In the middle of next week.

Posted on Fri Feb 5, 2016 @ 7:32pm by Captain Maritza Soran

1,020 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Pangaea (Wrap up)
Location: Soran's Quarters
Timeline: MD11 1300

::ON::

The first thing to punch through the shroud of sleep was the throbbing. Maritiza's head hurt. Hadn't hurt like this since the celebratory bender she'd had after denouncing the symbiosis committee on their very steps, making a very public spectacle of the whole damn thing, and had been bought drinks for almost twenty four hours solid afterwards.

She cracked and eye open and stared at the dark room. That wasn't so bad. "Computer," she rasped out. Her mouth was drier than desert. "Lights." A sudden supernova lashed out and seered itself across her retinas and she squeezed her eyes shut too slowly. "Down a bit. To 2 Per Cent." the light all but vanished. It was far more comfortable at barely above pitch black. She could see well enough to make out the indistinct shapes of any hazards. And she had to get out of bed.

She pushed the covers back. She didn't remember getting undressed, but she must have done it at some point. She glanced over to her desk. Her uniform was in a pile next to her chair. The various hyposprays she had had hidden around the room were also now in a pile under the desk. Had she really taken all of them? Fuck.

"Anna?" she asked the room. "Are you here." Had she dealt with her hallucinations for good. That much anti-psychotic should have burnt a hole in her brain. After a minute of nervously checking reflections, she decided no-one was going to answer.

She'd done it. She'd got rid of the hallucinations. Okay she had the hangover from hell, but she'd done what she'd set out to do and finally shut that part of herself down for good. "Yes!" she punched the air. And immediately regretted it, as the room span around her.

She grabbed the edge of the bed, and waited for the spinning to stop. "Computer. What time is it?"

"Thirteen hundred hours," the cultured female voice replied."

Fuck she'd slept a lot. At least she wasn't going to miss what was nominally her shift, even if the actual work rarely managed to fit inside the designated six hours. "Do I have any messages?"

"You have six missed calls and two messages from the Counselling department."

"Well they can go piss in the wind." She had no desire to pick old scabs with the counsellors, even though it would be standard procedure to get a psych exam after losing two crew.
Her mouth was worse than dry. She had morning breath that was conducive to growing non-carbon based life forms and she stank like she'd been rolling naked in urine. Considering her lack of clothes and a distinct lack of need to empty her bladder, she might have been.

SHe checked her bed. It was dry and unstained, though it stank of her quite badly. Time to shower. She wobbled through to the shower, and asked for a mixed shower. See liked the sensation of steam as well as the deep massage a sonic shower offered. She'd unbound her braids at some point and her wet hair plastered itself to her hips. There were tangles in it, worse than she'd normally have after a night with her hair loose. She worked conditioner into it and got the worst out with her fingers.

Suitably scrubbed, she left the shower reluctantly, and brushed the mirror free of steam and got a shock. Through the mirror she could see her back reflected in the blackened glass of her shower. There was something marked on her back.

She pulled out a hand mirror she kept for plucking eyebrows and turned her back to the mirror.

"What the hell?"

It was hard to make out all the details in the tiny hand mirror, but she could see the big picture. And it was a big picture, stylized and abstract made of dozens of sweeping curves and lines that seemed to end in points and thorns. It stretched the full width of her shoulders and swept down from her heft shoulder to her lower back and continued down the back of her right arm to her elbow.

When did she get a tattoo? Why did she get a tattoo? Especially one that big. She knew these days they didn't actually use needles as was done historically, and would do very big designs in a single sitting, but surely there should be redness and swelling or oozing or something. This thing looked like it had been there a while.

She walked back into the main cabin in a daze, scraping the black hole of her memory for what she had been doing last night. But she had nothing. The last thing she remembered was Anna fading away.

She turned on her terminal, and called up her personal messages as she started to brush out her hair.

The brush froze half way down.

The message was from the future. Two days away. the one after even further. "Computer what day is it?"

"The current Stardate is 67575.07"

Maritza swore. It was nearly a week later. She couldn't have lost an entire week. People would have come looking. Okay, she hadn't exactly made friends whilst she was here. But the 2XO couldn't exactly disappear. "Computer have I been asleep for a week?" she knew she couldn't. Not with a bloody great tattoo to prove otherwise.

"No. Your last sleep cycle lasted for six hours and fifty four minutes."

"Computer, what have I been doing for the last week? Why has no one called me for duty.?

"Compassionate leave was claimed on stardate 67557.47. Sensor records show that you have not left this cabin since then."

"Have I had any visitors?"

"No."

Maritza started tugging her brush through the remaining tangles again. Somehow, she had taken a week off work, and at the very least, gotten a tattoo, and hidden all the evidence. If there was anyone on this space station that knew how to fudge a sensor log, it was her. Except she couldn't remember any of it.

What the hell had she been doing?

::OFF::

Maritza Soran
2XO/Cheif of Strategic Ops

 

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