Remember The Rock

[Gemma Muradi]

Spoiler: Music

The expanse. An ocean, otherwise known. Vast. Endless. A stretch of emptiness. Of blackness. And it didn’t take a poet to know it or express it. It didn’t take many adjectives or definitions.

Space was space. Naked. Darkness if starlit, for the stars were far apart, and the planets and moons in between were rocks and stones, pebbles at best. Like rebels in a nest.

The captain of her ship thought in the cockpit. The vessel was in the trenches, drifting between the barren blocks of an asteroid belt. Just as well. The ship’s captain was a belter, and these rocks were like leaves in the wind if the ocean was a forest.

Chatter in the freighter. Operators at their stations, speaking of systems and coordinates, like music. Then their captain chimed in. “Cut terash for one thousand meter. Match vector. Ready the drone.”

Freighter slowed in the zone where her quarry was predicted to be. Objects in space looked so still from a distance, from up close even, but space was as relative as time, and these stones were not moving slowly.

They all looked alike on the surface, but a pair of eyes and the mind behind were certain that she had found it. She zeroed in. Honed in. Coordinates given. Ship in position. You’re here. I know it.

Like finding just one fish in an ocean. A nail in a stack of nails. The search area was limited to this position thanks to systems and the persons behind them. I will find you. She promised as she observed the perimeter beyond her window. This, I know.

The ship slowed, that armed assault light salvage freighter, but words were words. She was Grippa. No more, no less. Perfect for her designation. She could find, she could fight, balanced in weight, like a good blade in a good hand.

Time to dance. The Captain stifled a grin as her ship found purchase in the distance amid the asteroid field. One was lifeless, the other silent, quiet as night, as the abyss defiant. Eyes peeled, lips split, Captain commanded. “Launch the drones.”

So the drones were launched from the chasm and into the cavern. Survey drones, sensor beacons, fitted with long-range sensors and communication rigs, designed to find whatever it was that was hidden as bidden.

As they turned and searched, the Captain of Grippa waited with patience, drumming her fingers on the armrest as she sat at the helm of her cockpit. Come in, beratna. If he could listen, if he could hear her, he would answer her as surely as a Force-user.

Yet Captain Muradi’s internal monologue was responded with nought at all. Oh well. She felt one side of her lips stretch and quiver, deciding whether to quit. Fuck it.

“Ready da grapple. Put us on the deck.” Gem commanded, beckoned her companions, in what slang of language was known. Landing coordinates laid in, landing struts came next, for the facility in the distance.

Attempts to hail her friend had already failed. Her target was no starship, no space station even, but a complex atop or within an asteroid. Gemma’s voice fell silent, but the noise of Grippa would grip the very void at that moment as the drones had found it.

“Du sheru da burn sequence. Let’s get ‘im turned.” She rotated her fist in what functioned for a bridge, and grinned. Got you, kopeng. The ship descended upon the asteroid, all alone in the middle of a void, lining adjacent with the station on the surface beyond. The Rock.

 

[Gemma Muradi]

Spoiler: Music OOC

Some time since she had last seen it. They had an artificial lake back on Nauvina Station, back home in another place in space, in the Osarian system. But they didn’t have oceans.

She remembered the last time she had laid eyes on the sea. What planet was it? For some reason, at that very moment in time and space, she could not remember its name. But the waves...

Oh, she remembered the waves. How they crashed into one another. How they danced. Sometimes violently. The moments in between, as gently as a sweet dream. Almost put me to sleep.

Back then, back there on the sand, outside the city, but just outside, like where she sat, with knees curled up to chin, marked some separation between structure made by intelligence and what was made by nature. Some poetic shit in there somewhere, ke?

The sea was pretty to see to say the least, blue as a gem, but Gemma Muradi always preferred the blackness of another ocean. Space… To sasa deting imim showxa. The final frontier, they say. The ocean that holds the oceans. It held her gaze that moment today.

Starward. Starbound. Stars roamed overhead, beneath her boots, surrounding everyone and everything. She saw the ocean of water with her naked eye. She saw the ocean of nothing from behind a viewport or, at this moment, from behind the visor of her helmet. The ocean that holds the rocks.

The planets. The moons. The space stations. The asteroid stations.

The Rock.

“Open it.” Captain Gemma commanded one of her crew. They stood outside the structure made by man. It loomed over them, but it was a pinprick in comparison to the stars and the vast emptiness above them, all around them. The ocean.

“Door no budge. Don’t know if stuck but no kom open, Captain.”

“We see bout dat, ke?” She flicked her head. It was all that was needed for her crewman to fetch his equipment and get to business on the entrance to The Rock. “Crack it like an egg." She crunched her fingers into a fist for effect.