Dreary Dreamings

[Ilana Logan]

August 22nd, 2517

The year was 2517, and she was twenty-seven years old. She'd left home eight years earlier, and since then she'd never found another. There were one or two along the way that were close to home, but close to home, and actually being a home are two different things. The closest to home that she ever got was The Chainless. It was a spaceship owned and captained by a man named Marcus. She lived on the ship, and it wasn't a bad place to live for the most part. She had her own room, which entailed privacy, working showers, and peace and quiet… some of the time anyway.

On the ship then, were Jay, the resident doctor, Marcus, the pilot and captain, Ilana the mechanic and second in command, and Ray, a deckhand. Ilana preferred to think of Ray as the public relations official since he was so great at getting people to believe a line of bullshit, but that's probably beside the point. Since the first time she got on the ship, the whole crew has gotten into a fair amount of scrapes. They used to have a pilot other than the captain, but he disappeared one day, and they never saw him again. They also had some random slut running around the ship. Ilana didn't even remember her name, let alone why she had been there in the first place. She disappeared the same day as the old pilot, and she had no idea what had happened to either of them. None of them did. Trouble has a way of finding her, and the people around her.

[Ilana Logan]

The morning that ended it all, she found herself floating on a soft cloud of fluff. She saw nothing but white, for a moment anyway. When she opened her eyes and looked around to see her bunk on the ship - and by ship that does mean spaceship - she lived on, she discovered that her soft cloud of fluff was actually her bed. Once the discovered this, she sat up slowly and rubbed her head. "What the hell happened? I feel like I got hit by a truck," she said to the empty room.

She swung her feet over the edge of the bed and padded out of the room. She walked along the empty halls and glanced into empty rooms, but found no one. As she got closer to the bridge, or the flight deck, she called out to Marcus, then Ray, then Jay. She didn't get an answer from any of them. Then again, she hadn't really been expecting one. She'd never seen the ship look like this, and she'd never known it to feel like this. It felt, surreal, like a ghost ship.

Something was nagging at the back of her mind, but every time she tried to take a closer look at what that something was, it slipped away. So she walked back through the ship, the way she had come, and made her way to the cargo bay. She stood at the top of the ramp leading to the ground and thought, Maybe they just decided to let me sleep in, but the thought felt wrong somehow. Almost like she was forgetting something.

She walked down the ramp into the bright midday sunlight. She raised her hand to shiled her eyes from the glare, and looked around. There wasn't a single soul in sight. There was always someone wandering around Longstreet's compound. She'd never before seen it look so desolate. As she looked around, she noticed that it wasn't just devoid of people, it looked like someone had set off small bombs everywhere. Her heart went from a steady trot to concerned lope as she processed what she was seeing there. If it had looked like this when we landed here, the guys would have gotten right back on the ship and we'd have been out in the black, she thought, seriously worried for her crew by then. She knew since they weren't out in the black, this all had to have happened after they got off the ship. She didn't understand how she could have slept through something like this, but apparently she had done just that.

She walked away from the ship and headed for Longstreet's office then. The hallways were composed of torqued and twisted metal, and the door to Longstreet's office looked like it had been hit directly by a small bomb. She tried the door and found it unlocked, though dented and discolored. She pulled on the door and as it opened, it screeched and groaned against the metal of the frame. She walked inside and found blood. Her concern for her crew leapt to outright worry as her heart sped from a lope to a hammer. She walked carefully through the room, stepping on spent shell casings and a pair of chopsticks. What the hell are chopsticks doing in here? She wondered.

At the back of the room, one of the wall panels had been pried off, revealing a door, that was currently open. She walked through the doorway and found lighted stairwell, which she followed to a tunnel that was also lighted. The tunnel felt like it went on forever, and as she walked, she found a few more drops of blood here and there. The tunnel opened up into a huge hangar with vehicles and ships everywhere. She walked straight to a Mantis, another spaceship, where she thought the part her ship needed was most likely to be.

[Ilana Logan]

Now that's an odd thought. Last time I checked, my ship was running just fine, she thought curiously, wondering exactly why she thought the ship was broken.

She climbed the ramp to the cargo bay, curious as to what was drawing her to the ship. That something that had been nagging at the back of her mind was back, and more prominent than before. It was telling her that none of this had happened, or maybe that this wasn't what was supposed to happen. The feeling got stronger the further she went into the ship. By the time she got to the infirmary doors, she had forgotten entirely the reason she'd come on the ship in the first place.

She stood in front of the infirmary doors for a moment, looking around. Mostly trying to get her bearings. Something warm, and wet, and sticky seeped under her bare foot and squished between her toes. Before she looked, she knew it was blood. She closed her eyes for a moment, then she opened them and looked down. There was a relatively large pool of blood coming from a woman who looked as though her hair might have been blonde at some point, but with all the deep red coating it, it was kind of hard to tell for sure. She knew that woman hadn't been there a moment ago, and she fought with herself to figure out just what in the hell was going on.


She looked to her left, then to her right, and Marcus was there, though he hadn't been a moment before. He was holding his arm, which was bleeding steadily, a look of disbelief and sadness on his face. From somewhere behind her, Jay's screaming cut into her thoughts. There were three people lying on the ground dead in puddles of their own blood, and one more unidentified person running around the corner at the end of the hall. She heard a gunshot. She felt a spray of something wet and horribly warm go up her back, coating her hair. Jay's screaming ceased.

[Ilana Logan]

Oh god, oh god, oh god, Ilana thought over and over. This isn't happening.

She looked over her shoulder and saw Jay. His body was lying at an odd angle that didn't look very comfortable. His head was also missing from the nasal cavity up, which explained why he wasn't too concerned with his own comfort, and Ilana fought the urge to throw up. From down the hall, she heard Ray shouting something. She turned to look at him, but she couldn't make out what he was saying.

She took a step closer to him and saw a man at the end of the hall. Ray was firing shots off at the man, but he didn't look like he was really aiming. He looked as though he was just trying to deter the man from coming out of the room, and it didn't look to be working. There was another gunshot. Ray's shouting cut off mid-sentence as his head vanished in a spray of blood and other, worse, things. Ilana bit back a scream and fumbled for her gun. The gun was gone. Her arms didn't seem to want to work. She started to panic. She turned to Marcus, the so-called captain of their crew, her eyes blazing with equal parts of fear and anger. She grabbed him by the collar, shaking him and shouting in his face, "You have to fix this!"

He just shook his head sadly, and said, "No one can fix this, Ilana."

The words didn't calm her down, though whether they were meant to or not, she didn't know. She shook him harder and shouted even louder, "You have to! You have to!"

He looked at her with a sad smile on his face, a smile that made her want to cry, and punch him at the same time, and he said, "Sorry."


She would have punched him then, but she didn't have time. Before she could move even an inch, his head exploded in her face, covering her with his blood, tiny bits of his skull, and gray chunks of his brain.

[Ilana Logan]

Ilana shot to a sitting position with a deep, ragged breath, looking around wildly for a moment, her heart pounding so hard she could barely breath around it at all. After a brief moment of sheer panic, she realized it had only been a nightmare. She couldn't remember everything that had happened. The only clear memory she had was of Marcus's head exploding all over her. She shivered, wondering what had brought such a horrible dream on. She hadn't had a nightmare that bad in a long time.

Her whole body was aching, and she wanted nothing more than to lie back down and go to sleep again, but then she realized she wasn't in her bunk. She wasn't even on her ship. She was lying on the floor of an engine room that looked suspiciously like the one on a ship she'd worked on before acquiring the ship she worked on now. She knew she'd left that ship months ago though, so it had to just be a similar ship, and not the same one.

After a moment of trying to get her bearings, Ilana found there was a dull ache in her head, and a more sharp pain in her shoulder. Both were throbbing in time with her heartbeat. She rubbed her shoulder and it stung, and left her hand feeling wet and sticky. She jerked her hand away and looked at it. Bright red blood was smeared across her palm and three fingers. She eyed the blood with a sick kind of dread. The worst thing for her in that moment was having no idea what had happened.

"What the hell?" She asked to no one in particular.

She lifted the sleeve of her shirt, which was bloody and ragged, and saw and equally ragged wound. Funny, that looks the same way the graze I got back on Whitefall did when it was fresh, she thought.


She stood up, wobbling a bit at first. She steadied herself and managed to keep her footing. She walked from the engine room she had woken up in, and made her way through the ship. She didn't find anyone, and there wasn't a sound aside from the small noises her bare feet made on the metal floor. While I'm thinking of that, why in the hell am I barefoot? She thought.

When she made it to the infirmary she walked inside and rooted through the drawers and cabinets until she found gauze and medical tape. She rinsed her arm in the sink carefully, wincing at the sting. When it was as clean as it was going to get, she wrapped it and taped the end, then she walked back through the ship to the engine room again. Just inside the engine room, she heard a gunshot from behind her. It startled her because just moments ago she'd walked through most of the ship, and there had been no one on board with her.

She turned and darted back into the hall and found it full of people. That seemed strange to her, even then. She'd just left an empty hall, and immediately returned to find it crowded with people who were apparently shooting at each other. For reasons even she didn't know, she ran down the hall toward the gun fight. On the way, she watched in horror as a man she didn't recognize shot a man she'd worked with only once, but that she remembered because of his demeanor, and partly his smell. She had no idea where he had come from, or why he was there, but the result was the same regardless. His blood and bits painted the wall, and people, behind him in a nice coat of crimson. Griffin. His name was Griffin.

[Ilana Logan]

There was another person, a woman, she didn't recognize. She was lying in a pool of, presumably, her own blood at the feet of the man who'd shot Griffin. Ilana raised her gun, and fired two shots off at the unknown man. One got him in the base of his skull and his head disintegrated in a fine spray of blood and other things. The second shot though… God, the other shot didn't hit the unknown man, or the wall, or the floor, or even the ceiling. The second shot was a little off, from a tiny spasm in her arm from all the throbbing and pain. She stood watching helplessly as the second bullet slammed right into Jay's throat.

He made a horrible gurgling noise and dropped to the floor, his hands desperately clutching at his throat in a pathetic attempt to keep his blood on the inside. Her eyes widened and she dropped to her knees by Jay's side. She waved her hands over him strangely, looking as though she thought she were magical, but in reality, she was trying to decide what to do. She didn't think there was anything she could do for him. He was the one who had medical training. If she'd shot the engine, she could fix it, but she shot the doctor. He was the only one equipped to fix things like that.

Instead, she put her hands on his arm and whispered, "I'm sorry."

She sat there, watching Jay bleed out for a lot longer than it took in the movies, but not as long as it felt like. When his eyes glazed over and a shuddering sigh bubbled from the gaping hole where his adam's apple had been, she stood. Her hands were shaking, and she was covered in the doctor's blood. Her eyes blazed with fury, at herself, at the intruders here, and at the entire world for that moment.

Her fury was cut short when something bit her finger. She turned her head to look, and pain lanced through her arm, into her body. Her gun fell uselessly to the floor, and she screamed a wordless scream. Her knees buckled, shin banging painfully on the barrel tip of her own gun, her hands hit the floor hard to catch herself. There were more gunshots from in front of her. One of the bullets grazed her already injured arm, leaving a cauterized groove in her shoulder. Ilana groaned and wanted desperately to shoot someone in that moment. She searched for her gun with her hands and looked up. There was a man stalking toward her, deadly intent written all over his face, and he was firing shots and her and Marcus.

Ilana fought back the pain and grabbed her gun. Ray came tearing out of the engine room behind the man and shot him in the back of the head. Her eyes widened as she watched the man's head explode, sending blood and brain and skull flying in every direction. Even as she watched the body of the man falling, Ray stalked past him, gun thrust out in front of him. She spared a glance at Marcus, bewildered, from her position on the floor. He was on his knees, hunched over. He gave her a sad smile and said, "Sorry."


Then there was another gunshot. At the same instant that she heard the shot, bright red blood splattered over her as everything inside Marcus's head became visible on the outside, though definitely not in the original arrangement. Ilana barely felt the piece of Marcus's skull that cut her cheek. She turned back to Ray to see him standing about four feet from Marcus, gun still aimed at the man she'd never called captain unless she was mocking him, but who was in fact exactly that.

[Ilana Logan]

Ray was wearing a cruel smile when he turned the gun on her. Et tu brute? She thought, remembering one of Shakespeare's most remembered quotes. Having someone she called a friend level a gun at her face had been more startling than shooting Jay in the throat had been. She raised her gun, but it felt as though it had a fifty pound weight attached to it. She couldn't raise it fast enough.

She watched as Ray's hand squeezed the gun tighter, the knuckles on his hand turning white. His trigger finger twitching dangerously, but not depressing the trigger. She continued raising her lead weighted arm, even though Ray appeared to be hesitating. She wasn't afraid. Not yet.

Then his finger completely pulled the trigger. The bullet punched her in the chest and her body stopped taking directions from her in that instant. She flew backward with the impact of a point blank bullet to the chest. Her back stuck the metal flooring behind her hard enough to knock any wind she had left after the bullet right out of her, and her head rapped with a thunk on someone's wet shoe. She barely registered the sound of the shot at all. It happened so fast that she was hardly aware of any of this happening until she replayed it as she found herself staring up at the ceiling. No hesitation there, she thought.

She tried hard to breathe, but the best she could manage was tiny, painful gasps. She felt like she was drowning, which she sort of was. There was warm liquid running from the corner of her mouth, and she had a bare moment to realize it was probably her blood, before she heard footsteps coming toward her. She tried to look, even though she knew who it was, but she couldn't. There was only one person alive in the hallway besides herself, and she had a feeling that in a moment, there would be one less.

Then Ray's face came into view, his gun leveled at her own face. She opened her mouth, trying to speak. At first, all she managed was looking like a fish out of water. After several failed attempts, finally she managed, "Ray…… don't……."


Before she got out another word, Ray said, "Hello." She saw his finger squeeze the trigger and