No Sleep
That thought haunts you to the piloting station where you plant yourself and fall into a trance, using the experiences of this costume to keep the ship going. You zone into the job, lost yourself in the task. Hours seem to meld together, drifting into one. Buzz shoots from side to side of the massive conference room, slang you only half understand that fall together to basically mean the planet is struggling under these attacks. Without more soldiers and more pilots, they'll lose without doubt. For hours, in the back of your mind, you hear the desperation building.
Finally, after the darkness seems to have gotten even darker, though you're sure it's just imagination telling you with this fatigue it must be night time. The other pilot has returned and taps your shoulder. You raise, plotting down the hall with muscle memory guiding you to a door. It lights up: "Retinal Scan... preparing... loaded... Please scan retina."
You bent, guiding your eye into the beam before it chirps once and the door slides open to reveal a cube of a room with a bunk jutting from the wall. Seeing it, you collapse forward, exhaustion pulling your entire body down to curl naturally onto the bunk.
But, sleep doesn't come.
Instead, the decision in front of you haunts your mind. The decision to trap yourself in this form, in this gender for months sits there. It demands to be paid attention to. "If I stay here a week, be their pilot, that's enough for my part. I would have done no harm," you rationalize, but it doesn't work. The other voice in your head perks up, "A week is enough time for those samples to spoil. A week is enough time for the rest of their people to die. A week is enough time for such bad to happen."
"But, whoever owns this costume. Whoever Anyaka really is will be back in a week, she can make the choice." But, deep down, something tells you a week is too long to wait without something for these people. You gulp, trying to sleep instead of thinking in this circle, but just as you start to drift you hear the faintest sobbing from the next cube to your side. Instead of sleeping, you stare up at the ceiling until a distant ringing alarm signals you've done your sentence 'sleeping'
Heading into the hallway, you're thrust into a stream of people. "W-what's happening?"
"We've landed. We're picking up survivors," Someone tossed the response over a shoulder, tossing you a bone as the flow pushes you with them. Corridors wash in front of your eyes. You see more windows, more angles around the big, rounded blue mass you now see with a faint tinge of sadness. You can feel the grief in the air, the people all feeling a great ache for individual family members, the community as a whole, and their home itself. The ache is collective. The sadness washes through these people, it pours out into the hallway and soaks into the panels your feet shuffle over until at last, everyone spills onto the ground outside.
The air is thick, the planet a jungle atmosphere that instantly makes sense, the breeds you've been seeing on the spaceship suddenly making so much sense. At first, there's order. People spill out and head forth, gathering those who are fighters land-stationed and separating them from regular civilians. You hear a mixture of children screaming and woman weeping. No one has any good news.
Written by Picklessauce69 on 18 October 2015