Last Updated 01 Sep 1999.
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created and maintained by Virtual Insanity. |
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Chapter 8
by Sam Curry
Verran took a moment to examine his situation and his surrounding. The exterior of the Gri'Nashu was deeply scarred and pock-marked. Clearly the hull had once had a reflective shell, but this was no longer in evidence. Verran stood perpendicular to the hull with head pointing off into the void. In a strangely disembodied way it felt like he was standing on a metal planetoid: a planetoid with a diameter of over a kilometer.
Hidden now by the vanishing horizon of the ship's hull, Verran ran through his mental image of the assault scout whose transponder was "malfunctioning" in his mind as he bent to lash his boot sole back to his foot. The assault scout wasn't docked so much as tethered to an airlock of some sort. The standard salvage tether could be attached to an air lock and tightened to form a spar- like brace. That brace could hold nearly 15 thousand tons at 1g, anything more and it might as well be a second rate Kazak prayer rosary. It looked as if the assault scout had inflated a docking tube to couple the airlocks of both ship. Still, there would be little chance of entry there since it would be suicide to leave either airlock open; and he would be at a distinct disadvantage entering the tube. He had to assume two things and two things only: the other visitors to the Gri'Nashu were professional, and they were likely to be hostile.
Verran split the Gri'Nashu open in his mind like a segmented norange and assumed that a deck which bisected the hull would run right across it. The greatest chance of finding another air lock would lie at the south pole, so he set out on his polar mission with a slight limp care of his repaired shoe. He chuckled to himself as he realized how he had started to treat the Gri'Nashu mentally as a little world, as indeed it was for him. He had oriented the ship in his mind so that the foreign assault scout was the "north pole," which put him slightly south of the equator. By his best guesstimation he had a little around a kilometer to go.
Those fighters, if they were Sathar, had to be based somewhere nearby. Sathar fighters didn't have a long range, yet a Sathar fleet could hardly sneak all the way to Truane's Star without getting caught somwhere along the way. That meant they had have conspirators locally and that they had to be pretty sure they were safe...or they had to despearate enough to send fighters to cover something....
What if the ship were a Frontier design? thought Verran. There is no guarantee that UPF natives are inside this hull-that assault scout could be a deep cover recce ship for the Sathar! Perhaps they wanted to destroy this hulk of metal too. The simplest explanation certainly fit here.
Verran realized he had stopped short to think and stared around. He looked at his feet and saw he was standing on an enormous piece of hull plating - a patch. This ship had seen combat alright. He had lost his bearing slightly and was not certain he had traveled in entirely a straight line. Verran quickly bent and untied his sole, unthreading his so far extremely useful rope. With a small shove he allowed himself to gain altitude and quickly watched his horizon grow to the entire hemisphere.
There! He spotted a massively scarred air lock about 40 meters away. Verran, pulled himself in, hand-over-hand and inched one footed along the hull. It was slow step, slide, step progression; but Verran was nothing if not patient. That was perhaps the most important lesson he had learned all those years ago in Prenglar. "No need to drag back old ghosts when you're back out here in the void," he chided himself silently.
Verran examined the airlock - it was of a an alien style and clearly low-tech. It required no form of identification or authentication and was manually operated. The airlock had a thick black, soot-like dust on it. He scrathed the surface with his knife; and after some grating, it flaked and drifter free. Beneath was shiny layer of metal. Some powerful discharge had been used on this airlock and recently - an antipersonnel weapon. Verran tethered himself and thought "Well, fortune favors the bold." He grabbed the turnstyle and started to turn it.
Verran could hear the distant groaning of the lock turning as the vibrations traveled through his suit. Abruptly, the handle snapped and the jagged end tore a whole in his suit - he grabbed the last of his vac-seal and quickly avoided the worst of the damage. He collected his thoughts with a shiver as his eyes misted with fatigue, bobbing at the end of his tether. Finally, he reeled himself back to the door.
With more care, he pulled the small prybar from his Emmerkit and unfolded it to its impressive 2 meter length. He then cut some rope and bound his foot to a small progit which he in turn bound with OzHold-20 (tm) to the deck. He used the remains of the OH20 to bind the prybar to the defunct handle and braced himself against his bound foot to turn the handle. It turned easily and he unbound his foot once more to limp in circles around the air lock till it opened and disgorged a fine mist of air - red air.
He crawled to the edge of the airlock as the door banged almost silently, since some sound could travel through his boots, back against the ship. Inside, were two Yazirian bodies, morbidly bound to the walls of the small, antique airlock by what he assumed to be faithful magnetic boots of some sort. These bodies didn't look as old as they should....
Verran pulled himself inside and pulled the door-to behind him. He quickly applied some lubricant to the inner handle and wound it closed. The transition from sheer openness to such a confined space gave a slight twinge of claustrophobia, which he quickly quelled by turning his attention to the inner lock. He leant his helmet up against the door, but could hear nothing beyond it. Might as well be shot for a Sathar as for a worm, he thought, and opened the inner door. The airlock quickly filled with air, but still no gravity. The temperature read 192 K, pretty cold, but survivable for a few minutes if necessary.
Verran pulled himself into the hall projecting before him, hand-over-hand, using the handholds recessed into the walls. The hall was rectangular at three meters by three meters and nearly 12 meters long. To his immediate right and left were two doors, the right one of which yielded easily to his prybar, revealing a a corridor that curved out of site, presumably following a longitudinal line to his "north pole" and the other mysterious visitors around the outermost edge of the Gri'Nashu.
Verran followed this corridor until he came to a door on the left wall. He turned to this, and pryed it open as well. Inside was a cube-like room, 8 meters on a side with no doors. However, it was covered with round holes on the walls. He advanced into the room and recognized the wholes for what they were, cryogenic capsules - empty cryogenic capsules. Some of these had clearly been broken open too.
He retreated from the room, paused. There was now dim light coming from the four corners of the hall projecting left and right till he hall vanished along the curve of the outer hull he had come from - dimmer than normal even for Yazirians. Quickly he pulled himself back to the airlock and the hallway that ran in toward the centre of this great ship from there. "Dim lighting here too now," he pondered.
So much for the quiet interlude, something was goind to happen. Verran knew it and pulled his trusty vibro knife from it's belt clip. He pulled himself along the corridor from that led from the airlock deeper into the ship, until he had gone it's entire length. Opening this door reveleaed another corridor identical to the first with attendant side doors. He proceeded through this one, and another, and another until he reached one that ended in a blank wall instead of a fixed door. As he had done in the outermost layers of the Gri'Nashu's onion-like design, he turned to his right and opened yet another door. It popped open with a hiss, and Verran noticed the ambient temperature had risen to nearly 240 K despite the chain of open doors behind him. There was a slight breeze at his back pulling him further through the door.
That's when he saw it - the Sathar. Dead and floating: its three meter bulk took up most of the corridor. It looked like it had been gutted in anger but by whom remained a mystery. Slowly, the dry, dessicated corpse drifted away from him. Hearing a noise, Verran turned up the external gains on his suit.
It was a voice, Human. There was something familiar about it. He had heard it before but when and where? He backed slowly out of the room, and closed the door he had come through.
There was something behind him too! He had to think fast and carefully. Then it hit him - he knew whose voice that was. His blood ran cold; "he's supposed to be lost somewhere in the Rim on his last Zenk contract," thought Verran. Verran looked down at the knife in his hand and found a morbid, black humour still left as he contemplated the irony.
Verran knew what NJ stood for. He also knew intimately why Scarr was called Scarr. The only thing he didn't know was which misguided ancestors had brought about this final twist to an abysmal day.
The ship walls vibrated as he floated strangely to a distant muffled explosion while he floated still in his hallway waiting for those behind him to arrive and contemplated his options: three doors - one to the Sathar corpse and Scarr, one back towards the airlock and the other visitors and "door number three." The ship shook again. "Great," Verran muttered his first words allowed in a long time, "I wonder who's started shooting now - let's see what we scavenge, shall we?"
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