Headfirst into the Abyss

“She has escaped.” It’s a man. It’s a voice that Phoebe has known and loved for years, a voice that she had accepted as if though it were her own. Still, within her drug-induced haze, three days later, it takes her brain a lot longer than usual to put the voice to the face, and even more still to put the face to the name.

“I know, Afon.” Her voice is calm only because she’s drank more pills than she can name and because she’s been needled more times than ever in her life – and that says something, because Phoebe has been everywhere in the galaxy. Or, well—nearly everywhere. Just every place habitable by humans, that is.

At yet, three days later, she cannot string her sentences together enough to sound coherent to her own ears.

She wants to say something – she strains to, but the back of her neck stings from the needles and her throat is sore because all the medicine is making her thirsty. There’s untouched glass on the small table next to her stainless bed, but she did not dare try to lift it up.

Afon knows – he always does, after so many years of being together. Without saying a word, she can count on him to understand her. Even now, when she’s not herself, he moves towards the glass and lifts sit, slowly, to her lips. It feels like she’s drinking for years. It feels like she’s just managed to single-handedly revive herself, only to die, shatter into pieces moments later.

“It’s not your fault.” He says, ever the gentle. “She would’ve escaped even if you weren’t there.” She knows. She knows. She wants to—she wants to convince herself of this.

She wants to, but she cannot, not yet.

Phoebe opens her mouth to say something – to say that she knows. To confirm. She wants him to stop worrying. Still, what leaves her is not calm words that she wanted to make. These—these are not the words that she’s used to.

“There was so much blood—“ What leaves her instead is a high, pitiful sound. She sounds strangled. “There was so much of it and it—it—she’s—she is insane, Afon. I don’t know what happened to her but our little girl is—she is—“ She was given—she was given medicine for this. She should be calm. She’s been injected enough to keep a smaller squad sedated.

But she can’t. She cannot, not after so, so many deaths before her own eyes. Not after so many people she’s known and worked with have been slaughtered before she could even understand what happened.

“Most of your team survived.” She has let them live. They did not survive, there was no such thing as survival when it came to encounters with the Grimgrinner. They knew this. They knew this, and yet they decided to capture her anyway.

Phoebe remembers – even before she had known that the Grimgrinner was Arianna, she was up for it. Capture the tyrant, control him. Find out what he is, how he functions, and use him as a weapon. The Earth needed this. The Interstellar Alliance needed this.

Phoebe’s not even surprised that it didn’t go their way.

Nothing living could ever be made into a weapon, not if it was that much stronger than them to begin with. They had known—they had known the extend of Arianna’s power, they just didn’t want to acknowledge them. What a mistake.

“Where is she now?” She didn’t dare ask. She thought—she thought for sure that the world was going to come crashing down. It made sense, after all. The tyrant was captured, the tyrant escaped. Now he’s after vengeance. Doesn’t it always go that way?

“Back on the Deathbringer, the intel says.” Afon’s voice is neutral. Phoebe is the supervisor of the Sleeping Sun complex, specifically, she’s the main one when it comes to the undetermined wastes of biological origin. That’s how she got into this entire thing in the first thing. Afon—he’s here because he’s her husband and because his company has financed this entire complex from it’s very beginning eight years ago. It has its own perks. “She’s met up with Sundowner. He’s left the complex two hours later.”

“Where’s he going?” She needs this. She needs the fake sense of normalcy, if she’s going to survive. She’s been left on her own for three days, with only the smart bed and the AI to be her company and she was ready to go sick with guild and the bile and the heavy things her own mind burdened her with. One more day and she would’ve gone entirely unstable.

“Seconds after his departure, Grimgrinner appeared on the surface of Deathbringer and boarded into one of the ships. It intercepted our ship and decimated the crew.” He sounds so sorry—he sounds so heavy. She knows. She knows. “Sundowner’s moving towards the Betsalel Conglomeration.”

But she ruined the ships—she killed everybody. What’s the point—what’s the point of killing half the crew? The other half wouldn’t chase after another tyrant, where same fate surely awaits.

“She left souvenirs.” Phoebe only started doing this recently – addressing Grimgrinner as she. She, her daughter. She, Arianna. Her sweet little golden Aria, always so smart and distanced and genius and irritable. Brave, gutsy. Her little Aria, who died ten years ago, at nineteen – who died within a terrible, tragic space crash, too far from any active station for help to arrive in time.

If she and Afon hadn’t been as influential as they have been, Phoebe wouldn’t even have the chance to search for her daughter’s ship. She could only guess that she was dead, something that she has been so certain of, until recently.

“She left a camera, with the record of that wretched grinning helmet the voice—“ Afon sounds strangled for a moment, then his voice cracks. It’s only a second, though, before he’s back to his normal speech. “She said that the Sundowner is moving towards the Betsalel Conglomeration. To justify his name, she says, and to—to have something like a—“ He stops, unable to continue.

Afon sits next to her on the bed, making the mattress dip. Phoebe sees it, but she doesn’t feel it, not with all the soreness and medicine as side-effects from each other. She’s numb, entirely, and yet, she can feel—she can feel this.

“She’s entirely insane.” He says, as if though surprised. Phoebe wants to say that they’ve known this before, but she doesn’t. “She wants—the truce with the TIA, she says.” The truce with The Interstellar Alliance? Alliance will never allow it. “They offer this, she says, as the compensation for our ship and its crew, and for what happened here, at the Sleeping Sun.”

Like—like anything she wants to give them can replace the lives she’s taken? Not only them, but others, faceless, countless other lives, human and alien. Like anything, anything in this galaxy can be a replacement for the living, beating, warm—alive. Alive. Like anything can replace life.

In the place where Grimgrinner comes from, perhaps there is a such a thing.

But here, in the world of mortals, Phoebe is only angry, rage managing to seep its ugly path among the sedatives. It’s impressive, really, how much disappointment and resentment she can hold inside of herself.

“Remind me.” Phoebe breaths, as if though it’s a complete sentence. “Remind me again—“ She’s not a coordinator of military, or the woman building and customising cosmic charts. She’s bad at orientation in space. “What lies in the Betsalel Conglomeration?” It sounds familiar. It sounds like something that she could’ve heard around the complex somewhere, although in passing only.

“Well—“ Afon sounds tired, on the verge of the sleep, even. It sounds so good. “She claims that we’ve got a common enemy there.”

Something in Phoebe freezes, but she doesn’t say anything. So far, TIA has had two enemies – Grimgrinner and his empire of bones and molten rocks and shattered planets. And the other – a newly found species of highly aggressive aliens.

And now, Grimgrinner has decided that the new aliens are her enemies too.