Salvage

by MJ Kobernus

  Markus looked up from the computer terminal he was working on. “No response from Cho or Finn?”

  “No.”

  “Want me to check on their vitals?”

  “You can get their bio data?”

  “I think so. Shouldn’t be any problem to use the system to check on our chips. Just need to change the scanning frequency.”

  He typed several commands into his terminal, then input the frequency range of their own bio sensor implants. Each ship used a different frequency, and it was easily updated with the new data. He keyed a final command. The number on the screen showing current crew headcount made him visibly pale.

  Jensen looked over his shoulder. He swore. There were five signals, all in the CC. “Okay, that’s it. We’re leaving. Get your gear. Something is clearly wrong and we are not equipped to deal with it. We’re going back to the shuttle.”

  He tapped his comm device. “Shuttle Heimdal, this is First Officer Jensen. Do you copy?”

  “This is Chu. We hear you. Everything okay?”

  “No. We’re coming back. Something killed two of my team, and we are not prepared for this contingency. Recommend immediate evac.”

  “Roger that, we’re ready to go. Just get back here safe.”

  Jensen pulled his gun from his holster. Only one other of his team carried a sidearm, and she quickly pulled her weapon. Jensen looked at her. “Heat it up, Leoni.”

  Leoni Hansen thumbed the safety off, and the power quickly starting to build with an audible hum. Within seconds it was ready to fire a charge powerful enough to kill a man.

  “I’ll take point, you take the rear. Everyone else in the middle and move quick. Whatever killed Finn and Cho may well be coming for us.”

  Markus had been typing into the data console and finished the input with a final decisive tap. He shook his head in wonder. Jensen moved over to stare at the screen.

  “What is that?”

  “I reconfigured the internal sensors to pick up any bio readings, regardless if they were chipped.”

  “I didn’t know it could do that.”

  “Yeah. Well, we had to figure out how to reduce the rat population a few years back, so we worked out a method to use the sensors to track heat signatures.”

  Jensen nodded. There was a number on the screen. He could hardly believe it. “So, there are currently over a dozen bio organisms on the ship.”

  Markus swallowed. “No. Those are the ones in the passages between us and the central pod.” He tapped a few keys, and entered a new command. The screen showed a different value now. “This is for the entire ship.”

  Nine hundred and eighty five bio signatures.

  “Are they human?” Jensen asked, as he thumbed the safety off his pistol.

  “No. Their core temperature is too hot. If they were human, they’d be dead.”

  “Then what the hell are they?”

  “I don’t know,” Markus replied. “But we’re gonna find out.”

  The screen clearly indicated that several of the bio signatures were converging on the command centre.

  * * *

  Captain Pål Knutsen flipped a series of switches, engaging the drive initiation sequence. His First officer, Stephanie Chu floated horizontally behind him. He punched a series of commands on the terminal to his side. Internal cameras and sensors were now recording everything.

  “I have to go in, Pål,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “Fuck careful. Be lethal.”

  She nodded, then pulled herself towards him. She wrapped arms around him in a brief hug before jackknifing and pushing off his chair towards the hatch. She went through, barely touching the sides, and at the last second she grabbed a handle and pulled herself into a vertical standing position, relative to the floor. She opened a locker, and removed a heavy multigun. Designed to be used in any situation, the multigun could be configured for a variety of lethal and non lethal payloads. She flicked off the safety, and set the weapon to rapid fire, heavy charge. It whined as the power started to climb.

  Turning to the airlock, she punched in the code. The door opened and she stepped through.

  * * *

  First Officer Jensen tensed as the airlock doors opened. He moved cautiously into the corridor, expecting . . . he did not know what. The six members of his team followed close behind him.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  He moved briskly, each foot carefully placed. It was still a zero g environment, which meant that an attack could come, literally, from any direction. He eyed the ceiling and was reassured by the fact that there appeared to be no ducts, or other access points. At least here.

  They had been making quick progress for almost ten minutes when they entered a dark section, and even though they all used their light beams, there were too many dancing shadows. They did not even see the attack. A muffled yell, which quickly became a gurgling and the salvage team clumped together, eyes wide with fear, their light beams randomly illuminating their own faces, trying to see who was missing. Li, the Chinese kid. Markus let out a groan. They had been friends since they were children.

  “Goddamn and to hell,” he screamed.

  “Keep moving,” Jensen commanded, and the group moved forward again, this time noticeably closer to each other. Not that that would matter. Li had been in the middle of the pack.

  They passed a junction, where tubes led out to service points on the central pod. That was when they lost Leoni. She had time enough to scream, and fire her weapon. A blue flash indicated that she had been pulled into the service duct, but if she hit whatever had attacked her it made no difference. She did not come back out and their light beams revealed no sign of her.

  “We’re moving too slowly,” said Jensen. “Run.”

  * * *

  Stephanie stood waiting for whatever was coming. She slowed her heart, willing herself into a calm mental state. She had never been in combat before. None of them had. And yet they had trained. Simulations of all kinds, in case the planet they arrived at had hostile fauna, or intelligent and unfriendly natives. No one had believed in the latter possibility, but here she was, standing outside the airlock on the Argoss, waiting to engage an unknown enemy with unknown capabilities.

  She could feel her heart rate increasing, and a bead of sweat appeared on her forehead. She took a deep breath, then dropped into combat stance, going to one knee, steadying the heavy weapon, using her arm like a support, braced against her thigh. She aimed down the corridor, her finger lightly touching the firing stud.

  Markus Han appeared first, running with the clumsy, almost comical look that people had in zero gee. He was followed by a man she did not recognise, then came Jensen. He was stopping to fire at whatever was behind them.

  The three made their way towards her, and then she saw it. Her breath came in a gasp, but her hands moved of their own accord, tracking the thing, aiming, firing. Her first blast missed, but the second took it in the torso, and it stopped in its tracks, a tumbled mass of red ruin, with stick like arms and legs.

  More followed the first creature and she tracked them quickly, firing in rapid succession, laying down an enfilade that came dangerously close to hitting her ship mates.

  The creatures were oddly angular. Neither bipedal nor quadruped. Their limbs seemed to work in any direction, allowing them to move with erratic, quick turns. They had short bodies, with small heads. What really chilled Stephanie as she fired blast after blast, was their eyes. They were very human, and very intelligent. They were also, unmistakably, filled with hate.

  Markus Han reached the airlock and started to open the chamber. The others piled in and she followed, after laying down an intense barrage to discourage any of the creatures from getting too close.

  They cycled through into the Heimdal’s airlock, panting in fear, waiting for the door to open into the shuttle. No one even looked at their EV suits. They could not possibly afford the time it would take to p
ut them on. Besides, they did not need them inside the shuttle. They stumbled as one from the airlock as the door opened into the cargo bay.

  Stephanie put the multigun back into its cabinet, slamming shut the door. It automatically locked. She went forward into the cockpit.

  “Welcome back,” said Pål. “Things got hot, I see.”

  She almost laughed with the relief of tension as she thrust herself into her co-pilot’s seat.

  “What the hell were those things?” Pål continued.

  “They were us, I think. If we lived in an unshielded environment for centuries.”

  “Human? You’ve got to be kidding!”

  “Oh man, I wish I was.”

  Pål eyed the control panel. A red light blinked. “Everyone is back then. No one left behind?”

  “Everyone that is coming back is here,” said a voice behind them. Stephanie swivelled around to see First Officer Jensen float slowly through the hatch.

  “Then who the hell just cycled through the airlock?” said Knutsen.

  Screams from the two men in the cargo hold ended abruptly. Pål cursed and punched the main drive at the same time as the attitude jets. The Heimdal surged forward, ripping itself away from the great bulk of the Argoss. The sound of rending metal could be plainly heard as the craft tore itself from the side of its host.

  Jensen’s eyes went wide, and he was pulled back through the hatch. He fired his blaster, again and again. There was another scream, this one inhuman.Stephanie launched herself out of her chair. She went through the hatch, slower than usual, but faster than she wanted.

  Inside the cargo hold, she bumped up against Markus. His throat had been torn open. Blood was being suctioned out of the air by the automatic maintenance systems. The other man was also dead, and Stephanie felt a momentary shame that she did not even know his name. Jensen was holding his hand over a cut on his upper left arm. The thing, whatever it was, had slashed at him with razor like claws.

  She got a good look at it this time. It was floating, with its impossibly long and sticklike limbs moving in odd directions. If this thing had once been human, it had been a very long time ago. It was hairless and smooth, and dark skinned, but it wore clothing made from the same material as used by the crew on all the ships. But this only covered its groin, like a loincloth. There were no tools, or weapons. Its head was small, its mouth wide with a bank of needle like teeth.

  “Is it dead?” she asked hesitantly.

  “Yeah. I put enough of a charge into it to kill a dozen men. It’s dead, alright.”

  “We need to get it back to the Bitter Sea. They need to know what happened.”

  Jensen nodded. One look at their ‘cargo’ and no explanations would be necessary.

  “Did you radio them?” he asked. “Let them know what the hell happened?”

  Stephanie shook her head. “No. The ship’s on the other side of the planet, and the Endurance is still exploring the gas giant. We don’t have line of sight for another thirty minutes or so.”

  The thrust of the engines kicking in pushed the creature up against a bulkhead. Stephanie secured it with strapping, then started forward to the cockpit. “Get yourself strapped in, Jensen. We’re not gonna hang around.”

  He nodded, then secured himself in much the same way that Stephanie had tied down the creature.

  She propelled herself through the hatch and pivoted, swinging down into her seat. She strapped in as Pål banked the Heimdal sharply to avoid a support strut on the Argoss. They had to warn the other arks. She started to relay what she knew of the situation into the databanks, updating the ship’s log.

  Jensen put the shuttle in a close orbit, using the planet’s gravitational pull to propel it to greater speeds than would be possible with engines alone. Stephanie’s hands started to shake. She gripped the console firmly to stay them.

  “Shit, what the hell is that?” she said, pointing to a flashing red light. Collision. Warning. Missile. Had the damned mutants fired on them?

  “They must have launched some of the Argoss’ mines. Goddamn.”

  The mines had been designed to explode in close proximity to a moving target. Intended for clearing asteroids, it would be just as deadly for them, if they hit it.

  The explosion that blossomed on the port bow blasted the ship, and it knocked out the fusion drive. The shuttle streaked towards the surface of Palsenz, vapour from a blown seal turning to a trail of ice as they plummeted towards the surface of the planet.

  Stephanie Chu had been well trained. She activated the protocols to seal the hull breach, but nothing she could do would restart the engines.

  “Brace for Impact,” Pål screamed. They were rocked by the planet’s atmosphere, causing the shuttle to buck and twist as it fell. The temperature inside the cabin rose noticeably, but they would not burn up. The vessel was too well built for that. Jensen struggled to fly the ship, but without power it had the aerodynamics of a brick.

  It went down, ploughing into the rocks and sand of the Badlands, the harshest landscape on the planet. The salvage operation was over.

  Thank you for reading this story. If you enjoyed it, I urge you to leave a review. In this modern age, reviews are the lifeblood of the writer. Also, you might like to check out the next instalment of the series, Hunted.

  About the author

  MJ Kobernus lives in a small town in Norway with his wife and youngest daughter. He is the self-proclaimed inventor of Flash Philosophy as well as the founder of Nordland Publishing. An ardent motorcycle enthusiast, he has been likened to a bear on a tricycle, a comparison he has taken to heart. He has a keen interest in the metaphysical. Ask him about it. Go on, I dare you.

  MJ Kobernus is the author of the Guardian series, which you can find on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and pretty much any of the many outlets where you use a mouse to navigate.

  The Guardian - Blood in the Sand

 

  The Guardian - Blood in the Snow

 

  The Guardian - Blood in the Fire

  You can visit MJ at:

  https://www.amazon.com/author/mjkobernus

  https://metaphysicalgeometry.blogspot.no

  www.facebook.com/TheGuardianFantasySeries

  nordlandpublishing.com

  facebook.com/nordlandpublishing

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  www.nordlandpublishing.com