Starck's Lament (The Shadow Wars Book 11)

by S. A. Lusher

  But why?

  To what end?

  Besides Amanda's severed arm, Eric hadn't stumbled across a single corpse. He imagined, with a sudden chilly intensity, that if he were go right now and track down that infirmary where he had left Seth's body lying on an examination table, he would find that very same table vacant, save for a large bloodstain. He was positive of this, in fact. In a way, it would be simpler to ascribe the missing body parts with something basic and primal. Food, for example. He could understand that. Food for the pack, for the young.

  But the intelligence he had seen there, had seen in the opening of doors, the laying of traps, even in their malignant, pinpoint, glowing eyes...it spoke of something darker. Something more sinister. So what? What could it possibly be?

  He hoped he didn't have to find out.

  They reached the hangar they needed without incident. Apparently, the creatures were elsewhere, conducting their private, unknowable tasks. Fine, let them work. The pair of them moved quickly across the hangar and came into one of the airlock bays that would grant them access to the exterior of the asteroid where the ship waited for them.

  “Before we go out,” Eric said as he closed the door to the bay behind them, “we really need to make repairs to our suits.”

  “I was thinking something similar,” Autumn replied, reaching up and gently touching the rip that the creature had made in her suit when they'd been crawling in beneath the floor. They both pulled out some suit repair kits and spent the next ten minutes patching each other up. When they were finished, they both ran a suit check, making sure that there were no more rips. Autumn had managed to patch all of Eric's, but he had missed a few on hers. He found them, made the repairs and waited for her to run another check.

  “Okay, one hundred percent,” she said. “Let's switch over to the radios.”

  “Got it.” Eric flipped on his radio. “Check, can you hear me?” he asked as he closed his vents, sealing himself in.

  “Yep, loud and clear.”

  “I can hear you, too. Okay, let's top off our oxygen and get this over with.”

  They moved into the airlock and found an emergency oxygen reserve. Working carefully but efficiently, they each hooked their tanks up to the reserve. In the end, they took everything the reserve had and it gave them each just shy of an hours' worth of air. It would have to be good enough. They both ran one more suit check, just to be safe. Once they both came back positive, Eric closed the inner door and started the cycle.

  He felt his pulse beginning to climb. Going out into a zero atmosphere environment was always a bit nerve-wracking. He listened to the rush of atmosphere as it was sucked out of the small room, the sound getting quieter and quieter until it was next to nothing. Then, a few seconds went by, and the other door opened up, revealing a desolate expanse of the asteroid and a small paved road that led to the landing pad with the ship nestled on it. Eric studied it as they approached. Though there was damage, he could read the name of the ship.

  DISCOVERY

  It was painted across the side of the chewed, scarred gunmetal gray hull in thick, flat black lettering. Definitely some kind of cargo-hauler. At least a decade old by the shape of it and the design, probably older. As they walked closer, Eric kept a sharp eye out, looking in every direction he could for signs of the creatures. There didn't seem to be anything out there with them, but there were definitely a lot of places to hide out here.

  “What do you think our chances are of finding something on that ship?” Autumn asked.

  “I don't know, honestly. Less than I'd hoped. It's obvious that the creatures have gotten onboard from the brute force tears in the hull. And clearly they're smart enough to shred the comms arrays in the installation, so there's a good chance they've done it there, too.”

  “Fantastic.”

  Eric wished he had something better to tell her, and he did have a few hopes, but he felt suddenly superstitious about voicing them out loud. As if the universe was listening, just waiting for him to have some hope, so that it could eagerly smack him down. Ridiculous, of course, but, well, he didn't know how smart the creatures were. Or how capable. For all he knew they could listen in on radio frequencies or hear their thoughts.

  They finished their trek up the short, paved road to the landing pad and got up onto it. The Discovery dwarfed them. It sat at an awkward angle, as one of its landing struts had been broken somehow and it had fallen onto its left side, the side they were approaching. The good news was that they didn't have to bother with an airlock or any kind of hacking. They could just walk right up to one of the tears in the hull and get in that way. Eric flipped on his flashlight and looked up into the largest tear as he approached it.

  He seemed to be looking into a small storage room. Carefully, he began to climb up inside of it. Once he was in, he gave the all clear and helped Autumn up.

  “We shouldn't linger,” he said. “Unless we find some more oxygen, we've got about fifty minutes left now.”

  “Got it,” Autumn replied.

  They moved through the storeroom, which was a tumbled confusion of broken open crates and spilled supplies. Eric hurried through it to the door at the far end, which was broken open. He peered slowly out into the corridor beyond, hoping that the design was a simple one. Lots of ships ended up going with the design of having a central corridor that led from the engine room to the bridge, he'd noticed.

  This one was no exception, it seemed. The large passageway he found himself in went all the way back to the engine room and continued on in the opposite direction towards, presumably, the bridge. Unfortunately the ceiling had collapsed, filling the hallway with a wall of immobile debris. Eric cursed as he spied it.

  “We'll have to go around,” he said as he set off. The corridor was tilted at an awkward angle, making the going slow.

  Autumn followed after him. They moved down the corridor as fast as they could. There was almost no gravity now, as the ship's gravity generators were obviously offline. Everything was offline, it seemed. The only light came from their flashlights and suits. Eric found a door nearest to the crushed ceiling and opened it. He pointed his light inside and stopped. The room beyond was huge, definitely one of the cargo bays.

  “Whoa...”

  “What? What is it?” Autumn replied, an edge of worry creeping into her voice.

  “Nothing dangerous,” he replied, stepping into the room and out of the way. “Take a look for yourself.”

  She stepped in behind him, her light joining his. The room they were in looked starkly different from the rest of the ship. Whereas everything else so far had a grimy, industrial, rusted quality to it, this room was pristine and pure. Everything had a glossy shine to it, the walls, floor and ceiling a clean, clinical white, made up of tiles. All along the walls were large containment chambers of glass and steel. They were stacked three high and hooked into lots of different workstations. The place was a wretched, bloody mess.

  All of the tubes were broken open.

  “Holy fuck...this must be where they came from,” Autumn said softly, shining her light slowly across the smashed open tubes. “How many are there?”

  They counted them up and came up with sixty.

  “Sixty of these fuckers. And we've killed...how many? Seth said he killed one before we met up. Then that one on the ship. The one I killed that killed Seth. The one we dropped the crate on and the one you fried...fuck, we've only killed five of these things.”

  “And very nearly died during every single encounter.”

  “Obviously taking them all out ourselves isn't really going to be an option,” Eric said.

  “But what were they doing on this ship? Why is this room so different from the rest of the vessel? How did they escape?”

  “I've got a few thoughts but we should really be getting to the bridge. I imagine the ships' log will be there and we can hopefully find out what it was they were doing here and how it all got so spectacularly fucked up.”

  They walked
slowly through the immense bay. Eric's mind swam with dismal horror. Sixty of these creatures? There were at least fifty five of them left. He supposed it was possible that at least some of them had been killed before they arrived, though it seemed unlikely. Regardless, there were clearly just too many of them to handle. They had to escape, they had to find some way out. He didn't really see any other option that realistically resulted in their survival. Their only hope seemed to rest on this broken vessel they were occupying.

  They reached another door, opened it and looked out. Another stretch of corridor awaited them, this one unbroken by debris or anything else. Eric felt a small amount of relief settle onto him. At least they had a clear shot to the bridge now. But there could be any number of problems waiting for them there or elsewhere on this miserable rock hurtling through space. As they made their way down the corridor, Eric wished vainly that he was somewhere else, anywhere else. The best possible outcome right now would be his and Autumn's survival. That was a great outcome, and he supposed it was technically possible there might be at least someone else alive on the asteroid, but that just didn't seem very likely.

  But to only have two people survive out this mess...it just didn't seem right. All of this pointless death, and for what?

  He sighed softly as they made their final approach to the bridge. All around him, he could practically feel the cold, haunted atmosphere of the recently deceased and the horror that had been carried out aboard the wrecked vessel. Even here, though, they found no bodies. It was obvious that a terrible slaughter had occurred. The deckplates and bulkheads were heavily dented and coated in flash-frozen blood. There were bullet holes and spent shell casings. It was obvious that the crew had put up a fight, but it hadn't done them much good.

  The demons had been thorough, coming even here to collect corpses.

  Even as he thought it, Eric resisted the urge to call them demons. They were just...aliens. Monsters. Except that they weren't just anything. It wasn't like aliens were common. Besides the Cyr, who were long extinct, there were no other sentient races. A part of him couldn't help but wonder if these things were sentient. Technically speaking, a sophisticated enough computer could pass for a sentient without actually being one. Of course, that was opening up an entire other can of worms, with the endless debates of what actually qualifies as sentience. He supposed that ultimately the question came down to: were these creatures acting of their own free will or were they acting one some set of predetermined commands?

  For all he knew, they could be biological machines.

  At last, they finished traversing the lengthy corridor and arrived at the bridge. Eric turned around and watched their backs while Autumn got the door open. The central passageway stretched away before him, disappearing into gloomy darkness. Anything could be shadowing them. He tried not to think about it.

  “Got it,” Autumn said.

  Eric turned around and joined her as she moved into the bridge. It was a complete mess. The front windows had been shattered, most of the workstations had been smashed and were almost wholly dark and dead. Eric began wondering if they would have to find some means of external or emergency power. He supposed that if he absolutely had to he could hook his suit into a workstation and use it as a temporary power source. But as he headed towards the captain's chair, which was a workstation unto itself and sat on a raised dais in the center of the room, he saw faint traces of light coming from some of the screens and panels.

  So the ship wasn't completely without power.

  “Watch my back,” Eric murmured as he settled awkwardly into the chair, forced to sit at a weird angle due to the slant of the ship.

  “On it,” Autumn replied.

  He activated the main screen, which was coated in a smear of frozen blood, turning everything a chilling red. Ignoring it to the best of his ability, Eric began navigating the menu, hoping that there was enough power coursing through the dead ship to grant him the information he wanted. Like before, he attempted to activate the primary and then the auxiliary communications relays. Neither of them were working. With a sigh, he ran a diagnostic on each of them, both taking five minutes apiece to fully run. While he waited, he stared ahead, given a good view through the shattered windows of the bleak desolation beyond.

  What a horrible place to be trapped. Eric had never liked asteroids. He wasn't sure why, there was just something so...miserable, so lonely about them. And now, here he was, stuck on one with horrors from beyond the stars. What was worse, it was likely he was going to die here. That wasn't his misery talking, it was more his logic. He was facing absolutely overwhelming odds. If the creatures didn't kill him then the facility or the asteroid itself might. There were so many ways to die in outer space. Too many ways.

  The computer flashed, drawing his attention.

  Looking down, he frowned as he read through both reports. Just like back on Theseus Station, the Discovery's comms arrays were utterly, totally wrecked. The list here was even longer than the one before. He heaved a sigh and then began the process of calling up a manifest, hoping to at least find an emergency beacon.

  If they didn't find one here...

  “Any luck?” Autumn asked. She was pacing again.

  “So far, no. But we still have a slim hope,” Eric replied, trying not to get her hopes up too much. Well, trying not to get both their hopes up.

  Having your hopes raised and then dashed by a cold splash of reality was a pretty shitty feeling. Eric stared hard at the screen, waiting as the computer searched the database and manifest with tremendous lethargy, low on power.

  A single hit came back.

  He opened it up and studied it.

  Hope rose cautiously within him.

  “Okay, I've got something,” he said. Autumn came closer. “They have an emergency beacon in one of their storage bays. It should be functional. We find it and launch it.”

  He began to stand up. “Wait,”Autumn said, stilling him.

  “What?”

  “Well...see if there's anything on the creatures. I mean, obviously they brought them here. Maybe we can find out why.”

  “Oh...that's a good point,” Eric replied.

  He'd been so focused on the communications that he'd forgotten about the cages. Part of him urged him onwards, knowing that the knowledge very likely wouldn't make any kind of difference. But another part of him, a more powerful part, wanted to know. So, he began searching the database as quickly as he could.

  He began finding reports. As he brought them on screen, he and Autumn read through them as quickly as possible, piecing information together. It wasn't much and some of the data was either locked down or corrupted, but Eric thought he had a fairly clear idea of what had ended up happening, and it was pretty awful.

  The Discovery belonged to a corporation. They didn't say which, they were careful with that, but it was clearly some kind of bio-research organization, a big one. Corporations had their fingers in all sorts of shady and, often, outright illegal stuff. A huge hot commodity was Cyr technology. The Galactic Alliance had placed a full ban on any and all research or hoarding of Cyr tech by anyone not affiliated with the government. Of course, since the corporations were the ones constantly expanding the Far Reach as their probes pushed further and further into the galaxy, nine times out of ten they were the ones who made new Cyr discoveries.

  Most of the time they turned the information over to the government for a fat finder's fee, but at least some of the time they tried to keep it hidden for themselves. Eric had seen it happen more than once. This was what had happened here. The corporation in question had discovered an old Cyr ruin very far out beyond the fringe. They'd dug up these things in cryo suspension. Apparently, they hadn't been able to transfer the pods that the Cyr had been using. So, instead, they had thawed the creatures and quickly refroze them in their own pods, the ones he and Autumn had passed back in the massive cargo bay.

  Which struck Eric as incredibly risky.

  But it had worked...at f
irst.

  They had been planning on bringing them back to a more secure and high-tech research site under the guise of a salvage operation, hence why most of this ship looked like crap but the cargo bay looked pristine and new. They would have made it, except they had developed sudden power fluctuations, forcing them to stop at Theseus Station for emergency repairs. When they'd landed, the power to the cryo bay had failed completely, releasing the creatures and allowing them to go on a brutal, unchecked rampage through the ship and the facility.

  Interestingly enough, what little they'd managed to decipher and translate at the original Cyr facility seemed to indicate that these creatures were of unknown origin even to the Cyr. Apparently, the ancient race had also found them and been conducting research of their own. Ultimately, whatever had wiped the Cyr out had left the facility abandoned to the elements, the creatures still frozen in time. And now they were here, awake, aware and doing whatever it was they were doing. Eric stood up, figuring they knew as much they could.

  “Shit,” he muttered as he glanced at his HUD.

  “What?” Autumn replied.

  “Getting low on oxygen. Got fifteen minutes left. Come on, we need to find a reserve. There should be reserves all over the ship. Then we find and launch the emergency beacon,” Eric replied, heading back the way they'd come.

  “How hard will that be?”

  “Provided we don't run into any trouble? Not that hard.”

  CHAPTER 10

  –Hope–

  “Here, here's one,” Eric said.

  They'd found two emergency oxygen stores on the bridge, but both had been ruptured in all the fighting and were useless. So they'd headed back into the tilted main corridor which, mercifully, remained empty, and started checking out whatever rooms they came across. With just two minutes to spare, they found a large emergency oxygen store in a bathroom. The pair of them hurried across the dark room, which seemed mostly untouched by the slaughter, and hooked their suits up to the store, beginning the process of draining it.