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off the stool doing it.”
    Mark, leaned forward, letting his palms rest flat on the desktop in front of him, then straightened suddenly as a cry of surprise escaped his lips. Fire exploded in Heather’s brain as every neuron in her skull triggered simultaneously. She struggled to remove the headband, but found her limbs unresponsive. Every nerve in her body pulsed with an intense tingling as though all her limbs had fallen asleep and were now waking up with a vengeance.
    She screamed, dimly aware that nearby her two friends screamed in accompaniment, the sounds barely registering in her overloaded brain. Although Heather had never dwelt on death, she had always assumed death would creep up on her suddenly when it came, taking her with it in a couple of ticks on the clock, perhaps preceded by a long fall off the rocks or the screech of car brakes.
    Now death tore at her from the inside, and it was taking its sweet time.
    When Heather was small, she had been badly shocked trying to get a bagel out of the toaster with a knife, but that had been an instantaneous trip into the land of nod. This endless eruption of every nerve ending in her brain held her here, unwilling to let her consciousness flee from the agony. For what seemed like an eternity there was only pain. Then, as if all her pain receptors had been seared out of existence, it faded, replaced by a flood of imagery, hallucinations that lacked the faintest connection with any reality she had ever known.
    Three-dimensional symbols rolled past her as beings with large heads and skinny torsos darted about in all directions. They spoke at her. No, that wasn’t right. They thought at her, sending out the strange symbols that encapsulated those thoughts, and when she questioned them, her questions rolled out toward them as much simpler symbols that encapsulated each question. She understood none of it.
    Shift. Gone were the beings and their symbols. She found herself strapped in a craft darting between the planets of a star system, the walls of the craft completely transparent, as if she was sitting in a large soap bubble. A ringed planet darted by, its many moons careening away as her ship banked so hard it seemed the gravitational strain would destroy it.
    Then she saw it, flitting across her field of view, far ahead. It expanded in a magnified view, surrounded by circles and crosshairs as her ship attempted to establish a lock on the target.
    The long cigar-shaped craft she chased suddenly sent out a spear-like vortex that rippled through the space separating them, a narrow tube in which the view of the stars beyond twisted and bent.
    Heather’s ship torqued hard right and dropped, the ripple passing within a hundred meters of her. In response, a beam of solid red pulsed outward from her own ship, missing the cigar ship ahead, but pulverizing a small asteroid as they passed through a field thick with the spinning rocks.
    Ahead, a blue planet with a single moon loomed large, the other ship racing toward it. Almost simultaneously, the weapon systems on the two ships fired again.
    The red beam played across the other craft’s cigar-like surface, bubbling and warping parts of its hull as the enemy’s vortex beam punched through her own ship, sucking four small bodies out through the hole into the vacuum of space. All maneuvering control lost, Heather’s ship plunged onward, and the surface of the blue planet rose up to meet her.
    The imagery stopped. Heather stumbled from the stool, pulling the alien band from its place on her head. The room spun around her, only gradually stopping as she sank to her knees. Beside her, Mark leaned against the wall, his own headset held tightly in his fist. Struggling to his feet, he held out a hand to help her up.
    Heather’s eyes swept the room, panic threatening to rob her of her breath.
    “Jennifer?”
    Mark shook his head. “I already looked. She’s gone.”
     

Chapter 7
     
    There were times when loneliness hung so heavy in the