Safe Pasage
If I die, the legacy goes with me.
Visk opened his eyes.
He stood atop a stony cliff overlooking a vast desert. A cool breeze washed over him, his coat blowing in the wind as a gust picked up and kicked some dust into the air. Above him, he heard rustling as pine-green leaves floated off the scattered canopy of a gnarled tree.
The tree was important. He didn't know why, he just knew that it was.
In his hands, he held a small, featureless gray box. Its sides were flush and sealed, with no apparent way to open it. Whatever was within it remained a mystery, though he felt an odd certainty that the contents of the box were the reason he was here.
He turned to face the ledge he stood on. A small gravel pathway wound up the side of the cliff, curving upward and approaching the tree. He glanced over his shoulder, taking in the view one last time, then sighed and began to follow the path.
After a few minutes, he reached the top. The cliff was actually a spire, enclosed by the path on all sides as it spiraled upward. At the top, there was a plateau with a cluster of gravel and, of course, that tree.
The tree. It was important. It had to be.
He looked up at the flora above his head. It almost looked like an olive tree, its trunk twisting to the side, branches splitting out into a thin, round canopy. Its bark was weathered, like it had looked time in the eyes and lived to tell the tale; its leaves almost looked like that of a cypress, conifer nettles dangling down from the branches in curtains of green livery.
So we meet again.
The thoughts weren't his own. Or were they? He couldn't tell.
Visk glanced down at the box again, frowning. Something had to be done here. Something he'd been dreading.
He knelt down in the gravel, set the box beside him, and began to dig. Using his hands as shovels, he grasped palms full of soil and put it to the side. The sediment below the surface felt cold and wet, contrasting the sunny dryness of the air around him.
After a few minutes, the hole was big enough. He picked up the box and placed it inside, then brushed gravel over the top of it until its surface was barely visible. And then until it wasn't visible at all.
All the while, he felt the judgement of the tree as it towered over his prone form. He wasn't sure what the meaning of the tree was, or what it represented, but he felt the judgement of that too.
"I won't let you down," he whispered into the wind, desperately hoping that was true.
Consciousness came to him in blinks and spurts. At first he heard a buzz in his ear; slowly, he became aware of the sound of his own breathing, and the feeling of cool air on his skin.
Soon, he felt the pain, a dull ache resonating through his body. His scales were agonizingly itchy, and the muscles in his limbs hurt where they attached to his skin.
Where was he?
His eyes opened for a brief moment. Light flooded into them; it felt terrifyingly bright, like someone had just woken him up with a flashlight directly pointed at his face. He winced and shut them again, tight.
Gradually, he reopened his eyes, squinting slightly as they adjusted to the brightness. He was staring at a metallic ceiling, cold white lights embedded within its surface. He was laying down on some sort of flat, stiff mattress, and a subtle beep sounded every second or so somewhere to his right.
Mustering his strength, he was just able to move his muscles and lean up to get a better look at his surroundings.
The mattress appeared to be part of a hospital bed. He lay nude in it, under a blanket, and his whole body was pockmarked with blue scabs, clusters of dried blood interrupting the smooth patterns of his biolights. Two of his arms had seemingly-empty IVs attached, and an array of electrodes carpeted his chest, attached by a small cable to a machine in the distance.
Interestingly, he was on his back, with his tail tucked between his legs. He wouldn't have slept in that position himself; someone must have put him there.
As he glanced over to the side, he caught a glimpse of who that "someone" was.
It was a strange individual, someone - something Visk had never seen before. They were small, about a meter and a half tall if he had to hazard a guess, with turquoise skin and a vaguely salamander-like appearance. Their large, finned tail, small legs, and webbed digits suggested an amphibious nature, which was confirmed by the gills running down the side of their neck.
They had a feminine appearance, and wore baggy brown pants and a silky white shirt. Rather than ears, they had six small fins on their head, webbing between each; those fins were perked up at the moment, complementing their facial expression of something between surprise and curiosity.
"You're awake!" the mysterious figure exclaimed, her voice soft and friendly.
Visk blinked at her. "Whah...urr yoah?" he slurred, spit still caught in his throat.
"What am I?" the figure asked. "You really don't remember much, do you?"
Visk shook his head. He didn't try to speak this time, instead opting to try to swallow the spit and clear his throat a bit.
"Well, I'm a phosian. We're from an ocean world, in case you couldn't tell, and...uh, we're part of the Compact. That's the gist of it, I guess."
Visk smacked his lips, trying to wake his facial muscles back up. Eventually, he felt sensation return to his mouth, and he used his lower arms to pivot himself over toward the "phosian," grunting with pain as his sore legs bent.
"Don't overexert yourself," the phosian suggested. "You got pretty beat up back there."
"From the swarms?" Visk mumbled.
"Yep," the phosian nodded. "Y'know, you lost a lot of blood from that. You're lucky we got you back to the med-bay here when we did."
"Where...is...here?"
"We're aboard Scaving Vessel 817, part of Taro's scaving fleet. You remember Nari, right? I'm one of her crewmates."
"Right. How long was I...out for?"
"About a day and a half," she replied. "I'm Mala, by the way. Nari spoke highly of you, so it's nice to finally meet you properly."
Visk nodded in quiet agreement. "Where...is she?"
Mala chuckled. "She's up in her room, brooding again."
"Brooding?"
"Moping."
"I know what 'brooding' means," Visk sighed. "Nari is brooding?"
"Yeah. She tends to do that."
"She didn't seem like the type when we were...uh, running for our lives."
Mala laughed. "Okay, that's not a good indicator for how someone acts when outside of a life-or-death situation," she clarified. "Nobody mopes on adrenaline."
Visk tried to shrug, but the action pulled on his IVs. "Can we get these things out?" he winced, glancing pleadingly at the phosian.
"Blood transfusions finished hours ago. I just kept them in for if you needed painkillers, so if you're feeling alright we can take them out."
Visk frowned as considered the soreness seeping through his limbs. "I've been through worse before," he said. "I think. You can take them out."
"Alright by me," replied Mala, giving an awkward little thumbs up with the three digits on her hand. With that, she walked up to the liralen and began to unfasten the medical equipment attached to him, starting with all the electrodes on his body.
"Nari left some clothes for you in here," the phosian mentioned as she plucked one of the IV needles from Visk's skin. "You'll have to deal with your lower armpits being exposed until we get to Nexus, but she's the only member on the crew with the same number of limbs as you, so it's the best you're gonna get."
She pulled out the other needle and quickly applied bandages to the sites of both. Afterwards, she turned around and began to walk toward a sleek glass doorway, which slid open in two segments with a mechanical hiss. "I'm a biologist, so I'm not too offended by nudity, but you should probably get dressed before heading out of here. I'll wait for you in the hall."
With that, she gave a brief wave and waddled off, glancing back toward him as she passed through the doorway.
After Visk had made it out of bed and gotten dressed, he'd stepped through the same doorway and found Mala standing in the hallway beyond.
Visk wasn't sure what he expected the inside of a spaceship to look like. Cramped? Full of technology? Whatever it was, this room wasn't really it.
The hallway was thin, mainly just connecting two other doorways together. It was square-shaped, roughly two meters on a side, with a dark carbon composite floor, slightly dented to improve traction.
The right wall wasn't really a wall. Embedded in its surface was a glass doorway leading to an elevator shaft, and beside it was a steel catwalk, connecting the hallway to another hallway across the ship, and providing access to a ladder that ran up and down parallel to the elevator. Visk glanced up and down; he couldn't quite tell how many floors lay above him, but the bright "3" written on the far wall implied there were at least 2 below.
The left wall had panels extruding diagonally from its top and bottom, which provided lighting and ventilation respectively, and gave the entire structure a vaguely octagonal shape. Across its surface, there were metallic bars that seemed to serve as handholds. He'd noticed them in the med-bay, too - they seemed to be ubiquitous on this ship. He wasn't sure what they were used for.
The walls were made out of some sort of plastic compound. Besides all the paneling, the left wall also contained a large window, which Visk curiously stepped over to and looked out.
Unsurprisingly, he appeared to be in space, or something like it. The inky blackness outside certainly implied he wasn't on a planet, at least. He couldn't see any stars, though, which seemed at odds with everything he recalled about space travel.
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, a scene began to present itself. The first thing he noticed was the clouds of bluish-purple, faintly spreading against the void like random noise; as he watched, he could almost swear they were moving downward.
After a while, he started to notice something else; a flicker on the edge of his peripheral vision, something he couldn't quite tell the color of. No matter where his eyes darted, he couldn't get a good view of the flickers, but they were there, faint and ever-present. Just like the void crystals Nari had shown him back in the ruin.
"Where are we?" he asked.
"Hmm?" replied Mala. "Oh, right. We're in a slipway right now."
"Pretend I don't know what the hell that is."
"Right. Matter can't travel faster than the speed of light through space," the phosian explained. "It can, however, move between stars at a reasonable speed, if it travels through something that isn't 'normal space.'"
As she spoke, filaments of glowing white energy descended from the top of the window. Visk squinted, trying to get a better look at the strange glow, just as an enormous ring of some silvery material entered his view. It was spinning, though he couldn't quite tell the radius, and the filaments were connected to it, drifting off seemingly into the fabric of spacetime itself.
By the time his jaw had hit the floor, Mala continued. "The Precursors found a shortcut."
"The slipways are a network of pathways beyond regular spacetime. They're very spatially compressed compared to the rest of reality, so if you travel in the slipways, you travel much further in the regular universe, on the scale of stars."
"So, they're like a portal?" Visk asked.
Mala shook her head. "Not really. They're more like a river; if you walk on the shore, you'll move pretty slowly, but if you build a boat and follow the flow, you can move much faster. Main difference is that there's no flow here; you can go both directions at the same speed."
Figuring he understood it well enough, Visk sighed and glanced wistfully back out the window. The ring had disappeared by now, and the last filaments on the other side were slowly giving way to that void he'd seen before.
"What're they made of?" he asked.
"Good question," Mala responded. "We, uh, don't know yet."
"What do you mean you don't know yet?"
"Well, I mean that. Those rings are made of an unknown Precursor alloy. The rest of it's empty space. Space itself here is cylindrical, so if you look with a telescope, you can actually spot yourself from behind. That's all we know so far, and if you try to reach the filaments or the flickers in the background, you'll just end up right where you started."
"And you just fly through these, not knowing what they are?"
"I'm a science nerd. I don't like it either," Mala frowned. "But yes, we use them for interstellar transportation. There aren't any better options, really."
Visk pondered that. Even just a week ago, returning to civilization had felt like an unattainable goal, and now that he'd reached it, it felt as if he'd only scraped the surface of the questions this universe had to offer.
Do you really not know how...different this place is? What a find it is?
Nari's words about the ruin he'd lived in repeated in his head. With a species so powerful that the rest of the galaxy was still catching up, what did something "different" imply?
What had he found?
His thoughts were interrupted as Mala sighed. "Don't mean to interrupt your existential crisis here, but the captain called. He wants to talk to you," the phosian said, gesturing to the elevator. "I can take you."
After the pair stepped into the elevator, Mala set it to go all the way up to the bridge - floor 7. Once its doors opened with a loud ding, Visk stepped out; Mala stayed in the elevator, giving the liralen a brief wave as she disappeared into the floor.
Contrary to his expectations for a "bridge", there weren't any huge windows or spectacular views into space. Instead, the room was a modest, rectangular thing, with a complex sphere of technology to one side, and a wall with a couple doors to the other.
Visk peeked through the first door. Behind it was a fairly standard office, with a desk and a couple chairs. A figure sat at the desk, someone Visk could only assume was the captain.
He was clearly a reptile of some kind, with brownish scales and yellow eyes. Visk could almost believe he was a fellow liralen if not for the keratinous horns growing from his head, and the fact that he only had two arms.
He wore a featureless blue suit and jacket. One hand was buried in a pocket on the jacket; in his other hand, he held a mug of coffee, steam billowing from its hot surface. As Visk approached, he sat back in the chair and glanced up at the liralen.
"Please, take a seat," the captain said, gesturing toward a chair on the other side of the desk. Visk pulled out the chair and sat down, frowning as he bumped one of the bruises around his scabs.
The liralen glanced up at the captain. "Forgive me for asking, but who, and...what are you?"
"No need to apologize," the captain replied. "Nari filled me in on your situation. I'm Vakko Varin, captain of this ship. Pleased to finally meet you, Visken."
"I think I just prefer 'Visk.'"
"Righto," Vakko nodded, taking a sip of his coffee. "Since you asked, I'm a farong. No relation to your species, despite our similarities in appearance. Bit of a cosmic coincidence," he chuckled.
"By the way," the captain continued, "thanks for the heroism down on Genli - er, wherever you were, the other day. I know Nari very much appreciates it, and corporate is thankful for your efforts too. We don't like losing employees."
Oh, right. This is a company ship. I don't work here.
"How's she doing?" Visk asked, trying his best to ignore the obvious question. "Nari, that is."
"She's doing alright," Vakko replied. "A little shaken, but who wouldn't be, aye? She'll be glad to hear you're awake."
"That's good to hear."
The two sat in silence for a moment, Vakko scratching his chin as he stared down Visk. He briefly nodded and took another sip of coffee, then raised a brow as he looked the liralen in the eyes.
"Since I'm sure you're curious, we're currently on our way to the city of Nexus," the captain explained. "Capital of the Compact, if that name rings a bell. Although you're not an employee at Taro, I'd be more than happy to at least get you there. I won't kick you off at a random fuel stop."
Visk smiled, though he wasn't quite sure what "the Compact" was. "Appreciate it."
"Ha, it's no problem," Vakko chuckled. "I know you're dealing with amnesia of a sort, so if there's anything I can help explain about the state of the galaxy and what's going on, I'd be happy to. I've been flying around it for a long time."
"Thanks," Visk nodded appreciatively, sitting back in his chair. "I've certainly got a few questions."
Vakko raised an eyebrow at the liralen. "What would you like to know?"