“The grafts are baffling even the ship’s systems, we’re going to have to put you down the hard way,” sighed Estrada as he rubbed his eyes. He looked away from the display and out towards the ship ahead of them. “Assume this is a hostile salvage, but, and this is important, I’ve been given an update to the profile. I’ll send it to your tablet, they want the nav computer as the prime goal aside from any intact cargo. Good hunting.”
Less than an hour later Rhett activated the mag-clamps as his booted feet planted themselves upon the dark hull of the slave ship. At least there hadn’t been any debris to fight through during the drop, he thought as the rest of the team hit hull and began scampering over the ship. They moved quickly, each of them having spent the last week listening to Kratos describe his violent encounters with the Tasca operatives. Even Quinn was not her usually chatty self, and the team proceeded in silence as they converged on the main hatch for the cargo hold.
Doak cut a hole in the hatch so that Quinn could snake her camera inside, and immediately Rhett could see in her display the body of a bullet riddled operative in a lite grade dropsuit floating amidst bloody ice crystals and spent shell casings.
“John and Sparks, I want you to stay hullside, get that ship grappler disabled, just in case. That way the Six can get in here and pull us if we get into trouble we can’t handle. Scout the rest of the hull for any other weapons systems, disable it all,” ordered Rhett as he gave Doak the signal to cut the lock for entry. “Dante, on point, Drago, on overwatch, the rest of you stack on me. Here we go.”
Doak cut the lock while Quinn and Rhett heaved with their tools, opening the hatch with only a minimal rush of air as the ship decompressed. The body of the operative in the dropsuit soared out of the opening and into open space, soon fading into the black as the scrappers entered the dead vessel. Immediately, the group activated their various lights and illuminated the large cargo hold. It was empty, save for a few pieces of floating debris and spent shell casings.
“Well, whatever they were carrying certainly isn’t here anymore, this place is picked clean,” observed Quinn as the team spread out to cover the chamber.
“There was a firefight, obviously,” observed Dante, his voice seeming even more detached in the cold confines of the dark ship. “A mixture of precision strikes and sporadic gunfire. Perhaps some of the slaves fought back.”
“Captain, I’ve got a cargo hold that’s been emptied top to bottom,” reported Rhett on the main channel. “This ship is mostly engine and cargo hold, so I’m not sure what the client is hoping to get out of this thing.”
“Remember just get to the pilot deck and secure the nav computer,” responded Captain Estrada. “So long as we have that the bounty is good.”
“Honestly, I’m glad there’s no cargo,” said Quinn as she followed Rhett and Dante towards the hatch that led to the rest of the ship. “It would have been weird to hand over a bunch of dead or cryo-napping slaves. I’m happy not to have that particular moral quandary keeping me up nights.”
“More bodies in the hallway,” noted Dante as he swept his combo-weapon back and forth across the tight corridor, knocking aside floating blood crystals and more shell casings that drifted through the zero-G interior, checking both ends before moving towards the pilot’s deck, “Dropsuits, armor punched by small arms in extreme close quarters. Looks like assault rounds, maybe a bull-pup pattern, the kind Praxis Mundi pilots fly with.”
“The cartel hires people from all walks of life, could be a Praxis pilot found their wage higher than the corporation,” observed Rhett, thinking that no matter how many times Dante or Drago displayed their preternatural knowledge of firearms he was never going to get used to their fanaticism, useful though it was, “Drago and Doak, take the right, see what you can find in the crew berth and engine chambers. Quinn, you’re with us. John, give me a sitrep.”
“The grappler is disabled, we cut the aiming mechanism and severed the power couplings. Sparks found a skiff mooring, but no skiff, maybe it was left behind wherever this launched from,” responded John over the main channel.
“Copy,” said Rhett as he and Dante walked side by side to the hatch leading to the pilot’s deck.
They both noted that the lock had been cut, and nodded at each other. Dante hefted his weapon and waited for Rhett to place his off hand on the former cultists shoulder. Rhett tapped Dante’s shoulder and the pair rushed into the darkened pilot’s deck ready for a fight.
They discovered that the fight had been finished long ago, as three corpses occupied the small pilot’s deck. One wore a dropsuit and the other two were in simple flight suits. While the dropsuit operative looked to have been blasted on full-auto at close range, the two others, presumably the pilot and engineer, had been eviscerated. What would have been grisly in a full gravity environment was absolutely nightmarish in zero G, as the carnage drifted through the cabin instead of pooling on the deck. Their blood and frozen entrails filled the cabin, and it took everything Rhett had to keep his meal from coming back up.
While Dante kept watch as Rhett gingerly moved through the floating frozen mess and assessed the pilot’s control panel. From what he could see, though he was no expert, it looked as if the controls had been set and then the connection severed. He could see the cut wires drifting lazily underneath the panel.
“Doak, report,” said Rhett, his mind racing as he attempted to reconstruct what had happened on board this dead vessel.
“Crew berth be empty,” came Doak’s coarse voice in response. “I tell you what they left in a hurry, nothing made or stowed, just floating. Same with the engine room, its slagged from over thrusting. Nobody’s home.”
“Captain, we have the ship,” said Rhett over the main channel, “Looks like some kind of internecene conflict or slave mutiny, five corpses, all part of the presumed crew. Someone set a flight plan and then cut the nav computer, which means they probably tried to scrub the launch coordinates too.”
“Data recovery on the nav computer is someone else’s problem, we just have to secure it and tow this ship back to the yard,” the captain responded. “Whatever happened, wherever this ship launched from, or what it was carrying, none of that matters to us. Holt is bringing us in for tow hookup, good work everyone.”
Rhett was glad not to have had to fight for the salvage, and as things went it was one of the easier hauls they’d ever had. However, something just wasn’t sitting right with him, and the former trooper was ill at ease. Even compared to the AG16 this ship was bad news, worse because he couldn’t see a reason why. Slavery was horrible, and yet there was something more sinister at the root of this, he felt that deep in his guts. Whatever darkness had unfolded here, he was now a part of it, entangled in the web of action and reaction, yet he could not see any of the pieces in play.
Never had he been as glad to get off a scrap vessel as he was when he finally set foot back on board the Six. It would take them a full week to make the tow back to Andromeda Station, and much could happen in that time.
This was a doomed ship, and the sooner they could be rid of it the better.
11. PRECIOUS THINGS
It had been months since the raid on PM2258, and Sokol Targe was getting restless. Presently, he stood quietly on an observation deck as the gruesome Fatalis warship rested in dry dock upon the surface Fiat Lux.
As the mech pilot watched, crews of laborers in void suits scampered over the hull of the warship, soothing the great beast’s many injuries with torch, wire, and weld. It took a tremendous amount of resources to keep the Fatalis flying. Of the spoils seized in the raid, a full half or more had gone towards the repair and re-fit of the warship. The commune was short staffed when it came to skilled laborers, especially those qualified to maintain the battle-scarred vessel, and so what might have only taken a few weeks for a functional corporate shipyard to accomplish took several months for the Fiat Lux work crews.