The first verbal command echoed through Security Personnel emergency activation stations sprinkled throughout scattered positions around the ship. Some rooms were no longer in use, others had been recently smashed under mechanical feet. Several rooms still worked though. They spun up and five slots in the wall opened up and were filled by Cryo-Pods. They quickly opened and liquid splashed to the ground as several men and women were dropped onto the floor. The Terminal lit up and scrolled briefly before sitting idle and waiting for the room’s occupants to gain awareness.
Minus the failure rates, of which there were many, and subtracting the groups that were instantly killed upon activation for a multitude of reasons. Errant crabs taking advantage of the unconscious free meals, scattered and spooked scavengers, or even through simple cryo-failure. There were also a decent number of rooms that had been plundered and taken offline long ago. The most deaths occurred in those rooms that had Cryo-sick among their ranks, it wasn’t common but neither was it that rare of an occurrence.
Typically the first to gain their ‘sensibilities’ after a long-sleep, the Cryo-sick near immediately set upon their helpless companions.
Remaining, there were four. Four rooms were activated and in good enough condition to carry through their primary functions. 20 individuals, 5 apiece.
One room was set close to the primary Corridor running along the spine of the ship and the crew was immediately set upon by machines in the shapes of Men. Their screams were short.
Of the other three rooms, one had a non-functional Terminal and thus was trapped inside, the other had a functional Terminal but with limited access, much like Jack’s had been. The last one had proper access to the Security Personnel cache of Nano. 5 sets of footsteps settled warily into the cold pathways of the Cryo-Laboratory. The other 5 sets carefully entered an unfamiliar place in the ship.
Her other command would take longer to show its effects; even so, great mechanisms maneuvered in vast swathes, ancient machinery moved deep in the ship’s underbelly.
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The Cargo-Door slid shut behind them. The Clan was fewer, to be sure, but those that remained were rock-solid.
“Another Cargo-Bay. Chief Monitor?”
Yosef flicked over his portable, “Yes Clan Head, no readings. Visual… nothing.” He started cross-referencing with other Monitors to confirm his findings.
Yuma didn’t need to wait for the final word from the brainiac. It was empty as far as she could see, and she could see far. That said, it almost hurt to look around, the room was incredibly bright.
“Ah! It’s wonderful here!” Hendrew seemed to enjoy the glaring brightness.
She placed her hand on this side’s HandPad.
Welcome Emergent Security Personnel Yumata
“Any restrictions to my Authority here?”
Negative. You are the highest Authorized User present.
Command?
She looked over them, ‘Open Door’, ‘Lock Door’, ‘Set Door Defenses’. She debated, they had killed… everything in the last Cargo-Bay, maybe they would need to leave from it? She really didn’t want things coming up behind her. She Locked the Door and turned on its Defenses.
She turned and narrowed her eyes, shielding them with a hand from the bright lights above. She could even see the Door in the distance. Grateful, even if not particularly enthused for the long walk ahead of them. But still, like most in the Labs, she could recognize small mercies and accept them with cautious appreciation.
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“Well, here it is meat. Let’s get the fuck out of this sewer.”
Jack gave the SI a look, “Isn’t this your sewer?”
It cackled, too loudly, in his ear, “Not anymore!”
Yeah, they could leave now. But what if they could go all the way to the Bridge from here? It was at least worth checking out. There were bodies of Rats and crabs scattered all over the place. The sounds of fighting and dying had been a persistent sound throughout their journey.
“Let’s keep heading north, I wanna see what all that ‘oblivion’ talk was about.”
Jonah looked up from his tablet, “You what? You want to, what?”
Jack scowled down at the diminutive scientist, “Jonah. Do you think you can focus on your surroundings for, I don’t know, maybe 10 seconds?”
His eyes narrowed in response but Jack held his stare. Jonah put away his portable into an inside layer.
“Why not just leave from this egress?”
“Considering that every single new area we go to is more screwed than the last? If we can shortcut some of this toward the Bridge I’d be perfectly okay not connecting every single section of this ship.”
Jonah nodded, a still slightly sour look on his face, “You are not wrong. This is, what you would call, a shithole.”
Jack smiled at that then started to run but stopped. He placed Leanne’s body next to the Door. He wanted to bring her along but carrying her was slowing him down, especially if…
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“Jonah, hop on.” He squatted slightly and motioned to him.
Jonah looked to protest but just shook his head.
“We can travel faster and you can screw around on your tablet.”
“It’s not ‘screwing around’!”
Still, Jonah hopped on and Jack took off. His muscular endurance was definitely better but the real advantage he was noticing was how fast his muscles refreshed themselves and healed the wear and tear from exertion. He definitely wanted to see his Personnel Sheet after all these upgrades and as he thought that he realized that he could have likely checked while inside the Pod.
The silence as he ran was nice. The SI was on the lookout for crabs and fairly capable of handling any of the smaller ones without his assistance and Jonah was focused on his portable, as per usual.
He mentally reviewed his old list. Find Ark Door? Check. Save Leanne? Not check. Rattigan Dead? Check. Kill Tule? Not Check. Kill creepy other crab? Not Check. Kill Devin? Check. It felt like things were half done and how it had worked out left him… unsatisfied. But why should it? Besides Leanne, it had worked out better than expected and much cleaner than he could have even hoped for.
It was about time. Still, it felt… like there should be more struggle. It was also disappointing to have started with four and now, well, he still had four companions, at least technically but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to count that little rat as a companion, much less Trash.
Was he just wired that way? Anything but edge of your seat survival felt hollow? Maybe his survival instinct was just… broken? He didn’t know and he stopped the train of thought.
It didn’t matter how he ‘felt’, it didn’t matter at all. He had a purpose and hopefully, he had the ability to carry it out. That was all that mattered.
He dismissed the emotions and brutally repressed any others that resisted. He finally dismissed the pain he felt over Leanne, feeling it purge itself from his body through the burning exertion of his muscles. After all, 'at any cost'. He said 'any price' and it would be stupid to think that you could declare that and not have someone calling to collect on it. Still, losing Leanne had hurt more than he had assumed it would. Surprisingly so.
Just because things got a little too heavy for comfort, he was supposed to regret this path? He had made that promise to himself and, even more than that, it was bigger than just him, it was every Human on board this cursed ship. No one else was looking like they wanted the job.
It was all this alien… tra-, he glanced at the SI on his shoulder, all this alien filth that Humans would be subjected to and that was an untenable result, even if it was a distinct possibility that he failed to course correct the ship.
He became uncomfortably aware of a thought. There was a worse result than just 'failing'. Barely failing or barely succeeding were the worst outcomes, by far, and would subject countless Humans to alien horrors, both unknown and not. If he failed a bit more than that, it would be a mercy as the heat of a sun would compress and melt everyone. He’d either have to succeed or fail big enough and crash this thing with no survivors.
There was no other choice but to succeed or fail, hard. Half measures would be worse than no effort at all.
He hardened his resolve. The thing about hard things is that if they are made too hard, they become brittle. Just kick the can down the road.
He breathed out.
“You alright? Your pulse has doubled.” The angle in which his eyes absorbed light and the electrical signals around it, he could feel Jonah looking at him.
“Yeah, just… just thinking of a plan.”
He felt Jonah pocket his portable, “That’s actually a good idea.”
Jack ignored the semi-slight from ‘actually’, from anyone else it would have been a straight insult but from Jonah? It didn’t even register.
“What are your thoughts so far?”
Jack was hesitant to share his thoughts with Jonah, not because it was him, just in general. Maybe if he had, then perhaps Leanne wouldn’t have died. The pain of that thought, for some reason refusing to compartmentalize, was working itself out of him as his muscles coiled and released and burned.
“I’m thinking that if we can’t land this ship I’m going to crash it with no survivors. I don’t know if the system’s star we’re heading toward is a Human occupied system and this ship is full of horrors.”
“Who cares?”
Jonah could feel Jack tense beneath him.
“I’m not going to butcher my way through this damned ship just to save a bunch of malicious aliens. You told me about the mushrooms having started on this ship, right? Want to have those things growing on a Human world? You want to get mind raped by an entire planets' worth of 'Brothers'?"
Jack knew that bringing up that memory to Jonah might be the only thing that would give the man pause. Manipulating people seemed to be so much more work than just leaving them out of it and making his own plans.
“Well, we’ll be off the ship before it crashes, right? Can’t we just crash the ship and still leave from an escape pod?”
Jack shrugged, an awkward motion while running and carrying them, “Sure that’s Plan A but Plan B is not to land the ship safely.”
That sunk into Jonah, they had just escaped a death cult surprisingly easily. He had no desire to make a new death-compact, “So why don’t we just go to an escape pod, right now? Like this moment?”
“Too fast, we’re going too fast. It would get torn apart.”
“Relativistic…”
Jack nodded, “Yeah or something like that.”
“Something like that?”
“Yeah… you know what, nevermind. We just need to slow down the ship enough to launch escape pods but not too slow. We have to kill the rest.”
“You know there are potentially millions of Humans still in Cryo-Pods, right?”
Jack winced. Yeah… dammit, he had kind of forgotten about that, “So how can we save them and make sure that whatever is on here doesn’t escape?”
There was silence as Jonah was thinking, “Perhaps there is some sort of escape function built into the Mass Storage Facilities. After all, it’s obvious what this ship was designed to be, there's no other way that the Cryo-Bays would have kept refreshing for who-knows-how many years in the Labs."
Massive Cryo facilities, a Laboratory that specialized in Cryo, the constantly refreshing Cryo-Bays there, the massive Water storage facility. Now, Arkology.
“It’s a… colony ship, but beyond massive.”
“Precisely, and because it is so big, which means that it was meant to cover extraordinary distances, I would assume that there is some capability to eject swathes of Cryo-Pods down to the surface of a planet. What if the ship was unable to land at the end of its journey? There must be contingencies built-in all over the place. The scale of this ship, it’s unbelievable. I can hardly believe there’s any place in our galaxy that necessitated facilities of this scale.”
For the first time Jack was glad he had gotten Jonah’s input. His… perspective had been steadily narrowing. The worse things got, and the more he learned, the more that 'Landing with no survivors' had been steadily edging closer to take over the Plan A position.
“An intergalactic colony ship?”
He felt Jonah shrug behind him, “Who really knows? I am counting on the Bridge logs verifying or denying that particular theory.”
Jack shook away the thought, “So the plan-”
Jonah interrupted, “Let me guess; Slow down the ship, launch the Cryo-escape Pods if its possible, escape ourselves.”
“Forgot one. We make sure this ship will crash, then we escape.”
He left out, find Yuma. Jonah wouldn’t get it and he didn’t really want to have to justify it in a discussion and, knowing his luck, he’d have to start justifying his 'emotions' about Leanne’s death as a result. Just because he was ‘over it’, kind of, didn’t mean that he was in any rush to have a discussion about it.