I looked... average. I mean, I still looked like me, but without my acne and fighting scars, or the tattoos I had picked up in my long life. Yeah, I’d miss Marvin, especially out when I was among REAL aliens, but maybe someday I could get it replaced by something better than a seaman artist with homemade equipment who was just learning how ink worked on skin instead of poster board.
I guessed I could be considered handsome enough, especially if I could build up some actual muscle since average was a pretty good starting place for a man, but there probably wasn’t a woman within a billion miles of space, so it wasn’t likely that it mattered. The weird part though was that I looked young. I REMEMBER my fiftieth birthday ‘celebration’ that turned into a grief counseling session for my sixty-seven-year-old mom… I was long past that need, and in fact, I had gotten really upset about all the people who expected me to be bucked up and cheerful in the face of death when they mourned.
Sometimes, when you were angry at the world, you just want to be left the fuck alone and you start screaming at all the well-wishers going out of their way to make sure you were never left alone. That was my fiftieth birthday, and I had a lot of apologizing to do afterward, especially to my ex-wife who’d brought her new husband’s teenage kids to cheer me up.
Okay, they were her kids too. We had been separated for quite some time by that point, but the point still stands. Humans may be socializing animals, but they aren’t social animals. Humans aren’t a colony, and sometimes being alone is as important as being in company.
I had apparently been alone for a while, though, and a cute girl wouldn’t exactly be taken badly. My new body was a young man, and I was forcefully reminded of a young man’s urges after I had a tasteless, textureless, nutritionally complete meal washed down with stale water and had a sleep. As Dozer said, ‘Everything a growing boy needs’. Ugh.
I woke up when a quiet note rang. My new purchases were neatly stacked on either side of me, my head pillowed on my new armor, and I was wearing shorts and a tee shirt, finally. It had been fascinating, the way a beam of light had played out when I had confirmed my purchases the night before, delivering packages, and then the system install had occurred and I’d finally crashed, to dream of young versions of Pamela, Britney, and Connelly racing with me through the set of Baywatch without swimsuits on.
Yes, I was old enough to remember Baywatch reruns as a teenager. Sue me. The bayonet didn’t seem to be needed yet, though.
“You are conscious? Good. The governor, after a vivid and detailed description of your waste removal process, has approved an expansion of your habitat after your first delve, to approximately double its current size. If you can fit a hygiene module within that expansion, you are welcome to do so, assuming you can afford it with the Energy credits he has so grudgingly permitted. I cannot give you any more details than that, however.”
Good, it was time to earn my pay, even though I didn’t get any.
***
“Every controlled rift is numbered.” the doctor mentioned and rattled off a thirty-three-digit code consisting of numbers and a couple of hyphens.
“It should be within the list of class one rifts on your transtator. It has not overloaded recently, so the governor has stationed an army of drones to remove any resources you have recovered. It is stationed inside an old shipwreck, which has depressurized, so it should be safe enough for us to retrieve the resources. Take them to the exit and push them outside of the entrance once you have cleared the threats. There they will be retrieved and then you can return to the environmental module.”
“Why is it being depressurized so important?”
“Your default environment has an environmental pressure field nearly seven times as powerful as even I can tolerate, as does the rift itself. It would squash the drones irretrievably. In addition, your native environment has a high concentration, 22% as you mentioned, of oxygen, one of the most powerful gaseous acids in existence.”
“Add to that the water vapor, one of the most corrosive substances in existence, a likelihood of light radiation well past the lethal threshold, a gravity strength that could turn any of us into slime, and hazards that are so dangerous that half of us would instantly discorporate and die simply by looking at them. Oh, and did I mention that your comfortable heat tolerances are so insanely high that even my crystals would begin to melt from your body heat alone?”
“Wow,” I stated. “I must be a real hell-beast.”
“Indeed,” came the doctor’s reply. “There are some inner sphere inhabitants that might be able to tolerate one or more of your environmental hazards, but none that could tolerate all of them, even with specially designed armor. You strongly resemble the demons of Spindafor lore who terrorized their world ten thousand solar cycles ago, only with less armor to conceal your hideousness. Do not be offended, but you are so ugly that many Spindafor would rather die and discorporate than even consider that you might actually exist. You are fortunate that both the governor and I are considered mentally unstable and capable of communicating with you.”
I grinned, “If it makes you feel better, I am imagining you as a lump of congealed salt crystals crossed with a sea urchin, and the governor as a fat little amoeba with a gigantic mouth.”
“Why would that make me feel better?”
I shrugged in my armor, “Because to me, both of you are so ugly that you’d have to be covered with raw meat to get a vicious predator to play with you.”
“Ugh, pets. I will take that as a compliment. Why would one wish to socialize with nonsentient creatures anyway? I wish you a profitable delve.”
“Thank you,” I replied, finding the target code. Huh, it had a warning label that outside of the dungeon’s safe zone was a depressurized environment. I didn’t have any particular grudge against warning labels since the real Darwin Award winners ignored them anyway.
Originally, the Doctor had wanted to give me a list of items and resources that would be considered valuable to their species, but when I had mentioned that unneeded resources could be vended to the system for e-credits, he just said bring everything I thought was valuable, especially anything metal.
I suppose, as light as their world’s gravity was, they must have had a shortage of metals in their planet’s makeup. I know that the Sol system supposedly had a ton of nickel and other metals in their asteroid fields orbiting Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, and Venus, as well as a ‘free’ asteroid belt around the sun itself, so I wondered why they hadn’t harvested that?
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Maybe it was part of the restricted status. Is it possible that the system considered Sol’s mineral resources the property of its intelligent race? Sort of a legacy reward for reaching space that couldn’t be touched by other species while it was protected? It bore thinking about.
The screen flashed, “Prepare for transit” and with a whoosh, the scene changed.
***
Okay, the air wasn’t good, but it was different, and thus a relief from two days of ever-present sameness. It smelled old, and a little bit like sulfur and rotting greenery. I was standing next to a metal door with three flashing red lights on top of it, and the small room felt like a science fiction airlock, a big one, meant for transferring truckloads at a time rather than people going on spacewalks. Was this the room I was supposed to stack ‘resources’ into? I guessed so. Neither the door in front of me nor the one behind me had any windows on it, and it made me wonder how rifts were actually formed.
Were they always attached to something? Did they form in random spots in space and then the system moved something over to cover it? Why did it have Earth gravity and Earth air just because it was close to Earth?
My watch popped up a screen when I pressed it.
Welcome to the broken Derelict, a category 1 rift appropriate for levels 1-3.
Your party is significantly under-strength. If you wish to continue this rift, please take special care, as some of its hazards are balanced for multi-person parties.
This is a HUMAN category rift. Time since overload: 11 years. Danger category, E- Overload imminent.
I had chosen a class. It wasn’t the most perfect thing ever, since apparently, perfect was the enemy of good enough. I wasn’t exactly sure what ‘Returned’ was, but it offered to increase my durability and fatigue, and it offered two points, whatever that was, at every level.
I guessed that I would find out what those points were useful for later. It was also the only ‘common’ class available, the rest were considered ‘basic’ classes and offered traits like lifting and fly fishing I really didn’t think would help much. Apparently, when you gained level 5 in the class, and then again at level nine, it offered you a ‘free’ trait based on the class.
Sneaking would be difficult if this place was modeled after a ship of some sort, but my dark gray armored flight suit and helmet, with matching gloves and boots, were reassuring. I was just sort of wishing right now that I could have afforded a sniper rifle because I had been imagining medieval goblins or wolves or something from fantasy like in the tutorial, and I was getting an ‘Aliens’ vibe, which meant guns were probably likely.
At least Bruce Willis had a pistol to deal with the aliens on board the sci-fi cruise ship. Me, I had a long knife, a little remembered training, and a lot of hope. The door further in had a weird sort of cross-bar, instead of a navy-style dogging hatch wheel, and creaked slightly as I slowly eased it up. It looked like paint-peeling garbage, but it functioned fairly well as an airtight door.
Supposedly, when a rift formed and was encased by or dragged to some kind of structure, the structure became invulnerable to harvesting or tampering. That’s why they couldn’t just harvest the wrecked metal around the rift and use that as resources. In addition, things inside the rift were considered ‘props’ if they were connected directly to the rift, like doors and walls, they simply could not be removed or destroyed unless some kind of clue indicated that they could.
There were no English signs or anything, although there were yellow-boxed gobbledygook characters on the walls that might have corresponded to bulkhead numbers. I slipped through the door into a narrow passageway, with thick white insulated pipes along the ceiling, occasionally mysterious machinery jutting out of the walls at the perfect level to trip over them, and a big red box with a cheap plastic tab holding it closed.
You didn’t have to read the sign to know that it was a fire extinguisher. This seemed to be modeled after a ship of some kind, and ships had big red boxes with crappy plastic holders locking them that had fire extinguishers all over.
I pulled the cylinder out. The good thing about fire extinguishers is that they are always a useful distraction. The red metal tube was about two feet long, and while it was a little on the heavy side, it wasn’t too bad. I knew I’d probably use the foam or powder as a distraction, so I pulled the silver safety ring, examined the simple sticker with a picture of a stylized fire on it, and grabbed the squeeze handle in my left hand to both carry it and get ready to use it in an emergency.
It was also a heavy blunt weapon if I needed one, and as I crept as silently as possible around a curving passageway, I knew I’d need one. I was hearing what sounded like clicks, and cackles, and a crunching noise coming from ahead of me.
Ahead of me was another one of those airtight doors, but this one was wedged open, and I slid along the wall, hidden behind the lip of the door, and stepped carefully over one of the bulky machines that jutted at ankle level out onto the floor tiles. I knew what I’d seen a flash of through the door, and I did NOT like it.
Fast zombies.
There have been a lot of zombie movies over the years. But the worst of the lot were not the ones that infected everyone they touched, or the ones where every single body part seemed to keep trying to attack after you cut them into pieces.
No, in my opinion, the worst were the ones that looked like their flesh had shriveled up around their bones. Their teeth had extended out to jagged fangs and stumps, their noses were mere holes in their skulls, and they were more like animals than shambling zombies. They didn’t have to infect their prey, they tore their prey to pieces in seconds. They did, however, seem to have working eyes, which flashed around, bloodshot, searching for something even as they tore at the flesh.
I glanced down at my watch and tapped it for a moment while I peeked around the corner at them. They were ripping something human-looking apart, tearing at each piece with their jagged fangs, and whatever it was looked like it was wearing some sort of a uniform or jumpsuit.
Ghul (Category 1) undead
These terrifying creatures are the remains of humans who have been infested by a hag. All of their minds are consumed with a single cannibalistic urge to kill and eat humans.
They are not particularly smart or durable, but they attack instantly and are fast and deadly predators.
I had no idea where they had gotten their ‘food’. It wasn’t like this was some kind of contemporary wreck. The wear was consistent with something that had been derelict for decades… Where had this ship even come from? It looked more like a naval vessel than a spacecraft. Was it taken from some other human world and brought here?
Or was it all some sort of prop? The corpse they were ripping apart certainly looked fresh and human enough. Did that mean there was a chance there were other living humans on board, maybe hidden somewhere?
There was almost no chance I would be able to sneak around them or even ambush them effectively from behind, as they were on either side of the body, and I was honestly a little surprised that they hadn’t spotted me yet. Perhaps their perception was not up to snuff? Maybe they were like cats and had problems seeing things that were not moving, or their undead eyes were just not that good.
I started to ease around the doorframe, very slowly, hoping to get a chance to get a good initial strike, and maybe disable one while I used the extinguisher to blind the other.