Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
MARIA
"This is freaking me out a little bit," I said, my heart pounding in my chest as I stared out at the ice walls of the asteroid we were encased within.
I glanced all around, seeing my feet floating down below me as I hovered in the center of nothing.
"I know it is just a projection, but it is a little bit scary as well. "
"Does this make it better?" Lyrian asked, his voice coming out of the empty space around me.
A woven basket of filaments appeared around me, with large enough spaces in between them that they didn't obstruct my view.
Straps of filaments appeared around my body, matching the physical sensation of the ones I was actually encased in.
They arranged in the form of a seat, as if I were buckled down in the driver's seat of a giant mesh hamster ball.
"Yes," I said, surprised as my terror finally tipped over the edge into full wonder. "That helps a lot, actually."
"You said your planet has vehicles. Can you describe the controls for the one you have the most experience with controlling?" he asked.
I explained the basic pedal-and-steering-wheel system of a car, and a wheel appeared in front of me, with two pedals and a floor emerging from under my feet.
The part of the round basket in front of me spread wider, forming a windshield and mirrors where I was used to, even though I could just turn and look out any side of the mesh ball without obstruction.
"But you said I'm not going to actually be steering," I said, reaching out to grip the fake steering wheel. "You said that you're going to be handling everything. This is just to let me see what is happening, right?"
"Yes and no," he said. "You're not going to be controlling, but you are going to be reacting. It's why I have the projections set up so that everything is relative to you as if you were my full size."
"I don't understand," I said. "Reacting?"
"First off, you don't have to do this," he said. "I want to be clear that I can and will handle this whole thing. If you want to spend the whole escape strapped down like the birds, you can."
"I'm already strapped down like the birds," I said.
"You have me totally immersed in your filaments, right next to your core.
The only difference is you've put up a bunch of your holoprojectors around me so I can see what is going on.
If I'm not controlling anything, why give me controls I'm used to? Won't I just distract you?"
"I'm not certain, as I haven't done this before," he said.
"But I've heard about it from members of my kind who have taken on crew from species who have evolved to have heightened reactions in times of danger.
In giving you a direct line of sight and sense as to what is going on around us, you might react to a threat before I do. "
"I'm not sure how that would work for a space battle," I said.
"Don't you have to account for missiles crossing large distances and things like that?
Don't large ships require more effort to move because of the resistance to the change in motion?
The more mass an object has, the harder it is to change what it is doing. "
"I am quite agile, and the projections on the sensors take distances into account," he said.
"And if this doesn't help, it won't hurt anything.
You won't distract me or harm our efforts.
The only harm would be from you being scared at viewing what is going on, which again, if you don't want to do this, you really don't have to. "
He was so sweet, giving me an out. I knew it was because he wanted to make sure I felt like I had a choice, not because he didn't want me to help.
"No, keep me involved," I said, gripping the wheel. "If you want me to backseat drive and ghost brake, I'm all for it. I'll be your twitchy passenger that grabs for the wheel."
I floated up in the air.
"To get synced up, I'd like it if you made the motions as if you were driving," he said. "I'll follow what you do."
I pressed down on the gas pedal, and we began to float forward.
"Cars don't have an up or down," I said, as we lifted upward to avoid a large protrusion of ice.
"We don't need that," he said. "I just need you to feel enough like you're driving a car that you react the way you would to avoid a crash."
"Let's practice braking and accelerating then," I said.
"If I push the gas pedal all the way flat, that means go as fast as possible as quickly as possible.
I'm not going to do that in here because of the jagged ice, but let's feel it out.
Every car has a different feel to it, a different tightness in the turn or the sensitivity of the brakes.
If you can stay consistent in how you react to the press of my foot, then I'll feel like I'm driving a particular type of car. "
When we got to a corner in the chasm that he had slipped through to fit into this ice-riddled asteroid, I turned the wheel to try to aim towards it.
Instead of turning, the whole hamster ball rolled, and the asteroid spun around me.
"Woah," I said, letting go of the wheel. "That's different. Cars normally just turn; they don't roll over."
"It's a more effective mode of movement for a reaction-based connection," he said. "I will take care of the direction we go. I just need you to instinctively move to get out of danger."
"Okay. Let's practice that one a bit before continuing to move forward," I said. "The whole room spinning around me might make me sick."
The next time I turned the wheel, I stayed upright, and the outside world remained aligned with me. Instead of turning, I slide sideways, the hamster ball spinning around me.
"I've stabilized your view so it won't spin," he said. "You will still feel some of the forces on your body, but I've already set up minor gravity adjustors so that any extreme changes in direction won't harm you."
Warmth flooded my chest. He thought of everything. He took care of me so well.
I gave a few experimental turns, then I pressed down on the 'gas' again. Instead of just relying on him turning, I spun the wheel, and the end result felt like I was drifting the hamster ball around a corner.
I let out a giggle.
"You're enjoying this," he said, his tone warm.
"This is fun," I said. "I know we don't know what is waiting out there for us, and it could be someone lying in wait to attack us, but... this is fun."
We drifted around another corner, and I let out another giggle.
The view changed, angling to keep the crack level with my horizon even as it jigged and jagged in ways that weren't stuck on a linear plane.
I went with it, pressing on the gas pedal, and occasionally the brakes as I got more and more used to the sensation of maneuvering a filament-built hamster ball through the uneven pathway of the insides of a giant asteroid.
"We're almost to the entrance," he said, tension evident in his voice. "As soon as we have a clear view of the stars, we will be detectable."
"Pedal to the metal time," I said. Then I quickly added in case that idiom didn't make sense. "Once we see the stars, we should go as fast as possible out of here, right?"
"Not quite," he said. "We want to clear the asteroid first. Just because we are detectable doesn't mean a hunter would pick us up right away, but they certainly will notice if we crack open this asteroid by firing up the main thrusters while still inside it."
"You say when and I'll gun it," I said, loving the illusion that I was in the driver's seat, even when in reality I was encased in the grip of a gargantuan space-faring alien whale that had created a pretend environment to take advantage of the fact that my species was good at flinching.
I could think of a lot of scenarios we could pretend to do, once we were safe.
Happiness and contentment welled up in my heart, smothering out the fear of the unknown.
We were in this together. We would get through this together.
No matter what the future held, I was not alone, because right now, my entire world wanted to love me and support my dreams.
The stars spun into view, and I pressed gently on the 'gas' moving us closer and closer to the opening. It was small, and as we got closer, it was clear there was a problem.
"We can't fit through there," I said.
"I know," Lyrian replied. "I expended some of my water reserves to build up the ice around the edges to make it smaller, so it wouldn't be an obvious place to fit. I made it thin enough so we could break through in a hurry, but that will draw attention. Give me a moment, and I will crack it open."
Neurofilaments reached out from the edges of the hamster ball as we approached the small opening, cracking off chunks of ice and reeling them back in towards me. They vanished once they touched the edge of the hamster ball.
"Are you storing the ice?" I asked.
"I'm layering it on top of me so that if they're looking over here, we might look like a piece of ice just breaking off from the whole," he said.
"We're not hiding," I told him firmly. "If there is a hunter ship waiting, we are going to follow the plan we came up with. Got it?"
"Yes," he said. "But if it goes wrong..."
"It's not going wrong," I said with the full force of confidence I didn't feel but was great at projecting.
I didn't know anything about space battles.
The idea of a plan I'd come up with after looking through the blueprints of the hunter ship I barely understood was based on a lifetime of watching science fiction, not on what it was like to be a giant space whale being hunted by cyborg whale-riding wanna-bes.
"Your weapons system is top-notch. We're going to hit them so hard and fast they won't be able to chase us even if they want to.
You want to know the number one rule of fighting on a planet where you develop a fast nervous system? "
"The first rule is always run away," he said.