💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~smallbird › writing › novaseven.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 11:04:39. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-03-21)
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(original prompt: "mech pilot who just met the weirdest guy and needs to talk about it")
Nova Seven didn't per se wake up—you didn't fuck around with *falling asleep* in a mech, so she was on three different kinds of stimulants—but her focus sharpened itself back to attention from spacing out.
For a moment she couldn't tell why. On the back side of this asteroid where she was keeping watch, crouched in the sun's shadow, there was fucking nothing to look at. Rocks of various sizes, the black of space, distant stars, that's it. Honestly she probably *could* sneak a quick nap or two; it's not like base had the resources to monitor every pilot's biometrics for their performance reviews, even if they wished they could.
But—no cockpit alerts. Nothing on the scanners. Radio silent; no signals even from passing satellites.
Hang on. Hang on.
She'd taken it for a star at first, a white fleck against black, but it was larger when she looked back, an irregular shape drifting in the dark. Not just a shape—
A spacesuit?
Shit. Instructions didn't cover this; she was supposed to keep radio silence until the given time and only monitor, but it was coming *right at her*. No propulsion, and how the fuck would someone get here in EV? She almost instinctively stood to do—something.
Probably this was a stimulant panic. She had to remember that; she didn't have to do *anything*. All odds were that it was an empty suit that had gotten jettisoned for one reason or another, or the corpse of some unlucky sod floating in the biggest grave in the universe. The latter would be *gross*, but not something she had to deal with.
There was nothing to be worried about. So it couldn't be the anomalous spacesuit growing inexorably closer that was giving her cause to tap her foot insistently against the flooring, or gnaw on her cuticles.
She hoped it'd go over her head or just hit the ground, but—damn. It was really coming in right at her head. Once it was done, though—she could just chill out until end of mission.
Closer. Closer. Almost there. Seven couldn't see through the helmet at this angle, turned away from her—maybe for the best, if it was a corpse. But as it came within spitting distance, it started to turn—and at first Seven jerked back at catching her *own* reflection in the shiny surface of the faceplate.
But—only for a moment, because in the turning helmet she could now catch what was inside—a face. A woman's face, haloed by soft pale green braids, so peaceful-looking that she could be asleep.
And then the woman's eyes snapped open, black as night in space, as she pressed her hands against the cockpit window. And she opened her mouth and said—
---
"Come *on*, Senna, what did she say?"
Senna rolled her eyes. "It was a *dream*, Ell, and I might have found out if someone hadn't dumped a cup of cold water on me."
Thela, to her left, shrugged, and swung her feet under the cafeteria table. "You were going to be even later than you already were. I figured I'd give you a fighting chance against your record of demerits."
"Yeah, yeah," Senna muttered. "Anyway, the point is, it was weird, but not as weird as Ell's sleeptalking about her romantic fantasies. Who is it this time?"
"Hey!" Ell said, reeling back, but the others knew blood in the water when they heard it, and on a station as small as this, gossip was the main local pastime. Senna was just about to voice some guesses of her own when her voice caught in her throat.
There, just having entered the cafeteria—
Technically, she'd never seen the woman before. Soft, pale green hair framing her face in twin braids, chestnut-colored skin, and eyes as black as night in space and dressed in a sleek new-issue uniform, following on the heels of one of the COs.
Senna couldn't forget that face if she tried. And she couldn't forget what she'd said, either:
"I missed you."