Kilaeda - The First Days, Part ll
D. Finch
((After the Crash Landing - Delinides lll))
There was an incessant beeping, and she opened her eyes. The screen in her escape pod was cracked, jittering warning sounds at her through a red glow. It was hard to understand what was going on at first, her thoughts jumbled in her mind.
Her head rolled left initially, her eyes blinking to find focus. Then it rolled right, to the sight of singed machinery, pierced through the soft padding of what was once the inner walls of the pod.
By the time she had found full consciousness, she painfully forced open the door, falling out onto a field of red grass as pain seared through her left elbow. The ringing sound of the pods systems overloading filled her ears, vomiting sparks and smoke into the air, along with the nearby rustling of trees on an alien wind.
Once on her feet again, Laeda floundered through the canopy in the direction of the other pod. But quite like the wind being punched out of her lungs, she almost collapsed again at the sight; the exterior of their shared pod had clefted, and neither one was anywhere to be seen. She screamed their names as best she could through an anguished hoarse voice, her attempts unavailing.
It hadn’t been a week before drones arrived on the surface and the hunting began. She had tried reassembling the pods, her arm in a makeshift sling, with what little she could remember of the things her mother had taught her about engineering, switching on the emergency location transmitters with the hope of connecting with any of the other colonists who had made it to the planet unscathed. But there had been no response, no sign, no inkling of there being others there with her.
So she ditched it, leaving behind a message etched into its front for her brothers—or anyone else who had survived—on where she was heading. A direction far away, she hoped, from the marching boots of the Borg.
Days became weeks, weeks became months. Long and exhausting. A constant fight for survival; the planet, she had come to understand, was rapidly being demolished and devoured by the cybernetic army and their mountain-sized machines for its resources. What little chances she had to sleep or bathe, in creeks and caves and forests, were stolen away from her, squashed by the industrial destruction caused by the very monsters who had already ripped her life apart in every other way they could.
She became an expert in hiding and foraging; and better still, a doyen of drone behaviour. But no garnered resilience nor wisdom led her to her brothers. All that time alone left her toughened, yes, but miserable too. She found it hard to accept the sacrifices her parents had made. A frustration deep beneath her skin that festered sometimes into anger. Anger over their choices. Anger that her fathers bravery was too Klingon, that her mothers compassion too Human. Anger that she kept in a tight barbed ball, buckling with strain.
She used that anger to stay alive—even in her darkest moments, when relinquishing herself to the Collective seemed the easier thing to do.
((Some Years On - Nighttime: Borg Drill Site, Delinides lll))
She ran. As fast as her legs would allow her. Across the main deck, around the gigantic drilling machine, in the direction of the supplies she needed. Her heart was thumping away at her ribs. Her lungs felt as if they’d been filled with dry ice. The drones were preoccupied with their tasks, melding and welding components together, in a recurring pattern that she’d observed for days on end from an unseen vantage point.
And so she ran, coming to a screeching halt at the container filled with blunt objects, weapons and other useful items she wanted. Her hands rummaged through it at lightning speed, when suddenly everything lit up in a glistering white; she turned on her heel to an explosion, sending nearby drones in all directions, followed by muffled tintinnabulated shouting.
That hadn’t been part of the plan.
She grabbed and threw whatever she could over her shoulder, ready to escape to somewhere, anywhere. She’d zipped off in one direction, when another explosion sounded, sending her hurtling backwards into the air and against a black mechanical wall with a hard thump to the back of her head.
She faded in and out of consciousness. Blurred movement between her lids…impossible to really make out. Voices blended, as if underwater, weaved in and out of clarity. Except for one woman's voice.
Pittman: There’s no time, we’ll take the girl with us.
More muffled arguing; the hair hot and licking at her skin. It was a battle to stay alert, to keep her eyes open, to make sense of the situation. She knew it was people, real people, and yet everything inside of her wanted to run away, to find safety.
Pittman: Hugh, Mendora, I won’t tell you again, damn it! Pick her up.
Two shadowed figures hovered over her…hands reaching down.
Then...darkness.
((Present Day - Nassau, Ma no Umi))
She had never thanked Pamela for saving her that day. In part because she blamed her for it happening. Had she and her team not turned up at the drilling site that day, had they not been bodacious enough to attempt to scavenge from a Borg stronghold, she would have still remained on the planet, building on her supplies, surviving, searching for her brothers.
Pam had told her that her death had been an inevitability. That Delinides lll was heading for its “meteoric end”. She had told her that much of the surface had been scorched, reduced to rubble and ashes, purloined of everything it had left, and that Laeda had been living on borrowed time and just couldn’t see it yet.
Yet still a part of her resented her for it.
At first, she had to spend many weeks in Ugami’s under the care of the medics and nurses there. She’d wake from terrible nightmares, sweating and wailing. Nightmares of contorted drones, piled high. Corpses laden with sparking bits of technology, wires and spikes protruding from their flesh.
Other times it was of the pale and ghostly figures of her brothers always just out of reach, on her peripheral, or in the distance. Dreams that never really went away.
But a lot of time had passed since then. Nassau was now her home, even though the people on it perhaps would never know she thought of it as such. Instead all they saw was a dour girl with no friends, who spent all her time working.
She had found it difficult to open up to others—so the work, whatever that entailed, was her solace.
Though she made exceptions now and then.
fin & tbc