Lost Ships of The Deep!
The Yuzo vanished from the Errant Vineyard decades ago, never to be seen again. 10 years earlier, the legendary battleship Eternal Tuning Fork had sent out ten different distress calls before running silent forever. Sailing the black has always been a dicey proposition; all manner of things could and have gone wrong for even the most experienced. However, sometimes, a ship vanishes via means that can't be easily explained: the Yuzo and the Eternal Tuning Fork headline tonight's top 10 Lost Ships that need A Closer Look.
-A Closer Look with Con Vell
The Philosopher's Rift was first publically discovered almost 100 years ago by Captain Ron Baker. It was ultimately an accident, and while he subsequently tried to change that narrative, he had little success doing so. The story goes that he had been attempting to test a supercharged bleed engine he had made himself. He was infamous in his home colony for mechanical tinkering and held the unveiling of the invention over everyone’s head like a guillotine. Regardless, his experiment failed spectacularly; he jumped thirty thousand light-years off course and ended up in the Rift.
He was paid handsomely by the cartographic companies for his discovery, but when he was informed he would have gotten more with a complete system map, he attempted multiple trips back. All were failures, especially the last one; that was fatal. Ron Baker immortalized on every galactic map since then and blessed with a big bold “Discovered by:” tag featuring his name, finally had everything he wanted. Finally, everyone would know his name.
For a long time, travel to the Rift was prohibitively expensive. Some engines lacked the fuel reserves even to make the trip. Essentially it became a journey for the hardiest of explorers, kind of a rite of passage; something you just had to do if you fancied yourself as one. It took multiple jumps because you had to stop and scoop fuel often. So, if you just had to come out here, bring snacks, entertainment, and anything you could think of because it would take a while.
Corina felt this in her soul. When the Huffman finally burst out of bleedspace and into the real, she wanted to jump for joy. Sam had said nothing to her the entire trip, and it wasn’t like Corina didn’t try. She didn’t want to push, but she tried.
Corina had the helmet on and checked the date; they’d been flying for six months. Six months without so much as a word breathed at each other was madness. The tension was thick in the cabin, so thick the oxygen could barely cycle in and out. Sam passed much of the time in VR training modes, as there was a helmet back there that simulated emergencies and how to handle them. They both stayed productive in the face of the silence. Corina walked around the ship performing routine maintenance. She was rusty but enjoyed it. They say most pilots should be intimately familiar with their boats, and she had neglected this aspect for far too long.
She excelled at being a ship's mechanic; it was how she used to pay her way back when she was an anonymous vagrant hopping from colony to colony. Corina aced the old aptitude test when she was a kid, determining that she got on well with machines. Well, most machines, anyway. The previously mentioned King Robo was another story entirely.
Corina used the trip time to immerse herself into the ship's systems fully and pushed away all the negative vibes that had filled the interior. Sometimes she would wonder if Sam even remembered what he was mad at, but then they’d share an accidental glance she’d instantly find out that he ultimately did.
Corina understood the anger. She did. And she loathed to make such choices for her fellow OHs; this cure was her line in the sand. Hearing that a sample of it still existed pushed her over the edge. But she didn’t know Sam, and she didn’t know his circumstances beyond what little he felt like uttering. It was wrong to not only do that but to do it in front of him, and she knew that. But this was her blind spot; every self-admonishment came with a litany of justifications.
She thought I should apologize, but sometimes she was stupid and too stubborn for her own good. Stubbornness was good when it came to a fistfight with giant squid creatures that walked on land (true story). For interpersonal relationships? She was working on it. Corina felt so ridiculous. Sam was a kid; it shouldn’t be hard to be an adult and the bigger person. Sam could do what he liked, perks of being a teenager; she didn’t need to feed it.
Corina felt Sam shuffling behind her and making his way up to the passenger seat. It was the first time he had done so since they left. He sat down and leaned forward in his chair, squinted hard like he could see anything out there with his naked eye. With the helmet on, Corina set to play the game of Spot the Signal, just like before.
“Would you like to look for it?” Corina said, her voice shot through the silence like a thunderclap. Sam flinched at it but ultimately played it off as no big deal. He didn’t say anything back for a minute or two, but then:
“I guess.”
Corina slowly pulled the thing off her head, it loosened strands on her head, and they hung there like wisps. The cable connected to the helmet was stretchable enough to reach Sam’s side of the cabin. She held it out toward him. He leaned over without looking and held his hand open; she dropped the helmet into it.
He put the thing on, and she watched his hands mess with the controls on his chair. He looked comfortable doing so, probably all the video games. She winced at the thought; what am I? An old lady?
“He said it was a space station, right?” He asked.
Corina was shocked by this, not expecting a conversation. She was sitting there thinking of something to say and lost her train of thought. “Uh—what?” She sputtered out and felt like an idiot.
“Never mind.”
She leaned back in her chair and focused on piloting the ship. She ticked up the throttle bar with her fingertip, and instantly the boat hummed against the vacuum of space. If it weren’t for the UI on her window, she’d have no idea she was moving fast at all. Horizontal lines rushed at her from beyond the screen while a way point marking the neutron star had a light-second countdown that was also decreasing rapidly. Twinkling stellar objects made up the intergalactic backdrop, while the orange bands that made up the milky-way split the black like soundwaves on an equalizer. She didn’t want to get too close to the star; the gravity well was immense and could crush them easily.
The star burned a bright bluish-white and was ejecting matter in a slithering pattern out of either side of it. Corina rolled the Huffman to her right to orient the ejecting cones to her north and south. The intense light cast hard shadows across the ship's sharp edges that cut across their faces. A preliminary scan only showed one stellar body in the system, the star itself.
Corina hoped that a deeper scan would reveal more; otherwise, they came all this way for nothing. Someone had been to this specific system in the Rift before; that much was certain, just by cartographers. So if some space station were here, surely it would be in the record too? Which would prove or disprove weather the Urgineer was a myth or not. Now Corina’s head hurt, and her heart. If nothing was here, what was she going to do? And what about poor Roxanne? She thought.
Thinking about the Urgineer made her wonder why Sam was still with her. He could have asked off at any point; she had expected it. Mainly, the further out they got meant less occupied space and more of the final frontier. She raised a finger and attempted to ask, but he cut her off.
“I think I got…something.”
“You think?”
“It’s…kind of like what I’m not seeing.” He said. “If that makes any sense.”
“It definitely does not.”
Sam wanted to roll his eyes but didn’t see the point; it wasn’t like she could see it. “Hm, how to put this?” he pursed his lips. “So, like, at first, I got nothing but the star, right?”
“Okay.”
“Which was, whatever,” he continued. “But I started thinking: where would I hide if I didn’t want to be found around here? The neutron star, right?”
“Uh, sure.”
“So I’m cycling through all wavelengths, and there’s just nothing out there, okay? And that’s expected, y’know, if nothing was out here, but something is. That star. It should be the loudest thing here, but,”
“Nothing?”
“Zip.”
“Okay, but,“ Corina started. “The AI picked it up already. I saw it on the prelim.”
“Of course it did,” Sam replied. “It’s a big bright and extremely dense star ejecting degenerate matter. It better pick up something like that with a visual scan, or else I’d think it was broken.”
“But it’d still give off a signal?”
“Right, and there’s nothing,” Sam replied. “I figure that for something to be docked very close to a star probably has a mighty shield. Such a thing is probably giving off massive amounts of energy, and that energy is possibly blocking out the radio signal.”
“Okay, but so can you find it?”
“What like the exact location?” Corina nodded to his question. “I don’t think so?”
“Well, we can’t exactly fly very close to search for it.” She opined.
“Maybe you can?”
“Excuse me?”
“Lady Steel can do anything; isn’t that how it goes?”
Corina studied his face. He was serious. She wondered if she could actually do that and what it would mean if she could. She wasn’t very interested in that kind of experiment. “And so what if I could? What about you?”
“I’d stay with the ship.”
“Oh no,” Corina said while swiping her hands in either direction. “I’m not trusting you with the ship. You’d leave me behind or fly it into that star.”
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“Like you care.”
Corina shifted to face him and pointed a finger. She was about to let him have it when a voice broke in on their COMMs.
STATE YOUR BUSINESS.
Corina blinked at the silence that followed. She turned her head slowly to look at her screen. Someone or something was definitely on the line. She glanced back at Sam. He had leaned over to her side of the cabin; his eyes met hers, and he shrugged.
“…We’re looking for the Urgineer.” She said, not taking her eyes off Sam. The silence stretched further for what felt like 20 minutes.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING.
The COMM cut with a shriek. A black dot emerged from the star and grew larger every light second. Corina felt her heart attempt to heave itself free from her ribcage, grabbed hold of her chair, and fingered the throttle.
“Strap in!” she said before she slid it to the maximum. Both of them pressed into the chairs as the G’s kicked in. Corina swiped a screen onto her window; it was a real-time feed outside the ship. The star was behind them, and so was something else. It was huge, like a giant serpent, a twisting shadow that danced across the glow from the star. Parts of it glinted against the light, revealing a metallic sheen, but it moved like an organic monster.
The silhouette continued to grow.
Corina looked down at her controls; she was at max speed. She looked at Sam, his eyes were locked forward, and he clung to his arm rests. She could bleedjump out of here; it was the smart thing to do. But they were so close to finding something. Escaping couldn’t be an option anymore. Corina gritted her teeth when a mammoth shadow cast across the windows.
The machine finally overtook the little ship. This close, the machine-serpent was almost ten times its size. Each moving part of the machine shifted as it started wrapping itself around the Huffman, like scales moving and fluctuating on a snake. The Huffman's edges sparked against the coil's weight, crunched, and exploded with barely any effort at all.
*
Corina floated in the distance. The machine’s mass had dwarfed them; it felt like a wall between them in the middle of space. They had barely gotten out of the escape hatch. It was taking every last second for Sam to get his space suit back on. He was panicking and screaming; Corina had to yell at him to use his powers, or she’d leave him here. She didn’t mean it, but it worked and bought him the time to get the suit on.
They escaped before the last bit of give from the Huffman surrendered to external pressures. Seeing the ship crush and implode forced a tightness in Corina’s heart; RIP, old friend. Corina tried to look up at the machine, but that was impossible in all this darkness. Sam clung to her shoulder to keep from floating away and tapped her on the helmet.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I see something up there.”
Corina tried to follow where he was pointing but couldn’t see whatever he did. She gave a little push mentally and floated upward toward the machine. Corina scanned the surface as they passed, looking for anything to get a grip on. There, she spotted a split in the massive scale. Corina grabbed one end to stop their momentum, then grabbed the other with her opposite hand. She pulled.
The metal buckled and presumably groaned under her pressure, giving way to a small opening. Air rushed out from inside while Corina dug her fingers further. She pulled her hands apart, and the hull went with it like tissue paper; a force of escaping atmosphere met her. She dove in, landed hard on her hands, and Sam lost his grip on her back. He careened into the nearby wall.
They were in a hallway of some sort. Corina looked to her left and saw a large, heavy door slide down from the ceiling; it was cutting off the rest of the machine from the airlock breach. Behind her, the hole had begun self-repairing but not in any way recognized. The metal body rebuilt itself step by step like muscle and ligament flowing onto a bare skeleton. It felt alive and strange and moved organically.
Corina was used to swarms of Nano-machines flowing onto distressed items and rebuilding them alloy by alloy, but this took the cake. Once completed, the metal door slid open again with a loud chunking sound reverberating with the atmosphere restored. Corina looked to her top right peripheral vision and saw that the oxygen levels were acceptable, and she removed her helmet; it slid open and folded inside the suit. She walked over to Sam and offered her hand; he took it and stood up.
“I’d say it knows we’re here,” she told him. He just nodded and removed his helmet. Corina cautiously looked around and pulled out a small device from her belt: it was a personal recorder she kept on her for times like this. She has been through a lot in her time; seen a lot; done a lot. But this? A giant snake-like machine that moved and healed itself like a living organism? That was going in the memoirs, for sure. She pressed her finger to the glass front panel and placed the object on her belt.
“Where to?” Sam asked before having his helmet retract. Corina pointed ahead of them, as it was the only direction to go. She told herself she was being sincere about it. The hall was hexagonal shaped and stretched forward for what looked like miles. It was well-lit, too. A yellow light fixture hung above them and repeated every five rows of slats. The walls had visible cabling that looked like organic veins underneath translucent skin. Did the hall travel the entire length of the machine in total? Were they twisting in every way while the artificial gravity helped maintain the illusion that they weren’t? The hairs on the back of Corina’s neck shifted uncomfortably.
“I sure hope there’s—like—a ship here or something we can use,” Sam said, breaking the silence.
Corina nodded but added: “Well, maybe we can steal this thing?”
“Know how to pilot serpent machines now, do you?” Sam said sarcastically. “Guess you really can do anything.”
“Damn right,” she replied, using bravado to mask her nervousness. Being on a strange, seemingly alien vessel tended to do that to her. For all her might and power, there existed things out there that could kill her. After all, an alien brute was strong enough to beat her brother to death. And while she got her revenge, even Lady Steel wasn’t immune to the possibility of something bigger and badder out there waiting to punch her ticket. This machine, or whoever piloted it, could be that one-in-a-million. A metallic groan echoed around them, forcing Sam and Corina to pause.
You don’t belong here.
The voice tickled both of their spines. The hallway before them suddenly shifted and shot upward at a perfect 90-degree angle. Corina cranked her neck upward to look; all the lights were off. A black gaping maw now hovered above her with a tiny light at the end. It was getting bigger.
Thinking quickly, Corina shoved Sam behind her. Her eyes grew violet and pulsed as she concentrated. A silent explosion pushed all the air aside, followed by a purple light that cut through the artificial oxygen. The beam pierced the oncoming light but bounced over it like a stream of water against a solid object. Plasma embers collided with the wall while the ball of light glowed twice as bright where her plasma vision struck.
“Great,” She uttered before crouching slightly and pushing off like a rocket toward the light.
As she got closer, she could feel the heat from the light, and her skin started to sting. She could see that this wasn’t a ball of energy at all; it was a perfect spheroid pumping out heat at an accelerated rate, the purpose of which escaped her. Lady Steel and the spheroid collided, the force from the impact momentarily caused the outer walls to bulge out, but they quickly fixed themselves.
The sphere was so dense that it continued its momentum and forced Corina to drop down the shaft. The thing sat on her chest; it felt like her chest cavity was about to shatter into pieces. The sphere was barely the size of a basketball, yet it felt like the heaviest thing in the galaxy. She glanced behind her with gritted teeth; the floor was rushing toward her. The jury was still out on whether she’d end up a smear, but she wasn’t a fan of the odds.
Suddenly she got that feeling on the back of her neck. In her peripheral vision, Corina caught a glimpse of Sam seconds before grabbing her by the collar of her space suit and pulling her out from under the sphere as it hung like a useless disco ball. The heat it had been ejecting was barely a puff of smoke, but the minute she had gotten clear, standard time had resumed, and the ball slammed through the hull and caused another oxygen evacuation. Both of their helmets slapped back on immediately. Sam, yanked by the sudden decompression, still had a solid grip on her collar and dangled there screaming because his arm had popped out of its socket. Corina had dug her hands into the soft fleshy metal floor and hung on for dear life as the skin off her cheeks flapped forward uncontrollably.
Her muscles tensed and bulged through the thick material of the space suit. Sam had been unable to hang on to her collar, his fingers gave way, and he now slid further down her body. A last-ditch grab of her belt kept him from spaghettifying through the volleyball-sized hole. Corina waited for the wall to repair itself just like before, but it didn’t. The machine wanted them out, and it had all the time in the world. There was a good chance she could hold on indefinitely, but that did not ring true for Sam. He had seconds at most.
It was time to be proactive.
Corina grabbed a more secure hold with her right hand, which spitefully slackened on its own but only just. She let go of the floor with her left, and it snapped back violently, but nothing broke. She reached behind, grabbed Sam by his chest piece, and gave him enough leverage to climb on her back. He tightly wrapped his arms around her shoulders and pressed flat against her back. The metal had loosened further, but she was ready.
She let go.
Lady Steel floated there for a micro-second. Sam tried to use his powers, but his anxiety was through the roof; he couldn’t keep it up. He wasn’t strong enough. In an instant, her feet collided with the outer wall setting off a thunderclap. Air visibly funneled between her legs, and through gritted teeth, her knees buckled. Sinews burst in her neck as she gazed upward back through the 90-degree hallway. In the distance, the other end was irising shut. She grunted and allowed the suction to crouch her down just a little further.
Corina pumped her legs and burst free from the wall in one powerful motion. Her natural propulsion took over at this point, and she cut through the corridor like a bullet. She rose through the opening and landed with the now-closed door under her. The impact from her boots onto the solid surface echoed around them both.
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Corina collapsed to one knee while Sam slid off her back like a stream of water. Her chest expanded and decompressed rapidly; it was a fear response. She wasn’t in danger of running out of air in her suit, but she had held her breath anyway. Sam lay motionless on the ground, blinking rapidly at the ceiling, wondering just how he got here.
Corina glanced up. They were in a domed structure, a hollowed-out cave with jagged grooves running across the ceiling. The floor was a collage of veiny cables feeding into and out of one other like cracks in the pavement. Window screens to the outside wrapped around the walls; out there was the neutron star. The degenerate matter was a waterfall of blue and white gas and photons.
Before the front window was a horseshoe-shaped console, lights blinked at odd intervals all over it while various pads and screens dotted its landscape with alien symbols flying across them. Within the horseshoe, facing the curve, was a solid black elongated oblong blob. Corina thought it looked like a chaise lounge but wrapped up in that same fleshy metallic sheen throughout the interior. A teardrop-shaped head protruded at the top, encased in metallic flesh. The veins from the floor rose and connected to the chair; haphazard and disjointed, done with little care. The metallic skin slowly expanded and contracted as if breathing.
Corina was sure this thing would haunt her for as long as she lived.
She stepped forward cautiously, and the entire structure clicked and moved. Both chair and head slowly turned toward her direction, and she froze. Behind her, Sam was up on one knee and hung his elbow off that, utterly stunned. Wires poked out the head like a pin cushion while large bulbous wet green eyes blinked back at them. Like air sucked through a straw, a loud hiss filled the room.
Then it spoke: Persistent. Again the loud hiss filled the room. Corina realized that the creature was taking a deep breath.
Speak.
Corina looked back at Sam, who was still wide-eyed and stiff. “You’re the Urgineer?” She asked.
That is why you are here.
“I’ve been told you might be one of The Four.” The loud hiss again, longer this time. Lights on its body flash off and on with reckless abandon.
Tall tales.
“Right,” Corina said. Her helmet snapped off her with a thought, and she took another step forward. She kept her hands up, which was usually a sign of peace. Usually. “There’s a tall tale out there; a race of people, the Uzrath, that made impossible technology as easy as you or I breathe.”
Silence. She continued, “And there’s you.” She took another few steps and pointed her index finger at the creature. “They say you make impossible weapons.”
The Urgineer’s hiss filled the room once more: The point.
“I need to find the former home sector of the Uzrath.”
Why.
“I believe my friend is there,” Corina replied. “She wields the Cyntaff. Do you know what that is?” It was her last card to play. It carried weight out among other species; she knew that.
There was silence again. Another hiss this time, a different kind. More like air escaping from an inflatable. The chair cracked in half, and vapor spilled out. It wafted around Corina, forcing her to close her eyes and shield her mouth. When it all cleared, there stood The Urgineer. Humanoid; broad torso; nearly rail thin at the arms; claws with an opposable thumb; insectile.
“I do.”
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