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janestarzMarch 27, 2024 / 080-1104
Qupar wrenched the laser scalpel from Hollo's hand and rolled her onto her back so he could check her wounds and stop her from bleeding out. It was a little awkward with her hands bound behind her back, and she was still struggling against the restraints.
"Settle down and I can treat your wounds." Qupar said to her. It didn't bother him in the slightest to be the one treating the same wounds he had given her -- his face and voice didn't betray any emotion. Hollo struggled less for a moment, but her face was still set in a murderous scowl.
Hasta approached them, a small torch in his hand. As he aimed the light at Hollo's face she snarled at him. She struggled hard, trying to get up and she tried to kick Hasta with all her might. Hasta turned the torch off. "Maybe we should blindfold her."
Qupar bent over the med kit and prepared a shot of antibiotics and some coagulant spray for her wounds. He wasn't going to remove the slugs, but with a shot of antibiotics she'd have a head start at fighting off an infection. He wrote the kind and dosage on Hollo's arm so any medics treating her would know what had been administered.
"I could stay with her to make sure she doesn't bleed out while you go on ahead." Qupar said. "But I think we can move her."
"I think we need to stick together. Something is out there. *Something* is making these people behave in a strange way." Hasta replied. "We should all stick together. Otherwise you'll be picked off or even eaten like those people in the meat locker. Or they'll do something to your brain like this woman." He pointed a thumb over his shoulder at Hollo and grabbed his torch. "I don't need to shine a light into her eyes again to show you, do I?" He shoved the torch into a pocket. "Something weird is definitely happening."
"I agree." Moira said. Parappa nodded empathically, and Dendr gave a curt nod.
"Let's get you up then." Qupar said, helping Hollo to her feet with an arm under her elbow.
"Should we put our helmets back on?" Dendr asked. "Whatever is doing this to these people might be an infectious disease. It could still be on the ship."
"If that is the case, we're already infected, Dendr." Qupar said. "We've had the helmets off for more than an hour."
Dendr blinked. "We'd better find something to drink then." He always treated alcohol as a cure-all for his problems.
"Would it hurt us to limit our exposure though?" Moira asked.
"If you've got it, you've already got it. We still don't know what it is. Maybe the lead scientist here can tell us?" Qupar looked at Hollo. "If she even knows what it is."
Hollo was still snarling, but her head was down and her braids were swaying. Perhaps she was trying to keep the light from her eyes, even though the auxiliary lab was still mostly dark. She shot Hasta murderous glances. He was the man who had a light in his pocket, after all.
Myles eyed the helmet and gloves thoughtfully. He really didn't want to wear the gloves, as they'd impair his ability to use a gun.
"It's no use wearing the helmet without the gloves." Qupar told him. A vacc suit was only airtight if it was fully sealed, after all. He patted Myles on the shoulder. "We'll radio the starport before docking, just to make sure they have a team on standby."
Decontamination protocols were nobody's favourite pastime, but then how the authorities would handle the situation was different for each planet. They could be very strict or very lax. They'd probably find out soon enough.
They marched to the auxiliary bridge, Hasta in front, Hollo in the centre of the group with Qupar just behind her, holding her elbow. They checked out several rooms in the hallway before finding the auxiliary bridge. One of them looked like Engineering.
The auxiliary bridge was brightly lit, and Qupar held onto Hollo's arm more tightly as she started to become agitated. They moved inside to check the space. It wasn't ransacked like any of the other rooms, and there was a computer terminal and several panels with ship's controls. A door just to the right of the entrance would allow quick access to engineering right next door.
Moira went through the door towards engineering. "I'd like to check out the engines. If any of them go critical I'd like to know before it happens."
Dendr sat down at one of the comms panels, Parappa just behind him. Dendr tapped away at the console, but soon enough noticed Parappa was fidgeting at his shoulder, trying to point at the terminal and then drawing his hand back quickly before Dendr could swat at it.
"What?!" Dendr demanded.
"It's just... if you try..."
"Fine, you can do whatever the fuck you want then." Dendr stood up in a flash and marched over to the door to engineering to join Moira there in a huff, grumbling under his breath.
Hasta sat at another terminal. He plugged away at the keyboard, trying to hack into the system. He was mumbling to himself in a low rumble, sometimes tapping his chin thoughtfully. It took him about twenty minutes or so to get in.
"Got it." Hasta rumbled happily. He pulled up the terminal screen and started rummaging around the database. His happy smile faded quickly, as with each screen he got more and more frustrated. Scientists usually had brilliant minds, but the way they stored information seemed a jumble only they could understand. It took him almost half an hour to make sense of the way the system had been set up. Finally he managed to find and pull up the communication logs. Daily communications to Lysari Laboratories were easily decoded now that he had found them. There was a crew roster with some interesting information as well. It listed several mercenary officers being hired over the past few months and coming onto the ship. Rummaging around some more turned up more information about the crew, including biometric data. That would be helpful if they wanted to identify the bodies in the meat locker.
Hasta also found another incongruity. One week earlier, there had been an explosion in the auxiliary laboratory which had caused a power surge, disabling several functions. Once those came back online, the system detected unknown chemicals in the air. The filters had started scrubbing these chemicals from the air, which had taken 20 hours because they had infiltrated every quadrant of the ship. And finally, the logs indicated most of the security cameras were smashed.
Myles followed Qupar and Hollo back through the auxiliary lab. Hollo seemed to be sleepy and struggling less now that they weren't near the bright lights anymore, and she started complaining. "Why are you treating me like this? This is wrong!"
"Hey lady, you attacked *me*, remember?" Qupar retorted.
"Did I? Did I ...attack you?"
"Yes. You did."
"I don't remember anything."
"You probably attacked your crewmates as well, you just don't remember it."
"No, no. I haven't attacked any crewmates. Definitely not. I'm not that type of person."
Qupar raised his eyebrows and grabbed Hollo's elbow tightly. He wanted to show her exactly what had happened, how the crew was hanging from meat hooks. Myles shook his head silently, but Qupar was marching Hollo through the auxiliary lab already. When they got to the door to the meat locker, Qupar stopped walking. If he was being honest with himself, he still wasn't sure if Hollo was a victim or a perpetrator. He figured he would need to interrogate her, gauge her reaction, to see if he could work it out.
"What happened here?"
Hollo had her head down, looking nervous. "I really don't know what happened. One evening everything was fine, and then there was this loud bang, I think it was an explosion in the auxiliary lab. It just seemed to be all hell let loose, emergency warning lights were on and ...I don't *really* remember much at all. It was just a blur to me. There were people running around, worried we were going to lose pressure, and...I don't really remember much more about that. That was a good number of days ago. Since then I've hardly seen any crew members at all...I ... haven't seen anyone really."
Qupar pushed her closer to the common area a little further along. The few lightbulbs still intact, the barricade of tables and chairs and the bloodstains on the floor.
"Oh...What went on here? Oh...." Hollo asked, when she surveyed the scene. Then her tone changed, certainty in her voice. "It's nothing to do with me. No, no, it's nothing to do with me at all. What...what...what went on here?"
"Where were you when this happened?" Qupar asked.
"I...I...I don't know. I don't know when it happened. I don't know where I was at the time. I wasn't here though."
"As lead scientist, are you in charge of operations on board this ship as well?"
"Yes, yes, definitely." Hollo still had her head down, fidgeting away as much as she could in restraints. Qupar studied her reaction closely. Was she only pretending to be small and frightened? Was it an act?
She looked pensive and frightened. She was still fidgeting with her clothing, but she had been doing that all the time, even before when Qupar hadn't been asking her questions. He could imagine if there was a hole in someone's memory, that could be a nerve-wracking experience. Knowing something was missing, but not knowing what it was... It was clear she didn't want to talk about what had happened on the ship, but he wasn't sure whether that was because of shock or not. Was she innocent? He couldn't quite tell.
"Have you seen where your crew went?" Qupar finally asked. "The other scientists?"
"No, no. I've been hearing things, and I've seen some horrible things around like blood and...at some point I even saw some dead bodies in the rooms...I've just been hiding, trying to make myself small and keep out of the way. There's something scary on board and I don't know what it is."
"Something scary?" Qupar looked at Myles and prompted; "Explain 'something scary'?"
"Well, seeing dead bodies on the ship and ...my crewmates...something bad is going on and I just don't want no part of it. I just try to...hide...and wait for rescue. And you came along....and you...could be my saviours. I'm so glad that someone else is here."
"Quite a word you use there for someone who shot you twice." Qupar replied, waving a hand at the wounds on her stomach.
"I don't know what happened there." she replied. "I...felt threatened. It wasn't my fault. I just don't want to be hurt. I don't want to be hurt at all. I'm not a hateful person, not a violent person."
"Yet something triggered that instinct in you." Qupar sighed. He thought she was genuine in what she was saying and her body language supported that. The lead scientist just seemed frightened. He decided against showing Hollo the meat locker. Showing her a pile of dead crewmen probably wouldn't help her state of mind.
Moira checked the systems in engineering. Power was being generated and they were in a stable orbit so she decided to check life support next, and everything there was in the green too. The panel indicated no biohazards, and she sighed. It had subconsciously bothered her that there might be some airborne pathogen, but if the ship didn't detect anything...
She moved towards the ladder. Above the engineering deck was an access hatch to the drive pods. She figured she might as well check those out.
The hatch seemed to be stuck. Perhaps it was sealed in some way. She went back down and climbed the ladder to the other access hatch. The second hatch opened with a soft hiss, and she continued her climb.
There was a sudden sound somewhere to her right. A jabbing pain in the shoulder told her she was impaled by something. When she looked at her shoulder, she could see a sharpened pneumatic piston had penetrated her vacc suit and stabbed deep into her flesh. Moira screamed loudly.
In engineering, below her, a startled Dendr echoed her scream. He reeled, and turned to her. "Shut the fuck up!" he bit in the loudest whisper he could muster.
Moira tried to slide down the ladder again, but her shoulder was agony. The piston pinned her in place and she couldn't move. Then, from the corner of her eye, she saw something human-shaped move in the shadows.
"There's someone in the drive pod!" Moira shouted down. She grabbed the stun stick tight and tried to lunge and jab at the shape in the shadows. Because she was still pinned in place by the piston it was an awkward way to attack someone, and she didn't manage to hit the person hiding there.
There was a growling scream from the figure in the shadows, and it lunged at Moira. Moira ducked just in time as the person in the shadows tried to strike her with a wrench. Her shoulder caught the brunt of the force, but it was just a glancing blow. Moira writhed and wriggled, trying furiously to deflect any more hits, trying to get the piston out of her shoulder and out of her vacc suit. She managed it at last, and with a little squeal of surprise she dropped the five or six feet from the ladder back down into engineering below.
"Hasta!" Moira managed to scream before she hit the floor. Her shoulder was bleeding now, but at least falling from the ladder hadn't caused her any more injuries.
A grubby looking female appeared at the hatch above Moira. She was dressed in an armoured jumpsuit and holding a wrench, and she jumped down after Moira, looking ready to continue the fight.
Dendr reacted in an instant. He pulled out his pistol and fired several rounds into the woman. Bright red bloodstains blossomed on her jumpsuit and she groaned, but she didn't fall. Moira was still on the ground, and in an act of unexpected heroism, Dendr moved between them, trying to stop the woman from getting to Moira. She was still on the ground, and she tried to poke the grubby looking woman with her stun stick, but it was such a feeble stab she missed completely. Just as the woman tried to strike at her again with the wrench, Moira rolled and it smacked her shoulder despite Dendr standing there.
He wasn't taking any more of this woman's shit, and raised his pistol again. The rounds he fired off hit her squarely in the chest. "Stop hitting my friend!" Dendr shouted furiously.
It was a miracle the woman was still standing. She was bleeding profusely from several gunshot wounds in the chest, but she showed no interest in stopping.
In the next room, Hasta jumped up. What he had thought was gunfire repeated itself, and now he was damn sure it was gunfire and he wasn't going to miss the fun. At the other console it took Parappa several moments to look up from his spreadsheet -- the data was just so engrossing. He started as Hasta grabbed his flechette rifle and ran towards the connecting door to engineering, and had only just got up from his seat when Hasta disappeared through the doorway.
Hasta moved around engineering cautiously but swiftly, looking for the source of the gunfire. He saw Moira on the floor, and Dendr facing off against a woman that he recognised from the crew manifest as one of the engineering crew. As she was holding a wrench menacingly and not showing signs of stopping, he squeezed the trigger. The flechette rounds hit her squarely in the torso and she finally succumbed to her wounds. As she collapsed onto Moira in a heap, Hasta started berating them.
"Honestly, I leave you to do some computer things for *five minutes* and look what happens."
"That was never five minutes!" Moira objected. "Also, there's a bleeding person on top of me. Can we... move her off? Can someone call for a doctor?"
At that time, Qupar and Myles returned with Hollo to the auxiliary bridge. The woman squinted at the bright lights, but stayed silent. Parappa was fidgeting nervously; "Oh, oh! They're in there!" indicating the open door to engineering.
"What's going on?" Qupar asked as he entered engineering and looked at the two women on the floor, with Dendr and Hasta holding weapons trained on the unconscious one that was sprawled over Moira.
"I'm hurt!" Moira exclaimed, just as Hasta dryly stated "Moira has managed to piss of loads of people living in the ceiling." Hasta turned to Moira. "Moira, are there more of them? In the ceiling?"
Before she had a chance to reply, Hollo screamed "Oh my god! You've killed Pent, our engineer! You monsters! Who are you? What are you doing? I thought you were going to look after me!"
Qupar ignored her and bent down to roll the engineer off of Moira carefully. She was clearly unconscious, whereas Moira was still speaking. There was a lot of blood on them both. It was immediately obvious the other woman was just barely clinging to life, so he opened the med kit and set to work to try and stabilise her. He counted seven gunshot wounds, all of them bleeding profusely. It took some doing, but after a good twenty minutes the bleeding stopped and the engineer was drifting in and out of consciousness, but at least she was stable for now.
Qupar then turned to Moira. Her shoulder wound was still seeping, but as he tried to treat her Moira kept moving about.
"Hold still;" he grunted. "I'm trying to help you."
"I'm not wriggling, your hands are shaking." Moira bit back, her face set in a grimace. "Did you operate on awake persons before, or were they always unconscious?"
"I can unbunch your panties if you just - hold - still!"
"Do you want me to lick the stun stick for you?"
"If it helps."
After the first aid kit was packed away again, they shared what they had found.
"I don't think she knows what happened here." Qupar said to the crew, indicating Hollo with a nod of his head. "She seems truly shaken."
Hasta was still eyeing the ceiling hatch with his rifle at the ready. "Are there any more people in the ceiling?"
"Not that I've seen." Moira said, holding her shoulder carefully. The painkillers took the edge off the pain, but she was still uncomfortable.
They discussed their options and what their investigation had turned up. Parappa told them excitedly about what he had found in the comm systems.
"They sent out their daily reports before the blackout - they were encoded, obviously, but I could see them in the computer. But there was another message piggy-backed onto them, and they were also on messages coming back. These were sent to Abutla chemical company. I couldn't see anything but the headers of the messages, the contents have been deleted. They did leave a footprint in the logs - when they were received, where they came from. I can't tell you what they were doing. What I can tell you is that they were sent to a person named Harris Slocombe. The last message received was a day before the explosion in the auxiliary lab happened."
"Slocombe. That was the astrogator on board the ship." Hasta told them, and then summarised what he found in the logs. A week ago while the crew was asleep, the cameras were turned off for ten minutes. An hour later, an explosion in the auxiliary lab rocked the ship. Minutes later several crew members came from their cabins and started savagely attacking one another. Several of them were killed. The crew started going ballistic, smashing light fixtures and cameras. And something else had stood out: over the last four months the ship received several deliveries of cryo-berths of mercenary crews. The cryo berths were in the cargo room in Quadrant 3.
"Let's go check out these cryo tubes. It seems like there had been a leak of these toxic chemicals of some description that has had an impact on everybody. We know that something, probably people, have been brought on board." Hasta said. "It feels a bit like this could be someone trying to take over the science research station. Also: do we need to tell people what is going on here?"
"Yes." Qupar nodded. "My concern is that as soon as those people figure out we're onto them, they are going to blow up this entire ship with us on it." He paused for emphasis. "No evidence, remember?"
He turned to look at Hollo, who was sitting awkwardly next to the unconscious engineer. "Also, if we are to go gallivanting about the ship, what are we going to do with these two?"
"Good point." Hasta said. "We can't really leave them anywhere but we can't take them along with us either, can we?"
"You can't leave us in here." Hollo said suddenly. She had been listening to their conversation all along. "It's too dangerous! What if someone comes and finds us and attacks us? We can't defend ourselves."
"Hollo, are you going to come and walk straight into danger with us?" asks Hasta. "It's fine if you are."
She paled at the question. "I don't want to walk into danger but I don't want to stay and let danger walk into me..."
"Fine." Hasta nodded. "Come with us then."
"What about this one?" Qupar checked on the engineer. "She's barely conscious."
"We'll just have to leave her and come back for her in a bit." Hasta decided. "There are enough beds around, we could leave her in one."
"If we stash her in that burrow in the auxiliary lab she'll be out of sight." Qupar suggested. "It's right next door to where we landed the air raft, and there was bedding in there."
As they were putting the woman in there, Hasta summarised his plan. "I just think we need to proceed quickly and with maximum prejudice against things that might try and hurt us. And then get the hell out of here."
TO BE CONTINUED...
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Read the first entry in this campaign.
Qupar wrenched the laser scalpel from Hollo's hand and rolled her onto her back so he could check her wounds and stop her from bleeding out. It was a little awkward with her hands bound behind her back, and she was still struggling against the restraints.
"Settle down and I can treat your wounds." Qupar said to her. It didn't bother him in the slightest to be the one treating the same wounds he had given her -- his face and voice didn't betray any emotion. Hollo struggled less for a moment, but her face was still set in a murderous scowl.
Hasta approached them, a small torch in his hand. As he aimed the light at Hollo's face she snarled at him. She struggled hard, trying to get up and she tried to kick Hasta with all her might. Hasta turned the torch off. "Maybe we should blindfold her."
Qupar bent over the med kit and prepared a shot of antibiotics and some coagulant spray for her wounds. He wasn't going to remove the slugs, but with a shot of antibiotics she'd have a head start at fighting off an infection. He wrote the kind and dosage on Hollo's arm so any medics treating her would know what had been administered.
"I could stay with her to make sure she doesn't bleed out while you go on ahead." Qupar said. "But I think we can move her."
"I think we need to stick together. Something is out there. *Something* is making these people behave in a strange way." Hasta replied. "We should all stick together. Otherwise you'll be picked off or even eaten like those people in the meat locker. Or they'll do something to your brain like this woman." He pointed a thumb over his shoulder at Hollo and grabbed his torch. "I don't need to shine a light into her eyes again to show you, do I?" He shoved the torch into a pocket. "Something weird is definitely happening."
"I agree." Moira said. Parappa nodded empathically, and Dendr gave a curt nod.
"Let's get you up then." Qupar said, helping Hollo to her feet with an arm under her elbow.
"Should we put our helmets back on?" Dendr asked. "Whatever is doing this to these people might be an infectious disease. It could still be on the ship."
"If that is the case, we're already infected, Dendr." Qupar said. "We've had the helmets off for more than an hour."
Dendr blinked. "We'd better find something to drink then." He always treated alcohol as a cure-all for his problems.
"Would it hurt us to limit our exposure though?" Moira asked.
"If you've got it, you've already got it. We still don't know what it is. Maybe the lead scientist here can tell us?" Qupar looked at Hollo. "If she even knows what it is."
Hollo was still snarling, but her head was down and her braids were swaying. Perhaps she was trying to keep the light from her eyes, even though the auxiliary lab was still mostly dark. She shot Hasta murderous glances. He was the man who had a light in his pocket, after all.
Myles eyed the helmet and gloves thoughtfully. He really didn't want to wear the gloves, as they'd impair his ability to use a gun.
"It's no use wearing the helmet without the gloves." Qupar told him. A vacc suit was only airtight if it was fully sealed, after all. He patted Myles on the shoulder. "We'll radio the starport before docking, just to make sure they have a team on standby."
Decontamination protocols were nobody's favourite pastime, but then how the authorities would handle the situation was different for each planet. They could be very strict or very lax. They'd probably find out soon enough.
They marched to the auxiliary bridge, Hasta in front, Hollo in the centre of the group with Qupar just behind her, holding her elbow. They checked out several rooms in the hallway before finding the auxiliary bridge. One of them looked like Engineering.
The auxiliary bridge was brightly lit, and Qupar held onto Hollo's arm more tightly as she started to become agitated. They moved inside to check the space. It wasn't ransacked like any of the other rooms, and there was a computer terminal and several panels with ship's controls. A door just to the right of the entrance would allow quick access to engineering right next door.
Moira went through the door towards engineering. "I'd like to check out the engines. If any of them go critical I'd like to know before it happens."
Dendr sat down at one of the comms panels, Parappa just behind him. Dendr tapped away at the console, but soon enough noticed Parappa was fidgeting at his shoulder, trying to point at the terminal and then drawing his hand back quickly before Dendr could swat at it.
"What?!" Dendr demanded.
"It's just... if you try..."
"Fine, you can do whatever the fuck you want then." Dendr stood up in a flash and marched over to the door to engineering to join Moira there in a huff, grumbling under his breath.
Hasta sat at another terminal. He plugged away at the keyboard, trying to hack into the system. He was mumbling to himself in a low rumble, sometimes tapping his chin thoughtfully. It took him about twenty minutes or so to get in.
"Got it." Hasta rumbled happily. He pulled up the terminal screen and started rummaging around the database. His happy smile faded quickly, as with each screen he got more and more frustrated. Scientists usually had brilliant minds, but the way they stored information seemed a jumble only they could understand. It took him almost half an hour to make sense of the way the system had been set up. Finally he managed to find and pull up the communication logs. Daily communications to Lysari Laboratories were easily decoded now that he had found them. There was a crew roster with some interesting information as well. It listed several mercenary officers being hired over the past few months and coming onto the ship. Rummaging around some more turned up more information about the crew, including biometric data. That would be helpful if they wanted to identify the bodies in the meat locker.
Hasta also found another incongruity. One week earlier, there had been an explosion in the auxiliary laboratory which had caused a power surge, disabling several functions. Once those came back online, the system detected unknown chemicals in the air. The filters had started scrubbing these chemicals from the air, which had taken 20 hours because they had infiltrated every quadrant of the ship. And finally, the logs indicated most of the security cameras were smashed.
Myles followed Qupar and Hollo back through the auxiliary lab. Hollo seemed to be sleepy and struggling less now that they weren't near the bright lights anymore, and she started complaining. "Why are you treating me like this? This is wrong!"
"Hey lady, you attacked *me*, remember?" Qupar retorted.
"Did I? Did I ...attack you?"
"Yes. You did."
"I don't remember anything."
"You probably attacked your crewmates as well, you just don't remember it."
"No, no. I haven't attacked any crewmates. Definitely not. I'm not that type of person."
Qupar raised his eyebrows and grabbed Hollo's elbow tightly. He wanted to show her exactly what had happened, how the crew was hanging from meat hooks. Myles shook his head silently, but Qupar was marching Hollo through the auxiliary lab already. When they got to the door to the meat locker, Qupar stopped walking. If he was being honest with himself, he still wasn't sure if Hollo was a victim or a perpetrator. He figured he would need to interrogate her, gauge her reaction, to see if he could work it out.
"What happened here?"
Hollo had her head down, looking nervous. "I really don't know what happened. One evening everything was fine, and then there was this loud bang, I think it was an explosion in the auxiliary lab. It just seemed to be all hell let loose, emergency warning lights were on and ...I don't *really* remember much at all. It was just a blur to me. There were people running around, worried we were going to lose pressure, and...I don't really remember much more about that. That was a good number of days ago. Since then I've hardly seen any crew members at all...I ... haven't seen anyone really."
Qupar pushed her closer to the common area a little further along. The few lightbulbs still intact, the barricade of tables and chairs and the bloodstains on the floor.
"Oh...What went on here? Oh...." Hollo asked, when she surveyed the scene. Then her tone changed, certainty in her voice. "It's nothing to do with me. No, no, it's nothing to do with me at all. What...what...what went on here?"
"Where were you when this happened?" Qupar asked.
"I...I...I don't know. I don't know when it happened. I don't know where I was at the time. I wasn't here though."
"As lead scientist, are you in charge of operations on board this ship as well?"
"Yes, yes, definitely." Hollo still had her head down, fidgeting away as much as she could in restraints. Qupar studied her reaction closely. Was she only pretending to be small and frightened? Was it an act?
She looked pensive and frightened. She was still fidgeting with her clothing, but she had been doing that all the time, even before when Qupar hadn't been asking her questions. He could imagine if there was a hole in someone's memory, that could be a nerve-wracking experience. Knowing something was missing, but not knowing what it was... It was clear she didn't want to talk about what had happened on the ship, but he wasn't sure whether that was because of shock or not. Was she innocent? He couldn't quite tell.
"Have you seen where your crew went?" Qupar finally asked. "The other scientists?"
"No, no. I've been hearing things, and I've seen some horrible things around like blood and...at some point I even saw some dead bodies in the rooms...I've just been hiding, trying to make myself small and keep out of the way. There's something scary on board and I don't know what it is."
"Something scary?" Qupar looked at Myles and prompted; "Explain 'something scary'?"
"Well, seeing dead bodies on the ship and ...my crewmates...something bad is going on and I just don't want no part of it. I just try to...hide...and wait for rescue. And you came along....and you...could be my saviours. I'm so glad that someone else is here."
"Quite a word you use there for someone who shot you twice." Qupar replied, waving a hand at the wounds on her stomach.
"I don't know what happened there." she replied. "I...felt threatened. It wasn't my fault. I just don't want to be hurt. I don't want to be hurt at all. I'm not a hateful person, not a violent person."
"Yet something triggered that instinct in you." Qupar sighed. He thought she was genuine in what she was saying and her body language supported that. The lead scientist just seemed frightened. He decided against showing Hollo the meat locker. Showing her a pile of dead crewmen probably wouldn't help her state of mind.
Moira checked the systems in engineering. Power was being generated and they were in a stable orbit so she decided to check life support next, and everything there was in the green too. The panel indicated no biohazards, and she sighed. It had subconsciously bothered her that there might be some airborne pathogen, but if the ship didn't detect anything...
She moved towards the ladder. Above the engineering deck was an access hatch to the drive pods. She figured she might as well check those out.
The hatch seemed to be stuck. Perhaps it was sealed in some way. She went back down and climbed the ladder to the other access hatch. The second hatch opened with a soft hiss, and she continued her climb.
There was a sudden sound somewhere to her right. A jabbing pain in the shoulder told her she was impaled by something. When she looked at her shoulder, she could see a sharpened pneumatic piston had penetrated her vacc suit and stabbed deep into her flesh. Moira screamed loudly.
In engineering, below her, a startled Dendr echoed her scream. He reeled, and turned to her. "Shut the fuck up!" he bit in the loudest whisper he could muster.
Moira tried to slide down the ladder again, but her shoulder was agony. The piston pinned her in place and she couldn't move. Then, from the corner of her eye, she saw something human-shaped move in the shadows.
"There's someone in the drive pod!" Moira shouted down. She grabbed the stun stick tight and tried to lunge and jab at the shape in the shadows. Because she was still pinned in place by the piston it was an awkward way to attack someone, and she didn't manage to hit the person hiding there.
There was a growling scream from the figure in the shadows, and it lunged at Moira. Moira ducked just in time as the person in the shadows tried to strike her with a wrench. Her shoulder caught the brunt of the force, but it was just a glancing blow. Moira writhed and wriggled, trying furiously to deflect any more hits, trying to get the piston out of her shoulder and out of her vacc suit. She managed it at last, and with a little squeal of surprise she dropped the five or six feet from the ladder back down into engineering below.
"Hasta!" Moira managed to scream before she hit the floor. Her shoulder was bleeding now, but at least falling from the ladder hadn't caused her any more injuries.
A grubby looking female appeared at the hatch above Moira. She was dressed in an armoured jumpsuit and holding a wrench, and she jumped down after Moira, looking ready to continue the fight.
Dendr reacted in an instant. He pulled out his pistol and fired several rounds into the woman. Bright red bloodstains blossomed on her jumpsuit and she groaned, but she didn't fall. Moira was still on the ground, and in an act of unexpected heroism, Dendr moved between them, trying to stop the woman from getting to Moira. She was still on the ground, and she tried to poke the grubby looking woman with her stun stick, but it was such a feeble stab she missed completely. Just as the woman tried to strike at her again with the wrench, Moira rolled and it smacked her shoulder despite Dendr standing there.
He wasn't taking any more of this woman's shit, and raised his pistol again. The rounds he fired off hit her squarely in the chest. "Stop hitting my friend!" Dendr shouted furiously.
It was a miracle the woman was still standing. She was bleeding profusely from several gunshot wounds in the chest, but she showed no interest in stopping.
In the next room, Hasta jumped up. What he had thought was gunfire repeated itself, and now he was damn sure it was gunfire and he wasn't going to miss the fun. At the other console it took Parappa several moments to look up from his spreadsheet -- the data was just so engrossing. He started as Hasta grabbed his flechette rifle and ran towards the connecting door to engineering, and had only just got up from his seat when Hasta disappeared through the doorway.
Hasta moved around engineering cautiously but swiftly, looking for the source of the gunfire. He saw Moira on the floor, and Dendr facing off against a woman that he recognised from the crew manifest as one of the engineering crew. As she was holding a wrench menacingly and not showing signs of stopping, he squeezed the trigger. The flechette rounds hit her squarely in the torso and she finally succumbed to her wounds. As she collapsed onto Moira in a heap, Hasta started berating them.
"Honestly, I leave you to do some computer things for *five minutes* and look what happens."
"That was never five minutes!" Moira objected. "Also, there's a bleeding person on top of me. Can we... move her off? Can someone call for a doctor?"
At that time, Qupar and Myles returned with Hollo to the auxiliary bridge. The woman squinted at the bright lights, but stayed silent. Parappa was fidgeting nervously; "Oh, oh! They're in there!" indicating the open door to engineering.
"What's going on?" Qupar asked as he entered engineering and looked at the two women on the floor, with Dendr and Hasta holding weapons trained on the unconscious one that was sprawled over Moira.
"I'm hurt!" Moira exclaimed, just as Hasta dryly stated "Moira has managed to piss of loads of people living in the ceiling." Hasta turned to Moira. "Moira, are there more of them? In the ceiling?"
Before she had a chance to reply, Hollo screamed "Oh my god! You've killed Pent, our engineer! You monsters! Who are you? What are you doing? I thought you were going to look after me!"
Qupar ignored her and bent down to roll the engineer off of Moira carefully. She was clearly unconscious, whereas Moira was still speaking. There was a lot of blood on them both. It was immediately obvious the other woman was just barely clinging to life, so he opened the med kit and set to work to try and stabilise her. He counted seven gunshot wounds, all of them bleeding profusely. It took some doing, but after a good twenty minutes the bleeding stopped and the engineer was drifting in and out of consciousness, but at least she was stable for now.
Qupar then turned to Moira. Her shoulder wound was still seeping, but as he tried to treat her Moira kept moving about.
"Hold still;" he grunted. "I'm trying to help you."
"I'm not wriggling, your hands are shaking." Moira bit back, her face set in a grimace. "Did you operate on awake persons before, or were they always unconscious?"
"I can unbunch your panties if you just - hold - still!"
"Do you want me to lick the stun stick for you?"
"If it helps."
After the first aid kit was packed away again, they shared what they had found.
"I don't think she knows what happened here." Qupar said to the crew, indicating Hollo with a nod of his head. "She seems truly shaken."
Hasta was still eyeing the ceiling hatch with his rifle at the ready. "Are there any more people in the ceiling?"
"Not that I've seen." Moira said, holding her shoulder carefully. The painkillers took the edge off the pain, but she was still uncomfortable.
They discussed their options and what their investigation had turned up. Parappa told them excitedly about what he had found in the comm systems.
"They sent out their daily reports before the blackout - they were encoded, obviously, but I could see them in the computer. But there was another message piggy-backed onto them, and they were also on messages coming back. These were sent to Abutla chemical company. I couldn't see anything but the headers of the messages, the contents have been deleted. They did leave a footprint in the logs - when they were received, where they came from. I can't tell you what they were doing. What I can tell you is that they were sent to a person named Harris Slocombe. The last message received was a day before the explosion in the auxiliary lab happened."
"Slocombe. That was the astrogator on board the ship." Hasta told them, and then summarised what he found in the logs. A week ago while the crew was asleep, the cameras were turned off for ten minutes. An hour later, an explosion in the auxiliary lab rocked the ship. Minutes later several crew members came from their cabins and started savagely attacking one another. Several of them were killed. The crew started going ballistic, smashing light fixtures and cameras. And something else had stood out: over the last four months the ship received several deliveries of cryo-berths of mercenary crews. The cryo berths were in the cargo room in Quadrant 3.
"Let's go check out these cryo tubes. It seems like there had been a leak of these toxic chemicals of some description that has had an impact on everybody. We know that something, probably people, have been brought on board." Hasta said. "It feels a bit like this could be someone trying to take over the science research station. Also: do we need to tell people what is going on here?"
"Yes." Qupar nodded. "My concern is that as soon as those people figure out we're onto them, they are going to blow up this entire ship with us on it." He paused for emphasis. "No evidence, remember?"
He turned to look at Hollo, who was sitting awkwardly next to the unconscious engineer. "Also, if we are to go gallivanting about the ship, what are we going to do with these two?"
"Good point." Hasta said. "We can't really leave them anywhere but we can't take them along with us either, can we?"
"You can't leave us in here." Hollo said suddenly. She had been listening to their conversation all along. "It's too dangerous! What if someone comes and finds us and attacks us? We can't defend ourselves."
"Hollo, are you going to come and walk straight into danger with us?" asks Hasta. "It's fine if you are."
She paled at the question. "I don't want to walk into danger but I don't want to stay and let danger walk into me..."
"Fine." Hasta nodded. "Come with us then."
"What about this one?" Qupar checked on the engineer. "She's barely conscious."
"We'll just have to leave her and come back for her in a bit." Hasta decided. "There are enough beds around, we could leave her in one."
"If we stash her in that burrow in the auxiliary lab she'll be out of sight." Qupar suggested. "It's right next door to where we landed the air raft, and there was bedding in there."
As they were putting the woman in there, Hasta summarised his plan. "I just think we need to proceed quickly and with maximum prejudice against things that might try and hurt us. And then get the hell out of here."
TO BE CONTINUED...
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