Tears in Space

The alarms were blaring as the ship drew closer to the wormhole. Systems were failing and the vessel shuddered like it was having a seizure. Theodore Sphinx was floating in the chaos along with various other objects that had either broken loose or were never secured before the gravity drive failed. 

Using a crate to propel himself to the other side of the wall, he moved like the experienced spaceman he was: He hadn’t made it so far up the ranks of the patrol just for looking good in uniform. 

How had this all gone wrong, The blonde-haired man thought as he glided over the floor of the ship. What could he have done differently to prevent this? Where did his mistake lie? He shook his head, it wasn’t important at the moment. First he had to ensure that he would live to see a time where he could reflect and wallow in self-loathing. 

Maybe... 

Just Maybe...

...He could somehow salvage this. Maybe he could still save her too. 

Damnit. Even now - after everything she had done - he still loved her. He wondered just what that said about himself. He reached the maintenance door and slipped through, now he had hand rungs to guide him. He had to reach her. 

Orphea. 

Through the twisted halls of the once-elegant ship he went, dodging debris that bounced, he didn’t make it through entirely unphased. A loose wrench slammed into his left shoulder with a CRUNCH as he flew, hard enough to make his eyes water. Sphinx grit his teeth in pain his arm hanging loose at his side. 

Ignore the pain, focus on the goal. 

He finally reached the bridge. There she was, secured to the deck with a tether as she kept the ship going towards the wormhole, rerouting power to shields. 

The fox alien was still beautiful: her fur a brilliant red, her long bushy fox tail twitching, she wore a fine dress as if she were attending a party and not on the bridge of a ship, and it showed a fair bit of leg.

“Mistress Orphea, my love. We have to get off of this ship!” Theodore said to the vixen.

Her ear twitched as she turned to regard him with her violet electronic eyes, as he landed next to her, grabbing a railing with his good arm to keep himself in place. 

“I thought I told you to get off this ship!” Orphea stated.

“You should know me better than that by now,” Theodore replied. 

A smirk seemed to tug at the corners of the vixen’s muzzle. 

“Always the hero. You know, there are many beings that call themselves hero? And many of them are anything but. But you well and truly are one. Even now you can’t just give up on me. Even when you know just how wicked I really am.” 

Theodore chuckled. “I’m the sentimental sort. Now let’s get off this ship.”

Orphea shook her head. “No. I have chosen my fate, there is room for only one more to get off of this ship, and it won’t be me.” 

Theodore sighed and shut his eyes. “Then we’re going through the wormhole together. I’m not going to abandon you.” 

Orphea turned her head away. “You can’t. Your mind would not be able to comprehend what is beyond there. Please. My love. Leave - for me.” 

Theodore blinked the tears in his eyes that refused to leave, but tears in space don’t fall, they merely form balls of expanding water.

“No! Come on, if that place you’re going is so bad you shouldn’t go either.” 

Orphea hung her head. “And go where, a jail cell? And do what, lose my freedom? To finally see the consequences of my actions, like my brother’s disapproving face?”

“That has to be better than there. We can course correct, whatever happens we will still have each other. We can find another way.” 

Orphea reached for him, the vulpine alien’s delicate claws flicking away the salty ball of water from Theodore’s face. 

“You still refuse to learn the lesson I’ve tried to teach you. You can’t save everyone, no matter how much of a hero you are.”

“Don’t talk like that!” Theodore shouted. 

Orphea gripped him by the lapel and drew him close, planting a kiss on his lips followed by a nuzzle. She gazed into his watery blue eyes, with the flecks of purple in them.

“Farewell my love,” she said in her soft, princess voice. “Always remember: No matter what, I will always love you.” 

A robotic tether wrapped around him dragging him away from his love and to a waiting escape pod. 

“No! Damnit! Orphea!” Theodore shouted. 

The escape pod shot away from the doomed ship as the spaceyacht Nighthammer itself crossed into the wormhole to who-knew-where. Just as the boundary to his dimension and the other opened, Theodore caught a glimpse of something on the other side: Just a glimpse. She truly was going where he could not follow. 

Theodore hung his head. She was well and truly gone now. Everything he’d done. Every attempt, and it just ended like this. 

Sphinx sighed, the pain in his shoulder was now back in full force but the pain was nothing compared to what his heart felt. He wondered if this was what it felt like to be a character in some ancient, tragic play of some kind.    

He slumped against the escape pod walls as it steadily broadcasted the S.O.S signal. The voice that hailed him was familiar.

“Captain Sphinx!” Kairi called. 

A sad smile crossed his face, as he answered her. 

“It’s me, Kairi,” he said, the exhaustion fully setting in. “It’s just me.”  

The next week - after a visit to the medic - and he was in the captain’s quarters of his old ship, only this time the captain was his old navigation lieutenant. She poured him a drink as they looked out on the beautiful and terrible sight of a collapsing nebula, far away from where the wormhole was imploding.

Kairi like most of her species had blue skin, and elfin ears, her red hair contrasting with her skin tone. 

“I don’t have to be empathic to know what you’re feeling,” Kairi spoke. 

Sphinx sighed, “I couldn’t save her.”

Kairi looked away, sadly. “Who’s to say anyone could have saved her?” 

Sphinx looked out the window at the collapsing nebula: a gigantic purple cloud that matched the color of his vixen’s electronic eyes. “I just feel so empty, Kairi.”

Kairi didn’t know what to say. It was painful to see the man that she looked up to as her captain for so long like this. She merely came around the round little table and held him close. After a second she returned to her seat.

“And what of Lord Tennyson’s famous aphorism?” She asked. “'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? Or is some love poison?”

Sphinx chuckled softly. “Words that you don’t feel the full depth of till you experience it yourself.” 

“I like your new hairstyle and beard,” the blue, empath alien said, remarking on his long, unkempt locks. “A devil-may-care kind of style. And I think she did care,” she said, smirking at her clever turn of phrase.

Sphinx smiled, “I think. I think I’m going to return to the Cat’s Paw for a time at least.”

The Cat’s Paw was a gigantic, space-faring nature reserve: an endowment to Sphinx from Orphea’s ill-gotten largess. It was his now, legally, through the Starfleet’s admiralty.

Theodore spoke again. “I want her to leave something good behind, and the Cat’s Paw is something good.”

He kept his word. He spent the rest of his days living like a monk tending to the flora and fauna of the Cat’s Paw with the aid of Phoenecia, a beautiful robotic bird created by Orphea, and programmed with her voice. The vessel became known throughout the galaxy as one of the wonders of the universe.  

The former captain never left again, his heroic deeds he was content to leave behind to be told to aspiring cadets.  

Every night for decades thereafter, after a nice conversation with Phoenicia, Sphinx would settle in his cabin by the lake and hold the medallion Orphea had given him, while he listened to the haunting calls of the Melachian loons as he drifted to sleep - imagining that they were his Orphea, trying to tell him using their haunting, corkscrew calls, the deep mysteries of the other universe she had traveled to.