by Chris Hechtl
Captain Belerose knew the end was nigh. The chase was over; their ship was dead. The drifting debris trail behind her ship told her all she needed to know about the state of her sublight drive. And with it gone was her last vestige of hope.
Not that she'd had much to begin with. But there was one last thing she could do. One last act … call it spite, she thought as she her hands flicked at her keyboard to launch the computer works into the computer network.
“We've got a minute of power remaining,” Oswald said from the helm station. “Everyone else is dead, Skipper. Looks like it's just you and me in here,” he said, handing her an emergency mask. She took it and slipped it around her neck. She'd use the small bottle and rebreather charge only when it became absolutely necessary.
She rerouted power ruthlessly from life support to finish her plan just as the computers started to die.
“This is the captain. I'm using the remaining power to order you to disconnect the Ssilli. Destroy all databases; don't bother to try to get life support up and running.”
“Captain?” Oswald asked.
“I'm on it,” she said long fingers flicking out commands she alone knew and could use. She pressed her thumb to the activation port for the final authorization. She swore vilely when the self-destruct failed to go off. There was something cut between her and the packages and reactor. No matter, she thought. Where there was a will there was a way. She flicked out fresh commands.
“We're going to be boarded. You heard me, boarded,” she spat as emergency power fluctuated and started to die. Her eyes looked up to the lights, then down to Oswald who was sweating despite the chill in the air. “We have one last duty to perform. I expect you all to fulfill it. See you in hell,” she snarled as she cut the channel.
She finished her order then her finger hovered over the execute button. After a moment she grimaced and pressed down with her thumb hard.
Doors throughout the exterior of the ship received one last burst of electrical power from the grid. They followed their final commands and cracked open. Interior doors followed suit. The surviving crew had moments to realize they were about to die before their compartments were vented into space.
“What did you do?” Oswald wailed as he looked over her shoulder. She lunged to her feet.
“My duty she said coldly as she moved with deathly purpose to the emergency tool compartment he'd left open. The glitter of the fire axe called to her.
:::{)(}:::
PO Travere did the only thing she could think of when her ship shook and the lights went out. She abandoned her station and went to the center of the ship, or at least tried to do so. Then the power was cut, and the doors opened. When she heard the whistle of air being sucked out of the ship, she turned and frantically turned the manual wheel to shut the hatch behind her, then lunged for and did the same to another hatch.
Once that hatch was closed, she collapsed for a brief moment and tried to wrap her head around what had happened. The lights were out so she could only see the faded lettering that had been painted in glow in the dark paint. She realized she was trapped in a compartment in engineering country. It was a dry lock setup with an emergency suit and equipment to get into and service the reactor or drive if necessary. She had batteries for tools, lights and equipment.
The pounding of the lock made her stop and turn. There was no power, so she had no way to look out. But she could imagine someone, probably one of her ship mates, was on the other side. She listened, cringing as the pounding grew desperate and weaker. Whoever was on the other side was quickly running out of air … if they hadn't run out already.
But if she opened the hatch, they'd both be dead. She'd thinned the already thin atmosphere in the compartment, and there would be two people trying to breathe it, not one. As the knocking faded, she huddled in a seated fetal position sobbing in the dark.
“I'm sorry. I'm soo sorry,” Kelsea whimpered, dashing tears by rubbing them against her legs. “Just … go. Just die already!” she screamed out, then she ducked her head in shame and anguish at what she'd let slip out of her.
:::{)(}:::
It was over; they all knew it. All but the captain, she seemed to be doing everything but work on their survival. “We need to surrender,” Oswald said desperately. He and the skipper were the only ones left alive on the bridge it seemed. “Why did the ship vent?” he demanded into his mask.
“Because I ordered it to do so,” the captain said absently as she took a fire axe to the navigational computers. “Any other stupid questions?”
“What are you … why?” Oswald demanded.
She turned and hefted the axe. “Because it's our duty. I'll be damned if I let the enemy get what we know. Bad enough they'll find the bodies.”
“The … are you still on that?” Oswald demanded, eyes bugging out in surprise. “We need to worry about survival here!”
“You're out of line,” the captain snarled.
“So? If you haven't noticed, we're on a dead ship! We need to get the hell off this ship!” Oswald snarled in response. He turned to look at the hatch. “Maybe there is enough power for us to get to the shuttle,” he said desperately.
“And do what?” the captain laughed scathingly.
“I don't know! Get the hell off this dead ship! One thing at a time!”
“They'll pick us up. Then what?”
“Then we live!”
“For a while. And you will talk. Can't have that,” the captain said.
He eyed her warily and moved out of reach of the axe. The lights were dim; he put a console between himself and her. “What do you think you're doing?”
“My duty.” Captain Bellerose could feel the gravity lightening. The axe would be useless soon. She turned. She couldn't get to him; they could play cat and mouse around the consoles until they froze or help arrived.
She found a more likely target. She hefted the axe and then swung.
“What are you doing?!?” he said, eyes wide as the blade hit the clear window. “You'll vent what's left in here!”
“That's the idea,” she grunted. She took another swing, and it cracked the window. He frantically tried to get to her, but a third swing smashed the glass and vented the compartment. Small bits and debris were sucked out into the vented compartments. The temperature instantly dropped.
They were both wearing emergency masks, good in low atmosphere. But that didn't protect them from the sudden onset of vacuum. Their blood boiled and their skin burst like ripened fruit as the sudden change of pressure tore them apart.
:::{)(}:::
Doctor Cloutier had been in the Ssilli compartment when all hell had broken loose. He, the Cargo Master Mackey d'Bird, and Bruno, a life support tech, were trapped inside with the Ssilli.
Mackey had yanked the computer cords when the captain had ordered it. But that had been the last order they'd gotten from anyone. The compartment was dark and dead. Without power there was no way the three men could wrestle the gargantuan doors open, nor the smaller hatch door. There was no point.
“The good news is, we're in a big room. The bad news is it's got no air system. It's just a cargo hold,” Bruno said, looking about them. The only thing lighting the compartment up was the Ssilli.
“Doctor, this thing is …,” Mackey said dubiously, looking at the Ssilli.
“Is breathing twice as much as all of us. Hyperventilating. I'm giving him something to stabilize his respiration and calm him down,” the doctor said. He took out a syringe, tested it, flicked it a few times to get the air bubbles out, then injected it into an IV port he'd already established. “I hope I got the right dosage. He's scared like us so his adrenaline might burn through it.”
“Doc …”
“Yeah, that's right, go to sleep now. Just take a nap. Not that it's a good idea, napping takes up more air then being awake, but …,” the doctor said quietly, stroking the beast.
“Doc, we should think about …,” Mackey persisted.
“If yo
u're asking me to kill him, I won't. You want to answer to the captain or whoever did this?” the doctor snarled, glaring at the cargo master. The husky man shook his head. “Yeah, right, thought not. This guy is our only bargaining chip.”
:::{)(}:::
Brrfrak looked up to see cracks in the room they were in. He could see air and debris going to the cracks. The loss of air, the dark, the fear the two-legs projected, it was too much for his already traumatized mind to take. He shook and thrashed, then started to hyperventilate as if he was going to dive.
Then he saw the two-leg inject something into the tube that was attached to his side. Something soothing eased into his body, and when it got to his brain, he drifted. His eyes rolled back as he felt his overstrained hearts stop. His last conscious thought was of his former mate.
:::{)(}:::
“Doc …,” the Ssilli turned gray at the injection site then quivered. After a moment he seemed to slump and his respiration stopped. He floated, listless in the tank and started to roll slightly.
“Frack! Frack! He's flat lining and I can't …,” the doctor tried to rub the alien to stimulate him but it was too late. He scrubbed at his face, now angry and afraid.
“He's gone, Doc. Worry about the living,” Mackey said with a hand on his arm.
“Yeah, um …,” the doctor frowned and shook his head. It was getting increasingly harder to think. Not a good sign.
“We can do something. We've got water …,” Bruno said desperately. “We need power and um …,” his rushing thoughts started to slow as the air got thinner.
“We need to try to rig a setup to convert the water into air. The problem is we've got no power,” Mackey said. He glanced at the only source of light in the compartment, the dying Ssilli. “Too many of us. We're dead.” He tried to get to a pry bar, anything, but found himself sluggish.
“Hypoxia. We're …,” Doctor Coultier said something else drunkenly then slumped.
“Frack,” Bruno said, recognizing the symptoms. He cudgeled his mind to find some sort of temporary fix but nothing came to him.
:::{)(}:::
First Lieutenant Contenev, Descartes chief engineer and XO, had a sneaking feeling he had drawn the short straw as he led the boarding party. He took a pair of skin suited ratings to secure engineering while another pair led by the bosun from Loch secured the bridge and swept the ship for survivors.
It took hours to scour the dark ship—hours in failing gravity. Each hour the grav emitters and inertial dampeners weren't re-energized meant the mass shadows they emitted started to fade. He called in a report to Captain Levinson once they'd finished their initial sweep of the ship. He glanced at PO Travere. That had been all they'd gotten out of her, her name and rank. Petty Officer Third Class Kelsea Travere. The woman had clammed up after that.
“The computers have been scrubbed by the captain, sir. I'm not sure what we can pull from them; it happened before they exited hyperspace. It's not just deleted; they have been partially overwritten by new files and old. She even smashed a few of the computers on the bridge before she apparently vented the compartment killing herself and a crewman.”
The captain grimaced. Vacuum wasn't a death anyone would want to face.
“There is one reported surviving crew member, but she's traumatized.”
“Frack,” Captain Levinson muttered. So much for easy answers. He wasn't set up for an investigation, definitely not a long-term one. He didn't have the trained personnel, nor any to spare if he did. “So, no answers there I take it?”
“No, sir. We're still exploring the compartments that were locked down. We're hoping we'll find a journal or something but …”
“If we're only that lucky,” the captain muttered. “But we can't count on the Lady's blessings.”
“No, sir.”
“But keep trying anyway. She rewards hard work from time to time to make it worth the effort.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“You're sure the crew has been accounted for?”
“Yes, sir. There hasn’t been any life-sign readings, and thermal signatures are black.”
“Understood. Keep me posted. I want half-hour reports.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
:::{)(}:::
The crews of Descartes and Loch monitored the live feed from the boarders. It was a horror show some couldn't handle, but others were grimly determined to see it through to the end. A rare few had to do so; it was a part of their duty. There was lingering doubt about if the captain had made the right call. The fact that the Marengo's captain had chosen to suicide told them something was definitely up.
It still wasn't enough to get them out of doubting themselves and the captain's call though.
There wasn't much to secure in some cases. The plasma had wrapped around the hull to do serious damage. The freighter's small boat bay had been compromised. Plasma had torn through it like an abattoir, melting Marengo's shuttles into useless slag.
The ship was definitely dead. ONI was welcome to the scraps, but there was no point trying to salvage the ship for anything in his opinion. Of course, he was on the bridge, not on the ship, so he might be wrong, the captain thought idly. But he was pretty sure he wasn't.
“Captain, you need to see this.”
“What am I looking at?” Captain Levinson asked dubiously as he watched the video feed. He was still fuming internally about the diversion of his relief ships to Centennial. He wanted to get back bad, but everyone seemed against him. He shook his head and refocused on the video feed, leaning forward to get a better view.
It was dark in the compartment, only lit with the flashlights of the boarding crew. But when it passed a tank filled with green algae and something bumped the glass on the other side, he stiffened. “Back that up!”
He watched grimly as he saw the body of a Ssilli floating in the tank. It tumbled in place; belly up as decomposing flesh produced gas or whatever and filled its dive bladders to make it buoyant. He replayed the video to be sure and then ordered the crew to do a more careful inspection. They confirmed the findings.
“Damn. Poor sods or whatever,” he murmured. He turned to the comm rating. “Comm, send a signal to ansible—priority message, encryption key Baker. Copy to admiralty, intelligence and Doctor Thornby. We need to let them know what we've got our hands on … and what the hell do we do with it,” he said.
Chapter 3
Admiral Irons read the ansible report from Nightingale. The initial contact report read something like a fire mission that no naval officer wanted to read or be a part of. A naval ship being forced to fire into an unarmed freighter? Nightmarish indeed.
Then the follow-up report of the boarding. It had been instantly flagged by Sprite so he'd pulled it to mull over. And mull it over he indeed did for all of the two minutes it took to finish his bowel movement and then get cleaned up so he could issue fast orders.
Remains of a Ssilli had been found and recovered. It was a pity that the last Ssilli had died sometime before the boarding, but there was nothing they could do to change that. It was exciting news to the new federation. Monty, Captain JG Montgomery of ONI, the Office of Naval Intelligence, had been involved from the beginning of course. Questions about where the Ssilli male and female came from were buzzing the net, Irons noted, as he sent off his initial orders.
If Monty was right, they were definitely not sleepers since both had lacked cybernetics or so the initial report said. They'd had some sort of crude external interface to interact with the crew, LCD monitors taped and strapped over the male's eye stalks, and motion sensors strapped and taped to his body … even electric shock wands rigged to his torso to force compliance. Heinous.
According to the theory Monty's staff immediately put out, the poor being had been brutalized during his subjugation, most likely tortured to helm the ship in order to squeeze speed and some measure of efficiency out of him.
Captain Levinson had made the right call. Monty's people tagged the ship name in the captu
red Horathian war books. Funny how they hadn't provided an up-to-date copy to Levinson, the admiral thought. He'd sort that problem out later though.
It was going to be a subdued and dark report to him when ONI got around to their weekly meetings the admiral thought blackly. He preferred blunt honesty, but in this case he wouldn't mind someone glossing over the details of the poor alien's long enslavement.
The one lone surviving member of the crew of Marengo had refused to answer any of their questions. ONI couldn't use extreme means from where they were at. That meant the crew member had to be placed in stasis for safe keeping while a salvage and prize crew were dispatched from Pyrax to bring it back there.
In the meantime the small prize crew cloned the ship's database. The navigational database had been carefully scrubbed and overwritten in a paranoid attempt at hiding the origin of their finds. But fine pieces to the puzzle in smaller files they had missed cropped up according to the investigators. They burned a lot of ansible bandwidth for days to download the cloned database while the ship was towed to planetary orbit.
Lieutenant Vlad Contenov, Descartes' chief engineer, went elsewhere to find answers to the burning questions. He found clues in the engineering diagnostic files. They didn't have the location of the Ssilli, but it gave them a rough estimate of how far the ship had traveled and that estimate was reflected in each jump. The speed in hyperspace they traveled, the time in hyper …. It was a starting point, John thought.
He would have to dispatch a light cruiser to find the Ssilli world. It was imperative to his long-range plans that they do so. He made a note to OPS to kick an LC free at their earliest time period. Since ET had so much coverage and they'd already dispatched a ship, there might not be a need he reminded himself.
But it remained a possibility he thought remotely as his fingers flicked and typed at the virtual keyboard before him. He called up the ship registry and then passed on an order to Tumuloch to explore the nexus when they got back to port from their visit to New Dublin. When he was finished, he scanned the document once and then passed it on to his Yeoman and staff to go over to make sure he'd dotted all his I's and crossed all his T's.
