Welcome to the Journal of Now and Forever. This Journal is a collection of my Star Control and Star Control 2 fiction. Note: Some of this material is, by necessity, extrapolation from the slim information provided by canon sources.

New fiction is posted first at My Livejournal before it appears here. This story is in response to 15 Minute Ficlets' Challenge #37.

It's dim, not dark, in the starbase sickbay. You'd think it would be dark, but the ships and satellites and sun and moon and planet all create and reflect an amazing amount of light in this area.

Otto is lucky enough to have a room to himself, for the moment. It'll probably change soon – someone else will need the bed next to his. But right now, he has the quiet room to himself, with the shades drawn against the myriad lights outside. He has time to think.

The problem is not that he will or won't go back into space; there's nothing physically wrong with him, and much to his own surprise he found the idea of going back not all that bad, as long as there's a full crew around him. The doctors have talked about survivor's guilt and post-traumatic stress syndrome and delayed onset and things like that, just outside his door. He supposes it's possible that something will indeed kick in – maybe when he gets into the cockpit itself. He won't know until he's there.

No, the problem is that they couldn't account for all his injuries. The internal damage was as expected; he'd need some recovery time, but there would be no permanent problems. The falling damage was as expected, and again, nothing would remain.

But there were too many other injuries to be explained by those two events. Too many bruises, too much bleeding. It couldn't all be explained by the steady loss of cabin pressure. In short, they wanted to know how he'd beat himself up so badly. Otto wanted to know, too, but he resented that they thought he knew anything about it.

He'd told his story over and over, once he'd gotten well enough to have command of proper Anglic, and there was no variation in it; at last they had accepted what had happened. He had omitted one thing, though: the voice. He was too nervous about admitting he heard voices. Voices in the head could mean the end of his flying career. Probably it was all just from the stress of the battle. If it happened again, he'd speak up, he told himself. Right now, he felt fine, certainly not likely to spontaneously hear words in his head. Or in the air, since he wasn't sure where the words had been, really, in the Revanche.

If he'd heard voices, it was, he supposed to himself, theoretically possible that he'd also damaged himself by, who knows, throwing himself around the ship or something. Although he didn't remember doing it, and he did, in fact, appear to have woken up, in silence, in the same place and position as when he'd fallen asleep listening to the damned voice speaking nonsense.

Could the voice have done something to him? But a voice is just a voice, just sound, vibrations in the air. A voice can't leave physical hurts. Although he had fallen asleep...

Otto burrows under the thin medical blanket, and hopes with all his might that he doesn't hear the voice again. He wants to fly the spaceways. He wants to feel the ecstasy of hyperspace again. To be part of a crew, working together, even in wartime. It finally begins to sink in that his old crew is gone, gone forever, so he tries to remember them, fix them in his head as well as he can. It gives him something else to think about for a while.

Comments? Email me: laridian at aol dot com