Ahim folded her hands at her waist and turned to look at Luka. Her partner was nowhere to be seen. More irritated than worried, Ahim called her name.
"In here," Luka said, but Ahim couldn't tell exactly where she was. "I'm, uh, I'm kind of stuck."
Ahim sighed. "Keep talking, please," she said. "I'm not sure exactly where you are."
"Okay," Luka said, and then was quiet for a full thirty seconds before she started singing one of Ahim's favorite songs, just slightly off-key. Ahim laughed quietly, because of the many things she loved about Luka, the woman's singing voice was both high on the list and objectively terrible. She would, however, never ever tell Luka that she knew how far off-key she could sing. This particular song was one that Luka had practiced, over and over again, and it still wasn't quite right, but Ahim loved hearing it anyway.
"Keep singing," she said, just as quietly, and started down the hall. Luka had gotten quite far before Ahim had noticed she was gone; she was in a small room off the engineering main hub when Ahim finally found her.
"Hi," Luka said, waving her left hand. She was standing in the middle of the room, which looked like it was an officer's workspace. There was a second door opposite the door into the room, along with a console and a chair that was inexplicably bolted to the floor. What had appeared to be two opaque walls at right angles from the outside, facing an intersection, turned out to be darkened one-way glass.
"Stuck?" Ahim said, because Luka appeared to be no such thing. Luka sheepishly brought her right hand out from behind her back, where it was firmly caught in a solid metallic manacle. There was a chain spooling from the manacle back into the wall, where Ahim could now see was some sort of a cabinet or safe. "Really?" she said.
Luka shrugged. "We're supposed to find anything valuable," she said. "This looked like a good spot to try."
"Of course it did," Ahim sighed. Luka did not have the good grace to look abashed; instead, she was glaring at Ahim as though Ahim had accused her of doing something foolish. "Can you get it off?"
"I said stuck, didn't I?" Luka said, and then rubbed her forehead with both hands. The chain clinked as she moved. "I'm sorry, I don't know why I've been so annoyed at everything lately."
"I haven't been as calm as I could have been, either," said Ahim. "None of us have."
"That seems weird, right?" Luka said. "I don't expect not to argue with anyone ever, but things haven't been this bad since before you came on board."
"It does," Ahim said. "But now that you and I agree that something is wrong, we can address the issue at a more appropriate time."
Luka laughed ruefully. "See, I was all set to get mad at you for ignoring me," she said. "Which is stupid, because this time you're right."
"This time?" Ahim said, with a smile to take the sting out of the words.
"Don't let it go to your head," Luka said. "So." She held up the manacle. "Got a hairpin in there?"
"Please," Ahim said. "We both know you have a set of lock picks in your boots." She smoothed her lacy mauve skirts over her knees. "Of course, so do I."
"I, uh." Luka actually looked embarrassed. "I left them behind. Accidentally."
"Luka," Ahim said, reprovingly.
"It's not my fault," Luka said, and then shook her head. "No, it's – I was just so ready to be off the Galleon that I completely forgot."
"Well, this is what a backup is for," Ahim said, and pulled the rudimentary lock picking kit out of her own right boot. After being locked up one too many times, and following Luka around for the better part of two years, she'd taken to carrying it around. It hadn't helped her in far too many situations, but it might get Luka free now.
After a few moments, Ahim had to admit defeat. The lock, as far as she could tell, had some not entirely physical components. She didn't know if the trip was electronic or magnetic in nature, but she didn't think she could get it open. "Did you check the desk?" she asked, leaning back.
"Of course I checked the desk," Luka said. The chain was long enough to let her move throughout the room but not out the door through which Ahim had come. "There's nothing in the desk. Give me that."
While Luka tried to get the shackle off her own wrist, Ahim searched the room for something resembling a key. There was nothing in the desk, except a second shackle, open and on the floor.
"The desk might be booby trapped, too," Luka said, several minutes too late. Ahim had already found the trap Luka had sprung.
"I see it," Ahim said.
"No, I mean, there might be another one. This asshole was seriously paranoid." Luka frowned at the shackle. "This is ridiculous."
"Would the sabre work on it?" Ahim asked, leaning on the desk.
"Do you think calling the sabres from the Galleon would have the same effect on the electronics as transforming?" Luka countered.
"Oh, damn," Ahim said, coming to the same conclusion. "It might be worth it, though," she said.
"Let's try everything else first," Luka said.
The shackle resisted all of their attempts to remove it, and even a pry bar couldn't get the other end free from the wall. Ahim couldn't even figure out how far into the wall the other end was; it vanished through a panel she couldn't pry off, after opening the safe for the second time and avoiding the second shackle.
"I told you," Luka said, when Ahim jumped back just barely in time to avoid being manacled. At least the traps didn't seem to reset. "This is such bullshit."
"I would not disagree," Ahim said.
"Okay, try the sabre," Luka said, after the two of them stared at the manacle for a few minutes. "Because the only other thing I can think of is to cut off my hand, and I feel like that's not something I want to do."
"Understood." Ahim reached for the sabre, only to have her fingers grasp nothing but empty air. "What?"
"Well?" Luka demanded.
"I'm trying," Ahim said. "I can't get through."
Luka frowned, and reached, only to also come up empty handed. "What about the guns?" she asked, and came up with the Gokai Gun in her left hand. "The hell?"
Ahim reached for her own gun, feeling its familiar weight drop into her hands. "That's odd," she said. "Why should we be able to call one and not the other?"
"Annoying is what it is," Luka said. "Okay, maybe we can just, I don't know, shoot the chain in half." She wrapped the chain around the back of the chair to stretch it as taut as it would go. "You wanna pull the trigger, or shall I?"
"It's your wrist," Ahim said, taking up a stand behind Luka. It was best not to be around the front of the gun, while it was being aimed or fired, in Ahim's opinion.
"Cheers," Luka said. She had to aim at sort of an angle rather than straight on, and that turned out to be the most ridiculous piece of luck either of them had had in a very long time.
The bullet ricocheted right off the chain, yanking the chair out of the floor and pulling a startled Luka along with it. Only the fact that most of the kinetic energy had been absorbed by the chair saved her from a broken wrist, and luck sent the bullet into the wall instead of one of them.
"Fuck!" Luka swore, moving her wrist gingerly.
"Is it all right?" Ahim asked, but Luka's fingers were all moving purposefully, and she looked more angry than in pain.
"Fine," Luka said. "What the hell is this thing made of?"
The chain was dented, but not broken. More importantly, the lights had begun to flicker. Ahim looked around, cautiously, wary that this could be the start of the so-called cascade failure that Doc had warned them all about. Nothing changed except for the lights, though, which eventually settled down into a sort of partial twilight. It wasn't too dim to make out details, just noticeably darker than it had been. As if to spite Ahim's assessment of the situation, one of the bulbs flickered fitfully.
"Great." Luka sighed, and then inspected the chain more closely. "Hey, this link is almost broken." Ahim crouched next to her; the link was bent out of shape, but not enough to pull any of the chain free. It refused to bend under either of their hands. "I bet one more shot would do it," Luka added.
"Why don't I find a crowbar instead?" Ahim said, standing and brushing off her skirts. "I don't like how that ricocheted, and I don't like what the lights are doing."
"Paranoid," Luka said, but there was a note of affection in her voice. "Hurry back," she said.
Ahim had the distinct feeling that if she took too long, Luka would just try to use the gun on the chain again. "You know I will," she said, and without knowing why, she shivered. "Keep the door closed and locked until I come back," she said.
"That's really paranoid," Luka said. "There's no one alive here."
"Probably not," Ahim agreed. "But I would appreciate it if you humored me." She kissed Luka lightly on the mouth, just a quick brush of the lips and yet more intimate physical contact than she'd had with any of her crewmates for weeks.
"Fine," Luka grumbled. Her hand had ended up tightly grasping Ahim's waist, and she only let go slowly. "I missed that," she said.
"Me too," Ahim admitted. "But one problem at a time." Seeing a gleam in Luka's eyes, she continued without missing a beat. "If we're going to have you tied up, I prefer to have the key before we start."
"Oh, fine." Luka pretended to pout. "I'll lock the door," she said, when Ahim hesitated. "I have the Gokai Gun. You're not going far."
"Of course I'm not going far." Ahim inspected the door. It was a sliding door, like nearly every one she'd seen on the freighter, but there was a mechanical lock on the inside. "Right here," she said, pointing it out.
"I have eyes," Luka said tartly. "I know how locks work. The sooner you go, the sooner you're going to come back."
Ahim still couldn't shake the feeling that something else was going to go horribly wrong, but she nodded and left. She waited outside the one-way glass, knowing Luka could see her, until she heard the bolt slide home.
Luka was bored. There wasn't much more in the office for her to explore, although she had discovered that the second door led to a tiny bathroom. The sink didn't work, but the frictionless toilet apparently did, as she tested it by pouring in a little water from her pack. "Well, that's handy," she said.
There were no further booby traps in the desk or in the safe, although there was also nothing particularly interesting in either. Luka tried to pick the lock again, giving up after it became perfectly clear that it would not open with purely mechanical input. She checked the safe for a magnet or something that might generate an electrical current, but she didn't find anything she thought she could reliably use without also accidentally electrocuting herself.
"Why are you so boring?" she asked the absent occupant of the office. "And why would you booby trap an empty safe? It's ridiculous." She looked at the safe again, on the off chance that perhaps there would be something tiny and valuable that she'd missed the first time around.
Her questing fingers found an irregularity that turned out to be a tiny pendant. It was small enough that she hadn't seen it, and wedged far enough back that if she hadn't been bored enough to make a painstaking search, she wouldn't have found it. It looked oddly familiar, and after a moment she recognized its shape as a cross-section of a Ranger Key.
"What the hell," she said, and pulled out her Mobilate. The pendant lined up perfectly. She considered slipping it in there, just to test it, and then decided against it. Now was not the time, here was not the place, but as soon as they got back to the Galleon, she was going to have Doc take a look. She put the pendant in an inner pocket, where it would be safe, and the Mobilate back where it belonged.
Ahim still wasn't back. Luka sighed deeply, and set about trying to disassemble the sink for anything potentially crowbar-like. Unfortunately for Luka's peace of mind, the sink resisted disassembly. She did manage to unscrew several lengths of sturdy piping from behind an easily detachable bulkhead, but nothing of any use in breaking the chain holding her to the wall.
"What kind of engineer doesn't keep tools around?" she demanded of the empty office.
Predictably, it did not give her an answer. Luka poked and prodded at the walls, in case she'd missed something, and found nothing but offensively bland bulkheads. She strongly felt that they could at least be some color other than an indeterminate blend of beige and gray, like everything else on the freighter. She was rapidly beginning to feel active dislike for the freighter, and the red of her pack on the floor was both the most visually appealing part of the room and painful in its contrast to the deliberately vicious blandness of the floor.
The oppressive silence was broken by the distinct sound of someone's Gokai Gun firing several shots, muffled as though some distance away. There was a pause, and then more gunfire. There was another single shot, and then silence. Luka swallowed down Ahim's name; her crewmate couldn't hear her from this distance, and listened for something, anything else. All she heard was the barely-audible hum of the reactor.
"I'm coming for you," Luka muttered. She examined the broken link, which was just barely not broken enough. She tugged on it experimentally, but all that did was hurt her hands. If she had just the tiniest bit of leverage, she was sure she could widen the gap enough to slide the broken link free. She tried the edge of the desk, but she wasn't sure if she'd managed to infinitesimally widen the gap or if her hands were just slippery with sweat. She was just setting it up to try again when movement in the corridor caught her eye.
The dark glass was clear enough from the inside that Luka could see that the humanoid figure moving across the hall was not, in fact, Ahim. It was none of her crewmates. She couldn't quite make out the details, but it looked wrong. It moved in a shuffling gait, listing to one side as if ill or injured, but steadily enough to belie any debilitation. Luka held her breath as it walked past the office without any sign of noticing either her or the door, suddenly both deeply grateful that Ahim had made her lock the door and intensely worried for the other woman.
A tinkling crash from somewhere past the office rang through the silence, and Luka identified it as part of the walkway falling. She dismissed the sound, but whoever – or whatever – was walking past the office stiffened and then started to lope toward the source of the noise. Within moments, it was followed by several more humanoids with the same awkward gait, all moving with purpose toward the sound.
Luka was suddenly morbidly certain that Ahim had located the missing crew of the ship, and that whatever had happened to them had been no accident. She pushed the useless thought away and focused on what she knew for certain – Ahim was missing, and the freighter's crew was attracted to noise. She had her hand on her Mobilate, but she couldn't send a message to Ahim if the noise was going to bring more of the creatures down on her.
Luka cursed. She turned off the sound on her own Mobilate, pushing it back into her pocket as quietly as she could. The almost broken link on the chain attaching her to the wall was her next priority; she wasn't going to die chained up like a dog, not Luka Millfy.
The base of the bolted-down chair had a sharp edge neither she nor Ahim had noticed the first time around. The broken link just barely reached it, and Luka wedged the chain down onto the base as far as it would go; if she could hammer it down farther, she was sure it would open enough for her to slip free. Her gun would serve as a mallet, while her pack had a thermal blanket that she hoped would muffle the sound enough. Still trying not to make noise, and checking the one-way windows for movement, Luka pulled the blanket slowly out of the bag.
No freighter crew members were moving in her field of vision, and Luka tried not to think about how sturdy the one-way glass might or might not have been as she carefully wrapped the butt of the Gokai Gun. She took a deep breath, hoped for luck, and pounded downwards.
Muffling the sound also dispersed the force; it took Luka several tries to warp the link, and her heart was in her mouth after every blow. Nothing showed up in the windows, though. Once she knew the opening in the broken link was wide enough, Luka found a new problem. The chain was now stuck on the base of the chair, and it resisted her initial efforts to pull it free.
"Are you fucking kidding me?" she whispered at it. Her hands were shaking, and she stopped to breathe. The thermal blanket went back in her pack, neatly folded, while her Gokai Gun went firmly into her belt. A holster would have been nice, she thought absently, but she was fairly sure that she wasn't about to lose it. Her pack once again closed and firmly strapped to her back, Luka stepped over the chain to get a better angle and yanked as hard as she could.
The chain came free and Luka stumbled backwards. She caught herself on the back wall – not a window – with a thud that was far too audible for her liking, but she still saw no movement in the corridor. She glanced up and down, just to be sure, but all she saw was the ship. Luka went back to the chain, finding that the broken link had twisted enough that she could work herself free.
Luka was left with over a meter of finely constructed chain still dangling from her wrist, ready to give her away with its metallic clinking or – worse – provide some enterprising monster with a ready-made leash. She glared at it for a moment and finally settled for wrapping it around her wrist until she ran out. The end wound around the offending shackle until she could tuck the end where she was fairly sure it wouldn't slip free.
"Wait," she muttered, and went back into the tiny bathroom. The longest length of pipe she'd managed to liberate, perhaps a meter, seemed much less sturdy when she was contemplating using it as a bludgeon, but it was going to have to do. She took a deep breath and fixed a mental image of which direction she'd seen Ahim take. She was fairly sure she knew which corridor her crewmate had gone down. Luka took a deep breath and stepped up next to the windows, peering as far down as she could.
The window over the desk, next to the door, looked out toward the engine manifold, and Luka could see irregular shapes in the shadows. She couldn't tell whether they were broken pieces of fallen catwalk or motionless freighter crew members, but they were far enough away to give her at least a head start. She turned left, to the window looking out on the corridor.
The corridor still looked empty, but it curved gently in both directions and Luka could only see a relatively small portion of it. The freighter crew members had come from the left, which was perhaps not so coincidentally the direction Ahim had gone. Luka twisted her hands on her length of pipe.
If transforming into Gokai Yellow has the possibility to cause a cascade failure that might destabilize the engine core, is this enough of an emergency to consider it? She didn't have time to think about it, not if Ahim was in trouble. She could always transform later. Moving as silently as she knew how, with years of practice under her metaphorical belt, Luka unlocked the door and slid it open.
The shapes she hadn't been able to identify were freighter crew members, standing around the manifold. Luka tried to keep her back to the wall, trying to watch both where she was going and the freighter crew's unnaturally still forms. She got to the corridor without seeing them move, and slipped around the corner.
The corridor was still empty, and Luka began to move a little more quickly. She ran into the first freighter crewman at the next intersection, while she was trying to figure out which direction Ahim might have gone. It shuffled into view, going halfway past her before turning and lunging. Luka stumbled backwards, swinging her pipe almost wildly. It hit the crewman's shoulder and bounced off, but the creature staggered sideways. It was still reaching for her, still coming, and she swung again.
This time Luka aimed at its head, and the creature's skull caved in. It crumpled to the deck, grayish ooze leaking out of its ruined head. Luka looked around to see if the noise of their brief tussle had brought any more, but she was still alone. The creature's skin was pale and leathery, and Luka had no idea if that was its normal color or a manifestation with whatever was wrong with it. Its hands were oddly pointed, and with a queasy lurch, Luka realized that its bones were sticking out of the ends of its fingers.
"So gross," she whispered. Something metallic glinted under the skin now sliding off of its broken skull, but she had no desire to look further. Still holding her pipe tightly, Luka picked a corridor and started walking again. Ahim would have gone in a straight line, she thought, so she would be able to get back as quickly as possible.
At least, Luka hoped Ahim would have done what she herself would have done. She flattened herself in a recessed doorway as she caught movement down another intersection. Three of the creatures shambled past, and at some point she'd stopped thinking of them as actual thinking beings inside her head. One of them was missing an arm, and whatever clothing they might have had was hanging off of them in rags.
Luka held her breath, but they turned down her corridor and started to walk past the little alcove that was utterly inadequate for hiding anyone. She hugged the wall as tightly as she could and waited for the first one to walk past. Lunging out of the door, Luka swung the still-gooey pipe at one of the creatures' heads. It folded without a sound and she dodged backwards just before the second would have grabbed her with its bone-tipped hands.
Her dodge put her directly in the path of the third. Luka ducked and rolled, forgetting that she was wearing a backpack and angling sideways at the last moment. She kicked the creature just below its knee as she went, and felt its leg snap. It fell far too close to her as she scrambled to both get back on her feet and keep hold of her pipe. The second one grabbed for her again, and Luka could feel its fingers brushing through her hair as she swung the pipe around again.
The second creature went down, goo leaking from its ears, and Luka felt the third grab her ankle. It pulled itself forward, mouth opening as if to bite her, and she slammed her other heel down on its head. The bone felt like mush as it gave way, and the creature went limp. Luka stamped on its wrist until its fingers released her ankle, and planted her back firmly against a wall.
The entire struggle had been eerily silent, the thump of the pipe against wet flesh and Luka's harsh breathing the loudest noises. She looked up and down the corridors again, and decided that she couldn't blindly stumble around. She had to risk calling Ahim, whether or not her crewmate had figured out that noise drew the creatures, and then the two of them had to collect everyone else and get off the freighter. The corridor, however, was the wrong place to be standing while she made noise.
Luka moved quietly down the hall, looking for a door that could be easily opened. There weren't many in this particular corridor, and she had to go farther than she wanted. Pipe in hand, Luka pushed the control that had reliably opened doors for them so far while glancing over her shoulder to make sure she wasn't about to be ambushed from behind.
Looking down the corridor meant that the hand grabbing for the straps over Luka's shoulders took her entirely by surprise. She brought the pipe around in front of her purely by reflex, feeling the wet crunch as it broke the creature's arm, but it didn't relinquish its grip. It simply pulled harder with the other arm, teeth snapping. Luka threw herself backwards, frantically beating at the creature with the pipe. It wasn't until it let go that she saw the rest of them.
