Little Hope
Spock meditated.
Or he thought that was what he was doing. He was back in his quarters on Enterprise, his focus on a candle. A candle for a lost ship. Enterprise was a lost ship. His impulse to reason naturally tried to connect the two—but logic said he could not be on a vessel and mourning it at the same time.
Still, the candle burned.
He thought to close his eyes, to see if the light would disappear or linger. He realized then that they were already closed. He still saw the light. It was red. A kind of red that only existed in the deepest recesses of his memory, where he had forcibly hidden it away.
He had been a child on Vulcan when it had appeared to him. Crimson, glowing rays emanating—no, extending—from a figure that was there, and yet not there. It had hovered over his bed, instilling in him wonder—and also bone-chilling fear. There was no logic to the thing’s presence then—nor in his mind now.
I will not have this dream again. I will not!
Spock opened his eyes to darkness—and breathed the cool reprocessed air of his battlesuit. It had indeed been a dream, he thought, caused by exhaustion or injury. Or a hallucination caused by a flaw in his oxygen mixture—or perhaps nitrogen narcosis from the pressures exerted on his body. He had been spinning, hadn’t he?
It was then that he realized where he was: in space. The darkness, he now realized, wasn’t complete. A brown dwarf sun sat dully off to his right, a fuzzy blob hardly visible through the dust of the region. Much nearer, to his left, was a gas giant; his body had joined its family of satellites.
Spock had been aboard Enterprise. No, not aboard, but atop it—and had been dislodged. That, he remembered—along with the last sight he’d seen before losing consciousness: a blast, well aft, which sent the saucer section careening out of sight. He hadn’t been able to tell whether the blast had come from a Rengru weapon—or, worse, from the stardrive section, which Pike must have cast off for a reason. What mattered was that the ship was gone—
—and so was everything else from the colossal melee. It was as if the conflict had never taken place. No Rengru, no Boundless debris was visible anywhere, to the extent that anything could be made out.
He looked around, unsure of what to do. His gaze fell upon a white circle. An icy moon of the gas giant; perhaps it had been a full-fledged dwarf planet when the body was still a star. Now there was nothing special about it—except for the red point of light that had lingered before his eyes earlier. It appeared only when he looked at the orb; when he looked away, it vanished.
The jetpack on the Boundless suit could take him to it, he realized—eventually. It would take him a week to reach there, saving enough propellant to touch down safely. The armor could keep him alive during that time, and much longer.
It made as much sense as anything else. He was likelier to be found on the surface of a world, any world, than if he were floating like jetsam. Why not that world?
He called up the dialog allowing him to control the suit’s engine. Only then did he realize that, imperceptible to him, his jetpack had been operating all along, driving him toward that particular ice planet.
He had set the course in his sleep.