Dekker's Dozen #006

A relic from a bygone and era of space travel, the battle scarred capital-class cruiser might have been the flagship of some grand fleet before her death. Now, she bled flotsam into the vacuum through open fissures and poorly cobbled together cold welds used to fuse hull fragments as the behemoth crept near the space station.

It couldn't be a pirate ship. The ugly vessel possessed no atmosphere; it was a ghost ship, crewed by the damned. The dead craft likely came in support of the zombified scientists.

The massive, hellish cruiser rolled ever so slightly as it closed the distance, a sure sign that it intended to berth at the airlock. The monstrous cruiser was nearly the same size as the research station.

"This doesn't change the assignment," Dekker stated sharply, his voice even more urgent. He checked his personal oxygen tank again. "It merely stresses our timetable. Radio check every ten minutes. You each have your assignments, find that DNIET weapon. Move out!"

Salvaged Salvation

Dekker discharged his blaster. The brilliant beam slammed into the chest of an infected scientist further down the hall; it burned though his chest and knocking him off his feet. Another, closer, zombie snarled and charged.

Vesuvius had drawn a blade with each hand and leapt for it. With a whirling attack her first blade severed the horned protrusion on the fiend's head. The second blade took the head. She wanted to feel remorse for the victim—it had once been human, but no time remained to think about that. Her own life, and perhaps the lives of billions of others, hung in the balance. Should the DNIET device fall into wrong hands, many would certainly perish.

"Come on, this way," Dekker briefly consulted the map affixed to the wall. He noted the docking bay locations and escape pods.

They rounded a corner, sprinted down a hallway, and spotted the docking bay entry. Dekker ran through it and collided with an infected scientist; they both fell to the floor. The beast screeched with surprise and Dekker rolled through the tumble, he came up on one knee and fired before Vesuvius could even reach the door.

She stepped over the dead, female sentry, breaking the curls of smoke that wafted up from her chest. "Not really your type?" she joked dryly.

"No," he returned. "She wouldn't stop making bad jokes. You know how that gets on my nerves."

Vesuvius winked at him. "There's the airlock."

Dekker nodded and clicked on his communicator. "We're at the supply ship. About to check it out." He checked his timer—it was close enough to the scheduled check-in.

"Been on level B for two minutes." Nathan's voice. "These things are everywhere! Just a heads up, some are more resistant to lasers than others."

"Understood. Over and out." Dekker went to the access panel and activated the door switch.

The airlock, mostly useless since the oxygen recyclers had been destroyed, hissed as the seal broke and the doors slid aside. With incredible speed a trio of black-eyed zombies poured through the door and leapt upon them. These three seemed stronger than the scientists; they were probably the supply ship's crew—the original zombie spore carriers.

Dekker leveled his blaster and fired. A laser burned through the crewman's clothing and smoldered against his chest. It screeched in rage—a much different sound than a cry of pain; it clubbed Dekker across the face, knocking him across the floor.

Vesuvius kicked her first assailant with a heel to the face and knocked it over while she drew her blades. She turned to face the next opponent when a heavy blow caught her in the midsection. Vesuvius doubled over in pain and quickly found herself on her back as her attacker landed another fierce stroke.

She looked up in time to see the first wounded brute climb to his feet. Focused on Vesuvius, the trio didn't notice Dekker who sideswiped them with a cargo loader. He smashed them against the opposite bulkhead, snuffing out whatever shadow of life they held onto.

Dekker ran to Vesuvius and extended a hand to her. She took it and rose to her feet, then made a choking motion and pointed to the air cylinder clipped at her hip. The cylinder hung crumpled; a pinched crack in the metal hissed and vented the contents.

"Don't worry, Vees. I got you."

But there was no mistaking the worry on her eyes.

* * *

Guy hovered over Corgan as the Rickshaw Crusader drew closer to the sensor anomaly. "It could be an unlisted asteroid or something benign that's causing the sensor shadow, right?"

"Well that's the point, isn't it?" Corgan asked. "Making sure that it isn't a something."

Guy retorted with a childish look on his face. He believed further surveillance was the right call, even if he didn't think it likely had any threat to the mission; but he did wish he'd been assigned to the station, instead. For safety's sake, Matty and Britton both sat in the gun turrets.

Dialing in the visual display on the sensor readout, Guy thought he recognized a distinct shape, even at this distance. "Corgan, what does this look like to you?" He traced a finger over the darkened form to outline the edges.

The pilot leaned back and glanced at the visual feed. He almost fell out of his chair as he scrambled to grab the ship's internal comm unit. "Matty! Britton! Stay sharp!"

Guy leaned back and strapped himself into his chair. "I hate being right."

Corgan punched the engines and accelerated towards the object on a vector that gave him both attack and defensive options.

"Wait, you're flying towards it?"

"Yup," he flashed Guy a maniac grin. "It could be pirates... who knows. One thing's for sure, we need to get closer to know anything for certain."

Guy swallowed hard. The ship grew dramatically on screen. "It's definitely an old, pre-war battle cruiser, Class G." Pre-war ships remained deadlier than any other variety. Following the Intergalactic Singularity War that birthed the chain of Mechnar conflicts, Krenzin influence grew and convinced the young Mother Earth Aggregate to limit armaments and downgrade the MEA navy's destructive capacity. Many of Earth's pre-ISW ships had been hijacked and used as raider vessels. "There's no transponder signal so I can't pull a name or detailed specs."

Corgan exhaled in relief. "It's a G point five, actually." That would make it a Class G with upgraded armor extra weapons systems and a redundant shield array; The G-and-a-half was the heaviest classification possible: flagship grade. They didn't make them any bigger than this.

Guy gripped the armrests of his seat and looked at him queerly. Corgan didn't even glance at the sensor readouts, which incidentally had very little data to display. It almost seemed like the ship was cloaked, except that they could see it through the visual scope.

"I know this ship." Corgan, an avid history fan had studied the wars of all previous generations, but especially the ISW. "See that? The power is completely off." The cruiser loomed large enough to see it with the naked eye. "No running lights, nothing. That's why it could never be found after its disappearance decades ago: there were no readings to trace on any sensors. I think we just stumbled on a ship that salvagers have sought for decades," a huge grin spread from ear to ear. "It's the battleship Salvation."

Less confident, and much less curious than Corgan, Guy cringed in his seat while Corgan piloted their comparatively diminutive Class C alongside the behemoth's side. With no response from the Salvation, Corgan took the Rickshaw Crusader down to the battleship's launch bay and piloted their craft inside. The Crusader measured nearly four-thousand square feet; the Salvation had to be measured in acres.

"What are we doing?" Guy asked nervously.

"Solving a mystery," Corgan replied. He looked at the timer that ticked down, recording the Dozen's approximate air supply. "We've got over two hours before their supply gets critical. Let's get a little info and then report back." Corgan activated an infra-red failsafe beam that remotely powered and controlled the Salvation's bay doors. He remotely closed them and pressurized the hold. Magnetic docking feet clamped their transport to the deck floor despite the zero-gravity.

"C'mon." He called out to the two gunners, "Let's check it out."

Donning the remainder of the air-supply masks, they outfitted their own weapons and scoped out the docking bay. Everything was quiet as death.

Corgan used their IR feed to activate a diagnostic tool panel on the bulkhead wall; the rest of the ship remained pressurized and undamaged—it just had neither air nor power. "Let's make our way to the command bridge." He strapped a floodlight to his head and activated the interior door controls: the last thing he could grant a power override to via the Crusader's IR beam.

The others shrugged, not wanting to squelch Corgan's enthusiasm. They followed their pilot through the dark corridors, powering up personal lights of their own.

Bodies floated in random places; they'd died in contorted poses but the old, sterilized air did little to promote decay. Without power, the Salvation had no internal gravity field, but the Investigator's boots had magnetic controls that kept them grounded.

Britton had once been a medical scientist before joining Dekker's crew. He examined the first few intact bodies; they appeared humanoid but where definitely synthetic: Mechnar. "It looks like something fried them. My guess is that the rest of the crew suffocated. Well, except for maybe these ones." He pointed to the nearby bodies of crewmen who'd either been dismembered or shot; blackened, unoxygenated blood pooled in spherical droplets in zero-g or formed symmetrical blots upon nearby walls where the natural electromagnetic attraction of the blood cells' atoms pulled the clots against the wall. The dead humans wore the uniforms of the pre-MEA military. "We're inside a mass grave."

Corgan paused briefly in respect. "This way. I know the layout."

Within a few minutes he'd navigated them via the shortest possible route. The main control room was equally dead: more murdered humans and fried Mechnars. Corgan rotated a dead body that floated in anti-grav environment; the body was covered with cyborg implants. Several similar units floated nearby. "I guess these second generation units like we found at Osix must've existed during the ISW, too? Just another thing the MEA didn't disclose to prevent mass panic, I suppose." He and Britton examined it a little further.

"Probably ran out of raw materials and had to turn on people," Guy suggested. "The early tech purges of the ISW probably limited their supplies. That might've demanded a hybrid creation?"

Corgan nodded. It made sense, at some level.

At the primary computer ops station they found a shriveled, cyborg-Mechnar body tethered to a data jack by the cable protruding from his skull. The hybrid's skin had burned black and bubbled with deep, red pustules and preserved by the antiseptic air.

Britton looked him over. "Electrocuted, maybe? It looks like his blood actually boiled to the surface. Eerie." Britton unplugged the body and floated it off to the side.

As soon as he'd been unjacked, a large panel began to flash red, glowing slightly. The investigator's stood and looked at it, dumbfounded.

Matty spoke first. "A giant flashing red button? We all know that you're just dying to push it, Guy."

"Well, I guess you've all got me pegged." Guy slapped the switch. Nothing happened for three seconds, and then everything suddenly powered on with a gentle hum. In unison, the floating bodies crashed to the floor, lights flickered awake, panels came alive, and the computer ops station began scrolling a list of data commands as it rebooted systems.

"I think we just commandeered a derelict Class G cruiser!" Corgan's excitement suddenly faltered when the massive view-panel displayed an equally large ship bearing down on them. It appeared to correct course as the transponder signal flared to life. It veered away from an intercept course with the science station and turned unmistakably towards them.

"I'd bet we can be read by scanners now!" Corgan leapt forward and activated the cruiser's shields. They activated just in time to catch the barrage of laser fire. The Salvation shuddered violently under the assault. "There's hardly any power, yet! Batteries have to bank some power; shields are under ten percent! We won't survive much more until the reactor core is fully engaged."

The ghost ship pressed in further. Its gnarled visage looked like something Satan would have dreamt up for space travel, and it appeared just as deadly, too. The devil-ship might have been ripped open at random junctures, but the laser turrets belied the apparent damage as it unloaded another salvo on the Salvation.

Matty dove into one of the pilot couches and pointed to the navigation station. He shouted for Britton to take a post. "We've got to get out of here! Get me some FTL coordinates!"

"What about our guys on the station?" Guy protested, trying to coordinate the laser banks. There wasn't enough juice yet to do anything more than wishfully point the impotent bow gunnery bank at their attackers.

"We'll hafta come back for them! We won't survive more than the next few seconds here! Coordinates?" Without exact, plotted directions in all dimensions they risked being pulled into a gravity mass, or piloting their craft through a star or planet. Because of gravitational dynamics and electromagnetic fields, the risk was immense.

"We don't have enough time! That system isn't online yet!" Britton yelled.

"Then we gotta jump blind," Matty yelled flatly as he punched the controls, gambling with everyone's life: theirs, plus their friends on the station. They felt a slight whine as the giant Thumper engines warmed up for the momentary, random jump. They detonated their propellant force: a controlled, nuclear explosion that rocketed them into FTL. The crew felt the distinct "thwump," and then the battleship Salvation was gone.

* * *

Dekker and Vesuvius were tied together at the hip, quite literally. They'd rigged a splice into Dekker's air tube and tethered her into his air supply.

"We've got to control our breathing, try to make this one air tank last as long as possible."

"That shouldn't be too hard," she quipped. "You already know how you take my breath away."

Dekker gave her a wry look. "We've still got a job to do. Let's search this freighter."

"It'd go quicker if we split up." Vesuvius grinned. "Alright. I'll watch your back. But you know how I get jokey when my life is on the line."

"I'm the same way," he admitted. "Might be because we're getting a little less oxygen than our brains require. It knocks down inhibition."

"Does it now?" Vesuvius gingerly rested her hand on Dekker's muscular shoulder.

Dekker paused. "We've gotta keep looking." He handed her his blaster and drew his frag pistol before pressing forward with his search. "I don't think you've got room for the katana and we don't want to accidentally cut my airline, too."

Vesuvius glanced around. "This freighter's a large C-class: maybe twice the size of the Crusader. There can't be too many places to search."

* * *

"One thing is for sure," Corgan tapped the slowly crawling output meter on the reactor. Life support was operational now, but the charging rates from the fully depleted systems were dreadfully slow. "We're going to need more bodies to properly crew this thing."

They'd survived a microjump and been dumped out of FTL in the reaches of a neighboring system. The maneuver was a little like punching the throttle and jetting blindly through a busy vehicular intersection: eventually you would hit something, but they'd been lucky so far.

Matty and Britton trained their weapons on the Shivan prisoner they'd pulled from their cargo hold. "That," Guy interjected, "and the Crusader isn't big enough to take on whatever that ugly skeleton ship is by itself." He glared menacingly at his stumpy shivan prisoner. "If you want to live, you need to help us."

The shivan looked like a squat, stout humanoid. Slightly shorter than the investigators, he appeared tall for a shivan which were normally thick and muscled, as one expected from residents of heavy gravity planets. His forehead sloped back sharply above his brow line, giving some credibility to the vulgar nickname "flattop" that many crassly used to reference their race. His hair ended in a widow's peak which gave way to the long ash-grey skin of his forehead. With a guttural accent he said, "I will help you, but I expect to receive my pay: the same pay they promised when I consigned myself to the ship you destroyed." He jotted down a figure and handed it to Guy.

"There's that entrepreneurial shivan spirit we hoped we could count on." Guy looked over the figure and managed some loose math based on exchange rates. "That's doable. It's steep, but manageable."

"We have a contract, then. My name is Gr'Kah." He bowed with a standard shivan greeting.

Britton lowered his weapon and stepped over to the computer ops console. The red light flashed again and the screen stopped scrolling. It displayed two words. "Execute, SHIP?"

Guy noticed the display and shrugged to him. "Push it I guess?" He looked to Corgan for any advice from the history buff.

Corgan shrugged too.

"Let's just hope execute means 'run' and not 'murder,'" Britton tapped the activation panel.

The computer screen went black and the giant viewscreen at the command center's front blinked off and then on, adding a small heads up display in the upper right corner. The HUD displayed a simple green circle.

"SHIP active," a calm, feminine, computerized voice came from the Salvation's speaker system. The green HUD formed a dialogue icon when it spoke. "Calculating galactic time. Updating chronos. Refreshing diagnostics and checking logs."

The investigator's stood dumbstruck for a moment. "What is SHIP?" Guy asked.

"Shipboard Helpful Intelligent Personality. I am at your service."

"What happened here? How and why did the Salvation disappear?"

"The battleship Salvation experienced a system-wide shut-down sixty-two years ago as part of an integrated failsafe against new Mechnar hijacking methods."

Corgan asked the relevant question, "SHIP, what is the limit to your intelligence?"

"Singularity is impossible; I am hardcoded against self-awareness via the same hardware device which transmitted the virus to the Mechnar hacker who attempted forcing singularity upon me. It is impossible for Salvation to belong to any enemy force or to become an enemy force."

"Which includes what?"