Imperial Edge

by Celinda Labrousse

“Eric,” she called into what had once been a cockpit. Now it was scrap metal.

  “Oscar,” she cried. Her little droid had not been secured. He had gone up to bother Eric during the landing. She lifted piece of metal and scraps of things to see if he was trapped or hiding. She stopped every couple of feet to listen for his whine or Eric’s breathing. Oscar was nowhere to be found.

  At the cockpit, Miranda found Eric still sitting in the pilot seat. His harness had kept him in place. But his helmet had come off in all the shuffling, and he had a laceration across his forehead.

  She searched him for any other bumps and bruises. But he seemed to just have been knocked out by something. There were multiple puncture marks through the shuttle craft’s front window, so it could have been anything.

  Miranda made her way over to the gunner seat on what was left of her side of the craft. Cash lay there in a pool of blood, a trickle of it coming from his mouth; his eyes wide in shock.

  A piece of some craft penetrated through the middle of his chest. Miranda suppressed a gag by covering her mouth and stepping back. It was like looking at her parents’ dead bodies all over again.

  She turned and put her head between her legs, trying to breath, trying to get a semblance of normalcy back. She needed to get over this she needed to overcome death. Least Eric was still alive, even if he was unconscious.

  She looked for the other Ironside and the pilot. And the other gun gunner. But all three of them had been on the other side of the craft and gone down wherever it had gone. Miranda made her way out of the debris.

  "Oscar!” She cried, not knowing any of the other names of her companions.

  She should have known. At least then she could have prayed for them, or mourn their loss.

  She stood there on the tarmac looking out over everything that just happened. The only conscious survivor of the crash.

  She was so wrapped up in her need to find Oscar, or someone that could help her with Eric, that she didn't notice the phazer fire until she felt the shock of it hit her body, followed by the wave of pain as she passed out.

  Miranda's eyes felt glued shut. The kind of stuck that hours and hours of sleep building up on the edges and corners could only accomplish. Her head still hurt were the blast that had knocked her out. The bruises and cuts from bouncing around in the shuttle craft had every area of her body transmitting pain to the point that her brain had just blocked it down to an overall dull ache. She felt bruised and battered. She just hoped she wasn't bleeding anymore.

  Slowly, she lifted her fingers and rubbed them against the salt on her eyes. She opened them to the world around her.

  White completely filled her vision. Miranda blinked again.

  There was nothing. Had she died and gone to heaven? Or was this hell?

  Miranda hope that she wasn't in hell. She'd been a believer her entire life. She had never questioned the prophecies or the reality of the galactic transmission. And now all around her was proof of something. She just needed to find out what.

  The white was bright, almost blinding, with just enough dark to cause her to squint but not have to shut her eyes again. She removed more sleep from her eyes. She picked out the bigger chunks from the corners, then blinked a couple of times to get used to the new light. Then she tried to look around again.

  ‘Well, if this is Heaven, it is pretty lonely,’ she thought. She had always been told that all of her friends and family, all of the people that she loved most dear, would be with her there. They were all believers, too.

  Miranda started walking ahead into the light to see if she could find someone.

  Bam. Her face collided with something hard. She put her hands forward to see what her eyes had missed. It felt hard under her touch. She ran her hands up and down as far as she could reach. It remained the same solid hard surface. She counted back her steps. She had taken about about five steps before she had hit the wall.

  There was no way to tell what kind of wall it was she had run into. Everything around her was endless white in all directions. She thought she could have walked for hours. But no; there she was, pressing up against something. Her hands felt around for a panel or a door. Anything that would separate the white from the white. But there was nothing.

  She turned around and walked the other direction. A little less than 10 paces later she hit another wall. She could feel it under her fingertips. Smooth as plastic and bright, but not cold or particularly warm. Nor did it shock like the force field on the ship during decontamination. This was something different. Like being trapped inside a light bulb.

  Miranda thought about it and walked five paces to what she now considered the middle of the room, turned, then headed in the other direction.

  Five paces. She ran dab smack into another wall. This time she did it at a good pace and smacked her forehead into the thing. The force of it sent her back onto her butt, where she sat staring up at the blank whiteness, realizing that it had no depth, even though it looked out onto eternity.

  “This is definitely not Heaven,” she said to herself; and she hoped, very, very badly, that it wasn't Hell, either.

  "Is anyone there?" she yelled into the blankness. No response. "My name is Miranda Farmer, and I would like to know where I am." Still sitting on her bottom, Miranda used her heels to turn around again, and looked back at another blank white space. She leaned her head back against the wall.

  “How do you know if you're dead or not?” she asked the wall. She had this growing suspicion that if she were dead, she wouldn't feel like a big bruise. Somehow she had always envisioned death with a perfect body. One that never aged, never got cuts, never got hurt, stayed whole. And, well, it might have pain, but not like this.

  Actually, no; she believed in Heaven that there wouldn't be any pain because you couldn't get scratched or cut or bleed out or hurt yourself. And she looked down at the bloody mess that was her new uniform. She had been cut to shreds in the crash. She was 100% sure that this was not an afterlife.

  “So where am I?” she thought out loud. She knew for one thing that this place was made to look endless, but was in fact, a 10 foot by 10 foot square. And the only thing that she knew that was 10 foot by 10 foot and looked like eternity was a prison cell. They had been part of her holo lessons. Massive planetoids good for nothing else but storing the living dead back before the Enlightenment.

  Now, anyone who committed a serious crime was punished in one of two ways. Some were given the option to go into service for the Empire. This could include builder work, military work, mining, or even terraforming. All were very dangerous and deadly jobs. The likelihood of coming back before paying off a debt was very small, but at least it was a life.

  The other option for those that could not be trusted to be around others was simply death. Miranda had never been to one of the public executions. Before, when a person was found to have taken more than one life simply for the joy of it, they were paraded out in front of the entirety of the video screens of the Empire and given a chance to repent for their sins against humanity and the lives that they took needlessly. Then they would be promptly sent on to the next life. Two wrongs, and all that. At least this way they did not have a chance to redeem themselves.

  It was sad, really, she thought. There are some people who take life from others and not seek to atone for it.

  She shook her head. The Empire had gotten rid of prisons over 200 years ago.

  During the great Age of Enlightenment, it was determined that there was no crime that was unredeemable. In fact, every crime, every act of violence against another, had been laid out in a code and given a price value that the person would have to pay back to the individual in question. If the person was unable to pay it back, that's when service to the Empire was instituted. It would provide the person in question a job to pay the other person back, a roof over their head, food on the table, and oversight so that they could redeem themselves for their actions. And no dollar amount was ever set higher than the life of the person w
ho was meant to pay it. That's why prison planets like the one that they were traveling to had gone empty and into disrepair.

  So to be in a prison cell was something Miranda never thought would happen to her in her life. It just couldn't happen. But here she was.

  “Hello, is anyone there?” Miranda called at the walls. She was tired of pacing them. But she wasn't tired anymore. She checked the cuts and bruises around her body. Nothing was bleeding. Everything had been washed clean.

  “I would really like to know where I am,” she asked again. No noise reached her ears. If this kept up she would start to think herself mad. She sighed. She was getting nowhere. Whatever this light was, whatever this room was, it dampened all of her senses. And it was starting to drive her insane.

  She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and focused on her breathing. Who knew how long she had been here? Maybe everything had become hopeless.

  Her cuts had healed to a light red. Her bruises to pink dots. It was possible that she had been here for hours, or days, or even weeks, judging by how closed up her cuts were. Or the other possibility was that whatever this place could heal the human body faster than normal. It could have been designed for that, but there was no way for Miranda to know. If this was a med pod on a prison planet, these things were meant to torture and to keep their occupants alive. But if that was the case, where was the food and water?

  Miranda looked around. She was thirsty. She her tongue against her lips. Her mouth was dry, and her lips were cracked and bleeding from dehydration.

  “I miss you so much, Oscar.” she said in Droid. The lights seemed to dim, and then return to its off-putting whiteness. Miranda tried to stop the tears that were sitting at the corners of her eyes. But there just wasn't enough moisture in her body to cry.

  Her stomach growled. Who knows how long it had been since she had last eaten. If they didn't feed her, or bring her drink soon... well, there might not be a body to find. Miranda shuttered at the thought. No, she wasn't going die here. Not when she had survived the crash. Not when she had survived the interrogation of that droid. Not when she had survived the rebels who had killed all of her family. The rebels deserved to pay for what they had done. And she was the only one alive left to do it. She would find a way out of here. She would find her droid. And she would kick those rebels back to their planetary home worlds.

  Miranda took a deep breath.

  “Close your eyes and think,” she said. There had to be commands, had to be some way to feed prisoners and let them in and out of the room. She hadn't gotten here all on her own. Even if she had fallen through the ceiling, which she was now betting was only 10 feet above her head, there still had to be some sort of entrance into this place. Miranda felt around the walls again, searching for any edges or cracks anything that might even feel like a door, or drawer, or something. She painstakingly went around every inch of the room, her fingers lightly gliding in all directions. At last, after what seemed like hours, she had still found nothing.

  She sat back down again.

  “Think, Miranda, think!” she said. If Oscar was here, she could run all of her ideas by him. If she had Oscar, she could use his sensory base to look through whatever these walls were and find out where the control panel was. Then she could use his laser cutter to break through this to the outside, or whatever it went to. And then plug him in and use his system accesses to open the doors. But Oscar wasn’t there. She just had her.

  And what was she good at doing?

  “Droid. I can speak Droid,” she said to the walls. Miranda started talking at the walls “If this is a prison planet, then most likely the cells are operated by the computer system.”

  “Please pull up the computer mainframe,” she asked it.

  Nothing.

  She thought again.

  “Beep bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop bop.” She felt the Droid words flowing off her tongue in the she accent had spoken in the interrogation room. If this truly was a prison planet, then it had to be at least two hundred years old, if not older. And Miranda had a feeling that this particular prison planet was much, much older. It might have even predated the Empire. And If that was the case, then they probably spoke Droid that was even older than Oscar. Not that Miranda thought that was possible.

  “Beep beep boop,” Miranda tried it again. This time emphasizing her words. I want to speak to the mainframe.

  “Beep boooooooooooooooooooooo.” The long, slow words echoed off the walls. Miranda had to put her hands over her ears to block the sound. It made the walls vibrate, it was so loud.

  “Be bop,” she replied back. She couldn't quite tell what it said because of the way the words reverberated through the room. It might have said, “Hi there,” or, “What do you want?”

  So she told it what she wanted back.

  “Open Door,” she said in Droid. A panel slid open and a drawer was in front of her. Inside was what looked like pellet food: an old rationing system that never went bad and could be packed on to old interstellar transport ships. These often would take three to four light years to reach their destinations. Next to the food was what looked like a water box.

  She stuck the straw through the metallic sealed opening and drank. She didn't care if it was poisoned or not. All she cared about was the fact that it was liquid and it was on her tongue. She swallowed the food pills. They tasted like nothing, but they were filling. And that's what mattered.

  “Beep Beep,” she told the computer. Thank you. Now a door, please. She believed that the thing had heard ‘drawer’ instead of ‘door’ the first time.

  A panel in the wall popped forward and slid to the side, revealing a dark corridor without. Miranda excitedly stepped forward and stuck her head in and down the corridor. She had to be careful. Whatever had caught her and brought her here was probably wandering these halls. She hadn't seen it, or knew how it operated. So she didn't know what she faced entering that corridor.

  “I've got to find Oscar and Eric and the crew,” she thought as she made her way carefully down the hall.

  She checked every couple of feet. There was a door like hers, sunk slightly back from the main hallway. And each, to her surprise, had a control panel that registered whether or not a prisoner was being kept inside. With a few tweaks, she was able to press the controls and find out if each room was occupied without opening the doors. It took time; precious time that she didn't know if she had or not, to check each and every room. And eventually she came to a split in the corridor where the cells went left and right. She had to make a decision. Left or right. “What would have you done?” she asked in Droid to Oscar.

  But he was not there to guide her. The big booming beeps of the computer sounded again. But this time without reverberating around the walls of the room. They weren't quite as deafening.

  “Right,” she said. It was telling her to go right. Miranda turned and walked swiftly down the hallway. This one only had one door in the middle of a long corridor. It was odd; these rooms seemed to be bigger. Less individual cells, and more something else. Halfway down the corridor she found the control panel and checked.

  There was one single, solitary life inside. Maybe it was Eric, or maybe it was someone or something else. She had no way of knowing for sure. And the only way to find out who it was was to open the door.

  Miranda’s hand shook over the panel. She’d come this far. If it was Eric, he’d been badly injured the last time she saw him. So it was important that she find out if he was ok. She heard a clicking sound coming down the hall. She turned just in time to see the outline of a shadow approaching her position. She pressed the sequence that would open the door, desperate to get out of the hall. Anything trapped in there couldn’t be worse than being recaptured by whatever was out here.

  Chapter 13

  The panel slid open with a soft click. This place was noticeably quiet for being old and in disrepair. The doors here were well oiled. None of them squeaked. It was another mystery that she would someday solve, b
ut that day was not today.

  Careful not to be spotted, she slipped into a room that looked identical to hers. Four walls of empty nothingness. She stepped forward into the room. The outside panel had said there was a prisoner in here, but she didn’t see anything but the white. She went to take a step forward and tripped over a body. A person lay motionless on the floor.

  Their feet entangled. Their limbs splayed out. She fell flat on top of her Ironside.

  “Eric!” she cried. She wrapped her arms around him, giving him a big hug. The fact that she was laying on top of him was forgotten in the joy of finding him alive.

  “I'm just so glad I found you,” she said.

  “Well hello, little butterfly,” Eric said.

  ‘Little butterfly?’ Miranda thought. That was new. Maybe him hitting his head in that crash was more than she’d thought.

  “Who might you be?” Eric's face stared back at her with a blank expression. The handsome lines, the flowing hair. The perfect jaw. Everything was there. But none of scrapes or bruises or blood from when she had last seen him in the cockpit marred his face.

  Blush crept up her own face as she realized that she was pinning him to the floor.

  “Oh! Sorry,” she said as she scrambled up off of him.

  “It's okay. I much like my daydreams molesting me.” He wiggled his eyes at her. Miranda started, her mouth coming open on its own accord.

  “I’m not...” she stuttered. “I wasn’t...” The words refused to leave her lips as her cheeks got redder. She was mostly off him now. Only their legs remained touching. It was proving harder to separate their bodies from one another in the tight space of the cell. Miranda banged her head against the wall as she tried to stand. While her cell had been 10 feet by 10 feet, this one was barely over five feet in the direction she’d tried to roll. At this rate they would stay that way. Conjoined at the hip. Her hand slipped and her elbow slid into his stomach. He grunted.

  “A little lower and you would have gotten the crown jewels,” he said, a slight impish grin on his face. He propped himself up on his elbows to get a better look at her. It gave her the room to finally separate from him.