bookmark for self. Keep it comin'!

I was going to post the next chapter, but i've got a heap on today, and off to Barcelona on the weekend, so hopefully next week I'll get the time to finish this off. 

Too much Vodka-Redbull. Far too much.

We shuffled into the Library, all of us looking around and taking it all in. There was surprisingly little to see though, the omni-directional red light made it difficult to judge distances. There were still shadows visible in the walls, and the angular nature of them made me think they were caused by the diffraction of light within larger crystals. I made a mental note to discuss that with Paulo later. Running my hand along the wall didn't reveal much either, the surface was very smooth to the touch. Pressing harder seemed to force my hand away from the wall slightly but it still felt a lot like quartz I had handled back home. 

With a start, I remembered what my hidden mission was: to find out how to activate our Library. Given the organic nature of many Iconian machines, along with their extremely advanced robotics I didn't hold out much hope. Still, there was always the change that the taciturn master might accidentally let something slip. 

After walking not very far into the building, we reached a larger corridor that was wide enough to take 4 people abreast. We followed the instructions of our translator to line up against one of the walls and I noticed at that point that Carla had ended up next to me, with Paulo on the other side of her. The three of us had formed our own group within the students, and had taken to discussing things between us first before discussing with the larger group, so it was only natural for the three of us to wind up together.

"Do not be alarmed at what you are about to experience," came the voice I identified as the master. "We do not have TVs as you do, so this is how we experience distant events." I gave a grin to Carla and Paulo at those words, curious at what the master meant but also nervous about what was about to happen. Suddenly the lights went out. All around I could hear gasps from the other students, along with myself. I could still (just!) feel the wall at my back, and I pushed against it, seeking something solid until my eyesight came back. I always could feel my hand being gripped tightly by Carla, but I had no idea who it was reassuring, her or me.

Slowly I started to perceive some things moving in front of me. I strained my eyes to try and perceive what they were. At my side I could feel Carla sliding down the wall, as if to kneel down. Judging by the faint rustling I could hear, others were doing the same. As I stared at the faint sights, I could feel the connection to the real world fading away. Less sound was coming through, and I could hardly feel Carla's hand in my anymore, nor the wall against my back. The sights resolved themselves into flashing lights, mostly red and blue, and also into static white dots. The blue and red dots were slowly moving relative to view point, while very few of the white dots (and suddenly I realised just how many there were) were moving at all.

As I struggled to make sense of the view, I realised that the static white light were stars. I was seeing the view of a spaceship! Every second brought things clearer into view, and it started to look more and more like a standard holographic display. I could identify a space station straight ahead, and one of the larger blue lights was actually a planet. Between my view point and the planet the flashing red and blue lights had gathered. Suddenly they disappeared. Then, with a lurch and what felt like a twist in my mind, the view point changed from being me watching a ship in space, to it being me in space. It's hard to describe, but suddenly I was the ship.

With a thought, my view would instantly change to another perspective, and I quickly did a 360 degree scan. Behind was nothing, the only thing close by in space was ahead. My attention focused back to the forward view (I could sense I was moving in that direction) and then strange thoughts started appearing. When I focused on the space station (and the amount of zoom available was incredible) not only could I tell it was neither Human or Iconian, I knew it was a Korath space station, and I had a strong sense of wrongness, like it didn't belong there, along with the feeling that I could do something about it. Closer to me then the station though were many small points of wrongness, that I perceived as dangerous and moving towards me. The sense of impending doom grew greater as I felt them coming towards me, and then there was a hot flash of pain. They were fighter ships!

At the flash of pain, I lashed out instinctively. I focused on the fighter that had fired at me, and fired my own lasers that I knew I had back at it. In pain, I fired everything I had. The return blast I had triggered was several factors stronger then what had been fired at me, and instantly turned the Korath fighter into a ball of plasma, which then disintegrated as it's fusion reactor was destroyed. As I marvelled at the power I had, I could already feel the itch of healing where I had been hit, and knew that it was only minor damage. Still, a thousand stings could bring down the mightiest lion and the rest of the fighters were firing at me by this stage. I could sense a deflective field in evidence, that turned aside shots that were not targeted directly at right angles but several were still getting through. One by one I targeted each craft. Even if they had had shields like I did, the amount of power of each blast would have been enough to overwhelm them instantly, and shortly there was nothing left between me and the space station but expanding fields of radiation. 

Although the fight had taken its toll on my body, I could feel the scratches that the lasers had opened healing over already, and my energy levels were being swiftly replenished by the local star. After the short fight I had a much better idea of how my new body worked, and the manoeuvrability of the craft was astounding. I could see that the space station ahead was firing crude rockets and hyper-accelerated bullets at me, which I dodged with ease. Eager to test out what I could do, I dove down the gravity well at the station, determined to fix the wrongness of it. Despite the primitiveness of the weapons, there were a lot of them targeted at me so the sooner I could destroy it the better. Very quickly, I was within range and my lasers sought out the stations fusion reactor. The size of the station meant it would have taken much longer to destroy it myself, so I let the resulting explosion do the work for me. As the explosion ripped the station to pieces, I scanned local space using my new senses. Nothing was nearby, and there was a feeling of rightness about local space. Except for that star over there.... accelerating to an immense speed, I jumped towards the next area of wrongness.

Suddenly I was back in my own body, in my own bed. One minute accelerating towards a hyperspace jump, the next waking up feeling like I hadn't slept for days? What had just happened? Had I really been inside the Library at all? The answers would have to wait, as I physically couldn't move from my bed, so I put my head back down on my pillow and was instantly asleep.

This is probably one of the best stories I've ever read.

I had no idea how long I was asleep for. My sleep was disturbed by dreams of being a spaceship again, never the same, always victorious though. I'd never really thought about the Korath back home, but it appeared my sub-conscience really didn't like them.

When I next woke up I was feeling better, but still not 100%. My mouth was very dry and I would have killed for a glass of water. Just thinking about it was hard though, and I wasn't sure if I would be able to get to the small basin in my room to get a drink. There was a beep at the side of my bed, and I looked at my personal drone to see it extending a glass of water at me, using a pincer grip arm that I hadn't seen before. I barely had the strength to take it off the drone and drink it. As soon as the first drop hit my mouth I was guzzling it down though. My stomach didn't feel like it could eat, and sitting up in bed was an effort. As soon as I was up I could feel a massive headache starting.

I could really use an aspirin and some more water, I thought, looking down at my empty glass. There was a beep from the drone, that was still next to the bed. It was holding out a cloudy drink in the pincer arm again. As I looked at it, I got the sense that it was an aspirin dissolved in water, so I took it from the drone and drank it down in three gulps. With that sorted, I lay back down in bed to wait for the aspirin to take effect. As I lay there, I wondered what had happened, and how Paulo and Carla were. I closed my eyes, trying to make sense of the vision. It had felt like I was actually the real ship! Thinking back to it now with a clearer head, the sense of freedom had been indescribable. The ship had felt alive, and I was sure that as long as it was near a star to recharge whatever it used for energy it could stay in space indefinitely. 

I heard the door whoosh open and in came Paulo and Carla, both looking relieved when they saw I was awake. I moved over on the bed so they could both sit down on the edge.

"How long was I out for?" I asked. My voice sounded croaky, like it hadn't been used for a while.

"48 hours, you were out of it for 2 days. The drones had to get you here on a stretcher." Paulo replied. "How are you feeling now Ian?"

"Terrible. I feel like I had a fever and I have the worst headache in the world," I said. They both nodded in sympathy.

"We all felt like that," said Carla, "although you were the worst affected. Most of us were able to walk back, and were feeling back to normal by the evening. I don't think they realised just how badly we'd take that sort of experience."

"They do now," Paulo continued, "in fact they're planning on ending the whole exchange until they can re-think how it would work! Which isn't fair, most of us were fine with it, once we got used to it."

"Most of us," agreed Carla, "but not all of us. It was horrible!" she exclaimed.

"Yeah," Paulo grinned, "not all of us enjoyed it. Carla here would have run straight back outside if you hadn't had a deathgrip on her hand. You should see the bruises she has!"

I winced at the bruises that Carla showed on her hand. 

"I'm really sorry, I didn't know," I apologised to her.

"It's alright, you were completely out of it, you didn't know what you were doing," she said, waving her injured hand as if to say to forget about it."

"I admit it was weird," said Paulo, "seeing that ship take out the Korath fighters as if they were mosquitoes. The amount of firepower it must have! And most importantly, we were seeing it all real-time. While you were out, we got news that the Korath have surrendered to the Drengin after the destruction of their fleets by unknown attackers!"

"Which is good, but also disturbing," interrupted Carla. "We don't want those genocidal Korath near us, so the fact they're now under Drengin control is good, but the Drengin aren't much better."

"Would you rather be dead, or a slave?" countered Paulo. It looked like they'd been having this discussion quite a bit lately, so i thought it best to interrupt them before they really got going.

"Hang on guys, you're saying you saw the ship attacking the Korath? Is that what everyone else saw?" 

"Of course," said Paulo, "we all saw an Iconian ship destroying the Korath forces."

"What do you mean by everyone else," Carla asked, picking up on what I said, "did you see something else?"

"This might sound hard to believe, but I didn't see the ship. I was the ship!" Judging by how they shared a glance between them, they were skeptical of my claims. "Honest, the last thing I remember was destroying the starbase and then jumping out of the system."

"Ian, nobody else felt they were the ship, everybody else was an observer," Carla said slowly. Paulo looked excited though.

"What was it like? How powerful were you, do you think you could defeat anything?"

"I don't know," I said, "it's kind of hard to describe. It was all instinct, it wasn't like I had a manual to read." He looked like he was about to ask some more questions, but Carla got in first.

"I don't think you should tell anybody this," she said, a thoughtful look on her face. 

"Why not?" I asked, which was swiftly parroted by Paulo.

"Do you know how many Korath would have been killed in that attack?"

"Who cares?" answered Paulo, "They're not human and they would have done the same to us!" I was more thoughtful though. At the time it hadn't occurred to me that I was killing sentient beings. They were the enemy, and needed to be destroyed. If I was working on instinct, who's instinct was it?

"I think she's right," I answered before Carla could launch into a scathing reply at Paulo. "I didn't have a choice, it was kill or be killed, but not everyone will understand that. They'll just see dead people and look for someone to blame."

"They're Korath," Paulo said slowly, as if talking to children. "No human or Iconian is going to care if Korath are killed."

"We've only assumed the ship was Iconian, we don't know for sure," countered Carla. "The master only said we'd be observing events, not that it was the Iconian's. They haven't admitted it to us that they're responsible."

"Oh yeah? Who else has organic ships?"

"He's right," I said, thinking back. "It was definitely organic, and the ship was able to repair itself. I think it was alive."

"And if it wasn't? Who owns the ship? And what is its next target?"

I tried to stifle a yawn, but wasn't successful. Carla noticed, and stood up.

"Come on Paulo, we should let Ian get some more rest. You still look terrible! And make sure you're at the evening meal so people don't think we're making it up that you're awake!"

"Yeah, we need to show that you're alright so we don't get sent home!" said Paulo, as he got up from the bed as well. 

"Thanks for the concern guys, I'll make sure I'm there. I might even be hungry by then!" I gave them both a weak smile. I could tell they were still worried about how weak I was, as they both gave a wave to me as they left the room.

I was tired again. Maybe it hadn't been aspirin I'd taken. I made a mental note to make sure I woke up in time for dinner as I'd promised. As I fell asleep, I thought about what we'd said. Where would the ship attack next? And if it jumped to Earth, what would be the result? Before I could come up with an answer I'd fallen into a dreamless sleep.

I have no idea.... I was assuming something close to 24 hours for a standard cycle, but it's a bit more depth then the story needs to worry about that. We'll just go with 24 as that saves me having to work in a different day/night cycle.

I was asking because of this:

"48 hours, you slept an entire day"

Great addition to the story. I am eagerly looking forward to the next installment.

Thanks Muuurgh. This is a good read..good luck with new job.

Good stuff Muurgh-I wonder what control the Iconians have over our hero?