Admiral

Faith blinked, stirred. All around her, life was dark, reality a blur that had descended so far into the depths that there was nothing to see, nothing to understand. For a moment, she remembered the darkened caves of her youth, of exploring the depths of alien caverns on a field expedition with her exopologist uncle during what had otherwise been a long, hot and boring summer. Tiny hands of distant memory worked carefully with a brush, worked away the layers of centuries that had obscured the face of something forgotten, something wonderful, something chiseled with the markings of a language not from earth.

Admiral

Yes? She asked, and all at once she realized that there was no sound, that the word had not passed her lips but had rather been lost in the stirring, fathomless depths of her psyche. Distantly, she heard the ringing sound of shock, of silence, and the thundering thrum of blood pounding through eager, living veins. Somewhere, a mouth strained open, breathed a wordless and haunting moan.

I’ve got to get you out of here.

Uncle!? She felt herself cry out. Uncle Jackson!? Silence. Somewhere in that darkened cavern, that alien and buried passage that meandered through the deep and distant places of the mind like some hellishly narrow crawlspace, she thought she heard a voice, a shout. The brush stalled in her hands, the stone, engraved with the stick alphabet of a civilization that had lived and died within the confines of an alien world, dropped from her hands, shattered.

Uncle!

Hang in there, Admiral!

The darkness was oppressive, strangling. Memories of claustrophobic stirrings from days spent long ago crawling through narrow gaps and channels of subterranean stone, routes that ancient aliens leaner and more nimble than the humans who had traveled dozens of light years to study them had charted tens of thousands of years before. Breathing felt like a battle against an eternity of gauze, a fight against the walls of a cocoon that had become too tight, too tight, as if at any moment it might constrict suddenly and trap her forever beneath a mile of immovable stone.

But beyond it all, beyond the fears, the stifling pressure, she knew there was great beauty. Beyond the stifling crush, new caverns opened up, caverns chosen by the nameless aliens likely because they were more rounded, more resonant, places where beautiful mosaics of extinct megafauna played across domed ceilings like the Sistine Chapel of a tribal Leonardo da Vinci. She’d spent hours in those caverns, just sitting, pointing out features as her grinning uncle sketched the same curves, the same strokes and designs into a pad of silicon for later study. “So like Lascaux” He’d said. “Look at that one there.” Wonder in his eyes. “And that one. Reminds me of the style used in the paintings at Bimbetka. Simply amazing.”

Hang in there, Admiral.

In the darkness, she screamed. She couldn’t help it– the cavern was becoming too tight, collapsing. In the total darkness, she could feel her frantic breath bouncing back, hitting her face in frightening blasts that were a telltale sign something was only an inch or so from her face. Stone, her mind decided, and she panicked, fought against the narrow cavern passageway, struggled in its all encompassing grip. Fingers flexed sweaty and panicked, fighting to be free, constricting, held within a cruel darkness that would not release, that held her with all the immovable tenacity of ten tons of merciless stone.

“It’s okay, don’t move.” Her Uncle’s face was a strained smile, a grin made to comfort, to hide the irrational fears that played beneath the surface of his artist’s mind. “It’s okay, Faith, just– give me your hand.”

I can’t, uncle! She cried out, and she could feel the jellied tears on her eyes, taste the hot, acrid air of the cavern. I’m stuck! Help me!

We’re almost out. Hang in there.

The sensation of being lifted, of the cavern that locked her into its oppressive embrace moving, improbably shifting, bouncing, hands supporting her, supporting stone...

“It’s okay, Faith. It’s okay, just...” Her uncle swallowed against the rising panic, reaching down into the darkness for her hand. “Just... here...”

And then her sweat slick hands felt the wall between them, the cottony bulwark between the darkness of her cavern and that long dead uncle, that uncle who had been in just such a cavern, dutifully sketching the artwork of some dusty and forgotten civilization when some act of tribal justice instigated by some alien divinity had sealed him in, closed off his only escape and locked him in the with the paintings he had devoted his entire life to. It wasn’t until several months had passed that they had found him, followed his faint locator into the depths of the alien earth and opened his tribal tomb with plasma screens and gritty workers whose faces shined with dust and grease. He had died peacefully, they’d said, taking the time to sketch the entire cavern in incredible, dedicated detail until his meager day’s worth of rations had run out and the light in his silicon sheet lantern had finally died.

And it was in that moment, as she reached up and tried to touch her face, that she felt fingers come jarring unexpectedly off the visor of a deep reactor suit. She tried again, felt the smooth curve of the polyparent glass alloy, spread her hand across it and traced it to every seam and corner and back again. Nothing. She thought. Nothing.

The darkness wasn’t the oppressive shading of the underground. It was something else entirely, something more ominous, debilitating. Sightless eyes blinked, searched for any sign of light, of blurred color, but there was none. Only those fragments of color and light that lingered in her memories were left to remind her that while she was now blind, she once had seen.

We’re almost there. She heard Panem say. Hang in there, Admiral.