***
“Buckle your seatbelt!”
Mathilda heard these words and did what her mum told her.
Her stomach felt like it was turning, when she felt the engines of the ship.
She felt so excited!
Then.. the
ship left the ground!
Loudly she started cheering, together with her mother.
“Mummy mummy, we’re flying!”
She shouted, fascinated and utterly amazed.
As they left the system Aaricia pinked away a tear.
According to the navicomputer they had been here for eight years. Eight years
to rest, to raise her child and fix the ship. Eight long years.. but also eight years that had
changed her very much. Now it was time to go back.. how would the galaxy be now? Would the Empire still exist.. and all her friends..
An alarm started sounding as Mathilda was staring back at
the blue-purple colored planet that they were leaving.
“Bye Aurea.. bye
house..” The child sniffed a bit sadly now.
Aaricia was distracted by the message on her computer;
gravity fields appeared everywhere.
No stars were visible in this part of space. That was
because this area was crowded by black holes.
She thought back at her arrival on this planet. Chased by
first one, then two star destroyers.. these black holes had saved her life and that of her
daughter. As she had flown into this dangerous part, risking her life but this
was still less risk than letting her and her unborn child be captured by the
Empire, she had lost them. The black holes had damaged her engines and she had
crashed on this strange planet that wasn’t on any list. They had called it
‘Aurea’.
Now it was time to go back, back to known space, if
they would survive the black holes..
The
jump back
They barely made it. With a loud sigh
of relief Aaricia fell back into the pilot’s chair, her whole body sweating,
trembling.
Many stars had appeared in front of
them, amazed Mathilda stared at them.
With a wet, sweaty hand Aaricia
grabbed the ship steer again. Her throat felt dry.
“We are.. back.” She said with a hoarse voice.
With some taps she scanned her
surroundings, they appeared to be alone. She unbuckled herself and got up from
the chair.
“Let’s have a drink.”
Mathilda did the same like her and
followed her into the back part of the ship. There were many colors, it looked
cozy. Together with her daughter she had made the interior.
“Can I make the drinks mum, please?”
Mathilda asked.
Aaricia nodded. “Sure.”
“Yes! Ok.. what do you want?”
“Lemonade.”
The child hopped into the improvised
kitchen and opened a big bottle of water. Aaricia watched her taking two wooden
mugs from a little cabinet and putting some powder into them. Powder of the
dried fruits that grew a lot on Aurea: the blue-purple Jellymon. The taste of
this combined with water was a sweet-sour taste, that left a pleasant warmth in
the throat after being swallowed.
On her datapad Aaricia has put a
description of this apparently newly discovered planet. She wrote everything in
there, accompanied with a lot of drawings. There was also a description of the
Jellymon in it, as well as the other fruits and vegetables that she and later
also Mathilda had discovered.
For years they had traveled over this
planet. Depending on where on the planet you where, the climate could differ a
lot. They had experienced hotness and dryness, freezing cold and a pleasant
mediate climate. They had swum in the seas, washed themselves under waterfalls,
the sunlight sparkling through it. They had run from huge camouflaged ‘ink fishes’
that lived on the land instead of the water. They had built huts, in trees, in
caves, on the land. Several times their house had been destroyed by storms, or
the rain had been so much that the roof had just collapsed. Then they had
waited and when it was over they had rebuilt their house in a better way or on
a better place. They had led a happy life, but Aaricia also had felt pretty
lonely. There had been no intelligent life on Aurea, so they had been the only
humans on there. Probably due to the black holes it had been impossible to
receive or send anything into or out of the galaxy. So they knew completely
nothing about the current status of it.
“Mum what are you thinking about?”
Mathilda asked, while she offered her mother one of the mugs.
“About the last eight years. About us, our lives on Aurea. About how
the galaxy will be now.” Aaricia answered, taking a sip from the mug.
The child sat next to her on another
big cushion, gulping from her own mug of lemonade.
“I’m really curious to see it mum.”
She said enthusiastic. “And your friends.”
“I hope we can find them.”
“Mum you look worried. What’s the
matter?”
“Well I hope that they are still
alive. And.. well if the
Empire does still exist we might have a problem. The black holes are very
dangerous. There is almost no way to go back to Aurea.”
The child sniffed sadly. “I know what
you mean. We left Aurea, we left our home. And we don’t know how it will be
now. Doesn’t it feel like dying?”
Aaricia raised an eyebrow at the
child.
“Dying?”
“Well that you leave something and you
cannot go back there. And you don’t know what will happen now. The same as when
you die..?”
“You have just turned eight and
already you seem to be a great philosopher.” Aaricia smiled at her. “When you
die you don’t know what will happen, but you lost your body, forever. In that
way it can be considered the same.”
“What does ‘considered’ mean mum?”
“To consider is to see as if, to think
about.. for example: I say to
you that I consider you to be a philosopher.”
Mathilda made a face, mumbling. “All
those complicated words... what are they good for?”
After the drink Aaricia got up and
walked back towards the cockpit, while Mathilda was playing some game on her
datapad.
Back into the pilot chair she started
scanning radio frequencies. There was only a static. She plugged her little
datapad into one of the consoles, trying to receive the Holotv, or login to the
Holonet. But it did nothing. She wondered what had happened the last eight
years.. did the galaxy still
exist?
She decided to look at it in a relaxed
way: this could be pretty exciting! After another sigh, with a smile she tapped
in the coordinates of Talus space, ready for the first jump to lightspeed.. in eight years.