4. Dead Freight
Part Two
The helmsman expertly guided the cruiser to the freighter, lining up the airlocks and extending a short docking umbilicus through which the squad would enter the freighter.
Standing before the outer airlock of Sarah's Pride, Storm interfaced with the ship's VI and was faintly surprised that enough back-up power remained to power it.
"The VI reports the atmo aboard has been purged."
"Great," Saunders deadpanned, "We get to play find the corpse."
"Hey," Wilde jested, "Maybe you'll finally get lucky!"
"Can it, Marines," Carver admonished them.
"Opening the airlock now," Storm reported for the benefit of the combat log of the mission generated by her hardsuit computer. The airlock sighed open and the four soldiers crossed the line from Tokyo to Sarah's Pride. Main power was offline and the interior of the ship was lit only by red-glowing emergency lights, powered by a long-term battery system. Storm's helmet-mounted light clicked on, illuminating the dull grey bulkheads with a cone of white light.
Wilde cocked her head to one side, as though listening to something. Murder. Death. Kill. Wilde jerked and gasped, "Did you hear that?"
"Hear what?" Carver rumbled.
"The only thing I hear is the sound of my O2 slowly being used up while we stand here with our thumbs up our asses!" Saunders griped.
Ignoring him entirely, Storm addressed Wilde, "What did you hear?"
Wilde shook her head as if to clear it. "I...I thought I heard a voice. But it sounded like it came from inside my own head."
Saunders turned his helmet to Wilde. "Girl, you better not be cracking up."
Wilde spat back at him, "Fuck you!"
"Enough!" Storm barked. Oh this would look great at the debriefing. "Wilde, stay here and cover our rear, the rest of us will check the ship."
"Ma'am, I'd much prefer to come along," Wilde said firmly. Storm looked into the younger woman's eyes. Whatever had spooked her earlier seemed to have passed. Wilde's dark brown eyes conveyed strength and confidence. Storm nodded.
"All right. Wilde, Saunders, take the crew quarters and mess. Carver and I will check the rest of this deck. Sound off as soon as you find anything. Anything at all."
"Ma'am," Wilde replied and she and Saunders left. Storm and Carver entered the short corridor and turned right, towards the med-bay.
---
Wilde and Saunders headed towards the crew quarters, Wilde's mouth set in a grim line. She could still hear the voice, alien yet oddly familiar echoing in her mind. Trying to find something to focus on, she called up a small map display on the inside of her helmet and eyed the little blips representing herself and Saunders as they moved. Better. Slightly.
The door to the crew quarters surrendered to the standard Alliance decrypting algorithm that Wilde employed without being consciously aware of it. This whole ship felt off-centre. Wrong, somehow. Why did nobody else feel it? Panning slowly from left to right, Wilde's helmet lamp revealed rows of empty bunks, each one neatly made, sheets taut enough to bounce a credit chip off. At the foot of each bunk sat a footlocker. The room was empty of people.
"Oh hey, niiiice," Saunders said as he crossed to the portside bulkhead. Affixed to the metal wall between two bunks was the centrefold from a girlie magazine. Miss July pouted at them from the glossy poster, giving them a come hither look. Saunders reached out to pull it down. Wilde gripped his wrist, hard.
"What?"
"Leave it," she hissed.
"Jealous much?" he teased. Wilde thrust his arm away and turned her back as she keyed the LT.
---
"Do you think Wilde's OK?" Carver asked as they walked slowly along the hall. The ship was completely silent, not even the background hum of power that Storm never noticed until it was gone.
"I don't know," she replied, shining her light here and there. "I think she's just a bit rattled. A ship floating dead in space, atmosphere vented? Hell, I'm not surprised she finds it morbid and creepifying."
"But voices, LT?"
"I'll have a word with the doc when we get back," Storm said as she hit the release for the door leading to the medbay. The body sat, head thrown back in a swivel chair beside the examination benches. A bug-eyed look of near-absolute horror had overtaken the man. In the harsh light from her headlamp, Storm could see that the man, likely the medic judging by the blood-soaked white coat, had cut his own throat from ear to ear. The injury looked like a red gaping mouth below his jawline. Clutched in his right hand was a bloodied scalpel.
"Jesus," Storm muttered and, though she'd never been particularly religious, felt compelled to make the sign of the cross as she stood in the doorway. Hand on the butt of her sidearm, Storm entered the medbay, Carver behind her. Storm crossed to the body in the chair. Blood, long since dried had formed a wide pool around the swivel chair and the soles of the man's shoes looked as though they'd been pasted onto the floor by the blood.
"Lieutenant Storm? Wilde," the younger soldier's voice spoke into her earpiece. Storm started slightly.
"Go ahead."
"Crew quarters are clear. We're heading for the mess."
"Acknowledged. We've found the medic. Cut his own throat," Storm reported, wondering what had caused him to do that and what he'd seen to leave that look in his face.
There was the briefest of pauses and when Wilde spoke again, her voice shook slightly, "God."
Wilde clicked off and the lieutenant and corporal left for the captain's cabin. If anything, what lay behind the closed door was even worse then the sight that had greeted them in mebay. The captain sat behind his desk, sidearm held tightly in his right hand. The shot had been fired beneath the man's jaw and the top of his head had been blown off, splattering the surrounding wall and ceiling with blood, brain matter and bone fragments.
This time it was Carver who whispered, "Jesus."
Storm was overtaken by an instant of gallows humour and said, mouth dry, "Working conditions here must have been really bad."
"Yeah," Carver said and nodded vigorously. He was used to death, had spent his entire adult life dispensing it on various worlds but this was different. These people hadn't died fighting a war. They'd taken their own lives in as brutal a fashion as they could. The medic, for instance could have taken an overdose of drugs and gone out peacefully. Instead he'd performed a final act of surgery. On himself.
Storm keyed her comm, it was time to report to her higher power. "Storm to Tokyo, request permission to speak with Tokyo Actual," she told the comm officer.
"What's your status, Lieutenant?" Captain Montgomery's voice sounded oddly soothing in her ear. Whatever was happening here, Montgomery had likely seen it before.
"Ma'am, we've located the freighter's captain and medic. They're both dead. Suicides." Or something wanted it to look like suicide.
A pause. Then, "The rest of the crew?"
"I'll check with Privates Wilde and Saunders, Ma'am."
"I'll keep the line open. And Lieutenant?"
"Ma'am?"
"You're doing well."
"Wilde, Saunders?" Storm asked.
It was Saunders who replied, "Ma'am, we're in the mess. Found the crew. What's that word that means like suffocation?"
"Asphyxiation?" Storm replied.
"Yeah. I think the crew asphyxiated themselves. Skin and lips're all blue."
"Ma'am," Wilde put in, "I've interfaced with the VI. Says the crew deliberately over-rode safety protocols and purged the O2 supplies into space."
"They just sat there and suffocated?" Carver sounded ill.
"Yeah," Saunders said, sounding defeated.
"You getting all this, Captain?" Storm addressed Tokyo.
"I am. Get your crew together and finish sweeping the ship. I want logs, Lieutenant. Bring me that ship's VI core."
"On it," Storm said and closed the link to the cruiser. "Wilde, Saunders, meet us at the airlock, five minutes."
Back at airlock, Storm led the squad forward, to the bridge. Mercifully, the pilots' seats as well as the engineers' positions were empty of corpses. Storm nodded to Wilde, "Download the logs."
"Ma'am," the younger woman ground out. Murder. Death. Kill. "Oh!" Wilde gasped.
"Lucy?" Saunders asked, his usual gently mocking tone gone, concern etched in his features.
"I'm fine," she waved him off and sat before a console. Quickly, she used her omni-tool to interface with the VI who tried to deny her access to the logs. Eat this, Wilde mouthed to herself and tapped in the code the LT had given her earlier. Immediately the lock-out fell flat and Wilde began copying the files to an OSD. As the download indicator ticked along, she skimmed the files.
"This makes no sense," she said and looked up at the LT as she came around to peer over her shoulder.
"Huh," the LT said. "Looks like some kind of machine code but I've never seen it before. And looks like large portions of the logs are missing."
"Maybe Alice can do something with it?" Saunders suggested. He looked at Wilde's back as he spoke. I hope to God she's all right. Alice was what the crew had dubbed the cruiser's VI. Storm had another name for her: Stuck-up Bitch. Something about the tone of Alice's synthesised British accent rubbed her up the wrong way.
"Couldn't hurt to let her tackle it," Storm said as Wilde ejected the OSD and passed it to her.
"We done now, LT?" Wilde said and tried to keep the hopefulness out of her voice. She wanted off this ship now.
"We'll take a quick tour of the cargo hold, make sure we're not sitting on any more surprises."
Wilde nodded, eyes closed.
---
The door to the cargo bay yields as easily to Storm's omni-tool as the airlock did. Like the rest of the ship, the only illumination is via red emergency lights. Except for the softly glowing bluish-white orb at the far end of the cargo hold. The blue-white glow seems to cycle and shimmer, light waxing and waning, casting shadows on the surrounding cargo crates.
"What. The. Fuck?" Saunders breathes as the four slowly enter the room.
Wilde breathes rapidly, and a cold sweat breaks out on her forehead. This is it, the source of the voice and the wrongness. How come nobody else feels it? As she steps closer to the orb, it seems to beckon her Come. Closer. She shudders and steps closer, unable to stop.
"Wilde!" Storm barks, "Get back here!"
Wilde doesn't hear her, her voice is drowned out by the siren call of the blue orb. And now that she's bathed in the blue-white light, things aren't bad any more. Come. Closer. Surrender. Wilde sighs almost in pleasure and steps into the light. As though watching a vid, she sees herself detach the sidearm from her hip, release the safety. A rapt look steals across her face as the pistol unfolds itself like a deadly flower.
By the room's entrance, Saunders, Storm and Carver all have their weapons out.
"Drop it, Private!" Storm shouts.
"Put it down, Wilde," Carver says, voice soothing.
"God damn it, Wilde. What the fuck are you doing?" Saunders' voice breaks on the last word.
Wilde doesn't hear any of this. She's consumed by the light and has all but given herself to the terrible beauty it holds. Turning jerkily to face her squad, she raises the gun, presses the barrel up under the shelf of her jaw...and screams as a vicious bolt of energy enfolds her.
As Wilde turns to face them, gun in hand, Storm has an epiphany and suddenly sees how it must have been for the crew of the ill-fated Sarah's Pride. The crew find and bring aboard an alien artifact that somehow gets inside their heads and forces them to commit mass suicide. Now, her unit has stumbled across it and is about to offer up another victim.
"Not on my watch," Storm says grimly, bringing up her omni-tool and keying a command into the minifacturing unit. The omni-tool glows amber and a damping charge appears in the palm of her left hand. As Wilde brings the gun up and presses the barrel up beneath her helmet, Storm primes the tech mine and tosses it under Wilde's feet.
The resulting orange-white burst of energy causes them all to reel back and leaves behind after images for several minutes after. Saunders blinks away the light and begins to run towards his friend; Storm grabs him by the shoulder and shoves up against a wall. Jerking her head to Carver she snaps, "Get him out of here!" Carver drags away Saunders, who's screaming inarticulately as he goes.
On the outside of the cargo bay, Storm ejects the ammo block from her sidearm and hands both it and her knife to Carver.
"Ma'am?" he says, as though she's just given him the holy grail.
"Whatever that thing was, it made the crew of this ship kill themselves and tried to kill Wilde. I'm going back in there to get her and I don't plan on reboarding Tokyo feet first with a hole in my head."
"I'll go," Carver says and tries to push past. Storm puts a firm hand against his chest and pushes him back. "Stay here with Saunders." She nods at the young man who appears shell-shocked, tears drying on his face. Before Carver can protest further, Storm's back in the cargo bay.
Storm walks towards where Wilde lays twitching, gaze firmly on the decking between her feet so she won't have to look at the orb. Now she can hear a faint voice and wonders how she ever missed it, it's so clear. And it sounds so right. Storm pokes her tongue between her teeth and bites down as hard as she can. The pain and the taste of her own blood bring her back around. Now she can see, on the edges of her vision, Wilde's booted feet, jerking occasionally as the effects of the damping mine wear off.
In basic, Storm was subjected to the damping field's effects. The foul-mouthed drill instructor describes the damping mine like, "A taser on motherfuckin' steroids." So she feels bad for having reduced the young woman to a quivering mess. Better that than death, she thinks. Still looking at the floor, Storm takes a firm hold of Wilde's ankles and drags her as quickly as possible back the other way.
---
Back on the Tokyo, the ship is abuzz with talk of what the Marines found on the freighter. Storm, having returned from the medbay where the medics assured her that Private Wilde would be well looked after, finished her report to the Captain. The two sat in Montgomery's office. A copy of the OSD from freighter sat by Montgomery's right hand. Despite unleashing the impressive computing power of Alice on the logs, the files still make no sense. As for the blue-glowing orb, it still rested inside the Sarah's Pride's cargo hold. Once the squad returned and Wilde was being looked at, Montgomery ordered the cruiser to detach from the freighter.
Storm thought that wasn't going nearly far enough and wished she could order the crew to blow the ship and everything on it into atoms.
"And your belief is that this orb caused the deaths of the freighter's crew?" Montgomery asked.
"Yes, Ma'am and it almost forced Private Wilde to kill herself." Storm paused. "Permission to speak freely?"
Montgomery raised an eyebrow. "Go on."
Storm folded her hands into her lap to stop them from fidgeting. "Ma'am may I recommend that we destroy the ship and the orb? I believe it poses to great a risk if it's left intact."
"I'll take that under advisement, Lieutenant," Montgomery replied but, for an instant, her gaze broke from Storm's and Storm knew she was lying.
"Captain, please..."
"That will be all, Lieutenant."
Storm risked another try, "With respect.-"
"Dis. Missed!" Montgomery barked and Storm winced.
---
"How is she?" Storm asked Carver. The two stood just inside the cruiser's infirmary. Wilde lay still unconscious, wired to an array of monitors measuring respiration, heart-rate and brain function. Seated beside her, holding her hand and stroking her forehead was Saunders. For her own safety, Wilde's arms were tethered with restraints to the sides of the bed; the doctors having very real concerns that the young Marine would attempt another act of self-termination.
"The doc says there won't be any permanent physical damage," Carver answered.
"Yeah, I meant mentally. Right at the end there, I heard that thing talk to me and Wilde got it a lot worse."
Carver shrugged. "The doc gave me some long-winded medical babble that I didn't understand word one of. I don't even think they know what's happening."
"Fantastic," Storm muttered and ran a hand through her hair. Watching Saunders stroke Wilde's head she said, "They'd make a nice couple, don't you think?"
"Yeah," Carver rumbled, "If only Saunders would stop acting like a dick long enough for him to tell her how he feels."
Storm nodded and, hands in the pockets of her fatigues, walked towards the bed. "How you holding up?" she asked Saunders. He began to stand but she waved him off.
"I'm fine. Ma'am," Saunders inhaled deeply, "I wanted to thank you for what you did. I...should have done more instead of just standing around like an idiot."
Storm pulled up a seat and sat, folding one leg over the other. She eyed the displays around the bed for a moment. "You can thank me by buying Wilde dinner next shore leave."
Saunders looked away. "The whole ship knows you have a thing for her and so long as it doesn't effect either of you in the field, I have no problem with it," Storm went on.
Saunders looked up at her, lips twitching in his wrung out face. "Yeah. I'll do that. If...when she comes around."
Hayley nodded and left to finish recording her vid message.
A/N:I decided to try my hand at a bit of horror. Basic inspiration is the derelict freighter sidequest in Mass Effect where the crew have been huskified. But personally, I find the idea of something that gets inside your mind and makes you kill yourself horribly scarier. So voila