“An anthill?” Mikayla quirked an eyebrow. “Is that bad?”
“Bad? It’s terrible! Ants are one of the most dangerous kinds of Kaiju in the Coast! We need to get out of here, right now!”
“What’s so bad about ants? All they’re good at is walking in lines and carrying heavy things,”
Keldryn took a deep breath. “Ants are trouble because most Kaijus are solitary creatures that don’t like working together. But they’re all mindless drones controlled by the real monster, the Ant Queen that stays safely holed up in its burrow and sends armies of minions out to do their thing. They’re Class A threats that require whole teams of Goliath Guards to fight their way into the heart of the nest and kill the Queen. We are not equipped for this!” He looked on the verge of hyperventilating, his fur standing on end.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay. We’re safe. It’s just one dead ant. Let’s not panic until we at least find a living one. They’re probably all long gone,” Mikayla pacified him.
Slowly, his ears and tail relaxed as he got his breathing under control. “Right. Yeah. Right. Those are strange injuries. What could have caused them?”
“On the ant?”
“And on this man,” Keldryn inspected one of the corpses. “It’s as though his head exploded,”
Mikayla scrutinised the corpse. While one of the two dead sailors had his entrails hanging out of his chest, with injuries that had clearly been inflicted by the Ant Kaiju, the other hadn’t suffered anything of the sort. Instead, most of his head had been scattered into bloody pulp and splinters of bone.
She found the culprit abandoned on the floor beneath the dead man’s right hand. “I see what happened,” she nodded grimly, picking up a bloodstained pistol. “This is a weapon that fires small bits of metal called bullets at incredible speeds, called a handgun. It does a lot of damage to anything that gets hit. My guess is that these two men managed to lock themselves inside the bridge with just one Ant, keeping all the rest out,”
She paced, re-enacting the scene as she went. “This guy was attacked and fatally wounded, but the other guy shot the Ant enough times to kill it. Pew, pew, pew,” It was strangely reassuring to know that Kaijus could, in fact, be killed by modern weaponry from her world. “But he was trapped and alone and surrounded by monsters, and he . . decided to end things on his own terms rather than be eaten alive or starve to death,” she grimaced, using the handgun to mime shooting herself in the head. “Pew,”
“I see,” Keldryn nodded with a sympathetic grimace. “I’m sorry to hear that. But there’s nothing we can do for them now. What were you saying about the se-kyoo-rit-ee kam-rahs?”
“Right,” Mikayla unceremoniously pushed the corpse out of the way and scanned the main control panel of the container ship. “Here. These screens should show us,” The screens looked advanced, more than she would have expected, further reinforcing her suspicion that this ship had come from the future, or something akin to it. “I’ve just gotta figure out how to use this OS,” she murmured, flicking random buttons with no reaction. “The ship must be powered down. There’s gotta be a . . aha!”
At the other end of the room was a fuse box, which promptly lost its lock to an application of Sword Core. “Here we go. The circuit breakers triggered. If I just flip these back on,” Several loud clicks rang through the air, and the container ship groaned to life.
Keldryn jumped, looking around as the lights turned back on and screens came to life all around them. “Welcome to Ser-E-Core Shipping,” a smooth female voice rang through the room. “Identifying,”
“Um, Mikayla? Who’s talking?!” Keldryn panicked, looking around as though expecting a mysterious woman to appear out of nowhere.
“Huh, must be some kind of AI assistant. Hi! Who is this?” Mikayla looked around for any sort of camera.
“Unauthorised intruders detected on the bridge. The captain has been alerted,” There was a faint buzzing from the pocket of the headless corpse, and Mikayla fished a smartphone out of his pocket. There was a prompt on the screen that read;
[Unauthorised intruders on the bridge. Allow access? Yes/No]
She poked the ‘Yes’ option with her thumb, and the voice responded. “Access granted. Welcome, new employees of Ser-E-Core. Checking ship registry . . All other employees are deceased. Congratulations, new employee, you are now the acting Captain. Please input your name,”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“My name is Mikayla,” she nodded in the general direction of the nearest camera. “And wow, this system isn’t very secure,”
“Did the invisible woman just decide you’re its new boss because everyone else here is dead?” Keldryn whispered, still visibly unnerved.
“Seems like! Computer, uh, wait do you have a name?”
“I’m Seres. Pleased to meet you, Captain Mikayla,” the disembodied voice replied.
“I could get used to that,” she chuckled.
“Please input your name, new employee,”
“Is it talking to me?” Keldryn guessed, eyes darting around and tail flicking back and forth. “I am Keldryn. It’s, um, nice to talk to you,” This was Mikayla’s first time seeing him so obviously out of his depth. It was kind of adorable how flustered he looked, eyes darting around to find the mysterious invisible woman.
“Pleased to meet you, First Mate Keldryn,” the voice repeated.
“Heh,” Mikayla nodded as Keldryn tried to parse the meaning of ‘first mate’. “Okay. How do I get the security camera feeds online and visible?”
“I will open the security suite for you,” The main display promptly came up with a grid of sixteen camera feeds, each showing various rooms and corridors within the ship. All of them were deserted. Two of them had bones strewn about on the floor.
Mikayla’s attention, though, was arrested by the date and time readout at the bottom of the screen. Apparently, it was half past eleven PM on June 29, 2056. “Yup, I called it. Future boat,”
“I can’t see any Ants on any of these screens,” Keldryn noticed, peering at them.
“That’s a relief,” Mikayla nodded.
“Perhaps. Now, the question becomes, is the anthill actually here or is it nearby and the queen sent out the ants to raid this place?” he speculated.
“No, the question becomes, do we have a manifest of all the cargo on this boat, Seres?” Mikayla turned away and looked up hopefully.
The screen was already flickering away from the surveillance. “Accessing the ship’s manifest,”
“What are you doing, why does that matter?” Keldryn’s ears went flat.
“Are there any portable generators on this ship?” Mikayla asked.
“You’re still on that?”
“There are no commercial generators recorded in the ship’s manifest. However, if you require one, there is an industrial backup generator that can be easily removed from its housing in the engineering workshop,”
“Awesome! Show me the shortest route to the workshop on the ship’s schematics,” Mikayla requested.
The screen promptly populated with an overlay of the vessel, plotting a route down six levels and through the guts of the ship to reach a large room that was tagged Engineering.
“No. That’s too far to go, it’s too risky. It’s not worth it. You can live without this electricity stuff. We can’t just go traipsing into the depths of an anthill, not alone and underlevelled,” Keldryn said, waving his arms in objection.
“Come on, we got everything else, all that other stuff that we need a generator to use. We can’t just leave without it. And you saw the security cameras, there aren’t any Ants on the ship anymore. It’ll be totally safe,”
“They are Ants,” Keldryn emphasised. “You know there are more horror stories about Ants than any other species of Kaiju? I don’t want to become one!”
“We don’t even know if there are still any Ants here. We can’t just abandon it now. And don’t you need to write a report about this ship?”
“No one is going to blame me if I write ‘Found an Ant corpse, ran away, recommend sending a full extermination squad’. This is not something we’re strong enough to deal with, Mikayla,”
“We won’t need to be. Look. Seres. You can inform us with the captain’s phone if you detect any intruders, right?” Mikayla appealed to the ship’s virtual assistant.
“Correct. If any unknown people or animals come within range of my sensors, I will alert the Captain,”
“And in the absolute worst case, we go Goliath, punch our way out into the fresh air, and run for the hills,” Mikayla reminded him. “It’ll be fine. C’mon, please? We’ve gotta at least try it!”
Keldryn wavered. “. . Ugh, fine! But you owe me a huge favour,”
“Deal!” Mikayla didn’t mind trading favours at all if it got her a generator. She glanced back at the schematics, tucking the captain’s phone into her pocket. “The stairs are this way, c’mon!”
Keldryn reluctantly followed along as they descended the stairs. Mikayla hesitated when they reached the second-lowest level, peering into the corridor. The lights were flickering and failing, no doubt due to the damage to the ship. Mikayla frowned. “Have you got a light source in your survival kit? You’ve gotta be prepared for caves, right?”
“If I were carrying a survival kit for a human, then I would. Foxkin have really good night vision, though. I’ve never needed one, so there was no reason to bring it,” he shrugged.
Mikayla considered, peering down the corridor, and noticed a power outlet. “Okay, in that case, I’ve got a new plan. We’re not in a hurry. Let’s go grab some supplies,”