It quickly became clear to Zey that she needed some time alone to process the morning’s events once the meeting kicked off. The crew’s stressed and often overlapping voices prompted a harsh ringing in her ears that made it difficult to concentrate. She nodded distractedly, pinching her top lip with two fingers till she tasted blood.
“Alright, thank you everyone for your suggestions.” She said when she could bear it no longer.
“I’m going to my cabin now to…plan our next move. Carry on.”
Zey barely made it twenty paces out of the conference room before Vigdis ambushed her to say sorry.
“Thank you, Jonsdottir. You did well. Now hop to it - the ship isn’t going to repair itself.”
With that, the Captain half jogged, half staggered up the stairs to her cabin. Her vision was whiting out, she felt sick.
Wodan opened the door for her on arrival and she crashed through onto the floor of her quarters.
“Leave me alone now. Go!” Zey barked. The cabin door closed and locked.
She lay there, shaking and hyperventilating on her hands and knees.
“No, no, no, no, NO! Please…” She hissed through gritted teeth. The ringing was getting louder. She spat a gob of phlegm onto the deck in front of her. For some reason, her mother and father heave into her mind’s eye, and told her to pray. They practised Islam to this day as far as she knew, though Zey had long since renounced her belief in gods.
Laying in a pose of supplication, she started murmuring in Arabic. She didn’t knew where it came from, apart from that it was deep inside her.
“I seek…refuge in You from the evil of what I have done. I acknowledge the…favors that You have bestowed upon me, and I confess my sins. Pardon me, for none but You…has the power to pardon.”
All those people out there, depending on her. She had no idea how to save them.
After a minute, ten minutes, an hour, who knows, Zey crawled across her cabin to the sideboard, opened the lowest drawer and pulled out a bottle of navy rum. Collapsing on her side, Zey shakily opened the bottle and poured some in her mouth (and all over the floor). She swallowed, and immediately regretted it. Without moving, a half pint of bile shot out of her mouth and mixed with the rum on the floor.
She passed out where she lay, into a deep and dreamless sleep.
Morning turned to afternoon, and then evening. When Zey awoke she felt dehydrated, but the ringing had gone. She felt more alert, too.
Getting to her feet, she drank deeply from a bottle of water on her nightstand. Then she checked her watch. Must have been out for at least ten Earth hours. Zey stripped off, put her dirty clothes in laundry then took a quick shower. She thought about the events of the morning, and realised what happened after was hazy. She asked Wodan to summarise the meeting afterwards, nodding at the points made as water ran down her face.
Zey dried off, cleaned her teeth then changed into her uniform. Finally, she carefully cleaned up the mess she’d made earlier. Picking up her communicator from the floor, she pinged her XO.
“Hey, Mallory, I’ve been thinking about what you said in the meeting. Can we set up a reception area on the other side of the ship; use the telescopic ramp? That way we can use the shuttle bay to house the civilians if the engineers can repressurise it. Speaking of which - have we done a full audit of our passengers yet? Seen how they’re holding up? If not, get on that - we need to know their skills so we can put them to work. Everyone has to pull their weights now.”
“Got a flock of birds approaching. They’re carrying a box.” Ezra came in over all-crew comms.
“They’re doing that thing again.”
“What thing?” Zey responded, breaking her ten hour silence.
“I said one of the birds turned into another bird earlier, but you all didn’t seem ready for that information. Well, they’re doing it again. The birds just turned into all kinds of other things. They’re going over to the first group.”
Zey sighed. It was just one impossible thing after another. She resumed her 1 on 1 comms with her XO.
“Mallory, you wanna go see what’s going on? I need to run some things by Wodan.”
Truth be told, she actually still felt too weak to go outside again just yet. Mallory was perfectly capable of taking the lead for now.
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