9 – Cassie P
I swear mum would freak, like, daily if she didn’t have Bob to help. Can I get some likes for Bob in the comets below? Lol, did I say comets? COM-MENTS, obsly! But for real though, there were some rogue comets last month (check out my vid on that, link in the descripsh) and they are so pretty but also really effing dangerous. Early Warning System’s got our back though. EWS gets MVP every time. (Sorry Bobbie!)
Anyway, today I wanna talk to you about my fitness routine. Gotta keep that bod fighting fit up in space, yeah? So before anything else, you should know that— Um… Okay, this is weird. This pendulum on the Newton’s cradle just stopped. Here, let me show the camera. Just a sec…
There, you see? It’s totally stuck in mid-air. What the actual… That is so not good.
Mum? MUM! There’s another micro-gravity anomaly. MUUUUM!
The girl calls for her mother once more, then for Bob. Neither of them answer. As she gets up from her desk chair, Cass feels the odd pull in her entire body. It is faint, but it interferes noticeably with her balance. Not quite like being drunk – tipsy, perhaps, or just tired – but persistent, unchanging. She leaves her room in search of other passengers.
On the landing outside, it immediately dawns on Cass that this micro-gravity disruption is not quite as micro as the ones before. Everything hanging from the wall by the staircase – paintings, maintenance tools, vines from the potted plants – they are all askew, as if the whole space station were tilted thirty degrees off horizontal. Then there’s a muffled shout from downstairs.
As she hurries toward the sound, Cassiopeia grips the railing tightly in an attempt to steady herself. Even so, the transition from stair to floor proves deceptive, and the girl falls headlong, barely catching herself before she slams into the bare metal below. Cass checks herself through the pain: head? Fine. Hands? Okay. Knees? Rattled, excruciating, not broken. She rolls over onto her back, gasps for air, then steadies her ragged breathing with a slow count to five.
Above her head, maybe four feet or so, a teapot flies past at a leisurely pace before coming to a full stop in the middle of the hallway. Still hovering halfway towards the ceiling as if it were the most natural place for a teapot to be.
That is when Cass notices the pull is different here. Standing up, her feet feel less firm on the floor than usual, but down is most certainly down. The staircase decor is still at a strange angle, but on the ground floor, gravity is correctly oriented, though – for lack of a better word – unenthusiastic. A handful of kitchen appliances are floating around willy-nilly; some of them are gradually falling, others are making sluggish journeys through the hallway or back to the kitchen.
Following a pink plastic spatula, Cass makes her way to the living room. Her stepmother is slumped against the sofa and sporting a nasty cut in her forehead.“Oh shit! Bobbie? Bobbie!”
“Hey, gurrll,” Bobbie mumbles in response.
“Oh god you’re bleeding like mad.”
“I’m fine, honest. Jus’ a bit of a bump on the noggin’.”
“Just stay there, I’ll get you some bandages.”
Cass sets off on a panicked rush across the apartment, into the bathroom, and back with a first aid kit in a vice-like grip. She slides down next to Bobbie and rips a pack of gauze open, along with a tube of coagulant.
“Okay, Bobzy, I got this. Can you tell me what happened?”
“Mmm. All clear, then BOOM the gravity generator goes haywire like that.” Bobbie tries and fails to snap her fingers.
“Yeah I noticed the gravity’s a bit erratic,” Cass says as she fiddles with the bandages.
“Heh. Erotic,” giggles her stepmother, then stares at the blood on her hands. “Oh. That’s bad. Where’s your mom at? Isshe back yet? What time is it?”
Cass glances at her wristwatch. It has stopped at twenty minutes past five. The log on her cam drone, however, is ticking through 17:26.
“It’s five twenty-six shipboard. Where’d mum go? Do you remember?”
“Yup. Observatory. Said she wanted to confirm the sighting of those thingies with Dr. Qumrani.”
“What thingies? There, the bleeding has stopped. No, sit still. What things, Bobbie?”
“From yesterday. Amorphous celestial something-or-other. She’s only been gone for ten minutes, though. Can’t hardly be there yet.”
“I hope she’s alright. Well, the bandages should hold. Let’s get you to bed, then I’ll call mum.”
“Sure thing, girl.”
Cass supports Bobbie as her stepmother gets to her unsteady feet, then they make their way carefully to the master bedroom, at the back of the apartment. The girl lowers her into bed and covers her with a blanket.
“Hey, Bobbie?”
“Ya?”
“Why didn’t the Early Warning System go off?”
“I dunno. That is weeeird.” Bobbie’s speech is still slurred, and she makes wide eyes.
“It really is.”
“No, Cassie. That thing behind you.”
Cass turns around to look out the bedroom window into empty space. Except it isn’t empty. Barely a stone’s throw from the station – an Earth-gravity stone’s throw – sits a gigantic, shapeless, grey-brown mass unlike anything she has seen before.
“Is that a ship?” asks Bobbie.
“I think… I think it’s breathing.”
Cassiopeia looks into the lens of the still-rolling camera drone hovering beside her. “CassCrew, everything is not cool aboard the station.”