*Dirk-* "Dirk...I think you need to come down to the engine room. I think you need to hurry." Calliope's never sounded scared before. Even in the midst of her existential crisis about being a warship, her voice was more...fatalistic. This is scared. It wakes you up like a bucket of ice water. You pull on your mag boots and clomp down the hall to the lift and punch the button for Deck 16. You hop out of the lift into the reactor room. The lights are dimmed for shipboard-night. No alarms, no sparks, no fire. Tomoe is floating in the middle of the compartment. She's wearing a set of plain flannel pajamas, her bare feet a meter above the floor, hair drifting in a sort of halo. Her arms are stretched out and a little behind her, like someone floating on the water. "Tomoe, you're scaring the...." You stop when she opens her eyes and looks down at you. You feel as if the universe shifts slightly, or your place in it does. Now the room is full of the little firefly lights like the cavern on Helena. They're swirling about the both of you and the broader compartment, forming whorls and eddies in invisible currents. "Calliope, are you seeing this?" "I assume not, Dirk. My gravimetric sensors are returning anomalies but I do not *see* anything." "I feel like I have wings here," Tomoe says to you, barely more than a whisper. "I feel like I can fly." "That's because there's no gravity. Tomoe...I don't think we want to be having an 'experience'," you put 'experience' in air quotes, "ten feet from the dive system, right?" She makes small circles with her arms as if she's treading water, and rotates towards you at her hips until she's at eye-level, her legs drifting behind and above. Which is absurd of course because you can't "swim" in the air in zero-g, but then again...psychic alien space-fireflies. She reaches out and cups your cheeks with cold hands and looks at you with eyes that seem darker and more depthless than normal. "You silly, stupid, disgusting man," she whispers, "you have wings, too." And then the universe blows wide open, and you're swimming in the ocean of the galaxy. You see the stars and their gravity wells, perturbated by planets and moons, swept into the cosmic whirlpool from the galactic center. You see the tiny specs, like water bugs or minnows, plunging from one well and using their momentum to pop up again in another. You feel as if you're in a diving suit, like your tiny movements are moving something larger around you. *The ship....* Tomoe is here next to you, not holding your hand, but with a firm grip on your wrist. She's extremely still. She looks over at one of the wells, where hundreds of little minnows are bobbing out and up with a neighboring well. "Whistler," she says, though her lips aren't moving, "and Roberts." Your instincts being raised on a water planet suddenly kick in, and you're overcome by the sense that you're under water, and there are predators in the dark below. You thrash and turn, trying to swim. Tomoe restrains you, but not enough. You realize the two of you had been moving through the ocean, and you've done something to the trajectory. You're definitely not moving in the same direction you were before. You stop and hold perfectly still. "What did I do?" you blurt, shaken. "I think you moved us, moved the ship." "That's not good, I'm not an engineer but I know that's not good." "You're probably right," she says, a twinge of doubt in her voice. "I preferred the hookers. Why couldn't it be the hookers?" "What?" "Forget it." You look around, try to get your bearings. You're deeper than the minnows, but not by much. Some currents and buoyancy you don't understand are affecting you, but the motion doesn't seem to be insurmountable. "Is that Canto over there?" Tomoe takes a look around and nods. "It must be." You take a deep breath. "Okay. Okay. Enough with all this wings shit. We're going to swim. We're going to swim to Canto, okay?" Tomoe nods. You grab her wrist as well and reach out with your arms and kick with your legs and you both thrust forward, but something keeps attempting to push you to the surface the more you move laterally. Tomoe tugs at your arm. "Stop, stop. We need to go deeper to go farther." "Got it, yes." "And Dirk?" "What?" "There *is* something down there. Not too deep, okay?" "Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK." You pivot in the void and swim *down* and in the direction of Canto. It's difficult, but not much more difficult than diving while snorkeling. You quickly figure out how deep you'll need to go to make it all the way to Canto and keep pushing further down into the dark. The weird buoyancy pushes you up and you close in on Canto's well. Something about the scale of it all gets strange, and Canto's primary consumes your vision as you race towards the much smaller well of the planet. Then, without warning, you feel like you slam into a brick wall, and everything goes black.