Chapter 8
Discovery
DATE:
7088.03.07,
RECON
ERA
“Query,”
Forty-Five began, pushing aside a floating piece of metal scrap out
of his way, crouching
on the wreck exterior.
“Pilot possesses
a latent desire for termination? More efficient methods exist that
excludes boarding a
Hazard 4
Severed Wreck.”
“Oh, live
a little,” I muttered, a manic smile on my face as my plasma cutter
did its job on the exposed door. “No
life-forms, no heat signatures. It’s fine!”
Hazard-4
meant kinetic dangers. Asteroids, spinning debris, shifting plates.
It meant the ship wasn't just dead; it was being actively chewed up
by the asteroid belt. But to me, it meant the scavengers hadn't been
able to dock long enough to strip the good stuff.
And…maybe
the jump scare scrambled my brain, or maybe there was something in
the water. But the minute that Forty-Five
identified the ‘woman’
as
a Severance era
robot, I put all my
effort into winning the
argument to explore
the rest wreck.
taking
the deactivated robot
on board.
‘Query.
Travel time,’
he
complained.
‘Warning.
Danger level extreme.’
‘
I told him. ‘Extreme
is my middle name. Let’s go! Find of the century! Imagine all the
original, functioning parts!’
He
had paused at that. The mention of ‘parts’ seemed to
short-circuit his protests, but
with a caveat:
“Report.
Countdown 20
minutes 23 seconds remaining.”
I
heard the grumpy, robotic stuttered
voice through the headset. I let out a dry chuckle. Forty-Five wasn’t
happy but we compromised: if I couldn’t do it in 30
minutes, we would leave everything
behind.
I made sure that he
didn’t start the counter till we
were
out the airlock.
I had parked the ship as close as I could near the
bulk of the wreck, extending out the magnetic clamps to keep us from
drifting. The scanners showed there were still some sections sealed
from the void, but everything lacked atmosphere.
So
here I was, my
plasma cutter almost finished its journey to make a hole large enough
for Forty-Five to fit through. I
made a mental note of
the pitting I could see on the exposed metal, a special type of alloy
I’d seen in ships older than four centuries. Its
manufacturing process lost. But the damage from space exposure… it
was recent. The micro-meteoroid
pitting was shallow, sharp-edged. It hadn’t been drifting for
centuries; this wreck was fresh. Maybe twenty, thirty years max. It
had been flying for hundreds of years before something killed it…
and only recently.
But
before I could punch the way clear, Forty-Five grabbed my upper arm,
the grip gentle but firm through the spacesuit. He
spun me so I could see his visor.
“Repeating.
Rules.
Do
deviate from instructions.” He
let me go, watching me nod before continuing. “Query.
Scavenging experience?”
My mouth was still stuck in that deranged grin,
and I blinked at him for a second before I shoved my cutter back in
my belt. “Of I’ve explored spaceship wrecks
before! I’m an archaeologist!”
Forty-Five nodded slowly as if accepting my
answer. He pushed the door, the metal soundlessly popping free from
the plasma cuts I made. The large metal hunk now floated into the
corridor.
I
grabbed both sides of the entrance and pulled myself in, laughing
a little,
“I
just haven’t done it in
outer
space before!”
I heard a quiet burst of static over the headset.
It sounded suspiciously like a groan of deep, digital consternation.
Our mag-boots carried us along, slowly at first,
before I got into the rhythm of it. Forty-Five was ahead of me,
checking corners and clearing the way before waving me forward. He
had a torch built into his chest, where I’d approximate a clavicle
on a human. He’d turn it off and on periodically, as if preserving
the energy. I suspected he didn’t charge to full during his ‘nap’.
I rolled my eyes, with a guilty wince, reaching
down and investigating every single little object I could in the
desolate corridor. He seemed to know where he was going, confidently
turning at each junction after he confirmed the all clear.
Each
object I inspected told me a different story. A broken datapad, the
type used for ship manifests, definitely a hauler. I stuffed it
in
my knapsack.
But
out of everything I found, what I
find was equally puzzling. No human bodies. No pieces of fabric or
clothing. No blood on the walls. No
evidence
of a
human
crew.
My
gaze fell back on Forty-Five’s
back as he worked, taking
another turn without even checking the other side (it was a
dead-end), wondering
if he had been here before. Or another
ship
like it.
It wasn’t long before we walked past a door,
cracked open to show crates.
“Wait!” I gasped, peering into the crack.
“Crates! Sealed! This must be… a storage room.”
I
looked around the door. Eventually, my eyes fell
on words
etched in cursive above me,
underlined with a deep
scratch
as if to punctuate what it was.
‘MAINTENANCE STORES’
“Ah,” I
uttered, both of us staring at the words. I
pulled out my Slab, taking a picture of the sign. I muttered quietly,
“Hand-etched cursive.”
Reminiscent of
the Aureate Age in the 5th
Millennium,
when many of the Garden Worlds built their ships for luxury and
everything was ‘art’. But this ship was
between eight and six centuries old, considering the metals used in
the outer hull… Did someone try to emulate the ‘Aureate Age’?
Putting such font on a .
Which company or world had
the resources to put this
much effort in their ships?
Forty-Five moved
forward, pushing me back, catching
me unawares as I was lost in thought.
“Hey!”
My magnetic lock
broke with a snap, and I drifted backward, arms windmilling in slow
motion until my back hit the
opposing wall. Forty-Five
ignored me, using his superior strength to wrench the door fully
open.
Movement in my peripheral caught my attention. I
looked down the hallway where we were heading. Empty, save for a
couple of broken panels, ripped free from the walls during the crash.
“Hmm,” I hummed, curious. “That was odd.”
“Query.” Forty-Five turned his head to look at
me over his shoulder, on edge and apparently on high alert status.
“I thought I saw something move. Might have been
the panels.”
He stared at me
for a second before coming to join me back in the corridor. His head
on a swivel, pausing a moment before gesturing me in the room,
“Status. Room
clear.”
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He didn’t look
at me though. He
kept staring down the hallway where the movement occurred. His
chest
light flashed
irregularly, spluttering in
short and long bursts as if
it
were
glitching before it
evened out.
“Countdown
revised. Recommendation. Move with urgency.”
“Ah, no!” I protested, already halfway into
the room. “I want to get to the bridge and get any navigational
data we can. This is a pre-Severance era freighter!”
“Recommendation.
.”
Forty-Five repeated, staring
me down with his
twin lights flashing red. His
headlights were turned off.
“OK,
OK,” I gulped nervously. Looking around the room, I
counted four crates secured in the middle of the room.
The
walls were
lined
with closed panels. It
reminded
me of the panels on the .
I had a suspicion that if I opened those panels, I would
find… tools. Components, parts.
I experimented and opened one.
“!”
I
jumped back screaming
in
shock, floating free as my boots left the surface of the floor.
A
human-shaped
lump was
curled up tightly
inside the recess behind the panel.
The thick linen robes and pants hid most of their
body.
A shroud over their face, goggles hanging around
their neck.
But
the exposed
hands
were… not husks or skeleton. They were metal-plated. Cybernetic.
A finger twitched.
I screamed louder.
Forty-Five
was already pulling me down behind him. Slamming the panel
closed.
“Query.”
I gripped his armour plated arm, the solid surface
reassuring me a little. "It moved! It twitched! I think it was
human? With uh, cybernetic hands!"
Forty-Five faced the panel, his head tilted
slightly. I waited for him to respond or finish his scan.
One. Two. Three.
"Affirmative,"
Forty-Five spoke quickly, the
monotone voice smoother than before.
"Human
remains.
Heavily
augmented Scavenger. Deceased.”
“But it moved!”
"Vacuum
spasm," he continued, turning back to me, glancing
down at my grip on his arm.
"Displacement from the door opening caused it to move. It is
inert."
I blinked, my heart rate slowing as his words sank
in. Just a dead guy. Just gases and physics.
“Oh,” I breathed, my body shaking. “Right.
Vacuum spasm. Okay.”
“Status. 5 minutes remaining.”
I
shook my head, snapping out of the horror. “Wait! We said thirty
minutes not fifteen!
Where’s my other ten
minutes?!”
“Countdown
revised.” He reminded me, leaning forward towards my face.
“”
I placed my hands on the crates behind me,
grounding myself. “No! Do you realize what this is? This is as old
as the Severance! This could tell us why the network went dark. I
need to get to the bridge!”
“Client once again not listening to
instructions! We. Need. To. Leave.”
“I’m
not here on holidays, Forty-Five,”
I
snapped, my voice hardening. This was more than just about exploring
an old wreck, I was seeking the truth. That search the only thing
keeping me going. “This ship could tell me where it came from!
Where it was going! It’s centuries old, who knows where it went!”
“Deviating
from rules!” He moved closer, towering over me. His servos whined,
a sound of strained restraint.
“Rules revised,” I said, crossing my arms. I
forced myself to hold his gaze, remembering the contradictory ratings
I'd seen in his code, needing to know which ones were true. If I was
off the mark, he could snap my neck before I blinked. But I had to
know who was really in charge. I channelled every ounce of authority
I used to wield in the boardrooms back home. “My primary objective
is the Flight Data Recorder. I am not leaving without it. If you want
to protect me, you’ll help me get there faster.”
His
twin ring lights flashed red, then orange, then red again. He seemed
to calculate the odds of physically carrying me versus the time lost
arguing with a stubborn roboticist-turned-archaeologist.
I bet I would only need ten seconds
to truly figure out where his off button was.
I
stiffened,
an
ice-cold fear clawing my insides,
Why didn’t
I look for his off button before
He might be
death machine!
He
didn’t see my posture change, but
he didn’t snap my neck either. He made an odd movement with his
head, before turning
around to
roughly pull a
magnetically
assisted trolley off
the wall.
“Actions will hasten with two pairs of hands,”
he grumbled, his voice a low, unhappy monotone.
My mouth pulled into a shaky grin.
We
left the crates near the entrance, moving through the corridors once
more, this time taking a different route. I was convinced that
Forty-Five
been here before. Or something like this. This made me extra curious
about his origins.
“Have
you been here before?” I couldn’t help but ask.
He
paused at an intersection, looking around as if… he was checking
where to go. He eventually spoke, “Negative. Standardised
Freight-Class internal grid. Layout is derivative.”
hat
sure was convincing.
I
thought with an eye roll, but…
robots can’t lie. Right? So
he has been on a ship like this before? Does he have schematics in
his drives?
I
had to shelve the thoughts as we turned a final corner. Coming
face-to-face with
a fully sealed door, cursive writing on top barely legible from
deep
gouges.
Looked
like metal shrapnel cut into the wall. A part of my brain thought it
looked like claw marks, but there was nothing biological in the
galaxy that had paws that big.
“’Bridge’,
bingo,” I read out loud, pulling out my plasma cutter once more.
I was half-way done when I felt… vibrations
under my feet.
“What is
that?”
“The wreck is
occupied. And they are aware of our location,”
Forty-Five said quietly,
squaring up and filling almost the entire hallway. Blocking me from
whatever was coming towards us.
“Who
is ‘they’?!” I
squeaked, forcing my plasma cutter on its max setting and…
expediting.
“Countdown
reaching end.”
I was
infinitely glad that Forty-Five had an emergency speech mode that
truncated its speech, though the urgency of its new tone did little
to quell the rising panic in my gut.
I
gritted my teeth and did what he
asked. Concentrating on cutting through the seams of the thick
bulkhead door.
The final
seal gave way.
I stepped
inside quickly, Forty-Five following my six.
I expected
stale air or darkness. Instead, I was staring at the universe. The
entire starboard wall of the bridge had been sheared off. The
captain’s chair was gone, lost to the void decades ago.
What
remained of the consoles glittered with frost, lit only by the
uncaring starlight and the distant rotation of the asteroid field.
My stomach
dropped. I clicked my mag-boots to maximum, terrified that one wrong
step would send me drifting forever.
"Don't
look out," I whispered to myself. "Look at the prize.
Look for the orange box."
I scrambled
over the tilted deck plates.
The
main console was a wreck, but the raised
floor plates underneath - where
the Flight Data Recorder lived - were
intact. I spotted the tell-tale hazard orange hatch.
"Gotcha.”
A
smile crossed my face,
palming
a short
pry-bar
from my toolbelt
to use
to
snap
the frozen clamps, the
lid opening and revealing the orange sphere suspended in a clear,
thick-walled box.
It
was heavy, shielded against nuclear fire, but I shoved
it in the knapsack. I made room for the bulky cube moving things
aside, and that’s
when I saw it.
Tucked
into a recessed compartment that should have held emergency flares
was a small, flat box.
It wasn’t industrial plasteel. It looked like... polished wood? Or
a synthetic mimic of it. It was elegantly
decorated, the paper labelling long bleached and worn away.
Someone had hidden this.
Curiosity
kills the cat,
Mel, I thought, shoving it into my knapsack too,
the thing fit to burst.
But
satisfaction brings it back.
I turned around to signal Forty-Five that I was
done.
But he was struggling with something, his arms
bent as if he was trying to push something back.
He twisted. He was grappling another robot. It was
built similarly to him. The interlocking plates, the shape of the
visor. But its twin lights where eyes would be were larger, and were
a solid red, compared to the multi-coloured rings Forty-Five would
cycle through.
Two more droids, one with a missing leg, were
crawling like insects on the walls.
My throat went dry, my eyes wide open.
“Forty-Five?”
“Report?”
“Umm, done?”
“Acknowledged.”
With that, Forty-Five pushed back the droid he was
currently fighting, freeing a hand and driving a palm-strike into its
head. It didn’t just dent; the metal crumpled like paper, the
violence unfolding in uncanny, absolute silence. It bent backwards at
the knees, while its magnetic feet glued it to the floor.
The visor shattered, revealing the naked circuitry
of those two large sensors, one flickering while the other went dark.
Its
limbs weren’t operating smoothly like any
civilian or security units I knew.
They twitched, jerking in a chaotic, glitching rhythm that made my
skin crawl.
Forty-Five moved.
But I didn’t see the strike. I only felt
vibrations through my feet.
Because another
droid, the one with the
missing leg, launched
from the ceiling straight at me, filling
my field of view.
An explosion of
metal shrapnel erupted far behind it.
I took one step
backwards. My
arms were frozen; my mouth uncooperative.
A static whine.
A whisper, layered with a dozen distorted voices.
“
The droid’s head jerked backwards, its fingers
centimetres from grazing my suit.
Forty-Five had pulled it by its remaining leg.
With a torque that should have stripped his gears, he roughly pulled
it back before catching it by the back of the head and smashing it
into the floor. The vibrations of the impact travelled through the
floor panels to my boots.
The first armoured droid was already in pieces,
its head and arm missing.
The third droid tried to flank him to get to me.
Forty-Five didn’t even turn to look at it. He lashed out with a
side-kick, the sole of his boot connecting with the droid’s side.
The impact lifted the twitching humanoid off the floor, breaking its
boots’ magnetic lock, and sent it spinning silently out the broken
wall… and into the deep dark.
Five seconds. It took him five seconds to
neutralise the three targets. He stood amidst the wreckage of the
first two, his armour spattered with their leaking fluids, droplets
of which were still floating weightlessly between us.
He’d been staring at me since the second droid
tried to get to me.
The red halo lights of his visor burning bright.
“Status. Enemies neutralised. We are leaving.
Now.”
He reached out a hand, the metal fingers
glistening with black coolant.
