'Brykthylosians are barbaric yes, and are the most barbaric in terms of just, general messed-up ways and practices. But Kozolequinians are bred for war. They practically live to have a gun in their hand or to smash in a Torkaxion's skull,' Leon countered.
'Actually, having had to be in a fighter ship repelling a Kozolequinian launch on a small planet in the Firestorm cluster, they're pretty damn brutal,' Oliver interjected.
'You were there against Kozolequinians? When was that?' Jenny asked, looking up from her pasta sludge.
'Must have been about, oh, ten or twelve years ago now. They had just decided from out of nowhere to attack a tiny unsuspecting planet that Celestria was just starting to make connections with. People, there are essentially massive snakes with ten arms, so they weren't the most noted interstellar travelers. I can't remember the name of the planet even though I really should do.'
'I think I read about it in the news actually. Vernim wasn't it? Something like that,' Leon added.
'Probably. But they launched strikes against it and refused to stop when the Celestrian guys asked them to kindly stop firing plasma missiles at them. I was one of the guys that went over to try and stop them being such violence elitists.' Prissy raised one eyebrow.
'Violence elitists? What the hell is violence elitist?'
'Someone who thinks that only their idea of violence is the correct one. Anyway, shot a fair few of the buggers down that trip, although I know several people that didn't make it out. Skeletons are probably still strapped into the ruins of their ships, sinking into the swamps down there. Poor guys.' The company was silent for many seconds before Holden raised his glass.
'To the fallen, whoever they are, and wherever they are.' The crew raised their glasses in silence, hovered for a moment in suspended animation, and then brought them all together to clink them in appreciation for Holden's words.
'And the exploration and safety of the rest of us still here, so that we might not have to honor so many fallen again,' Leon tolled. Their drinks were drained, nourishment for weary bodies. They began to eat again in silence, one of the first silences since the trip had begun. All seven of them were perfectly fine with one another, and each would say of their companions something along the lines of 'they're all amiable folk, and I have great pleasure in accompanying them into the darkness for I know that they will carry me through with light enough', although perhaps in not those terms. The seven began to move off one by one once food and drink had been taken in, back to their various workplaces, although Prissy went straight to the sleeping quarters, as she had been on the nightshift the longest so far and was about ready to drop to the mesh grating floor.
For the main part, each crewmember spent their various time doing work for Celestria, tasks that they would hand back, reports and such, or researching into their favorite topics and enhancing their knowledge. They had seen nothing yet, so there was nothing much to do. Duma was reading many a document on the relationship between artifacts found on different planetary clusters and solar systems that had no links when the items were made. Jenny was watching documentaries on the making of various guns, Yuki on horticulture on different planets. Oliver was reading over the manual for the ship once again, making sure he knew every little button on the entire vessel, just in case something was to happen. Leon was filling out the reports and doing the rounds of Nightingale, Prissy was asleep, and doing the general chores the rest of the time, and Holden was interviewing everyone and reading a novel. Each of them was relaxing, taking their time. There was no rush, no immediate danger, or at least nothing the scans and monitors could detect, so they were all content and snug inside the belly of the ship they were flying into uncharted territory.
Duma was reading his texts, fascinated by the information that it contained when the Halo-Core in his desk flashed. Oliver was there in the projection.
'Hey, Duma.'
'Howdy Oliver, how's it all going upfront?'
'She's sailing nicely, light as a feather, engines are barely going and she's just powering through as if there was a tailwind throwing us through,' Oliver said, relaxing back in his Navigator's chair with a Rubik's cube. Over 3000 years old the confounded contraption was all the way from earth. Oliver still didn't have the faintest clue how the hell to solve the blasted thing. A few twists here and a maneuver then, and he somehow always ended up worse off than he started.
'So what's up?' Duma asked.
'I was just wondering. If we do come across anything, what are you expecting to find?'
'What do you mean?'
'Well,' Oliver began, 'let's say we find a rock, floating out here in this god-forsaken emptiness that's got less life than the Abyssal Cluster. What will that tell you? That no bugger has taken a dump out here for a thousand years so it's ok to claim it as ours?'
'To be honest I've no clue what we are going to find. If we find that there has been something out there and they've kicked the bucket, it's going to be me to find out if anything's going to come back and eat it, or if it's actually dead, stuff like that.'
'You're our death expert then?' Duma grinned.
'That's about it.'
'Fair enough, just wondering. 'Cuz we've been flying through this for a while and I can't seem to think of shit that we'd actually find out here in the blank space. How far are they wanting us to go in before we say 'nope, nothing here? Go on Celestria, shove another outpost here, no clue who's going to visit but ah well, I'm sure we can hold events here. Negotiations in the abyss, coming to a Halo-Core near you.'' Duma shrugged.
'No clue man, probably better off asking Leon about that, or Prissy.' Duma informed his pilot.
'Yeah,' Oliver sighed, 'you're probably right. Thanks, man, have fun doing whatever you're doing.' Duma laughed.
'Nothing interesting, texts and the likes. Have fun with scanning for sod all.'
'Will do man,' Oliver said, 'over and out.' The navigator switched off the coms system and retreated back into his bubble of fury over a cube with smaller cubes, which endlessly eluded conformity.
It seemed that Duma had barely returned to his work when the door beeped at him. He glanced up from his texts to turn to the door.
'Who is it?' he called.
'It's me, Yuki' came the petit, well mannered and graceful voice. Duma bade her entrance, and the door slid open. Yuki walked in, sleek and perfectly poised as always, a slight smile upon her face. Duma thought she was slightly flushed as well, but could not be sure of it. The grey of the ship was starting to get to him.
'Hey, Yuki, what's up?' The young woman sat down in a chair near him.
'Nothing much, I was just bored. Nothing much really happens does it?'
'It does seem that we are in the process of exploring absolutely nothing at all. But the pay is good at least, and I have the chance to catch up with some of the reading material that had stacked up lately.' Yuki laughed, although it was more of a childish giggle in Duma's opinion.
'Same here. It's rather funny, isn't it? The two of us looking for opposite things. I'm looking for anything alive, and you're looking for anything that isn't.'
'Well, that is certainly one way to look at things. I think Oliver was just saying similar about me being the death expert onboard. Quite morbid I think, but perhaps apt enough.' Yuki laughed again.
'What harsh words for such a good looking guy,' she commented. Duma feigned appreciation.
'You're too kind to me, you're not bad yourself.' Yuki raised an eyebrow.
'Only not bad? That's it?'
'Well, when I say not bad, I actually mean that you're pretty damn attractive. Good-natured, kind, friendly, intelligent, amiable, I could go on but I think you get the picture.' Duma smiled kindly, he meant most of those in the list. Yuki moved in closer to him.
'Keep going.' Duma's surprise was genuine at this simple statement.
'Oh, ok. Well, you're pretty funny, especially at mealtimes. That one about the guy that flew into the sun of the Starburst Galaxy was pretty ep
ic.' Yuki crept closer to him. Duma could almost feel her breath upon him.
'What else?'
'Uhh, well, I guess...' he never got any further. Yuki's tongue had found its way into his mouth, and her hands were deep into his hair. Duma returned the compliment and the two sat there, embraced, deep into each other's throats. The fumes both of them were giving off enticed them further, as they got more passionate with every passing second.
Then Nightingale started talking.
'All crew are to report to the cockpit and bridge at the request of navigator Oliver.' The couple broke; looking away nervously like two small children caught sneaking downstairs to raid the fridge.
'Yeah,' Duma muttered.
'Hmmm, well...' Yuki returned. The two sat in silence for a few seconds, the awkwardness hanging in the air like the fading cadence of a singer's final breath.
'I guess we'd better see what Oliver wants,' Duma said, rising from his chair, Yuki swiftly following. She smoothed down her clothes to regain her composure as best she could. Both of them exited the room, not speaking a word to each other, barely glancing at the other, eye contact avoided as eagerly as a recent plague.
The two entered last into the cockpit, the other four having already reached their meeting point.
'Guys, get here now,' Oliver said, urgency soaked into his voice like chloroform on a cloth. The two rushed over to a large table, where a hologram was projected up.
'This is what's in our vicinity for a stretch of around 30,000km; this is zoomed out to the max. This here,' he pointed to a flashing red dot in the center, 'is us, Nightingale.' Duma nodded to show he understood.
'Ok, that's all well and good. So what's that over there?' He leaned over through the projection and indicated to a flashing green dot, almost unnoticeable.
'That,' Oliver told him, 'is the point. We're in the blank space. There's nothing here.' Duma shivered.
'So here's the question,' Prissy started. 'What the fuck is that?'
Chapter 4:
The blip in question was barely noticeable. The crew fell silent, all staring at the blinking spot, flashing in the distance, hypnotized by it like moths to light.
'So there is something out here after all,' Duma spoke, breaking the silence.
'It would appear so,' Prissy said. The silence fell again, although all of them could seem to hear the cogs turning in each other's heads, calculating and plotting, analyzing and deducing the meanings of what they were seeing before their eyes.
'What actually is it Oliver?' Leon asked, turning to him. Oliver shrugged.
'Don't know. Just pulled up the screen for a look, it's got a slightly wider range than the monitors upfront, and there it was. Tell you what though,' Oliver began. He turned around, seemingly to gather some sort of composure.
'Hey Nightingale,' he said.
'Hello Oliver, what can I do for you?' the woman's voice was back again, with a soothing, calming quality about it. Leon's heart was stilled very slightly by the simple politeness of it.
'Can you put the hologram map into 3D view for me?'
'Certainly Oliver, one moment.' The hologram before them floated up, drifting, about a foot, and another foot of hologram appeared above and below this line.
'This view shows us in three-dimensional space. We're always in the middle in order to make it easier to calculate the relative position of everything else. The object,' he pointed to the little icon, 'is above us, relatively. It's about half a day's journey to get it in view of the cameras, if it's big enough, on cruising speed, about three hours if we floor it,' Oliver explained.
'But we still don't know what it is. Is there a way to get any dimensions, or any other information on it?' Jenny asked.
'Nightingale,' Prissy spoke, hoping that it would pick up on her wish to speak to the ship. It was the first time she had done so.
'Hello Prissy, what can I do for you?'
'Can you give us any details on the object in quadrant V54, 88B, 490?'
'I shall try, one moment please.' Leon had moved around the table to be on the side nearest to the floating mystery, adrift in the dark. He stood on a chair nearby to be above the hologram, looking down on it with an eagle-eye view.
'What are you doing?' Holden asked.
'Just getting a different perspective on things. Sometimes it helps to go at things at a different angle to help creative juices to flow.'
'What creativity do you need?' Yuki enquired.
'I need to decide what to do,' Leon said simply.
'I am unable to retrieve any data on any object in that space,' Nightingale returned. Prissy frowned.
'You can't? What do you mean?'
'My systems cannot detect any object in that quadrant.' Prissy frowned, she was sure that she had read out the coordinates correctly.
'It's vanished,' Holden said. The other six, who had turned their attention to Prissy and Leon in their various exchanges, looked back at the hologram. Sure enough, the item of interest was no longer there, and the only object still registered on the screen was the lonely Nightingale, drifting ever onwards in a barren emptiness of the universe.
'Nightingale, rewind the recordings of the hologram for me,' Oliver asked.
'Certainly, Oliver, rewinding now.' There was no discernible difference in what they were seeing, and sure enough, no blip reappeared.
'Nightingale, you are rewinding this aren't you?' Yuki asked.
'Yes Yuki, the image being seen is the image you saw one and a half minutes ago.'
'Then we should be seeing it by now,' Yuki said.
'But we aren't,' Duma objected.
'Play it forward from the time that Duma and Yuki entered the room please Nightingale,' Leon commanded. The hologram shuddered slightly, as if there was interference with it, and then stopped. To their disbelief, only the Nightingale was shown upon the projection before them.
'Are you sure you are showing what we saw when we entered the room Nightingale?' Jenny questioned.
'Yes Jenny, this is the image that you saw.'
'But there is no object there.'
'You are correct.' Jenny frowned, her eyebrows knitting together in frustration. She thought that the ship was winding her up and then reminded herself that it had no consciousness, and therefore was incapable of such an act. Nobody spoke once more for a few seconds.
'There's got to be a glitch somewhere in the projection screen. Maybe it was a bug in the system,' Holden suggested.
'Nightingale is a brand new ship, state of the art. Suggesting that there's a bug in the system that is virtually inconceivable,' Yuki retorted.
'Well, obviously something is out there. Apparently we just argued over the location of an object that never existed,' Holden fired back. Leon looked around the room for inspiration. There was something not right about this, something out of the ordinary. He was sure that it was there, and so were the others. If it was a hallucination, it was a mass hallucination and a bizarre one at that. A glitch was an unlikely prospect, but not inconceivable. It had happened before, just think of that star liner years before, The Futan, that had hyper-launch problems coming out from past Karbinous Star, and bubbled away into nothingness. That had only been up and running three weeks, and still, nobody knew what had actually happened with its systems. There had to be some way to recall the information, other than what the hologram showed.
Suddenly Leon's eyes saw a small light in the corner, and he had an idea.
'Oliver, this place had cameras running, doesn't it?' Oliver looked around at him.
'Yeah, sure. The whole place has cameras so someone if they wanted to, could see what everyone on the ship was doing at the same time.'
'Which means,' Prissy continued, 'that if it actually was there, it should have been picked up by a camera in the room somewhere.'
'All the cameras feed their links back to the observation room just down the hall,' Duma pointed out. 'Whole room with banks and banks of monitors. The ones in here and the captain's room a
lternate randomly to make sure that nobody is caught trying to fuck up the ship in the case of mutiny or something.' He looked down, slightly flushed, and caught Yuki's eye out of the corner of his. She blinked and looked in another direction.
'In which case, let's get down there. Oliver, stay here and plot a course in the general direction of where that thing was, just in case there was something there,' Leon ordered.
'I'll do that Captain, no problem.' Oliver stepped over to his seat and began plugging away at the various screens.
'Nightingale, take us out to V54, 88B, 490. Up the cruise speed by 5%.'
'Yes Oliver, certainly.' That soothing voice that once stilled Leon's heart seemed to speed it up somewhat, by only a few beats, but enough to notice. He walked out of the cockpit without saying any more, and walked down the bridge, with the other five following him.
The observation room itself was not more than a large cupboard, barely big enough to fit all of them in there. All four walls, the ceiling, and floor, even the back of the door, were filled with screens. Leon looked around for some way of controlling them.
'Nightingale, can you show us the footage of when Duma and Yuki walked into the cockpit under fifteen minutes ago?' Leon was baffled by all of the images before him, this was more Oliver's domain than his, he had only been in here once before, just to check where and what it was. He trusted his crew enough not to have someone in constant watch of the ship, although Prissy and Holden had come in here during their rounds whilst the others had slept.
'I'm afraid not Leon.'
'Why not Nightingale?' Prissy asked.
'This room displays only live feeds. To access past camera footage, you will need to go into the main database and extract it manually.' Leon cursed.
'The main database takes ages to get to. Damn it,' Leon cursed.
'Well we need to get there anyway, system maintenance comes up in a day or so,' Duma pointed out.
'That's a good point actually Leon,' Yuki said. Leon leaned against a wall of screens, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. This thing was stressful and unsettling at the same time; there was an irregularity about it that could not be ignored. Had something been noted and stayed there, a course been charted, a floating, dilapidated fortress of some ancient warrior race been found, declared empty, and they moved on, it would not have caused nearly as much confusion as what was happening now.
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