Solar Flare prevents interstellar war!
BREAKING—This just came across my little desk. I’ll label this as “News From The Bubble’s Edge”*screams off camera* What? I’ll call it whatever I want! Anywho, new-ish hero Solar Flare is reported to have been instrumental in quelling tensions between the human colonists of Raven V and their local stellar neighbors. I cant pronounce that, so I won't even try. But you know it's these guys *shows a picture* Those cute little rascals, who knew their teeth were so sharp? *screams off screen again* What? I already said I wasn’t going to try!
-From Mister Toddie’s News Desk
Issue One
Serendipity Knocks
The edges of our galaxy were a lonely place. Very few ship captains ventured here. As stars become few and far between, a dark universe becomes much darker; it can play with one's head. Captain Jim Maddow wasn’t one of these people. He went everywhere, often searching for that next big score. Maddow was a thick man with a full brown beard meticulously kept in line with no stray strands on his face. He was 50 years old and had kept up with the same grooming routine since he was discharged from the Izanami Central Space Command about 20 years ago.
“Other than honorable discharge,” they told him. He had a scrap with a commanding officer, and the guy earned it.
His ship, The Serendipity, was an unattractive bucket of bolts and plasteel, but it ran like a dream. He always ensured his ship had the best and was worked on by the best, but he cared little for contrivances such as aesthetics and looking fit for travel. It got the job done, and that was enough.
Captain Maddow was in his quarters studying star charts with his brow furrowed; he was annoyed. Finding salvage was supposed to be easy. A contact had keyed him onto a derelict ship spotted in passing by a drone, a so-called ghost ship. What the drone was doing out here was anyone’s guess, as most trading routes tended to avoid this section of the galaxy like the plague. Maddow never paid that stuff any mind; most space sectors had many tall tales and legends that never stopped others from going there, but this was different.
Everyone avoided the entire area to be safe.
Still, these were the proper coordinates; he was sure of that now. And no sight of a ship. Maddow leaned over his console and furrowed his brow further. The glow from the screen cast shadows across his leathery bronze skin like jagged rocks.
His quarters had a round layout, complete with a stand-up hibernation chamber for long trips and—by far its most comfortable amenity—a lavish leather chair that ergonomically molded to his body. They’d have to try and find this ghost ship the hard way, and he wasn’t very much looking forward to that. With most of his sensors damaged during their last mission, his engineer, JV, had spent most of this recent trip in the engine room trying to fix them.
Maddow pressed his finger into the view screen, brought up the COMM system, and spoke, “What’s the status on our scanners?”
A window blinked on the screen, and a young woman appeared within the borders. She had a round face with freckles painted on each cheek like a starry backdrop. The top of her head was freshly shaven, smooth, and completely shiny all around. Various cables and wires stuck to the sides of her head and spread every which way. She blinked once before grimacing at the camera.
“I have no freakin’ idea what to do, Cap,” she lamented.
Maddow sighed, “What does that mean?”
“The stupid OS just keeps freakin’ rebooting itself every time I start the damn thing up, and I swear, I’m going to go crazy.” Maddow stared at JV. He didn’t need this right now.
“Have you turned it off and on?” he deadpanned.
“Ha-Ha,” she answered; he thinks he’s funny. A grimace flashed across JV’s face like she had been electrically shocked. “FINALLY,” she let out. “Good to go, Captain,” she told Maddow and winked off the screen.
Satisfied, Maddow tapped the screen and stood up straight. He waved a hand over the thin monitor and watched it slide back into the wall. The main door to his quarters slid upward behind him; he casually turned to face it and walked out. The ship's insides resembled something more akin to a sewer system or steel plant; all rough edges and obvious machinery.
When it came to ships, most of the time, it was typically a you get what you pay for situation. The Serendipity came from modest beginnings as a Junker found for pennies on the dollar. But after a little bit of some love—and shoving in a nice new Bleedengine in there—it was a fine ship for doing what they did for a living. When you lived out in the black, it was anything for a credit, and his crew was no different. The Serendipity was maneuverable enough for combat, too. It could also be fitted with many weapons while still being large enough to haul cargo/salvage.
The 3-person crew were jacks-of-all-trades; that’s how you survived out in the void.
Outside, The Serendipity looked like an oblong beetle and even more so when the landing gear was down. Its outer shell was also very rough-edged, lacking a coherent paint job or uniform plating of any kind. Parts of the ship were either blue, grey, or red. The front was a pair of “eyes” that were just domed cockpits, one for the captain and co-pilot.
Maddow preferred a small crew. The only other soul aboard aside from JV and himself was Haysus, his second in command by default. Haysus was an ace pilot who got tired of the rules and regulations of military life, so he quit. From there, he pretended to be a pirate for a few months; he didn’t like that much either. He tried to captain a ship of his own after that; that’s how the two met.
They were both contracted for the same job, and when Haysus’ crappy little ship got blown out of the void, Maddow gave him a lift and a place to stay. While Haysus hated the rigidity of service, he liked having a boss. Haysus sat in one of the two chairs and was messing with his holographic flight controls. Maddow emerged from behind him, the large door sliding downward while he took his place in the other chair.
As he sat down, his entire bubble came to life with status indicators and other notices that he promptly swiped away with a gesture. Haysus looked over at his captain and simply nodded his head in acknowledgment coolly. He was a skinny guy who looked leaner in the too-big grey flight suit. His dark hair was greasy and unkempt; he’d gotten lazy since the service when it came to his appearance. Haysus was covered in an 8 o’clock shadow, making his face appear much smaller than it was.
“What’s going on, boss?” He uttered as he shifted in his seat. Maddow didn’t say anything in response. He continued messing about with his display, fine-tuning some of the details that flashed across his numerous screens. Then, finally:
“Sensors came back up. I think we got it.”
“Oh Yeah?”
Maddow swiped some info to his partner's display. It was real-time footage of a derelict ship floating out in the black; a colossal box-like race car with wheels replaced by wings and large gun cannons. In a low power state, it was barely visible. The vessel floated there lifelessly like an interstellar casket.
“Yeah,” was all Maddow had to say back.
“So what’s the deal with this thing, anyway?” Haysus asked. Maddow glanced over at Haysus and scoffed. The story behind this ship, the one he had heard, was so patently ridiculous that it was surprising he hadn’t told him already.
“That,“ he pointed in front of him, indicating his screen. “That’s the Yuzo,” he continued, but Haysus blinked back at the captain. “You’ve never heard of the Yuzo?” Maddow asked. Haysus shook his head with a simultaneous shrug, forcing Maddow to sigh heavily.
“The Yuzo was a colony ship that had disappeared into the Errant Vinyard.”
Those last two words made Haysus’ eyes perk up as he had heard of the Errant Vinyard; most military people had. It was a section of the Milky Way that most captains refused to go to, not unlike this one. If you were looking at an aerial view of a galaxy map, it was toward one of the southern spiral arms.
Scrap recovered from the Errant Vinyard had quite a reputation among the entire verse. Ships had a habit of disappearing out there; Maddow considered that it was no wonder Haysus had never heard of the Yuzo. It was one of the hundreds, perhaps even thousands. The legend of the Vinyard was enough, but sometimes, those formally lost ships returned. Haysus glanced at the screen and shuddered, most of whom had wished they hadn’t.
“You should have said this was Errant trash,” he uttered.
“C’mon, man, you know the types of credits verifiable salvage from the Vinyard gets on the open market,” Maddow said, partially ignoring him. Haysus nodded; he did. They could conceivably never have to fly again or get into a shoot-out again. Haysus wasn’t sure if he loved or hated the idea.
“But,“ he started. “What about…y’know?”
“What?”
“Y’know, what they say happens to ships that come back from the Vinyard?” Maddow let out a long, hearty laugh.
“You seriously believe that crud?” He asked, and Haysus shrugged. “It’s just stupid stories sailors tell each other and have been telling each other since we crawled out of the soup!”
“I saw some stuff on the net…,” Haysus said with little conviction. Maddow just shot him a look and shook his head. Haysus clammed up quickly, no longer interested in any kind of debate, no matter how minor.
“Hey,” Maddow started. “This is just a lost ship, okay? We’ll check it out, catalog it, and sell the location to the cartographers; we’ll make so much bank!” Haysus glanced over to his captain and smirked. Money solved anything.
“Can I come too?” Over the COMM system, it was JV.
Maddow glanced upward and grinned, “Road trip.”
***
The tiny beetle mounted the massive racecar gently. Maddow took over for maneuvers like these as he was the most experienced. They hovered within centimeters of space before he activated the magnetic locks. Anchored, the immense size of the Yuzo was readily apparent. Miles of dark surface loomed around them.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Vessels like this carried hibernating colonists, embryos in storage, and a small crew to service the ship. The legend of the Yuzo goes that, when the ship vanished, the Corpo that funded the venture took a beating on the stock market and had to downsize heavily. Maddow wasn’t even sure if the company existed anymore.
The three of them suited up. The suits were beige-colored and bulky, with pouches and machinery built into the chest area. The helmets were bulbous and reflective, enough to protect from harmful radiation. People who weren’t careful in the black ended up with their eyeballs fried within their sockets. On the inside, it was translucent with a HUD showing them their oxygen level, relative position, and a compass.
JV exited the ship first and bounded to the spot marked on her HUD: a large door marked out with “ESCAPE HATCH” printed in big, bold letters. Haysus was next, and he followed with less enthusiasm. Spacewalks were old hat to him; something about the quiet, the sound of his muffled footsteps pounding on the ground, bored him to tears. Maddow dropped out next. He sealed the hatch behind him and drifted down slowly toward the ground.
He glanced around and noted the dull yellow glow of the central star and the smattering of imperceptible white dots around it. Up ahead, past the virtual waypoint, was a massive railgun. It stood there uselessly, lacking purpose; it cast an enormous shadow on this side of the ship, making a tough job more challenging. Maddow switched to the night vision setting on his visor with a thought.
JV set up a bot over the hatch. It was an oblong sphere with four telescoping legs unfurled from within and clamped onto the door. The globe lowered closer to the door while the legs held firm. The center of the sphere got red hot. A red laser collided and liquefied the metal. The robot finished the job in 15 minutes.
Air rushed out, and each crew member shimmied into the hole with Maddow last. Once inside, he removed a small beige square from one of his chest pockets. It was moldable, and he squeezed it into the shape of a ball. He released it and watched it float toward the hole; it expanded once in contact with the oxygen. Fully formed, the substance hardened, and all was quiet.
They were in a small chamber with barely enough room to stand side by side. Three capsule-shaped escape pods looked primed and ready to be loaded onto a chute. The crew of The Serendipity stood silent while bathed in red light. Maddow broke off and stepped toward the main door; dead too. Each step he took echoed in the suit; he felt alone. Almost.
“JV, find a way to open this door manually,” he said.
“This place is giving me the creeps,” Haysus chimed in. He hugged his elbows and the wall; he couldn’t see anything except for that damn red light. Maddow rolled his eyes.
JV kneeled in front of the door and touched it. She felt she needed to make contact with any tech to fix it. To help it, as she had put it, it was her thing. Maddow wasn't sure if this made her an OH; he didn’t care. JV was the best of the best.
She unhooked a box from her belt and pulled a cable out. It was tiny in her gloved hand. Every door like this had a port for service technicians to diagnose or perform routine maintenance. She connected the cable to the port and clucked her teeth. Ancient tech in relative terms; she enjoyed the challenge.
Readings from the door flooded her visor. JV studied every bit displayed. She got lost in a sea of technical jargon and numbers. Maddow took note of this and tapped her on the shoulder.
“Well?” He asked. It snapped her out of it. All she needed was to find the emergency override, but she loved the jargon; it got her hot. JV sometimes required a little poking by Maddow to bring her back to reality.
“Okay, done,” she said as the door slid horizontally. Maddow took point, followed by JV; Haysus covered the rear. A wide hallway was hazy as dust particles clung to every surface. This ship had to be at least three decades old at this point. Maddow suddenly felt very naked and wished he had at least brought a rifle. He put on a brave face, no point in freaking out the crew too.
The hallway stretched on for miles. Every so often, a door off to either side would present something to check out, but they were powerless and sealed shut. Maddow didn’t care about those; the only thing that mattered was the main deck. The main controls would be there, and they could figure out what had happened. This ship was a gold mine; Maddow could already see the credits rolling in.
JV called up a schematic of the ship and guided them more or less. There was only so much she could do; the onboard suit AI took the schematics and displayed them on her HUD as a make-shift map. She estimated where they were, had that marked, and told it to update continuously. JV bolted on a motion tracking program onto the map and hoped that it’d never go off.
After a left turn, they came to the doors of the lift. JV again plugged her machine into the service port. “Elevator’s not here,” she said. “We’re on the 4th deck. Hibernation.”
“Do you think their bodies are still here?” Haysus wondered out loud.
“I’m not interested in seeing a bunch of corpses,” Maddow replied.
“What if they’ve been in hibernation this whole time? Most low power modes would allow for that on most ships,” JV offered up. Maddow smirked inside his helmet.
“Then we’re really going to be rich.”
There was a blip on JV’s HUD that made her squeak. Just a faint ghost on the edge of the map, and she told Maddow about it. Under the thick material of the suit, Maddow felt individual goosebumps rise on his skin. JV turned and focused on the direction of the blip. It went off again.
Behind them, maybe. It was impossible; standard colony ships had 20 floors at least, and there was nothing typical about the Yuzo. There it was again. Perhaps in one of the rooms.
“I really wish we brought weapons,” Haysus uttered, and Maddow agreed with him. He decided that finding the flight deck would be the most important thing rather than chasing after nebulous blips on JV’s scanner and made the call.
“Get this elevator open,” he hissed, and she obliged. She returned her attention to the connected box and entered an override to open the door. The door split in two and spread horizontally. In front of them was a deep shaft stretching vertically north and south. Maddow poked his head into the black; his night vision gave him perfect clarity. The elevator was on the floor below them, and its cabling stretched upward before him.
He removed a device from his belt and clamped it to the cable. He gave it a tug for good measure and saw that it held firm. A thick wire shot out from both ends of the device. The bottom string pierced the top of the elevator and bit into the metal. The forward wire traveled silently until all three heard a soft thud. Maddow tapped his wrist and listened to the machine come to life. The cables retracted, bringing the elevator to them. He stopped it at the floor below them and jumped on. Haysus followed. JV fitfully glanced behind her, and the motion detector continued to ping rapidly, making her nervous.
“Hey!” Maddow hissed. “C’mon!” She hopped on.
“There’s something alive on this ship,” she told him.
Maddow ignored her and set the device to retract. Slowly, loudly, the elevator lurched upward. Deck after deck passed until they reached the top. The beeping from the motion detector fizzled out in time; JV finally exhaled.
Maddow watched her. She looked scared. He hoped he didn’t look afraid; they needed him not to be scared. “Get this door open,” he told her.
JV unhooked the box from her belt and shined her headlamps, hoping to spot the service port. “Uh,” she breathed. Haysus looked over the edge, between the cracks. He shouldn’t have; now, he couldn’t stop thinking about it.
“What’s ‘Um’ mean, JV? Talk to me,” Maddow said, cutting through the noise.
“There’s no port on this side of the doors,” she replied. Haysus sighed loudly. It was obnoxious.
“So we gotta force it open the hard way,” he said, and Maddow grunted in agreement. Five-inch long metal prongs emerged from their fingertips as they stepped forward. Maddow went first and stabbed the spikes in the slit; Haysus followed suit, and they pulled. Time for the fun part.
Each man grunted in their suit loud enough to cause an echo, pulling. The door groaned at this insult and fought them; it was old and refused to budge. But a few inches gave way all the same. Maddow stopped and peered in with such a clunky helmet as best he could.
He saw nothing, just pure black and dust. They needed more real estate.
He signaled Haysus, and they both pulled again. The elevator whined some more in their general direction, but it fully surrendered with one final and loud screech. Maddow had the prongs retract back into the gloves and gestured toward Haysus, indicating that he would take point. Haysus knew that meant he was bringing the rear; he peered over the edge again.
Maddow lifted himself onto the floor. The flight deck presented itself in night vision. He saw three rows of consoles and monitors with hunched-over bodies handling each one. Maybe they were bodies. He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t keen to find out, either. If they were, then they were nothing but skeletons inside of spacesuits. Between these rows, at the center, was an oversized chair—the captain’s seat.
Typical for a Corpo, it was gaudy. The back was too damn high, and the seats were too damn wide. It was a chair purely for show; look at it now; caked in lifeless dust and stale odors.
“We good?” Came a voice below him. JV had peered over the lip of the floor. Maddow cursed; her headlamps were blinding.
“Turn that off, will ya?” Maddow spat, and she did. “Can’t you use NV like a normal person?”
She ignored that, “Am I good to come up?”
Maddow nodded, “Yes, come on.” He offered her a hand; she took it and pulled herself up. She dusted her suit off while Maddow reached down to assist Haysus. JV squeaked, setting both men off.
"What is it??” Maddow shouted.
“These people…,” the words trailed off her lips. Maddow looked around at all the shapes. He’d already forgotten they were there. He put a hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t look okay?” He told her. “Let’s just find the main console.”
“Do you hear that?” Haysus’ words made them all pause. It was faint at first. Breathing; labored breathing. The sound chilled Maddow down to the bone. JV visibly shivered. It followed a pattern: a long exhale followed by three stuttered inhales. There was a brief minute-long pause before starting again.
It was coming from the captain’s chair. Maddow was the only one who made any sort of move in that direction. Haysus stood frozen in place, arms at his side, while JV started inching away from the shapes at the consoles, suddenly concerned that they, too, would begin breathing.
Maddow approached the chair carefully, not sure he should even touch it. The breathing pattern repeated itself and was definitely coming from this chair. Maddow gulped down something hard, possibly the last of his courage. He wished again that he had brought a gun, stupid stupid stupid, he chanted to himself like a mantra.
He walked around the chair, again greeted by breathing. He saw what sat in it and something rushed up in his throat that was impossible to keep down this time. Some bile escaped his lips and splatted against the translucent glass of his helmet.
In the chair sat a man.
Or what’s left of a man? Chair and man partially melded, the tech now exposed and sewn onto his body parts with little to no care. Wires hung helplessly from his skin while thick cables ran up and down, in and around his entire body. All of them fed back into the chair.
His arms and fingers were fused into the armrests and burned like melted plastic. Thicker wiring protruded from the hand bones and up and through his skin. A metered light glowed and dimmed on his chest with every breath he took. Somehow it had no mouth. Somehow it had just one eye.
It stared at Maddow. A beady little bloodshot marble. It never took its gaze off him. The eyelids were long gone. Maddow hunched over and slapped a button on his chest. He didn’t trust the O2 meter on his HUD—cheap aftermarket parts—so taking the helmet off was not an option; the smell needed to go. His vision fogged up while scents pumped inside of his helmet. It was lipstick on crap, but it would do.
JV and Haysus rushed over and caught sight of the thing in the chair. JV let out a small gasp, but her curiosity over how this monstrosity worked overruled any fear she was experiencing. It read to her like some bio-mechanical surgeon had run amok, high on their own supply and playing god. Still, this was beyond any such sort she had ever seen. Haysus stayed even-keeled. He was already so freaked out that it was whatever at this point.
Maddow stood just in time to catch JV with her hands inches away from the horror. He lunged for her and grabbed her by the wrist. “What’s wrong with you?” He spat. She was caught off guard by this and snatched her wrist back; she said nothing.
“Don’t touch that…thing,” he continued. JV looked at him, concerned. He looked pale, like he’d seen a ghost.
“Should we activate the chair?” She asked. The thing kept on breathing as if it didn’t hear her. Maddow wasn’t sure if they should even be looking at it, let alone touch it. The way to get control of this ship was right in that chair, but that thing was the chair. He felt paralyzed by indecision. JV continued to study it, the lone eye never not focusing on her. The breathing increased the longer she stared.
If only she could touch it…
Her wrist got snatched again.
“What did I say?” Maddow breathed. She turned to him again, not snatching her hand back this time. She wanted to say something. Maybe tell him that he’s being ridiculous, but the words are stuck in her throat. A blip went off in her peripheral vision; the motion detector. An unholy wail erupted from the elevator shaft. A bubbling-like sound soon followed, and the three explorers suddenly huddled together.
Maddow stepped in front of them both. Something rose from the shaft, a large shadow of flesh and machinery fused in a forge as hot as ten thousand suns. It had no natural face, but a discerning eye could see what made up most of its mass: hibernation chambers, body parts, and pieces of hull. This mass had no arms; it was a snake-like construction, gurgling, bubbling, and pulsating in-between bits of metal, ceramic, and wire.
The man in the chair's irises went wide as saucers. He shifted in the seat unnaturally while lights blinked at odd intervals across his body. The flesh snake slithered around the captain’s chair before stopping and towering over JV. She screamed. The flesh snake reared back.
A scratchy sound emanated from within the man-chair. It sounded like a voice, hoarse like it had swallowed glass and gargled anti-matter.
“Kill…...us…..”
The serpent gurgled and pulsated some more, and an eye emerged from the blunt-looking end of it that could only charitably qualify as its head. This eye, bloodshot like the one belonging to the man in the chair, just stared at JV, iris growing ever wider.
Like a black hole, it swallowed.
It swallowed them all up.