Chapter 3: Purple Haze

Tabitha's boots released from the ship and she started to float away. She felt the tug as her inertia was stopped by the tether to Genzi.
"Honey?" she heard over the radio. Tabitha couldn't respond.
"Honey," Genzi said again. "Honey! Listen to me."
An incoherent whimper was all Tabitha could manage.
"Honey, close your eyes. Close them tight. I'm going to help you, but you have to be able to do what I say."
Tabitha nodded.
"Honey, I need you to answer."
"Y... yes..." Tabitha managed.
"You got your eyes closed?"
"Yes."
"Ok, sit like that for a moment. Imagine you're in your bunk, tucked up. You got a mom?"
"N… no. Dad raised me… She… d…"
Genzi interrupted. "Ok, your dad. He's with you, sitting next to you on your bed. He's got his hand on your hand, he's keeping you safe."
Tabitha pictured it, trying to keep it in her mind.
"Ok, hold your breath. Control it. In slowly. Out slowly."
"Yeah," Tabitha said, letting her breathing slow. The tugging on the tether stopped and she felt Genzi grab her.
"Ok, honey. Stretch your legs out, let them re-attach to the ship."
She felt the movement stop, but was glad Genzi didn't release her. "Ok, eyes still closed?"
Tabitha nodded again, then remembered that Genzi couldn't see it. "Yes," she said.
"OK, open your eyes slowly, tell me if the display is on."
Tabitha opened her eyes, quickly shutting them again. "No, it's not there."
"Ok, this is going to be hard. But I want you open your eyes again. Then turn on the display. Right-left-right-left."
It took her three tries, but at last she managed to control her eyes enough to get it to come on. She took a strange relief in the appearance of the colored display. It has disoriented her in the ship, but now it was a comfort just to see anything.
"You doing ok now, honey?"
"Tabitha let out a long breath. Yeah, I think I'm alright. Thanks, uh… Ms. Genzi."
Genzi laughed. "I guess I never introduced myself. I'm Neva. I guess you got my last name. The muscle's name is Percy, but for obvious reasons we just call him Schwartz. I'm sorry about this. I had no idea you'd be a kenophobe."
"A what?"
"Kenophobe. Someone frightened of, well, space. It's not the stuff in space, it's the nothing in space. It's not uncommon, I just… wasn't thinking."
"It's ok, I didn't know either. All of this… is so weird to me."
"Heh, honey, you ain't seen nothing. This is a big galaxy, and there's some bizarre things in it.
"Look, I need to work on something, but we want to keep your mind from wandering off. There's a help manual in the HUD. Down-up-down-left. That'll give you something to read. Sorry it's not more entertaining."
"What? No romance novels?"
Genzi laughed. "Sorry, honey."
Tabitha read for a long time. It was impossible to tell how long—though the HUD had a clock synced with the ship, she didn't take note of the time when she started and didn't know how to access the HUD's logs. After a while, though, her eyes began to swim and dry out. Her brain had dried out long before, but she kept reading, even though she didn't understand most of it, because she didn't want to succumb to her kenophobia again.
She wanted to rub her eyes, and even reached up to do so, and felt sheepish when her gloved hands bumped into the bubble over her head. She laughed nervously.
"Incoming," Neva said over the suit communicators.
Tabitha looked around but all she could see was the wall of text that covered the inside of her helmet. She bit her tongue before she could cry out in irrational panic. She flipped her eyes from side to side to deactivate the HUD and tried to see what Neva was talking about.
It didn't take her long to find it. A wide shadow was blocking out stars and shining lights onto the surface of the ship in a search pattern. The black spot grew larger till the reflection of the light it emitted finally gave Tabitha a sense of its shape. It was broad, and seemed to be flat in comparison. It was a diamond shape, with one of the longer sides in the lead, the extended points out to each side. The back end of it had a long triangular tail. As it was nearly on top of them, Tabitha realized the size was sort of an optical illusion. Compared to her it was big, but it was probably only a couple hundred feet from one wing-tip to the other. It was clearly not large enough for interstellar travel, and probably belonged to one of the two ships in conflict.
That was confirmed a moment later when the light shone directly on them with blinding brilliance. The ship stopped moving and narrowcasted to their helmets. "This is Sergeant Blod of the Inverness, attached to the cruiser Passagarde. Maintain position. We will pick you up." The connection snapped off just as quickly. Tabitha relaxed. It was from the good guys and not the pirates.
All the same, she heard Neva curse over the suit comms.
Tabitha held up her hand to block some of the light, but she still couldn't sense anything. A few moments later a smaller pod landed on the ship's surface just a few feet away. She could feel the vibrations through her legs and feet.
A square door in the pod opened and two Gen-Ds stepped out. Tabitha thought one might be Schwartz for a moment, but they were too short to be him. Their guns were massive things. Nearly the same size as their body. Impractical for most to use outside of a zero-g environment, but with a Gen-D, it might be what they used all the time. The soldiers motioned for the women to enter the pod with them.
After they did so, the door shut. Tabitha thought it was completely dark at first, and she felt some bile rise in her throat till she realized there was a light dome on the ceiling, and it was just the comparison to the search lights that made it so dark. No one opened their suits, and there was no gravity in the pod. But she felt it move, the ship above, the Inverness, Tabitha supposed, reeling them in at what felt like a rapid pace. A moment later, the door opened again and she had a view of a large area. The pod was in the center of a large room with brown floors, and a huge arching dome overhead. Around the edge of the circular room, servicemen sat at computers. A man sat in a chair nearby, turned to face them. He must be the commander of the vessel. He lounged comfortably, slouching. His splayed fingers steepled as he regarded them without expression.
The Gen-D that had picked them up removed their helmets, and one held a datapad in front of Tabitha's face. A dot moved in strange patterns across it. It took her a moment to realize it was the code to unlock her suit. She pushed the "restart" button at the bottom of the pad then dutifully followed the dot. When it finished, she was rewarded with a soft hiss as the seals on the suit released. One of the Gen-D took her helmet before she could even move. She looked over and saw that Neva was being treated the same way. They left the space suits on them.
"I see," the seated man said finally, looking at Neva. His face twitched once, ever so briefly showing anger or hate or something similar before he restored his stoic appearance. "Contain her," he said, pointing at Neva. "Don't let her speak."
"But, she helped me!" Tabitha said in confusion. Neva didn't say anything.
"Indeed." He waved to the Gen-D soldiers and they dragged Neva away.
"What's going on?" Tabitha asked.
The officer finally stood. He wore a uniform identical to the ones she'd seen on Schwartz and Neva when they'd revived her, except the name and he had decorations on the shoulder. Tabitha assumed that indicated rank or medals. "I'm sorry I can't be more helpful," he said. "I'm Commander Tarsak. And as a commander, I'm not cleared to explain much. You've already seen that pirates have boarded the Passagarde in an attempt to kidnap you. Beyond that, I'm not allowed to explain. I'm sure the chief captain of the Passagarde can help you further. We're taking you to her now."
Tabitha tried to think of what to say. Before anything came to mind Commander Tarsak returned to his chair and rotated to face the front of the ship.
Tabitha watched out the dome as the ship propelled itself along the length of the big cruiser. As they moved toward the front she could see the pirate ship disengage and pull away from the Passagarde. It seemed to happen in slow motion as the two huge ships drifted apart silently. Compared to the Inverness, the pirate ship was huge—easily a hundred times as large. Even at that, it was only a quarter the size of the Passagarde.
Every interstellar ship in the galaxy either belonged to a giant conglomerate (which ran their fleets like military), a government (which made them a part of an actually military), or to pirates (which either ran their ships like military or barely controlled anarchy). The Passagarde, while government (and thus military) was not a combat ship, which meant it had very few weapons. So while the pirates looked gutsy, the Passagarde was actually the kind of ship they found ideal to attack.
So why were they retreating? Were they simply incompetent or under armed? Decent pirates could take the ship, or at least enough of it to demand something to get rid of them. And they had that Gen-D on their side. The one with the freakish arms. Something was weird about all that.
But Tabitha couldn't put the pieces together. So she stared at the pirate ship starting to distance itself from the Passagarde. The Inverness was moving faster, relative to the Passagarde, so they managed to see some details on the pirate vessel before they distanced themselves. There was no name printed on the side like legitimate ships had, but there was a huge, if dirty and faded, emblem on the side. A scorpion with a devil's face, in what was once a deep red, was painted on the vessel's metallic hull.
It made Tabitha shiver.
A few moments later and the pirate ship was starting to gain inertia and really separate from the Passagarde. The Inverness slowed as it approached a thick tower jutting from the Passagarde's primarily smooth surface. There was a mechanical whirring and thumps, and the smallest shiver through the hull of the Inverness as it docked.
Tabitha was escorted by the same two Gen-D soldiers back to the Passagarde and through a maze of tunnels. She tried once to speak to them, noticing that the name on one of their uniforms said "Blod," the sergeant that had hailed her earlier. But the men just grunted. Eventually they arrived at a gold-painted double door with the Earth League's crest on it, centered over the crack where the doors met.
Sergeant Blod tapped the computer on his wrist and the doors opened. Neither soldier stepped forward but instead saluted by making a fist over their heart.
There stood the coldest looking woman Tabitha had ever seen—pinched nose, sunken cheeks, pale, nearly translucent skin, but corded muscle evident under the skin and the same skin-tight uniform. She had shaved her head, but not recently, and stark black stubble stood out on her scalp.
That's when things got very strange. A purple, cloudy haze drifted through Tabitha's field of vision. "What is that?" she asked, but no one else seemed to react at all to the violet fog. Tabitha's adrenaline spiked, and she fell back into a ready stance, not sure if she was about to be attacked and ready to flee if she was. The mist grew thicker, obscuring everything, and eventually hiding it entirely. She held up her hand and couldn't see it until it was mere inches from her eyes.
Then shapes started to form from the purple clouds, making images, new colors. Small actions, like tiny vignettes acted out by players on a stage, but some of the players were people she knew. A vision of Schwartz firing a large gun into a crowd of silhouettes. Her own hands, covered with blood, the woman officer at her feet. Neva being carried away by a mob. The pirate ship trading weapons fire with an unfamiliar ship, swarmed about with fighter craft. Flashes of even shorter scenes she didn't have time to make sense of.
Then a flash and the purple haze drifted away faster than it had appeared. Tabitha stumbled in place before catching herself and rubbing her eyes. What the heck had just happened?