Fandom: Blake's 7
Title: Joys Seven Drabble Set
Rating: General
Disclaimer: I don't own Blake's 7. It belongs to the BBC and to the estate of Terry Nation. No money is being made or solicited for this work of fanfiction.
Notes: This set of drabbles (and one double-drabble) is based on the carol "Joys Seven", and was written as my celebration for Christmas 2005.
Blake
By now the ship was home. A strange home, but a home nonetheless. Zen had proved reluctant to provide a schematic for anything other than the most vague technical details. There wasn't a map of the corridors of the ship, either. He wound up exploring using a ball of string to find his way back. It was a wilderness, one he found he enjoyed mapping.
By the time he'd finished mapping all the corridors (and oh, the sense of achievement that provided) he'd got used to spending the majority of his off-watch time in the bowels of the Liberator.
Jenna
The ship was amazing. So fast, so responsive. She'd never flown one as easy to handle, as light on the controls. She'd thought her old ship (a small freighter, whose modifications started with the installation of an engine twice as powerful as the original specifications) had been good, but Liberator was so far beyond that nothing came close. The ability to outrun pursuit ships, not dodge them. The ability to traverse large areas of the cosmos without needing to stop and wait for the power units to recharge.
She'd been walking before - or maybe limping. Now? Now she could fly.
Cally
A charged capacity brain. That was what the computer said it was. She had asked, one time, while she was on her watch, with nobody else around.
Avon had declared Zen to be merely a collection of programming, but Cally wasn't too sure. She gathered her information.
One night, on watch, it came time to put her hypothesis to the test. She laid her hand on the panel, lowered her barriers, and reached out to touch another mind for the first time in over five years.
I once was lost, but now am found;
was blind, but now I see
Vila
Blake and Avon had been moaning about the lack of a schematic. He couldn't understand why. It had shown up on his console one day, out of nowhere. Took him three days to figure out what it was. Another two weeks to decipher all the symbols, figure out what a lot of it meant.
In a way, it was a challenge like being faced with a new lock or security system. He didn't let any of the others see him working on it - they'd want to help, want to talk him through things. This was his secret, all his own.
Gan
Zen's vidlibrary was ... interesting. That was probably the best word for it. There were the standard Federation propaganda channels, the bits and pieces of local vid-programming which got picked up whenever Liberator came within range of a planet. And then there was what he could only describe as the other stuff. Images of strange people. Images of their lives, their memories.
He watched them. What they spoke of was strange. It wasn't until one of them spoke of the creation of the Federation, sounding passionately happy about the notion, that he realised he was watching voices from the past.
Avon
He'd never had the chance to fully unwind the programming. He'd sworn he'd find out the full scope of what Zen could do, but he'd never really had the chance. First they'd been running, trying to avoid the pursuit ships. Then they'd been fighting – humans, aliens, lawmakers, lawbreakers. Then he'd been needling Servalan purely for the hell of it. Now, he was trapped inside this little cell, waiting. Waiting for Shrinker. Waiting for vengeance. Waiting for death.
It seemed strange that the thought of decoding Zen's complicated logical structures should give him something to live for when nothing else did.
Zen
The explosion wasn't the end. It could never be the end. Not for Zen. The Liberator had disappeared in a burst of energy, a liberation of its own, but to Zen's surprise, its consciousness lived on. It was such a combination of coincidences that it wouldn't have been calculable, not even by Orac.
First, the changes which had been made by Kerr Avon back when the crew of the Liberator had flown the ship through the forbidden area had opened up some long-hidden capabilities of Zen's programming. Other changes had occurred as a result of the encounter with the System - in this case, Orac's work to get around the overrides. The Darkness, and its own efforts to fight such a thing, through Cally. The battle against the Andromedans had made changes, as had the efforts of the Thaarn and the alien ghost to hijack the ship. The cloud of charged particles had merely been the final stage in the process of becoming Zen had been undergoing. Zen became alive.
On a quiet planet, the explosion became a star, shining brightly above a barn where a pair of fugitives watched over a sleeping child.
"We'll call her Jen," they decided.