Stardust
Operation: Galfax—SciFantasy
Ros was staring at a man. Probably the last thing she thought to find in a massive biostasis tank. A biostasis tank she had been told she wouldn’t be working with behind a door she was informed was specifically off limits. She had only been on-planet for five days, working for DEM, Co. for two.
Not a great start.
She back-peddled toward the exit, hoping no one had seen her enter, all the while trying to pry her eyes from the pale suspended form in synthetic biometric fluid. He wore nothing but neoprene shorts and countless sensors, his face almost entirely concealed by a respiration device. Black hair wafted around his head in a halo, softly swaying with the motion of his breathing.
She slammed her elbow into the door jam in her distraction.
So graceful, Ros.
The hall was blessedly empty and she recovered quickly, straightening her lab coat and raking loose strands of hair back into her messy bun.
For another moment she stared at the open door, the keypad activated by her keycard.
Shit.
There was a nondescript plaque over the keypad which simply read GALFAX. No room number, nothing else to identify the lab. There would be a record she had entered. How could she have been so stupid?
Fuck.
She pulled the door closed. Maybe they didn’t check entry logs?
It didn’t matter, she heard footsteps and tried to make it look like she was doing anything other than staring at a door she had specifically been told not to enter.
“There you are Rosaline. Dr. Mirrium has been waiting in Lab D…” Ketrinn, Director of Projects, froze and met Ros’s wide eyes with speculation. “What are you doing here? This area is off limits.” She turned Ros away by her upper arm like a mother would a misbehaving child. “I thought Dr. Mirrium told you. That hall, that lab specifically…” Ketrinn squeezed Ros’s arm tighter for emphasis. “That lab is strictly off limits.”
They passed several other doors, ones with no keypads, and no name plaques. More mysteries. More questions. They turned back down the main hall, Ketrinn leading Ros the entire way until they stood outside Lab D. Before Ketrinn released her, she turned her roughly so Ros was forced to face her.
There had been a handful of moments over the last couple days as Ros got used to her new responsibilities, where she thought Ketrinn had been a sweet, perhaps even affable woman. As Ketrinn stared her down now, Ros was forced to redact her earlier opinion.
“I don’t know if you went in there, and if you did, I don’t want to know what you think you saw. What I do know is if Dr. Mirrium finds out you know...well let’s just say, you don’t want him to find out.” Ketrinn released her arm, holding Ros for a moment longer with burning eyes. She left Ros pressed against the cold stainless paneled wall, her heart threatening to tear through her ribcage.
Ros was distracted. She was existing on very little sleep from a night dwelling on mysterious men in biostasis tanks and a mind full of questions. The last thing she wanted to do was focus on biochemistry. Ketrinn had her cataloging samples from the last off-planet mission under a very watchful eye.
Her mind kept going back to the man in the tank. What was DEM, Co. hiding? What was Dr. Mirrium up to? And how much did Ketrinn actually know? Ros could see the outline of his thin frame in her memory, his bare feet suspended a foot from the bottom of the tank, his arms hooked up to a multitude of tubes and wires. Perhaps vitals? Fluids? Nutrition? It was clear he was in some form of stasis sleep.
Ketrinn stood from her desk, startling Ros from her daydreaming. She gave Ros a dirty look before stepping out into the hall, leaving the lab in thick silence.
From the hall Ros heard a stifled scream.
What in the?....
She let her scrappy, off-world instincts take over and ducked under the lab table just in time. Between the gap in the legs she watched three men in heavy black armor dip into the lab, their automatic plasguns cradled against shoulders.
Fuck.
They did a quick visual sweep then slipped back out into the hall leaving Ros to count her racing heartbeats. DEM, Co. was not what it seemed. It was clearly not the savory establishment it touted itself as being.
After what felt like an hour, but was probably only a few seconds, Ros dragged herself from the safety of the lab table and crept to the door. Peeking out, she found Ketrinn’s lifeless body in a pool of blood.
Double fuck!
She checked both directions again and risked stepping out, running in the general direction of the locker rooms where her personal effects were stored. She didn’t make it far before she heard movement down another hall. Muffled whispers, the squawk of a communication device. Panicking, she turned for the nearest door, praying her keycard had access. Her hands were shaking so violently she fumbled with the handle as the lock clicked open causing her to nearly fall into the room. She almost slammed the door, but at the last possible second she slowed, pushing it the rest of the way with nothing more than a soft click as the lock engaged.
She turned, pressing her back against the door that had likely just saved her life and met the familiar sight of a man...in a biostasis tank.
Triple fuck.
It was quiet in the hall. Too quiet. She wasn’t sure how long she stood there, back pressed against the steel door, heart thundering its staccato rhythm through her eardrums. It was long enough that she noticed the biostasis tank control panel appeared to be accessible using a similar keypad as the door. If she was lucky, which was debatable of late, she just might have access.
Once she freed herself from her anxiety and the surface of the door, she rushed across the room to the keypad and held her keycard up, but paused.
Not the smartest move, Ros.
Nagging at the back of her mind was the previous day when she hadn’t thought everything through before entering this very room. Whether second guessing now was smart, as black clad soldiers with automatic weapons were stalking the halls, was beside the point.
Ros pressed a hand to the surprisingly warm curved polycarbonate tank and glanced up at the man’s softly shifting form. From this distance he looked startlingly young, not much older than herself. The gentle curve of his eyes and slender features indicated a mix of Old World Earth heritage or perhaps Outer Ring Colonels. She stared at his closed eyes for another moment before she turned back to the keypad.
She didn't know who he was or where he was actually from. Perhaps he was the last original human being in the universe. None of that mattered at the moment. She couldn't leave him. He was a living breathing man and likely had no idea what was going on outside this lab.
She pressed her card to the sensor, but nothing happened.
Of course.
Staring at the dark screen didn’t help. She backed away, searching along the wall for some other possible means of accessing information on the man in the tank, but there was nothing. In fact, there was literally nothing. The lab was practically empty other than the biostasis tank, the access panel, and a single empty lab table to the right.
Her gaze wandered back to the man’s face in peaceful slumber.
“How the hell do I get you out of there?”
His eyes opened.
Uh, NOT GOOD!
She took several steps back, head reeling with a new type of fear. Was it possible he could have heard her? She didn’t know enough about auditory dynamics, but it seemed unlikely through three inch thick polycarbonate and submersion in a few hundred milliliters of biometric fluid.
He found her with his disturbingly blue eyes, penetrating into her like plasgun munitions. An arm lifted, his palm pressed to the inside of the tank. Ros had a sudden overwhelming urge to place her own hand over his. Before she indulged she heard voices, loud shouts from just outside the door. Plasguns firing.
Shit! Out of time!
The last thing she wanted to do was turn her back on the man in the tank who was now very much awake, but the door flying open made her decision for her.
A startled, staggering Dr. Mirrium stumbled in, leaving the door wide behind him. From her vantage, Ros could see what looked like three dark lumps littering the hall.
“Rosaline.” He was bleeding, leaving a trail behind him with a dark stain down his usually crisp white lab coat. “Rosaline...” He shuffled forward until his hands were on either of her shoulders. "You have to get him out of here. Please.”
Dr. Mirrium was a middle aged man. Practical, itelligent, more than a little secretive. He had taken Ros under his wing immediately when she started at DEM, Co. only a few days ago. While professional, he possessed a fatherly quality. He was looking for a protégé and it was clear from the look in his eyes that he had selected one.
“What?” Ros could usually keep up, but she was struggling. Lack of sleep combined with erratic adrenaline spikes were clouding her otherwise sharp cognitive processes.
“Operation: Glafax.”
A devastating chill wicked up her spine as she felt the man in the tank’s eyes on her.
“You have to…” A hand slipped from her shoulder and Dr. Mirrium listed to the side as he started to lose his battle with blood loss. “...use my keycard. It will activate the evacuation process. Get him out of here. Get him off-planet…” He stumbled to one knee and Ros followed, trying to help him to the ground as best she could. “They can’t have him. They can’t know what he is.”
“Why? What...who is he?”
Dr. Mirrium seemed to fall in slow motion onto his back. In his withering consciousness, he managed to retrieve his keycard from an inside pocket and handed it up to Ros.
“Stardust.” He set his head back and closed his eyes, struggling to breathe. “I found him. Frozen. In cryo stasis.” He took a few more shallow breaths. “On the Galfax asteroid…off-world mission.”
Ros looked over her shoulder to confirm he was still there in the tank, still glaring helplessly as he floated in his weightless prison.
Operation: Galfax. Stardust.
She rushed to the keypad and scanned Dr. Mirrium’s card, activating the control panel and setting off a strange sequence of audible tones from behind the main control panel.
Grinding brought Ros’s eyes back up to the man as he ripped the tubes and wires from his extremities then continued to the suction cup sensors carefully adhered to strategic locations on his chest to monitor vitals.
Cool liquid washed over her shoes. The biometric fluid rushed out from drains at the bottom of the tank and flowed over Dr. Mirrium’s still form. When her attention returned to the man in the tank she could see he was standing, or rather, struggling to stand with his hands pressed against the interior of the curved surface and his knees bent at awkward angles.
As the fluid levels dropped he ripped the respiration device from his face and tried to speak, but Ros couldn’t hear him clearly through the thick tank material. Instead she stared at his moving lips, mesmerized by the muscles in his neck shifting just below the surface of his skin. Pale, alabaster skin, such a drastic difference from her own bronzy brown flesh.
She had seen people with genetics that indicated heritage from Old World Earth. She had administered to test subjects who were direct descendants from several of the original colonies, but Old World Earth was destroyed. It had been gone for a few hundred years. These people were only descendants of the original human race, but him?
The tank sank into the ground and his hands followed until he was down on one knee.
“Are you okay?”
His crisp blue eyes traveled the length of her, curiosity touching the corners of his lips before he met her gaze.
More commotion from the hall. Ros reached down and took his upper arm, helping him to his feet, but he wobbled, unable to stand up straight. Exactly how long had he been in stasis?
Smooth, Ros. Do you plan on carrying him out of here?
It wouldn’t matter for much longer. Two more men in black clad armor were inspecting the lifeless lumps just outside the lab, their attention eventually falling to Ros, and the practically naked, drenched man struggling to stand on his own beside her. Plasguns were aimed.
For a brief moment Ros reflected on everything that had come before this moment. Her unexpectedly simple childhood. Life with her parents on Ward 8 Terra-colony. A proficiency in biochemistry that led her to secondary education at the University. Finding a coveted on-planet job at DEM, Co.
She closed her eyes, anticipating the pain of plasma slugs ripping through flesh. Instead the atmosphere around her seemed to bend, buckling in on itself. Electricity tightened until the hair on her arms stood on end.
Shots fired.
When she opened her eyes, rather than being dead, there were several conical masses of plasma munitions suspended in a curtain of liquid oxygen, pulsing with ripples of blue light radiating out from each projectile.
As if this wasn’t miraculous enough, the slugs rotated, turning in various directions until they were pointed back at the two plasgun wielding men before exploding in the direction they had come. They pierced armor, tore through flesh, spraying blood against the door frame the men had just come through. They crumpled into unrecognizable mounds of sticky black carbon fiber, weapons clattering to the linoleum, still slick with biometric fluid.
Ros was too scared to look over at the man who was now standing fully upright beside her. His arms cocked forward, palms pointed in the direction of the bloody mess of shredded human remains.
“That was...unexpected.”
She heard a warm chuckle beside her, smooth and velvety. “If the good doctor is correct, there will be more, and they’ll be looking for me.”
Curiosity got the better of her. She glanced over and found his blue eyes. They were glowing with a strange otherworldly light, causing goosebumps to bloom down her arms. She was well past the point of being scared of who he was...what he was. He was right, and she still had questions that couldn’t be answered if they didn’t make it out of this place.
They stepped past the lifeless masses, rushing through the maze of halls to the locker room where Ros grabbed her personal effects, including her travel pass to get them back to her dormitory. She frantically rummaged through other lockers and found him a shirt and pants which were entirely too large for his wiry frame. Then they slipped out the staff entrance at the back of DEM, Co. and into the artificial twilight of evening on Specter Z.
“So why exactly were you in a biostasis tank?” Ros had held out asking questions until they managed to make it safely to her dorm. Now she watched as his eyes traveled across the surfaces of her sparsely furnished dorm designed to house only a single human occupant.
“Stevv Mirrium didn’t think I was cooperating.” He spoke with a poison laced tone.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s a long story.”
“We don’t have anything else to do until I figure out how to get you….wherever you need to go.” She fumbled with the buttons on the coffee maker. At least they could have something to drink. Her meager food supply was a problem they'd solve later.
A short laugh slipped past his smirking lips. “You’re right.” He sprawled out on her sofa as if he hadn’t just been in a state of stasis only hours before. “He found me on Galfax. An asteroid with a dangerous trajectory toward Earth. I was part of a mission sent to figure out how to destroy it before impact, but Stardust experienced some…malfunctions. Cryo stasis was never released. I was frozen when Mirrium found me. Stardust made it safely, but if it hadn’t been for him, I’d still be in stasis on Galfax.”
“Wait...Stardust?”
“Yeah, my ship.” The pieces fell into place. Dr. Mirrium had called him Stardust and she hadn’t entirely understood. “My mission...the ship, Stardust, was designed with the sole purpose to fly to Galfax, an asteroid. Literal stardust.”
Clever.
“That doesn’t explain why you were in the biostasis tank at DEM, Co.”
“No, I guess it doesn’t.” After a pregnant pause, he took a deep breath then pushed himself up, resting his elbows on his knees. “Mirrium and I discovered my...gift. Apparently, I can manipulate energy fields. It must have been a side effect of whatever material Galfax was made of. I couldn't do it before the mission. He thought it might have something to do with being from Earth. I was helping him try to figure out how to harness it to produce a form of usable power, but…”
He was quiet for an uncomfortably long moment.
“But?”
“But, I learned he was using it—using me to try and create some kind of weapon. I don’t entirely know what he was doing, but it had to do with making explosives. I was being used as a battery to charge some kind of....”
The eerie blue glow ignited within the depths of his eyes before fading away.
“My name is Taryn, by the way.” He extended a hand in her direction but she wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it. “Do you guys not shake hands here?”
“Shake hands?”
He shook his head, his lips breaking into a warm grin that showed his teeth.
“Nevermind.” He stood from the sofa and took a timid step in her direction. “And you are?”
“Oh…” She blushed, realizing that she hadn’t introduced herself. “Ros...Rosaline, but I go by Ros.”
“Well Ros. Thanks for saving my life.”
But she wasn’t entirely sure who saved whose life. All she knew was that he was different, special, and that she had an almost unbearable need to fulfill Dr. Mirrium's final wish to get Taryn off this planet.
“So, I’m confused.”
When are you not confused, Ros?
She shook her head at her inner monologue before continuing. “The trajectory of Galfax?”
“Earth. Pre-colony.”
“Wait…”
“I was frozen for...a while. Mirrium informed me that what you guys call Old World Earth doesn’t exist anymore.”
“But that would make you like...what?”
“Six hundred years old, give or take a century.” Taryn smiled wryly, holding the bottle of poor grade imitation wine across to Ros. “I was shocked when Mirrium told me the year. Honestly, there's a lot I was shocked about.”
She took the bottle and rather than pouring into her glass she took a long drag straight from the rim. They had been talking for hours, nothing should surprise her anymore, and yet...
She managed to secure transport tickets to Ward 6, but only for him. She hoped whoever infiltrated DEM, Co. wouldn’t be looking into the other employees. Or if they did, they wouldn’t trouble themselves with a girl who had only worked there a few days.
“So what exactly were you doing working with Mirrium?” His curious eyes seemed to trace the lines of her face.
“I managed to get a job working for DEM, Co. after getting high marks at the University on Ward 8 where I grew up. It’s pretty prestigious to get a job on-planet, so I didn’t really look into who I’d be working for. Sounds crazy but…” She shrugged.
“Only about as crazy as a man being frozen for hundreds of years floating in space on an asteroid headed toward a planet that no longer exists.”
“And almost as crazy as knowing that same man can literally manipulate the electro-magnetic fields around him to stop bullets,” Ros added with a grin.
Taryn ran a hand through his thick messy black hair. “So you’re not coming with me tomorrow?” His voice carried a solemn note.
“I…”
“I get it. I’m a stranger. You’ve helped me so much already.”
He pushed himself up from the sofa across from where she sat with crossed legs on her bed, crammed into the tiny space they had occupied for the last 24 hours.
“I’m just worried you haven’t seen the last of the super soldiers.” His expression sank into one of pure melancholy.
“There was only one spot available with the next transport in three days. I thought it would be best to get you off-planet as soon as possible.”
As if on cue the familiar sounds of excessive shuffling and shouts filtered under the thin gap at the bottom of the door and both Taryn and Ros froze.
Fuck.
“Maybe someone’s just having a scuffle in the hall?” Ros reasoned with her inner monologue aloud. She knew she was wrong before she finished the sentence.
A girl can hope.
She and Taryn were side by side in a flash, facing the door, ready for plasgun wielding “super soldiers” as Taryn had so appropriately labeled them.
The tap on the door didn’t come from a hand. If Ros had to guess she’d say it was the barrel of an automatic rifle, but she didn’t particularly want to find out. Instead she pulled Taryn toward the tiny kitchenette, pressing them both into the pantry nestled around the corner from the entry.
She heard the door ricochet off the wall as it was slammed open; heavy booted feet stalked in. The sofa slid away from the wall. The coffee table overturned. Another soldier rummaged through the small closet next to the lavatory. Ros and Taryn had seconds before they would be found.
They faced one another in the small space, his chin at her eye level. She couldn’t see his expression in the dark, but she could see his eyes begin to glow. The familiar stretching and condensing of energy began to pull the electricity tightly around them.
The door to the pantry was thrown open, but before the soldier on the other side could react, Taryn was moving. He caught the soldier in the jaw with a well placed uppercut and sent him reeling, his plasgun pointing safely straight up to the ceiling.
Everything was moving too fast. The soldier Taryn punched was already recovering, bringing the barrel of his plasgun level with Ros’s head. For another brief moment she reflected as she prepared herself for her inevitable death.
Twice in 48 hours has to be some kind of record.
The second soldier stepped toward them, but they both seemed to slow, coming to a stop as if submersed in solidifying resin.
“We have to go.” Taryn grabbed her wrist and yanked her out of the pantry and toward the door.
They managed to get half way down the hall before the soldiers broke free, their boots slapping the concrete floor behind them. Shots fired. Taryn turned and just as he had in the lab he stopped the plasma slugs in midair with nothing but his extended palms. This time, rather than sending the slugs back he left them suspended like a shield and pulled Ros after him down the hall and into the stairwell.
They raced down eight flights of stairs, exploded out the emergency exit and across a small green space. They darted between a row of dorm buildings, crossed an open walkway, careful not to run into any of the other people milling about. Down a small transport lane between what looked like warehouses. Taryn pulled her into an empty storage unit attached to the side.
They waited. They were easily a few kilometers from the nearest transport station. Even if they were able to get there, Ros couldn’t guarantee they could get any kind of transportation secured. It would be private companies with expensive premiums. Not the free public transport tickets she had already secured for Taryn. She would need to get credits to get them on to a private transport, and she realized that any means of obtaining credits had been left back in her dorm.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah. Not the best situation here.”
“No, I mean, I left my ID at the dorm. I could get us on a private transport with credits if I hadn’t been so fucking…”
Taryn took her shoulders to face him “Don’t. This isn’t your fault. You’ve done more for me than you should have already.”
He smiled and leaned forward, pressing his forehead to hers causing her stomach to do somersaults. He smelled like her shampoo and sandalwood. His breath tickled the hair on the nap of her neck as he leaned to whisper in her ear.
“It just feels like I’ve known you forever.” His lips brushed her cheek.
Shouts erupted from the alleyway.
Out of time. Always out of time.
“I’m sorry I got you into this.” There was regret in the set of his jaw, hesitation in his eyes.
“You didn’t really get me into anything I wasn’t already a part of.”
“They’re after me. I should have just let them take me in the first place.” He grasped the handle.
“Wait, what are you doing?”
“I’m going to test Mirrium’s theory.” His grin never touched his eyes.
He closed the gap between them, kissing her gently, sweetly, then lunged for the door before she could do anything to stop him.
From her vantage she watched in horror as he walked casually toward the soldiers, arms raised. They didn’t shoot; instead they approached with extreme caution, one restraining his arms behind his back.
Now, what the fuck do you do, Ros?
She was about to step out when she felt it. Taryn was drawing in the electromagnetic energy from the air. Everything seemed to thin as it collected around him and the half dozen soldiers in the alleyway. It solidified into a translucent bubble surrounding them, ripples of eerie blue energy wafting away in waves. It was like looking at them through the surface of water—a shimmering blanket of electric madness.
It continued to build, solidifying and pulsing until she saw him glance in her direction, his eyes glowing that vicious blue until he closed them and leaned his head back, his face toward the artificial sky.
The explosion was unexpectedly massive. It ripped the walls off the storage unit’s frame, tore away splinters of metal, showering debris across the transport lane. It threw Ros against the corrugated steel exterior of the warehouse, leaving her dizzy and disoriented. Smoke clouded the street enough that she couldn’t get a clear view of where Taryn had just been standing. All she could see was...nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing.
Taryn.
After a desperately long minute she pulled herself to her feet, brushing dust from her scraped and bloodied arms.
Taryn.
She stumbled forward until she could see the remains of the soldiers. Pieces of mangled flesh. Scraps of black armor and carbon fiber. The twisted metal barrel of a plasgun.
Taryn.
Had he blown himself up? He said Dr. Mirrium had been using him to create an explosive device.
Taryn!
Her mind couldn’t accept it. He was just there in the storage unit with her. Stopping plasma slugs in the hall of her dorm. Sharing a bottle of fake wine on her sofa. His piercing eyes, his warm arms, his lips...so soft, so...
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
She turned in the direction of his voice. A voice she had only known for a paltry 24 hours, but seemed so damned familiar.
“I guess it worked, huh?” His pristinely clean face was alight with a victorious smile that she struggled to see as her eyes filled with tears.
“Seriously?” She smacked his shoulder hard. “I thought you were dead!”
He bent over, laughing, hands on his knees.
“Shit,” she said, placing a hand over her racing heart.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I honestly didn’t know if it would work.” He took her hand and pulled her toward him. “We should get off this planet before they send more super soldiers.”
She nodded, finally accepting they were in this together. She leaned forward to wrap her arms around him, burying her face against his warm chest.
“No more blowing up.”
“No more blowing up without letting you know first.” He wrapped his arms around her and squeezed her tighter against him, tucking his chin over her head. “We figure things out together.”
Together.
Her face still pressed into his chest, she took in a deep breath of him. The smell of sandalwood and ozone and...
“Together.”
He chuckled as he pushed her back to look into her eyes. His Old World Earth features wouldn’t be easy to hide. They would have to figure out a lot of things. How to get off this planet. Where they would go once they did. How best to keep one step ahead of the “super soldiers” that were likely still hunting them.
As if reading her mind, he said, “I’ll turn anyone who finds us into stardust.”
Stardust.
Dr. Mirrium hadn’t realized how perfect that name actually was.
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