Carrion Duty (Necrospace Book 5), page 4
THE SMILERS
Moments later the group of scrappers stood in the engine room, the massive machine looming ahead of them, easily the size of a small building. Their lights did little to pierce the gloom of the tremendous chamber, though what they could see was enough to make them happy for what they could not.
Corpses, at least five of them, had been lashed to the engine with an assortment of cables and wires. Each of the bodies was encased in a void suit, ravaged by wounds from a combination of bullets, shot, and bladed objects.
As Rhett stood in silence, looking at the bodies with a mixture of horror and morbid curiosity, he noticed that he could actually see the faces of two of the former crew members. They were the two bodies hanging the lowest, making him remember that without the mag-clamps on his boots the tallness of the engine would not have mattered and someone could have easily moved the bodies where they pleased. He shined his light directly into the faceplate of one and stifled a gasp, one that Quinn finished for him as she followed his light with her own.
“He’s smiling,” breathed Quinn, seemingly blissfully unaware that Rhett could see the same thing.
Through the faceplate, Rhett could see that the corpse was indeed, smiling, though upon further observation the man’s smile had the rictus angle to it, as if he’d died in the midst of a powerful muscle contraction or seizure. Rhett moved to the next corpse, also a man, and he, too, was smiling wildly despite the obvious trauma of his violent death. The trooper noticed that both individuals had sickening white and green flecks around their noses, eyes, and mouth.
“Quinn, get your diagnostic, set it for organics, I want to know what that is growing on their faces,” ordered Rhett, shaking his head and steeling himself for the mission once more, “Sparks, take an electrical bit and drill out this guy’s faceplate. Everybody double check your filters, I know we’re in vacuum, but just do it.”
As the two women moved to follow his orders the team’s comm-bead suddenly erupted with noise.
“Contact! Contact!” came the voice of Vader, “Drago’s hit and he’s not moving!”
“Steady now, Vulture. Hold your position,” said Rhett with some authority, suddenly feeling calmer now that the shooting had started, as if a flood of tension resulting from this silent tomb of a ship had been released, “Pull Drago into cover wherever you can find it and return fire. We are on our way.”
Rhett turned and started moving out of the chamber, several steps behind Dante, who had already broken ranks, no doubt his eagerness to come to the aid of his twin overwhelming his mercenary’s sense of squad cohesion.
“Quinn, get me an answer on those bodies then form up and hold this room until I give you the all clear,” ordered Rhett as he picked up the pace, not wanting to fall too far behind Dante as the former cultist rushed headlong through the maze of darkened corridors. “Doak, you’re on overwatch. This whole ship is hostile, so if anyone approaches that isn’t us, you shoot first.”
Rhett could feel the dull thud of Vader’s pistol as the force of the weapon reverberated through the walls of the dead ship, something it would not have done had the vessel been fully functional. Something about gunshots in dead space had always felt rather ominous to Rhett, as if they were a stark reminder that silence and freezing cold were the natural state, and all warmth, life, and light were anomalies upon the face of hard vacuum.
“Vader, sitrep!” shouted Rhett as he saw Dante leap through the dark hatch and rush down the passageway towards the fray, his weapon at the ready.
“Multiple hostiles, sir, they’ve got guns,” responded Vader, inadvertently reminding Rhett that other than the twins he was the only other scrapper with legitimate combat experience.
“What’s the visual?” snapped Rhett, his frustration mounting as he lost sight of Dante. “Who is out there?”
“It’s the ship’s crew, I think,” said Vader, his voice shaking, “They’re wearing Aegis void suits.”
Rhett hurled himself out of the hatch and looked down the passageway just in time to see Dante unleash several blasts from his weapon, presumably at a target out of Rhett’s sight, further down a side passage. Suddenly the multitude of passages in the cross-section chamber were much more menacing, and Rhett imagined that a determined foe with intimate knowledge of the ship could move through not only the usual corridors, but also the various access tunnels, air shafts, and utility tubes that served as the ship’s circulatory and respiratory system.
As if to confirm his musings, Rhett watched in shock as an attacker in a void suit emerged from a utility tube and started firing its pistol at where Vader and the wounded form of Drago had attempted to take cover. Dante had plunged further into the network and the former cultist was expertly toggling back and forth between his assault rifle component and his shotgun component as he sent withering amounts of fire in multiple directions. By the time Rhett, no slouch when it came to swift and decisive action himself, got his rifle to his shoulder, Dante had already drilled the new attacker with several deadly rounds and moved onto other targets.
Rhett felt more than heard the hatch open above and behind him. He threw himself to the deck, twisting as he fell, and raised his rifle.
A smiling crew member looked out at him from behind the grimy faceplate, the green and white growths on her face making her look hideous and less than human. His swift maneuver saved his life, as the attacker squeezed the trigger of her weapon and sent a focused beam of energy slicing through the space where Rhett had stood only a moment before. The beam cut into the metal wall of the passageway and down into the deck plating, the smiler tracking the trooper with her weapon as he scampered backwards. Rhett pulled the bull-pup stock of his compact rifle into the crook of his arm and fired wildly as he reached out with this free hand and grasped for purchase.
The smiler did not flinch as several rounds bit into the edge of the hatch in addition to one punching through her upper chest. She continued to move her beam across the floor to chase the trooper.
Rhett’s hand found a depression in the floor, a maintenance panel that had either been torn open or left open. He managed to get his gloved fingers around the lip of the panel and heaved himself across the floor, cursing the mag-clamps on his boots for preventing him from just kicking off and sailing away from danger. There had been no time to shut them off and had he not reacted so swiftly the beam would have been the end of him. As it was, the smiler kept moving the beam towards him, though now that he had a split second to adjust his aim Rhett drew a solid bead on the attacker.
Rhett squeezed the trigger five times in rapid succession, missing only the first time, before three rounds put holes in her chest and the last shattered her faceplate.
The smiler’s grip on her weapon tightened as the nerves in her dying body caused all her muscles to constrict, worse than Rhett had ever seen in combat. It was as if she had been struggling against convulsions before he had ever shot her, and death made it all the worse. The beam went off track, scorching a deep cut through the far wall of the passageway before mercifully sputtering out as the power supply was drained. Finally, the smiler stopped contorting, and her corpse just bobbed gently in the extremely low gravity, the crystalized blood from her wounds creating a sort of macabre asteroid field around her.
Rhett ignored the sounds of Dante continuing to battle the unknown number of assailants as he got to his feet and took a moment to look at the woman’s body more closely. The beam weapon was actually just a standard ship’s maintenance tool that appeared to have been modified for handheld use.
Normally, beam tools like this were used for cutting away massive sections of heavy material. It was for emergencies, when a ship’s crew needed to decouple from something, was tangled with a large piece of debris, or needed to drop one of the tremendous cargo containers in the event of a catastrophe or toxic spill event. To use such a tool as a combat weapon, especially in the void, was evidence of desperation or insanity. Rhett was beginning to suspect the latter.
The trooper looked down the passageway towards the rest of his team. Dante stood with his back to the wall next to a small, open chamber door leading into the room where he’d seen Vader dragging Drago only moments before. Rhett started making his way to them, taking care to check every corner, vent, and hatch as he went, determined not to be the victim of another bushwhack attempt. No further attacks came, and as Rhett reached the trio he could see the bodies of three more smilers floating lazily in the low gravity.
“I’m getting a lot of shooting and not nearly enough reporting!” snapped the voice of Captain Estrada in everyone’s comm-beads, “Get your people online, Calibos!”
“Drago is down, but alive, med update to follow. Four hostiles in the hurt locker, equipped with assorted small arms and converted ship’s tools. Aegis void suits on all of them, something not right about them, possibly a shipboard disease,” said Rhett as he took Dante’s overwatch position so that the twin could care for his brother. “Quinn, give us a sitrep on the engine room.”
“Chamber is secure, Sparks has done a sweep and we’re clear,” responded Quinn over the comm-bead, “Samples of those growths on the corpses are being worked now, this diagnostic kit is a little outdated so it will take a few more minutes to get a reading.”
“There you have it, Captain,” said Rhett as he watched Dante crimp the feed line on Drago’s tanks before tinkering with the output mixture. From the looks of it a bullet or bit of shot had damaged the regulator on the twin’s atmosphere supply, disrupting the delicate balance of breathable chemicals. As Rhett watched, Dante adjusted the chemicals. He could see that Drago was already beginning to come around. The former cultist might have some brain damage to cope with after being out cold for several minutes, but Rhett supposed that beat getting shot and freezing to death from the inside out.
It was standard training for soldiers who experienced void combat to learn how to rapidly apply void patches over exposed wounds, though Rhett had to admit that even he had not received more than a few hours of training in that regard. Cor-sec troopers weren’t scrappers, and most maintenance crews only wore void suits so weren’t accustomed to wearing modified body armor in hard vacuum. Rhett made a mental note to bring that up with the Captain once they finished this scrap job, as this could have been a needlessly fatal encounter for Drago had the bullet impacted just a few inches differently.
“Noted,” responded Estrada, “Proceed with the mission, Calibos, at least now you have some idea of what you’re up against.”
Rhett wanted to say something pithy, but restrained himself. Captain Estrada was not a man to antagonize, and not only because he was the captain. Both Captain Edmond Estrada and pilot Vitrian Holt, were debt-free Aegis corporate citizens, and had a vested interest in the bounties collected by Vulture Six. Their percentages were tiny compared to the employer, more so as they were off-set by the salary they both drew, but it was enough that neither man had much of a sense of humor when it came to the Bottom Line. Rhett kept his mouth shut and waited for Dante to get Drago to his feet.
“Okay, team, we rally here and press onwards. We can’t be sure of the enemy’s numbers, but we’ve just had a confirmation about their disposition with regards to our interest here,” said Rhett as he swapped out magazines, “We can assume they’ll attempt another ambush, but I’d rather fight them here than out on the hull.”
Minutes later Drago was back online and insistent that he was ready for action. Quinn, Doak, and Sparks joined the group and as a team the bounty scrappers moved out. Rhett took point, having decided that if there were any kind of IEDs or booby traps set in their path, he was most qualified to notice them. Pirates in the Tardis sector were notorious for their judicious use of such tactics, something that had made them particularly difficult to engage. More than once Rhett remembered wiping the remains of a comrade off of his helmet’s visor before finally running the last of the pirates to ground.
They moved slowly and carefully, each of them keeping an eye on the various hatches and corridors. Rhett mused to himself that while the team had encountered a few hostile salvages in the years they’d been together, this one was easily the most disturbing. It was one thing to shoot it out with a gang of low rent space pirates or to drive off a clutch of desperate scavengers, but this mission had become something out of a nightmare.
“Calibos, heads up, I’ve got your analysis, this old thing finally crunched the data,” said Quinn, taking Dante’s place behind Rhett as the trooper picked his way down the main corridor of the ship, the team having reached the midway point. “It’s organic, of course, a rapidly self-propagating fungal body. The kit can’t lock down an identification, which I hope you realize is disconcerting, but the closest thing it can pin it to is ergot. That’s a kind of grain mold.”
“Could be something happened to the food stores,” observed Dante from behind Quinn, “If a seal was broken, maybe.”
“Possibly, or the contaminant was present in the mess hall stores, then it...” Quinn nodded.
“Quinn, reset your kit, I see something,” interrupted Rhett as he shone his light down the corridor. All their lights were bouncing off something hanging in the passageway, like a thick fog held in place by the freezing cold and the lack of gravity.
“That’s Bay 7, according to the ship schematic,” added Vader as the team got closer.
“I want to focus on getting to the bridge. We know we have a fight coming our way, but grab a sample as we pass through,” said Rhett, “the ship is our bounty, not the cargo, but I don’t want the folks at the yard dealing with any surprises.”
The corridor widened to where the team could walk several abreast. As they moved through they could see that many of the cargo hatches were open. More blood crystals hung in the air through the compartment hub, and as the team moved across the gangplank that led over the interior staging area Rhett could see more stains on the floor. A small skid loader looked to have been intentionally rammed into the hatch of one cargo container, pinning the hatch closed with its loading spars. Judging from the amount of blood and debris, not to mention bullet holes and blast scoring throughout the hub, this had been where the serious business had happened.
The sight of so much implied violence kept the group silent, even Quinn, who stopped to take a sample of the fog coming from Bay 7 before following the rest of the group.
There were no bodies visible, yet something about what he’d seen in the engine room was causing Rhett’s imagination to run wild with images of what might be waiting behind the blocked hatch or what lurked menacingly ahead of them. This was a true death ship, the sort of salvage that gave rise to myths and cautionary tales. There was no doubt in his mind that the fate of the AG16 was going to be the talk of taverns and tugs for years to come, he and his team just had to survive the scrap first.
“Take a good look, team,” growled Rhett, tapping his finger against the metal of his weapon, “Whatever happened here, there were no survivors, even the ones who are still walking around. Anything you kill here consider it a mercy.”
They carried onwards for what seemed like an eternity in the dark tomb of a ship, though Rhett’s mission clock only reflected ten standard minutes before they reached the crew deck.
Rhett moved his helmet back and forth and sucked in his breath as he took in the sight of the main recreational chamber. The windows that connected it to the crew barracks had been broken or shot out, and the hatches leading into the various bedrooms and bathrooms were all either open or haphazardly barricaded. It looked as if the entire second deck had been rapidly transformed by an outbreak of violence. It was a battlefield much like the cargo hub, only added to the chaos was a sea of floating debris consisting of what would be considered non-threatening items. Playing cards, bedding, sporting equipment, clothes, electronics, and many other such items drifted silently alongside clouds of frozen blood and spent shell casings. So much death and destruction had befallen this ship.
Without warning, Drago opened fire into the darkness, and was answered by the muzzle flash of a smiler’s shotgun as it briefly illuminated one of the shadowed bedrooms.
Rhett caught movement in his peripheral vision and saw that another smiler had launched itself across the rec room towards him. It was wielding a vicious looking power drill and a heavy wrench as the smiler plowed through the thick debris with great momentum, intent upon engaging the trooper in close quarters. The dull thud of pistol fire filled the space as Doak and Vader both opened up on one or more smilers who appeared to have been attempting to flank the team by emerging from several grated ducts in the ceiling.
In an instant, the team was beset by attackers, only this time the vultures were ready.
Rhett swiftly sank to one knee as he pulled his combat rifle snug against his shoulder in order to fire upon the drill wielding smiler who was bearing down on him. At the same time clouds of shot peppered the trooper, and though they were deflected by his body armor, the force of the impact threw his aim, causing his shot to go wide as the rifle was knocked from his hands.
Rhett’s rifle was tethered to his utility belt. It sailed into the darkness and then the line pulled taut. Everything around him was in motion as smilers and vultures battled furiously in the half-light of the compartment, the strobe of muzzle flashes flickering in the tight space, making it difficult to see clearly. Rhett ducked as the smiler swung its heavy wrench through the empty space where the troopers head had been a moment before.
Rhett’s cor-sec hand to hand combat training had been augmented by years in the penal system and it was all that saved him. As the smiler’s wrench swept over him, Rhett instinctively reached out with both hands to catch the arm driving the drill towards his chest. His armored gloves locked around the smiler’s forearm and wrist, which prevented the tool from impaling him instantly, though physics was for the moment an ally of the smiler. Rhett’s mag-clamps kept him in place while the smiler, not similarly fettered, kept going, and the momentum of the attacker’s body slamming into Rhett drove the bit into the trooper’s armor. Rhett was knocked onto his back and landed with the smiler on top of him as the nightmare person pushed harder against the drill.
