Starsnatcher - Trapped In An Alien World [COMPLETE]

Chapter 5.1 (Part 2)

"Crick, give me my singularity stone!" I transmitted. "If I remember the display, I can tell you guys and we plan!"

Crick didn't even dare to argue or say anything belittling. They took the stone out of its Faraday cage and threw it to me.

The acceleration fluctuated so quickly, it felt like fists pummeling my rib cage. A bone or two cracked.

Where's the singularity stone?

It jumped around in the wavering acceleration like a ping-pong ball. That it didn't break was a miracle.

When Tesla took a break, I stretched out my hand and caught it.

Much like in the forest back then, it shone brighter than any light in the darkness. As if through esoteric magic, the light cleansed my wounds and calmed my mind. Then, it spat recovered memories back into my mind. The room with its lights intact. The screens. And the holographic display.

It was too blurry to read anything, damn it!

The stone's effects stopped. I found myself floating. Apparently, the pincers had been damaged too much to hold onto me.

Now, I was the ping-pong ball, helpless to the alterations between micro- and hyper-gravity.

I was going to die. The only question was how. Through the ship's destruction or through Tesla's flying style?

I couldn't go out like this. There had to be a way out, there had to be!

"Crick, kill me!" I transmitted.

They didn't react. Tesla meanwhile took a break from accelerating. Apparently, Crick's pincers had been damaged, too, as they were every bit as airborne as I was.

"Or try to. Or harm me or put me in danger. This stone works best in times of stress!"

"I do not have the time to set anything up!"

"Just do it!"

"I-"

Helix tackled Crick in my direction. Their body glow highlighted them in the microgravity's darkness.

I couldn't trust them to reach me on my current course, so I stretched out a hand. Crick grabbed it with a tentacle. Then, they seized my helmet with four of their tentacles and pulled it off.

I remembered these stories where divers had their gear pulled off by octopi. Probably a good thing that I thought of this.

Once the helmet was off, my collar clutched onto my neck.

The pressure of two atmospheres overwhelmed my eardrums as if I was a scuba diver. Only that the air was hot rather than cold. I had already experienced this pressure in the desert when I tried to drink, but it was too far away to remember. How had I described the air back then? As a burning inferno of thick gas digging itself into each pore of my skin?

I panted. Twice as thick as Earth's air with only half the oxygen content. Add my injured ribs and I literally couldn't get a single breath in.

Please, let this be enough stress, please.

I clutched my stone again.

It came back to me. The feeling. This time, it felt far more pleasant, far more soothing, as Iris had described it, than at any time before. Hopefully, this wasn't just a feeling and it really contained medical nanobots as I suspected earlier.

The memories were much fresher than before. The holographic display shone before me with all dots in impeccable resolution.

It wasn't a still image though. The dots moved. We moved closer to the Mothership. Automated ships took blows for us so that we survived. My singularity stone reconstructed the most likely path the ships took without signals.