Get Moving. Keep Moving
by Ken Barnett
Muffled shouting drew Teavany into that fuzzy, liminal space between conscious and unconscious. She floated there, as if in zero-g, just long enough to grow content before noticing a throb in her scalp crests. The throb quickened into a pulsing headache that unceremoniously yanked her into full consciousness. She sucked in a pained breath of pure oxygen through clenched teeth. Hints of burnt coolant and acrid electrical smoke accompanied the oxygen. Memories exploded through her headache like flashbangs: civilian transport; R&R interrupted by pirates; fleeing to a nearby planet; trying to calm hysterical civvies; entering a dust storm; an explosion; screaming; cursing; more explosions; someone shouting, “Brace brace brace!”; reflexively throwing up a biotic barrier; wrenching metal; lancing pain in her head; the eternal void . . .
The muffled shouting continued.
Teavany opened her eyes to an unfocused universe and immediately winced at the invasion of headache-amplifying light. After blinking her surroundings into focus, she assessed her situation. She was still in the transport ship’s mess, but she was now lying on the floor and breathing through an unfamiliar, ill-fitted mask connected to an emergency oxygen tank. The ship lay canted at a twenty-degree angle. Detritus and bodies—some moving, others deathly still—lay scattered across the floor. Sparks popped from behind wall panels. Her skin pricked from the cool, bordering on cold temperature. Orange dust swirled through the ship. A young boy, human, shouted from the warped frame of a doorway that led to an adjoining hallway, except the hallway was missing, replaced by a howling dust storm.
“Hurry hurry!” the boy shouted into the storm, his voice muffled by a torn piece of blue fabric covering his mouth.
There must be other survivors out there, Teavany thought. She sat up and instantly regretted it as vertigo spun the already tilted ship around and around. Inhaling deep breaths, she focused on a single point: the scuffed tip of her left boot. Ten breaths later, the vertigo had faded, though the headache, and now nausea, remained. I definitely have a concussion. Need to get moving. And keep moving. After removing the oxygen mask and performing a test inhale—the atmosphere was thin but breathable—Teavany rose onto unsteady legs, waited for her equilibrium to settle, and shuffled over to the boy.
When Teavany crossed into the boy’s peripheral vision, he startled away from her, his brown eyes growing wide at the sight of the formerly unconscious purple-skinned Asari.
Teavany smirked internally. Humans were still new to the galactic community. He’s still probably getting used to all us aliens.
Orange dust caked the front of the child’s clothes and flaked from his curly hair. To his credit, the boy rallied quickly. He pointed out of the ship and asked, “Can—can you help them?”
Teavany peered through the doorframe into the hissing storm. They had crashed upon a windswept plain of red-orange rock. Sheared off sections of hull plating littered a fresh gouge left by the stranded transport. Lighter debris tumbled across the plain, blown along by powerful winds. Fifty meters away, three figures—one being carried between the other two—trudged through the gouge towards the ship, their heads hunched against the biting dust of the storm. The three survivors walked into the shadow of a towering hull fragment jutting from the ground. The fragment teetered precariously in the wind, and it only took one unfortunately timed, powerful gust to tip the scale.
“No!” the boy cried as the fragment fell towards the unaware survivors.
Teavany rapidly inhaled a lungful of air and engaged her biotic implant; her eyes glossed into starscapes; undulating purple-white energy glowed along her body; spacetime became visible and as malleable as clay; she imagined a fist-sized black hole a meter behind the falling fragment; exhaling, she thrust her hand forward.
Within a fraction of a second, the swirling, biotic energy traveled down Teavany’s arm, flowed off her fingertips, and immediately disappeared. Obeying the conservation law of thermodynamics, the energy reappeared instantaneously at the point where Teavany had imagined a black hole. The biotic energy formed an invisible mass effect field and then condensed into a fist-sized, lightless ball. Dust from the storm began falling towards the singularity from all directions. The massive hull fragment slowed to a halt in midair, stopping a mere meter above the survivors, who themselves existed just beyond the singularity’s pull.
“Yes yes yes!” the boy said gleefully while hopping up and down.
Teavany’s headache intensified; vertigo returned to rotate the world; her black hole shrunk; the hull fragment shuttered; the boy gasped; the survivors lurched into a jog.
Teavany slumped against the doorframe and sank to her knees. Reality became blurry, as if she were peering through a glass of water. She ceased feeding energy into her biotic construct. The singularity imploded, its mass transforming back into energy that dispersed randomly across the entire solar system. The hull fragment crashed to the ground seconds later, crushing rock and dust beneath it, but not people.
“Hurry!” the boy said. “You’re almost here!”
The three survivors were fifteen meters away, the injured one awkwardly hop-skipping with their good leg. Though Teavany’s eyesight remained unfocused after her biotic exertion, she recognized the figure on the left wearing the bright teal hood attached to a smoke-gray faceplate: Veen’Serah vas Wador, her Quarian bunkmate. Though she’d known the pilgrim for less than three standards, Teavany felt relieved seeing the woman alive.
Preambled by a swelling gust, a dense hail of sand pelted the survivors, lacerating clothes and digging into flesh. Teavany unleashed a kinetic shove. The biotic energy slammed into the hail, breaking it apart and diverting the worst of it. Her headache mutated into a rapid staccato of sharp pulses. Purple blood dribbled from her nose. Veen’Serah and the others were only five meters away, but a large, jagged shadow tumbled through the storm towards them. Teavany once more thrust her arm forward, fingers splayed open; a violet mass effect barrier swirled protectively around the survivors; her vision darkened; the boy screamed; the shadow crashed into the barrier; her brain exploded—
—Teavany jerked awake and immediately groaned. She felt as if someone had crushed her brain with a biotic grip. Breathing heavily, she lay back down, her head resting on something soft. Concussions and biotics really—really!—don’t mix. Eyes firmly shut, Teavany focused on her breathing, silently counting out ten breaths. Then she counted ten more.
Sand bombarded the ship’s outer hull, as if millions of arrows were plinking off an impenetrable fortress. But none of the sand blew through the transport, at least not whatever compartment Teavany occupied. The other survivors must have plugged the holes somehow. She was not alone. Quiet but deliberate activity drifted over her—fingers tapping screens, whispered conversations, thunks of objects being moved, clinks and clanks of tools.
Headache marginally better, Teavany opened her eyes and discovered she was still in the ship’s mess, tucked under a thermal blanket. A pair of LED lanterns dimly lit the compartment, sunset having come and gone, apparently. Two dozen other survivors milled about here and there, some looking lost while others desperately focused on whatever small task they could accomplish—counting rations, clearing away debris, organizing equipment, administering first aid, anything to distract themselves.
Veen’Serah vas Wador knelt a few meters away next to an open wall panel. A variety of colored cables snaked from the wall to a circuit board the engineer fiddled with. Seemingly feeling someone’s gaze upon her, Veen’Serah glanced over her shoulder. Teavany offered a small smile to her bunkmate. The Quarian nodded once before returning to her task. Next to Teavany, the boy lay curled and slumbering on the lap of an adult human woman. A metal rod was strapped to the woman’s bandaged leg. She’d been the one Veen’Serah and the other survivor had been carrying. The exhausted woman, who shared a strong familial resemblance to the boy, stared at Teavany through bloodshot eyes.
“Thank you,” the woman said. “For saving us.”
Teavany attempted to speak but only succeeded at coughing. Her throat was desert-dry and sand graveled between her teeth. The woman fed her water through a straw. After draining half the bottle, Teavany swirled her last gulp around her mouth to dislodge the sand, and swallowed. With her vocal cords now moistened, she asked, “The third one?”
The woman looked away and shook her head.
Teavany exhaled a weary sigh. She wasn’t on assignment. This was a vacation, not a mission. She technically wasn’t responsible for the safety of these people. But technicalities didn’t matter. She felt responsible—she became responsible the moment she engaged her biotics. And though she saved two, her efforts failed to save one. One knife wound was still a knife wound.
As happened every time she lost someone in the field, she recalled the words of her biotics mentor, said in a somber voice just before Teavany had shipped out on her first assignment. “With biotics, we can warp spacetime, alter the inertia of a boulder as easily as a pebble, and bend the laws of physics to our will. But we can never break physics. We can’t alter causality. We can’t substitute one reality for another. What we do isn’t magic. It has calculable limits. It can’t save everyone. We can’t save everyone. So save who you can, however you can. Feel the loss of those you couldn’t, but then let them go, and keep moving.”
Teavany lay awash in the emotions of the day, allowing herself that moment to feel—thrill at still being alive; grief for those not; anxiety for if the pirates were lurking around to threaten them further; dread at the unknown of what they faced to get out of this situation alive; joy at saving Veen’Serah and the human; guilt for the one she didn’t save.
It had been a very rough day. Not the roughest of days Teavany had endured, but it was close.
But that day is done. Time to start the new one. Get moving. Keep moving.
Teavany bundled up her emotions and tucked them aside. There would be more time for them later. Hopefully. She pushed herself up, grimacing through her lingering headache, and stood. Thankfully, the vertigo had disappeared. She surveyed her fellow strandees and their busted ship. She shared another glance with Veen’Serah, who again returned a single nod.
Teavany got moving, kept moving, and saved whomever she could.
You can also find this story posted at the following websites:
Cybernook 