A musical tone echoed through the ship’s internal communications system, followed by Tria’s projected image appearing in front of us.
I have taken the liberty of slowing the ship as we have impacted a debris field. Would you like to bring the ship to a full stop to avoid further collisions?
She was talking to Dick, our honorary captain given the fact that he was one of two people Tria, the ship’s AI, would acknowledge. Light was the other.
“Yes, thank you, Tria, but run a scan before you bring the ship to a complete stop. I want to know if this is an ambush of some type before that.”
He gave me a slightly embarrassed smile and held an arm out.
“Do you mind helping me to the control room?”
I snickered but helped him to his feet, slinging one of his arms over my shoulders for support.
“I guess,” I said, feigning exasperation. “I was the one who shot you, after all.”
He leaned in to whisper closely to my ear as we hobbled down the corridor toward the common room.
“Alternatively, you could always rub some more of that magic juju on me where it hurts.”
His voice tickling my ear coupled with the slightest hint of his pheromones leaking through, caused shivers to ripple down my back. I purposefully reached down and smacked him lightly on his sore buttocks. He let out a painful yelp, nearly choking on his own laughter.
“Better?” I asked, innocently.
“I guess I asked for that.”
“Asked for what?” Cash said, meeting us in the commons room.
Seeing me doing my best to support Dick’s larger frame, he offered a helping hand. I eagerly transferred my charge over to Cash.
“Asked for someone else to help him to the control room before I have to shoot him in his other ass cheek,” I commented, and Dick simply chuckled.
We arrived in the control room to find Vomero already punching commands on the navigation panel at the right side of the room. This panel also controlled the room’s 360-degree view screen, a unique feature I had heard of but never seen on a ship before. It offered us an unimpeded view of the environment surrounding the ship.
“What did we hit?” I asked him, wasting no time.
The view outside was dimly lit, being quite far from the nearest star. I could make out vague shapes in the eerie twilight-esq atmosphere.
“I’ll have to get the flood lights on to see properly,” Vomero said. “But I figured we’d want to do a scan of the area before turning on a big, bright beacon.”
“Correct,” Dick said as Cash helped him to a seat on the center pilot’s platform. He winced as his tender rear touched the cushioned surface. “Tria, have you finished that scan I requested?”
I am detecting small, sparse amounts of organic matter scattered throughout what appears to be a debris field in our direct proximity.
“Organic doesn’t mean living,” Vomero pointed out to Dick, who nodded.
“Tria, what about life signs? Is there anyone or anything alive in the debris field?”
The only life signs I am detecting are several herds of Ekara. They appear to be feeding on organic matter scattered throughout the debris field.
Ekara were carrion feeders, space vultures, cleaning up any organic matter. Their unique biology made them immune to the fluctuating temperatures and vacuum of space.
“What type of debris are we talking about?” Cash asked.
“Tria, can you tell what the debris originated from?”
It appears to be the remnants of a settlement-class space vessel.
That explained the Ekara. It wasn’t unusual for these settlement-sized space vessels to attract a large herd of Ekara. They liked to feed off whatever organic waste the cities jettisoned into space.
“Let’s just have a look for ourselves,” Cash prompted, but I shook my head.
“Dick, ask Tria how capable the ship is of detecting cloaked vessels?”
Dick relayed the question, to which Tria assured that the ship’s scanners were quite advanced and would be able to detect residual disturbances produced by cloaking devices, if not the ships themselves. Satisfied that we weren’t flying into an ambush, we all agreed to turn on the flood lights and get a look at the debris field for ourselves.
A warm amber glow washed over the area, illuminating a gruesome scene. Dead bodies, some frozen, others partially destroyed, drifted between piles of debris as far as the eye could see. There were building size chunks of what would have been a massive space vessel scattered around, while smaller pieces of debris floated like flotsam on some invisible tide between the larger structures.
The Ekara, which looked like large bat-like creatures, flitted between the wreckage and perched on pieces of floating debris. Each was the size of a pony, with razor sharp teeth and claws. They looked horrifying, like something from a nightmare. Yet, they were generally docile, preferring to sustain themselves on the dregs floating in space.
Today, they were partaking in a much more gruesome feast.
“Holy Hell!” Ryuuk said, finally joining us in the control room. He was staring at the wreckage surrounding our ship with eyes so wide I felt they might fall out of his head.
I looked over at Cash, meeting his gaze. The signs of a bloody battle hovered in the viewscreen all around us. I knew we were thinking the same thing.
“They were attacked,” I said, and he nodded.
“How do you know?” Vomero questioned. “A settlement-class ship, it would have taken an armada to destroy it this way. It could have also been some type of malfunction or explosion.”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Dick and Vomero were both looking at me. Cash had turned away from us to study the view screen.
“You’re right,” he said. “It would have taken more than one ship to take down a vessel this size, but ships this size don’t just have accidents and explode.”
“This one don’t seem to know that,” Ryuuk said, gesturing to the wreckage depicted on the viewscreen.
“If you’ve ever tried to sabotage a ship the size of a small city,” I said, ignoring the sardonic look Dick gave me, “you’d know they don’t build them as a whole unit. That’s for two reasons: the practical logistics of building it and safety. The bigger something is, the more opportunity exists for something to go wrong. You don’t want an accident in one part to set off a chain reaction that destroys the whole thing and leaves everyone stranded or dead.”
“They go to great pains to make sure these safety measures are sound,” Cash added, “because if a ship our size explodes, a few people die. A ship that size...well let’s just say a lot more people would suffer without some type of failsafe in place.”
“How many more?” Dick wondered aloud. Cash and I both shared another grim glance, hesitating.
“Thousands,” I finally answered. “Maybe tens of thousands.”
The room grew quiet for a long moment as we each silently considered the implications. Someone had attacked and destroyed this city-size vessel and killed or captured the tens of thousands of people on board. I knew my crewmates weren’t quite as exposed to the factions of our galaxy who operated outside of the law as I was. Most of them probably couldn’t fathom what groups could be responsible.
I glanced at Cash again. He was back to studying the debris field. He probably had a better idea than most, hell, maybe even more than I did.
Vessels this size almost always belonged to one of the nearby planetary governments. They were constructed and used to supplement nations that had more population than their geography could sustain or whose environment was inhospitable to habitation. It was often easier to build these floating suburban settlements than to fight the elements in a hostile environment or acquire land where it didn’t exist.
So, it was always possible that whatever government this floating city-state belonged to decided to act upon it. Maybe the city was in active rebellion. Even more likely, the city might have been attacked by a nation or government in conflict with the city’s governing body.
I had seen that happen before, but those types of conflicts usually involved sieging the vessel until the inhabitants surrendered. Establishments of this size were resource intensive and expensive to build. Recapturing the vessel to repurpose would be the biggest boon from such an operation.
“You know, don’t you?”
The question Vomero addressed to me pulled me out of my reverie. I looked at him quizzically.
“You know what or who could have done this,” he said. “I can tell you’ve figured it out.”
“No, I’ve got a list of at least half a dozen entities that could have caused this, and a best guess at which one actually did,” I answered.
“A list?” Ryuuk said, incredulously. “I can’t even think of one thing that could do this kind of damage, much less make a list.”
“So, what is it?” Vomero pushed. “Your best guess?”
I took a moment to look at the 360 degree screen, taking in the carnage surrounding us.
“Whoever attacked this vessel wasn’t interested in salvaging the ship or its people,” I observed. “So, that eliminates several options on the list.”
Cash nodded. “No government would have wasted a settlement this big. At most, they would have cleared it, putting the people in exile and repurposing the ship for their own use.”
He paced back and forth in front of the screen, working out the possibilities aloud as he went.
“A naturally occurring cataclysm could have done this, but there would be signs if it were something like that.”
"And it wouldn’t have left anything behind to find,” Dick pointed out.
“Well, something destroyed this floating city-state,” Vomero said. “I ,for one, don’t want to be here if they decide to come back and admire their handiwork.”
We were all in agreement that we should leave the area as fast as possible. While we were discussing our options, however, an urgent chime sounded in the control room. Tria appeared to give a status report to Dick.
I’ve taken the liberty of setting the ship’s sensors at their highest sensitivity. The system has picked up faint traces of what appears to be a large armada of vessels traveling at the far outskirts of the wreckage.
“Tria, have they detected us, yet?” Dick asked, immediately.
No. This ship’s sensors can reach much further than even the most advanced detection systems on the market today.
“So, we can see them, in a manner of speaking, but they can’t see us, yet,” Dick surmised. “Tria, go ahead and cut the spotlight and reduce our power output and energy signal as far as possible.”
“There’s nothing left, here,” Cash said. “What would they be coming back for?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, urgently. “We need to hide.”
Everyone in the control room stopped to look at me incredulously. It wasn’t often that I so vehemently advocated for running or hiding from a problem.
“I knew it,” Vomero said, pointedly. “You do know what did this, don’t you? Or at least what it most likely is.”
I had suspected from the moment we first laid eyes on the wreckage who or what we were dealing with. What Tria was reporting on the sensors confirmed it. Now, though, we needed to act fast, not stand around educating everyone about the various hazards of the galaxy.
“Look around, Vomero,” I said, forcefully. “What travels in large, swarming armadas preying on indefensible targets and doesn’t give a damn about how much death and destruction they leave in their wake?”
Recognition began to dawn in his eyes. I glanced at Dick and Cash to see them following suit.
“Reavers,” Vomero breathed the words more than spoke them. If a green lizardman could turn any greener, he was doing just that.
“Reavers,” I said.
“What are Reavers?” Ryuuk asked.
“Oh, shit,” Dick said. “Tria, what are our options for running and hiding as far and as fast as we can?”
The armada of ships have moved too close to use our light-speed engines without detection. They will soon be within range to detect us on their sensors.
“We don’t have star drive capability,” Vomero pointed out. “We can’t just zip away and expect them not to follow.”
Using a star drive like the ones found on long-range ships would be untraceable. Our light drive engines, however, didn’t travel that fast. It was why we were taking weeks to travel from Kalo-Mahoi to Rodan, a relatively nearby planet in the same quadrant of the galaxy. A ship with a star drive could get us back to the pact worlds in that amount of time. The slower light drive would also be easy for someone to follow and track.
“Ok, so running is out,” Dick said. “What about hiding, Tria?”
This ship is equipped with powerful cloaking technology. However, only Ancient Light can access those systems as it requires his energy to operate.
A collective groan emitted from the five of us. Relying on Light to get us out of certain death situations was becoming an uneasy pattern to follow. Still, Dick pulled the iridescent gem dangling from a leather corded bracelet from his wrist and spoke to it.
“Wake up, bud. We’re going to need your help.”
The stone glowed bright yellow as the gem coalesced into pure energy only to reconstitute itself into Light’s childlike, Ancient form.
“Tria, how do I explain to Light how to use the cloaking system?” Dick asked.
The ship’s operating systems are intuitive for Light to use, much like your hologame. He simply has to access the system and it will take over the process. However, activating such an advanced system at his age may be draining.
“How draining?” Dick asked warily, patting Light’s head gently as he rubbed the sleepiness from his eyes.
With plenty of rest, he should recover unchanged and unharmed in a day’s time or so.
Dick lifted the little Ancient into his lap, dipping his head as he spoke to Light.
“What do you think, bud? Can you help us out by activating the ship’s cloaking system?”
Light nodded groggily and looked at Tria for direction. The AI activated a holo-window in front of him with a command button he simply had to push. As he did so, I could feel a surge of energy pulse throughout the control room, and Light began to glow and pulse to the same rhythm.
Cloaking systems are active.
Vomero had switched part of the view screen cameras to focus on the hull of our ship. It was an uncanny feeling to watch the now dimly lit hull fade into nothing as the vessel’s cloak engaged.
We weren’t given any time to dwell on it, however, as the ship’s proximity alarms immediately began to blare. Vomero switched a section of the viewscreen to the long-range sensor display.
The Reaver’s arrival began with a few red blips on the edge of the display. A tiny spark of hope ignited inside of me, thinking that the swarm was just a small scouting party. That thought died a bitter death, however, as the indicators grew rapidly. First 10, then 50, and eventually 200 red dots flooded the screen like a red wave as the Reaver armada drew closer to us.