Ramirez didn’t look up from her task at the helm. “You think we might have to get physical?”
Rook shifted his massive frame in the command chair. “If my tip was right, what’s down there is worth more than the net worth of some planets. So, if it comes to it, yeah, I mean to get physical, ‘Ghost of the Frontier’ or no. Besides, it’s high time Strega earned his pay.”
---
“All shuttles and escape pods are present and accounted for.” Quantum’s three-fingered hands moved across the console, flipping through displays. “With the exception of the heightened energy readings and the ensuing power surges, most everything on the station appears to be fully operational.”
The Warden and Quantum stood in the station’s command center, surrounded by computer terminals, 3D charts, system displays, and rectangular windows showing a panoramic view of the fog-enshrouded system. The overhead lighting flickered every time the decks and bulkheads creaked with a strange rattling noise.
“And the crew? Are the station’s sensors picking them up?”
Quantum shook his head. “No. The copious energy output is interfering with the internal sensors. Based on this personnel report, there should be fifty-nine people aboard.”
“Can you isolate the location of that energy output?”
Quantum flipped through a few more displays. “The lowest tier appears to be a sealed radiation-proof chamber used for energy experiments. I propose that to be the source.”
Another disembodied wail sounded from just outside the command center.
The Warden checked the security monitors. There was nothing in the outer corridor, just like there was nothing in every other part of the station. At least according to the cameras. Unable to shake the uneasy feeling he’d had since first boarding the station, he asked, “What about the logs? Anything to explain where everybody went?”
Quantum looked up from the console. “It would appear the logs are kept on a secure server in a different location. The operations of this facility are highly compartmentalized, indicating that its purpose was of a high-security and clandestine nature. However, by analyzing the information I have here, I would surmise that this was a science and research center.”
“But researching what? And who was doing the research? From what I can tell, there are components on this ship from several different corporations. Could this be a U.P.C. black ops facility? If so, there might be a Star Cav warship on its way in response to that distress signal. We might not want to be here when it arrives.”
An automated proximity alert sounded from one of the consoles: “Ship approaching at intercept trajectory. Slowing to docking velocity.”
The Warden stepped to the window, spotting the approaching ship. “Looks like we’ve got company. If they’re Star Cav or a U.P.C. envoy, maybe they’ve got some answers.”
Quantum scanned the ship. “Highly unlikely. Though they are submitting the proper access codes, the ship’s registration indicates that it is a salvage vessel based in Centauri Prime. They have come for an easy score, no doubt.”
The Warden rested his hands on the butts of his Comet blasters, wondering how a salvager out of Centauri Prime had the station’s access codes. Or even knew the station was here, for that matter. “Not ’til we get to the bottom of this. Let’s go welcome them aboard and make sure they understand that.”
---
Rook stood in the airlock with Ramirez and the rest of his crew. Brock, the blonde Undoc engineer he’d picked up on that rundown station in Orion’s Belt, stood beside her two assistants, the shifty-eyed Hicks and the goateed Chan. Rook’s resident bruiser, the hulking, saurian alien Strega, occupied almost as much space as the rest of the crew. The humans wore boarding armor and carried sidearms and shotguns or submachineguns. Strega wore his vibro-ax strapped across his broad, scaly back. The saurian didn’t need armor, his hide being impervious to all but heavy blaster fire.
“You think we’ll need all this hardware?” Ramirez asked quietly as the chamber’s pressure equalized with that of the station. “Maybe we should leave somebody on the ship.”
“The payday promised by this place demands we put all our pieces on the board. Even if it didn’t, his presence would.” Rook shook his head as the first door opened. He could see two figures dimly outlined behind the GlasSteel barrier of the next chamber. “I’ve heard some stories about this guy. If only half of ’em are true, I don’t want to take any chances.”
When the final portal opened, Rook led his crew into the corridor to face the man and blue alien waiting to greet them. The Last Star Warden was slightly shorter than Rook, but not as bulky. The alien was taller and thinner still. Both wore old-fashioned form-fitting blue and silver spacesuits. The man’s entailed a skull-cap and visor, which concealed most of his face.
Both were armed.
“Rook, captain of the Magpie 6, and crew. Requesting permission to come aboard.”
The man surveyed the group, obviously taking note of their martial gear. The hint of a smile played at the edge of his grim mouth. “You can call me Warden. And this is Quantum. What’s the nature of your business here, Captain Rook?”
“We were looking for hulks to salvage from the Tuatha Wars in the next system over and heard the distress signal. Came to see if we could lend a hand.”
“How did you come by the access codes for this place? If you don’t mind me asking.”
Rook smiled. The man was shrewd. “We’ve got a database of all kinds of access codes. Comes in handy in our line of work… Look, do you want our help or not?”
The Warden kept his hands resting on the hilts of his belted guns. “Maybe... We just got here ourselves and haven’t yet been able to locate any of the station’s crew. If we work together, we should be able to search this place up and down and find out what happened.”
Rook smiled wider. “Happy to oblige, Warden. However, before we get started, I’d like to invoke the Right of Salvage as outlined in Star Law 19-39.12a. If we don’t find anybody aboard, then we are entitled to any and all resources on the abandoned vessel. Naturally, seeing as how you two got here first, we’d be willing to negotiate a finder’s fee.” He looked pointedly at the Warden’s guns. “A generous one, of course.”
The Warden’s hinted smile turned instantly to a frown. “We can discuss salvaging issues later, Captain. As a duly appointed Officer of the Law, and in accordance with Star Law 3-42.1, I am declaring this an active crime scene until further notice. Now, do you want to help or not?”
Rook heard Strega hiss behind him, felt the tension from his crew. “Like I said, we’re here to help, first and foremost. Where do we start?”
An unholy shriek tore through the station’s intercom system.
The Warden tilted his head. “How ’bout we begin by looking for whoever’s doing that?”
---
“We should split up and cover more ground,” Rook suggested as they entered the station’s central winding corridor.
The Warden nodded. He didn’t trust the big scavenger as far as he could throw him in super gravity, but in this the newcomer had a point. “All right, you and half your crew come with me to search the lower decks. The rest go with Quantum to the upper. We’ve already checked the control room, but there’s no logs indicating what happened here. My guess is the head of the facility will have a private system with that info on it, either in quarters or an office.”
“What about the energy output?” The question came from the wiry blonde woman in Rook’s crew. She wore tool pouches as well as ammo bandoliers on her web gear. “Have you located the source? I’m an engineer, maybe I should look into that.”
The Warden shrugged. “Our first priority, for now, is to locate the station’s crew. Or at least find out what happened to them. Go with Quantum; he may need your help breaking into the administrator’s system.”
He knew his friend would require no such help, but he was not about to let a scavenger poke around something that could be respo
nsible for the entire weird scenario. At least not until they had more information.
Rook nodded. “He’s right, Brock. You take Chan and Hickman with… Quantum. Me, Ramirez, and Strega will go with the Warden.”
Another shriek and moan echoed from somewhere in the station. The decks creaked eerily in the ensuing silence.
“Did you see that?” Rook’s brunette first mate, Ramirez, raised the muzzle of her submachinegun in the direction of the right corridor. “Something moved down there.”
The saurian alien, Strega, lifted his head and tasted the air with a glowing purple tongue. “Human. Sssoiled. Male.”
The Warden headed that way. “Come on. Keep the coms channels open and report anything you find.”
He reached a four-way intersection ahead of Rook and his team. The central corridor crossed a narrower hall leading to storage lockers to the right and a stairwell to the left. Trusting that Strega’s assessment was true, the Warden touched his visor to see ambient thermal temperatures, hoping to track the individual by his heat signature.
He caught a whiff of body odor and filth. Something hit him. Hard. The attack knocked the wind from his lungs. Strong, feral hands scratched and clawed at him.
The Warden’s spacesuit kept the fiend’s ragged nails from finding purchase in his flesh as they went to the floor. Rolling with the impact, the Warden took advantage of his screaming, snarling assailant’s momentum.
The manic individual sailed through the air to slam against the far bulkhead.
The Warden rose to one knee as Rook and his crewmates arrived on scene, weapons drawn. His attacker was a scrawny man in a tattered and grimy grey jumpsuit. Cowering on the deck, the man’s dark hair was shaggy and unkempt, his face covered in dirt and several days’ worth of stubble. His brown eyes were wide and full of madness as he whimpered, “Please… please don’t take me to hell… Please don’t make me a ghost… Please…”
Rook laughed, holstering his blaster pistol. “Looks like you won’t be getting much from this one, Warden. He’s loopier than a Senesian moon’s orbit.”
The Warden dusted off his shoulders. “Looks like you won’t be salvaging this place, Rook. It’s not abandoned after all.”
The captain’s laugh died as his face went hard. The big saurian hissed, bony ridges along the top of his skull extending menacingly, his green scales taking on a reddish hue. Only the woman, Ramirez, showed no sign of frustration.
She looked at the cowering man with a mixture of pity and fear. “What happened here?”
Rook motioned to the alien hulk. “That’s what we’re going to find out. Strega, grab him. Take him to our ship’s med bay and try to calm him down enough to talk.”
The Warden stepped between the mad crewman and the saurian bruiser. “No. I’ll take him and see if we can find the station’s medical facilities. Besides, there may be records there that could give us some clues. You three keep looking for more crewmembers.”
Strega’s clawed hands flexed into scaly fists and his yellow eyes dilated. One eye swiveled, looking to Rook for an order.
The Warden didn’t move.
“Fine.” The scavenger captain’s face slid into his wolfish grin. “But take Ramirez with you, Warden. She can watch your back in case there’s any more of these nut-jobs running loose. Hate for you to get outnumbered and taken down.”
The Warden returned the smile. “Thanks for your concern, but I’m pretty sure I can take care of myself.”
Rook motioned Strega to follow him down the storage corridor. “I’m sure you can. Still, misery loves company. Ramirez, you’re with the Warden.”
When they reached the first storage bay, Rook did not bother to attempt the lock. Making sure the Warden was watching, he signaled Strega to use the big vibro-ax. The saurian alien hefted the weapon, blue energy and an electric hum coalescing around the blade. In one quick stroke, the ax sheered through the thick PermaSteel door as if it were paper.
Rook smiled at the Warden as Strega carved a hole through the door with ease.
As soon as the two salvagers disappeared into the storage bay, the Warden knelt beside the mumbling man at his feet. “Hey, you’re okay. No one’s going to hurt you. I promise.”
The man’s terrified eyes wouldn’t make contact, flitting from relived nightmare to imagined terror as his mouth slurred the same words over and over again. “… Hell… ghosts… dead in the walls… Take me to hell…”
Ramirez knelt at the man’s other side. She produced a hypo-syringe from her belt’s first-aid kit. “This’ll calm him down. Make him a bit more manageable.”
The Warden watched as she gently shushed the poor man, calming him with her voice before carefully administering the injection. Ramirez was a strikingly attractive woman with smooth, olive skin, long dark curls, and darker eyes. And she obviously possessed a level of compassionate humanity not shared by the rest of her crew. He found himself wondering how such a woman might become involved with Rook’s ragtag band of scavengers.
“One of these things is not like the other.”
“What?” Ramirez frowned as they helped the now docile man to his feet.
“Nothing. Come on, let’s see if we can find sickbay before your boss lets his pet lizard off its chain.”
“I wouldn’t joke about that if I were you. Strega is a killer…”
The way she trailed off, the Warden understood the implication. So was Rook.
“Quantum,” he said into his com, “we’ve found a survivor one tier down from where we split up. He’s in pretty bad shape. Any chance you might know where we are in relation to the station’s med bay?”
“From the readouts I accessed in the control room, I believe you are two tiers above and on the opposite side of medical.”
A chorus of howling moans rose from the lower decks, reminding the Warden of something he had read a long, long time ago. Dante’s Inferno.
He smiled against the hollow feeling in his gut. “Thanks. If you heard that, you know our man isn’t responsible for the spooky noises. At least not all of them.”
Quantum’s voice carried no emotion over the com. “Be careful.”
---
“Sssalvage?” Strega hissed. He and Rook stepped into a supply locker filled with racks of various tools, parts, electronics, and mechanical components.
“No.” Rook gave the big room a cursory glance as the automated overhead lights flickered to life. “What we’ve come for is worth all this junk, the entire station, both ships, and much more besides. Somewhere on this station, my friend, is an experimental Tuatha superdimensional engine. To the right buyer, it’ll set us and all our descendants up for life.”
The big reptilian’s hiss almost sounded like a purr as his green scales took on a bluish hue. “Ssstrega have many off-ssspring. Many des-ssscendantsss.”
Rook smiled. “Good. Because when we find that engine, I’m pretty sure the Star Warden and his blue friend aren’t going to just let us walk out of here with it. I’m counting on you to make sure that doesn’t become a problem.”
Strega bared the double row of razored fangs filling his mouth. It could have been a smile, Rook decided. The scariest one he’d seen this side of a childhood nightmare.
“Ssstrega sssolve problem.”
---
The medical bay lit up as soon as the Warden and Ramirez carried the dazed man through the automated door. A med-bot activated as well, its multiple limbs rising from its side, its anthropomorphic head wearing a digital smile.
“How are we doing today? Got a case of the blues, or is it something a little more serious?”
The Warden cringed at the automated doctor as they settled the man onto the first bed. Robotics had taken a decidedly weird branch of evolution since his time. In his day, robots had been robots and people had been people. The medical bot bridged the gap in an unsettling way, at least as far as he was concerned. “Um, he’s suffering from some form of mania, possibly post-traumatic in nature. Exhibiting v
iolent behavior and incoherent speech.”
“He’s been sedated,” Ramirez added. “Somunal 7. Two grams.”
The robot took this information in with a metallic hum. Its digitized face made the appropriate thoughtful expression as its six arms went to work scanning the new patient. “I see. Abel Carter, Technician First Class. From Mobile Station in the Pleiades. History of hypoglycemia and hypertension. Looks like you’ve had quite a bad time of it, my friend…”
The Warden motioned Ramirez away from the robot as it continued to administer its automated bedside manner. “We need to see if there are records here that might indicate what happened on this station. You know how to hack a modern computer?”
She wrinkled her nose and grinned. “Hack? What are you, my grandpa? Nobody talks like that anymore. But yeah, I know how to slide a ‘modern computer.’” She gave him a wink as she walked over to the med bay’s terminal. “When we figure out what’s going on here, you’ll have to share some more of your old-fashioned lingo.”
The Warden smiled, his cheeks growing warm. That wink made him feel like a kid again. “It’s a date.”
The robot’s head turned like a mechanical owl, the cartoon face showing a frown and arched eyebrow. “I’m sorry, but that system is restricted to medical personnel only. Please step away from the terminal or I will be forced to engage my security protocols.”
“So much for the Hippocratic Oath…” The Warden noted the six elongated appendages, each ending in an array of medical tools that, in a pinch, might be used as weapons. Remembering how his jurisdictional code had bypassed the station’s defense systems, he decided to give it another shot. “I am a Star Warden, investigating a possible crime on these premises in pursuant to Star Law 3.42.1. As such, I require access to all systems.”
The Last Star Warden - Tales of Adventure and Mystery from Frontier Space - Volume 1 Page 5
