Level With Me

Posted on Tue Dec 6th, 2022 @ 7:38am by Lieutenant Anthea "Thea" Mariatis

Mission: Scylla and Charybdis
Location: Jeffries Tube, somewhere in the bowels of the Avalon
Timeline: Concurrent with "Two Heads"
1261 words - 2.5 OF Standard Post Measure

The jostle of impact shook Thea to her senses.

They had been crawling, navigating, twisting their way through the jeffries tube at a rate that would have frustrated a sloth. Having already suffered instability enough to fracture its integrity, the subspace bubble that was meant the protect them threatened to be the unreliability that cost them necessary time. Winfield had insisted at stopping every second junction to scan and inspect the field's fluctuations, like a worried hen counting its chicks despite having literally zero recourse if the fox decided to jump the fence and whisk them away. She had no instruments at her disposal, no access to the power grid, no tools with which to fashion any kind of emergency stop-gap measure if the temporary nature of her efforts decided that 'right now' was a fair and reasonable cessation point. No amount of data was going to aid them when they had no means to correct it, even if there was the time.

It had been tempting to just settle into the dark catacomb and admit defeat. A hand on her back, as always, had kept her pressing forward.

Now, the shudder of a significant hull impact knocked the scientist sideways, her shoulder hitting the side of the tube with enough force to leave yet another bruise. She lay on her side, half-dazed, and braced for another tremor, the knit of her brows forming a deep furrow as none were forthcoming. For the longest moment, the pair of them lingered where they had sprawled, huddled together to breathe in synchronicity as one of them strained his ears for sounds of further complication and the other stared into the gloom that had surrounded her and plunged her into acute sensory deprivation. Thea took several short, sharp intakes of breath in through her nose and closed her eyes. They weren't doing her any good anyway.

"This isn't how I imagined spending our alone time together," Winfield remarked, trying to bring levity to what was feeling more and more like a hopeless situation. He wasn't the sort for narrating during silent moments, but he'd known Thea long enough to sense when she was struggling to keep pushing on. "Just a little more," he urged. "We're not really that far from the labs now. We'll get there, you'll fix everything back to normal and we'll have a great story to tell the grandkids one day. Right?"

In the darkness, it was only the press of her fingertips against his lips that gifted them the ability to communicate and, with it, a lifeline out of silent oblivion. Being reduced to coping without her implants wasn't the issue; there were plenty of times when Thea inflicted that on herself to warrant the hyper-fixation that didn't deal well with other people's interruptions. Like so many in her situation, however, she relied on her other senses to compensate and, with her vision reduced to very little in the gloom, it was not the ideal situation to get across everything she needed her husband to understand. She waited for another impact, braced to avoid being flung about again, but none came. The fingers pressed to his lips slowly became the hand settled against his jaw.

"We need to keep moving," she agreed softly.

Winfield had stopped, desperately gazing into her eyes. They looked so distant. Her words hadn't filled him with the hopeful optimism he was looking for. Nor the one that was characteristic of their conversations in the past. "What's the matter? We're going to be okay, aren't we?"

"I don't know."

She could have just not answered. By now, there was enough elasticity in their relationship for him to at least anticipate the silent treatment when she wanted to avoid hard questions. He never let her get away with it but chasing her for answers was a skill Winfield Mariatis was exceptionally proficient at. Right now, Thea seemed to lack the energy, which was every bit as abnormal as her lack of certainty.

"We just need to get to the lab," she added quietly, "I can't do anything stuck in here."

He wasn't willing to let it go, but by the same token he was acutely aware of their lack of time to resolve it either. That meant things would have to go unsaid.

"If I'm right, we can drop down into the hallways outside the lab just at the end of this Jefferies tube. One step at a time, just like we talked about. Nice and easy." Getting her to their destination was the only other priority he had.

At least the hallway had maintained its emergency lighting. As she slowly stretched herself down to dangle for a moment before dropping to land on her feet, Thea twisted her head to determine the emptiness of their departure point and then moved out of the way. Hands twisting to pull at her knuckles, a symptom of displaced anxiety that she didn't attempt to mask, the scientist fixed her gaze on the entry to her lab and swallowed deeply.

She'd run out of time.

It was always going to be a long shot. In terms of theoretical physics, the emergency subspace protocol had a success rate under test conditions of around 72%, and though it had been a pet project tucked to one side but not forgotten because of the nature of the Avalon's volatile environment, she hadn't exactly had an opportunity to apply amended calculations to see if they made any difference. The fact that they hadn't been vaporised had given the illusion of total success but Thea, emerging from unconsciousness far later than she would have liked, had seen the writing on the wall the minute she'd taken over monitoring the viability of their new safe space. Degradation was inevitable, the entropy over time that rendered it only a temporary solution and not one easily resolved. Instability was already almost critical.

Why did it have to be Skritt who separated first?

Hearing her husband drop lightly down behind her, Thea closed her eyes for a moment and clenched both fists in an attempt to still her hands. Then, turning to face him, her dark eyes scanned the careworn features of the man who had followed her down some crazy rabbit holes over the years, and for once didn't try to shield him from her defeated certainty.

She held out a hand towards him.

As Winfield's hand clasped around hers, he found himself wishing that he could feel something. But he couldn't tell if she was warm or cold. It was strange: their hands touched but the normal sensation of holding hands with someone just wasn't there.

"Just a little further." He didn't know what else to do to provide any sort of encouragement. Focus on the next step. And then the one after. That was all he could think of.

The Labs were ahead. And maybe relative safety.

Or not.

"Do you feel it too?" he asked, glancing around at her. The nausea. The cold. The feeling of...fading away. "Thea...I think..." He was losing the ability to speak. And all of the world started to close in around them. The cold, and the dark, embracing them like a shroud.

"Get into the lab!" Yelling was likely futile, but the sight of her husband losing tangibility prompted Thea's stubborn refusal to allow pitiful odds to beat her. She turned, and without any reserve of will or energy to turn to see if he followed, made a final push to enter the lab.