Foundations and Memories

Sa’li looked around the small room that her hosts had guided her to. It was spartan. Utilitarian. Clean. Unlived in. The ship was a midsize transluminal yacht. Fairly new as far as Sa’li could tell. This was one of a dozen or so crew cabins on the secondary level. Most were empty. A soft hum permeated the space.

She stepped inside and opened a large utility panel along the interior wall. Inside she found clothing. Jumpsuits. Underclothes. An emergency vac suit in a case at the bottom. Storage cubbies along the sides. A wardrobe. She closed the door. She opened the next utility panel on the wall and a light illuminated a small restroom. This boat must have cost a fortune if the hired help get their own lavatories. She closed the door. She turned to the next wall, a single person desk was inset in the center, surrounded by smaller utility panels, a magnetised chair locked underneath. A large horizontal panel on the third wall with a latch along the top opened into a small bed, larger than she was used to. She collapsed onto the bed, the grav set to standard was more than she was used to after a few weeks on the moon, her ordeal was catching up with her, and it started in her legs.

She looked to the open door and saw the two crates she had hauled across the barren waste of that moon. The crates that her crew had died to deliver. Only the crates weren’t the deliverable, it was that little book of mysteries. And some aristo had paid significantly to get it to… her current benefactor. For people like them that coin was nothing, Sa’li didn’t need to see the executive deck to know that the owner of this ship could throw that kind of money at a whim if she decided. Is that what her crew died for? Some flight of fancy? Some kitschy collectible? She sighed deeply and stood up, walking to the door. She heaved each crate into her quarters and mag locked them under the bed out of the way. The fancy grav system was nice, but it didn’t take long on a zero-g ship to learn to always lock down everything, else it might be your end if that fancy system failed.

She opened the crate to check that her haul was still there. All that physical currency locked in place. Seems absurd, nobody uses physical credit anymore. Not unless they don’t want to be connected to whatever they’re buying. Sa’li thought about her crew. In her mind their faces melted away into the terrified distortions that burned themselves into her psyche during the crash. They were barely more than strangers, but they deserved a better end than dying to pass off some trinket between the wealthy. There has got to be more to this, but Sa’li wasn’t about to question the fortune she made on their misfortune just to get tossed out an airlock.

She closed the door to her quarters, stripped off her suit, collapsed on the bed, too pure air burning her nostrils. And slept for what felt like months.

Sa’li woke like a corpse raised from the grave. Desiccated and stiff. She stumbled to the faucet and drank like the dehydrated animal she was. There were stars in her vision. Fairy lights floating around. She couldn’t focus her eyes when she stared at herself in the mirror. Slowly the blob of flesh resolved into her familiar figure, skin caked with dust and sweat that had built up in her weeks on the moon, cuts and bruises from her ordeal in the most inconvenient places. She washed herself off with more leisure than she could have afforded in the past. The warmth of the shower stall melted through her ache and removed her second skin of grime. She felt refreshed, but not quite new. The clothes she found in the wardrobe didn’t fit quite right, but function over form was good enough.

When the door opened, the light of the hall poured in and made her squint as her eyes adjusted. All white. A little too clean. Each direction seemed to go on much longer than would be reasonable. And she became acutely aware that she had no idea where anything was, and a yacht like this was apparently too good for signs. A few doors up the corridor to her left a woman was doing something with her holobrace at an open utility panel.

“Hey! Excuse me?” Sa’li yelped, her throat still a little raw.

“She’s up! Time to collect!” The woman turned to Sa’li with a look of glee on her face, gently illuminated by the holo in front of her. High cheekbones and large bright eyes drew her in. Platinum hair pulled into a tight bun on top of her head. Her glee shifted to satisfaction, and Sa’li was put a little more at ease in the strange new environs.

“Sorry, collect what?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing. There was just a little wager on when you would come out between my comrades and I,” she typed something swiftly into the holo and closed the display and the access panel, “I won,” her smile lit up the darkness that Sa’li had been wading through.

“Well, I guess I’m glad to be of service,” Sa’li lost her words, caught in the simple ease of the moment.

“I’m Cori, mechanic. So... did you have a question?”

“Oh, yea, sorry. I’m Sa’li,” she stepped forward and proffered her hand to Cori, and saw white luminescent ink threading an intricate design up her right arm and into her sleeve, another design stretching out of her coller and up the side of her neck, “I uh, where can I get some grub around here? I’m starving.”

“I can imagine, a couple of days unconscious will do that.”

“A couple… days?!”

“Fifty-three hours to be precise. As for food, there is a galley down the hall to the left, about midway up on the right. But the Countess asked to see you in the dining room on the exec level when you woke. I can show you the way.”

“The Countess?”

“Countess Tyriel of the T’shiik Consortium, our benefactor.”

As Cori led Sa’li up the corridor to the lift, that new information settled in. Countess Tyriel was the owner of this ship. The one who she had given that book to, presumably. Sa’li didn’t know much about her. She believed she was from a different system. And she knew she was wealthy. There were people with money, like the aristos back home, and then there were the truly wealthy, and the Countess was among the upper echelons amongst the latter group. She was the sort to deal in planets and moons, not notebooks and… people like me.

“Here we are,” Cori stopped at a large arched double door, the shape being the only thing that stood out amongst the clean seamless rectilinear white of the corridors.

“You’re not coming?”

“Would love to, but I have to get back to what I was doing. Don’t worry, she doesn’t bite,” Cori turned and began making her way back down the corridor the way they had come from, she looked back and said, “usually,” with a smirk.

Sa’li turned back and found the door sliding open from the middle to reveal a lavish dining room. The colors remained monochrome with some mirrored accents mixed in. The walls were covered in intricately printed patterns that gave a sense of vastness and grandeur that she hadn’t expected to encounter in the confines of a void faring vessel. The table was constructed of what looked like actual organic wood, bright white, with luminescent grain. At the far end of the table sat the woman she had handed the delivery to, that little book in her hand. In front of her a plate with a large piece of chocolate cake in the center, untouched. To her side, a matching place setting sat in front of another chair.

“Please, take a seat,” the Countess signalled to the open chair with the cake in front of it.

Sa’li walked to the chair and sat down. The cake was moist and fragrant. The sweet buttery richness of real chocolate, something she hadn’t had a taste of more than a few times in her life. Only when her parents had been able to scrounge it up for a special event, and even then it was never quite like this.

The countess took a bite and Sa’li followed suit. The flavor sent her cascading back to her last birthday. The last time she saw her parents. Alive or otherwise. The last time she stepped foot in the bloc she grew up in. The last time she had feet on the planet she came from.

The walls of their small apartment were lined with festive colored holos. The sweet savory scent of mushroom bourguignon hanging in the air, mixing with smells of baked goods that came before. Her parents had done everything they could to make it special. They always did.

In front of Sa’li was a plate covered in chocolate cake crumbs, her favorite, even more so for how rare it was that cocoa could be found to make it. She was lucky, her parents still knew how to bake, it wasn’t something common amongst the gents.

Her parents were running around frantically gathering necessities into a bag as Sa’li stared blankly at the news holo that had taken over the wall across from her. The newscaster was talking about a conspiracy that had taken the lives of two of the aristos, Julius and Octavia Rivington, with a list of conspirators which included her parents.

She returned to the moment. Looking up at the Countess who was staring at her tenderly.

“I want to express my condolences for the loss of your crew. We never expected pirates around the moon. You should know that they were neutralized before we left orbit.”

“Thanks for that.”

“I also wanted to tell you that, for what it is worth, it was very important that I receive this,” she indicated the book in her hands, “and the lives of your crew may have saved countless others.”