Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. It is a draft; there are mistakes, many misspellings and sometimes long periods of no updates. copyright: ion fyr 2025
During the maneuver Nila’s suppine injured body had only shifted a little, but it was a reminder that she was, afterall, just laid out on a table. A loose and simple webbing was put together from cargo nets, set over Nila’s torso and anchored to the table with additional ropes to the benches.
Attention was also given to the gaping triangular hole in the cargo hold floor. The lift had been cut off during the jump back to 189x so the opening, big enough for Luc’s car to pass through, was open to the water and desert sands below. The same nets that had supplied them with Nila’s tie-downs, were tied off over the opening in the cargo bay floor, so that no one accidentally fell through.
They were now over Vandalian Barbary, nearing the Libyan interior, Etelka having considered it safer for them than Brethmanic airs.
They took the remaining leg of the journey in shifts, with one piloting (except for Luc, for some reason he could not establish) and another watching from the upper access port, the one that jutted up from the limp envelopes. They would take turns, one at the helm, followed by a time of rest, then a similar period on the watch, followed again by a time of rest. The sequence passed from Etelka to Atilla to Beatrix to then, either Luc or pseudoPool.
Luc could not figure out why he was lumped with Pool in the schedule or why either of them only had half of the rotation. Perhaps it was that he was the newest among them (aside from pseudoPool) and they did not trust him either. That did not sit well with Luc.
Instead, Luc spent his time awake monitoring Nila. He was the only one of them that could properly monitor the medical clamp, so he did lost in thought and feeling exhausted.
Nila continued to exist in a state somewhere between coma and restless sleep. She mumbled inaudible things and her eyes continued to move under her lids.
Every now and then, after making sure Nila was alive and reasonably comfortable, Luc would venture back to the cargo hold, mindful of the gaping chasm beneath the nets. He lifted the metal grates from the floor, scanned the spaces under spare pieces of equipment and miscellania and for the alien rings that they had–or at least Nila, Etelka and Pool had come to rely on.
Luc came across a macabre collection of fragments, but not one of them anything like a ring: bits of bone, a bent brass rod covered in congealed blood, a stinking gob of flesh with a piece of Nila’s coat still attached.
No rings though.
Ion Fyr 