“Understood. However, I require the master override code to open the door.
“Right. It’s one, two, three, Alpha, Beta, Charlie.”
“Seriously?” that was Puar. “One, two, three, A, B, C?”
“What? It’s easy to remember and so simple no intelligent person would be able to crack it.”
A long pause, then. “I got nothing.”
“Blowing the seal in three… two… one…”
The silence was unnerving. As soon as the doors to the lift blew open. Khai took another deep breath and blew the hatch on the shuttle. The air rushed out. Despite the lack of sound, Khai focused heavily on his other senses. When he felt the added weight drop into the ship, he turned to hazard a glance back into the cabin to confirm his passengers were aboard. When he saw both, he closed the door and vented air back in.
All three gasped for air as it filtered into the cabin. A moment later Sibrex was on his feet and in the copilot’s seat. That was the first time anyone had really looked out into the hangar through the canopy. Not a single person survived. In fact there weren’t even any bodies.
“The door mechanisms must’ve failed. Otherwise they would have shut when the force fields went down. They probably didn’t even see it coming,” Khai said sadly. It was his first command and most likely everyone was either dead, dying or trapped, doomed to suffocate.
He spun the ship around to the doors and saw that they had indeed closed. Panning around further, they found the culprit. A hundred-foot breach in the hull stretched across the ceiling of the hangar big enough for the Star Splitter to fit two times. Khai piloted the ship up into the fissure and squeezed dorsal side out of the Vyysarri. Once they were out into open space, they could really survey the damage. Both ships were a total loss. The Hellfire was buried bow first several hundred feet into the Vyysarri’s dorsal and starboard sides, sticking out at a hundred-and-twenty-degree angle.
They all watched wordlessly. The Hellfire sustained heavy damage along the port side. Several breaches pocked the hull. It was obvious that the Hellfire was outgunned and the only option for victory was to push the engines to full and ram. And ram it did. The bridge of the Vyysarri was the first to go. Khai was actually paralyzed for the first time since he watched his drill sergeant, mentor and adopted father get cut down by a dozen Vyysarri warriors.
Khai just sat there staring at his ship, barely a month old, which had never left Seryys Space until today. And now she floated in shambles amongst the debris of her innards, another ship buried deep inside her Ti’tan’lium flesh. She bled atmosphere. Her hull undoubtedly groaned with pain. Her external hull lights flickered as her heart stopped beating.
Sibrex chimed in. “Khai, I’m reading a massive energy surge coming from the Hellfire. It appears that whoever did this was not finished. Her self-destruct has been triggered. If we don’t leave soon, we will be vaporized in the explosion. “
Reluctantly, Khai pulled the ship away and started heading for a safe distance. That was when another klaxon went off.
“Khai, we have been locked on to!” Sibrex shouted.
“By who?”
“The remaining gun emplacements on the Hellfire!”
“Shit!” Khai went evasive, diving so hard that the inertial compensators struggled to keep up. Before he was out of the dive, he started rolling the ship to starboard. He pulled sharply out of the nosedive and ran parallel to the two capital ships. Red fire blazed across the bow as the gunner, whoever he was, tried to lead his target.
“Puar! Pull up the long range sensors, there was an energy signature out there. We were about to head there before this all happened. It might be a good place to hide until I can contact some friends.”
“What kind of energy signature am I looking for?”
“A star!” Khai shouted as one of the beams of energy struck the small ship.
“Shields down to eighty percent!” Sibrex reported.
“I think I found it!” Puar yelled. “I’m transferring it to your HUD now!”
The holographic heads up display (HUD) showed the coordinates. “That’s it! Plot a course and prime the Eve’Zon Drive. Make the jump as soon as it’s hot!”
“You got it!”
Khai was using every move he knew to keep those guns from reaching his ship. Just as he thought they were finished-
“Engaging Eve’Zon Drive now!”
The space before them ruptured and yawned. The black hole formed just as Khai lined up the ship. That was most dangerous time for a ship in combat. The turbulence with entering a black hole could literally tear a ship apart, so ships entering black space had to go nice and easy. In a lot of cases, ships were destroyed while entering black space because they were sitting ducks.
This was the case now. As Khai eased the ship into the singularity, the gunner aboard the dying Hellfire pounded the Star Splitter.
“Our shields are failing, Khai!” Sibrex shouted over the alarms blaring in the cockpit.
“She’ll hold together! We’re almost in.”
And that was it; they were on the other side staring at a small, dark ball of blue and yellow, barely visible in the vast blackness of space. As Khai adjusted the light amplification levels on the canopy, they saw it for what it really was: a lone planet. It was slightly misshapen, not a perfect sphere like most planets. It looked like something big had impacted on one side of it.
“Puar, you idiot!” Khai shouted. “I said plot a course to the star, not a random planet in the middle of nowhere!”
“I did!” Puar responded indignantly. “The energy source is coming from the planet!”
“What?” Khai heard him, but couldn’t quite wrap his brain around what Puar had just told him. “Where on the planet?”
“I’m uploading the planetary coordinates to your HUD. Looks like on the southern hemisphere on a small body of land.”
“I see it,” Khai confirmed. “Let’s go check it out.”
Khai flew down to the planet. Though there was gravity, felt when the ship’s artificial gravity transitioned to the planetary gravity, there was no atmosphere at all. The closer they got to the planet, the more they realized that it was a dead planet, but might not have been some time ago. The blue they saw from orbit were planet-wide glaciers, some peaking at twenty thousand feet from its relative “sea level.” The yellow spots were nothing more than sandbars in a sea of ice. In some of the continental lands, there were deep scars and pock marks as if at one time it was bombarded with asteroids, possibly an asteroid large enough to knock it out of its orbit around whatever sun it once circled. The power signature was coming from one of the larger sandbars in the ocean of ice.
“That power signature is dead ahead, just past the horizon,” Puar reported.
As they crested the horizon, the view stunned all three of them. At this distance, it looked like a massive structure partially buried in gray and black-flecked sand. The building was enormous, though somewhat undefined through the canopy’s light-enhanced imagery. It bore an unusual shape, with diagonal angles and sharp features dulled slightly by age. At the tallest point it was nearly a mile tall.
“What the hell is that?” Puar asked from over Khai’s shoulder.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Khai murmured in amazement. “And the power source is coming from there?”
“Yeah,” Puar answered.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“You have evac suits?” Sibrex asked.
“Yeah,” Khai said, jabbing a thumb aft but never taking his eyes of the spectacle in front of him.
Sibrex got up and moved aft to the upper engineering level, where the shield generator, Eve’Zon Drive generator and weapons targeting system existed. The sub-light engines and power regulation systems were located in a crawlspace directly below. It could be accessed by the hatch in the floor or, if the ship was parked, a hatch on the outside.
On the right wall between the damage control consol
e and the door to the small armory, was a locker with the four evacuation suits rated for the harshest space conditions. They wouldn’t stop large pieces of debris but they were armored enough to stop small particles traveling at a thousand feet per second. Puar and Sibrex donned the suits just as Khai set the ship down on her landing skids.
In short order, Khai was also dressed for the occasion. Khai popped the hatch and walked down the ramp with the others on his heels. The ship was only fifty feet from the structure and looking up, Khai saw the full size of the building. It rivaled even the tallest buildings in Seryys City.
“Remarkable,” Sibrex marveled. “An engineering feat of epic proportions!”
“You can say that again,” Puar breathed.
“Why would I say it again?” Sibrex asked, puzzled by Puar’s remark.
“It’s just a-a, um… never mind.”
Equipped with the same light amplification technology the ship had, the visors of their helmets gave them a plain-as-day view of this monstrosity up close. It was then that things started looking a little…off. The broken windows of the building were proportionally diagonal to the edges of the building. So either the load-bearing beams of the superstructure had broken and the building was leaning, or…
“It’s a ship,” Sibrex finished Khai’s thought.
“This is amazing! I’ve never seen anything like it!” Puar shouted. “I wonder how she handled.”
“I doubt we’ll ever know,” Khai scoffed. “Doesn’t look like she’s spaceworthy.”
“We can gain entrance through that port there,” Sibrex pointed to a shattered port at ground level.
The flecks of black and gray in the sand were scraps of metal and ash. “Looks like she crashed here,” Puar remarked.
“It would appear that way,” Sibrex agreed.
They crawled through the port onto a slanted floor. There was no lighting on whatsoever, but their visors made it possible to see. Khai looked around to get his bearings. With the floor slanting, it was more difficult than he expected. The room appeared to be a stock room of some kind. There were crates lying haphazardly about the floor and leaning up against the lower wall. He pulled a mircocomp with a sensor package from his pocket and scanned the area.
“The power source is coming from up there,” Khai pointed up and to the left.
“Well we’re never gonna find it this way,” Puar grumbled. “We need a map or something. Maybe we can find a computer around here and get it to work.”
“Right,” Khai murmured as they moved on to another room.
They had to pry the doors open to leave the room. From the store room they stepped into a long corridor with several doors on either side.
“Well, pick one,” Khai said gesturing to the seemingly infinite possibilities.
Puar stepped forward and tried the next door. It didn’t open, so he had to pry. The room was vacant, completely empty.
“Looks like it might have been another store room. I say we try one farther up the hallway,” Puar said.
“Should we be heading for the engine room, or the bridge?” Sibrex asked.
“That’s a good question,” Khai admitted. “The bridge would have all the controls we need, but we don’t know where it is or if it’s even operational. For all we know, the bridge may not even exist. I think it’s safe to say that she crashed nose first. If this ship is designed anything like ours, the bridge is located forward. So my guess is that the energy source we’re picking up is coming from the engine room, which we know is aft.”
“So we head aft and up,” Puar pointed at the more-than-forty-five-degree-angle climb.
“That’s right,” Khai said and started walking.
“Actually, that’s left,” Puar said prompting a scoff from Khai and a cocked eyebrow from Sibrex.
They started climbing their way up toward the aft of the ship, grabbing doorframes wherever they found them, and crawling when they didn’t.
They finally reached an intersection and stopped to rest. There were several doors evenly spaced on either side all the way down the corridor. Puar shrugged and picked a door at random. With Khai’s help, he got the door open. Inside was what appeared to be a crewman’s quarters. There was a bunk, a computer… and a crewman, frozen and preserved.
“Looks Seryysan,” Puar commented.
“Indeed. The resemblance is striking,” Sibrex agreed, taking a step closer to the frozen body.
He clearly wore a uniform; it was gray with black stripes leading from the armpits to the waist where it was tucked into his pants, which had a similar black stripe down the outside of the leg. There was a patch on his right shoulder that was far too faded to discern its origin and a patch on the left side of his chest with something that looked like writing. The letters were remarkably similar to Seryysan script, but they were either too faded to translate or different dialect all together.
Sibrex casually walked up and broke a finger off of the dead body.
“What the hell are you doing?” Puar snapped.
“Getting a DNA sample,” Sibrex said innocently, pocketing the severed digit. “This could be an ancestor of ours.”
“Good point,” Puar shot back. “Maybe we can get this computer to work. What do you think?”
“It is possible, if we have a compatible power source,” Sibrex said.
“What about the batteries from our lights?” Puar said. “With the light amping effect on our visors, we don’t really need them.”
“That is a viable solution.”
“How long would it take to rig something?” Khai asked.
“Not long,” Puar answered. “It has to have basic things to operate; power source, ground and an interface.”
“How long?” Khai wasn’t interested in the particulars, just the timing.
“Maybe an hour, maybe a little more.”
Khai nodded. “Sibrex, stay here and help him out. I’m going to find that power source and take some scans. Com me when you have something.”
“Are you certain you want to go alone?” Sibrex’s gravelly voice showed concern.
“Positive. I can take care of myself.”
“As you wish, Khai. Good luck and be careful.”
“Will do.”
Chapter Four
Khai had been walking for what seemed like an eternity. The all uphill climb was taxing even in his physical shape. He had plenty of time to think. He missed his wife already, wondered what she was doing. He felt a pang of regret at missing his best friend’s wedding. Dack’Tandy Dah was a brother in arms during his last adventure, provided Khai with the Star Splitter when Khai was considered a fugitive. He was marrying Bria’Nah Briar, who had been the mistress of the Chief Medical Examiner who was assassinated by the Prime Minister’s right hand, Chief of Staff Tran’Ri Trall—the perpetrator of the whole government conspiracy that spearheaded Khai’s exploits into Vyysarri space where he met Sibrex and had the foundations of everything he believed in crushed to dust. Hundreds of years of war, countless lives (in the trillions between Vyysarri and Seryysan casualties) and an uncountable number of credits wasted all for a false cause. Such a waste, Khai thought sadly. All the Vyysarri he killed, all the notches on his trusty pistol (now, scraped off) were constant reminders of his and his peoples’ mistakes.
Now one of his closest friends and his wife were both Vyysarri. Both he met at the same time while on a floating space colony deep in Vyysarri space. Khai was the first Seryysan in history to marry a Vyysarri; it was a spectacle and media nightmare. There were, of course, protesters. SAVR (pronounced saver), or Seryysans Against Vyysarri Relations, were standing outside the venue with picket signs saying unsavory things, and stuffed Vyysarri dolls hanging from nooses. One man in particular got on Khai’s nerves; he was blocking the way to the front door and confronted Khai about his choices. He asked him if his “blood sucking bitch had fangs down there, too” and Khai, despite his promise to his future wife to not hurt anyone, grabbed the man by the front of h
is shirt and tossed him over the railing of the steps that led up to the front door. When Khai spun around to face the crowd, fury behind his gaze, they all fell silent. Everyone knew who he was. That much was certain, because some of the signs were calling him a traitor.
His best man, Dack, finally arrived with a full platoon of riot police. Being the chief of the Seryys City Police Department had its advantages. And having him as a best friend also had its advantages. What Khai didn’t want was to have this jeering crowd of prejudiced filth do anything to his bride on her day. He wouldn’t put it past those closed-minded individuals to stoop to such levels as throwing rotten food at her. He wanted nothing to ruin this day. The day that someone finally tamed the legendary Khai’Xander Khail was a momentous day indeed! It was an amazing day and Brindee’Lyyn Brook was just as beautiful then as she was the first time he had ever seen her.
He finally had reached a point where he either had to go up or down to continue. The micro-comp indicated that the power source was coming from a few decks up. As he walked, he had the computer doing a constant sweep of the immediate area and was getting some of the layout. It appeared that there was a maintenance tube a hundred feet to his right that looked as though it would lead to the engineering level.
The hatch was on his left and the ladder led all the way up. The climb up the ladder was grueling! Not only was he climbing upward, but the ladder was at a forty degree angle from the ground. For a while Khai was relying strictly on upper body strength, letting his feet dangle and climbing the ladder as he was traversing an inclined set of monkey bars backward. Eventually, to give his arms a rest, he started hooking his feet around the bars to take the bulk of his frame off of his arms. He would even stop and hang upside down to take a breather and let the blood flow back to his hands. After an hour of laborious climbing, he reached the engineering level.
He pounded the hatch open and crawled out of the tube into an expanse. The room was big enough to house a Lance-Class starship, maybe more. There were broken consoles, preserved remains of engineers and tools everywhere. Every ten feet or so there would be a catwalk that lined the walls and stretched out overhead with more consoles and bodies. The uniforms they wore were of the same design, but instead of a black stripe down the sides, it was a blue stripe. They bore the same time-faded patch on the right shoulder and the same patch on their chests. With so many from which to choose, it wasn’t hard to find one that looked to be intact. It was in Seryysan! In bold letters, it said FREEDOM. They all said that! One of the other unusual things Khai noticed about these people versus the man they found earlier was that they all had the same interesting boots on. They were larger and had a small key pad on the outer side of the boot, both boots, he realized. Why?
The Seryys Chronicles: Of Nightmares Page 4
