Chapter Text
When Gale woke in a brightly lit, sterile-smelling, enclosed space, he had no idea where he was. He searched his memory for any scheduled medical appointments that might explain his predicament, but nothing came to mind.
His brain felt like mush and his vision was bleary. His breathing was laboured, his throat raw and burning as a tube was being retracted since the instant he regained consciousness. Had there been an accident?
The last time he had experienced such profound confusion was when waking up in a private room at Cromwell Hospital in London, just after the explosion. Yet, that had been a decade ago, and surely a disgraced biologist-turned-science teacher for disinterested highschoolers had no reason to find himself in another catastrophe of that magnitude.
An automated voice droned on, almost drowned out by the roar of blood rushing in his ears. It had that distinctly clinical, persistent cadence of a medical professional, rising at the end of clipped sentences as if waiting for a response he couldn't provide. Gale couldn't make sense of a single word.
Panic surged as the auditory prodding was met with physical movement above him. Blinking rapidly to clear the haze, he realized a mechanical arm was descending toward him, equipped with an unidentified tool. He tried to shield himself, only to find that he couldn’t move his limbs.
As the tool neared his face, Gale began swaying his torso with all the strength he could muster. The momentum was enough to send him tumbling from what he assumed was a rudimentary medical bed. There was no grace to the fall; his body felt unnaturally dense, like dragged down by a heavy pull that made the short distance feel like a plummet from a great height. He landed hard on his right shoulder, a strangled grunt escaping past gritted teeth as pain pulsed through him.
The impact barely loosened the grip of the tight bag cinched around him—he recognized it now as a sort of heavy-duty sleeping bag. But as the robotic arm hooked the fabric to haul him back onto the table, the counter-friction gave him the leverage he needed to squirm free. Soon, Gale was on all fours, eyes wild as he scanned for an exit: out of reach of the robot, out of the room, and preferably out of whatever twisted lab he was confined in. Finding a way out proved nearly impossible. Like an elderly man struggling to recall the passcode for a retirement home exit door, Gale felt utterly at a loss, and trapped. His vision was still swimming, the room around him smeared as if seen through frozen glass.
He'd never classified himself as claustrophobic before, but as he desperately crawled around the perimeter of the room, he swore the walls were narrowing in on him.
With a hurried and feeble sweep of the hand, he wiped the heavy beads of sweat threatening to fall into his eyes and went back to methodically dodging the robotic unit that rolled after him, chirping for him to "stay calm" (of all things!). Save for a narrow entryway leading to what he assumed was a bathroom, based on the curtain partitioning it, there was no other door in sight. Exhausted, Gale let himself slump against the nearest wall, wincing as the back of his head struck something hard and cold. His hand shot up to investigate and his heart leaped with joy and renewed hope when he recognised the rung of a ladder.
He wasted no time gripping the metal. Gathering his remaining strength, he hauled himself up and began to climb toward escape, his body weighted down by a leaden exhaustion.
A hatch stopped his ascension at the summit.
He pushed—nay, hammered—against it until it jerked upward and out of his way, granting him access to… freedom? He didn't care anymore as he extricated himself from the maws of the narrow passage, overheated and covered in sweat. Safely out of the mini-torture chamber and far out of reach, he peered back down.
Below, the robotic voice called after him with monotonous persistence: “Dr. Dekarios, you should not leave the sleeping quarters before your health assessment scan is complete.”
Gale scoffed and slammed the hatch shut. He closed his eyes and rolled onto his back, panting from the exertion, but feeling a surge of sweet relief coursing through his veins.
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Gale lay there for a few minutes, catching his breath and feeling appreciative of the fresh breeze from the AC on his damp skin and sweat-soaked t-shirt. The unit hummed so deeply he felt it reverberate into his bones, which was definitely weird, but his subconscious chose to push that information aside for now. No one had yet barged in to snatch him back down to the lab—or the “sleeping quarters,“ as the robotic voice had called it—so that was a start.
As the erratic rhythm of his heart gradually tuned back to its usual, calmer tempo, he raised a hand to sweep away a few locks of stray hair that had been bothering him. His fingers continued their way up his forehead and into the thick mass of his hair, combing through the strands. His eyebrows furrowed as he realized his fingers were moving through long, tangled curls instead of his usual, neatly trimmed waves. His other hand shot up to assist the first, and he realized with astonishment that the long hair was matched by—and matted to—a just-as-substantial beard.
As confusion arose once more, he opened his eyes and froze. Terror seeped through his veins like cold poison, numbing his limbs and halting his breath. It wasn't the appearance of his slimmed-down face, nor the wild state of his unkempt hair and beard reflected in the wide panel of reinforced glass that had stunned him. It was the spectacle beyond it. The glass belonged to a porthole, offering an open, unobstructed view of the cosmos.
The silence was broken by a loud gasp as he brusquely remembered to inhale, instinctively reaching for the handle of the hatch next to him and gripping it with both hands. For a moment, all sense of rationality was extinguished from his mind.
In that instant, the sole thought passing through his head was that the glass would break, and clutching that handle was all he could do to avoid being vacuumed into the cold, dark void of space.
Gale closed his eyes once more—forced them shut, really—perhaps to separate himself from the absurd reality of waking aboard a spaceship. Alone.
Instead of slipping away, the truth tethered itself to him, and he could only flinch as an incessant chorus of memories assaulted his every synapse.
After a few minutes, or perhaps a few hours—he couldn’t tell—he opened his resigned, tired eyes and stared back at the void, scanning it as he fell into his thoughts. His scheduled awakening from the medically induced deep sleep meant that he would reach the orbit of the Tau Ceti system in two weeks.
In two weeks, the second phase of his assignment would begin, one that he shuddered to think would decide the fate of Earth and the billions of living beings on its gradually freezing surface.
After that, well… he preferred not to think about what awaited him at the end of his mission.
Dr. Gale Dekarios, born and raised in London, was now lightyears away from his home planet and everything and everyone he had ever known. He’d been only thirty-two years old when he’d last seen the blue skies of Earth, smelled its fresh air and seen another human face.
Now, he was thirty-six, slumped on the hard steel floor of a cramped spaceship. He would have been forty-three back on Earth, with another decade of survivability guaranteed before everyone started to inexorably die of intense cold and food scarcity.
A loud, broken sob escaped his lips, but he didn’t care. Why would it matter anyway, if he cried like a child. He was alone up here, and no one would hear his blubbering. He was on a Hail Mary mission with no way back home, and he was owed at least this much for the suffering he was bound to endure.