The triple-note chime of distress beacon – a desperate wailing for help so long unanswered by the cosmos sang out into the silent void like a requiem as the ship of the dead bore its cargo from a war so long unwept – refugee thereof, fleeing out into the all-nothing for anything – broadcasting the dying signals that would travel for all eternity, bouncing from space to space – system to system forever and ever to come for all to hear a million-million lightyears all around.
Decrepit, beaten and worn – parts repaired that should have been replaced long ago – paint peeling down in mansized patches from the nacelles up – the arrowhead scout shouldered its way through the vacuum in search – away from the vast nothing it had left behind its ion boosters. Of distant stars beyond the reach of its dying sublight engines.
External lights had long given up their due and few internal systems were even in operation anymore; what little light even existed on the derelict came in through slanted cockpit canopy panels where the ship had been set out on its flight through the forever nowhere and nowhen of the eternal night for the star they had left behind in another life – another time.
What little juice the ship's clapped-out reactor could still squeeze out of five exhausted fuel rods got dumped from the engines as cosmological flotsam, pushing through the never-there course of rescue.
Engine baffles dim with age long past their lustre, could barely even bring themselves to sputter their ion into the void anymore; quintuple fuel rods having been squeezed long-dry by the ship's reactor in the years run past.
Like Charon ferrying his cargo over and through the River Acheron, the derelict drifted – like boatman, unwilling to take the unpaying passengers anywhere, doomed to wander the cosmos for eternity.
The three-time chime wail for help was as much a plea to rescue the ship's entrusted charges as it was a requiem for those who had long passed.
Not even the ship's cheap, bottom-of-the-line communications array could be brought to work anymore, beyond its sole remaining purpose of desperation-cries throughout time. It did not, therefore, hear the ping of a ranging laser shot out over the trillions of kilometers between here what it ran toward. It did not hear the hail. It did not hear the demands, and it did not hear the coming.
It crawled like a dying animal from the primordial soup of the grand nothing as something stalked on the starship clawing for the final ephemeral scraps of hope, gaining minute by minute.
First nothing, then something, a speck of dirt that grew and grew. The coasting interloper coming up in the baffle-wake of the huskship, unnoticed in the dead cockpit's unattended readouts and growing larger by a few thousand kilometers with every passing moment.
Had there of been any windows aft with someone a-gander, they could have seen the pinprick of shapeless definition in greater and greater clarity, growing out into something more definable, backlit by the twinkle of Proxima Centauri.
Grey. Slabsides. Rectangular. Industrial. Mass-manufacture. Plug-and-plag. All words that came to a mind beholding the approacher – a vessel of similar size and uncaring utilitarianism – it was in fact a UNSC Coast Guard cutter and like most of its kind, her ugly shape descended from having been a decommed Navy gunboat in another life coughed up by the senior service as a charity for the less-endowed cousins.
They still called it the Coast Guard. Even so many centuries after the mindspace of Mankind had been liberated from the three-dimensional boundaries of Earth's oceans – but the vast lightyears of the interstellar culture still needed its services, even if those services involved catching derelict junkers before they got caught up in planetary atmospheres, dumped by skippers and charter-companies uninterested in the expensive retrofit and refuel jobby.
Dump them in a decaying orbit and just let gravity solve the problem, which is when they could become high-yield warheads; the one-way ticket to Sedna thePenrose-512was cashed in for, à la gigaton-grand-slam in a couple of years. Hence the CG. Pop 'em with a nuke or two before one man's maritime space crap becomes another man's relativistic kill-vehicle blowing his apartment into high-solar orbit.
Slow, sublightspeed and lacking an FTL-engine, The ex-UNSC Zealous Convert had picked up the drifter's distress call as it entered the outremer of the Oort Cloud – Sol's proverbial back garden and the vast-beyond-measure deposit of natural resources that fed the system with the astronomical amount of minerals it needed. Minerals that fueled Sol – fueled the interstellar empire Earth was the swirling centre of – and by happy, coincidental, happenstance – minerals that Earth wanted protected on their years-long round-trip of the solar system's commercial routes.
Hence the UNSCCGCOzymandiascarried four M5381 Rudra-class nuclear missiles – a number that would have been one less, had the dead ship not been pinging an uncatalogued distress beacon for all in sundry to hark, preventing the cutter from carrying out its usual tag-and-destroy protocol for all such drifters it had carried out since the days of the Interplanetary Wars nearly four-hundred years ago that the ship's hull already bore the grim-harvest tallies of dozens of hulks so destroyed, from the Koslovite and Frieden gunboats of yore, drifting in interstellar space to the irradiated dumps like this one.
The three-note chime wailed out hopelessly into the cosmos –the desperation-cries of the condemned. Something about its tinny trill of centuries come unsettled the cutter's skipper. How long had this ship screamed for? Where was it going? Who was it carrying? Why hadn't they picked it up? And why had it turned around to flee back to Sol?
456K kilometers out and steadily gaining, theOzymandiasflagged the derelict on widecast to knock on the door and see who was home, though none of the ship's crew of 23 who were awake and on duty expected to hear any returns from so old a trawler.
'Unregistered ship Five-One-Two, this is the UNSC Coast Guard cutter Ozymandias coming alongside your portside for boarding.' Hailed the approaching ship, looming up large in the drifting pseudo-derelict's sputtering baffles. 'You are operating your vessel in interstellar traffic lanes in violation of UEG Maritime Merchant Law, get ready to release your outer airlock.'
CPO Jiménez waited for the returning hail as he watched the dim twinkle of maritime fusion engines burning deuterium and crapping ion against the eternal night out there in the eather from his workstation but received no such acknowledgement of either him or the cutter closing.
'Unregistered ship Five-One-Two, you are operating your vessel in interstellar traffic lanes, this is the UNSC Coast Guard cutter Ozymandias coming alongside your portside for boarding.' He repeated for the same return-false as the first time.
The note-chime cried, unheeded now that the two ships were closing.
The CPO looked over his shoulder at the skipper and shook his head. 'Either their communications are offline, or they had a nasty accident, that thing's leaking rads like a sieve.'
'We'll go in anyway – and see if there are any souls onboard before blowing.' Shrugged the cutter's CO. 'Raul and Mip're suiting up downstairs already.'
'Pity we're not allowed to salve deries, I wouldn't mind the change of scenery for a bit – nor the wad of cash, mind.'
But orders were orders and post-2435 protocol stated that the salvage of old hulkships by the Coast Guard was prohibited. Just blast them with a nuke and be done with it – they said – let passing shipboard anti-asteroid lasers take care of the rest.
Obliterate entire ships in a single go – turning them off like flashbulbs bursting in the ethereum – heavy ordnances that theOzymandiasherself had fired countless times over her long and her career patrolling the outer reaches of Sol.
She worked her powerplant down and cut back on the burn as the two ships' airlocks drew level with one and other on the huffs and puffs of maneuvering-thrusters– close enough that exterior camera feeds could pick the hull's identification markings out in the dim-cast lights of the cutter, though none of those foreign words meant anything to the watching crewmen on station or the ship's automated logbooks who had no record of an arrowhead ship flagged under an antediluvian East German banner as the thing was snagged by the boarding umbilical.
The first thoughts of the boarding party leader Petty Officer Raul Marcos was of the derelicts their own cutter must've snuffed out in the times of their grandfathers, whenOzymandias' playground stomp had been the Jovian System before time, age and obsolescence as well as the star-devouring pace of mankind's universal expansion had pushed her from there, to the Kuiper Belt for a century-stint, then the Oort Cloud so many of her crew now called home.
The star-jeweled seal of Koslov's old movement bore proud on the wing they closed on, under the register-number 512. The shipboard Decca-manufactured supercomputer tagged the unresponsive machine as a possible pre-2170 Koslovite hulk and ran into yet another headache when it couldn't index the docking ring under any known human or alien design then or ever in use.
Both members of the boarding party peered beyond the transparent metal of the airlock's windows and tried to better get a look of their newest catch. It had been a very boring month, and this was only the third ship snagged in Raul's six-year service in the guards.
While his junior colleague was ready, eager, discomforted by this old tomb-ship. Interplanetary laser grids had gotten too good in recent years at slowly eating away floating claptraps and rarely left anything larger than the everyman's family sedan to handle and for him it was his first ship boarded.
So Raul and Mip made sure their suits were packed in tight, and their gear secured for an EVA spacewalk when the docking arm clamped on hard, sans seal. Both had gone out after the final call to release the outer airlock had gone unheeded and carried that out themselves.
The two were armed with the usual kit-gear of the boarding guard. Nothing flashy or heavy-duty – just a taser and an M6C service pistol, topped up on solid-rubber stun rounds for the uncooperative customer.
But neither of the two were particularly proficient with their issued irons and their own ship hadn't been provided for by way of a firing range, either. But those pieces hadn't even been fired in anger either and neither of the two boarders walking down the docking tube to the thud-and-peel of magnetic boot souls sticking to, then tugging off the floor thought they ever need do.
With only the slightest shift of effort of Rual's prosthetics, the double-handled black-yellow warning-tagged door controls pulled out from their flush in the door and swung inward on center-hinges, popping the lid with the gush of air the breathed out into the void.
Worries that the entire ship had just been voided were put to ease when they saw a sealed inner airlock just a few meters down a short stair, so they went in, buttoned up and found the system automatically cycling air back in to bring equilibrium back to the shipwide pressure, lest they turn the ship into a one-direction bomb with them in the line-of-blast.
The ship looked old. It looked dead. As though it had been going for a very, very long time, wherever its destination lay. Rual remembered when his parents had taken him and the two sisters to the Apollo 11 Lunar Museum when he was six and only just getting into a love of the cosmos – a treat for a stellar year of school. The old pioneer rockets of yore looked much like this, with such crude and utilitarian interiors of steel.
Bold and hard-edged letters painted in white words of warnings, instruction or who knew what in languages foreign to the Oort Cloud where English had been thelingua francasurrounded the two-way airlock the cutter-men descended down, and their ancillary-minds packed-away in Guard-issued neural hardware told them what they were reading was German.
'Frieden warship tried to pass as Koslov's boys? Intelligence-gatherer? Blockade-running?' Raul asked no one while his mind went over the ships name and registration unknown to any UEG or UNSC maritime records and received the desired no-answer when they trooped out into an unlit corridor their helmet LIDAR washed over in dull hues of yellow, singeing the asymmetric lines on their HUD where light ought to have sufficed had it of run.
Their magnetised boots kicked up the dust gathered by years come and years gone as they popped the door to the cockpit and weren't disappointed when nobody was found manning the prehistoric flight controls, though the ship's heading was ascertained for certain, which was much in line with theOzymandias' own NaviComp suspicion. Straight-back run at Sol on a 1G-burn, though where exactly the vessel had made this plot from eluded investigation.
Though what did turn-up was an old polaroid tagged to the navigation box over the pilot's bucket seat, pinned there by a dried and crackled wad of sellotape. Mip tugged it off gently, snapping the tape where the photograph met the console panel and holding it up for them to gander at the two women smiling at a camera.
Another trinket for Davy Jones' locker. Another unmemory to lose – another piece of humanity passed to tag on the memorial wall. It was what made the job somber on these derelicts. You never slept well, wondering who these people had been, who they had loved, laughed with and cried with – where they were from and who's kin they had been.
Sometimes, Mip thought the starry-eyed visions of Messrs. Gagarin and Armstrong of a mankind unshackled by the hates and grudges of race and creed in humanity's shared exploration of the cosmos was a whole hell of a lot rosier than his own experiences.
Backtracking down the gangway of doors lined, most were on ready-set-lock and didn't budge to their interloping, though one or two did. Guessing by the look of it, the middle portside cabin must have been some sort of flight-ops/dining hall where the crew could chomp down on some munchies under the steady buzz of monitor feeds.
Now though only one burbled a hum of semi-life cast in buzzing redscreen. A computer so old in design and appearance it felt more and more like they'd blundered into a museum ship knocked loose from some Oort science centre.
Had the photograph been a revolutionary agent of yestercentury?
But something about the screen and the prehistoric rotating poly-model of the ship they trespassed over caught his eyes and made them bulge out of their socket nearly.
'Jesus, boss…' Mip whispered, tugging Raul's suited elbow, who felt his own eyes swell in awe as the implants therein buzzed to rearrange the letters to his native Portuguese from the dust-glazed alphabetic spaghetti it was.
PENROSE-512
SCOUT VEHICLES STATUS MONITOR
STATUS: CRITICAL SYSTEM FAILURE DETECTED
LOCATION: UNKOWN
-REPORT-
CREW STATUS:
A.YEONG, GESTALT PILOT – ACTIVE (CRYOGENICS)
LSTR-512, REPLIKA UNIT – ACTIVE (REACTOR)
The Ceres-born elder-Guard opened his mouth to say something but couldn't bring out the words that got stuck in his chest like a barbhook on his ribs. A survivor? A no-bullshit survivor of the Interplanetary Wars out here in Sol's back garden carrying a survivor and an AI unit of the bad times? Fuck.
'You genuinely think someone's alive on this fossil?' Mip asked over their shared COM-link the cutter's bridge crew were tuning-into.
'Bit hard to believe, isn't it? This thing looks like its twenty-second-century at least – probably even older. No translight engine; no working lights – not answering any calls.'
'Frieden or a Koslovite ditched the cause, took the ship and the computer and ran?'
Raul shrugged. 'Could be. We won't know till we find our deserter or this AI.'
How had anything survived on this relic from another time survived for so long out here? Sol'd been scoured raw by the decades of delousing operations that peeled the skin of Mars and the Jovian backs almost thrice-over.
Neither man paid notice for the terminal's flickering CRT-screen during the double-back, or they would have noticed the LSTR-status board flicker for a moment as the descending wave of static washed over and contorted the words into:ACTIVE (MEDICAL). Nor did they register the muffled thud of heavy footsteps as their own filled their suits over the distant hum of a dying reactor.
Both Ozymandian argonauts followed the faceshifting words writ large over doorways as their fonts and meanings translated over the barriers of eons overcome by subcranial second-brain prosthesis. For Raul, whatever they ever had been to the known world was now a crisp, intelligible deckplan – while to Mip, the foreign hieroglyphs were broken and put back together in the curling script of the Arab scholars.
'There.' The latter guard pointed to the rearmost bulkhead door with the arm that nudged his colleague's elbow on the way up. 'Cryogenic bank right there. If anyone's still beating on life, we'll find them in there.'
'And there's our billon-Credit question.' Raul sighed over a new sound that went unnoticed by the helmet auditories. The faint woosh of metal sliding into a ceiling frame.
Neither man knew their footsteps down the dim-lit corridor had been trod in reverse when they had keyed open the cryogenics bay, followed into the cockpit by a broken and delirious mind, where the derelict's own master collapsed heavily into the pilot's seat – seeing the broken tape and their boarder-ship that jutted out long and shrimplike mandrels of antennae out of stems at theOzymandias' prow that bore the starred hammer and compass of the Koslovite gunshipUnitarian, destroyed circa.2199 in a gold wreath. Neither men could have known about the fury that crest caused – nor the fireaxe being pulled from an emergency case.
Both men were too starry-eyed at the honest-to-the-Allmaker-God-of-All-Temples, 100% jen-yoo-wine vintage cryopod they found humming continued operations after what must have been centuries on the primitive bulk advanced decay after keying the door.
Neither man heard the coming falls of heavy feet of polyethylene and iron as the ship's live occupant made a B-line straight for the open cryobay door, snarling in rage-yet-to-come from the end of the axe. Both were too obliviated by their own wonder to see the doom-coming closing on their turned backs, axehead climbing higher and higher, about to scrape the ceiling.
'Holy mother of God, I think there's someone in here, Ra.' Said Mip who cuffed the crust of dirt and grime of eons with his wrist and pulled his superior over. 'Take a gander.'
'Fuck.' He breathed into the void for no one. Who was this person in the tank's fluid? How old were they? How long had the hibernation been going on for?
He checked his suit's Geiger and saw the ticker dancing at the 1,700-mark and started to grope the machine for its release and shutdown mechanism and found what he was looking for at the base of the machine. 'We've got to get them out of that tank with this much background radiation, Mip. They're dead meat snoozing if we don-'
A noise somewhere between a primal roar of anger and an animal howl of primeval epochs coming from behind and Raul's goosebumped skin came close to jumping out of his vacsuit when the figure loomed and went for the blasting iron at his hip before Mip could do anything – or stop the fireaxe that came down hard across his chest of taught fabrics protecting him from the radiation and the mad thing that cut him down.
He howled – halfway delirious between some insane cloud of agony and mind-killer fear as his diaphragm drew contaminated oxygen through his partly-excavated ribs and managed to rip the pistol right off its holster before the second blow took his shooting arm apart at the elbow in one great machine-strength swing.
Mip watched in fear-stunning horror through the pitter-patter of bloodspray over his plastic visor as the force of the second blow sent his friend down to the deck in a near 360c-pirouette, pistol spinning into some dark corner, down an open service grate – showering the deck all around in his blood as he clutched the shredded stump in illucid pain.
He stumbled back and away, holding up the useless meatbarrier-hand that hadn't saved Raul from the butcher's slab and wouldn't save him as he nearly keeled back when his boot caught in an exposed service panel.
The axe rose high again as the VISR-wash silhouette brought it down like the hammer of the archangel Michael on Raul's helmet – bursting the titanium-plastic composites at the seams like a child's toy.
His mind had tumbled in that trip into the little-death of child-fear as two burning lights set deep in sockets shadowed-over by an unkempt head of black hair buzzed in his direction like some hell-demon leaping out of the imagination-canvas of ancient painters.
Those red lamps met the pale-white halo-glow of his own retinal implants as their owner excavated the bloodied axe from Raul's helmet with a crackle and pop of collapsed titanium and plastics peeling out under the weight of a steadying hoof-boot.
The training of years long-gone him by fired-up their pre-programmed hoops in the blank synapses and four wild shots spoke from the business his service piece, striking his would-be hacker once, twice, thrice in centre-of-mass with three .50-caliber non-lethals that hammered home hard enough to disintegrate even augmented-density bone at this range – sending the hellspawn pinwheeling back and out for now.
He swallowed hard and tried to bring his bellowing wheezing back down by eleven notches from where he'd fallen to his knees in the post-fact numbness that buzzed his cranium clean of intelligent thought, until he kicked the axe away and called his mothership over his chest-tickling lurches of a brewing vomit:
'Shoh… shoh… sho-ts fired; shots fired. Off…'cer down. I repeat off…'cer down. I need fucking help over here!' He wept in breathless hysteria into his mic as he collapsed into the corner shadows of the room, legs out and clutching his pistol to his breast like a child hiding.
Raul had found officer Yeong and Mip had found LSTR-512