The interior of the wreck was in even worse shape than the outside. Wires hung from the ceiling while the walls held large holes that displayed the inner supports. The smooth floors were slippery from the constant snow storms, making it difficult to traverse along the broken corridor.

“Do you remember what this ship was? Before this?” Lus asked Zer-Dasht as he carefully made his way along the edge of the first exposed hallway, near the wall where he had supports to grasp to hold himself up.

“Just a cargo ship I thought,” Dasht answered, his voice tense as he followed in Lusac’s steps.

“Yeah, but Corporate or Federal?”

“Neither. It’s older than the war,” the Nemarian responded. “Not that it matters anymore.”

“It looks like it was designed with Kremel in mind.” Lusac gazed at the wide corridors and doorways. That didn’t necessarily mean it only hosted Kremel, but clearly it wasn’t meant for only Humans and Nemarians.

“Good eye, Captain Obvious,” Dasht said. “Honestly, Loser, I think sometimes you just talk for the sake of hearing your own voice and–”

Lus rolled his eyes. Of course it was Zer-Dasht of all people lecturing him about talking too much, as if the Nemarian didn’t spend every waking second looking for chances to tell his own stories.

“And?” Lus realized that Dasht had never finished his rant. There was no response.

“Dasht?” Lusac stopped and spun around to see that the Nemarian was frozen in his tracks, staring into the black void of one of the open doorways they passed. Lus hadn’t seen anything in there when he passed, but his eyes weren’t nearly as good as the Nemarian’s.

“What is it?” he asked as he walked back to him.

Dasht’s black eyes blinked slowly, still trained on whatever they saw in the next room. Lus stepped up next to Dasht and swung his lantern past the doorway to illuminate the whole room so he could actually see. He immediately regretted his decision as he caught sight of what shocked Zer-Dasht so much.

The space had been some type of mess hall or other recreation room based on the scattered tables and large, broken windows at the back, a thin layer of frost covering everything. But it wasn’t the disarrayed furniture that bothered Lus and his friend.

It was the bodies.

Over a dozen of them, of all three species, littered the floors. They weren’t whole bodies, though. Just fragments, torn apart by impact, with many of them missing limbs or even their head. All of them were ripped up at the torso area as well, and blood and gore covered the floor and walls, some bits even decorating the ceiling.

“Watcher save us.” Lus murmured the familiar prayer of his childhood, unable to fathom how violent the crash must have been to cause this. He tried to pretend he didn’t notice the exceptionally small bodies strewn with the others, ones that were far too little to be adults for any of the species.

“It’s a massacre,” Dasht whispered, still gazing into the room alongside Lus.

“I… Let’s just get out of here.” Lusac turned away. When Dasht didn’t follow suit, he grabbed the Nemarian’s arm and forcefully pulled him away from the disturbing scene. “Let’s just find what we need and get out of here.”

“Shouldn’t we bury them or something? It feels wrong just to leave them there, like that,” the Nemarian argued.

“Bury them where? In the snow? And with what? Our hands?” Lusac’s heart raced and his stomach curdled as he remembered the scene. As much as he wanted off this ship, they had to find the parts or else they’d end up as four more bodies in the collection.

They walked in silence up the corridor, their pace much faster than before. About five minutes passed before Dasht spoke again.

“What do you think did that to them?”

“The crash,” Lus answered tersely. “The inertial dampeners must have cut out at some point, ripping them apart when they hit the ground.”

“I’ve seen the aftermath of shuttle crashes with dampeners, and the bodies looked nothing like that,” Zer-Dasht said.

“What else could it be?” Lusac pointed out.

“You don’t think… there’s something alive that did that to them… Or that the survivors did that?”

“I have [Sixth Sense], Dasht. I’d know if there was something around stalking us. We’re safe,” Lus assured his friend despite his own doubts. Those bodies did look mangled in a way different from not having dampeners, but the Nemarian was already starting to spiral, and they needed to be focused on their own survival at the moment.

“I thought that only applied to [Invisible] creatures like the Shaquine,” the Nemarian said, his voice soft.

“You have the better eyes. Do you see anything walking around this wreck besides us?” Lusac gestured to the eerie hanging wires around them.

“No.”

“Then that settles it. There’s nothing else here, [Invisible] or not. If there is, one of us will know, yeah?”

“Yeah.” Dasht didn’t sound convinced, but his voice held a little more strength to it, which was the best Lus could ask for after that grisly sight.

“Great. Now let’s keep going. I’m hoping we can find a Systems Control area or Bridge to help us orient ourselves. It’d take weeks to comb through this whole wreck just to find the antenna and fretrics.” Lusac looked around with a sigh. It was getting cold, even with all his layers. The sooner they could get out of here and back to their shuttle, the better.

Silence resumed as they continued their trek towards the front of the ship. The damage they passed only grew in intensity, and after another few minutes, they were climbing over and through debris, entire walls and beams laying in their path. It slowed their progress immensely, but it did work up a good sweat, and Lus even considered loosening his scarf and coat a bit to cool off.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

“Do you have any clue where we’re going?” Dasht asked when Lus stopped to tug his scarf off and regain his breath.

“To the front,” Lus answered honestly. “I figured that’s where anything important would be.”

“Great. So we’re literally just wandering this graveyard of a ship, hoping we bump into what we need. Awesome plan, Lus,” the Nemarian grumbled.

“Knock it off, Zer-Dasht. All you’ve done is complain since we landed on this planet. It’s not doing anything to help, so either offer a real suggestion or just shut up.” Lusac’s patience was running low after dealing with that horrific scene earlier. It’s not like he enjoyed climbing through the derelict ship either, but his desire to survive outweighed his distaste.

The Nemarian was quiet once again as they resumed their trek. It wasn’t long before Lus’s 12 [Luck] decided to show up, and they ran into a set of double doors, the sign denoting it as the ship’s secondary system control center.

“See? My plan worked out after all,” Lusac exclaimed as he shimmied through the thin parting of the doors to step into the room.

“Dumb luck doesn’t count,” Dasht said.

“It does when it’s system [Luck].” Lus looked back over his shoulder to grin at his friend.

“You and that blasted system. It’s just not fair.”

Lusac was through the door and ready to respond when he stopped in his tracks, his voice caught in his throat.

“Lusac?”

“There are more bodies in here,” he said in the most calm tone he could manage.

This room wasn’t nearly as messy as the previous room they looked in, but there were plenty of corpses, all of them perfectly preserved. There were some spots of blood, and most of the bodies were clearly broken in some fashion, but they were all intact, limbs and heads attached to whole torsos.

“This is bad,” Dasht murmured from beside him, startling Lusac who hadn’t realized the Nemarian made it inside already.

“It’s nowhere near as bad as the other one.” Lus was a little surprised Dasht found this to be more disturbing.

“No. It’s bad because it’s proof that someone or something was eating those other bodies. We’re not alone here,” the Nemarian said with a shaky voice.

“We should warn the others.” Lusac’s hand went to the comm unit on his backpack. “Nippy, Hwnlr, come in. We’ve got news.”

“What’s up?” Nippy’s voice responded, sounding a little choppy due to interference from the storm.

“We’ve found some bodies that look like they were torn apart by something so we think there might be wildlife to contend with. Be on the lookout,” Lus replied.

A few seconds of silence passed before their team leader spoke again.

“We found some bones, but we assumed that was what was left of the corpses. You’re sure that it isn’t just rot?”

“No. It’s cold enough to preserve the bodies. We’ve found some intact ones in a spot that the animals couldn’t get to,” Dasht jumped in.

“Alright. You two stay on the lookout and call in the second you need help. Hwnlr and I are in the more dangerous part it sounds like but we’re better prepared for a fight, so I suggest you guys continue gathering parts while we finish our search here.”

“Understood. Good luck, Nippy.” Lusac was happy to let the two Kremel deal with the threat of ravenous beasts while he and Dasht handled scavenging. That sounded like a good deal to him.

Lus dropped the button on his communicator and turned to Zer-Dasht. “Let’s each take a side and start looking around. If we can find a console that’s in good enough shape, I have an emergency travel generator I can hook up to it so we can get the schematics to find what we need.”

“I’ll go right, you take left.”

The two separated, and as Lus crossed through the room, he was careful to avoid stepping on any of the bodies. It was difficult to ignore the twisted faces staring up at him, a thin layer of frost doing little to obscure the details.

Unfortunately the room was a mess, and every control console he passed showed such obvious damage, he didn’t think it worth trying to power it up and risk it blowing up or ruining his generator.

“Lus, over here. I think I found one that will work for us,” Dasht called out.

Eager to escape the room, Lus once again danced around the strewn bodies, forced to look at his feet as he went to keep from desecrating the dead. Dasht’s side of the room sustained far less damage, and he found the Nemarian clearing frost from a perfectly intact console.

“Good eye.” Lusac slid his backpack off and dug around for the generator he took from the shuttle emergency storage. It was right on top, but he had to dig in farther to gather his tools so he could properly set up his temporary power source.

“You’re pretty skilled with this repair stuff for a Fsylan crawler," Dasht noted as Lusac tugged off the front panel of the console and set to work inside the wiring.

“What does that mean? All I do all day is repair stuff,” Lusac joked.

“Yeah, but Fsylan crawlers typically handle light weight stuff like splicing wires and repairing fuses. You can hack into security systems with a circuit closer,” the Nemarian continued.

“Becky’s even better than me at that kind of stuff. I think you just don’t know the job very well,” Lusac said. “But that makes sense since you’re so busy on the bridge helping run weapons.”

“I guess what I’m trying to say is that you’ve impressed me these past couple of years. When Cewi-Bano first put you on the off-ship mission roster, I thought she was crazy, but you’ve proven yourself over and over again. I’m happy to have you around.” Dasht’s voice was genuine as he spoke.

Lusac paused his work for a moment. “Thank you Zer-Dasht. That means a lot.” He had never expected such kind sentiment from his friend, especially not now of all times, but it was nice to hear, especially after everything that happened on Aschir Alpha.

“Get back to work. I’m going to freeze to death at this rate.” Dasht’s tone regained his usual tone of complaining and teasing.

Lus laughed as he turned on his all-in cutter and resumed his task. Only a couple of minutes later, he had the generator hooked up, and the console hummed to life.

Standing up, Lusac allowed Dasht to take over in navigating through the various screens on the console until at last they had a full map of the ship from when it was in one piece.

“Welp,” Lus said as Dasht pulled the maintenance overlay showing all major systems and their sections. Comms was located in the rear half near the engines which meant they would have to join Nippy and Hwnlr in the more radiation heavy section to find the antenna and fretrics.

“It’ll be fine. Like Nippy said, as long as we’re only there for a few hours, we’ll be okay.” Dasht sounded like he was trying to convince himself more than Lus at that point.

Lusac nodded. “Do we need anything else before I shut this down?”

“Nope. Go ahead.”

Returning to the open panel, Lus carefully removed the generator and replaced all the equipment in his backpack before zipping it and putting it back on his shoulders.

“Ready?” he asked Dasht.

The Nemarian nodded, though his face was hard to read through the double scarves. Together they made their way back through the graveyard and to the door where Dasht shimmied through first, followed by Lusac.

The trek back through the ship was eerie, and Lus did his best to keep his eyes forward so as to not think about how many more bodies might be scattered throughout the rooms behind each door.

They finally reached the broken end and stepped back into the snowy crater when a growl sounded from the side.

Lus reached for his weapon as he whirled around, coming face to face with the beasts that had desecrated the bodies inside the crash.