Chasing Solace

by Karl Drinkwater

  The pile formed an imperfect trihedron squashed into the corner and as she neared the top it became more precarious. Each movement wobbled canisters and threatened to tip the whole thing. No time to worry about it. She jumped from one tilting container to another, only just keeping her balance, then scaled a final narrow tower of boxes to the peak. But it wasn’t stable, and that, too, started to topple, its balance as off-centre as her own. Crates tumbled down the way she’d come, followed by Opal if she didn’t do something about it.

  She unslung the grappling rifle as the summit collapsed, then she used her strength to leap, taking a big step up the wall and kicking away from that one firm surface, out over the scary forty-metre drop to the channels below.

  But she didn’t plan to fall. As her body flew through the air she aimed at the walkway above and fired. The adhesive and magnetic grapple caught on the grating and she swung like a pendulum over the huge drop. She’d always excelled at point-and-shoot, enough to take this huge risk without thinking. Just as well. If she’d thought about it, she’d have panicked and frozen.

  The cable retracted with a strained whine, jerking her upwards until she slammed into the walkway above, hard, rattling it and her. She placed one hand over the edge of the platform, then the other, and scrambled up to relative stability. She lay on her stomach and reached down to grab the rifle, disconnecting the grapple end from the walkway and slinging the rifle over her shoulder as she stood to survey her position.

  The gantry swung with her movements. It was narrow and suspended from the ceiling far above by chains. Chains that she hoped weren’t as rusty as they looked. She leaned against the cable barrier and looked over it, powering up the silverlight for range.

  The creature scaled the wall, tremendously fast, all the conjoined parts acting as a sinuously snake-like whole. It reached the ceiling and manoeuvred over that with ease, gripping or sticking on somehow, heading towards a point above her. She had no idea how long and large it was, but if it was as heavy as she suspected then if it dropped onto the walkway the whole thing was likely to snap and collapse, and tumble her down into a broken heap at the bottom. Even if the suit wasn’t cracked her soft tissues would take a beating from the impact, and the thing would be on top of her in seconds.

  Walkways had to lead somewhere. She turned and ran as fast as the dangerously creaky flooring allowed. It swayed, and she was forced to grab a rail for balance. She would not have long. But she didn’t look back. The gantry ended at a narrow open doorway in the wall ahead, far above the ground, and a new walkway continued over the room beyond.

  She skidded through the doorway, hand on the frame to stop herself. As soon as she was through she grabbed the heavy handle and heaved the door across behind her, then snatched the welding tool and applied two glowing dots to the frame, before freezing the door shut.

  She expected to hear something crash into the door, or to hear the snapping of chains beyond, but it was silent. Maybe the thing was coming at her some other way, trying to get around. She moved quickly and carefully along this new walkway. The creaking made her wonder if it would even take her weight. She was now high above the room that had conveyor belts.

  “So, you think other routes will work?” she asked.

  “Yes. As long as you keep on moving upwards and towards the fore of the ship, we’ll be fine. Some rooms follow standard patterns that match other ships, but others are jumbled together into new configurations. So my navigation is inevitably partly guesswork, based on your position as scanned from the exterior.”

  The walkway had a gap where some chains had snapped and a piece of gantry dangled. She could jump it. Probably. It would be tricky from a non-stable surface.

  She took a few unsteady running steps and leaped, sailing over the gap and landing on the other side. She tried to keep running as she landed, to spread the load so that it wasn’t a sustained single impact on the weak edge. It swayed, but did not break.

  “Wait a second,” said Athene. “Look at the pattern of the floor grille.”

  Opal knelt and examined it briefly. An angular swirl, crossed by lines that split it into concentric sections; the design was repeated thousands of times across the floor. Then Opal noticed that, where many of them joined together, they made the same pattern on a larger scale. There was something hypnotic about it.

  “I’m guessing this is significant,” Opal said.

  “Maybe. It’s not a design I’ve ever seen before on a human ship or a walkway or anything else. Which isn’t a big mystery, except I have seen it before – on the other Lost Ship. It was a decorative pattern in the fabric of some sofas in a seating area. And possibly in the raised lumps on one of the rubberised non-slip walkways, with the same fractal arrangement in both cases. Now that I think of it and flash through the recordings, it was also part of the layout of the arrangement of supporting beams above the engine core. Seeing it repeated here must mean something. I do not know what, though. Perhaps it ties into the chemical composition of the construction materials? When you climbed onto the walkway your palm touched it so I analysed the substance. It looks like base terrestrial metal but actually seems to be a metallic organic compound. It has some of the properties of steel, but altered: so while it is magnetic, the attractive force is much less than standard steel. Luckily the grapple gun’s adhesive connector and clamping claw compensated for the lower magnetism.”

  “Like the hull of the previous Lost Ship then. I remember the Hedgehogs had trouble connecting at first.”

  “It was the same on this one. I was careful with their movements after our experiences last time.”

  Opal made her way over these fragile walkways and passed through another open doorway at the end – this time into a room with solid floors. She could have hugged them.

  This area had plastic moulded seats in lines, surrounded by lockers. A bin of what looked like bloodied clothing stood at the end of one of the rows. The stains were so dark brown they were almost black. Not fresh, then. The edge of the room was lined with cubicles. The door hung off one, and peeping through the gap showed it was a shower and toilet. She decided against opening the doors. Or the lockers. Who knew what insane jack-in-the-box might be waiting to leap out from something so innocuous as a cabinet or drain.

  Doorways led out of this room onto other dangling walkways, but also to a staircase leading up. The stairs were solid and web-free. She began to ascend.

  Ascending

  < 37 >

  THE CIRCULAR STAIRWELL spiralled tightly upwards, turret-like. Opal ignored the exits on each floor, intending to ascend for as long as the stairs continued. Athene had said the bridge was near the highest point to the fore of the ship, in a large blocky section of command and control.

  There wasn’t much to look at during the repetitive and claustrophobic climb, each circular loop just like the last, every step the same. The stairs seemed relatively clean, at least. No stains, no bloody hand marks, no depressions worn in the steps. She imagined they didn’t get used much – a last resort for if elevators and gravity shafts were out of operation.

  She ascended for half an hour, with the only disturbance being a rumbling on one of the landings, as if something huge moved in the dark rooms beyond that floor’s exit. Machinery, perhaps. She didn’t investigate, but darted from one side of the doorway to the other to minimise her visibility from the rooms beyond, her back against the wall and energy rifle at the ready. A few seconds to confirm that nothing was coming through the doorway after her, and then she ascended the next set of steps.

  “My signals are weaker at the moment, as you are in the deepest points of the ship,” Athene told her. “Even with the Hedgehogs as relays I’m experiencing delays and jumps. Things will improve again as you get higher and approach the hull once more.”

  “You don’t sound broken up.”

  “I send signals to the suit in packets; the suit waits until they are complete before relaying them to you. You shouldn’t notice much apart from
some occasional jitters to the HUD navigation elements. It does mean I can’t take full control of the suit at hi-res movement, but you seem to be doing well on your own.”

  “It depends on what I come across. I get more nervous when there’s long periods of quiet like this. As if I’m using all my good karma up in one go and there’s going to be payback.”

  “You have plenty of good karma in the bank. I keep track of it.”

  Then the stairs ran out. The top landing had an exit, with an illegibly-blurred sign to the side. Opal stepped into the room beyond, ready for any movement that wasn’t her own.

  It was another huge chamber. Unlike the others, which had been warehouse-like cuboids, this circular room was domed like the top half of a sphere. The floor level she entered was too large to see across in the blackness. A safety barrier ringed the room’s centre. To her left and right were exits at different heights, with staircases leading up to them.

  “There are a number of directional options,” said Athene, “and I am uncertain which is best at present. Please circumnavigate at least part of the room. That will enable more accurate triangulation.”

  Opal skirted the narrow edge, staying on the correct side of the safety fence and curious about the function of what appeared to be a giant central drain on the other side. Yet more exits were revealed as she proceeded around the circumference of the room which was like a vast inverted bowl.

  “So many entrances – this must be the heart of the ship,” said Athene.

  “A travel nexus?”

  “Of sorts. I have my suspicions. Please look up.”

  Athene extended the silverlight in narrow but long-range beams, zooming in to view areas much higher in the domed chamber. Opal’s level had normal-sized doorways but high above, near the peak of the dome, was another zone punched with openings. These were larger, with no way to reach them from down where Opal stood. Some had the edges of conveyor belts visible within, while others leaked liquid in brown sludgy runnels, like revolting waterfalls of faeces.

  It made more sense when she looked down the sloping floor towards the centre of the room, where a circular tunnel curved downwards at forty-five degrees; in the tunnel were rings of huge gear teeth and serrated blades facing inwards.

  “I was right in my guess,” said Athene. “It’s a variant of the grinders they have on mineral processing ships, which can revolve each ring in opposing directions to crush rock and minerals into smaller, more easily processed pieces. It normally faces the front exterior of the ship in those cases. But here it is for grinding up organic matter – presumably things that aren’t fit for consumption in a recognisable form, along with bones and hard tissue.”

  “But I thought the floors below were where the killing took place?”

  “A ship like this would have many flowlines, many products. The high tunnel exits obviously tip whole beings into the grinder, based on their size. Maybe alive.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “I’m guessing. I have archived footage from when there used to be planet-based poultry farms for egg production. Back then they had no way to control the sex of the hatching chicks, and they did not want males, so workers separated them out – roughly half of all the hatchlings – and put them on conveyor belts. Thousands a day would tumble into rotating blades and be minced alive. I can show you the footage if you like?”

  “No thanks.”

  “This resembles that system, but many hundreds of times larger. Further, it appears as if there are routes to here from most areas of the ship. Completely irregular. Perhaps it is a message from the designer.”

  “Which would be?”

  “That all flesh should be channelled here to be pureed.”

  “Please tell me I can leave through a normal doorway and I don’t have to go through the grinder.”

  “You may leave through a normal doorway.”

  A flickering arrow appeared on the HUD, directing her to one of the exits that involved climbing a narrow staircase. She’d be glad to get out of this room, but had only taken a few steps when she heard something heavy drop onto the walkway behind her.

  Encountering

  < 36 >

  SHE SPUN IMMEDIATELY and raised the rifle but it was too late, the blurred shape was upon her and swatted her weapon aside, following it up with punches that rang out with their impact, staggering her. Opal hardly had time to focus on her attacker, which seemed to be shifting and insubstantial, yet hit hard as a hammer. Then some kind of rod extended from what might be a flicker of a limb, and that was used to pummel her too, striking low then high so that Opal had no chance to achieve a steady posture or block the blows. She crashed into the wall at an angle, glanced off and fell, head spinning from the speed of the attacks.

  The attacker had stopped raining blows, maybe to observe, and it was a humanoid-sized shimmer that moved left and right, never too far away to strike Opal, and never a still target; the background was somehow reflected in and through its shape like a ghost, and suddenly in this strangely-granted respite, Opal knew what she faced.

  “Some kind of stealth suit,” Opal said, watching the blur move around her, just out of reach.

  “I agree, but it’s more advanced than normal designs, because it is hard to focus on even at this range.”

  “UFS assassin,” said Opal. There wasn’t time to ponder the what and why and how of its presence here.

  “Why would it just attack you with fists, and hold back? That’s not practical when they could have used the element of surprise to win outright.”

  Sometimes Athene revealed her lack of human insight. “Display of power,” replied Opal, adopting a half-kneeling position and never taking her eyes off the shimmering figure circling her. Maybe the assassin had been responsible for the swinging abattoir tools earlier, ghosting Opal, taunting her.

  “I’m picking out the frequency of the chameleonic field,” said Athene, and immediately a humanoid outline surrounded and followed the movements of the assassin as it paced and watched Opal’s crouched, still form.

  “Thanks, that’s a huge help.” Opal activated the loudspeaker controls. “What do you want?” she asked the figure in front of her.

  “Surrender,” a sexless synthetic voice replied.

  “No,” said Opal. She switched off the speaker as she performed a backwards roll and raised the rifle again. Far too slow; the assassin leapt through the air and brought the short staff down in a myriad of precise strikes, knocking her off balance. Opal tried to block them with the energy rifle but a leg lashed out, striking the rifle exactly in the centre. It snapped in an explosion of fluid fire that seared Opal’s visor, flares from the exposed energy coil lashing out and weakening her force shield as she threw the useless and still-sparking weapon forward, towards her attacker. It was casually knocked to the side and slid towards the grinder. Another kick smacked into Opal’s chest, flooring her with an echoing clatter.

  But the assassin held back again, giving Opal the chance to stand and shake the fug out of her brain. A blow from a normal human wouldn’t even register on her suit, but the assassin was also in a strength-enhancing suit of combat armour, and the precision of its strikes were enough to raise orange warning indicators in Opal’s damage display.

  “It’s far too fast. It must be pumped up on combat drugs,” said Opal. “That’s how it’s taking me apart piece by piece.”

  “Shall I inject you, too?”

  “Not yet. I hate military accelerants. They impair judgement, and the endocrine crash afterwards could get me killed on this ship. I just need to win this quick, then work out what the hell’s going on. It seems to be testing me, otherwise I’d be dead already after my poor showing. Let’s switch it up.”

  Opal stood in a battle stance. “Blades,” she said.

  The two curved nanoblades extended from her forearms and locked into place. The assassin stopped pacing and adopted a low battle pose to face her. Opal changed her stance, one arm held high so the blade pointe
d down like a scorpion’s stinger. The assassin adjusted too, and moved to the right. But Opal’s movements and pacing were just to buy her a few more seconds.

  “Prep an EMP grenade,” said Opal, changing posture too.

  “Done. Make sure you’re not in the blast radius.”

  The assassin struck in a blur of blows. Opal parried, slashed back, was blocked, followed up with further attacks, trying to vary between thrusts and slashes. The assassin dodged to the side of the blades and hit Opal’s ribs, yet it was still holding back, testing her. Opal spun away, extending her arm in an arc, knowing the assassin would duck beneath the decapitating attack, and Opal immediately kicked out, the sole of her foot connecting with her attacker’s helmet, throwing them off balance for her follow-up blade attacks. Of course, the assassin would recover immediately, but her target wasn’t the assassin this time: as it swung the short staff, Opal cut her two blades in opposing directions like a pair of scissors. The nano-edges severed the staff near the centre, turning it into useless sticks.

  Or rather, they should have been useless, but her opponent immediately began jabbing with them like tonfa sticks, pinpoint blows of focussed force, too close for Opal to swing her extended blades. Opal wrapped her arms around the assassin and smashed into the assassin’s visor with a head-butt, another, trying to use her foot to trip her opponent as it let the pieces of broken staff fall useless to the ground. They both tumbled together.

  Opal rolled away, lunged back to try and spear the assassin but it shifted off-centre and grabbed the outside of her arm as it spun her, slamming her to the ground on her chest and using its suit strength to lock her arm vertically, trapped between its grip and a knee, Opal’s elbow locked out. The HUD’s display showed increasing pressure as the assassin leaned and twisted, orange warning, red warning, it was going to snap her arm and she was unable to twist her body to escape.