Chapter 5 – Awakening
“Should be around here that the aliens attack,” Hilde said. “This sealant is obviously their blood or like their secretions that liquify their food.” She clicked a button at her wrist and swept the beam of her forearm mounted light across a particularly large section of floor covered in the dried sealant, stopping on a bundle of cables spilling from an open panel in the ceiling that had some of the stuff coating them, dried and hanging like ropey stalactites. “See, they even have tentacles.”
“Nah, we’re not vulnerable enough just yet…and there hasn’t been the big revelation or whatever either,” Kaylee replied, easing around the mess of cables, leading with the barrel of her big gun. “We need to find something significant first, then on the way out it all turns to shit. Kind of like those adventure movies where finding the treasure sets off a booby trap.”
“You two do realize that horror stories like that do have some basis in reality, right?” Shi said, noting the annoyed growl coming from Murissa as she stalked behind Kaylee. The ferakatian didn’t care for movies or most entertainment that didn’t involve keeping herself at the peak of lethality. Shi herself had a flash of memory from one of her past lives then, a situation not unlike what the two were describing, though she was in some kind of tomb somewhere, surrounded by undead, fangs dripping a dark, viscous substance, a foul odor, her arms wrapped around some object that she knew was very important as shadowed warriors fought the monsters. And then it was gone, just as suddenly as it had come. If she concentrated, she could probably glean more from the memory, but now wasn’t the time.
They had been trekking through the DSM black ship for nearly thirty minutes now, keeping their pace slow and steady. Many of the doors they came to had to be forced open, tearing the coat of sealant that covered them away. There had been several more signs of hostile activity, but so far no bodies, just signs that there had once been bodies, like tools and tablets laying scattered about, and trails through the dark rubber, even footprints, but with no obvious defined shape. That discovery had led to the discussion on space horror stories. They had intentionally avoided going through any side corridors, and were perfectly content to leave any additional doors alone for now.
Shi had kept her arcane sight active for much of the journey as well, picking up the same lingering auras that were akin to wisps of vapor in the air. As they approached another pressure door, this one a few levels down from the airlock they’d come through, she glanced at the holographic map Hilde kept online from her tablet; they were close to engineering, just through this and another set of doors; the layout of the ship was fairly standard, though they had come across several side passages that weren’t in the basic specs. She turned her eyes back toward the upcoming door. “Kaylee, stop!”
The human woman froze in an instant, raising her weapon; Murissa had her short blades at the ready in the same instant, already crouched and ready to pounce.
Shi eased around Hilde and Briar, her arcane sight picking up an intensely glowing object in Kaylee’s path. At least, it was glowing intensely compared to what she’d seen so far; the aura was fairly weak compared to something like her revolvers, or even the enchanted ammunition on her belt. “It’s okay, I don’t believe it’s a trap,” Shi said as she put a hand on Murissa’s shoulder and maneuvered around her, crouching atop a pool of the dried sealant a few feet ahead of Kaylee. As she focused on the aura beneath the rubber, she could see that it indicated a destructive magic, fire in fact, stored within in the shape of a tiny rod. Shi tugged at the rubber, tore it away and picked up the object, holding it up for a closer look. “Don’t see these much these days.”
“Is that a wand?” Briar asked, voice tinged with surprise. “With…fire magic inside?” Good, he was using his own magical sight, though his was a gift from Erisaya rather than something he had learned from long hours of study, as with Shi.
“It is, but it’s almost completely drained,” Shi said, staring intently at the object. Aside from a few arcane sigils impressed into the surface, it was mostly an unremarkable gray carbon fiber rod, a foot in length and half an inch wide at its base, the narrower tip blackened, with a faintly glowing crystal set into the grip. As she turned the cylinder, she saw the ‘Property of DSM AR&D’ and the company logo printed on one side, and what she assumed were the standard legal disclaimers printed in nearly microscopic text. “I’d heard DSM produced these on a limited basis for their magically inclined employees, but I’d never seen one in person. I’d say it has one or two charges left…a cone of fire, about…fifteen, twenty feet long.” She didn’t say it aloud, but she could read the magic aura and knew the command word to activate the wand, the elvish word for ‘incinerate’. Like the ship and pretty much anything else from DSM, the wand lacked creativity or flair of any sort, and unlike a properly crafted wand, didn’t seem to be rechargeable.
“Signs of burning on the walls and floor,” Murissa said in a low rumble, using one of her blades to peel back some of the sealant where she crouched, motioning with the other to a darkened patch on a support beam circling the corridor that wasn’t from the rubber.
“Think that thing was useful against the rubber aliens?” Hilde asked, fingering the cutting torch dangling from her harness.
“Well, rubber does melt and burn, so it’s very likely,” Shi said with a shrug, spinning the wand in her fingers as she stood. She slid the wand beneath a strap on the underside of her left forearm, situating it so that the tip was just below the heel of her palm; out of the way of her drawing her gun, but easy to use if she were to extend her hand and say the activation word. It might only be one shot, but that one shot could make the difference. “Come on, we’re almost there. Stay alert.”
It took a little more effort to get through the last set of doors to the engineering section as they were not only thicker, but set with more locking bolts that had to be bypassed. It hadn’t stopped the mysterious rubber aliens or whatever had spread the sealant around, though. Once the doors were open, there was plenty more of the stuff splattered around. Aside from scattered tools and parts, engineering looked to be intact, though many of the panels were coated in the sealant.
“Still no radiation leakage detected,” Briar said, fiddling with his scanner. “Faint power readings from the main power generator and TK-drive…”
“It’s in standby mode,” Hilde said, snapping another comm relay into place at the base of the door frame. She stood and quickly made her way to one of the engineering consoles. She waved a hand at a trio of stout levers on the side of the console, sealant coating and hanging from the door that had kept the heavy switches separate from the rest of the controls. “These are the emergency shutoffs, and they’re all thrown. Primary and secondary power generator, and the TK-drive.”
“You’d normally only do that if there was a risk of explosion or severe radiation leak,” Kaylee said, looking around the large chamber, approaching the conduits leading from the generator chamber. “Nothing obvious damage-wise I can see from here, just more of this sealant stuff. If there was a radiation leak, we should have detected that a while ago. And if the generators were leaking and you couldn’t fix them, you’d eject them.”
Hilde had moved around the first console, shining her light along another console, tracing a particular bundle of blue cables to where they split off on two different, but parallel paths. “Ohhh…I think they have a secondary data core! If that’s not been wiped, then we may have a chance at some of that juicy secret corpo data!”
“Get started with it, then. If we can get a download, that’d be great; we can decrypt it later. Let me check in.” Shi tapped her comm. “Captain, we’ve reached engineering; initial inspection shows no obvious damage, no signs of anyone still aboard in the sections we’ve traversed. We’re going to start trying to access their data core and see what we can find. That sealant is everywhere…signs of people having gone through it before, but…no signs now.”
“I copy, commander,” Maerill said a moment later, voice pitched high as he weighed what she had just told him. “DSM can be tricky; be extra careful of traps on their systems. I want-” His voice was drowned out by a sudden burst of static. Shi’s ears twitched, and she winced and jerked at the painfully loud sound.
Three loud metallic clangs came from her right. Shi had a revolver in hand and leveled before she had finished her turn toward the source. Kaylee and Murissa were also looking in that direction, ready to act. The trio of kill switches had just reset themselves, the door to the panel swung shut with a swift motion, and the locking clip reseated itself in its slot. Shi didn’t need her magical sight to know that arcane energy was building around her. “Hilde! What did you do?!”
“Nothing, commander! I haven’t even gotten my gear in place yet!”
“Magic is surging into the generator chamber!” Briar shouted, his eyes wide and filled with a golden tint, a sign he used his magical sight.
Shi whipped her head that way, reactivating her own arcane sight. Sure enough, a massive surge of power came from somewhere within the superstructure, flowing along various pathways. The generator suddenly hummed loudly, then vibrations filled the chamber as it came online much faster than it should have.
“Power levels are rising fast, systems restarting!” Hilde called, various sealant-splattered screens flickering to life, loading indicators filling and going green much faster than they had on the bridge. “That’s one hell of a rapid startup!”
“That shouldn’t be possible! A power plant that size should take an hour or more to even ramp up to start levels!” Kaylee said, head and weapon swiveling around the chamber.
Shi felt the gravity shift around her, her weight growing closer to its normal single-G value. The TK-drive had started up too! “Magic! They accelerated the startup sequence somehow!” The flows were moving fast, pouring in from somewhere…Shi could just start to see their makeup, transmutation, alteration, an extremely complex mixture of multiple types of magic that-
Just then, the ship shuddered slightly, and a faint, but very recognizable thump reached Shi’s ears. “Shit, they detached from the airlock!” Shi hit her comm again. “Captain, do you read! Anyone?”
There was only static, and the thrum of the awakening ship around them.
Well, with a title like “Awakening”, you knew things were going to ramp up, right?
Those tricky corpo types sure know how to get things moving. Or maybe it was due to the team being just a bit too genre savvy?
Just how big a mess is Red Team in? Stay tuned for next week’s chapter to find out!
Until then, Urban out!
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