Best of Beyond the Stars

by Patrice Fitzgerald

  An intact room? “Pass it along to the others.” I changed direction. “Guys, got a room with atmo’. Looks to be about deck seven, ‘bout forty metres away from the hull.” Right at the core of the ship.

  “No way,” said Stanco. “Survivors?”

  “Who knows?” With a mental thrust I transferred the information Sandy had compiled for me to my team.

  “We’ll meet you there,” said Angel.

  Floating through bloodstained halls, I made my way further and further into the ruined hulk of the Anchorage, following the red line deeper into the ship’s heart.

  * * *

  I floated past a lot of things. I saw computer screens powered down and inert, I saw half-melted emergency bulkheads breached and useless, I saw personal effects floating in the nothingness and loose bulkheads and yellow oxygen masks drifting like tentacles, their precious cargo long ago discharged.

  But I saw no bodies. Personal effects, plenty. Weapons and shell casings, sure. Blood, and lots of it, including some that looked like the victims had been dragged. Not a single corpse.

  Finally, the red line led towards a thick blast door labelled Secure Hold. There was a button to open it, but the display glowed with an angry red hue and flashed the words decompression failure. The metal had the same acid scoring as every other door we’d seen, but this one had held up, probably due to its significant thickness and anti-theft reinforced polymers.

  The shipbuilders valued the passengers’ gold more than it valued their lives. Although, by booking passage with that particular ship, the paying customers were de-facto supporting them.

  Whatever. It wasn’t my job to feel sorry for anyone.

  “Man,” said Stanco as he crawled around the corner, “we are going to get so much free shit.”

  “Salvage of non-Earthborn items isn’t one of our objectives,” said Angel, appearing right behind him.

  “You kidding? What’s the point of being a Crisis Exacerbation Specialist if you don’t get to loot anything afterwards?”

  I shook my head. “Golovanov said we were Private Third-Party...something-or-rather Engineers.”

  “Golovanov,” said Angel, “can also hear you. The audio is piped into mission command.”

  “We’ve been through a lot,” I said. “He can handle a joke.”

  Stanco floated toward the door, peering in close.

  “Thoughts?” I asked.

  He extended a giant metal hand, reaching out and touching the pitted and scarred door. “Knock knock,” Stanco said, rapping silently on the metal. Anyone inside could hear us, but we had no hope of hearing them through the vacuum of space. “We should send through a probe first.”

  That sounded gas. Stanco pulled a small metal oval about the size of a discus off his back and clipped it to the wall. It glowed faintly as it began to cut into the door.

  The minutes ticked away.

  “How long could someone survive in there?” I asked. “There’s air, so presumably they didn’t just die.”

  Angel’s suit’s head appeared over Stanco’s metal shoulder. I could see her portrait on the side of my vision, but I looked her in her optics, too. Some human habits died hard. “With food and water, a long time. The ship was well stocked, and no matter how strong that acid is, they must have had some time to prepare. There were armed guards at the first door to be breached, after all. As each door went down...they probably stockpiled as much as they could inside and waited it out. Fortunately, these doors won’t open if there’s no breathable air on our side, so if they’re in there thinking they’re saved, they’ll have to wait a bit longer.”

  Made sense.

  “What do you think they did to pass the time?” asked Stanco. “Played cards? Drank?”

  “Sex is an excellent recreational activity,” said Angel, matter-of-factly. “Although I imagine that privacy would be at a premium.”

  “A substantial part of the crew would be Osmeons,” said Stanco. “They wouldn’t care.”

  “And some would be Erisians,” I said. Just thinking about having sex while someone else watched was super weird.

  Finally, the probe flashed a bright green, and Sandy connected the link.

  Darkness. The probe’s light turned on; the camera was looking at the back of a metal crate. It snaked out around it, thin optic fibre slipping between tiny cracks, weaving its way through a tightly packed maze.

  “They barricaded the door,” said Angel, the first hints of...something filtering into her voice. Stress, maybe? Relief? Fear? Did crazies from her world even feel fear?

  The optic fibre tried to push a box. It didn’t move. Its laser worked again, drilling a tiny hole. This, unlike the reinforced bulkhead, fell away quickly. Harsh, white light flooded in from the other side. The lens adjusted.

  The secure storage room was a low-ceilinged metal box fifty metres squared. The far side of it was stacked with boxes, most neatly arranged, although some had been hastily opened. Deep scratches lined the floor where they had been dragged over and welded together to form a crude, additional barrier.

  In the centre of the room, a pile of people, over thirty of them, lay huddled together on the metal, dressed in thick clothes. Weapons lay scattered all around, close at hand, ready to pull up at a moment’s notice. Empty bottles and food wrappers lay scattered all around.

  “O2 is solid,” said Stanco. “It’s pretty cold, though. -10c. Miserable but survivable.” He sighed. “No loot for us. Wakey wakey, sleepy heads.”

  Our view floated toward the huddle. It slid close to one of the people, a woman with long, dark hair who lay on her back. The camera manouvered around to look at her face.

  Her eyes were rolled back in her head, skin pale and desiccated. A rusty stain spread out from underneath her chin, and the pistol she clutched in her hand was held by thin, shrivelled fingers. The camera moved to another one‌—‌a young boy. He, too, had blown his brains out on the deck. The camera panned over a half-dozen faces, all dead.

  “This is why I don’t fly coach,” said Stanco.

  The camera rose and swung out. “They had plenty of food,” said Angel. “Water. Air. Warm clothes. The bulkhead was holding...”

  “They probably heard the acid melting down the door,” I said. “Decided they didn’t want to be prey for the Earthborn.”

  Angel shook her head, her tone turning venomous. “This isn’t their style. Earthborn desecrate the bodies of their enemies, they would never give up just because they were already dead. They couldn’t let an opportunity like this go to waste.” The only time she seemed to feel anything was discussing our long-lost cousins.

  “You okay?” I asked her, using my implants to send the signal just to her.

  For a moment, she said nothing, then her suit looked back at me. “We’re all animals,” she said. “Some just wear clothes.”

  “They’re still people,” I said. “Them and us. These dead civvies, the Earthborn, everyone they killed on Polema. All humans.”

  “What makes a human life inherently so valuable that ending one is so terrible?”

  “Life is preferable to death,” I said. “For most people.”

  “Not on Uynov.”

  I tried to grimace with muscles I didn’t have control of any more. “Going to be honest Angel, and don’t take it the wrong way, but why didn’t you just kill yourself if life on Unyov was so bad? How’d you get to be here?”

  “Suicide doesn’t end pain,” she said. “It just gives it to everyone else. When we die, the only thing we leave behind is the joy we give to others. I don’t want my legacy to be distilled suffering.”

  I digested that. “Erisians believe all life is sacred, and only death is owed to those who cannot abide this simple tenet.”

  “People only say all human life is valuable because that means the speaker’s life is valuable. It’s an ultimately selfish action.”

  It was hard to argue with that.

  “So,” said Stanco, “if you two are done staring cre
epily at each other, are we going to head in or what?”

  * * *

  We sealed each end of the corridor with emergency bulkheads, then retrieved the probe. Air hissed through the tiny hole it had drilled, white and visible as it rushed to flood its new home, and slowly the pressure equalised. The open button turned from red to green.

  Time to disembark. The world went dark again, and then Sandy’s suit opened up and rotten, frigid air blew against my face.

  I’d almost forgotten that smell. Dead things left to rot in a too-small place. I stepped out of the suit. The ship’s corridors were so much bigger when I wasn’t crawling through them.

  I unclipped a light carbine from the outside of the suit and watched as Angel stepped out of hers, taking a weapon and shouldering it with the detached air of someone who had done so a million times before. I was nervous, and the smell was getting to me, but Angel might well have been taking a stroll down to the mess hall.

  “Ready?” I asked, hand hovering over the button.

  “Breach it,” she said, and so I pushed.

  The doors groaned, strained, the metal underfoot vibrating. The motors whined loudly. The reverberation travelled through the metal of the ship, shaking its deckplates, and then with a horrible grinding noise the bent, battered door retreated into the floor.

  “Make more noise why don’t you?” Stanco reached around with his giant metal fist and pushed the box-barrier away, breaking the welds and collapsing it easily. How strong the Immortal Armour seemed as a mere mortal...

  Angel and I stepped inside, weapons shouldered. The smell of the dead got stronger as we drew close. I put one hand over my nose, holding my rifle with my prosthetic. It was strong enough to comfortably hold it up.

  “We should check them,” she said, her nose wrinkled but otherwise seemingly unbothered by the stench. “Whoever attacked this ship was looking for something. I intend to find out what.”

  I gave one of the corpses a nudge with my boot. “Where are all the bodies aside from these arseholes?”

  She didn’t answer. I looked her way, then followed her eyes.

  One of the dead was wearing combat armour. Where she had found that I had no idea. Maybe she was a soldier, maybe she was a merc’. That didn’t matter.

  What did matter was the large claw protruding from the ceramic plate covering her gut. It was curved, nearly half a metre long and was wickedly serrated. It was dug in deep, bone yellow and attached to a green, leathery limb which had been severed with a laser cutter.

  “What the fuck is that?” I asked, crouching over it for a better view. She’d killed herself, just like the others, although instead of using a pistol she’d injected a dozen morphia needles into her leg.

  “Caddy,” said Golovanov in my ear, “retrieve that corpse when you go.”

  “Aye aye,” I said, staring at the claw, transfixed. Despite all the medication its victim had injected, she still seemed so terrified...

  “Sometimes,” I said, “I think that if I ever decide to just kill myself...I wonder how it should go. Should I go the painless way, or the painful one? After all, once I’m dead none of it matters anymore. Maybe I can snatch a glimpse of the other side before I go.”

  “I have had my fill of pain,” said Angel. “It is nothing to be romanticised.”

  I let go of my weapon, switched my rifle into my flesh-hand, then touched the bone; it was smooth, and covered in a thin layer of slime.

  The slime began dissolving my prosthetic finger.

  “Shit!”

  Even though I’d had a metal and polymer arm ever since the war, human instinct was a powerful thing, and hard to override. I flicked my fingers, trying to get rid of the stuff; the array of sensors in my prosthetic fed me information. It felt cold, wet, tasted of brine and salt...and plenty of pain, too.

  My finger dissolved up to the third knuckle before the acid became too diluted to do any more damage. I stared at the withered remains of my index finger. It hurt; the prosthetic was wired directly into my nervous system. I used a mental push to lower the implant’s sensitivity, turning down the pain on that finger completely. It slowly went numb.

  “You okay?” asked Angel.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but getting the body out is a no-go. That acid is wicked stuff.”

  Angel inspected the wound on the corpse. “It doesn’t seem to be dissolving the victim,” she said. “Maybe it reacts only to non-organic material...”

  Before I could stop her, she slipped her glove off, and poked the bone with her finger.

  Nothing.

  “What kind of creature is coated with an acid that only reacts to metal?” I asked. “Some kind of bioweapon?” I felt a vague sinking in my gut. “Is the Anchorage...a weapons test?”

  A faint sound reached my ears. The sound of rain on a metal roof, from above.

  “Contact,” said Stanco. “I got movement out here. Vibrations from the deck above. They’re moving.”

  “They?”

  Angel and I exchanged a worried look. The sound travelled directly above us, distant but audible, and then toward the stern of the ship. Toward the way we’d come. Drawn by the vibrations of the opening door.

  Hundreds of those claws were making pitter-patter rain on the deck.

  They were coming for us.

  * * *

  I ran toward my suit.

  “Operations, we are egressing now. Right now!” My rifle bounced against my side as I ran. If whatever was coming for us reached the emergency bulkheads we’d set up, and breached them...I didn’t want to think about it, but through those thin sheets of metal was the logical way to get to the meat the creatures had too long been denied. Sandy moved towards me, the suit opening up. Angel’s AI did the same thing, presenting its open chest for boarding. We passed by the ruined boxes.

  Something heavy slammed into the emergency bulkhead. A massive bone claw, just like in the gut of the dead woman, broke through the steel, smoke hissing as it dissolved the barrier.

  Air rushed out. Alarms screamed. The button flashed red‌—‌the door, hopelessly jammed, strained as it tried in vain to seal off the breach.

  Stanco opened up with his assault gun. It fired like a titan ripping cloth, shaking the walls and floor, impossibly loud in the cramped quarters, drowning out the howl of escaping air. Brass shell casings the size of a fist slammed into the bulkheads.

  I practically fell into my suit. Darkness enveloped me as the armoured plates closed, and the gunfire became muted and distant. The only thing I could hear was profound ringing in my ears.

  “C’mon,” I shouted to the darkness. “Boot. Boot, damn you!”

  Plugs attached themselves to my implants, then the ringing went away. For a second, there was nothing, and then I was a metal giant once more.

  Bugs. A wall of eight legged bugs, each roughly the size of a horse, some smaller, some larger, all tearing down the shredded remains of the emergency bulkhead. Their eyes glowed red in the dimly lit corridor and the deck was soaked in the same black fluid I’d seen before. The blood.

  They were all different; some had massive pincers, some huge claws, others were bigger or smaller or weird colours. A myriad of forms, all trying to tear us to pieces.

  Stanco fired again. Rushing air blew the spider-like creatures back, and debris‌—‌including the bodies of the crew‌—‌thumped against them, but still they came, crawling, hissing, reaching for us with a host of teeth and talons.

  I ignited the pilot light on my flamethrower and turned that corridor into a tiny piece of hell.

  Orange and red consumed everything, the rushing, escaping air twisting the jet of flame and pulling it off in random directions. I saw dozens of the creatures be consumed by the flames, the sticky, high energy fluid seeping between cracks in their carapace. I bought my right arm around too and added autocannon fire to the mix, heavy shells wailing in the rapidly depleting air.

  The deck plate underneath me gave way. I nearly slipped and fell, the
escaping air buffeting me from behind.

  “I got you!” Stanco grabbed hold of my suit’s leg. “Hang on!”

  I scrambled around, digging my fingers into the skeleton of the ship, trying to hold on. I felt Stanco’s metal fingers weaken and a crate slammed into my back.

  Then I lost my grip and, torn away from the metal by the rushing air, tumbled down the corridor.

  * * *

  Sandy fired the EVA pack, trying to stabilise us, but we were a big thing in a narrow box. The suit clanged off metal bulkheads, screamed as it was dragged along the floor, then tumbled head over heels as we were pushed towards the ship’s stern.

  I hit an exposed beam and bounced off. Then another. My vision went static-y as the suit’s cameras took a hit. We spun and spun, puffs of nitrogen trying to stabilise us.

  Finally, we got stuck arse-first in a door. This one had been melted through like the others.

  My head hurt from the close proximity to gunfire and taking a spin through the insides of a too-small ship. A strange sensation, coming from my real body; fake parts of me hurt. Sandy was trying to tell me I was injured.

  “Hey,” I said, groaning as I eased myself out of the ruined door. “How about dialling down the pain some?”

  “You’re already heavily medicated,” said Sandy. “Are you sure?”

  Uh oh. “Did I break something?”

  “A few somethings,” said Sandy. “The human body is just not designed to survive these kinds of forces. Fortunately you have lots of implants.”

  We’d have to do something about that. There were ways to play with gravity, create it and negate it. The suit would have to be modified for future operations.

  I couldn’t think about that now. Not my job. I’d include it in my after action report, though.

  Assuming I survived to write it.

  “Let’s get going then,” I said. “If I need medical treatment...”

  “You do,” said Sandy, her tone sincere.