Repel Boarders

by Dean Henegar

“They’re cutting their way in, sir. Send us some help!” Jameson said in a panic from the bridge. Slater had no help to give and was forced to listen to his bridge crew’s panicked attempts at surrender. Their attempts were met with the distinctive twang of laser pistols firing.

  One by one, the brave defenders of the Franklin went silent, eventually leaving only Slater and the other crewman in the reactor room as the last survivors. The sounds of clanging at the now-secured hatch began, and the red glow of a cutting torch began to make its way around the locking bar.

  “It has been a privilege to serve with you, sir,” the crewman said as he raised his pistol toward the door.

  “It has been an honor to lead such a brave crew. Well-fought, son,” Captain Slater said as he pressed the overload button.

  A wave of heat and a bright light filled his view. There was no pain other than an initial spike of agony in his head. The captain’s final thoughts dwelled on why it was taking him so long to die.

  — 3 —

  “Hey! You awake yet in there? Come on, I didn’t think your kind would be this lazy . . . Hello? Wake up. We got work to do!” an unknown voice demanded. It sounded annoyed at Slater, but he didn’t want to wake up just now. Sleep felt so good since the burning pain was finally gone from his body. The voice persisted until eventually a flash of anger passed through the captain’s thoughts, finally forcing him awake.

  “If you’re part of my crew, you’ve just bought yourself some brig time,” Slater threatened as he opened his eyes—or tried to. He struggled to see. Something as simple as opening his eyes seemed to take too long and feel so much different than he had expected it to.

  When his vision finally returned, the sight that greeted him was not his cabin; he was instead in the ruined reactor room. He was able to spin around and see the entire space . . . without turning his head. As a matter of fact, he didn’t feel his body at all. Fear began to set in as Slater realized he couldn’t move. If I can’t move, why am I able to spin my head around all the way? Slater thought as he fell deeper into a panic.

  “Hold on there, big guy. Let me explain before you get all worked up,” the invisible voice said. “This is all going to be a big shock to you, but please try and hold your questions to the end, okay?”

  Slater couldn’t place the voice; it didn’t belong to one of his ship’s crew. Was he imagining this all? Was the entire room a hallucination induced by the trauma he had experienced? Was he going insane? Slater exerted his will, pushing away the panic as he focused on the strange voice and its question. The disembodied voice might not have sounded familiar, but the pattern of speech reminded him of something. Instead of the navy physician whom he expected to be talking to, based on all the pain he had experienced, the voice was more like that of a used car salesman. Slater tried to nod in response to the voice but couldn’t. Instead, he mumbled his agreement as his body still refused to cooperate with him.

  “Okay,” the voice continued, “so you may remember the battle: the lasers, missiles, gunfire, explosions, and all the other shenanigans? Well, all that happened, including the part where you overloaded the reactor to take out both you and the kobold ship—nice strategy, by the way, if a bit suicidal. So back on track, you were about to be atomized by the exploding reactor, but yours truly saved your sorry hide. Well, I guess I didn’t actually save your hide. I transferred your entire consciousness somewhere else. Your body was disintegrated in the explosion, but you, my friend, are now the proud new sentient reactor core of a derelict. Exciting, I know. You ready to get to work now, bub?”

  Slater contemplated—or tried to contemplate—what he had just heard. His thoughts were slower than normal, and he didn’t feel quite like himself. Strange urges and desires danced in the back of his mind, things he was able to push away . . . for now.

  “Wait, I don’t get it. I don’t think you’re making sense. You mean to say that I died in the battle and now I’m supposed to be somehow inside the reactor core? How is that possible? This has to be some crazy dream, or am I dead and this is my personal form of eternal punishment?” Slater asked, his confusion mounting.

  “Let me run it by you again. You are alive, in a sense. Your entire being is still intact even if your body isn’t. Instead of being inside the meat bag you inhabited before, you are inside the old reactor core of your ship. You are now, in a way, the ship itself, or you will be if I can ever get you off your duff and back to work,” the voice said, giving Slater a minute to absorb the information before continuing. “As I mentioned before, you are now a derelict. Not the standard definition, mind you, but a living, breathing—okay, not breathing—independent entity. Make sense?”

  “Uhhh, no. It really doesn’t make sense, but somehow, I believe you. Why would I believe you, and who exactly are you?” Captain Slater asked, more confused than ever and a bit concerned that he almost felt a compulsion to trust the strange, disembodied voice in his head.

  “Okay, first, you believe me because we’re joined together. That’s right. Not only are you an awesome derelict, but you also get to house me—yours truly—inside your core. It’s a great thing, trust me. As for your second question. You remember that anomaly in your reactor just before the kobolds showed up? That was me entering the reactor. I’d been drifting in space for who knows how long and needed a place to rest. Thanks for that, by the way. The reactors you humans build are crude but somehow quite comfortable. I am what is technically called a parasitic interstellar xeno-infestation. I go by Pixi for short.”

  “That’s just . . . creepy. You’re a parasite. Do I need some medication to get rid of you? Are you harmful?” Slater asked, freaked out even more that he might have some kind of parasite inside of him.

  “No, I’m not that kind of parasite. Sure, you’re my host and I feed off your energy, but I don’t plan to take it all. After all, if you croak, I croak, so we’re in this together, pal. We both need you to grow strong and improve yourself. When you grow, I take my little bit off the top and get to extend my own life and power. It’s a win-win situation we have here,” Pixi said.

  “Then why aren’t you called a symbiote if you’re not here to harm me? Shouldn’t you be Sixi?” Slater asked.

  “Look, you didn’t get to choose the name of your race, did you? No, you were a human and had no say in the matter. Do you think I personally chose the ‘parasitic’ as part of my race’s name? Of course not. It’s what we’re called, and you’ll just have to deal with it,” the voice said in a huff before mumbling something about bigoted derelicts.

  “Fine. You’re a pixie? Aren’t they supposed to be little, cute women with wings?” Slater asked. His knowledge of pixies was limited to the old fantasy novels he had read in his youth, but the masculine voice in his head was nothing like he imagined.

  “No. Are you a little slow on the uptake or something? Pixi, that’s P-I-X-I, not the fairy-tale kind . . . the parasite kind. I mean, if it’s a problem for you and all, you can call me something else,” Pixi said.

  “Don’t you have a real name? Do all your kind just call themselves Pixi?” the captain asked.

  “There are more of my kind, but we better hope we don’t meet any. We’re as kind as kittens to our host but usually pretty brutal to each other. As far as an actual name, it’s Hubert.”

  “Hubert? That’s your name? Pixi it is, then,” Slater replied. He wasn’t quite convinced about what was happening, but he was willing to accept that his life had just taken a very odd turn. Though Slater could feel that he had become something that shouldn’t exist, he was still willing to attribute the situation to an elaborate hallucination. He’d never had a hallucination before and didn’t think one would seem this real. Still, he had to admit that what the voice said was at least possible. Slater couldn’t deny that, in all the vastness of the universe, something like this could happen. After all, just that day he had encountered an alien species—two species, if Pixi was to be believed.

  “You mentioned kobolds. That name s
ounds familiar, but I can’t quite place it,” Slater told Pixi.

  “Oh yeah, I was getting to that part. You, humans, are a little behind in the whole joining-the-spacefaring-races game. I can see that you heard about kobolds before in books, games, and movies. Before you ask, yes, I can see some of what was stored in your noggin, at least some of it. You have a lot of stuff knocking around in there, including, strangely enough, much of your old ship’s database. Me knowing all this stuff about you and your ship, it’s just a side effect of saving your mind and not an intrusion of privacy, I can assure you.”

  Slater was worried that Pixi was going to rush into some kind of legal defense for sifting through his mind.

  “Stop getting me off track, Slater. This is the good part, so you’ll want to pay attention here, boss. You see, all that stuff your authors came up with, all the dragons and dwarves and fantastic creatures . . . they’re real. Yep, they’re real and they’re all over this big beautiful galaxy, each race doing their own thing. Somehow—for reasons even my kind doesn’t completely understand—every sentient race has some deep-seated knowledge of the universe in their collective psyche. A select few are gifted, cursed, crazy, whatever you want to call them. Well, these gifted few are able to tap into that collective knowledge and conjure up the stories and descriptions of other members of the galaxy. Weird, right? We’re not sure how, but every race has the same types of fairy tales and mythical creatures—mythical to them, but most are real . . . except elves. Those jerks had to be wiped out long ago.” Pixi’s disgust for elves was evident. Perhaps Slater would ask for more detail on that later.

  “So what happens now? What do we do, and what’s the purpose of it all, Pixi?” Slater asked.

  “Don’t get all philosophical on me, pal. Just understand that you get to decide what you want to do . . . within the confines of being a derelict, that is.”

  “What exactly can I do? Seems like I just sit here inside the reactor core and look at this destroyed room.”

  “Let me explain a bit about the mechanics of your new life. It’s going to be very different than anything you could have imagined. First off, a derelict core is what most beings will call you. A derelict vessel is just what you remember it to be—ships that were too badly damaged and never salvaged floating around until they are pulled into a planet’s atmosphere to burn up. You, my friend, are different. Others will seek you out for what you can do for them. Most will want to explore your interior, defeat the challenges you’ll place inside, and hopefully come out with some loot while surviving the whole process.

  “Before we get further in the weeds, you need to see what I’m talking about. You have the ability to review your current status, and we need you to open that up so we can check out what’s going on with you. Just think hard about your status and it will display for you. The information and the way it looks will be in a format that is familiar to you, and the display can also be dismissed with a thought. It’ll take you some practice, but before too long, it will become second nature. Give it a try now.”

  Captain Slater tried to do what Pixi said, but for a long time, nothing happened. Then he could feel something tickling at the edge of his vision. When he latched onto it with his mind, a data screen, not unlike the ones he was used to seeing on the ship’s interface, was displayed. He took a moment to read the information.

  Derelict Core, Level 0

  Designation: Slater

  Experience: 0/100

  Core Health: 5%

  Core Power: 1/10

  Biomass: 0

  Salvage: 0

  Nanobot Permeation: 5%

  Compartments Controlled: 1

  Defenses: None

  MOBS: None

  Boss MOBS: None

  Construction Drones: 1

  Schematics: Construction Drone, Level 1

  Time until next jump: n/a. Core needs to be fully repaired to begin the jump sequence.

  “Okay, Pixi, I’m able to see it. Not sure what it all means, but I get that it’s not very impressive, is it?” Slater asked.

  “No, it’s not,” Pixi replied. “We’re actually in pretty bad shape, which is why I’ve been trying to wake you for the last few years. Before you ask, it has been exactly 131 years, six months, and twelve days since you blew yourself up and were transformed into a derelict core. We have a couple of things going in our favor. First, the hull of a derelict is the most difficult substance in the universe to damage. Our hull is made up of a unique alloy that was created when the reactor went critical and is held together at the molecular level by nanobots. A highly upgraded core can repair exterior damage almost as fast as it is dished out.”

  Slater was still a bit confused by the whole thing. “How do I get more resources? Looks like we’re completely out of everything except core power,” he asked.

  “That’s the problem we need to address right away. Your core was damaged when you fused to the reactor and was slowly deteriorating. While you were conked out sleeping, I funneled all available resources into stopping the ongoing damage. It took me all this time to get to a point where I could wake you up. This is where you come into the equation. I can do all the stuff you can, but I kind of stink at it, I’m sorry to admit. The ship responds to me slowly, and the nanobots are downright rebellious when I give them orders. It takes a derelict core to make this place function properly.”

  “Okay, I get that, but what do I actually need to do?” Slater replied.

  “To gather resources, you need to use your construction drone. Concentrate on activating it and you’ll see the options it has.”

  Slater concentrated and could see a thread of data flowing from him and into a small panel on the side of the wall. The panel opened, and a spiderlike robot the size of a house cat emerged. At the same time, options opened in Slater’s interface.

  Construction drone interface, 1/1 units online, select action:

  1. Gather resources

  2. Repair damage

  3. Build structure/MOBS

  He hit gather resources and watched as the drone scuttled about the compartment, scooping up the debris that was all over the floor. The counter on Slater’s display showed the salvage total tick up to one as the little construction bot did its thing. Watching his little bot work was hypnotic. Slater could feel his connection to it and knew that he was controlling it, but not directly. Like his body would breathe on its own, he was instinctively operating the bot. When he focused, Slater could even drive the thing around, his point of view switching to that of the bot. As much fun as he was having with the construction bot, he still had more questions.

  “Hey, Pixi, where are the salvage resources going that the bot is processing? With all the garbage it scooped up, the little guy should be full by now.”

  “That’s the beauty of a derelict permeated with nanobots: the materials inside the drone are processed into easily absorbable base components that it spits out the back in bits the size of a single molecule. You can’t see it with the naked eye… Well, you don’t have any eyes. Your sensors are better than eyes. It’s part of the beauty of being a derelict . . . Give it a shot if you want. All you have to do is concentrate and think of zooming in.”

  Slater tried what Pixi had said, and a wave of dizziness hit him as he zoomed his vision to the molecular level. He zoomed back out and experimented at a slower pace until he got a fix on the drone. The drone was scooping up some debris, and he could make out the tiny base molecules of matter constantly flowing out the back of it. The floor and walls glowed with tiny pinpricks of light, his nanobots at work, gathering and storing all the materials the drone was processing for them.

  “Unfortunately, we’re a little depleted on resources, so our single drone has to do all the heavy lifting until we’ve gathered enough to build more drones,” Pixi said.

  Slater continued to watch the drone go about its task. The little arms on the spiderlike creature would scoop up any debris it came across. The floor was littered with items strewn
about from the explosion, bits of metal and plastic for the most part.

  “Pixi, why wasn’t the whole ship vaporized in the explosion?” Slater asked, suddenly curious about the lack of burn marks or obvious structural damage. In theory, the reactor overload should have vaporized the ship and everything around it.

  “That’s my doing. I was occupying the reactor at the time you popped it and directed the force of the blast away from our ship for the most part. The resulting explosion still almost destroyed us, but most of the energy was absorbed and used to transform the vessel’s composition into a derelict.”

  Slater nodded his nonexistent head in understanding, finding himself lulled into a calm state while watching the drone go about its duties.

  — 4 —

  Captain Slater’s attention left the drone as a new notification flashed into view.

  All resources within the area of control have been gathered. The drone is now returning to standby mode.

  The little drone scrambled back through the access hatch in the wall as it completed its task.

  “About time you came back to the world of the living,” Pixi said. “Normally I don’t advise zoning out that long, but you’ve had a traumatic experience and I felt you could use the rest. Before you ask, no, you don’t really ‘rest,’ but it is sometimes refreshing to just idle your processing power for a bit. Now, let’s see what we’ve got to work with after cleaning up the place.”

  Slater pulled up the status screen again. With a little effort, he found he could adjust the data that was displayed, opting to only show what he felt was relevant. While he could now process unbelievable amounts of information, his human side still wanted to keep things simple.

  Salvage: 7

  “We’ve got seven salvage. What can we use that for?” Slater asked.

  “Well, we’re in a bind, as we only have control over this compartment. My advice would be to use the salvage to increase our nanobot production. That should give us enough of the little guys to start permeating the next compartment over. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to see inside there and, hopefully, find more salvage for us to work with. The only other option is to send the drone into the next compartment blind and let it gather more resources. The problem with that option is that if something were to happen to the drone, we wouldn’t have enough resources to build another . . . we’d be stuck here in limbo, never able to advance and just waiting to die.”