Victorious Dead (The Asarlaí Wars Book 2)

by Marie Andreas

  Vas wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, but the high-pitched whine followed by a poofing sound wasn’t it. She got to her feet to see nothing but a pile of fake Asarlaí parts, all smoking slightly. Then the lights and power went out and she couldn’t see anything.

  The only noise was the crew on the deck scurrying around trying to find a light source. The ship was dead silent. No lights, no engines, and within about an hour, no life support. Vas heard the emergency life support kick in—but it wasn’t a long-term solution.

  “Marli, do you know what that thing did?” Vas asked as she felt around the console. Gosta had added some hidden hand-held lights to the deck, ones that used batteries, not the ship’s power. Finding them wasn’t going to be easy.

  Wait a minute.

  “Galatia, queen of the sea.” Vas spoke it softly and was rewarded with a glowing square two feet over from her. She peeled the hand-held light off and raised it.

  Her crew was well trained. They weren’t completely losing it, but they were also still too loud.

  “I need everyone to be quiet for a moment,” Vas said, then added, “Galatia, queen of the sea.” Eight more hand lights came to life.

  Marli took one and came over to Vas. “You name your emergency lights?”

  “No, Gosta did. I forgot he set them to be called,” Vas looked around for more threats, but the smoking pile of metal pieces seemed to be the only danger. “How did that get onboard?”

  Pholin winced and rubbed his throat, so Marwin answered. “It came out of the hull, Captain.” He pointed to the bulkhead. “We didn’t know what was happening at first, but it fought its way through. Shook the entire deck, but we couldn’t stop it.”

  Vas walked over and touched the side where he’d pointed. Nothing. It felt like every other part of the ship. “It wasn’t only the deck, I felt it in the holosuite.” Now that was odd, not that she felt it, but that no one besides her and Marli responded. Not all of her crew would be asleep right now.

  “I didn’t feel anything. I was already coming up here when I heard someone shooting at the lift,” Marli said.

  Vas had no idea why she felt the attack, but she did. However, life support, engines, and weapons were first priority. “The fact these lights work tell me that it wasn’t an EMP attack, nor an electro net. Then what was it and how do we get our power back?”

  Marli pulled out a small tablet and scrolled through a dozen screens before stopping. “It attacked the core. These lights weren’t affected because they weren’t part of the core, same with my scanner. But that thing over there had been working on it for a while.” She looked up. “It came through when the breach was on the side of your ship. It waited out there until it could go after the core. I have no idea how we missed it.”

  Damn it. Vas allowed herself a few solid moments of stomping around. The core was still intact, or they wouldn’t even be alive now, but it was obviously seriously compromised. There was no way to contact anyone else on the ship, and all she had to work with was a disguised Asarlaí and four crewmembers, none of which were computer experts, to try and fix a compromised core before they all ran out of air.

  “Can you tap into our comm system with that thing? You seemed to have no problem doing so from your ship.” Vas pointed at Marli’s tablet.

  “Sadly, no,” Marli said. “I can only do that through my ship.” She raised her hand, “And no, I can’t reach them either. It’s as if your core isn’t listening to the commands of the ship anymore.”

  “Captain? Pholin might need more help than I can give him up here. He’s still not looking good,” Anthling said, but Pholin shook him off.

  Vas knew Pholin needed medical help, but they couldn’t get him down to the med lab.

  The core. “Marli, could you use that thing to talk to another core? One that is intact but offline?” Vas tried to recall anything she could from Gosta’s ramblings about the Victorious Dead’s core. It had been the first piece of ship they’d found—it was actually in the Warrior Wench when they’d taken it over. Gosta and Hrrru had taken it upon themselves to remove it from all connection with the Warrior Wench in preparations for the day they were able to reconnect it to the Victorious Dead.

  “You travel with extra cores?” Marli looked up from whatever she’d been trying to get her small scanner to do.

  Marwin nodded enthusiastically. “That’s a great idea, Captain. The controls for the Victorious Dead core are run through this console—but it’s a free system.”

  Vas started to shake him off. She wasn’t surprised Marwin knew about the work on the extra core, but if the only access was through shut-down systems they were still stuck. She paused when a light flashed as Marwin hit some buttons.

  “Hrrru wanted it free of the Warrior Wench so he never connected it,” Marwin said.

  Marli beat Vas over to Marwin and held her scanner over the console. “I can access it. It’s going to be odd. This ship will be controlled from another brain, one that might be limited.”

  Vas was going to argue that ships don’t have brains, but she couldn’t. She knew she’d felt the heart of the Victorious Dead was in the core. If the thing had a heart, it could have a brain.

  “Do it,” Vas said. The air felt different now, and the ship was starting to roll a tiny bit. Not to mention if that pile of burnt metal in the middle of her command deck had any friends, this would be the perfect time to attack. A chill went through her—if they weren’t already doing that. That thing appeared to have come through a bulkhead—there could be more of them on other decks of her ship. “We need control of our ship, now.”

  Marli nodded and her fingers typed out commands too quickly for Vas to see. The ship jerked forward, the lights flashed on, then silence. A moment later the engines came to life, the small noises of a functioning ship popped on, and secondary lights filled the deck. The lift opened but no one was there.

  Then complete silence and darkness again.

  “Well, if our crew didn’t know something was wrong, they should now,” Vas finally said after the fifth time everything faded to black.

  “This isn’t easy, you know. That second core of yours has some odd modifications to it, and a mind of its own.” Marli tried yet another round of commands.

  Vas’s comm crackled to life, but everything else was still dark. “Captain? What the hell is going on? There’s no lights down here and that weird buoy is talking to me!”

  “Mac?” Vas was glad to hear from any of the crew. Then she did a double take on his words. “What are you doing down there?” She hadn’t made the room with the buoy officially off limits, but it had been assumed. Never a good idea with Mac.

  “We were, that is, I was…” His words dropped off and Vas heard a very familiar female voice swearing in the background.

  “Bathshea? You’re with him?” Great, not only was Mac getting into trouble, he was back with Bathie. “Never mind, we’ll deal with that later. Bathie? Can you tell what the buoy is doing? Too long to explain, but the ship’s power has been drained. We’re working on getting it back up.”

  Vas knew Bathie was probably trying to see if she could force open the doors and climb through the access tubes to get up to the command deck. This would have been a dream problem for an engineer like her.

  “It’s talking,” Bathshea said. “Not a language I’ve heard, and it doesn’t seem to be aimed at us. But it is acting like it’s trying to communicate with something.” A noise could be heard in the background, one of the machine languages it sounded like.

  The lights and power for the ship came on again.

  “I think I have it, maybe.”

  The noise from Bathie’s comm cut off and so did the lights and power.

  Vas walked over to where Marli was working. “Bathie, can you talk to the buoy? Doesn’t matter what, but talk to it? I have a weird feeling I know who it’s trying to talk to.” Aithnea had been an engineer way back in the day, and had always felt more at home with machine systems than peo
ple. She also seemed to have known way more about Vas’s ship, and what was in it, than Vas did.

  Marli looked up from her scanner. “I speak many languages, but none of them are machine.”

  “Not you.” Vas sat down in the pilot’s sling and waited. “I think it’s trying to talk to the Victorious Dead’s core.”

  Bathie left her comm open as she and Mac both spoke to a lump of space metal. Vas wished the systems were on line so they could keep that video. They both sounded like they were speaking to their favorite newborn niece.

  The machine language started again. The tone was a little different, but it worked. The lights came back on, and the engines kicked in. A dead stop and start wasn’t good for any ship, but thruster engines were simpler and might not cause problems.

  They’d been sitting dead in space for at least fifteen minutes. That no one had attacked them yet might have been because they were waiting for their robot to finish its job. Whatever that had been. Vas figured they couldn’t afford to wait any longer.

  The power seemed to hold for now. “Bathie and Mac, keep talking to that thing. Marli, keep working with the second core. I’m getting us out of here.” She punched the thrusters and the ship started to move. They couldn’t go through a gate, nor any hyperspace, and they were still a slow-moving target. But at least they were moving. If that automon’s job had been to keep them in one place, at least Vas could thwart that.

  “Hey! Who’s moving the ship?” Mac yelled and the lights and power flickered.

  “I am and keep talking to that buoy!”

  Marli was still quiet but she continued to type in commands to her scanner. “Keep going, keep going,” was all she said.

  Anthling and Marwin lead Pholin to the lift. “We’ve got to try and get him down to the med labs, Captain. There was some serious damage done to his throat.”

  Vas nodded. They’d kept the power on for a few minutes. Hopefully it wouldn’t strand the three of them in the lift.

  Another three minutes later and Marli raised a triumphant fist. “We have it. The Warrior Wench’s core has been completely corrupted, but with that odd artifact’s help, the core from the Victorious Dead is now running things.” She smiled around the room, but only Vas was there to see her.

  “Can we stop talking to the buoy now?” Mac said with more whine than Vas thought was possible.

  She looked to Marli and waited for her nod. “Aye. And since you’re both up, come on up here. I’m getting the engines on line but we need to clear this area.”

  Vas didn’t wait for his response, but flipped open the ship wide comm. “We were attacked internally and the ship took some damage. Please look around your areas for any intrusions or anything suspicious. Gosta, Hrrru, Mac, Bathshea, Xsit, and Terel get up to the deck ASAP.”

  She leaned back in the sling as systems came online. Marli had stationed herself at Gosta’s console and was busy typing in commands.

  The automon was still in a pile in the center of the floor, but at least it was no longer smoking. What had been its original mission? The blackout had been a defense mechanism, Vas would bet on it. If the goal of the people behind that thing had been to cut off all power to her ship, that thing could have done it the moment it got on board.

  People started coming on deck, command crewmembers from all of the shifts, not only the ones she’d called. Even some non-command deck folks.

  “There are too many people up here. Please go back to your quarters if not on shift. But will someone grab a containment suit and take that pile of crap out of here? Don’t touch it directly, and keep it in a decon chamber.”

  Mac hovered over her, clearly wanting his pilot sling back, but not sure about kicking out his own captain. Vas waited a few more minutes until the crowd on the deck thinned out. She slowly got to her feet. “Check the thrusters. I had to cold start them. And I will need a report as to why you and Bathie were down in a decon chamber,” Vas said then held up her hand as he started to speak. “A report. Sent to my computer. Not in person.”

  The lift doors opened again and Vas turned to chastise whoever it was.

  “What happened?” Deven stood there as the doors opened.

  24

  V as knew he was alive. Or some part of him was. And she’d run into two clones of him. But seeing Deven, the real thing, standing on the bridge again was enough to make the oldest campaigner weep.

  Or freak out that he shouldn’t be out of bed yet.

  “Deven? Should you be out and about?” Vas approached him slowly, as he looked a little wild around the eyes. She fought to keep from running into his arms.

  “Why wouldn’t I be here? And how do you two know each other?” He looked from Vas to Marli and back again. It didn’t help the freaked-out look on his face at all.

  Damn. His memories didn’t all come back with him. That was a fear that lurked in the back of Vas’s mind—that they’d get him back physically but not mentally. At least he knew who she and Marli both were.

  Vas moved forward and took his hand. “You introduced us, remember? Rather, she forced you into introducing us by charging our ship?”

  He shook his head, his longer hair making the movement more noticeable and Vas wondered if enough of him would come back to remember that he usually wore it shorter. “No, I never… Wait.” He tilted his head, then shook it as if there were bees around it. “Yes, I do. Ore ship. Her crewman. She stole the mutated bodies.”

  Marli laughed. “Neither of you told me you knew it was me. I had hoped you’d think you misplaced them.”

  Vas pulled Deven into the command deck and sat him down at a station. She was sure he wasn’t supposed to be up here. And he wouldn’t have woken up, nor gotten out of his bio-bed, unless all the power went off. Another thing to thank whoever was behind the automon for—scrambling her second-in-command’s brains.

  “Terel, I think you need to get up here.” Vas hadn’t been worried that her doctor hadn’t shown up initially, there would be a good reason. But she needed her now.

  Terel’s voice overlapped Vas’s. “Vas, I don’t know how to tell you, but Deven escaped.”

  Deven looked around and realized he didn’t have a comm, Vas handed him hers. “I didn’t escape, Doctor. I came to the bridge.”

  “That’s him. Why is he up? Why are you up? Get back here immediately. No, wait, stay there.” Terel cut the link and Deven handed the comm back to Vas.

  He was starting to lean. “I feel odd, and I have to admit, I’m fuzzy. Were we on a job somewhere?”

  “You’ve been out of things for a bit,” Vas said and looked over her shoulder at the rest of her crew and gave a quick shake of her head. That was the understatement of the year. Normally Deven would probably take the ‘you died and came back in three bodies’ well. But he wasn’t himself yet.

  She needn’t have worried. Aside from Marli, who was doing her best scowl, the rest of the people on deck were wide-eyed and silent. Even Mac.

  The lift slammed open and Terel and Pela came running out. Terel had a med chair with her.

  “Damn it, you have always been the worst patient. Why do you think you were in that bed? For my health?” Terel didn’t even give him a chance to respond. She bustled him into the chair, then pulled him back toward the lift.

  “Apparently, I have been very bad and annoyed the good doctor. Again.” He flashed a very Deven grin and waved to everyone on the deck. “Please come visit me in her dungeon.”

  Terel turned and shook her finger at Vas, then pointed it around the bridge. “Not until I say. I have no idea what he did pulling out those wires like that.” She sputtered on a tirade to herself and the three of them vanished into the lift.

  “Okay, you all saw him. Yes, the rumors were true, and we’ve got Deven back. But, I have no idea how long it will take him to realize what has happened. So, all of you—and spread this around the ship—you do not visit, engage, or anything with Deven until Terel and I say so.”

  Everyone still looked
stunned, but there were a few nods.

  “What about Ragkor?” Mac asked.

  Damn, Vas hadn’t thought of that. She now technically had two seconds-in-command. That neither was up to doing anything was a separate issue. At some point they’d both be functioning.

  Then she thought about all the shit that was currently messing up the universe—at least her universe. Having two seconds-in-command was low on the worry list.

  “We’ll sort that out later,” Vas said.

  Marli was still looking at the lift when Vas called her out of her thoughts.

  “Do you want to try and figure out what that thing was?” Vas motioned to where the automon had been. Marwin had it taken down to a secured decon chamber. At the rate they were putting things behind heavy decon doors, even a big ship like the Warrior Wench was going to run out of room soon.

  Gosta looked up, like he was hoping Vas would include him. He hadn’t seen what had happened when it happened, but he had watched a replay when he got up on deck. Vas knew he was dying to get a peek at the automon parts.

  “Sorry, Gosta, I need you to take the deck. And I need you and Hrrru to figure out how in the hell that thing got in here, and where its people are. We were dead in space for far too long for them to have been nearby.” Vas marched to the lift.

  Marli came in right after. “Unless this was a mistake.”

  “An extremely advanced automon, who can walk through a ship’s hull, happens to look like your people, and the attack on us was a mistake? No way. Although I will say I was damn glad that it was a machine.”

  Marli scowled. “You and me both.” She held up her scanner. “I did get a full recall of the interaction, so we can have more people work on it. I already uploaded it to Gosta’s station. But I won’t tell anyone else this, not even Deven; I thought it was one of my people for a split second. It was only when I was able to pull my blaster on him that I realized it wasn’t.”