by Luke Norris
She shut out the anxiety that came with space combat. There were extra dangers up here that she didn’t have to think about planetside. It was the knowledge that if the suit suffered damage, the consequences were more severe… hundreds of degrees below zero, complete vacuum that would pop a human body, and no air was always a downer.
As soon as Rieka was sitting on the bike, the airlock snapped shut, and she was ejected out the side of the ship. More than seventy defenders torpedoed out of the ship with her. They flew with such precision, they were like an extension of her body.
It was dark. Everything was black as they raced over the moon’s surface. She was probably passing over craters, canyons, mountains, who knew? Her drones were only visible to her bionic eye as neon outlines. The colors they took on were dependent on their position in the formation. They were continuously morphing to different patterns as she maneuvered and turned, repositioning for defense, and concentration of firepower.
As the horizon sped towards her, something appeared to take shape in the distance. It grew rapidly as they approached. Blazing hydrons, it was huge. One of the older juggernauts by the looks of it. It was long, probably fifteen hundred meters. This old thing was many times the size of Tin. Its long thin silhouette was outlined as it blacked out the stars behind it.
Rieka slowed to a cautious speed. “Recon view!” she ordered. Her bionic eye took on the view of a reconnaissance drone, which shot ahead. It always felt strange watching through the view of these recon drones as if you were flying them, because they flew in ways that would simply break a human body.
“The deep space drives have not been active on the ship for a very long time,” Tin observed. “I cannot detect any residuals. This vessel has been here a very very long time.”
The recon drone neared the ship. They had approached from the rear and Rieka could see the megastructure’s thrusters. Even in the eternal vastness of space, flying close by these gargantuan propulsion systems made her feel tiny. But they were black and dormant, as cold and inert as the space around them.
The drone continued on, traveling past them. Rieka turned the drone’s eye to watch as it passed. The surface was pockmarked from small asteroids, space dust, and space debris that had taken its toll on the vessel, another telltale sign that it had not had its fields active. So strange. Rieka couldn’t think of any logical reason why not. It looked like the drone could probably land on the surface, and not be repelled or even detected.
Further and further the drone flew along the length of the great craft, without any sign of being noticed. Smooth and featureless, like most interstellar vessels. It was rotating on its long axis to maintain artificial gravity inside. The recon drone had adopted a spiral flight path to keep itself on a stationary longitudinal line with the ship, as it made its way toward the bridge.
“Tin, bring up the schematics on these old juggernaut models.” In her bionic eye lines overlaid the camera view so she could see the plans for different rooms and chambers in the ship. By focusing she could go into deeper levels. Unless the pirates had made major internal structural modifications to the layout, what she saw would be reasonably accurate.
There were long rooms. She knew instinctively what those probably would contain. Drivers. Hundreds of men that had been drugged and forced into a life of servitude. They would be frozen, but just alive, in stasis sleep on gurneys. They would probably never have another thought of their own volition again. Triton’s dark center take those early-traders!
“We are close to the bridge,” Tin said.
Rieka herself was still a long way from the ship, but her view through the drone showed the bridge and crew’s quarters approaching. The drone slowed down…
“What is that?” Rieka was confused, it looked like a hole in the side of the ship near the bridge. Impossible. These vessels had force fields that stopped large objects long before they got near the fuselage. “That can’t be what I think it is, can it Tin?”
“The ship’s hull has been compromised,” he replied. “My systems detect zero pressure in the bridge. It is not sealed to the outside.”
Blazing hydrons! The thought of an interstellar vessel being punctured made her cold. She lived her entire life in one, and to think that they were vulnerable in this way was unnerving. She had never heard of a ship being punctured. Ever.
The drone became stationary meters above the hole.
“Rieka,” Tin said, “this hole has been created by design, it’s not the result of an impact from a foreign object.”
She didn’t need Tin to tell her, she could see herself the straight lines that had been cut through the vessels thick hull. That was where the crew would be.
“Are you detecting signs of life?”
“No life detected.”
It made no sense. Pirates had never been known to attack each other, it was part of their silly code. Maybe things had changed. No. E.T.s did not attack other second-stagers.
Could it be, was this a ruse, a trap placed here for her? Did they want to lure her in, then destroy Tin while she was inside? Would they really go to the lengths of acquiring a juggernaut to take out a protector? Yes, they probably would, but they didn’t have the resources for that. Early-traders would work a lifetime to acquire such a ship. Unless they acquired it through treacherous means.
This was too much! She couldn’t continue to inspect this through the drone’s eye from a distance.
“I’m going in to take a look, Tin.” She disengaged the drones eye and accelerated forward toward the ship. Drones fanned out as she flew past the deep space engines and up the length of the long thin juggernaut. The recon drone was a dot on the ship’s horizon, and as she quickly closed the distance, she could make out the dark shape of the incision on the surface.
Rieka was on high alert, yet her intuition told her something else was amiss, what was it? She arrived above the gaping hole. It looked so wrong.
“You’re right, Tin,” she said. “These are score marks here, you can clearly see it. Somebody has cut the aperture. It looks like there are multiple unsuccessful cut lines here too, which tells me whoever made this hole, made it from the outside.
Why had somebody cut through a ship’s hull to get to the bridge from the outside? It was a baffling mystery.
“I want full scans of the bridge, and risk assessment,” she ordered.
The reconnaissance drone split into many smaller drones, each smaller than Rieka’s hand, and they entered the aperture.
She waited. The massive vessel was slowly rotating on its access, and the black surface of the moon came back into view. Her bionic eye suddenly showed the interior of the bridge. The small drones had begun their mapping. It would take them some time to explore every crevice, but a three-dimensional reconstruction was visible to her and increasing in size and detail as the drones did there work.
She was familiar with the generic layout of the bridge on these juggernauts, and she could see that it had not been modified.
“Camera view!” she commanded.
She commandeered one of her small bots, taking full control of its motor functions. The room was dark. “Brighten!” The picture rendered itself brighter until it was similar to a lit room. Rieka gasped. There was debris floating in the room, pieces of metal and material, it made the whole scene look sinister. She turned, inspecting the seats and main projection table. There were large score marks as if gauged by an atomic cutter. She scanned further. What was that? Bots. Floating inert. Several had obviously been shot. The telltale signs of a blaster could be seen where a bot’s shell had been burnt through. She recognized these small robotoids. These were the abominations early-traders created—clever minds and geniuses from first-stage worlds. Used for their great intellects, and doomed to the worst fate one could wish on another. Their minds encased in a tiny robotic prison. But why were these robotoid humanoids here on the bridge? They would typically be kept with drivers and other first-stagers in the hold. And, why were there signs of a
fight?
“Tin?” Rieka was perplexed. “What happened here?”
“I still have not detected any life on board,” Tin said. “Perhaps the crew’s sleeping quarters will provide us with some explanation,” he suggested. “I am working on accessing the ship's log. It may take some time to get through the security protocols. If I can access these, it should be able to tell us what took place here.”
She moved the drone in the direction of the cryo room. This ship seemed abandoned, but the crew’s sleeping chambers might illuminate something. In the meantime, the drone worked its way from the bridge down the hallway.
Rieka was still outside, but with the first room cleared she made the decision to enter. A defender parked beside the bike and rotated ninety degrees, so it became a flat disk. She stepped onto it, and her shoes clicked in place. She descended into the black hole.
Her helmet adjusted to brighten the room. Just as she’d seen through the drone’s camera, there was paraphernalia floating loose around the bridge, including several of the small bots. There were clear signs of a struggle.
She made her way through the bridge to the secondary smaller projection tables. This would be used as a battle room when waging war on Laitam. The tables, currently bare slates, would have holographic projections of the territories and geographical features of the landscapes. It was a game for them.
Something caught Rieka’s eye. Small spheres were floating around, tiny marbles of various sizes. Most smaller than her fingernail. She snatched one from the air. It was a small solid ball. “Analyse!” she said, focusing on it.
“It contains nanites,” Tin replied. “It is most likely frozen human blood.”
“Blood?” she moved further along in the direction it had come. Then she saw it. On one of the chairs facing away from her, on the armrest was the glove of a combat suit. Rieka hovered around to the front of the chair. A crew member in planetside suit stared back. She could see through the broken helmet of the unfortunate crewman, bulging eyes, black swollen face, and tongue. His suit had been compromised, and he’d been frozen. Who knew how long he’d been there? Space had a way of perfectly mummifying your body. Which meant there was no way to tell how long this person had been here. The pirate's arm had been severed with some cutting tool. She could see the separated forearm on the ground, frozen solid around the blaster gun.
“Tin, have you accessed the ship’s log yet?” Rieka asked. She needed some answers.
“Still working on it,” Tin said. “The type of encryption they used, leads me to conclude they did not want U.W.F. seeing their activities.”
“Well reasoned, Tin,” Rieka laughed. “Keep working on it. There has been a conflict in the cabin, and it looks as if these small droids from the hold are responsible. I’ve never heard of anything like this. Look here! These ones were shot by the blaster. But they had weapons of their own. It looks as if they’ve used cutting tools as weapons.”
“Found another body,” Tin reported. “There are more.” He corrected.
“How many?”
“Maybe seven, I am having trouble counting them.”
Rieka received the camera feed of the drones. Blazing hydrons! It was a horror scene. The room was littered with floating corpses that had harrowing injuries. An amputated limb bounced lethargically off the camera, to drift through the room with others. Some of the bodies had been severed in half. This is why Tin couldn’t easily count the bodies. The cutting tools the robotoids had used to penetrate the hull of the ship had clearly been used in this conflict. Burnt fissures in the wall panels were evidence of that. There were also blaster holes in the walls from the crew members who had tried to defend themselves. These robotoids staged a mutiny, she realized.
Rieka noticed that some of the second stagers were wearing battlesuits, and others weren’t. They were alerted to the attack moments before it happened. She thought to herself, they’ve frantically armed themselves, and then this battle ensued.
“Rieka, I have overcome the encryptions,” Tin informed her. “I can now give you information available on the ship’s log.”
“When did this happen?”
“The ship’s computer alerted the crew to the hull being breached five hundred and twelve years ago.” Tin said flatly, not comprehending that this was a long time by human standards. “The ship’s log shows most of the crew were still in hibernation when this occurred.”
“This was just the skeleton crew that were awake when the attack happened,” Rieka said. “It looks as if they were only alerted moments before they broke through the hull. Look at this person! They had no suit on, and froze as soon as the breach happened.” Rieka flew herself into the room to inspect it first hand. “Those little robotoids really did it, Tin,” Rieka exclaimed disbelievingly. “They actually stopped this entire crew, and sacrificed themselves in the process.”
She took a moment to process the extraordinary actions of these poor human souls, geniuses who’d had their bodies robbed of them. They’d done this knowing it would mean sacrificing themselves. They would not survive for long with the ship’s computer being disabled.
She flew through the other rooms and was greeted by similar scenes, robotoids and humans floating. All dead.
“You are approaching the cryo-room,” Tin told her.
As soon as Rieka flew through the door of the long room, she could see that it had not escaped the assault. The perspex cryo-bed lids had been smashed. She hovered over to the nearest one and could instantly see the bulging features of the sleeper.
“The robotoids have gone to each bed and broken the lid,” Rieka said.
They probably deserved it. But the thought made Rieka cold. She shuddered.
“These robotoids are heroes, but this was still the methodical and calculated execution of an entire crew, a pirate crew, but still...”
“Not an entire crew,” Tin corrected her.
“What do you mean not an entire crew?”
“I cannot account for one landing craft. There are normally fifteen such vessels for driver transportation to take them planetside. I only count fourteen. One of the transport bays is missing it’s landing craft. The ship’s log also records six crew members and a unit of drivers were deployed planetside shortly before the attack on the bridge.”
“What happened to it?”
“The ship’s computer lost contact soon after departure. Evidence suggests the landing craft was also sabotaged. The crew members never re-established contact with the ship, and it never returned.”
“That was five hundred years ago, by Laitam’s calendar. If they never made it back, then they would have lived out their natural lives on the planet. They are long dead.” Rieka calculated.
“Tin, can you say what crew members were on the landing craft?”
“The six crew members included the captain, the lieutenant, a sergeant, an engineer, and two extra crew members that had joined this expedition on the last trading post.”
The captain himself was on the landing craft. That was surprising.
“Who were the two extras?”
“A mercenary, and a girl with no role assigned to her by the computer.”
Rieka stopped. “Did you say she was picked up at the trading post?” Verity, it had to be.
“The name, Tin, do you have it?”
“Captain Yarn, lieutenant Shira…”
“The girl!” Rieka interrupted. “I just need you to confirm the girl’s name.”
“Verity.”
Her search had finally come to an end. The thing she had secretly dreaded was true. Verity had turned. She had become one of them. Finally, after following dead ends and false trails across the galaxy, the question had been answered.
Why did Rieka not have the sense of closure that she’d expected? Something felt hollow about the discovery. All the evidence had pointed towards this eventuality, yet some part of Rieka had believed that Verity couldn’t be capable of this. She had poured over Verity’s profile and fel
t like she knew the girl intimately, even though she’d never met her.
Rieka had seen enough of this ghost ship. It was eerie and chilling to see all these pirates dead in their cryo-beds.
“There’s nothing more here to see, Tin,” Rieka said quietly. She watched as her drones flew down the length of the hall, scanning the cryo-beds. “I have a call to make.”
She would give the minister details of what she’d found here. Kaplan didn’t need to know that his daughter had turned. She was dead. Hopefully, it would give him more closure than she felt right now. She turned to leave.
“Rieka,” Tin said. “Drone thirty-two has detected a faint life signal, in one of the cryo chambers.”
Impossible! “Show me!” she ordered.
The camera view filled her vision, she was looking at the perspex lid of one of the sleeping chambers. It had not been smashed like the others and was still intact. She could see through the transparent glass. There was no naked body like the others.
“There is no person in there, Tin,” she said, “is this the correct one?”
“I did not say there was a person. I said there was a faint life signal.”
She looked again, and this time noticed the small red orb. It was one of the robotoids.
“This robotoid is still alive?” she asked astonished.
“Yes,” Tin confirmed. “It is demonstrating the same brain activity as a person in hibernation.”
It took several seconds for Rieka to break out of her absolute bewilderment. “Are you telling me this little robotoid put itself into hibernation and has been here for nearly five hundred years? So many questions were wracking her brain.
Why would it do this? It survived all this time. Did it think somebody would one day come for it? Who would come back to this ghost ship for a robotoid?
