Part 3
"Did the cargo hold check out?"
Corsu and Bane have cycled open dozens of cartons and confirmed their innocuous contents. When they'd opened the first case they'd been jumpy. Bane nearly sprung out of his boots when a vacuum seal released with extra puff of energy. Nothing had come of the search.
All of the containers matched the manifest. They reported those results and described the few containers of rare earth at the end of the list.
"What the hell would make someone transfer dirt from one rock to another?" Bane wondered to Corsu.
"Some kind of agricultural work?" he conjectured. "Or maybe it has valuable minerals in its makeup."
"I don't know about those things," Bane admitted. "I've never had to grow food."
Poe is relieved that the cargo is not explosives. Now the commander can move to the next things on his list.
"While you're down there, can you check status on the escape pods? If any jettisoned recently," he is working his way through the steps that will help them reconstruct last activities. "I'm resetting the life support so we can get some atmosphere back in here. I want us to spend a little more time to make sure there is not some dangerous life form still aboard."
"I'm in counting all lifeboats docked and in their cradles. None missing."
"Damn," he frets. "Wish a couple had gone."
"Something could have docked with the ship and then departed," Tallie posits.
"There are two airlocks. Can you check the door pad readouts?"
That is a smart request. The bridge record is central and easier to access and read, but susceptible to obfuscation. He's doubtless checked the bridge. Asking her will reveal if there is a discrepancy. The mechanics on the doors are less sophisticated but also much harder to falsify. They don't give very much detail, but what they do record stays.
She wishes R9 was with her because he could communicate with the mechanism more easily. She takes out her data pad and a multi-tool that will let her spring a maintenance hatch below the door controls. Once she opens that small panel, she has two small jump wires that she wants to connect so her data pad can pull out the readings. The matter is clumsy with her gloves. She would dearly love to slip them off, but contamination is not ruled out and the life support needs time to complete the restoration. She has to stay suited. She puffs some frustration but gets the fine attachments connected.
The first door was last cycled 5 days ago. The second one was cycled 32 hours ago.
"How long since the last recorded port activity?" She asks Poe.
"5 standard days ago," he tells her. "Last port was Esquinn."
"The starboard docking entry was last used 5 days ago, so matches up to the Esquinn load out. The port side docking entry was cycled 32 hours ago."
"Peculiar. Nothing on the logs about ship-to-ship."
"I might not log a ship-to-ship if it was clandestine materials," she postulates. "What's the profile of this hulk?"
Poe gives a low whistle. "Come back up here. Let's talk this through and see how we summarize this to command."
The four of them get to the bridge but then Poe immediately sends Corsu and Bane to check the galley. His reasoning that the food stocks might have some very good sense of when the last meals were dispersed and if there were nine or more? Tallie grimaces as she looks at the corpse, again.
"You're supposed to find him grotesque. Whoever did this went out of their way to showcase barbarism."
"Score one for our unseen adversary. Did this person leave the ship?"
"I would," the commander contemporizes.
"Did he space the rest of the crew?"
That question has barely left her lips when the coms they share start bleating electronic squeaks and chirps. Poe knows the dialect of his BB8 unit, and understands the chattering flash.
"Found them," he mutters. "Stacked up in a maintenance closet in the forward hold." He issues a calming command to his robot as if emotions are overrunning its circuits. "All dead," he conveys to her in clipped tone. "Let's go look."
/&&&&&/
Laddie has contracted with two scavengers to go acquire the materials off the Demeter. The ship has not crashed. His impatient partner will not tolerate further delay. The four men in this rag-tag group do not know anything other than the task to bring back crates of rare earth from the hold of the ship. They are warned about the condition of the freighter as it was left by Lady Hr'kr.
He reflexively hires men with firepower. There is no reason to do as much, but those are his contacts. It's light work for them, but also the type of task they think is beneath their skills. He has to pay as though the weapons are needed.
Whey they depart he returns to his part of Lundun. The clean, efficient, bright and cheerful portion of the city. He thinks he will be able to relax, but as he enters his domicile, he is greeted by Lady Hr'kr's greeting. Her species of manticum have a ear grinding sound that might be a territorial warning, but in mixed species tradition has become a form of welcome to their presence. These are his rooms, but he finds she considers them an extension of her territory now.
"I sent men to go intercept the ship. I didn't think the planet forces would bother given it was going to hit the unpopulated table region. Terribly proactive of them."
"What of the replacement crew?"
"My team is prepared," he asserts
/&&&&&&/
Poe and Tallie set off from the command bridge to the place BB8 has directed them.
Tallie doesn't know the crew personally, but she regrets the loss someone out there in the wider world will feel when these people don't come home. As a combat pilot she has reconciled herself to the likelihood she will die at the controls of her ship. It almost happened a few months back when that torpedo detonated in the hangar. She falls into step with Poe and they make their way to where BB8 waits.
The little robot meets them at the nearest intersection and guides them to the place. She again admires his intuitive capacity. They approach and she's glad there has not been atmosphere. It means there was suspension from decomposition. Even so, the condition of the corpses show terrible mutilation. Limbs have been snapped. There are wounds similar to the slashes seen on the captain.
"Unpleasant endings," she dryly remarks.
"Force be with them," Poe mutters bleakly. "How many, BB8?"
The little droid answers and it is exactly the 8 remaining members. All accounted for. None left alive.
"What now?" Tallie asks darkly.
"Take a scan to make sure they died from physical trauma and are not harboring anything nasty that could hurt us." Poe swallows the gall back after providing his direction. "Rule out any kind of disease vector."
Wincing she sets the sensor and completes the scan. It is negative and she relays.
"Ok," he lets out a breath. "We need to take them out, lay them across the floor and make some observations."
"Of course we do," she is not happy for this step.
"If I call Bane and Corsu here to do it, they believe we wussed and harbor…"
"It's fine. We should do it," she should modulate better, but implying she isn't up to the task has her irritated. Partly because he's pushed the right button to secure her compliance.
She takes recordings, and then documents the state of the room before they begin the next step. Gingerly she positions herself and they grip the figure at the top of the pile of bodies and when he nods they both lift and she strains under the weight of the heavy individual. The two manage to extricate the first body and set it down so that he's laid out.
"I don't like this much. Let's line them up and then make further recordings. I want to be done with this." His tight mouth and tense jaw are signals that he's grim about this. No manic conversations are leeching into the space. This bothers him a lot, she thinks. Bother. Not the right word for the spiders-creeping-on-skin sensations she has as she sees the face of the dead man.
Eyes open. Fear evident on his death mask. Not the throat slit display that was made of the captain, but still a grisly death end. The mouth is open in a silent scream.
"Limp muscles. Been dead more than a few hours. Not nearly enough blood in this space to be where the killing happened."
"Yeah," his tight answer is all the normally loquacious Poe returns.
The crew is all male, but only mostly human. By dress and features she sees several different racial backgrounds. This is in keeping with a non-corporate vessel. They need more history. Both Tallie and Poe can sketch a basic story from what they've seen.
"Should have let you call Corsu and Bane," she is breathing a little harder by the time they are repositioning the 8th body. Her words make the corner of his mouth twitch upwards for a moment.
"These wounds look like a hand weapon or set of claws. Can you take measurements on the spacing and see if that backs up appearance that all of these are inflicted by the same device or hand, BB8?"
The droid goes from figure to figure taking scans and halfway through provides the update that they are. He further divulges the marks are product of claws by virtue of the deeper, more detailed analysis of the wound contours.
"If it was a single attacker, could they really have overwhelmed the whole crew and no one responded?"
"Depends," Tallie shrugs. I hate to think what it would have been like to have someone moving along the decks killing this way, hunting everyone down."
"Where do you supposed it happened?"
"Sir," Bane's voice cuts in on their coms. "You want to come to the mess hall." The tight phrase is not explicit but given everything else, they both have an idea.
"Be there directly," he tells the two. Then aside to her. "Mess might be apropos."
"Maybe." She won't mind leaving this room, but his faint attempt at humor falls flat.
The ship has gray industrial walks with awkward bracings that narrows the corridor at points. The door frames are several inches thick because the pocket recessed doors are designed to hold in the event the hull is compromised. It is a failsafe that portions of ship could be decompressed and with quick action pockets of space retained. It was graceless in design.
Tallie has steeled herself for when they enter the mess hall, but her best efforts feel inadequate. There are no bodies in this space, but the evidence of horrendously violent exchange is etched into the very beams and surfaces. There are broken bits of furnishings, destroyed components, and blood everywhere. Blood and what are probably other smears of human remains. She blinked hard at the scene and swallowed bile.
"Make a recording of this space BB8. Did you check this room previously?"
The small droid beeped a negative. He'd been working meticulously from the front of the ship and this mid-ship cabin hadn't been closed as he passed. The small window too high for his visual sensors when he passed.
Poe asks the two pilots to bag and box up their dead bodies so they can be stowed. The rot won't be far behind now that atmosphere is restored. He and Tallie will take care of the Captain on the bridge. Both men grimace and request to enlist their droids.
When they reenter the bridge, they both pause and consider how to unhook the dead hand and move him out of the command center. The prior work with the other dead crew could have softened the blow, but it didn't. Tallie was still queasy from touching and moving the captain. The set him on the floor and BB8 finds containment wrap and brings it to them so they can cocoon the body. Once it is encased, they shove it onto an anti-grav platform. Poe instructs the droid to take it to the hold and put it in cold storage.
"Good riddance," Tallie mutters as the door closes.
"Agreed." Poe slumps against the wall.
"I'm going to move us out to orbit the fourth moon. It's uninhabited. If we lose control and the ship gets pulled down by gravity, I'd rather have it crash in uninhabited land."
"It doesn't seem likely," Tallie is checking readouts. There is fuel. The machine is old, but with only the usual level of blinking red warnings. "It's space-worthy. What is its name?"
Poe reaches over and finds a display. "The Demeter," he answers her.
"We know the crew and captain are dead. What next?"
"Does this ship have business with the Resistance?"
Tallie gives him an impatient glare. "No ship would keep records that say delivering arms, munitions, and food to the Resistance."
Poe smiles. "It wouldn't but scan the records and see if the destinations look familiar. You've been protecting the heart of our operations for a while now and you can name our last ten bases and supporting base locations."
"I wouldn't make it a destination, just an intermediate part of a run."
"Then scan the records with that in mind."
Tallie goes through looking at all the travel recorded. She seeks familiar destinations, but as she is looking she sighs. "I don't think these are reliable records."
"Why?" Poe asks.
The same first officer is recorded as the person inputting records, but the records from the last 2 months show differences. The style of entry changed."
"Style change?" Poe comes and peers over her shoulder and notices what she is seeing. "Strange."
"When I sent you the information from the docking bay doors, they didn't match the logs?" Despite the question there is a guess by her phrasing.
"You are correct." She feels Poe's smile and doesn't look because he's invaded her space and facing him will make her push away. "You are smart, Commander."
"One of the reasons I was granted command," she rebuffs the comment as if it should be assumed.
"Machine parts and dirt in the hold?"
"Yep," she answers.
"Who is receiving these items?"
"The shipping contact named Liam Edge," she shrugs. "No idea if that detail is genuine. Should we find out?"
"We should," he moves back to restore reasonable distance. "I'm ordering the squad back to base. The action already happened, here. I want to take a few more readings/records. Then we should return and give our debrief to command."