Screaming. She can’t hear it, but she can feel it. Behind the silence of this ruined corridor she can feel the screams of strangers. This empty passage has seen violence. Flickering lights are casting eerie shadows on the heavy smoke that lingers in the air. The walls are splattered with a deep red that Mara is certain is not paint. She carefully steps through the rubble towards the viewports. The landscape is a dusty grey, and littered with metallic wreckage. A small moon makes it’s way across the sky at an odd angle. Behind her. There is something or someone behind her! The unease she had felt in this corridor is replaced with cold fear. She turns. She can see nothing of the figure behind her except for it’s eyes. Those eyes! Those terrible eyes!
Screaming.
Mara wakes in her room with a start. For a moment she remains in bed catching her breath and waiting for the disturbing images of her dream to subside without much luck on either account. Those eyes. Every time she closes hers, she sees the eyes of the thing in her dream. It’s pupils glowed with a dull red, like the last remaining coals in a fire that is burning out, surrounded by a sickly yellow. It wasn’t the eyes themselves that made her skin crawl, it was the hate she saw in them. Mara made her way to the small bathroom on the far end of her living quarters and began to splash cold water on her face. No sense in trying to get back to sleep. The Eyes wouldn’t let her.
Mara had spent the last hours of the early morning sitting at the terminal on her desk. No part of the nightmare had faded from her mind and she found that she could rewind and replay the dream in her head like a video. It helped take her mind off The Eyes if she focused on other parts of the dream. The little moon had caught her attention and she had been searching every database she could think of for it. Her view from the corridor had made it apparent that it was a Belt moon. That ruled out the proper planets and left small planetoids and charted asteroids that were large enough, and stable enough, for any kind of outpost or colony. This, she thought, is going to take forever.
In the end, it didn’t take forever. In fact, she found what she was looking for just before lunch. The moon was Alexhelios and it is one of the two moons of Kleopatra, one of the most important and productive Research and Resource facilities in The Belt. Somehow, just knowing the name of the moon, and the asteroid it orbited was comforting. She was concerned about how her subconscious was able to reproduce such vivid and accurate images of a place she had never been too. Those worries could wait until after she ate. She was absolutely famished.
The rest of the day went by in a blur of research. Kleopatra took up the whole of her day. The news had no story of any disaster on the asteroid of any kind. No sad news of death and destruction on a place she had never seen. No images of The Eyes that she had seen. For a brief moment Mara had considered contacting her older brother to make sure the news agencies of Ceres haven’t missed anything. Jacob is The Company liaison to all the news outlets in this region of the planetoid, and that has……had it’s perks. He would always give her a heads up when a scoop about some big breakthrough or some horrible mining accident was coming down the pipe. Back when she was still gainfully employed as a reporter for a grimy zine called Source. The advance notice on big news gave her an edge, which in turn, gave the zine and edge. She was superstar who seemingly had a nose for news. Not so much of a superstar that her supervisors would let her regularly come in three hours late and still drunk. Jacob was more upset than she was at the loss of her job. The only thing she had felt at the time was the mind blowing hangover. He was still her big brother though and felt obligated to take care of her. Even if he wouldn’t speak to her. He paid her rent and made sure she had enough money to feed and cloth herself as long as she kept applying for work.
Afternoon ran into evening, evening ran into bedtime and before she knew it, Mara had run smack into the middle of the night. Her research had taken her to many places. Skipping her around through time and space. She had started out learning about the rich metal deposits that where mined on Kleopatra and how they were researching interstellar travel for humans (among other things) with the aid of the Wisps. She went from there to learn the asteroid was named after Cleopatra VII It’s two moons, Alexhelios and Cleoselene were named after Cleopatra’s children. They were apparently some kind of royalty that lived in a place called Egypt back on Earth. It was all very fascinating and somehow felt relevant. As the midnight hour came along, her search had pushed her farther and farther into the data networks of Ceres until she had found a live video feed from Kleopatra, and all seemed well.
Calling the video feed she was watching “live feed” was a stretch. It took the data about a two standard days to reach Ceres. Communication and video calls were instant, even over the greatest of distances thanks to the technology that the Wisps had gifted to humanity, but it was expensive to build. What she was watching was no doubt technology left over from before the First Contact. All it was was a little lab showing a man with an overinflated ego, probably working on something not nearly as important as he made it out to be. On the bottom left corner of the feed was a time stamp and to her great satisfaction, contact information for who she assumed was the scientist in the video. Noting the late hour, she sent him a message:
Dear Sir,
I am doing research for a story on day to day operations on facilities like Kleopatra. I have stumbled across your video feed and am fascinated by what I have seen. Before I go to my editor with anything, I was wondering if I you would have time for an interview, complete with demonstrations of your work over the the video feed you are currently broadcasting. I understand there is a significant delay in the feed, so I would like to iron out the details over messaging prior to taking any action on the feed.
Thank you for your time,
Mara Sinclair
She had little to no concern over lying to the man on the video. Not at this hour anyway. She would keep watching however. She was certain that what she saw on the video feed reflected what was happening on Kleopatra in present time. She was equally certain that her dream was more than a dream, more than a nightmare, she was certain that it was going to happen.