“What happened? Collision?” I called out.
“A missile impact, starboard side... I think Joe...”
“My ship's gone, my connection was severed.” Joe shook his head, his eyes doing a weird dimming and reigniting several times. “Sorry, it's like suddenly losing seven of your senses all at once while someone is applying a red hot brand to the back of your eyeballs. Bait, what's happening?”
“We're taking fire, I'm fielding it, my point defense turrets are holding off the missile barrage now that I know where it's coming from... looks like 25 degrees out of the ecliptic, 230 degrees spinward.”
“They burned up out of the system's plane to avoid focused scan, pirates almost definitely. Bait! We need to get gone, you mind taking on some guests?”
“All aboard!” Shouted Bait, climbing to her feet using the table, before sprinting out the door.
I climbed to my feet, taking a moment to help Joe to his own, before the two of us fled out the door, following close on Bait's heels as we sped through the ship.
“What about the other colonists?” I gasped out as my unsteady limbs send pangs of pain through my body as I rushed down the corridor.
“We'll have to come back for them, Pirates prefer to steal rather than destroy most of the time, if we get back in time, we should be able to...”
Another explosion rocked the ship sending Joe rocketing into my side, sending the both of us into the wall.
A sickening crunch came from my arm as we impacted the wall, and my vision went white with pain.
Blinking the pain away I foundered on the ground for a moment before I felt my good arm being hauled on.
“Up you get kid, we're almost there.”
The two of us hobbled down the white hallways till we got to an airlock. Through it he got his first glimpse of a C.O.G.S. Vessel.
Where the walls of his colony ship had been white and sterile, the C.O.G.S. Ship was anything but. Through the airlock the visible bulkhead was covered with open panels, LED lights in a colors ranging from purple to green to red blinking away, little multi limbed spider robots scuttling back and forth. The bulkhead itself seemed to bulge in places rather than be uniformly flat, and while there appeared to be bolts and fasteners along it, in other places it almost looked like the metal had been grown into place.
I rushed through the airlock alongside Joe and the airlock cycled shut behind us, and we both stumbled as the corridor lurched to the side around us. Bait's voice issued from somewhere in the hall around us.
“Hold on, going evasive!”
Joe tapped my shoulder and motioned me to follow him. “Come on, we need to get to sick bay.”
“What? Why are you hurt?”
“No, but you need the bare minimum implants or you wont be able to do anything on this ship, and unless I miss my guess, it's gonna be all hands on deck. Also I am fairly certain I heard your arm break”
Joe ran down the corridor and I followed, winding my way around various protrusions in the wall and deck, until Joe ducked into a door that irised open, clutching my arm all the way.
Inside the walls were much cleaner, in stark white, though still with bulges here and there. In the middle there was... table was the wrong word, it was a series of platforms that seemed to make the outline of a human form. It looked more like a torture device than anything that deserved to be in a medical facility of any kind.
Joe sensed my hesitation.
“Seriously I need you to sit down before...” the whole ship shook around us.
I was thrown to the ground, but quickly scrambled up onto the table, the adrenaline making the pain in my arm fade into the background.
Instantly the legs of the table moved up under my limbs, and straps wrapped around my ankles, the same thing happened to the arms, and I was forced back onto the table where another set of straps went around my chest and forehead.
“Wait, what? Joe what's going on? The fuck are these straps.”
“For your own safety, flinching during the procedure can result in damage to your ocular organs, hold on.”
“Ocular organs.. what...” I asked, just as a dozen robot arms folded out from the ceiling above me and began advancing menacingly.
Two of them went for my eyes, the rest distributed themselves around my body. The needles in front of me started advancing inexorably closer, and I struggled as hard as I could against the restraints.
“Stop moving your eyes! You'll hurt yourself... oh hell here.” Joe said.
I heard the sound of something whirring, then a grunt, then a needle jammed into the side of my neck.
“Hey! What...”
I suddenly found myself paralyzed, unable to move, my eyes frozen facing forward.
All of a sudden the needles darted forward, and my vision went white, I felt... not intense pain, but comparable to the prick of a needle.
Unfortunately this was the prick of a needle in my eyes, my fingertips, my feet, my neck, my belly and sides.
An instant later and it was over.
“See, now that wasn't so bad was it? Brayden? Oh right you still can't move.” Joe replied, his feet rolling with the motion of the ship.
That last sentence both scared me and filled me with indignation
All of those emotions drained away as I looked at the words that overlaid themselves on my vision.
NEW USER DETECTED! BEGINING FIRST TIME SETUP
INITIALIZING...
MULTIPLE MEDICAL FAULTS DETECTED, DO YOU WISH TO APPLY TREATMENT?
What followed was a long list of ailments that scrolled across the screen too fast for me to really understand. The screen went blank and then a paperdoll appeared in my view, with little lines connecting to parts of my body, leading to a listed ailment. As I focused in on each one I got a larger description, from my trick knee, to my missing appendix, to...
about 17 different arrows were pointed at my head. And a big one pointing to my arm.
I briefly scrolled through several of them, none of them had names I recognized, but several brought up often being misdiagnosed for many of the things my doctor had said I had back before I had gone into cryo.
The prompt to APPLY TREATMENT popped up again, I selected yes.
Almost instantly I felt more at ease, a headache I had not even noticed, so constant had it been, that I had not even noticed I had it. Pain in my joints and legs went away, and all of a sudden I felt more alert. My arm also almost instantly felt better, though... stiffer.
WARNING: PARALYTIC AGENT DETECTED. FLUSH SYSTEM Y/N?
I thought yes and the Y flashed, I felt something pinch in my sides, and all of a sudden I could move my eyes, then blink, then my limbs began responding.
RELEASE RESTRAINTS?
I immediately thought yes and they released, letting me jump up with more vigor than I had been able to muster since high school.
“You asshole!” I shouted at Joe, who just smiled like an asshole in response.
“Come on, let's get to the bridge, it's the most heavily shielded part of the ship.” Joe said, and took off.
“Wait up!” I called out, but he was already gone.
I stepped out into the hall, and immediately my view was transformed.
I could still see the bulkhead and the odd protrusions coming out of it, but now there was a load of data hovering over each protrusion, labeling them as 'wireless nodes' and, hovering over the floor were a series of lines of varying colors. As I looked at each, they expanded in my view and a label appeared beside each.
ENGINEERING lead off to the left.
MEDICAL did a little loop between nodes and went right back into the room I had just exited.
And the line titled BRIDGE Looped off to the right.
I immediately began following the bridge line, but no sooner had I started than the lights all cut out in the section I was in, along with all the brightly colored images in my new fancy Augmented Reality display.
ERROR: WIRELESS CONNECTION LOST. RELOADING ASSIST MODULES WITH LAST KNOWN DATA.
And like that I could see again... though it was in wireframe, and my view kept glitching to the side every few steps.
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The line leading to the bridge also reappeared, but in places it was fragmented or glitchy, popping to the side back and forth trying to follow the wireframe of the hall. More than once I hit a wall, but I soon figured out a pattern, pausing and waiting every time it glitched and then picking back up to a run.
As I paused, I felt like I could feel a shudder through the ship that coincided with every glitch state. “That... is telling.” I told myself under my breath, mentally going through a number of things that would cause a cyclical glitch like that, a bad capacitor that kept discharging once it reached a certain charge into the electrical system, some kind of short... maybe an emp? But those were bombs, it should be one disabling blast then nothing...
After some time of this I began to see light from around the corner, and all of a sudden I was back in full light. My display updated and the glitches stopped, I was just going around the corner when a little speaker icon lit up in my display. I mentally 'touched' it and it said
YOU HAVE BEEN INVITED TO THE HOOK INTERNAL COMM CHANNEL, WOULD YOU LIKE TO JOIN?
After mentally saying yes, all of a sudden my head was filled with the voices of Joe and Bait shouting loudly to eachother.
I reflexively covered my ears, but that did nothing, though a display appeared in front of me.
REDUCING INCOMING VOICE VOLUME TO 10%
All of a sudden the voices were far more managable.
“... I've lost all connection to the aft port of the ship, which includes one of our main launchers and half of our plasma projectors, what is going on Joe?” Bait's voice streamed into my ears... head... mind... I heard Bait is what I am getting at.
“I don't know, I am busy using the two projectors we got as point defense, you want me to stop? I've intercepted more than double what the automated system was projecting.”
“Fuck every drone I task to go into that area... hey... HEY! Brayden's on the network!”
“Knew you'd figure it out kid, took you longer than I thought it would though.”
“Well after the lights went out everything went haywire. Took me awhile to figure out where the bridge is.”
“Lights went out? Shit, that means it's not just a lost connection...”
“Yeah, it was almost like something was pulsing, my onbaord... stuff kept glitching out at regular intervals. I figured either a capacitor is continuously overloading, or some kind of repeated emp...”
“It's a vampire! Shit we need to get it off the hull right now! We're just lucky those things you installed broke and kept it from disabling the whole ship!”
“They're called breakers and they're like fuses but you just flip them back! Brayden! I need you to find the vampire, it's a missile that jams itself into the side of a ship and then start's sending out a repeated EMP pulse. It should short out on it's own eventually, but we need it gone!”
“How am I supposed to push it out?”
“Sending you the location of a vacsuit, there will be some mechanic tools with it, either use the impactor to launch it out or the torch to cut it out!” The ship rocked from another impact.
“Hurry! My drones get disrupted the same way everything else does from the vampire! They're made specifically to mess with C.O.G. Machinery!”
A compass appeared in my vision, pointing the way to the vaccsuit and tools, or at least that's what it said. What it actually lead me to was three one piece suits with a hood and a small toolbox about the size of a laptop case.
The ship shook again, and I reached out to pull down the zipper of the suit and pull it on.
***********************************************************************************
I rushed down the corridors, back the way I had come from the medical bay. It was still dark but the grid-type overlay was still functional, AND my new suit had built in headlights, which helped seeing as there was now debris strewn over the corridor.
As I sealed the powered down bulkhead behind me(Manually, and I made sure I was able to unseal it before I went through) my heads up display indicated that the oxygen concentration of the corridor was swiftly decreasing.
“That leak will probably lead me right to the breach...”
I quickly opened up the toolkit, finding what looked like some kind of welding torch with built in welding rods, some kind of hammer... or multitool? It had a complicated grip.
And a can of something that looked like lubricant.
Quickly grabbing the lubricant and sealing the toolbox, I sprayed it in the air.
In my suits headlights(mounted on top and to the sides of the helmet, I was starting to notice a repeating pattern of threes on this ship) the aerosoloized lubricant drifted swiftly and surely down the corridor. Nodding to myself, I followed it.
It didn't take me long to find where the trail was leading me. Some distance past the medical bay I found a door that had been crudely bent open, likely by overpressure, and could hear the faint hiss of atmosphere streaming past through my suit.
I reached out and grasped the edges of the puckered door and levered back, sliding the left side back into the wall as far as the warped metal would allow. It resisted at first, and then all at once slammed to the side a good foot, causing me to slice my hand open on the warped metal.
“Fuck ow!” I grunted to myself, my hud popping up red alerts and flashing a red halo around my right hand on a paper doll that just popped up. I raised my hand before holding it up to the suit lights.
The cut was not very deep, but it ran the span of my hand. As I watched the suit seemed to crawl over the gash, and in a moment the suit was sealed, and I could feel blood starting to pool in my glove.
“Handy that, hopefully it clots in there soon.” I again talked to myself.
I pushed my way into the corridor, and almost immediately my suits hud blanked out on me. The pulses form before had been occuring this whole time, but the closer I had gotten the longer each blackout lasted. This close, it seemed like the pulses were causing my suit to shut down for an interval long enough for another blast to go out, keeping it shut down.
Which unfortunately also meant my suit lights had gone offline.
If this room had been like the rest of the corridors I had been making my way through, I would be SOL, stuck in the dark.
Thankfully, this room had a giant pulsing blue light illuminating it.
A light that presumably was coming from the massive warhead sticking through the bulkhead.
Air was streaming out through gashes in the hull this thing had torn open, and the closer I got the greater the pull.
It wasn't as bad as I had initially thought though, the warhead had punched right through the hull, and formed an, admittedly imperfect, seal.
Which as going to go away as soon as I dislodged it...
Reaching down to my waist I fumbled for something I had noticed when I had first put on the suit, a little carabiner attached to a short cable. Looking around, this appeared to be some kind of... machine shop? Most everything was bolted to the floor so I hooked onto the nearest sturdy looking apparatus, this looked like some kind of auto-lathe.
Turning back to the warhead my visor tinted just as it released another pulse. I could barely discern it with the naked eye but my suit obviously could detect whatever it was putting out.
“This is gonna give me cancer isnt it.” I muttered to myself.
I opened up the toolkit and grabbed the multitool.
It seemed for all the world like a hammer, but pressing a few buttons on it caused... well nothing to happen, but I put that on the giant glowy ball of fuck you right in front of me. Grabbing the neck of the hammer while depressing... well all the buttons, I managed to get it to extend into something resembling sortof kinda a crowbar if you squinted enough.
A sudden explosion rocked me onto the warhead itself, and I felt more than heard something click inside it.
It started glowing a brighter blue.
“shit shit shit that's not good...” I muttered to myself as I jammed the crowbar tool into one of the small rents in the hull the warhead had penetrated.
I tried multiple different angles before I found one that seemed to be putting pressure on the warhead, and heaved.
The crowbar bent nearly double before I felt something give.
Unfortunately, It was the crowbar.
I had fallen off to the side, and was now holding half of said crowbar, while the other half jutted out from where I had rammed it above me, mockingly.
“Son of a...” I muttered to myself, then I pulled back both legs, and donkey kicked the remaining half of crowbar.
With a lurch the warhead shifted, the little hiss of escaping atmosphere turned into a howl, and in a moment it was gone, flung out the side of the ship.
Swiftly followed by me.