'Ok. Here's the plan,' he began, pausing to consider just what needed to be done for a second longer.
'Duma, hold station here and keep watch over everything from here, just in case something happens. Don't know what, but we've just seen something which the ship is implying didn't happen, we've no idea what could be next.' Duma nodded his acceptance of the position.
'Holden, go prepare some sort of test to check each of us individually, including yourself, to make sure there is no conceivable way we experienced some freak hallucination. I don't care what abstract theory you have to test to disprove it, like phantom particles in the bloodstream or what, and in fact, pair up with Yuki on it. Both of you carry out tests to make sure that we're not all delusional. I don't know what just happened, but I would rather it turn out to be a massive warship with the ability to fuck with parts of the ship than us tripping out.'
'We'll get on it right away,' Yuki said, and Holden acknowledged the same.
'Jenny, go prepare a good amount of weaponry and hand out one handgun to everyone, full and primed. If that thing was intelligent and it just did something to us, it isn't going to be friendly if it's real and we meet it.' Jenny smiled; an excuse to play guns again was one of her favorite things in the world.
'Prissy and I will head down to the main database and try to locate the footage of us in the cockpit. Everyone keep in radio contact, meet back on the bridge in two hours. Remember where we are. We're in the blank space, and we are on our own.'
Chapter 5:
Leon clambered down the ladder; cool against his palms, Prissy following after. The whole place seemed to vibrate with a faint hum, a constant reminder that nothing was at rest. A faint drip, drip, drip somewhere out of sight. 'Condensation near the engines' Leon told himself. Prissy jumped the last two rungs, thudding onto the mesh grating that was the floor. A drip of sweat made its way down the side of her face from her brow, which she wiped away with the back of her hand.
'Never been down here,' she said.
'I have once, the main database is this way,' he replied, gesturing to a corridor with a faint orange glow to it. They began to move down it, a jet of steam from a pressure valve startling Prissy. All of the walls were covered in pipework, valves, and cogs, wheels and channels, it somehow felt alive, biomechanical. 'Biomechs would love it down here, the damn heathens' Prissy thought to herself.
'They didn't exactly make this the greatest looking place in the ship did they?' she mused.
'We're technically in the inner workings of the ship, I bet you're internal organs aren't as pretty as your outside,' Leon answered.
'Did you just call me pretty?'
'I'll leave that up to your imagination. It's left here if I remember correctly.'
The dripping began to get louder, and Prissy saw it was dripping from one pipe to another, where it was instantly vaporizing from the heat of the pipe below. Prissy reminded herself that they had to maintain all of this in a few hours, and only now began to see what a nightmare task it would be, the place was a labyrinth.
The pair took a set of stairs down, holding onto the handrail on the way down. It was a way back up to the main decks for support, and they didn't want to suffer an accident down here. Not to mention that someone would have to clean up the mess. Another jet of steam, and to Prissy's nostrils, it smelled faintly of oil. She made a mental note to suggest that some sealant might be needed on that; she was no mechanic but was pretty sure that gas smelling of oil should not be venting into the walkways.
The two of them walked out into a large room, where two covered pods hummed loudly.
'Those are Nightingale's engines,' Leon said, raising his voice slightly to be heard. Inside were two balls of raw energy, the very essence of all things, permanently kept spinning, releasing their power to propel the vessel throughout the stars, or even, as it was at the moment, the absence of stars. Prissy looked through a gap between the pods and saw a flight of stairs leading to a balcony, meshed together, a crude but effective latticework. Upon the balcony, against the walls of the room, were several screens.
'Are they the main databases?' she enquired. Leon nodded.
'That's them, you go on up and start having a rummage for the footage. I'm going to have a quick check of the engines and make sure they're ok.' Prissy turned sideways to move between the engine pods, a faint heart warming her, and made her way up the stairs. She went to the engine at the far end of the walkway, starting to sort through the menus and look for what she wanted. Leon, down below, scanned through detail after detail on the Halo-Cores for each engine, making sure his ship was in pristine condition.
Jenny was down in the testing area, cleaning up a few XF-50 Alphas. Her polish was running low, her hands getting a good workout from polishing the weapons. They needed to be as clean as could be to ensure nothing went wrong. The plasma-guns, firing green plugs of energy, were known for their efficiency, but anything could go wrong. Even a state of the art ship like the Nightingale could possibly have its little glitches. She took one of the guns and put it out in front of her, eye in the scope. The crosshairs moved, juddered, and then focused in on the target at the end of the hall. She exhaled slowly, calmed her nerves. All this crap with the hologram wasn't going to put off the best shooter in the Celestrian Exploration Unit, no sir, that was not going to happen.
'You've certainly got what it takes, Jenny,' her instructor told her. A girl ten years younger than the Jenny onboard Nightingale beamed at the praise. She had scored an 8,9,9,8,8. 32 out of 40. The class had applauded her, save for one. Heilie. She had had it out for Jenny ever since they started, the two best markswomen in the entire class of students that year. Jenny could cope with rivalry, but Heilie downright hated her. Jenny couldn't fathom just where this loathing had sprung from, and she reasoned it must just be because she was an average girl from Region 30 and Heilie was a spoilt brat from Region 12 who got everything she asked for because she was daddy's pride and joy and she was damned if anyone was going to beat her.
'I'll grind you to a pulp, bitch,' Heilie had jeered from the crowd. Jenny placed her gun back on the stand, and retaken her place on the sidelines, waiting for the next girl to step up to the mark. Silence ensued, 7,8,7,9,9. 30 out of 40. Not as good but still pretty impressive. The following girls took their punts, but never as near as Jenny.
It was then Heilie's turn at the firing range. It had all come down to this, and the whole class knew it. Heilie held it in two hands, then got cocky and dropped her left to her side, holding the weapon out with one hand. Blam, Blam, Blam, Blam! 8,9,9,8. It would all come down to this final shot. The audience held their breath, and Jenny almost felt the atmospheric pressure of the room change as the air was taken in by the class watching. Heart rates increased, beads of sweat emerged from their hiding places deep in the pores of their skin and rolled down to the floor. A prolonged tension.
Blam.
7.
Jenny smiled, grinning like a fool, and Heilie cursed. 'That's what happens when you get cocky, bitch,' she thought to herself. The girl in front spun to face her rival; coming second wasn't in the rulebooks of her life.
'Don't think you've won,' she spat. Jenny got up to accept her prize of 50Zale, walking past her nemesis.
'Except I have won, and I'm still the best.'
'I'm still the best.' A perfect 10 at the far end of Nightingale's shooting range. Jenny grinned, that memory was always a pleasant one to relive. In the end, she never knew what had happened to Heilie. Rumour had it that she went mental in the end, lost her marbles completely, started blasting in the middle of Region 17 during market day, and found herself on a one-way ticket to Kalvulseah, the prison planet of The Empire Of Humanity. It made Jenny happy to think that, even if it didn't happen. It relieved her stress and gave her comfort as she prepared the other weapons.
'So do you think I'm mental Holden?' Yuki asked. Holden was looking at the data on his Halo-Core, flicking through the various theories of psychoanalysis that
he had come across, ticking them all off to try and discredit the delusion theory. So far he couldn't come up with a single thing to imply that she had had something happen to her head since their last meeting, which wasn't many hours before.
'I can't come up with anything, which makes the whole hallucination theory look pretty bad,' he said, leaning back in his chair. He tossed the Halo-Core onto the table and closed his eyes.
'So if I'm not delusional...'
'And you saw the same thing as we all did...'
'Then it's more than likely that the rest of you aren't delusional either,' Yuki reasoned. They sat in silence, the hum of the ship keeping them company. Nightingale never seemed to be silent, even in the absence of all things that they were in. Holden thought the evidence was pretty conclusive but went about setting up the test for the others, just as Leon had told him to do. That man had been in the middle of the Androssos VI crisis, one of the squad leaders in charge of taking down Kzarre, The Last Demon King of the planet, and he knew what he was doing.
'Nightingale,' Yuki chirped.
'Yes Yuki,' the ship replied.
'Do you have the results back from Holden's testing?'
'I do. Would you like me to send them to your personal Halo-Core?'
'That would be great Nightingale,' she said, 'thank you.'
'I am pleased to help in any way that I can,' Nightingale answered. A quick three-note tone told Yuki that the information had arrived. She took her device and pulled up the information in front of her. Projected towards her were various graphs of data, statistics, numbers, and tables. Heart rate, blood rate, blood contamination rate, breathing results, water levels, sugar levels, even DNA mutation rates. Five minutes later, she tossed it onto the table, in the same manner, that Holden had done not long before.
'So, who's drugged me?' he asked in his typical sarcastic tone.
'Fortunately, nobody. Your biological signs are perfectly normal.'
'So if I'm right in the body, and you're right in the head, and we apply these results to everyone because everyone saw the same thing...'
'Then we reach the conclusion,' Yuki said, 'that we really saw the thing on the screen.'
'This is weird as hell,' Holden sighed, a slight exasperation in his exhale.
Up in the cockpit, Oliver went over every device he had available to him, to try and find any evidence of tampering with the machinery. Dials were turned, levers pulled and pushed, commands asked of Nightingale and followed through. Several instruction manuals were consulted, including one or two that Oliver didn't even realize existed.
Nothing.
Everything he tried, attempted, came up empty for him. According to Nightingale, and every instrument and rewind he could try and try again, there had been nothing on that hologram, save for the lonely, isolated blinking of their position in the blank space. He decided to ask how his first and second in command were doing.
'Nightingale, get me in touch with Leon and Prissy down in the main database.' Four tone notification.
'Guys, any luck down there?' he asked.
'You won't believe it. We've found the footage, and put it onto my Halo-Core, but I don't think you're ready for it,' Leon came in. Oliver gripped an armrest.
'Please tell me we're all sane.'
'That's the bizarre thing. Holden and Yuki have come back to tell me that there's nothing wrong with us, either biologically or psychologically. But this footage, we can see us around the hologram.'
'And?' He heard Leon sigh.
'We're all pointing at nothing.' Oliver frowned. Had he just heard his captain correctly?
'What do you mean we're all pointing at nothing?'
'I mean...' but he never got further than that. Because at that moment, Nightingale lost power, and blacked out.
Chapter 6:
The lights onboard flickered off, as if someone had attached a hose to them and drained the power, slurping away. The noise reduced as well, Leon felt the engines die as well as heard them, powering down to tick over into idle. The loss of engines meant that the heating also began to fade, drifting away like a piece of debris floating in open space. Holden and Yuki, seconds after the lights disappeared into the black, began to shiver.
The crew, rightly so, we're in a state of confusion for a good ten seconds. In the dark, with no way to tell what had just happened.
'Leon, what's going on?' Prissy muttered.
'I don't know, the engines have just...'
'The engines have just what? What's happened, Leon?'
'They've just, died,' he replied in disbelief.
'I can't see a thing. What do you mean they've just died?'
'Well they haven't completely died, but it's like someone has put them on standby,' Leon said. He tried activating the Halo-Core in front of the right engine, but with no response. He moved over to try the left one and ended up getting the same result. He grunted in annoyance, but internally was starting to get worried.
'I'm going to come down.'
'Prissy stay up there. If you can't see a thing then if you trip we're fucked,' he commanded.
'I can't stay up here...'
'Prissy that's an order, stay where you are,' he repeated, and the footsteps of his second in command stopped. There were a few seconds of complete silence before a small, faint vibration could be felt. Leon frowned and dropped onto his stomach, resting his hands on the floor. Yes, there was definitely some power still there, still going.
'Captain. Captain, come in, answer.' It was Oliver, somehow over the coms system. Leon jerked himself upright and looked towards the far corner of the room, towards the speaker.
'Oliver, what the hell's going on?' Back in the cockpit, the navigator of Nightingale was furiously flicking switches, lighting lights and pushing buttons. It was like that old song about the guy that worked in the button factory, and you ended up doing more actions pushing buttons until eventually you were kicking and pushing and nodding and using your tongue and pirouetting like a mental patient in the science labs of Kalvulseah.
'I've not a clue Leon, the thing just died. I'm trying to activate the emergency backup power unit now; it should give us some rudimentary controls and lighting.' He got up from his chair and ran to a panel of controls on the left wall, in the dark feeling his way for a slot on the wall.
'How are the others?' Prissy asked.
'I'm ok down here,' Jenny came back.
'I and Holden are fine in here, just can't see a thing,' Yuki answered. The door to the cockpit opened up and Duma entered.
'Duma, go over there,' Oliver gestured to his right, 'and put it into setting 62, see what that does.' Duma did so silently, bashing into a chair but remaining on his feet. His fingers trailed over the controls with practiced ease, putting them into a predetermined configuration. He alerted Oliver to it having been done, pretty quickly considering it was pitch black he thought proudly to himself, and Oliver finally found the slot he was searching for. He inserted a card into the wall, and a system of faint lights lit up around the ship. It wasn't much, but enough to see by.
'Lights are up guys, all doors should work, and I've got some controls,' he informed the crew.
'I think it would be good to meet up in the cockpit in case something happens again and we are left stumbling blindly in the dark,' Jenny mentioned.
'Seconded,' Prissy piped, making her way casually down the stairs back to Leon, she assumed it would be ok to do that now.
'Agreed; everyone to the cockpit as quickly as possible. Let's find out what the hell is going on.'
Jenny was the last to enter the cockpit, a belt with seven XF 50 Alphas and two Automatic Se7er-Gammas over her shoulders. She quickly dispersed the 50's, one to each crewmember. She kept one Gamma for herself, readjusting it to being slung onto her back, and propped one against the wall. 'If something happens, this is the place that needs defending,' she reasoned with them, and that seemed to fly with Leon.
'So what happened Oliver?' she asked.
'Damned if I know. I'm just trying to get Nightingale to play ball with the footage and boom, dead. It was as if someone pulled a switch.'
'Any idea what could have caused it?' Holden enquired.
'I didn't even know this thing could just shut down on its own,' Duma said.
'It shouldn't be able to, and of all the places to have a major malfunction this is the worst.'
'We need to get Nightingale back up and running again. This is getting out of hand,' said Prissy.
'First the thing on the hologram, now this...' Yuki whispered, and it seemed that in that moment, everyone was thinking the same thing.
'Is there any way that the two incidents could be related to each other perhaps?' Holden mentioned.
'It's more likely that the Celestrian mechanics just got lazy and couldn't be arsed to put all the wiring in properly and she's having a fit,' Jenny jested.
'Jenny, not the fucking time,' snapped Leon. Oliver was still a blur, his hands moving over the controls, flicking and flipping, spinning and programming, trying to get the ship to power up again. It didn't seem that any of it was working, for the engines weren't starting to hum with that familiar buzz again that had become ingrained in each crewmember.
'She's actually got a point though,' Holden interrupted. 'I mean, say there was someone at the factory that had been down the clubs the night before and hadn't got his head in the right place, and he puts in a faulty bit of wiring that starts messing up and fucking up the systems. It would certainly explain it all.' They all pondered this thought; it did make sense, though they didn't think that their species would send them off into the void without anything more than absolutely perfect. Either that or they didn't want to, it was another thing that could go wrong, and they didn't want things going wrong. They wanted to find out that it was just a phase the ship went through that they hadn't been told about. Maybe Nightingale was currently engaging in some kind of power-saving mode that would restore the engines to full fuel loads again. Yes, perhaps that was it, or maybe it was just in a phase where it could cruise, floating, drifting thanks to Newton's first law, engines idle and awaiting the need to be used once again.
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