CHAPTER ONEHOPE IS A SPECTER
Reminiscences, Part I
STARFLEET REFUELLING VESSEL VIXEN, I-RF-049-7864/A-289
CLASS: D
CREW: TWO
WARRICK, J. – CAPTAIN
WARRICK, C. – CO-PILOT
STATUS: EMERGENCY MANEUVERS
I was fifteen years old at the time – not legally allowed to be aboard a vessel of that nature, so the reason behind my name not showing up under the official crew registration of the Vixen was obvious. Cerres and Jericho Warrick – adoptive mother and father, respectfully. From a certain perspective I may have alluded to them as my parents at times, but not at others. They were military, paid like shit for half-assed jobs. Underneath the uniform they were intergalactic truckers that knew a thing or two about refuelling United Alliance military frigates, but strictly a thing or two. They were small time, real small time.
I spent a lot of time taking things apart and putting them back together inside the Vixen – and I still remember that lowlife go-nowhere shit-hole atmosphere it had – to a fucking tee. I knew that boat back to front – it was a standard military issue refuelling vessel so it was nothing out of the ordinary, but I was fifteen. Like a lot of the UA boats back then – and probably still to this day, now that I think about it – the lighting inside was mostly a depressing orange glow, which tricked you into staying warm and sweating if you were attending to any physical activities. Jericho was a clean freak, more than his wife, so the ship was always in immaculate condition, for which I was thankful for. That meant I could rummage through power conduits and maintenance ports all day and at the end of it, I knew I wouldn't be cleaning up the mess. I was always covered in lubricants and black slimy residue from the ship's bowels, but it was alright because I never wore anything more than what looked like half-eaten rags. In space, nobody gives two shits about what you wear. Unless it's a UA uniform – that could change a potentially bad situation into a bad situation.
Right, so I was a grease monkey, even at fifteen. Even that young, Jericho had me doing a lot of maintenance around the Vixen, keeping her exhaust ports clear of build-up (though a lot of that kind of work was generally handled by the ship's mainframe, Mother), repairing faults in the primary generator rotors, keeping an eye on the sublight engines (those were always the first of things to fail with the crappy ships the UA was spitting out around that time)… looking after that domain, mainly. I worked with Mother and onboard computers sometimes but I wasn't as bright with them. Plasma circuits were no problem but I always had the impression that working with the interfaces was like sitting back and trying to solve illogical math problems rather than physically getting somewhere and achieving something. At the end of the day, you could go about most duties on the Vixen one way or the other – through a computer terminal or a maintenance passage – but I stuck to the latter.
The spaces of the ship were tight, there was hardly room in a single passage in that ship where two people could stand adjacent of each other without crunched together like the two of you were crammed into a single cyrotube. Thankfully there wasn't much of a need for cryogenic sleep; the Vixen was a small ship, it never had to go far to reach the nearest frigate. The only time we'd submit to the god damn freezers was when we were heading to another system to serve a new convoy. We'd be out cold for about two or three months, which is not that long because the jumps never were that far. Usually, or almost all of the time, the big boats would find us first, and Cerres and Jericho would take care of business when it came to refuelling them. It was a fairly simple process, almost completely handled by the two ship's mainframes, which would communicate with each other and correspond with orders. All Cerres and Jericho had to really do was push down a couple of buttons and hope that Mother had all the trajectory calculations configured correctly. Even so, in spite of the simplicity of their careers, they nonetheless had to know how to act when a situation went wrong. Say, when a thruster for some unknown reason throws one of the ships out a little, and a fuel line ends up causing a hull breach in one of the ships, or slices through a communications dish. Those circumstances were incredibly infrequent, in fact I don't think the two of them ever had to deal with a situation gone-wrong in their entire fuckin' uneventful lives, but it did happen, apparently…
From outside, which I hardly ever saw the Vixen, it looked like a metal box, with attractive and luminous gas exhaust trailing from one end. That was it, more or less. There were the usual appendages that were fastened to the hull in a clutter circulating the entire ship of course, but again, the Vixen was of an incredibly linear design. Nothing out of the ordinary at all. I suppose I could have admired the ship a little for how it was put together, if only the parts weren't causing catastrophes of an epic magnitude every leg of every run. The inside of the Vixen was where I spent most of my time. The proper inside, that is. The labyrinth of interconnecting passages with just enough headroom to fit my bulky frame was where I'd be. Power conduits, vent shafts, moving machinery I could hardly make out because it was so dark… it was the sight I loved and couldn't get enough of. Learning and fixing at the same time, it never got boring, never got old. I knew I'd put it to good use later on in life, I'd be working on one of those ridiculously oversized military packhorses that they never even fired a shot with, not on something small and pitiful like the Vixen. I suppose the more I worked with it however, the less I hated it overtime.
It was the last run of the Vixen's shift, we were finally heading home. That was the 'when'. It didn't stir a giddy feeling inside of me, going back towards Gateway. After all, that piece of shit ship was home more than anywhere else. Yes, it would be nice to look at waterfalls I hadn't seen before, see a couple of animals, get away from those god forsaken uninteresting 'parents' of mine, but the novelty wears off after a little while and I knew that.
Those aforementioned intersections of circuitry and mechanics? That was the 'where'. The 'what' still remains a mystery to me, and the 'who' was certainly not of this universe as I knew it. 'Why' was the question I'm still asking. This was where the story started.
Some kind of surge of electricity had shot me off to sleep, and I don't know how it happened, either. The bottom line is, we came in contact with something that was off-radar just before we were about to hit the freezers for the final leg. As a result of that contact, something tampered with the mainframe, I don't know what exactly – but the ship went berserk. That's how I got zapped and fell unconscious, but when I woke up, I wasn't in the Vixen anymore. It had been transformed into something that frightened me beyond belief.
When my eyelids fluttered open, my muscles were frozen stiff. In my disoriented state after not knowing what had happened in my parents' ship for the last twenty-five minutes, my jaw had sprung open like a jack-in-the-box. My lungs filled with the air – cold air – of the ship as I desperately gulped in all of it I could, as if it had been deprived from me for the time that I had been blacked out. I uttered incoherent mumblings under my puffing breath to search for the logic behind what had happened, but once I realized curiosity wasn't going to serve me with a silver platter answer, I hushed. The air was cold, and gave me insight into a few possibilities. Three things may have gone wrong: the secondary generator may have failed to kick in after a massive surge, the ship's central heating unit was failing, or, most likely, there was a hull breach.
I was curled like a sleeping cat in a maintenance duct where fully grown adults wouldn't have been able to enter – it was one of the advantages of being a fifteen year old boy. The channel was dark, filled with cables and machinery, the very bulkhead I rested against was an assortment of different reinforced metal casings that covered delicate ion devices which powered the ship's utilities. The arrangement of corners, curves and points created impressions upon my shoulder blades, and I pushed away from them when the irritation set in. Not expecting my legs to be so weak and shaky when I tried balancing upon them, my body weight shifted forward awkwardly and open palms greeted pipelines with a loud slap as I fell down.
Like a contagious hysteria spreading throughout my body like a rapid infection, instinctive shaking took hold. My body knew I was scared before I had fully worked the situation out, and a sickly pit stretching from my throat to my stomach gaped open. This had never happened before, usually all systems would be up and running by now, or Cerres would have come running and told me everything was fine. But when I took a quick glance at the timer strapped around my wrist, which also served as a locator and scanner, it was apparent nobody had come for almost half an hour. This made me scared, and I'd come to realize that I wasn't as brave and tough as I thought I was. I tried to think systematically, eliminating possibilities of what couldn't have happened and determining what may have. But when you're scared – when you're whole body is shaking and the only certain feeling you have is a pounding within your chest… you can't think clearly. My mind settled for a simple goal, and that was to make my way out of the conduits and find my folks. So I stretched my arms outward and clutched my fingers around a pipeline coupling, pulling myself forward. Avoiding hanging manifolds of circuitry and fuel lines, I came to a T-junction I was familiar with (I knew the ship's bowels back to front) and took a left. Venting pipelines let off bursts of steam as I crawled past them, not terribly hot but the heat was enough to add another line of sweat droplets on my forehead. I kept my eyes fixed ahead for the most part, though I checked over my shoulder every now and then. I don't know what for, it was just something I found myself doing instinctively. When I scrambled around the final corner, I could make out the end of the channel I was in. Through the jungle of circuitry, hanging wires and mechanics was a closed vent covering, and to get out I would have to unbolt it from the inside. I had left my tools lying around in the conduits, so I had nothing to pull the vent off harmlessly.
That problem became irrelevant when through the small gaps in the vent covering I could see a flickering orange light. This meant that the ship had been physically damaged from the inside, or we had collided with something in space – but the latter seemed unlikely. Remaining hidden in the conduits suddenly seemed like a safer option, but a growing dread inside had me worried that something had happened to Cerres and Jericho. They may have only been pilots of a refueling vessel, but they were pretty crafty when they needed to be. I decided to be optimistic, I didn't want to be alone on this ship… and that meant going to find them. I knew they were alright; I just had to confirm it for myself.
I placed the covering gently on the metal grating inside the conduit after prying it open with a steel rod I had found. Quiet footsteps on the floor panels of the deck hallway were my best attempt as I treaded cautiously and slowly toward the bridge. I held the steel rod tightly in right hand, high, pointed toward the ceiling and ready to strike at anything that budged. There was no way in hell I was letting this makeshift weapon out of my grasp. It was difficult to distinguish with the flickering orange light, with periods of complete darkness followed by dim illumination, however lime-colored splotches scattered across the bulkheads became more apparent as I neared the bridge. I approached one of them, down each direction of the corridor beforehand, and then ran my fingers across the top of it. The crusty edges told me immediately it was a burn, and charred fragments tore away when I touched them with my fingertips.
"What the hell" I muttered. I didn't stop to examine the cosmetic damage, the sight of the burn had made my heart beat a little faster than it had been. Obviously, something had gone terribly wrong, and all I wanted was to make sure the folks were alright.
Hesitantly, I took in a deep breath and snuck around the final bend toward the bridge. In the flashes of orange light, I could see ebony webbing, coated with a shimmering residue, blanketing the bulkheads of the room ahead. My initial reaction was of confusion and curiosity, but moments later I felt sick to my stomach. An open palm coupled with my mouth and I shuddered with fright, hunching over and taking a few steps backward. I backed up against a wall and leaned there for a moment, closing my eyes and wishing everything I'd seen in the last few minutes away… to no avail. I was sweating like mad and bawling my eyes out as quietly as I could. Never had I seen anything like this horrid exhibit of twisted black netting dripping with some variety of sap in my life – it simply looked like something from a nightmare. It wasn't just because of how it looked that made me upset, it was the implications toward what had happened to Cerres and Jericho, and that I was all alone dealing with something that scared me shitless. Right then, I knew I was in the shit.
I must have been just leaning against that bulkhead, shivering, for a good ten minutes. I hadn't even noticed the wall had begun to take hold of my clothes by that time. As I pulled away, a translucent sticky resin trailed after me, detaching itself from the wall and intertwining with my clothes. I had calmed down slightly, partially ignored the substance that had taken a liking to me, and proceeded toward the hellish jungle of black twirls up ahead. As I drew closer, I noticed the webbing was shaped like claws ready to snap downward and devour me. I moved slowly through the gateway, dreading what would happen at the end of each step. I came to a sticky entanglement of some of the resin that had solidified, breaking apart some of it with my hands. The stalactites guarded the opening into the bridge and sprouted from the ceiling and surrounding walls. When I banged against it, it created a crackle and the more noise I made the quicker and more desperate I hacked away. A cry escaped me as I wrapped both hands around the steel rod and took a final swing. The foul covering cracked apart, and slabs of it shattered as they hit the floor.
In the bridge, I saw the back of two seats facing the navigational computer. The two seats where Cerres and Jericho should have been. Although everything in my body told me not to, I uncertainly circled around the bridge, passing by computer consoles devoured by the black foreign substance, so I could check the fronts of the seats.
And when I saw them, I wished I hadn't.
They were there, encompassed in slimy resin and dead still. I didn't know if they were still alive or not but I didn't get any closer. There arms dangled by their sides as if they had been flailing about hopelessly, unable to save them from their horrible fate. Although partially covered in their vile prison of webbing, I could see their faces. Expressions of sheer terror and torment, eyes open wide and unfocusedly looking toward the ceiling. Were they alive?
Maybe I could have saved them, but I was too much of a coward. I just dropped to my knees, and then huddled my arms around my shoulders, sobbing, wishing everything was back the way it was about an hour ago. As I knelt there, I felt something warm trickle onto the bare skin on the back of my neck. I yelped, scuttled about, and reached around to feel what it was. I brought it down before my eyes and saw a puddle of gooey jelly sitting in my palm. I looked up, but didn't see anything; it was too dark.
What followed were noises, decaying high-pitched screeching and violent pierces and thuds. Before me was a fast-moving blur, and for a moment I thought I had seen a ghost. A human outline, but almost invisible. The room seemed to be enlarged within the confines of this figure's body. A chair popped up twice as large as it was, but as the body moved, it reverted back to its normal size. It became apparent to me that what I was seeing was an almost completely camouflaged being, at war with something else in the bridge.
I ran. I escape the bridge, left all the horrors behind me, and ran. At first I didn't know where the hell I was going, but the words 'escape pods' circulated through my brain. They were on the lower level, but my guess was that the elevators weren't operational. I sprinted down the aft corridor of the deck level and spotted the conduit I had emerged from earlier. I squeezed myself inside clumsily – my arms and legs were still shaking like crazy – and pulled myself along the pipelines.
After dropping through a shaft and crashing through a vent covering onto the docking bay floor, my head darted up, and I checked my surroundings for any dangers. Nothing was apparent, everything was dark, and the bay was silent. I rose to my feet, hyperventilating like anyone would have been.
Approximately, about one minute and thirty seconds later, the Vixen exploded. With all that fuel onboard, it was a big enough bang to be seen from a couple of planets away. An orange cascade of detonating ship mechanics all going up in flames at once – nobody should have survived it. The radius of the blast would have taken out any nearby or escaping vessels. But almost as soon as the Vixen transformed into an erupting ball of fire, the vacuum of space transformed it into a graveyard of floating debris.