Paradox : Two

Paradox 

She didn’t understand it. He had just… gone. He had just committed suicide, and with a casual toss of a grenade he had jammed the doors so that she couldn’t come after him. She wanted to scream for him, take the time to mourn, but she knew he might hit her if she did. Somehow, from the dead, he would reach out and smack her hard across the face for “panicking in an emergency situation.” That was how he put it.

Viza started through the door sobbing and shaking so violently she could hardly stand. She couldn’t make it, couldn’t go on. People were dying around her. She saw awful things, things that she had never believed possible, horrors that made her nearly faint. But her nightmares had steeled her to that sort of thing. Those terrible nightmares that raged every night.

Her comlink buzzed. She gripped it in her hand, struggling to breathe. There were pale, spongy bits of bloodstained flesh caked under her nails, staining her suit. Her arms felt like rubber from swinging the dull blade of her vibrosword through armor, and her heart continued to race painfully from somewhere inside her throat.

She pressed the button on her comlink, gasping for air. There was that man, Carth – his eyes were steely and his air was impersonal, if not a little angry.

He didn’t introduce himself this time. “Where the hell are you? I’m tracking you through the life-support systems, but it only tells me that you’re alive. Bastila’s escape pod is away, and you’re the last surviving member of the Endar Spire. We can’t wait for you much longer, so get your ass on the move.”

She only nodded, swallowing an enormous wad of cold spittle and fear bile. He was gone, then; she felt as though she were being suffocated.

She had to get out. She had to get away.

The last surviving member of the Endar Spire? Viza suddenly felt very alone, and she also felt her chances of living slipping away from her quickly and easily. She didn’t walk carefully though the halls anymore for fear of alerting her enemies. She ran, and she ran hard, killing those who confronted her with power and with speed, merciless. “I WANT TO LIVE!” she would scream at them as she killed them, drove her sword through them, and she would scream, scream, shaking that body on her blade like a banner. “I WANT TO LIVE! I WANT TO LIVE I WANT TO LIVE!”

She was crying by the time she came to the last room. Carth buzzed her at the last minute, warning her of the danger inside. Two dozen Sith were in the next room, trying to block the escape pods from any more potential escapees.

“Are you close?” He sounded breathless. The air he blasted through his nose caused awful static.

Still unable to use words, she nodded frantically and wept.

“Find some way to kill them. And be quick – we have to leave, and now.”

After some panicked searching, she managed to overload a power conduit on the other side (God knew why that was an option – perhaps on some occasion they expected a battalion of Sith to be standing right next to it). It killed them all but one, who wept as she brought a quick death to him. The others stank like barbequed sausage. Some deep, hidden part of her wondered what they would look like underneath the armor, roasted alive, but she dared not check, and pushed through the door, falling sobbing into the arms of a stranger.

It had to be Carth Onsai. His grip was firm and powerful. His fingertips were rough and callused against the exposed skin on her arm. “Pull yourself together, we have to get out of here.” She looked up into his face, which was handsome but stony. It was that hard determined look which sent her sprawling into the escape pod, beside another survivor who was wrapped in linens. She could not see their face, but felt a swelling relief nonetheless.

Viza didn’t say anything to them. What could she say?

This explosion was the worst, throwing the both of them against the wall. Carth stumbled in, slamming the hatch shut and thrusting himself towards the escape pod’s consol. “Dammit,” he said, and that was all – but the meaning was clear enough. They probably weren’t going to make it.

There was a sickening lurch as they were detached. Viza started to scream, and suddenly they slid out on a belch of fire, spinning in the atmosphere and free-falling. Gravity pulled at her cheeks, made her stomach flip. Blood rushed to her head; they were upside-down and falling. Falling. Down into the abyss of unknown, to certain death. The ship behind them exploded – the force ripple pushed the escape pod even faster. It spun through the atmosphere almost like a child’s yoyo. Viza screamed so long and hard that she saw stars, and all the while the mound next to her was motionless. The person inside only breathed.

“Shut her up, for God’s sake, I’m trying to fly!” Carth barked, irrationally calm, sweat shining off his dark and unshaved face.

A hand snaked out from the mound of linens, and finally the world went black for Viza.

When they struck earth, it was decided that it was probably for the best, because when they pulled her from the wreckage the back of her head had been split open like a nutshell.

-fin