertheless she sustains her defiance.
“I did know one of them actually, and it wasn’t quite like that…”
“You knew one of the Mantronic boys? Really?” Rama gives Amelle a sarcastic and clearly disbelieving look.
“Yes, and I …dated them,” Amelle replies unequivocally but her bold assertion is already faltering and her cheekbone spots darken with embarrassment, “Well….for a short while.”
Rama cuts a side eye at her, momentarily feigning surprise before shaking their head and breaking into raucous peals of laughter.
“What?” Amelle feels the unwanted surge of humiliation well up, threatening to engulf her in angry tears but manages to sustain her stoic composure.
“Okay indulge me - which one?” Rama splutters.
“Sage.”
“You??? Come on! I’ve heard some tall tales in my time but…” The Felidan slaps their thigh with a fur-covered clawed hand, their entire form shaking with cruel mirth.
“It’s true, I have his photo and holo-matrix in my luggage and this – she holds up her wrist to show them a bracelet inset with exotic Shelian stones, “He gave it to me…”
“Yeah whatever, fangirl. Dream on. Now we’ve got the comedy over with are we going to talk business?”
Amelle manages to sustain her resting bitch face and affects a serious tone, “Absolutely. I take it you are the one dealing with ship brokerage?”
“I am indeed - your plain simple trustworthy feline,” Rama replies without a shred of mirth.
“Good, I want to sell my vessel, can you give me a good price?”
“Depends what you have going on.”
“An Auroro VXX - ten years old. Good nick, just needs a tweak with the inertial dampeners.”
“Hmm,” Rama strokes their furry chin before fixing Amelle with a cold impassive cat-like stare. “Okay what did you have in mind? Price wise that is?”
“About ten thousand?”
Rama gives a sharp toothed grin and rises from their seat. “Fine. Let’s go to my office, it’s just by the docking area…”
Terra – A Day Later
Amelle digitally transfers her haul into a deposit facility along with the rest of her savings. She has a sizable amount now, enough she thinks to live on for some time and if she can get some grifting income as well could see her through until she dies.
Now all she has to do is get clearance to stay on Terra.
Reluctantly she clears out the Minuet of all her belongings before handing it over to its new owner. She isn’t sorry but she does carry a glimmer of affection in her heart for the old girl.
At the border control two guards are waiting. They gesture to Amelle and direct her to an oval shaped booth.
“Credentials?”
Amelle produces a digital chip and one guard scans it.
“Everything appears to be in order. Can we see that?” The other guard asks brusquely, glancing at her travel bag.
“Of course.”
Amelle hands the bag over to the guard, who empties it onto a counter, perusing the contents briefly before scanning them and noting them one by one on a database.
“One shawl of B’zelian origin, cosmetics – ten pieces, personal hygiene items and undergarments, two items of formal apparel – an Ortegan dress and formal shoes, one obsidian orb – charged, a box of – electrical? – components, origin unknown and one Personal Information Device…”
The guard, satisfied she is carrying nothing sinister returns everything to Amelle and nods that she can proceed through security.
In the departure concourse she pauses for a moment to take a deep breath of relief and roll her shoulders to expel the tension before checking her itinerary. She will board a shuttle bound for London in the former United Kingdom and from there take a hover bus to the South Western region, where she has decided to set up her main home base. Once all her business is settled there she will charter a flitter to San Francisco Metroplex and initiate the next part of her plan.
A great deal of research and fact finding has gone into her decisions on how to achieve her end goal, but as it’s still in the early stage she mustn’t build her hopes up too high just yet.
Arriving at the diverse coastline of what was historically North Devon turns out to be much more of a breath-taking experience than Amelle had imagined and instinctively she knows she has made the right choice.
It’s exactly as Doug Whyman described and even to her jaded space travel weary eyes the scenery - a sweeping montage of Atlantic Ocean waves crashing into jagged soaring cliffs, unsullied expanses of white-golden sands and a salty tang to the clean air is something extraordinary. She is astounded at how it has been preserved and unspoilt for hundreds of years.
Despite the aura of isolation however Amelle has taken the precaution to wear a hooded cloak and sunglasses to avoid stares and attracting attention to herself. She knows that in this part of the world the population is still not used to seeing anyone of alien heritage.
‘Perhaps that is all part of its charm?’ she muses reflectively, while consciously fingering the vibrant orange glass and sand bead on its weathered cord around her neck.
She continues her exploration, noting the wild sand dunes which etch the skyline in a jagged profile, their formation rising and dipping before sloping gracefully down to the shoreline.
Acres of farmland, fringed by tall cereal stalks with plumy heads are used as nurseries growing root vegetables just as they did 300 years ago. Human workers trim brassicas before loading them into wooden crates.
Amelle smiles at this bucolic vista and the welcome absence of bots being utilised to carry out these tasks. It prompts her to consider why there are so many of them in urbanised areas of Terra again after the Confederation-wide ban ended.
‘Didn’t they learn anything?’ she reflects, miffed by Humanity's apparent lack of moral caution, and then sighs resignedly, ‘Well evidently not…’
Eventually after a lengthy walk Amelle comes to the sweeping expanse of Saunton Sands and is struck by the magnificence of the surviving ancient seafront houses dotted along the cliffside. They are undeniably picturesque with their wrought iron and carved wood aesthetic detailing. Many still have huge imposing palms in the gardens, and sprawling shrubs and trees flank their rendered stone walls. Amelle feels the concept is somewhat sanitised and pretentious but reluctantly concedes it has its charms.
‘In a way it looks almost too perfect,’ she ponders warily, but maybe this hackneyed image of idyllic serenity is what she needs to empty her head of negative cynicism and banish her ghosts.
She walks down to the beach, lured by the inviting sprawl of quaint stalls, offering the usual mix of seaside wares, including one selling those fun slip-on summer sandals called flip flops in an array of jazzy colours. She strolls away from the focus of the sea front to a narrow footpath snaking behind it. Here nesting in tranquil obscurity she spies a row of timber chalets, all artfully weather beaten but delightfully rustic and walks up closer to get a better look. It turns out several are up for rent.
One in particular catches her eye, painted in a natural redwood stain with a corrugated zinc roof and jigsaw cut fascia boards, along with a green wooden gate and a tiny front porch. A hand written name plaque on the panelled wall reads ‘Stress Free.’
And all of a sudden for Amelle it seems like an omen.
She smiles inwardly, ‘I think I’m gonna like this,’ and infused with newfound energy and hope she takes out her PID to make enquiries.