“THEY EAT THE DEAD…”

Ensign Liu stopped as she entered the compartment. They were taking yet another detour due to the corridor becoming too destroyed to follow. Deliberately so, it appeared. A makeshift barricade had been built there at some point with fighting positions still occupied and a by now familiar flood of little yellow shells. According to her downloaded map there was a way through here to a connecting corridor. There was also a message scrawled in space paint on the wall. Anything else would have flaked off in the cold of space over the years.

She recognized her woolgathering for what it was. She was trying to ignore what she’d just seen.

“What do you make of it, Ensign? Are they talking about the bugs? Or these ‘bioforms’ we heard about from the Spitfire?”

She jumped involuntarily, not noticing when his helmet had touched hers a moment ago.

“The intelligence issued from command did not mention that they ate our fallen. Or their own. The bugs, I mean. But it would not be the first time command had given us information that turned out later to be incomplete.”

“True. But there are times that information is dangerous. Not just to command, but to humanity itself. Us, too. Like spies. We don’t need to know about the spies I am morally certain humanity has working even now, searching for answers and intelligence that will not only keep us alive, but give us the advantage should we ever be drawn into another full-scale war.”

His voice was patient but firm. She couldn’t see his face so she twisted around, keeping her helmet in contact with his. She looked up at him, his trademark smile and brown eyes still tinged with pain that by the looks of things was getting worse.

“I know they have their reasons for it sir, I-I’m not implying-”

She hated her stutter. Hated it with a hot, burning passion. It only ever came out when she got flustered. When she didn’t continue, he spoke.

“I know you aren’t. Whoever wrote that hadn’t lost hope. They wrote it to help someone who was alive and could read it. We know the bugs either can’t or don’t bother reading human languages. This… is a message for the living.”

His words helped. She nodded, hesitantly at first, and turned around to look at the room with new eyes. The message remained in its neat and blocky letters. It wasn’t something dashed off in haste. Whoever wrote this had taken the time to do it properly. The rest of the room was filled with makeshift beds in orderly rows. The bedding was mussed on a few, but others remained made and strapped down the way one would to sleep in low gravity. A few stacked crates in the corner showed where supplies were stored, ready for crewmen that never came back. This had to have happened after the shot that killed the ship, she suddenly realized. These people were still alive… Why hadn’t they all gone to the escape pods? Why did they stay behind?

Her fear mastered for the moment, Liu made her way through the bedding towards the closed hatch on the other side. It looked to be braced in such a way that it couldn’t be opened on the other side, a solid bar of metal jammed through the mechanism that would open it. There had to be a way to disengage the lock somehow, otherwise they could have simply welded it shut like the barricade outside. She felt him tap on her shoulder, motioning her to grab the bar and push up with it. The makeshift locking mechanism may have defeated her efforts to understand it, but not her captain.

It only resisted her efforts for a moment before grinding upwards. The hatch popped open slightly then stopped, opening the rest of the way only with effort. Corrosion or a warped frame, either would have made it just as hard to close. The corridor beyond ran perpendicular to the path they had been following, fore and aft. No monsters jumped out at them, and no more messages adorned the bulkheads. The Courageous was a big ship, bigger than the heavy cruiser she had trained on but not so big as the battleships and dreadnoughts of the main fleet. Miles of corridors twisted through her guts. At least, according to the plans she was following. The damage was quite obviously not listed.

A ship this size had dozens of different systems and backup systems that took over in case of battle damage or maintenance. The Celerity could be piloted, for example, from the pilot’s station, the captain’s station, or the engineering repeater on the bridge, as well as in the engine bay itself or even on the hull, if special auxiliary equipment was installed. They passed maintenance bays, backup weapons stations, environmental substations, crew quarters, the ship’s safe, medical bays, passenger quarters… Wait a moment.

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“Captain, may I request a brief detour? It’s on the way. Five minutes or less, I promise.” The captain was still moving steadily, if not quickly. His wounds couldn’t be tended to until they got back to the ship. But this just might be worth it.

“What is it, Ensign?”

“The ship’s safe.” Understanding dawned on his face instantly. The ship’s safe always contained important information and items. Things that could not be trusted to the logs, secret orders, contraband, anything that needed to be absolutely secure was in the safe. Only three members of the crew could ever have access. If those three were all dead, no one could open it until a higher ranked officer arrived from the fleet itself. This hadn’t changed, as far as she knew, from the old Earth practice.

“Do it. I will wait for you at the next intersection.” He continued on, his face having grown markedly paler since the fight with whatever it was that attacked them in the CIC.

Liu darted into the safe compartment, through both open security doors. The place was a mess, even more than the corridor, with dents and gouges marring the bulkheads, and some gritty, dark substance stuck to every surface including the ceiling. Small gun turrets poked their stubby muzzles out at foes that were long dead. I hope.

The safe itself wasn’t a small box hidden in the most protected part of the ship like her own tiny scout. This one was enormous, the size of an entire room by the looks of it. Closed. And locked. She sighed, turning away. It had been worth checking out, but- She froze, looking at the bulkhead behind her. And back at the safe door. Security turrets bulged out from every surface, even the deck. Burned into the bulkhead opposite the safe was a long series of numbers and letters. A code!

To the left of the safe door was an old console with a lever on its side. This could be used to charge up temporary batteries and activate equipment for a short time that did not require too much power. It blazed to life in seconds, an amber colored cursor blinking as the screen appeared, swiveling out from a hidden panel. She entered the code in wonder.

Crash consoles like this were part of the standard schooling that all colony brats like her were made to memorize as part of their history of the Exile. The massive wonder that was Malta, the cobbled together mobile space station that escaped Sol and led humanity into the Exile was a legend in its own right. These same crash consoles, as they were called, existed on Malta in the oldest sections. Rumor had it that crash consoles were how he piloted Malta when the first Great Disaster occurred, manually controlling her massive engines while writing a brand new drive code on the fly. According to her school texts, that code was even still used in some form today on some of the largest ships humanity created.

The console processed the code in an instant, flashing a green ‘CODE ACCEPTED’ before hiding the screen and powering down once more. A series of vibrations rattled the deck under her boots as the heavy mechanical locks withdrew. The code had been over a hundred characters long and took her longer than she’d expected to enter. Normally there was some sort of retinal scan, bioprint, or even a brainmap to access a safe, but at least one of those technologies she was almost sure hadn’t been around when the Courageous still flew. The door finally ground open, shoved out on heavy rams. Trapped air rushed out as the door crumpled warped deckplates that no longer lay flush. A cloud of debris swirled up in the filthy room just outside the safe..

Liu made her way inside the safe room by feel. Fortunately, the foul cloud did not follow her in save for the bit that had already gotten on her suit, so she wiped her faceplate clean as best she could. What she saw inside made her gasp yet again, this time in wonder.

* * *

“So what did you find?” Captain Everts still looked pale, but alert. Her detour gave him a little time to rest, which seemed to have helped.

“Too much to say. One of the crew locked himself in there. Dead now, of course. He left us something, though,” she indicated the satchel she now carried strapped to her suit. “I haven’t looked through it much yet, but there’s a lot of it. Are you ready to go?”

“Lead the way, Ensign. High time we got back to the ship.” She didn’t mention the irony of her running off like that. It was a risk. But that risk was part of the mission, to find out what they could. That’s what scouts did. He’d taught her that.