EVE Fiction

I quickly put on my pants and a shirt while my love slowly turns away from the window, she's clearly as shocked as I was just a moment ago. However, my shock was quickly replaced with something else...determination perhaps. I decide not to bother with shoes and underwear; the buzzing alarms do their job at conveying urgency.
I head out the door and towards one of the round transparent alcoves offering a better view at the exterior of the station. A brief glance around tells me that I'm not the only one doing so, although most people are running around, with their faces displaying varying levels of distress. I notice my love is following behind me, although more hesitantly.

When I look outside, I can barely believe my eyes. The Sansha ships have already destroyed or disabled the few defending ships outside. I see them, or pieces of them, rotating eerily through the vacuum, and together with the creepy Sansha ships, the scene gives me the shivers for a moment. Then I feel the warm arms of my love holding me, and I'm grateful for that, because I may have seen a Sansha attack before, but this time, seeing it with my own two eyes and nothing but a pair of transparent nanoalloy sheets separating me from the carnage outside makes me feel a bit...naked. Too close for comfort.
Then I notice something that makes my discomfort fade away, and I'm intrigued instead. The attack patterns are changing. That by itself is not surprising, as it is quite logical to change them after the defenses of the station have been disabled, and it looks like they've done that by now, but what the patterns are changing into fascinates me so much that I forget about being worried about the destroyed sentry guns.
I see the lasers of the Sansha burning away the armor of the station at seemingly random spots with surgical precision, until only the bare structure is exposed. Then I see some Sansha cruisers, Phantasms they call them, crashing into those spots, slamming into the station like thistles slamming into trees during a hurricane.
I've never heard of them doing this before, and I'm wondering what the point of this suicide attack is. One would think that the Sansha would know that it is hardly an efficient tactic; there aren't enough cruisers to damage the station severely, even if the battleship joined them. They are just removing firepower from the attack. "If only they had a supercarrier..." I joke inside my head.
However, as the dust and debris scatters from the impact points, I see something, and I'm in awe. The Phantasms have suffered little damage from the collision. I had heard that these ships are sturdy, but this...wow. I am so impressed that it takes a few urgent tugs from my love to alert me to a message being relayed through the speakers.

"Intruder alert! All citizens and non-essential personnel are to head towards the nearest emergency shelters immediately!"

My love clearly wants to follow those instructions, but I hesitate and look towards one of the Phantasms that penetrated the station. This could be my chance.

Just as the pleas from my love have convinced me to come with her a set of lasers striking near our location needlessly encourage me in doing so. We run down the corridor hand in hand, away from the focal point of the lasers. We are running for about a minute when a jolt throws us off balance and we tumble to the floor. We are still for a moment until a slight, short-lived breeze informs us that while some air has escaped into space, the remaining structure is holding, and the force fields have sealed the breach, at least for now. Well...not just the force fields, I'm guessing.
I look behind me to confirm my suspicions, but a mixture of vapors, gasses and disabled lights shrouds the area. A number of fast closing sirens draw my attention away from the impact point and we hurry to the side of the corridor to make room for dozens of hover carts, carrying squads of emergency response troops. I am impressed by their response time, even after I realize that the station commander must have noticed what the Sansha were doing and send the troops here right after the lasers started hitting the armor.
The sound of weapons fire coming from the impact point, about 400 meters from where we are, can be heard long before the last cart passes us, and as it passes I feel like the slipstream begs me to follow it.
"So close...I've never been this close..." I think as I walk back to the central axis of the corridor.
I stand there for a while, trying to gauge how the battle is proceeding, until I've made up my mind. I look towards my love, and she looks like she already knows what I'm going to do. The look on her face, a strange mixture of desperation and resignation, makes me feel sorry for her, but not enough so that it makes me change my mind.

"I have to see." I say apologetically.

Ever since I learned about the Promised Land, the name that Sansha Kuvakei gave to his domain in Stain, and his utopian dream, I have had these questions. And as I learned more, some questions were answered, some remained and new ones took the place of the ones that were answered. The same happened when I exchanged some thoughts with Nation sympathizers. A lot of them indeed seemed to be much like the idealist Kuvakei claimed to be, wishing to bring peace and unity to humankind.
At the same time, a lot of those opposing Nation bring forth arguments that mean less and less to me. They want to protect the free will of humankind, and I do not believe in free will. And even if I did, I might want to sacrifice it for cluster wide peace and unity.
Some say that Nation should be destroyed because of all those they kill in Kuvakei's name, but how is that any different from any of the other empires, that are now once again locked in a war that may never end?
Others speak of cultures, or traditions, or emotions, but are those worth having when they stand in the way of a united humankind?
They even speak about the preservation of humankind itself, as if the current form of humans is the only right one, the true pinnacle of life. We might as well fight evolution itself. And is humankind, as it exists today, not the greatest threat to itself? Even if Nation's citizens and slaves cannot be considered humans, they might be better than humans, perhaps even more...humane.
Over time, one question became more important than others: Is a utopian cluster really Kuvakei's goal, or is it just a farce, a scam to enslave humankind to his will?
Sadly, there are not many ways to be sure. The journey to Stain is dangerous, but I was considering going there anyway, in an effort to end my depression, to have a goal. The other way to be sure is to plug yourself into the fabled Sansha hive mind somehow, but I was not even sure it existed, and it seemed like a farfetched possibility...until now.

If I would ever find a connection to the hive mind, I would find it here, now. And so I search the bodies of Sansha's soldiers. The feeling of being so close to answers is more than enough to make me forget about the threat the Nation cruiser poses.

After a searching for a minute or two, I find what I'm looking for. At my feet lies a Nation soldier, his helmet broken, the side of his head exposed. Curled partly around his ear is a half translucent rubbery antenna, with a color resembling quicksilver. One end is attached to a blue plastic implant sticking into his ear canal. I kneel down and I try to pull it out, but it's stuck. I try twisting it, after a second or two I hear a short faint hiss and I feel it move a little. Then the antenna suddenly curls up into a coil. It startles me, and I let go. I look at the thing for a moment, it does not move anymore. I reach out again and now I can pull it out easily.
I stand up and hold the end of the antenna between my thumb and index finger. The coil is a bit flexible and it stretches under the weight of the solid blue part. Suddenly an adrenaline rush affects me; I feel my heart beating faster. This is it. I have reached the end of the diving board and now I'm looking into the deep dark below. I'm anxious, and I hesitate. Will the water quench my thirst for answers, or will I fall into an abyss, drowning, with no chance of escape? Possibly both.
I look over my shoulder and I see my love still standing behind the wall. She is looking at me and I spend a few moments just looking at her. I don't have to say anything; she knows how I feel.
After I've calmed down a little, I return my attention to the implant. I grab the blue end and gradually push it inside my ear. Nothing happens at first and just as I'm starting to wonder if I should do something to activate it, I feel a sensation resembling a dozen thin anesthetic needles spreading out from inside my ear canal, and the antenna curls around my ear. It does not hurt, or I don't think it hurts. Anyway, the sensation is gone before I can even consciously react to it, and it does not matter as the next sensation washes over me.

It works! I am connected! And I am at peace.
I start to smile. I have my answers. I am at peace.
I climb the stairs and make my way to my love. I am at peace.
She smiles at me hesitantly as I smile at her and hold her head in my hands. I am at peace.
I break her neck and let her body fall to the floor.
I look at it and keep smiling.
I am at peace.



I wake up. Or I was already awake, but still trying to dream. Trying to pay no attention to the world outside my head, but at some point becoming so conscious about the fact that it exists that you can no longer ignore it. It was a arrhythmic shadow play, a Morse code of light and darkness on my still closed eyelids that made it impossible.

So I open my eyes, during a period of shadow. I look outside to see what the source of the shadow play is. It's a Nightmare battleship, on a regular approach. Sounds coming from the kitchen tell me that my love is alive and well. It was just a nightmare.
I close my eyes and lay my head back down on the pillow again. I chuckle softly at some of the silly aspects of my dream; the rather low-tech representation of the hive mind in my dream, kind of like the retro headsets that were in fashion not too long ago, and the improbable tactic of Sansha cruisers ramming the station.

Then a sadness comes over me as I realize something: I still have no answers. I’m not at peace.
I find myself wishing that the dream was real.
I am awake now, and this is my nightmare.

Engrossing story. The use of the present tense can often be difficult to pull off, but you do it well. Likes all around.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this, The tone did sway back and forth a bit from concise simple descriptions to "flowery" metaphor but I can't say if that was intentional or not. Regardless it seemed to serve the narrators twisted views and did not harm the piece as whole.