Captain Van’tu, the Garaboosian commander of the Alliance of Free Stars light scout cruiser Mandrake, frowned, in the way of his species, and gestured with a lower lefthand at his human science officer to continue.
The woman turned back to her console, to peer into the hood of her ‘scope and minutely adjust a control.
“The ship is an old Terran Alliance Explorer class, the TAN Nebula Star. She was reported overdue for resupply a little over a hundred years ago, exact details are spotty as the station she was supposed to report to was destroyed in the Terran civil war. By modern standards she was little more than a heavy cruiser with an oversized jumpcore, and limited weaponry. The Terran Alliance Navy was very much focused on exploration and first contact, and several of their vessels vanished without trace only to show up decades later in pirate hands. However, this does not seem to be the case with the Nebula Star…”
The image on the holotable was mute testimony to this information. The old starship, much more massive than the Mandrake, but significantly less well equipped, looked derelict. Several holes gaped in her once-pristene white hull, the smooth lines marred and crooked, and the jumpcore bulb near the stern showed a terrible, blasted crater, black with soot and melted steel.
Captain Van’tu scrolled the smooth wheel of the holo controls, swivelling the image and zooming into the damage.
“What do we think of this, Sasha, that looks like an internal explosion, not battle damage.”
“Yes Captain.” Sasha, the science officer, agreed. She manipulated a pad on her side of the console. Several sidebars lit up. “Here, here and here. Chemical signatures we’ve picked up in the dustcloud around the wreck, and the blast pattern, indicates a high yield chemical explosive was utilised, we would need to get a scan from inside the wreckage to be certain, but I think I can confidently say this was caused by a c4 package commonly kept as part of ship inventories of that era. We carry a similar type of explosive even now, it has uses in a number of emergency protocols.”
The captain nodded. “I’m familiar with Human paranoia, ‘better to have and not need than need and not have’, which is why I learned to carry a backpack heavier than myself at the academy.” He smiled at the woman, who grinned back in that wolfish human fashion.
Commanding a Terran vessel as part of the Alliance Navy was a high honour for a non-Terran, and he’d earned it the hard way, he’d actually completed his officer training on Earth itself, heavy gravity, lethal flora, fauna, and practical jokes be damned, he’d always dreamed of command, and he had never planned to settle for anything less than the best ships of the fleet.
Somehow his determination to ‘make it’ had actually impressed his trainers and teachers, and earned him the interest of a senior Admiral, which explained his current command. And he was no ticket-puncher, his crew was, in his opinion, the best in the fleet, and if his ship was small, he was so proud of her, some days he could almost burst his hearts from it. She was his first, and with luck, not his last, and while scouting duty following pre-war exploration routes was far from glamorous, it was essential work for the Alliance, following up first contacts, reopening lost trade routes, and, now and then, coming across relics, and giving closure to the descendants of those vanished vessels.
“Alright. She looks cold, and her reactor is dead, but we don’t know what happened to her, she could have run afoul of pirates, or been captured and misused for decades, or been left boobytrapped, so pack up a SAR shuttle, and give them a leader drone, they don’t enter unless the drone clears the way in.”
“Aye aye Captain, I’ll get them on their way. Sidearms?”
“Yyy…esss. Yes. And overarmour. If someone’s left any surprises, it will help.”
Sasha turned and walked off, already tapping her communicator to summon the personnel she’d be sending.
He frowned again, looking into the depths of the hologram. Something was bothering him, the same sensation he’d felt while visiting a zoo on Earth. Humans around him grinning, nodding to one another, and the confirmation of his worry came as a boom of hundreds of pounds of apex feline carnivore crashing against the high density crystal he’d been standing with his back to…
Something was creeping up on them, he could feel it.
***
The shuttle launched from the brightly lit boatbay of the Mandrake, arcing smoothly through the glittering blackness towards the cruelly murdered starship. In front of it zipped the mote of the drone, its scanners and sensors slaved to the shuttle, giving the drone specialist on board an instant feed to all his senses, feeling, experiencing everything the drone saw.
It zipped around the gaping hole where the jumpdrive had once been housed, then around in a helical pattern, scanning every micron of the lost ships hull, mapping it in complete three dimensional perfection, then tracking towards the boatbay. Inside, two, much older, versions of the Mandrakes shuttle rested, crooked against their davits, the bay airlock doors lying open.
The drone slowly crept inside the dark corridor as the shuttle followed it in, nestling into an empty davit. Power hookups, identical after a century thanks to long ago agreed standardisation, marry up, pogo pins compressed and energized, drawing trickle power from the shuttle to latch securely.
The crew debark, except the probe operator who remained strapped in his jumpseat, guiding the drone deeper into the derelict.
Suited figures follow its path, jumping from the shuttle hatch to the airlock. They don’t bother trying to seal it, it had been lying open for a century, there was no air left within to preserve. The drone met a cross passage, and moved right, headed towards the bridge, following schematics downloaded from Mandrake’s computer. The scout crew followed, alert, and making note of damage to bulkheads, the carpets that once covered the floors looking torn, dark stains telling a worrying story.
The probe entered the bridge of the Nebula Star and paused. The LIDAR scanner illuminated the space in a slow pass of green laser light, left to right and back again. The chamber was empty, save the various consoles and chairs the crew would have used, and the lone figure of the Captain, in his central command chair.
To Captain Van’tu, observing the time delayed remote feed on his own bridge, it was remarkable just how similar the darkened derelict wreck was to his own vessel, down to the arrangement of bridge consoles and type of carpeting used. He’d read, in one of his intro to ship design classes, that Terran bridge layout owed much to speculative fiction of pre-spaceflight eras, and a lot of experimental wet-navy designs.
He'd brought it up once with his chief of engineering, who had responded with a ridiculous approximation of a Scottish accent, “Aye laddie, we Terrans owe an awfy lot tae an auld lass called the Enterprise!” and laughed, continuing his explanation in his more natural German accented standardised Terran. Van’tu had spent several informative evenings with his console, soaking up ancient Terran entertainment as a result.
The drone circled the bridge, slowly, keeping its thruster exhaust well clear of the mummified body in the central chair, making its way to the science console. A small arm popped out and slotted into the consoles data port.
Several lights flickered on the antique panel, the probe powering up the cold circuits to read the datalogs, then around the room, dim red lights came to life, as more of the bridge woke up. Through the hull itself, a faint whine transmitted, the probes oversized fusion battery providing enough current to trigger the startup of a backup generator below the bridge.
The scouting party stepped in, peering around. One, her grey skinsuit marked with a red stripe down the arms, moves across to the captain, a medical scanner in her hand.
“I’m reading significant trauma throughout the corpse, but remarkable preservation as well. Life support must have been glitching badly for a long time after… Wait…” She smacked the side of the scanner, then passed it back across the corpse. “Scanner keeps picking up my own heartbeat, trying to tell me this guys still alive, fucking thing.” She put it away in the side pocket of her suit and pulled out a smaller device. “I kept my old one, should be good enough to… Fuck me sideways…”
“Maybe later Carol, what’s the script?” A green stripe on the party leader’s arm. He was looking around, feeling… itchy, between his shoulder blades. Something wasn’t right, and not just the dead ship. He’d been lead on two other derelict searches, and they never went like this. Accidents happened, people died, usually horribly, and you always found, well, bodies. Whole or otherwise. Yet, aside from the clearly traumatic bloodstains on the floors, soaked long before the artificial gravity had failed, this ship hadn’t shown them a single body, nothing, not even fragments.
Not only that but he could swear he’d seen movements. No-one else had, but he also knew that his reflexes tested significantly higher than average, he was seeing something the others were simply not noticing.
Carol stepped away from the corpse.
“My old scanner says this guy’s alive Mark. Heartbeat, brain activity, oxygenated blood. He’s not breathing and he’s a fucking corpse, but both my scanners say he’s gooey in the middle. And I’ll be honest I don’t want to be here, send probes back across on AI control and let them explore, this is too freaky. I know you’ve been seeing shit, well, I’ve been picking up weirdness all along, and this is too much. We should leave!”
Mark bit back a curse. He agreed, but he was also supposed to be a professional, and as the leader of the scout team who first boarded the derelict, he’d have been slated for command of the ‘prize crew’ to bring her home. At the same time, he was holding back a growing uneasiness, his other two team members were shuffling nervously, and Carol was on the edge of panic.
“Alright, we head back to the shuttle and leave the probe to grab the logs. Something’s weird here, might be the atmosphere on this thing, I admit it’s spooky, but we all know I see weird bugs and things other folk miss, and Carol, you’ve had that personal scanner since high school, if it’s saying something weird, something weird is going on. If Captain… Morrison, is still alive after a century in vacuum, he can keep a few more hours until the AI probes can collect him. We’re not equipped for medical evac anyway.”
They stepped back through the hatchway, leaving the probe to its work. Emergency lighting flickered into life, adding a lurid red glare to the tableaux, Mark, last to leave, sharply snapping his head back around as something… He was reminded of a time as a child, he’d turned over a log in his parents’ yard, and hundreds of inch-long centipedes had scurried in panicked circles to escape the sudden glare of sunlight.
Nothing moved, aside from the slow pulsing of rebooting computers.
He followed his people towards the shuttle.
One by one, they made the leap back to the shuttle davit, and boarded, cycling back aboard, and taking their seats. The drone pilot barely moved to acknowledge them, clearly lost in the datefeed from the old computers, and aside from a quick glance across readouts to ensure the data was flowing cleanly to the Mandrake, Mark didn’t disturb the man.
He hit the switch to release the davit clamps, and the popped free. The shuttle turned, and smoothly glided out, aligning with the mothership and headed home. He blinked and shook his head. That motion again, out the corner of his eye. He glanced over, seeing the drone pilot’s faceplate swarming with legs for a fraction of a second.
“Uhh, Josh, you alright there?” He hated breaking into drone pilot concentration, but this wasn’t right, and Carol was gesturing desperately at him from her chair. He reached across, and nudged Josh’s shoulder, the skinsuit collapsing under his fingers and the skull clacking loosely against the faceplate.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
***
Captain Van’tu listened to the soft report coming from Sasha, the scout crew had found the captain of the derelict but were returning early due to some unsettling information they’d found. He didn’t like it, but he also respected human instincts. If skilled officers felt there was a reason to withdraw before mission completion, he knew better than to override the human-on-the-spot.
He’d have a word with Mark later, in private, if necessary, but the man had never been wrong before.
Across the communicator, there was a sudden eruption of yelling, the shuttle on the holo spiralling wildly. Sasha was demanding a clear response from the screaming communicator.
Mark came over the channel. “Abort mission, contamination, alien threat…” His words ended in a gurgling scream, the kind that began high and ended, eventually, in a growling snarl of mortal agony. The line remained open, however, and the entire bridge crew turned to stare, mouths agape, as into the silence the faint sounds of gnawing began to echo.
Sasha shut off the feed with a shaky finger. “Captain, I…”
“I know. Arm several probes, get them to the shuttle, find out what happened and…”
Once more, attention fell to the holo display, as on it, the icon of the shuttle winked red. Sasha motioned, and the focus zoomed in. Where the shuttle had been, a spreading scatter of debris remained.
She pulled up the sidebars again.
“Right before Mark, uh, died, his authorisation codes were used to trigger an overload on the shuttle reactor. We didn’t pick up the feed in real time, they were returning after all, but all of them suffered catastrophic biological distress immediately before their lifesigns cut out. Mark was the last one alive, and severely injured when he triggered the reactor.”
Captain Van’tu shook out his lower hands with a stress-shedding gesture. “The shuttle reactor is in a sealed compartment. He had to get from his chair to the access panel and enter his code, while suffering life threatening injuries which had already killed the rest of his crew?”
“Yes, Captain. I’m sorry, I missed it, my team is still processing the data, but it looks as if the drone pilot ceased responding several minutes before the shuttle departed the wreck. At five minutes into the flight, the three junior officers began exhibiting distress, but gave no verbal alerts. Mark seems to have reacted to something that triggered a fight or flight response, but within a few seconds was exhibiting the same injury markers as the others. At the six-minute mark, he sent his warning, while moving. It appears as if the cessation of his vocalisations was not the end of his life, almost thirty seconds later his code was entered into the shuttle reactor, and it detonated.”
Captain Van’tu moved to his command chair, and sat down, lower hands grasping the armrests, upper hands folding under his chin. “Helm, chart course back to the nearest Alliance outpost, and warm up the jumpcore. Tactical, bring shields to standby and start charging the grasers, I don’t like what’s happening, and I do not want to be caught with our backs turned.”
His crew moved into action, tactical alerts bringing various stations to readiness.
“Sir! We’re receiving a communications request, uh, from the Nebula Star.”
He stared at his communications officer, who looked equally shocked.
“Please, Jen, put them through to the main holo.”
The hovering image of the wreckage that had once been a shuttle vanished, replaced by the familiar/strange image of the old bridge, and its captain.
The man was a corpse, there was no debate. The papery skin had pulled back from his eyes and teeth, his nose collapsed inwards, decades of icy coldness and baking heat as the derelict tumbled slowly from shade to sunlight had freeze dried the body, yet, it moved. The jaw flapped open, and the sticklike arms gestured against the command chair arms, clawed fingertips clicking uselessly.
“Gree. Tings. Un. Known. Vess. Sell. I. Am. Cap. Tan. Morr. Iss. Son. We. Come. In. Peace.”
The corpse in the holo quivered and twitched in some horrible mockery of life, the bared grey teeth clicking as the jaw spasmed open and closed, not, Van’tu noted, in time with the words being spoken. Inside the jaws, he also noticed, something black and shiny and segmented.
“I highly doubt you come with any sort of peace in mind, what are you really, and what did you do to the crew of the shuttle who boarded the ship you are on.”
The body twitched, a trickle of black ooze popping free from the corner of the sunken eye socket. Under the dried up eyelid, something squirmed around, curling with segmented motion, a few pointed claws poking briefly free before vanishing once more.
“I. Am. Cap. Tan. Morr. Iss. Son. We. Come. In. Peace. We. Rek. Wire. Ass. Iss. Tan. Sse. Let. Uss. Board.”
An alert flashed from Sashas direction. A gesture diminished Captain Morrison to a corner of the holo and expanded the view of the derelict. Two shuttles of archaic design had just launched from it and begun making their way towards the Mandrake. He muted his pickup and turned to his tactical officer.
“Jeff? They do not get close enough to board.”
“Aye aye sir, tracking has them locked and my grazers are charged.”
“Very good.”
He returned to the holo and reopened the grisly view of the dead man being puppeted on his display.
“You will not be permitted to board my ship. I demand to know who you are, what you represent, and why you are trying to impersonate Captain Morrison.”
“You. Are. Food. You. Have. Use. Full. Tech. Nol. Ogy. We. Will. Take. It. We. Will. Use. You. We. Will. Mul. Tip. Lie. This. Vess. Hell. Came. To. Us. In. Peace. We. Took. It. We. Came. For. Ter. Rah. We. Became. Trapped. We Became. Lethargic. We have waited. Now you have brought us. A new vessel to carry us. To Terra.”
Captain Van’tu shook his head. If these things were familiar with humans, they’d recognise the gesture. For the sake of understanding he’d long ago learned to at least emulate some human body language.
“You will not be allowed to go any further. I have a duty to safeguard the people under my command, and to the people of… Terra.” Whatever this species was, it was not something he wanted anywhere near a colony or, worse, defenceless homeworld, of any of the Allied or friendly species he knew lay between here and Terra herself. Best for all they only had Terra in mind.
“Sir! The incoming shuttles are not going for docking, they’re on a ramming approach! Firing solution lost on bogey one!”
The Mandrakes grazers were firing, gunnery crews managing their weapons as they tracked automatically and fired, spearing one of the wildly corkscrewing shuttles with lances of gravitationally focused gamma radiation. The second shuttle however spun, and fell downwards, smashing into the still warming shields, and through, impacting the Mandrakes hull with tremendous speed.
The scouting vessel shuddered. The shuttle had breached through the outer hull and spilled into a mess area.
Thanks to the alert condition, all crew had been in skinsuits, not that this helped the two cooks who had been finishing off the lockdown of the mess kitchen.
Fresh alerts sounded, the sound of which sent crewpeople to arms lockers. Mandrake had been boarded.
Captain Van’tu pointed to his tactical officer. “Destroy that wreck! vaporise it!”
“Sir! Weapons are offline, on-mount crews are reporting power losses.”
Across the bridge, the communications officer looked up. “Reports coming in, boarders are breaking out of mess two!”
The captain snarled. Ancient Garaboosians had warded off predators with that sound, and his teeth bared in an animalistic threat display. He slammed a finger into the appropriate button on his armrest.
“All hands, all hands, defence stations, repel boarders!”
His head snapped around. “Sasha, do we still have telemetry from the drone on the Nebula? If so, I want it to shut that shitheap down, or overload its reactors!”
His science officer acknowledged with an “Aye captain!” and turned to her console.
He returned to his holo. Removed the mute. “You have attacked an Alliance of Free Stars vessel, while using a Terran Alliance vessel reported lost to causes unknown. I am hereby declaring you to be pirates, and you will be treated accordingly. Surrender now and you will be returned to your government or homeworld after serving a prison term to be determined by Admiralty courts.”
He did not expect the thing pretending to be Captain Morrison to surrender.
“There will be no surrender. We will take all you have and all you are. You will be ours to consume and use.”
His tactical alert flashed, somehow, the older ship was charging its weapons systems. He flicked a gesture, and the old vessels appeared, with sidebars. The weapons were underpowered, and normally not really a threat to a modern vessel, but the Mandrake had just been rammed by a shuttle, cutting power to her own weapons, and disrupting her shields, it would take several more minutes to regenerate them.
He glared at the grinning visage of the corpse which was still mimicking life. The left arm was still quivering against the rest, fingertips drumming against a keypad almost identical to his own. From the bottom of the sunken belly of the dead man, a slowly undulating shape crawled, a thick-pincered head, followed by a segmented body flowing with sharp-tipped clawlike legs. It moved upwards and climbed back in through Morrisons throat.
“Captain, boarders have been destroyed. Sir, they were humans, but they were dead. Like mummies. They had some kinds of bugs inside, we had to go in with plasma to clear them out.”
“I see. Ensure all the bulkhead seals around the messhall compartment are still green, and pull everyone back, full medical scans on exit. Once everyone is clear, blow the compartment.”
“Uh, yes, sir, understood. Engineering teams are saying they’ll have full weapons restored in eight minutes.”
“Good. We can’t allow any of these things to get back to inhabited space. I want that wreck vaporised. Mess compartment too.”
He continued to watch the dead mans fingers rattle against the old command chair. And nodded.
“Captain Morrison, it has been an honour. Captain Van’Tu, out.”
In the holo, the corpse finally went still. The creatures which had inhabited him began to swarm, black blood and ichor bursting from his skull as the mother of the monsters which had ridden his body and his ship since they had tricked their way aboard a century before, burst free from her manipulating, feeding grasp in his skull.
“Captain, the drone has fully copied the Nebula Stars database, but is unable to access any critical systems. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay Sasha. When we have weapons available, we’ll finish whatever is left.”
“Sir? I don’t understand what…”
The holo tank cut her off. The Nebula Star had fired its engines, angling towards an intercept with the Mandrake, it needed to be much closer to engage with its much more primitive weapons. As the engines flared to life, fire blossomed across the aft hull. Multiple explosions rippled through it, billowing outwards from within, as the reawakened fusion reactors, initially stirred to life by the probes batteries, then by crawling undead crew hidden in the ships dead spaces, all overloaded, and detonated in a final orgy of self-annihilation.
There was a shudder again, as the Mandrakes crew activated the emergency charges that blew an entire section of the ship into space, carrying with it the bodies of dozens of the Nebula Stars crew, hundreds of incinerated and still crawling parasitic alien monsters, and the corpses of two unfortunate cooks.
“Begin sweeping everything in range with fire, maximum power and aperture, everything must burn. I want medical and bio survey teams going around the clock scanning for any trace of those things that might have breached containment. For the record, I will be recommending the Mandrake be scuttled once all crew are cleared and disembarked. Needless to say, we will not be making any landfall or station docks before then.”
He sat down in his command chair. He couldn’t remember standing up. He stared down at his armrest, and the keypad on it. With the fingers of his bottom left hand, he began typing, sending the results to the main holo where Sasha watched, curious.
||ENMY HMWRLD r41429.135 i334451 b-1.791 KILL BURN QURTN||
The rest of the sequence was the override code that would trigger the Nebula Star to overload its powerplants and blow itself to pieces before it could be used against its creators.
“Captain? How did you get that message? The log entries are still being processed, but it doesn’t look like anything coherent survived, there’s no co-ordinates in them.” Sasha was confused, and Captain Van’Tu smiled.
“Humans, you’re all the same when it comes down to the wire. Mark blew his shuttle rather than let it dock with those things on board. Even while they ate him alive, he crawled through his command, to do his duty to his species, and to the galaxy. Captain Morrison held off death, kept those things guessing, somehow, as they tried to use him, his ship, to reach Earth, made them keep him in some sort of horrific half-life, until they were distracted enough that he could get back control of his hand. His chair Sasha, same as mine. Probably came out of the same factory, a century apart, and he was typing, while they tried to speak to us, while they tried to board us, shoot us, while we distracted them, he set them up to give us the knowledge he knew we would need to ensure they would never threaten anyone again.”
Fire was still blossoming across the larger area of the holo display, graser weapons detonating fragments of hull with nuclear fire.
“Once we’ve cleared the skies here, we head to an outpost, and start warning the Admiralty. Jobs not over until these things are completely contained.”
***
103 Years, 4 months, 5 days before.
Jack staggered, his leg still bleeding from where a crewman had slashed at him with fingers broken into sharp bone claws. He’d stamped the mans head until the skull popped, rupturing the centipede thing curled inside. He was close. The familiar, once comforting hallways of the Nebula Star had become nightmarish, red lighting and blotches of gore, streaks of blood on the pristine walls, he was living in a horror game, but he had a job to finish.
He pushed off the wall he’d leant against. Behind him, he could hear screaming, and begging. He didn’t stop. It was a trick. They found the noises amusing, and mimicked them, discovering that it could draw in ‘helpers’ they could ambush.
Aft section, frame fourteen, jumpcore bay. He slapped the button, and fell through the door as it slid open. Inside, the bay was immaculate, no-one had been in here since this had started. How they had gotten aboard, he didn’t know.
Inside the skull of a landing team member, he could guess.
He knelt beside the humming machinery. His vision was going grey around the edges, he could feel dripping around his knees, he was kneeling in a pool of his own blood after only a few seconds, he didn’t have long.
He pushed his burden against the drive casing, the chem-catalyst agent on the back bonding it to the drive with a molecular weld.
He pressed the keypad of the emergency c4 cannister, the detonator arming with a beep, and a green telltale.
He typed in a code, short, sweet, he’d forgotten it by the time he reached the end, it didn’t matter. The disarm code was only for when you wanted to be able to stop the countdown. Ten seconds.
They reached him, before it finished counting. Inside his brain, they couldn’t find the code to stop the bomb.
The Nebula Star would not reach Terra, he made sure of that.
As the jumpcore failed, blowing a ragged hole out of the sleek hull, a single shuttle spun away from the boatbay, damaged, lifeless, cold and drifting outwards into the depths of space, the mutilated human corpse within stirring once with scurrying life, then going still.