Before The Storm
Chapter Twenty-one
Lara brought the ship in like she didn’t have a care in the world, so smooth it might as well have been a milkshake. There wasn’t any shake or rattle to The Praeteritus’ approach path, just a soft and gentle drift in.
“Nice flying,” Sketch said as the ship moved to sidle up to the large unidentified alien vessel. The older ship had slowly sunken slightly into the face of the comet, ice and rock having claimed the bottom edge of it, concealing one side of the derelict ship within its cratered bosom. “Anything on any of the sensors? Nothing howling, screaming, shouting or, dare I say, singing?”
“Quiet as a tomb planet, boss,” Lara said, tapping a few consoles surrounding her. “Nothing alive in there, as far as I can tell. Nor has there been for a long, long time. I’m able to see the part of the ship the last crew spent a while trying to cut into, based on the scuff marks on the hull. You wanna try the same section or someplace different?”
“Ten to one those morons were trying to cut through a hard bulkhead,” Loz said, pointing over towards one side. “You’re much more likely to get a softer breach point if we link up somewhere over on that curve over there. That’s recessed, meaning it’s not as strong as the outward facing stuff. Can you get us tucked in there, Lara?”
“Sure thing, stud,” Lara said, grinning as it made the young man blush. She tilted the wheel and pushed a few sliders before The Praeteritus slid and moved to attach clamps to parts of the other vessel, getting itself secured in place.
“Okay Lara,” Sketch said to her. “You have the conn while several of us are going to go grave digging. You ready, Charlotte? Aliara?”
“You know it, Miles,” Charlotte told him.
“Always, boss,” Aliara agreed.
“I’m coming with you as well,” Serena insisted.
“So am I,” Loz added.
“C’mon, Loz,” Imogen said. “Are you really telling us you want to be big and brave and storming into the possibly booby-trapped tomb ship?”
The young man frowned, narrowing his eyes at his sister in annoyance. “About as far from it as possible, sis,” he grumbled. “But if we’re going to loot everything we can off this ship, I’m the only mechanic this pleasure cruise has on it, and so I’m going to be the one to decide what’s worth unbolting and what isn’t. I have absolutely zero desire to go on that fucking deathtrap, but I’m going to be needed to figure out what’s worth the weight and isn’t.”
“Tell you what, Loz,” Sketch said to him. “Once we’ve scouted around a bit, then we’ll come and bring you in. I want front liners only for this breach.”
“I’m a goddamn front liner,” Serena said with her hands on her hips, “and I won’t hear a word otherwise.”
“Did you see me rushing to argue with you?” Sketch laughed. “I’ve learned exactly how futile that is. So let’s all go get suited up and prepare for breach.” The four of them left the bridge and stepped into the elevator, before the chamber started moving down towards the extended temporary tunnel connecting one of their hatches to the hull of the crashed ship.
The dock had a handful of human sized space suits, remnants from when Sketch had been salvaging any random parts and pieces he could, just after he’d come out of the deep freeze. Aliara had brought her own with her, as she had a couple in her battle dart. In the early days, when he was still alone, there’d been a lot of trying to scrounge for parts, food, fuel and clothing, and as such, they’d spent a decent amount of time as scavengers, sifting through dead and derelict ships. It wasn’t enjoyable work, but there was plenty of unexamined space refuse out there for the taking when people were bold, daring or just tolerant of dealing with dead bodies.
Sketch suspected this wasn’t going to be all that different.
As they moved to get into their suits, Sketch made a point to keep his Kazshi outside of the suit, seeing Charlotte do the same. Once all four of them were sealed in and the oxygen was flowing inside of their suits, they flooded the umbilical tunnel with a low mix of atmosphere and attached their magnetic boots to the extended plankway, with Loz staying back on The Praeteritus until they’d proven that it was safe to come over.
Serena walked between Sketch and Aliara, both of whom had some experience with this sort of thing, with Charlotte bringing up the rear. Sketch made his way right up to the hull of the ship and tapped it with amusement. It was a sturdy enough kind of metal, but Sketch had seen more than his fair share of sturdy metals collapse beneath the raw power of a Kazshi. They moved to secure the umbilical tunnel a bit more firmly, and double checked the seals on the edges of it.
They were ready to breach as Aliara backed away from the exterior of the derelict and Charlotte moved forward to take her place, as they looked for an appropriate weak point to start in on.
Once he’d found an adequate spot, he grabbed one of his Kazshi from his belt and flicked the actuator to the on position, as the blade emerged and hooked around his arm. The air sizzled as he gave the blade a couple of test swipes before he brought it over and leaned it against the bulkhead, as sparks began to fly and whatever kind of metal it was began to liquify. It dripped and slowly trickled away and there was a sudden gush of air out of the ship and into the umbilical tunnel as there was a quick plume of fire jetting out, engulfing his arm before he flipped off the Kazshi and the channel of flame slowly dwindled and returned to normal. He waited a moment for the atmosphere between the inside of the ship’s chamber and the umbilical tunnel to equalize before he started the blade back up again and resumed his work. While he continued to cut, Charlotte turned her own Kazshi on and started in on the other side, with occasional blooms of fire every so often, but not long enough or severe enough to burn through the atmosphere suits.
“What’s with the flame jets?” Serena asked from behind them.
“Means a higher-than-normal oxygen content inside the ship, which is weird,” Aliara said. “The majority of the alien-based species we know about are carbon based, and prefer atmospheres with oxygen rates at around 20-22%.”
“So it’s weird that they’ve got more oxygen than normal?”
“That’s part of why it’s weird,” Sketch said. “Most derelict ships, they’re fully depressurized, usually as a result of whatever caused them to go derelict—crashing into something or something crashing into them. The few ones that aren’t or have pockets on them that aren’t, those are usually almost completely devoid of oxygen, Oxygen rich? That’s definitely a new one on me.”
“Me also,” Aliara said as Charlotte and Sketch started to approach each other’s start points, nearly forming a complete cut. Once they had gotten it sawn through, Aliara grabbed a beam from the umbilical tunnel, turned off her maglock boots, lifted her legs up and then kicked with both feet at the block of metal, pushing it inside of the derelict. The ship was dead, so their artificial gravity was clearly off as well, and the chunk of sliced off hull flipped end over end as it sank into the dark chamber of the ship.
Sketch reached into his pouch and pulled out a handful of chemical light balls, cracking the inner capsule to let the two chemicals contained within glow brightly before tossing them into the chamber, offering some blooms of illumination inside of the chamber, giving them something to see by, as the yellow pinpricks drifted further and further into the cavern of darkness.
“Doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen before,” Sketch said as he was the first one inside of the chamber. “You may not want to come in here, Aliara.”
“Why not?” she asked before peeking her head in after him. “Hmm. You’re right. Whatever species used this ship, they weren’t all that tall. You humans can probably be fine with crouching a bit, but I’d be on my hands and knees moving through this whole space, and that’s not going to work for me.” The chamber was a little less than one and a half meters tall, or a little less than five feet. Sketch had to bend down a little to move inside of the space, and it was uncomfortable, but not unbearable. Unfortunately, Aliara as a Y’Bari/P’Nox was closer to eight feet tall, far too big to comfortably fit inside the derelict’s chambers. “I guess I’m stuck on door guard, but you be careful in there, you two, and if there’s any problem at all, you come running back this way immediately, you hear?”
“You know that Sketch is the Captain, right, Aliara?” the princess sassed, and immediately Sketch regretted it for her.
“And the Captain’s been in deep freeze for more of the last century than he’s been out of it, so he knows enough to trust me when I tell him that it’s a dark and scary galaxy out there, and he wants someone attentive and careful watching his six,” Aliara said in a scolding tone. “Since I’m not there to do that, you’d damn well better be.”
“I’m standing right here,” Charlotte said, a little bit of annoyance in hers.
“Yeah, and I still don’t know you well enough to trust you yet, Weaponeer,” Aliara said with a slight smirk. “No offense intended. You just haven’t earned my trust yet. Give it time. Right now, I’m strictly implying the amount of importance I’m entrusting with Serena, making sure she understands how vital her role is in all of this. Got it?”
“I got it, Ara,” Serena said. “There’ll be three of us. We’ll be fine, and if we aren’t, well, if he doesn’t come back, I won’t come back without him.”
“You don’t have to take it that far, Princess, but just stay on your toes.”
“If I do that, I’m probably going to hit my head a lot in there,” Serena joked.
“You know what I meant.”
“Sure, but if you’re going to give me shit, expect me to lob some back now and then.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“If you two are done,” Sketch said as he stepped from the tunnel into the derelict ship, “I’m going in.”
The inside of the chamber made him think they’d broken into some sort of rest area attached to some corridors, as he could see what looked like padded benches on the walls, and some furniture bolted to the floor, which made him wonder if the ship had ever had artificial gravity, or if it had just always been functioning in a zero-gravity environment. That said, he didn’t see much in of decoration or adornment on the wall, and while there were dust particles floating in the atmosphere, nothing seemed decayed or overly damaged, and he certainly didn’t see remains anywhere.
They moved into the space and attached their magnetic boots, glad to see the floor was metal, so they could still get around. Either end of the hallway looked like it was sealed off, so Sketch realized they might be in here for a while, cutting through bulkheads and section doors.
Left led towards the edge of the ship, so better to head right and deeper into the belly of the derelict. The door was much easier to cut through than the exterior of the ship had been, and between Sketch and Charlotte, they were through it in less than a minute. The next room seemed like it was a storage chamber for machine parts, and while much of it was still strapped down in boxes, whatever crash had caused this ship to run into this comet had done a number on what was and wasn’t strapped down, so there were floating things drifting back and forth, shifted out of their places of slumber by the disturbance of cutting the door open.
“Machine parts?” Serena asked.
“Could be,” Charlotte said. The loose bits and bobs floating around didn’t really tell any of the trio anything. “You want Loz to come in and start evaluating, boss?”
“Not quite yet,” Sketch said. “I want a better idea of what’s going on here first before we make that kind of call.” They moved through the room, pushing things to one side or the other, making a pathway through the storage area towards the other side, where there was another door to cut, which they made quick work of.
As they continued to progress through the ship, Sketch kept a strict eye out for the box they were told to look for. The client, an alien of some aged years, ed being on the derelict ship as a child, and there was a box that the ship’s Captain took great delight in showing off, something the Captain had ‘commandeered’ from the primitive natives, the species of which the client was. The amount of details the client had been able to provide about the derelict, the species or the accident were sparse at best, as the client’s memory of being on the ship was close to a century old, and that meant so many of the details had been jettisoned over the decades. Even non-human species could only hold onto a memory for so long.
They were five chambers in before they encountered remains, and even then, it was little more than a skeleton, all the flesh having been stripped from the body by whatever parasites clung to the very last vestiges of life in the atmosphere. The race that occupied the ship looked like they were squat, powerful people, with thick bones and a rodent-like head structure.
The longer they made their way through the ship, the more they found that they could loot and ‘salvage.’ There were plenty of gems and metals, and as soon as they’d let Loz onto the ship, he’d immediately found things he started hauling back to The Praeteritus, either for repairs, for upgrades or just even for backup parts. The young man seemed to think it was a veritable treasure trove of things they could use.
“Hey, am I okay to start prying doors open on my own?” Loz asked across the radio. “Because I think this door you went past leads to the munitions depot, and I wouldn’t mind picking up some explosives and shells we could convert to our own systems.”
“Charlotte can double back and let you in there,” Sketch said. “I’m still making my way towards what I think is the bridge.”
Charlotte turned and started walking back down the hallway with the click-tap, click-tap rhythm of her footsteps disappearing back down the hall as he and Serena approached a much bigger door with slightly bigger thickness to it. “You think you’ll be alright with this on your own, big man?” Serena asked him as he examined the door. The last couple they hadn’t even had to cut open—they’d been able to open a safety off one side, unlatch the safety locks and then just slowly pry them open rather than cut through the metal. It was safer and less messy.
The two of them slowly pried open the door and not only was it clear they’d found the bridge, they’d found the last stand point of the survivors, although they’d been dead and gone for decades. There were close to three dozen skeletons scattered around the room, a number of them in some sort of circle, and it looked like they were deep enough in the ship that they’d mostly stayed in place, their attire not having rotted away enough so that their boots kept them affixed to the floor, as they seemed to use permanent magnetics rather than the electromagnets humans preferred in their boots, ones they could turn on and off.
The body of the Captain was still in its chair, and its arm bones were still wrapped around the box they were looking for. It was an ornate chest about a meter across, half a meter wide and about a quarter of a meter tall, made out of bone of some kind, covered in ornate inscriptions in a language Sketch didn’t recognize, not that he expected to. Hell, for all he knew, they weren’t language but purely decorative, but there were hundreds of grooves that formed black lines against the white surface of the container, patterns of some kind, if not language then art of a high nature.
At the front center of the box was some kind of spinning metal plate, a combination lock, if he had to guess, although the symbols for markers were also completely unknown to him. He’d been told, if at all possible, not to open the box. If the box was damaged or opened, it would be worth significantly less, but still important to be retrieved. The contents, if unopened, were worth the entirety of the ship, at least to their client.
“That’s our box,” Sketch said as he walked onto the bridge, heading over towards it. There were a trio of skeletons gathered around the captain’s chair, reaching out to the box, as if salvation lay within. Maybe it did, Sketch thought to himself, although if it did, they would’ve had to get it open first. Or maybe they were worshipping it in their final moments. The exterior of the box certainly could be taken as an object with religious significance.
“Aren’t you worried about disturbing the dead when you pick up that case?” Serena asked him, as he laughed, shaking his head back at her.
“I don’t believe in a life after this one, not one we can really interact with, anyway,” he said to her as he moved to start adjusting the bones of the arms, the last bits of tendon clinging them together snapping easily, letting him toss the arms off towards the far end of the room. The chest must’ve had some serious weight to it, because it took quite the push to get it moving away from the captain’s chair, floating it out and through the rooms and back down the hallway.
“That our box?” Loz said, poking his head out of the munitions depot he’d been rooting around in for the last hour.
“Certainly matches the description,” Sketch said, “and it was in the kind of place something important would’ve been found. It’s pretty damn heavy, too. Takes some good force to get it moving, so I’m trying not to push it too fast, because the inertia would be brutal.”
“Any idea what’s in it?”
“Nope,” Sketch replied. “And we’re not gonna look. We’re paid not to look. We’re just gonna haul it back.” He moved to get back towards the umbilical and saw Aliara still hanging outside of the ship, keeping watch. “This thing is probably going to clatter down hard if you just let it drop into artificial gravity, Ali, so I want you to carry it in there and get it stowed away somewhere secure.”
“I mean, it looks wild from all the details on the outside, but I don’t know if something that small could really be that heavy,” she answered with a shrug. He moved to line the box up and pushed it through the breach towards her. “Oof! Okay, yeah, that’s got some heft behind it. I’ll get it into place.”
Once he saw Aliara carting the box back onto their ship, he turned to go check on Loz and Charlotte. They’d been in the munitions depot for a while, and he wanted to make sure the two of them weren’t going to accidentally blow up the derelict.
When he got to the door, he saw Loz had loaded up a giant net full of boxes, and was still going to town like a kid in a candy shop. “Bossman, we have got so much potential stuff here that I’m having to be picky and choosy about what we take,” Loz laughed.
“Don’t get so caught up on munitions that we don’t get the important shit, kid,” Sketch said to him. “If you fill my cargo hold up with unstable explosives, you’re gonna get us into all sorts of troubles. I want the important shit. Fuel trumps everything.”
Loz waved his hand with a slight frown. “Bad news on that front, boss. Their engine has some kind of chemical reactor and doesn’t use anything even close to our fuel rods. I could try and bring some of it on board, maybe we could trade the stuff to somebody else, but not too many ships use this kind of configuration. I still don’t even have a handle on what these people were like.”
“Short, squat rodents,” Serena said as she moved to them in the depot. “And this wasn’t an accident—this was an intentional crash.”
“What are you talking about?” Sketch asked her.
“I hooked up a small generator to the bridge computer and spent a bit of time trying to finagle the language or at least get the general idea of what happened,” she said. “And the last plotted course of the ship is to take it right into the back of the comet. I can’t read any of what it says, but the imagery’s pretty hard to miss.”
“Maybe the navigational systems were screwed up?” Loz asked. “Lemme go take a look at the bridge and see what I can see.”
“So you’re done here?” Sketch said, gesturing to the large cargo net full of things.
“That’ll be plenty, Boss, without getting us into trouble,” the young man replied as he headed toward the hallway, following Serena, leaving Sketch and Charlotte to haul the plunder back to the ship. “I’ll see what I can figure out.”
Sketch and Charlotte sighed, mostly just annoyed that they were doing all of the hauling while the two youngest and most spry of the crew were poking at the long dead systems. It wasn’t hard to move all the stuff—just tedious, getting it all shifted and shaped, as the amorphous blob drifted through the arteries of the derelict spaceship. Once it was stowed and secured in one of The Praeteritus’s cargo holds, they headed back towards the derelict.
“How’s it going, boss?” Lara’s voice said to him over the comms.
“Overall pretty well,” he said. “We got the box the client was looking for and we’ve got some pretty decent plunder, although we’ve got a big no-go in of fuel, or raw currency. So a lot of what we’re getting is barter goods. I’m not thrilled about that, because it means we’re going to have to go to a market planet and offload a bunch of this stuff, but it’s the only way to make this salvage read as legitimate, because if we just showed up, took the box and left, then everyone in the system would know we came for something specific and we got it, instead of we just happened to be a handful of enterprising young scavengers who got lucky and made off well. So we need to pick this derelict over pretty well.”
“Yeah, so about that, boss,” Lara replied, her voice taking on a slight edge to it. “You know anything about Renzitars?”
Sketch closed his eyes and curled his hands into fists. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me…”
“They’re not here yet, and it’s gonna be maybe an hour or two before they get a good approach window vector, but there’s a trio of their ships getting ready to try and dive bomb onto… well, I can’t tell if they’re going after us, the derelict or just… yes.”
“It’s Renzitars,” Sketch grumbled. “They’re vultures, but they especially love Tropage vessels, meaning they see us as a value add on, something to sweeten the pot.”
“They don’t have great ships for this kind of thing, boss,” Lara said, clearly tapping the terminal in front of her. “I don’t know that they’ll even be able to pull off an approach vector that doesn’t rip their ships to ribbons.”
“You said there’s three of them?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Then I’d expect one or two to get lost on approach, and the survivors to come bearing down on us, given a chance,” Sketch said. “Do they know that you know they’re trying to find a window?”
“Doubtful,” Lara said. “We haven’t moved, shifted or adjusted since we got here, so they probably think we’re all hands on pillaging the derelict.”
“Good. How quickly can we disengage and get clear of this mess?”
“If you want us to safely retract the extension bridge, whole process should only take about five minutes for us to get ready without them even knowing what we’re doing,” she said. “If just want us to jettison the extension bridge, we could be gone in less than a minute.”
“Let’s keep the second option as a backup and we’ll plan on the first one for now, but the last thing I wanna do is have those assholes in pursuit of us. But I think I’ve got an idea for that. Do everything you can to get us ready without tipping our hand that you’ve spotted them.”
“You got it, boss.”
“Loz? Where are you?”
“I’m on the bridge with Serena,” he said back. “She’s totally right—this ship was piloted into this comet. It wasn’t an accident. It was completely intentional, although over half the escape pods are missing, so I’m guessing the captain gave everyone who wanted to get off the chance to bail before he piloted the ship into this ice ball.”
“Great. That’ll haunt me for a while. I need you to meet me in the munitions depot.”
“I thought we were done with stuff from there.”
“Just meet me over here, will you?”
“On it, boss.”
While he waited, Sketch poked around the munitions depot and found that Loz hadn’t been kidding when he’d said there was still plenty to go around. Lots of what looked like torpedoes all over the place, and boxes of handheld weapons, but weapons that you didn’t know could often be even more dangerous than leaving them behind.
“Okay, boss, what’re we doing?” Loz said as he stepped into the room.
“How quick could you rig this room to explode while still making it look like an accident, like something just went off?”
“I assume you want us to have some time to GTFO before it goes off?”
“I assumed that would be understood.”
“Check,” he said, glancing around the room. “Well, honestly, if this room has a single explosive go off, it’s likely to take out the whole ship in this condition, so it doesn’t matter what it’ll look like in the wreckage. I can probably whip something together in like ten, fifteen minutes, why?”
“Get started.”
“You sure? There’s still plenty of plunder we could haul off this place, boss, and I don’t think we’re in any hurry.”
“I do,” Sketch sighed. “We’ve got a little less than an hour before we’re going to have to deal with a Renzitar boarding party trying to invade our ship.”
“That’s against Dominion law,” Loz said with a scowl. “We’re here, and they aren’t, so we’ve got reclamation rights and they have to wait until we’ve separated before they can come scour the ship.”
“Yeah, it’s not the derelict that they’re gonna raid,” Sketch told him. “So maybe get to work and strap together that bomb.”
“On it, boss.”
Charlotte and Serena did a last , picking up a few odds and ends, before heading back to the ship as Loz built an explosive device in the center of the munitions room. As they were heading back to the tunnel, Sketch’s radio blipped back to life. “You there boss?” Lara said to him.
“We’re retracting the tunnel now,” Sketch said as the tunnel was depressurizing. “Why?”
“Looks like they’re preparing their attack runs now.”
“Good,” Sketch said as the gangplank and rings began to retract. “In about one minute, we should have everything ready on our end. Loz? Meet me up on the bridge.”
“You got it, boss.”
Once Sketch got the gangway locked back in, he headed to the elevator and up to the bridge. Once there, he could see on the screen the approach vectors of two Renzitar corsairs closing the distance. “Lost one, did they?”
“First one stumbled into some shed ice blocks and got battered until they crashed,” Lara said. “Other two were better at clearing their paths. They’re going to be coming up on us in about ten minutes, and they don’t look like they’re going to slow down much, just sort of batter us into the derelict and pin us there.”
“You gotten comfortable enough to make a quick pace maneuver and dart out of the way just quick enough so that they can’t turn and move into us?” Sketch said as he climbed up the stairs and hopped up into his oversized captain’s chair.
“With the improvements the kid’s made in of acceleration,” Lara said, “I can scoot us right out of the way with ease. They won’t have time to turn or adjust, assuming I time it right.”
“Make sure they don’t.”
A little bit later, Lara had retracted the clamps and started prepping the engine, as everyone watched from the bridge.
They waited.
And waited.
And finally, when they could see the ship bearing down on them, Lara flipped the switches and turned The Praeteritus’s engines on full blast, pushing to one side, a perpendicular path to the incoming dive bombing corsairs, and with a few hundred meters to spare, the corsairs went crashing into the derelict, their raiding pincers breaching the dead ship’s hull and latching onto it.
The Renzitar fired a couple of torpedoes at The Praeteritus but Lara was ready and used ice debris from the asteroid to destroy them long before they became any danger. The pilot offered a quiet pump of her fist in pride before coughing, smirking and resuming her composure.
“Kid?” Sketch asked.
“Do the honors, boss,” Loz said, tossing a small remote over to him.
“Boom,” Sketch said, clicking the button.
And then nothing happened.
Just when Sketch was starting to think the bomb had been a dud, the derelict blossomed with fire and shrapnel as explosions started rocking the inside of it, causing sections to implode, before spreading to the two corsairs, taking them with it, in a fiery celebration of death.
“Fuck with my ship, will they?”
“Captain,” Helen, the ship’s AI said, “I think you should go and take a look at the box we’ve brought on board.”
“What’s up, Helen?”
“I… I’m not sure how to explain it.”
So Sketch, Aliara, Charlotte and Serena headed back to the elevator and took it down to the cargo hold, and as soon as they stepped into it, all four of them heard it, a sort of high-pitched warbling noise, almost musical in nature.
“Does… does that sound like singing to you, boss?”
“A’ight, let’s just hope it quiets down long enough for me to deliver to it the client and get it off my fucking boat…”