Star Seed
Ebook editions (PDF, EPUB, and MOBI) of Hulderotica #5: Star Seed, by Kaya Skovdatter.
Fikriyya floats through space on the edge of death, left adrift after her ship was sheared through by interstellar debris. With her oxygen running low, she makes peace with her imminent end. But fate has something else in mind for her: between the boundaries of life and death, dream and reality, Fikriyya will come face to face with the infinitely unfolded aspects of herself; an exploded view of alternate choices and moments locked in time. And through that experience is reborn. But in that celestial reawakening, so is something else. Something never meant to bear consciousness: an endless hunger now all too aware of the void at its core. An emptiness it will do anything to fill.
5,300 Words. Standalone.
Ebook editions (PDF, EPUB, and MOBI) of Hulderotica #5: Star Seed, by Kaya Skovdatter.
Fikriyya floats through space on the edge of death, left adrift after her ship was sheared through by interstellar debris. With her oxygen running low, she makes peace with her imminent end. But fate has something else in mind for her: between the boundaries of life and death, dream and reality, Fikriyya will come face to face with the infinitely unfolded aspects of herself; an exploded view of alternate choices and moments locked in time. And through that experience is reborn. But in that celestial reawakening, so is something else. Something never meant to bear consciousness: an endless hunger now all too aware of the void at its core. An emptiness it will do anything to fill.
5,300 Words. Standalone.
Ebook editions (PDF, EPUB, and MOBI) of Hulderotica #5: Star Seed, by Kaya Skovdatter.
Fikriyya floats through space on the edge of death, left adrift after her ship was sheared through by interstellar debris. With her oxygen running low, she makes peace with her imminent end. But fate has something else in mind for her: between the boundaries of life and death, dream and reality, Fikriyya will come face to face with the infinitely unfolded aspects of herself; an exploded view of alternate choices and moments locked in time. And through that experience is reborn. But in that celestial reawakening, so is something else. Something never meant to bear consciousness: an endless hunger now all too aware of the void at its core. An emptiness it will do anything to fill.
5,300 Words. Standalone.
Want to sample before you buy? Read on:
Fikriyya has been drifting through space for time beyond time; drifting in and out of consciousness like the wheel of stars around her; light trailing through gaseous nebula and the endless midnight black as she tumbles. They’d taught her space was deathly cold, ice and exhalation gone to cloud and crystal in the dark, backlit by light-years’ distant points of inaccessible solar heat.
But here, buoyed by unseen, gentle hands, all around her is an endless sweep of warmth. Like being loved. She never expected love to feel like dying.
Fikriyya long ago drifted away from the wreckage of her ship, past sheared hull panel segments hardened against the void; past jettisoned deep-space sonar arrays and free-floating chemical compounds gone globular and shattered specimen containment units; past pages torn free from beloved books and cracked photos of loved ones – their splintered safety glass shining sun-bright in light from distant stars.
There could be other survivors out here somewhere, lost like she is. Fikriyya was not the only one in the midst of external repairs, barely suited up and beginning her work when a massive shadow fell swift and sudden across the ship, drinking in the light of the stars behind it. A negative space hidden in the shadows between blazing constellations as it hurtled in from points unknown.
She’s given up trying to figure out what exactly tore through the Horizon. Given up on looking for others drifting into her orbit. If any of the others did survive, she’s seen no sign of them. She knows she should feel more than she does; that grief should be hitting harder. Some part of her vaguely aware that it’s a trauma response, her body and her mind slipping into shock. But even that part of her is tired of trying to think. The background blare of her suit’s low-oxygen alarm answering the why that she’s barely had the strength to ask.
This is it then. The end to an admittedly short, if illustrious, career in the sciences; of probing the deeper questions of the universe. The only question now whether anyone will ever come looking for her and her crewmates’ remains. Far more likely she’ll burn up in the orbit of some distant planetoid with sufficient atmosphere, or be scattered by the impact of a spatial object travelling blithely between points too distant to ever truly comprehend with a rational mind.
It's not a good way to go. But she can think of worse ones. Most of those are why she left Earth.
