Hunting Grounds

Chapter 5

"What are we looking for?" Kate questioned Rick softly as they walked but could only see as far as their own light went.

"Stairs." Rick stopped in front of them and peered up. They were clearly on the ground floor so they only went up. "Don't fall behind, you could get lost in here," he warned her.

Kate rolled her eyes and followed him up the stairs. At every floor they each went a different direction but never lost sight of the other person's light and then came back and discussed what they'd found.

Finally Rick liked a certain floor and went to one of the closed doors. "So why this door?" Kate asked quietly. She had another question about why there weren't any other dead bodies but that one could wait.

"I'm thinking that if this ship still has power, said power will be in Engineering. Now I may not know much about spaceships but I'm betting Engineering will be in the aft section of the ship, just in front of those thrust nozzles like you see on Star Destroyers on Star Wars," Rick explained. Right now he needed to figure out how to get the door to open.

So far both of them had stepped though doorways that didn't appear to have an obvious door but were wide enough to hide a pocket door. Rick was thinking bulkhead doors.

Kate simply hummed since it made sense. She watched him shoulder his weapon, take out his knife again, and work at jamming it into a seam. Once he got the door to move he used his fingers and finally pulled the door aside just enough to squeeze inside.

Rick liked this room the second he got inside it and with both of them inside he went back to the door and pushed it closed.

Since their lights only went just so far they walked around to look it over. Both of them found a lot more dead bodies.

There were four chairs on one side sitting in front of a number of dead screens resting on a slightly raised platform. The opposite side had glass and a single door while the very center of the room had this big bubble.

"Pick a chair and have a seat. If you can get the lights to turn on I'll kiss you. You get the power to come on and I'll have your baby," Rick told her and walked toward the wall of glass.

"And where are you going?" Kate asked him.

"I'm thinking that the lead Engineering officer would have an office and I'm betting it's on the other side of this glass through that door." Rick walked to the door.

Kate looked over the four chairs. Each chair was tall and had a head rest, was cushioned, and was maybe just a big dusty. They also had this hole in the back she was betting would accommodate a tail.

So far all the dead bodies in this room were just like the first one: deteriorating clothing, bone, and some decayed flesh that looked partly mummified. Thankfully none of them were in any of the chairs.

"Turn on the lights he says." Kate decided on a seat and sat down after dropping her backpack next to her. "Hey! I'm the one that's going to end up pregnant!" She turned her head around to look for him and saw him working on the door.

Kate turned back around to look this area over. "Kiss me, huh?" It left her wondering if she wanted him to kiss her. From what she had seen so far she definitely would've said yes to a date and mostly like a kiss at the end.

"One little kiss." What could it hurt? So now she was looking it all over and quickly realized she had a problem. "It's all in Klingon!" Literally none of it even looked remotely like English.

"HEY!" Kate turned her head to yell at him but he was already inside the room and she could see him through the glass. "I don't speak Klingon." She did speak Russian but that didn't look to be helping her any either.

Rick was looking his room over and found a desk with items sitting on it. There was also a dead body in the chair behind the desk. He was guessing this space had its very own computer since he was betting that was what one wall was.

However, like Kate was learning, he couldn't read a single thing anywhere. There also looked to be filing cabinets. But pulling one open didn't reveal folders filled with papers. This one was full of these large disks. Curious, he took one out, walked across the front of the computer with it, and actually found a space that fit it perfectly.

Now he knew just enough about computers to get them all into trouble, so he put it back and kept opening drawers only to find more of them. "Storage maybe? Like a portable hard drive?" Rick knew he was guessing but it was all he had to work with.

Kate meanwhile was looking her station over and spotted a panel that actually was backlit so something had power and it was red. Pressing a red button was supposed to be really, really bad.

"The History Eraser Button." Kate grins wide. "Oh, can I hold out? Will I succumb to my need to press the shiny red button? The Jolly Candy-like button? ...NO I CAN'T!" Kate stabbed the red panel while grinning widely.

However instead of her, Rick, and everything else just disappearing, her entire station lit up. Just hers and no one else's. "YES!"She knew it had to be a risk but what the hell.

"RICK! GET IN HERE!"Kate yelled and waited for him to show up.

"You got it to work!" Rick was impressed. "How did you do that?" What he saw here was what he saw in the office. It was all in Klingon.

She grinned at him. "I pressed the shiny red button."

"You pressed the History Erasing Button?" Rick was shocked.

"You know about that button?" Kate was now shocked.

"I may be a Navy SEAL but of course I know about the Ren & Stimpy History Erasing Button. The Jolly Candy-like button." Rick did his best to impersonate the guy on the cartoon that was doing all he could to get Stimpy to press the button.

He sat in the chair next to her, searched for a glowing red button and pressed it, and watched this station light up. "I'll be damned."

"Do I get my kiss now?" Kate silently cursed her lack of a filter. Usually what her brain thought up never made it out of her mouth. She even watched Rick get up and walk over to her.

"I kinda meant the ship's lights, but a light is a light and a deal is a deal." Rick bent down to kiss her.

Kate saw his lips getting closer and closer till he was actually kissing her. She found herself kissing him back. Then she reached up to hold his head in place and really kissed him back. She felt his tongue run across her lower lip so she opened her mouth and a tongue war began.

Rick finally broke from the kiss and quickly became aware that he missed her lips.

Kate looked up at him and mouthed the word "WOW!" She had been kissed before. Granted the last kiss had been a while, let alone her last date after getting Lanie to stop setting her up with blind dates. Not that she had kissed any of those. But this was a real kiss!

Rick was ready to kiss her again but decided to tease her instead. His nickname was Jackass after all. "Turn on the ship's power and one of us is getting pregnant." He broke down and gave her a quick kiss that Kate barely had to time to react to and kiss him back.

Now she was watching him return to the office "Since I'm not the one getting pregnant this should be fun," Kate yelled and watched him just grin at her and go into the office.

Kate turned around to face her station. "Turn on the ship's power he says." She didn't see how she was going to do that when everything was written in Klingon.

One thing she did notice was that the station Rick had turned on had a lot of red while hers had all green so she got up and sat down in that seat. Of course everything was still written in Klingon as far as she was concerned.

"So what does this station control?" Kate said to herself and looked at some of the screens. This had her getting up and sitting at one of the dark stations where she pressed the red button and saw nothing but green.

Off to the next station. She pressed the red button and again saw nothing but green. However, there was a difference between this screen and the one with all the red so that had her moving between each station and trying to make sense of it all.

Kate was back to the 4th station where she pressed a panel and suddenly all of the lights in the room turned on. "WOW!" Now she was really paying attention when Rick was standing next to her again.

"That station is mostly all red while the other three are all green. I came up with the idea that that station is monitoring the main power supply while this one is monitoring batteries, I think. All that red suggests that main power is down but battery power is working. So why was it off in the first place?" Kate turned to look at him.

"Alright, assume for a moment that you've had a malfunction of main power and you crash, but maybe the crash is not a hard crash. The ship doesn't break into pieces. With main power gone what do you do?" Rick looked down at Kate.

"Call for help." Kate thought that was obvious. "But what if battery power isn't enough to contact anyone. You need main power for everything. It helps explain why the air in here smells a little stale."

"That all works but it can't be the only way to contact someone." Rick tried to think and then snapped his fingers. "An emergency shuttle. The survivors all take the shuttle and either leave or use it to call for help and leave the dead bodies behind."

"I'll buy all that. But why was everything off when the batteries still work? Did they turn everything off before they left? One little shuttle isn't going to allow much. What about life boats?" Kate kept looking up at him.

"They only work when out in space maybe?" Rick suggested. "See if you can turn everything else on. I'm going back to the office and see if I can get the computer in that room to work. Maybe it can tell me something. Very nicely done, Kate." Rick leaned down to kiss her again for all of this.

Kate watched him lean down and his lips were getting closer and closer and soon he was kissing her. Since she saw it coming she kissed him back and then watched him leave her.

She found this kiss was almost like the previous kiss. Just as amazing as the first one. Maybe if she got the power to work she would get another kiss.

[_] /\ [_]

Kate had left the battery station, skipped the main power station, and went to the first one she had sat down in and looked it over. "What the hell." What could happen? The ship suddenly blows up?

She was still sitting there trying to figure out if she had done anything when she noticed something. "AIR!" This had her out of her chair and searching the ceiling. To her delight she found an outlet blowing in air.

"KATE! GET IN HERE!" Rick had gotten something and wanted her opinion on what was happening.

"I think I turned on the A/C system. What have you got?" Kate went to stand behind him and looked at the monitor on the desk that he was staring at.

"It's been showing me pictures," Rick said. Right now it was showing what all of the dead bodies were wearing, only it looked to be in perfect shape.

"Uniform maybe or is it showing us a rank? You're a captain so is that a private?" Kate wondered. Then the view changed again.

"The first ones were easy. Chair, clouds, tree, river, triangle, square, and so on," Rick said.

"May I try something?" Kate wanted to sit in his chair and saw Rick stand up and let her sit. "Maybe it's a touch screen." Kate drew a straight 1 from top to bottom. "One." Next she drew a 2. "Two." She continued drawing numbers till she made it to 0. "Zero."

Suddenly the screen showed more crisp copies of what Kate had just done only a lot faster. "That got something. Do the alphabet next," Rick encouraged her and watched her go from A to Z.

Then the screen went dark and they saw nothing. "Maybe it's thinking," Rick said thoughtfully.

"Or it's as lost as we are," Kate countered. Then unexpectedly there was a square on the screen.

"I told it what that was already," Rick commented. "Try spelling it this time," he urged and watched her not just draw the word but say it as well.

Soon they were moving on to triangle, rectangle, cube, star, and others. Then the screen went dark again.

"Did I break it?" Kate turned to look at Rick.

"If this was a science fiction movie I would say that it's trying to learn English so it can communicate with us. Maybe it can teach us Klingon." Rick shrugged; he didn't know any more than she did.

"Maybe." Kate gave him that. "But wouldn't that computer be on the bridge and not down here?"

"Not necessarily," he said. "It's a different species. Maybe they think differently. Design their ships differently. Not everyone thinks Star Trek. Or maybe the computers are interconnected. And I noticed the air came on. That was nice work. Remind me to give you another kiss."

Kate tried to hide her face and grinned. The first two kisses had been really nice so maybe the third would be just as nice.

All at once there were letters in the screen. "English." Kate read it and watched it change again. "Klingon." She kept saying what the screen showed.

"Maybe it likes you better." Rick hadn't gotten this far when he sat in that chair.

"You are a Jackass," Kate teased him.

Rick raised his eyebrows. "So much for your kiss." And then they saw the word KISS on the screen. "It's listening to us." He knew it for a fact now. "It seems to like you, so explain what we know to it. Start with waking up on this planet."

Kate glared at him for that. She had gotten the lights to come on, turned the batteries on, and got the A/C to work. Now he wanted her to explain. "Fine!" She didn't want to but maybe they were getting somewhere.

[_] /\ [_]

Kate had explained most everything that had happened since they had arrived and finally stopped when they found this ship.

"You can talk to us, you know," Rick told the screen.

They heard a mechanical voice. "In your language this ship is called the Tigris. It is a long range, armed scout ship. In your language the race is called Ranats."

"Now we're getting somewhere." Rick liked it so far. "So what happened?" he queried. "This ship is crashed on a planet. A moon we believe orbiting a gas giant."

"I do not know. I am a computer interface. You ask a question and I use my memory to find an answer. I have no control over any portion of the Tigris. I am simply an interface."

Rick walked backwards to lean up against the wall and tried to think.

"So you do not know if this ship can be repaired and taken back out into space?" Kate questioned.

"Correct."

"Without main power I would doubt it," Rick added. "Can you show us a floor plan so we know how to get around?"

"That information will require a password to be entered. Access is restricted."

"Figures." He rolled his eyes. So much for this being easy. "Then if I ask where the armory is located that would be restricted as well? Keeping in mind that we are being hunted on this planet."

"Correct."

Kate asked something less critical. "How about food or water?"

"That would be located in the kitchen."

"But you can't show us where the kitchen is," Kate guessed.

"Correct."

Rick decided to groan and didn't see Kate roll her eyes. So for their luck was pretty much holding.

"So you have no access. Meaning you can't run a scan of the area, tell us about where we are on this planet, or even in this system." If not this thing wasn't of much use to them.

"Correct."

"We need better questions," Kate said and turned her head to look at Rick.

"What we really need is something it is going to tell us is restricted. But… How long ago did this ship crash?" Rick didn't think that was restricted.

"I do not know. When all the power is down I do not function so it could be hours, days, or years."

"That was helpful." Rick was getting frustrated. What he wanted was answers but wasn't getting them. "How about if we search for the kitchen to see if there's food," Rick said looking at Kate. "We have lights now so we can at least see where we're going."

"I am hungry," Kate admitted.

But they only made it as far as the door they came in as Rick spotted a cabinet next to the door. "I think I missed this on the way in." He shouldered his weapon and opened the cabinet.

"JACKPOT!" He was liking what he was seeing. "Weapons." He saw four rifles and a number of clips.

"Shouldn't that be in something like an armory?" Kate inquired since having them here didn't make much sense to her.

"Maybe they do things differently. Spread them out in case they're boarded by an enemy." Rick picked up a clip to look at the ammunition. "I'll be damned!" He was shocked.

Rick showed it to Kate. "Two clips attached to each other?" She hadn't seen anything like it before.

"Not just that but the ammunition. This is caseless ammunition, Kate. No brass. We've played with this some but can't get it to work. Solid propellant, booster, bullet, and a plastic cap that centers the bullet. Problems with production expenses, heat sensitivity, sealing, and fragility.

"You don't need any metal like brass to manufacture the casing. Plus you don't need to eject the brass after each round. I'm betting each clip holds 30 rounds so if both of these are connected to the weapon it can hold 60 rounds." Rick pulled out a weapon and looked it over.

"Grenade launcher, integral sound suppressor, optical sights, and laser light. Very nice!" Rick slapped in the clips and handed it to Kate. "Take this one. This one is mine. We can find a way to carry more clips later."

The computer might not be very helpful but at least they had new and better weapons.