Hope Young was a coward, and she knew it perfectly well. She wanted nothing more than for it all to end, but she couldn’t bring herself to pull the trigger. She had all she needed. More than she needed. Ropes were historically used, albeit they needed to rely on gravity. There was some small spin-gravity in sections of this massive ark, but was it enough? Would it be fast enough? She couldn’t just wait until the next landing on another desolate planet the Coalition intended to exploit for resources. What if she’d been found hiding the tether? Not to mention there was hardly any time in isolation during such an excavation. Nope, only time for work, work, work, for the Prophet, Prophet, Profit. No, that wouldn’t work.

She sighed, and put the tether back in the supply closet, traveling back into the massive ship. She could feel the crushing weight of the Ark begin once again to press upon her as she entered the spin-grav ring. It was a far cry from what planetary colonies had, but the ship did have a kitchen of sorts. “Snacks” were a concept foreign to most in space, but Hope was not most. Not that Hope was hungry, of course---she merely needed an excuse in case she was stopped. She stepped inside the cramped preparation area, ducking down so her head did not hit the ceiling. She stumbled over a pot, and cried out in pain. 

A muffled woman’s voice. “Brother Alma?”

There it was again. The reason she wanted an out. The reason she needed an out. Why was she here again? She stared at the tiny preparation surface. It was stainless steel, layered with a gross, pasty, monochrome white color coating. Their obsession with “purity” bled through into all facets of life.

“Dearie?”

Hope shook herself out of her trance. “I’m fine, I’m just getting a snack. And I’ve already told you, it’s Hope!” She yelled back. Did she know? Oh god, what if she knows? No, no that’s impossible. Hope hasn’t told a soul. Little bursts of colors appeared, popping all over Hope’s vision. The hairs on her body stood all on end. Static crept into every corner of her vision, until there was nothing but the knife block in the center. Did Sister Smith say something back to her?

Breathe in. They aren’t omniscient, despite what they say. Breathe out. Hope could do this. Breathe in. She grabbed the smallest knife. Down the river, she repeated to herself. Breathe out. This isn’t so hard. Pain. Sharpness. Down the river. Breathe in. Just press in a little harder, and then drag it downwards. Quick, and easy. Breathe out.

Hope dropped the knife, now stained with the smallest drop of thick crimson liquid at its tip. She couldn’t do it. But she couldn’t go back, and now there was an evidence trail. She’d be put in the Prayers Chamber, unable to do anything but listen to their brainwashing. No! Hope couldn’t go back, she wouldn’t go back!

Think. Think, think, think. Hope cleaned up the blood as best she could quickly, and concealed the knife within her suit, the sharp edge covered by a ragged towel intended as a dish wipe. Hopefully this’ll buy her some time while she manages to muster up the courage she so desperately needed. 

“Prepare for planetary landing and extraction of resources for God’s Choice Peoples.” An automated ship said, in a robotic monotone voice.

What? No. No, no, no! They weren’t projected to land on another planet for resources for another five days! Oh, no. Oh, fuck. This is bad. She didn’t want to go in the Prayers Chamber. She either needed to finish what she started right now, or quickly find another way that was easier to mentally prepare for. Blasters? No, blasters were not permitted except in God’s Armory on the ship. They were retrieved for planetary excursions in order to… “pacify” any of the native life, or so they said. To get a blaster, she’d need to go there, and all the other Brothers and Sisters would be there, preparing and suiting up for rapid exploitation of resources like good slaves to the Omnichrist. Prophet. Whatever. They were the same thing, and everyone knew it. She needed to remain unseen. Even when she focused, she could tell her breathing was shaky and her hands trembling. One look at her and she’d be detained. 

Could she send herself out the airlock? It wouldn’t be pleasant; though for that matter neither would the knife. Getting the air sucked out of her over approximately two minutes, from every orifice in her body, not to mention being bombarded with lethal doses of radiation too…

She shuddered.

Hope was a coward at heart, and she knew it perfectly well. Maybe, just maybe, if she got to the transport shuttles first, she could avoid getting caught. The shuttles had a weak jump drive, and using that would buy her some time to steel her nerves. She wouldn’t have the equipment she needed to land, but that problem would have to wait.

Hope dashed, she scrambled to reach the shuttles first. Someone had seen her, at the far end of a cramped hallway, but she did not waste her breath or slow down in the slightest. It was all a speed game, now.

The shuttle guards attempted to call her to stand down, but she wasn’t having it. She sprinted up the ramp into one of them, knocking him to the ground, quickly recalled the ramp, and immediately started the engine, flying it out of the Noah’s Ark Mk. III, scuffing one of the wings in doing so. Hope knew how to perform all the roles on this shuttle, but they were not meant to be flown alone, so she hopped around, bouncing between the position for both Jump Drive operation and directional flight control. The ship wavered haphazardly, groaning as she pushed the shuttle beyond its normal operational limits and set it to jump its maximum distance, 1 parsec away. Doing so would probably buy her a few hours. After that… Well, after that wouldn’t matter.

The shuttle jumped, and Noah’s Ark behind her vanished, as did the planet they intended to ravage.

Now then, breathing exercises. This shouldn’t be so hard, right?

Hope crumbled into the pilot’s seat. She was tired. She was so tired. All the time, every day, she couldn’t stand it anymore. She picked up the knife, and squeezed it in an attempt to ground herself. She needed to be focused, but instead her mind wandered. The Latter-Day Coalition of the Omnichrist---Nephites, as they were commonly called---became a megacorporation and bought their way into a massive colony ship on which they would search for the promised land, supposedly a planet made of glass on which God himself lives. That is to say, Heaven. Once upon a time, Hope believed these fairy tales… But she could not bring herself to any longer. In some warped, twisted way, Hope envied the mindless members of its congregation, so deluded as to think themselves happy for being worked to death by their “Prophet”. 

Hope… did not want to die. She was afraid. Those mindless members believed that their suffering would lead them to a better place, together, after death. But for Hope, there would be nothing. No Heaven, no Hell, nothing in-between. When she died, she would just be… gone. And when she was gone, who would remember her? The universe would forget about her; worse, with her gone, there would be no one left to remember Archer. Life was suffering, and there was nothing she could do about it. Not without trampling on their memory… On the promise she made to them.

Hope sighed. She hopped on the emergency FTL comms panel on the shuttle, and typed out a simple message. “S.O.S.” with her coordinates linked. Her fingertips hovered for a minute, before she ultimately hit send. The message was unencrypted: whoever was in range would receive it, which no doubt included the Coalition. The Noah’s Ark Mk. III would take quite a while to spool up, and they wouldn’t send another shuttle after her. She’d be dragged back to the Coalition, suffer through whatever mind-numbing torture they had planned for her, and be an obedient slave the rest of her life, if only to keep Archer alive in her memories until she ultimately collapsed from exhaustion.

Some small, hopeful part of her thought that maybe, just maybe, someone else would come. There were no “good Samaritans”, that much she had learned. But if she was press-ganged into slavery by another faction, at least she wouldn’t have to suffer through those religious nuts looking at her with pity, insisting that they’ll pray for her to return to the light.

There was some conflict going on with the Terran Accord, right? They were fighting some overgrown weeds, or something. The weeds were known for some sort of mind-melting drugs, too. That was why the Coalition had taught to stay away from them, that they break the Word of “Wisdom” as naturally as they breathe, even that doing so is a cultural thing. Come to think of it, did they even breathe? Regardless, it was almost comedic in its absurdity. On the colony ship the conflict hardly affected her, so she didn’t really keep up to date with the details.

Hope sighed, and awaited oblivion, sinking lower into her chair, as silence muted all of her senses.

The seconds ticked on. Seconds dragged on into minutes, into hours. Had the Coalition given up on retrieval of God’s Merchandise? Did they simply not care? Hope observed some striking beauty in peering out the shuttle’s piloting window. Millions of stars, twinkling. She’d grown up all around them and indeed even visited some, but seldom had she ever had time to just sit and stare out the window at them. Wasn’t there an old Terran constellation of an archer? Orion, was it? No, Orion was the scorpion. Was it Sagittarius? No, Sagittarius was a horse: 4 legs, humanoid torso, human-like intelligence. Had Terrans really lived alongside horses since ancient times?

The radar beeped. Hope jolted back to awareness, her hairs standing on end, prickling up as her sense of touch rapidly returned to her, one by one until her whole body shivered with anxiety, but also excitement. It felt like hours, but the clock had read that only about half an hour in Terran time had passed. 

Hope paused and stared straight at the radar. This was not what she had expected. A small ping; still several times the size of her shuttle, but a mere fraction of the size of what the Noah’s Ark should have been. It was behind her; she couldn’t get a closer look at it through this frontal window. Hope jumped over to the pilot’s controls and directed the ship to align itself to stay at range from this new ship. It wouldn’t stop them from boarding her, but it would buy her a moment of time to allow her to gauge this situation and determine the best course of action. That is to say, preferably one that didn’t involve her getting beaten, or worse. A quick surrender and submission into whatever form of slavery they had going on.

Fear crept into her mind, eating away at the fringes of her vision. Within her heart, excitement. This was another faction! This surely wasn’t a Coalition ship, so however awful it was, at least it’d be a way out! 

Hope paused. After the initial surge of emotions, a new one, one she wasn’t expecting, filled their place: regret. …Why? Hope wanted this. Didn’t she? After the way they’d treated her… The ostracizing, the ridiculing, the pity. It had been unbearable. Not for Archer and not for her.

An image appeared in Hope’s mind. “We love you,” her family had told her. She was a grown adult when she’d come out, but the nature of life on Noah’s Ark meant that she was never truly separate from her family. “No matter how you are. We’ll all be perfect again in Heaven.”

Hope’s entire body, from her lips to her feet, recoiled in disgust at the vision. Kind words were one thing, but they were still just cogs in the massive Profit Machine. They still worked for and supported a system that hated her. Even if they believed that she would be “perfect in Heaven” in the sense that she’d be a woman in Heaven, the rest of the Coalition did not share in that belief. Even so…

A crash shook the entire shuttle, ramming Hope into the ceiling of the shuttle. Shaking off the pain of blunt trauma to her head, she pulled on the handles to bring herself back down to the pilot’s seat. The hell had they been using to board her? A tractor beam? For stars' sake, that should be used for salvage operations, not to draw in craft with actual people on it!

Oh, right. People. Fuck! Hope had gotten so lost in her own head and emotions that she hadn’t been watching the ship. Was there going to be Terrans on this ship? What faction did they hail from? 

The airlock hissed, opening by force. Hope cursed. She hadn’t thought this far ahead. Here she was, in a lone shuttle, without any sort of protective gear to survive against the uncaring vacuum of space. Would all of her air quickly be sucked away in the void?

The second airlock opened, and a few Terrans in strange black outfits stepped in, a semicircle logo with a curved, distorted star atop a pedestal emblazoned upon their suits. If she recalled correctly, this was… The Terran Cosmic Navy.

One of the men that stepped inside barked out a complaint. “What the fuck! A single girl, aboard a tiny shuttle, without jack shit for supplies,” the man peered over at the pilot’s display, “And not much fuel, either.”

Hope shrunk back, trying to make herself small. This was all her fault. She made them waste valuable fuel to get here, and now they didn’t even have anything to show for it. Picking up such a worthless piece of shit Terran as her hardly counted in comparison to the exotic matter they’d used to jump here. “Sorry. Sorry. I’m sorry. Sor--” Hope repeated, as a broken record.

“Girl, quiet. I’m David. What’s your name? Can you tell us what happened?” A man reached out to help her up.

Hope fidgeted, hesitant to take his hand. “I---Hope. Hope’s my name. I’m sorry. I---” Where would Hope even start? There was so much to explain.

Blip! The radar beeped again, orders of magnitude louder this time. Dave cursed. “Oh, stars!” He grabbed Hope by the wrist and dragged her along, barking orders to the other Terrans. “We’re leaving! Abandon the shuttle, it doesn’t have meaningful supplies. Guns, stations! Jump Drive engineers, begin spooling up!”

Dave turned to Hope. “You can hold a blaster, girl? If any of those damn weeds board, shoot them with this and maybe we can hold them off and regroup with our full force. Perhaps a coordinated attack could deal a heavy blow to them, but this is just a small Cruiser vessel.” He handed her a blaster pistol. Hands trembling, Hope took it.

An airlock closed behind her, and with it, the shuttle disappeared from sight. Hope looked at the blaster, her vision receding around the edges until it was all she saw. There was noise in the background. Terrans shouting, Jump Drive spooling, a deafening crash… It was all one continuous droning to Hope. It was just her, and this blaster. In this chaos, nobody would notice. It would be fast. She wouldn’t even feel any pain.

The droning quieted down, but it was all still white noise to Hope. Right. The blaster. Hope gripped it tightly. She was worthless and she knew it. Nothing but deadweight. She’d be doing the Terrans a favor by finishing what she started. 

Hope’s hands loosened their grip as all of the muscles across her body began to relax, from her hands to her feet. Was this a brief peace before she died? She hadn’t remembered pulling the trigger, but she wasn’t in quite the right state of mind, so maybe she did. No, it should be instant; the blaster would melt her brain in a fraction of a second.

A long vine speckled with flowers reached out to Hope. In one smooth motion, the vine wrapped around the blaster and tossed it to the ground, wrenching it out of Hope’s shaking hands. Hope paused. She… She needed that! Why… Why did she need it? All of that unpleasant ambient noise had vanished, an unusual serenity overtaking her mind. Hope looked up slowly, and stumbled backwards onto the floor. Another vine extended out to her, padding her fall, before returning to its former task.

Ahead of Hope was a large bundle of fibrous vines, vaguely in the shape of a Terran, but notably 12 feet tall, with several limb-like vines shooting off from it so as to give the appearance of a 6-armed green Terran. The Terrans were fighting it, it seemed. Should Hope be, too? The thought entered Hope’s mind, but she couldn’t seem to bring herself to move, much less fight. She’d rather just watch. It was so melodic, so rhythmic. The Terrans were fighting, but this creature… It seemed less like it was fighting, and more like it was dancing, as if this was all a dangerous game to it. It was… beautiful. Each of the vines fought off a different Terran, disarming them and restraining the Terran once they lost. Before long, all of the Terrans were captured, bundled snugly in vines, save for Hope. The creature walked over to Hope, several Terrans in tow.

“What a good Terran you are.” It said, another vine reaching out to pat Hope’s head. “You must be the one that called for help, then? Come on, then. I’m Meum Perseas, Third Bloom, She/Her.” She crouched down and picked Hope up with a single vine, loosely holding her close to her chest.

“So, what’s your name? Can you tell me what happened?” She asked the cradled Terran.

Hope tried to respond, but her exhaustion rapidly caught up to her. She hadn’t slept well in months, if not longer, and the past few days were particularly bad with her actively planning how she was going to go out. As Meum held her, her mind raced with fear, but her body couldn’t help but admit the sheer security and comfort in how she was being held by soft vines. Hope’s consciousness quickly receded before her, and oblivion enveloped her in its place.