<+++Carrier Signal Corrupted+++>
Signal Received.
w̺̌͢ȋ̀͢d̯ͫ̍e̦ͧ̌b̛̎ͧa̾̋͡n̩᷇ͅd̤͗́ t᷿̺͗r̵̗ͨa͚̓͘n̡̑͘s͏͕᷿mͧ᷉᷀i̯͋͆s̻̱ͬs̾͒͝i͍͉͜o̦ͥ͡n̵ͩ͟
Ȍͩ͏r̯͔̀iͫ̈͟g͐᷁̎i̭᷂͑n͏̄᷅(̯̪ͧx̧̮͝)̞͋ͬ̈́̑᷉̚:̛̛̇ D̛̛̋B̛X̛ C̛̛͋ơ̛̛ͯ͊n̛̛͊ṱ̛̛i̛̛᷾n̛̛͊e̛̛̛n̢̛̛t̛̛ͨa̛̛̲l̛̛̤ D̛̛̪ŗ̛̛i̛̛̪f̛̛͈t̛̛͇ẽ̛̛ṛ̛̛
Src Loc: Ṱ̗̄rͦͮ͏iͭ̃͠l͚ͬͫ᷄a̛͕̹t̝͚ͪe͚᷁͜r͉̈́̉a̢͏̬̊l̙᷊ͦȉ̠̲͒͟͟ͅz̳᷁͐a᷿̝͞t̂̿̈̎i̓ͅ͏o̭͘͡n̫͇̔ F̛̯᷀a̡͚̝i̷̠ͪl͙̓̃ù̏͟r̫̈ͯe̺̬͟
***carrier signal corrupted***
***signal tuning complete***
Computer, take down this log and buffer for immediate transmission on remlok failure.
This is Commander Irvin Cranshaw of the DBX Continental Drifter, I hope to god this gets through. I've had to get creative, lens the signal through the grav wells of a few stars to bounce it back using some unlisted beacons. Tough work, signal is going to be corrupted to hell, but all I've got here now is time to try. Need to get news to folks back there and I'm in no position to do it now, so I've fired it at the private news nets. No point with GALNET, it’s not shiny and happy enough for them, no political incentive. Got to hope a smaller net will do it out of goodwill.
I'm on an oblique exit vector down and out of the galaxy. Frame shift took a hit and the injectors are fused. The ships a flying fuel tank, I always meant to escape, just didn’t realise it'd be like this. Anything that could be replaced with a fuel tank, was, along with a couple of outrigger tanks for good measure. All of them full.
I've been at terminal velocity a while now, no point sending help, it'll never reach me. Life support will fail a long time before the drive does. When the drive does finally give up the ghost, best guess I'll be smeared across space for a couple of light years or more. The ex-wife always said I should get around more, not sure that’s exactly what she meant.
I’m attaching some profile and kill data to this transmission. The first bunch, pirates. I don't know if they have records or bounties, but those folks are down. If there's any credits to be made there, well I ain't in any position to collect, so you take your admin fee, then split the rest between the families of those I've listed in the second bunch. It's the least I can do, all I can do now, because I screwed up, and they're gone too.
Those folks were crazier than a bag of cats, but they were honest and good, they didn’t deserve what they got, but it’s a damn sight prettier than what I got to look forward to.
Computer is still analysing the telemetry, I'm not sure why it flashed over like that, maybe it'll give me an answer to that before the scrubbers fail. I'll attach any data I have to this transmission, it’s the best I can do.
I feel like I should be blaming the kid. Not his fault, not really, and I guess it’s hard to be angry now, all things considered. Stupid damned kid. I knew he'd be the death of me, but I figured it'd be because he'd cook us with a messed-up power core or drive us into a rock. Never even learned his name.
If you've looked me up, you know I worked for the Salvage and Rescue arm of the Mawuru Group, stationed out of McAuley Platform. More salvage than rescue, truth be told. The belts were rich pickings, to be sure, and the boats that went out to harvest them were richer still. Easy prey, minimal security. For the local pirates, the Crimson Raiders, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. We made a living off the salvage they left. Empty hulks and haulers, spare parts and hull plates. We'd haul back anything we could find, fix what we could and render the rest for parts. The pirates left us alone, provided they got first shout on any goods we put up for sale.
We got the call a couple of months ago, me and the kid. Derelict T-9 spotted out in the belt. Big score, 1200 tons of scrap and spares, or upwards of 50grand, if we could get it running again. Nice easy payday, we thought, and some much-needed experience for the kid.
He'd only been rolling with me a couple of weeks, fresh out of some place no one ever heard of, and riding the company apprenticeship train, learning his trade from a down and out former Lakon engineer before they rotated him out in a couple of years to run his own operation, landing me with some other bright eyed and bushy tailed greenhorn to try to teach not to blow us both up. Fresh meat for the grinder.
So yeah, we took the call. Fired up the Dajiang, our company gunship turned salvage tug, and we made good time out to 2A ring. The coordinates the tower gave us were deep inside the ring, tight to the planet, and the planets magnetosphere turned our sensor resolution to yogurt. A cold, dark metal rich ship in a field of cold dark metal rich lumps, whoever spotted it out here in the first place must have had the kind of sensor suite that would have made a capital ship navigator jealous.
Even then, I remember thinking it didn’t feel right. Sure, miners liked to hide themselves where they couldn’t be found by pirates, but to go so deep into the field, to be so hidden that they couldn’t be found in an emergency? It didn’t sit right with me. I tried to talk to the kid about it, but he was too wet behind the ears to have the kind of instincts an older spacer like me had honed over decades in the black.
We lit up the area with limpets, broadcast our intent to invoke the right to salvage on the wideband. It was the dance you did. Like the holo-facs about those tribes’ people back in Sol that would walk up to packs of lions singing and banging drums to stay safe. We sang and banged our drums, warning other miners to keep out of the way, warning pirates that we weren’t miners and were worth more to them left in peace, and to tell everyone else that we weren’t worth the hassle of attacking.
As we lit the area up, we took our first good look at the ship we'd been sent to investigate. She was a mess, for sure. Hull plating and drive cones either shot full of more holes than a colander, or just missing where they'd been sheared off. They'd been trying to run, which I always felt was worse. The crew had known about the attack, they'd been running scared, too slow to get away and too close to the belt to try and jump. It probably sounds weird, but I always preferred to find ships that had been taken out surgically. Knowing the crew hadn’t had time to respond or even comprehend what was happening, always makes me feel better somehow, and not just because it tends to mean there's less work to do to make a profit salvaging the hulk, although that was always a bonus for sure.
Cargo hatch was burned open. Not unusual for a ship this size, they were too heavy to breach with charges, too much risk of damaging cargo. The metal was warped and rippled out like fossilised waves. But it was clean. Too clean. There wasn’t any of the normal dust and gravel you'd expect to see on a rock grinder. Didn’t seem likely that a pirate would hit a miner that hadn’t actually mined any material. Chalked it up to suspicious and carried on the inspection.
As we swung around to the front of the ship, we found the kill shot. The entire flight deck was gone, in its place a gaping hole, ringed with icy fangs. A clear sign of explosive decompression. The ice said the deck had gone suddenly, it hadn’t been shot out, or the emergency bulkheads would have sealed off the bridge to preserve atmosphere in the rest of the ship. A torp hit then. Seemed like overkill for a miner.
We stabilised the ship with limpets. A few repair drones to shore up the hull, and then a full suite of salvage limpets to stop her drifting. Standard. Then the kid and I suited up for inspection, collected our suitcase sized recovery kits, and walked right in through the space where the deck should be.
See the thing with salvaging any ship is that if you don’t check it out before you move it, you don’t know what kind of trouble you're hauling back home. Dangerous or toxic materials or radiation aside, if you're dealing with a crafty crew, you could be hauling a booby-trapped ship back home, and that’s bad news for you one way or the other if you run into it on the pad. Either the corp ends up hiring a cleaning crew to scrape you off the deck, and bills it to your next of kin, or they're putting out a bounty on you for detonating a sizable chunk of space station.
As we move through the ship towards the engineering cabin, I realise she's looking less and less like a mining barge all the time. It feels more like someone’s home than a place of work. Soft furnishings where you'd expect to see it more spartan and corporate. None of the survey tool's you'd expect to see, no evidence of any refining equipment.
Kid spots it first, probably because he's not seen the insides of a shot up ship before and gotten desensetised to it. There's the clear path of a through and through round. A hole on one side of the cabin floor, and one to match it passing through some kind of locker on the other. In the space between, a moist crimson trail. I call out to the kid but it’s too late, he's pulled the door on the locker, and inside, most of the body of a child, girl by the look of the clothes, a fluffy looking toy of some kind in her arms, staring out at us with a stitched-on smile and dead glass eyes.
He holds it together though. Adrenaline, probably, or perhaps a desire to not embarrass himself in front of me. But he's clearly shaken, and I'm not ashamed to admit, so was I. What the hell were they doing here, dressed up like a mining barge, hidden so deep in the ring and the planets magnetosphere? One thing for sure, they weren't here for the rocks, and any pirate worth his salt would have known that before trying to jump them. I hoped we'd find the answer as we moved on through the vessel.
We found the hatch to main engineering welded shut. Waste of time for an experienced spacer, any pirate was going to cut in through the cargo hatch, not take their time wandering the corridors of a hostile vessel. Another discrepancy I added to the growing list, as the kid traced around the edge of the door with a plasma cutter.
Once he was done, the kid slipped the cutter back on his belt, and in a fluid lithe motion, he had kicked off the deck in his mag boots, swung out 90° to the side and planted his feet back down on the wall. Then, securing his grip on the door, he used his legs to push the door "up" and open.
I started laughing, and the kid turned his head sharply to the side as the sound fed through his headset.
"Clever move kid, but it just got you killed."
The kid tensed, but held still, through the side of his remlok I could see his eyes narrow slightly, preparing for a fight.
"Not me, you muppet," I laughed, and then laughed harder as he visibly relaxed, and then seemed to crumple in on himself.
"I mean in the door. You get extra credit for conservation of energy, pushing a door open with your legs is much easier than dragging it to one side, but it also means that you're exposing your waist and chest to whatever is on the other side. A booby trap in there would have done wonders for ventilating your intestines. Containment breach on the other hand, might have left you with glow in the dark swimmers or worse. Hell, if it had been pressurised you could have been left getting intimate with anything that hadn’t been bolted down. Safety kid. Payday only happens if you make it there in the first place."
He dropped his head and slumped. I expected him to get petulant, the rookies usually did, but he just nodded. Message received. Good kid.
I reached out and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and twisted, pushing him back down to the floor and through the door. No nonsense, just part slap on the back, part 'get back to work', and we took in the scene in front of us silently for a moment.
"Tai Kong Suo You Di Xing Qui Dou Sai Jin Wo De Pi Gu," whispered the kid.
"You ain't wrong" I replied sourly.
The room couldn't have looked worse if someone had set off a grenade in there, to be honest. Actually if I'm really honest, it was very possible someone had. The space was full of a cloud of particulates, more like fine gravel than dust or gas, but it peppered the space uniformly. Except where we had disturbed it, the stuff hung there motionless. It had obviously been ejected into the room somehow after the atmosphere had already vented, or it would have been carried away by outgassing, but it had bounced around the room enough to give up most of its kinetic energy to the ship around it.
On one side of the room, the entrance to the cargo bay. The door was open and through it a couple of dozen red tendrils reached out and surrounded a handful of motionless bodies, carrying a motley assortment of non-lethals and weaponised tools. Slavers then, non-lethal weapons to subdue and capture any stray personnel they found. Weaponised tools for those that either couldn’t afford them, or for those that just wanted something that looked more threatening.
I prodded at the nearest of the bodies with my foot. They all wore light armour, but not the stuff the local Crimsons wore. This stuff was mottled grey, with some kind of spider insignia similar to that worn by Archon Delaine's followers, but without the skull shaped thorax. The armour was barely heavier than an environment suit, likely worn for mobility over longevity. The bodies were just goons. Hired cannon fodder who relied on force of numbers to overwhelm unwary miners. More here than normal though, someone put up a fight.
"Boss?" came the kids voice over the comms.
I looked up to see him looking at something high up on the opposite side of the room, and I followed the direction of the beams from his remlok.
She was suspended there in a ring of ghostly blue tinged remlok light, like some avenging angel caught in a lepidopterists specimen case. Long hair, freed from gravity drifted like a halo around her masked head and face. Limbs akimbo, her fine, light dress swam around her like frozen ripples on some ancient pool. Where the dress touched her body, it looks a grisly, moist red, whilst elsewhere it was plain and silver. In stark contrast to her angelic bearing, in each hand a heavy shotgun, undoubtedly the reason for all the dead goons, and at the center of it all, just below her sternum, where the dress was darkest, the heavy jutting end of an industrial stem bolt.
My mind took in the picture, and immediately ran it like a holo-fac simulation.
The ship crippled, the goons had swarmed through the cargo bay and up here to main engineering. The woman, possibly the mother of the child from the locker, had sealed herself in here to wait them out, maybe protect what was left of her family, not realising a stray shot had already resolved that concern, when they burst through.
One of them had let off a shot with a hull sealant gun, pinned her to the bulkhead with the stem bolt, but driven by mothers’ instincts and adrenaline, or just raw grit, she'd unloaded those hand cannons into the swarm whilst bleeding out, and made them pay for every step they gained on the deck of her ship.
"Kid, lets clear this deck a bit so we can work. Separate out any equipment that looks like it’s worth a few credits, and then secure them to the bulkhead with some webbing. The corp bio farms can always do with the extra biomass. I'll cut our girl down and deal with her, she deserves more than being dumped or recycled."
I gently tugged the guns from her hands, and set them on deck before turning my attention to her body. I tried to lift her slightly, to reach a plasma torch behind and sheer the bolt off the wall, but to my surprise the movement lifted her further than intended and she slid cleanly off the bolt instead. Her hair and dress flowing around us both, I swung her down and laid her on the deck gently, and held her there with one hand across her chest as I reached into a pocket for a strip of webbing and clipped it to the floor across her torso with magnetic clamps. I folded her arms across her chest giving her some semblance of peace after the violence of her death. Then I reached out, my hands stopping short of the release mechanism on her remlok visor. I should have confirmed her ID with an iris scan, but something held me back. I'd find her in the ship records, no doubt, so the scan wasn’t really necessary, and there was something peaceful in the mirrored visor that I didn’t want to steal from her now.
With that done, I turned my attention to helping the kid manhandle the pirate corpses into another corner of the room and we ran a couple of web straps across them from one wall to the other to hold them upright. With the bodies safely stowed, we collected their weapons and tools together in slipped them into a mesh salvage bag which we clamped to the floor. All of our movement in the room had disturbed the particulate matter and blood trails, but there was no way to prevent the waves of material washing across the room or to secure it in any meaningful way without re-establishing either gravity or atmosphere first, so we did our best to ignore it.
Signal Received.
w̺̌͢ȋ̀͢d̯ͫ̍e̦ͧ̌b̛̎ͧa̾̋͡n̩᷇ͅd̤͗́ t᷿̺͗r̵̗ͨa͚̓͘n̡̑͘s͏͕᷿mͧ᷉᷀i̯͋͆s̻̱ͬs̾͒͝i͍͉͜o̦ͥ͡n̵ͩ͟
Ȍͩ͏r̯͔̀iͫ̈͟g͐᷁̎i̭᷂͑n͏̄᷅(̯̪ͧx̧̮͝)̞͋ͬ̈́̑᷉̚:̛̛̇ D̛̛̋B̛X̛ C̛̛͋ơ̛̛ͯ͊n̛̛͊ṱ̛̛i̛̛᷾n̛̛͊e̛̛̛n̢̛̛t̛̛ͨa̛̛̲l̛̛̤ D̛̛̪ŗ̛̛i̛̛̪f̛̛͈t̛̛͇ẽ̛̛ṛ̛̛
Src Loc: Ṱ̗̄rͦͮ͏iͭ̃͠l͚ͬͫ᷄a̛͕̹t̝͚ͪe͚᷁͜r͉̈́̉a̢͏̬̊l̙᷊ͦȉ̠̲͒͟͟ͅz̳᷁͐a᷿̝͞t̂̿̈̎i̓ͅ͏o̭͘͡n̫͇̔ F̛̯᷀a̡͚̝i̷̠ͪl͙̓̃ù̏͟r̫̈ͯe̺̬͟
***carrier signal corrupted***
***signal tuning complete***
Computer, take down this log and buffer for immediate transmission on remlok failure.
This is Commander Irvin Cranshaw of the DBX Continental Drifter, I hope to god this gets through. I've had to get creative, lens the signal through the grav wells of a few stars to bounce it back using some unlisted beacons. Tough work, signal is going to be corrupted to hell, but all I've got here now is time to try. Need to get news to folks back there and I'm in no position to do it now, so I've fired it at the private news nets. No point with GALNET, it’s not shiny and happy enough for them, no political incentive. Got to hope a smaller net will do it out of goodwill.
I'm on an oblique exit vector down and out of the galaxy. Frame shift took a hit and the injectors are fused. The ships a flying fuel tank, I always meant to escape, just didn’t realise it'd be like this. Anything that could be replaced with a fuel tank, was, along with a couple of outrigger tanks for good measure. All of them full.
I've been at terminal velocity a while now, no point sending help, it'll never reach me. Life support will fail a long time before the drive does. When the drive does finally give up the ghost, best guess I'll be smeared across space for a couple of light years or more. The ex-wife always said I should get around more, not sure that’s exactly what she meant.
I’m attaching some profile and kill data to this transmission. The first bunch, pirates. I don't know if they have records or bounties, but those folks are down. If there's any credits to be made there, well I ain't in any position to collect, so you take your admin fee, then split the rest between the families of those I've listed in the second bunch. It's the least I can do, all I can do now, because I screwed up, and they're gone too.
Those folks were crazier than a bag of cats, but they were honest and good, they didn’t deserve what they got, but it’s a damn sight prettier than what I got to look forward to.
Computer is still analysing the telemetry, I'm not sure why it flashed over like that, maybe it'll give me an answer to that before the scrubbers fail. I'll attach any data I have to this transmission, it’s the best I can do.
I feel like I should be blaming the kid. Not his fault, not really, and I guess it’s hard to be angry now, all things considered. Stupid damned kid. I knew he'd be the death of me, but I figured it'd be because he'd cook us with a messed-up power core or drive us into a rock. Never even learned his name.
If you've looked me up, you know I worked for the Salvage and Rescue arm of the Mawuru Group, stationed out of McAuley Platform. More salvage than rescue, truth be told. The belts were rich pickings, to be sure, and the boats that went out to harvest them were richer still. Easy prey, minimal security. For the local pirates, the Crimson Raiders, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. We made a living off the salvage they left. Empty hulks and haulers, spare parts and hull plates. We'd haul back anything we could find, fix what we could and render the rest for parts. The pirates left us alone, provided they got first shout on any goods we put up for sale.
We got the call a couple of months ago, me and the kid. Derelict T-9 spotted out in the belt. Big score, 1200 tons of scrap and spares, or upwards of 50grand, if we could get it running again. Nice easy payday, we thought, and some much-needed experience for the kid.
He'd only been rolling with me a couple of weeks, fresh out of some place no one ever heard of, and riding the company apprenticeship train, learning his trade from a down and out former Lakon engineer before they rotated him out in a couple of years to run his own operation, landing me with some other bright eyed and bushy tailed greenhorn to try to teach not to blow us both up. Fresh meat for the grinder.
So yeah, we took the call. Fired up the Dajiang, our company gunship turned salvage tug, and we made good time out to 2A ring. The coordinates the tower gave us were deep inside the ring, tight to the planet, and the planets magnetosphere turned our sensor resolution to yogurt. A cold, dark metal rich ship in a field of cold dark metal rich lumps, whoever spotted it out here in the first place must have had the kind of sensor suite that would have made a capital ship navigator jealous.
Even then, I remember thinking it didn’t feel right. Sure, miners liked to hide themselves where they couldn’t be found by pirates, but to go so deep into the field, to be so hidden that they couldn’t be found in an emergency? It didn’t sit right with me. I tried to talk to the kid about it, but he was too wet behind the ears to have the kind of instincts an older spacer like me had honed over decades in the black.
We lit up the area with limpets, broadcast our intent to invoke the right to salvage on the wideband. It was the dance you did. Like the holo-facs about those tribes’ people back in Sol that would walk up to packs of lions singing and banging drums to stay safe. We sang and banged our drums, warning other miners to keep out of the way, warning pirates that we weren’t miners and were worth more to them left in peace, and to tell everyone else that we weren’t worth the hassle of attacking.
As we lit the area up, we took our first good look at the ship we'd been sent to investigate. She was a mess, for sure. Hull plating and drive cones either shot full of more holes than a colander, or just missing where they'd been sheared off. They'd been trying to run, which I always felt was worse. The crew had known about the attack, they'd been running scared, too slow to get away and too close to the belt to try and jump. It probably sounds weird, but I always preferred to find ships that had been taken out surgically. Knowing the crew hadn’t had time to respond or even comprehend what was happening, always makes me feel better somehow, and not just because it tends to mean there's less work to do to make a profit salvaging the hulk, although that was always a bonus for sure.
Cargo hatch was burned open. Not unusual for a ship this size, they were too heavy to breach with charges, too much risk of damaging cargo. The metal was warped and rippled out like fossilised waves. But it was clean. Too clean. There wasn’t any of the normal dust and gravel you'd expect to see on a rock grinder. Didn’t seem likely that a pirate would hit a miner that hadn’t actually mined any material. Chalked it up to suspicious and carried on the inspection.
As we swung around to the front of the ship, we found the kill shot. The entire flight deck was gone, in its place a gaping hole, ringed with icy fangs. A clear sign of explosive decompression. The ice said the deck had gone suddenly, it hadn’t been shot out, or the emergency bulkheads would have sealed off the bridge to preserve atmosphere in the rest of the ship. A torp hit then. Seemed like overkill for a miner.
We stabilised the ship with limpets. A few repair drones to shore up the hull, and then a full suite of salvage limpets to stop her drifting. Standard. Then the kid and I suited up for inspection, collected our suitcase sized recovery kits, and walked right in through the space where the deck should be.
See the thing with salvaging any ship is that if you don’t check it out before you move it, you don’t know what kind of trouble you're hauling back home. Dangerous or toxic materials or radiation aside, if you're dealing with a crafty crew, you could be hauling a booby-trapped ship back home, and that’s bad news for you one way or the other if you run into it on the pad. Either the corp ends up hiring a cleaning crew to scrape you off the deck, and bills it to your next of kin, or they're putting out a bounty on you for detonating a sizable chunk of space station.
As we move through the ship towards the engineering cabin, I realise she's looking less and less like a mining barge all the time. It feels more like someone’s home than a place of work. Soft furnishings where you'd expect to see it more spartan and corporate. None of the survey tool's you'd expect to see, no evidence of any refining equipment.
Kid spots it first, probably because he's not seen the insides of a shot up ship before and gotten desensetised to it. There's the clear path of a through and through round. A hole on one side of the cabin floor, and one to match it passing through some kind of locker on the other. In the space between, a moist crimson trail. I call out to the kid but it’s too late, he's pulled the door on the locker, and inside, most of the body of a child, girl by the look of the clothes, a fluffy looking toy of some kind in her arms, staring out at us with a stitched-on smile and dead glass eyes.
He holds it together though. Adrenaline, probably, or perhaps a desire to not embarrass himself in front of me. But he's clearly shaken, and I'm not ashamed to admit, so was I. What the hell were they doing here, dressed up like a mining barge, hidden so deep in the ring and the planets magnetosphere? One thing for sure, they weren't here for the rocks, and any pirate worth his salt would have known that before trying to jump them. I hoped we'd find the answer as we moved on through the vessel.
We found the hatch to main engineering welded shut. Waste of time for an experienced spacer, any pirate was going to cut in through the cargo hatch, not take their time wandering the corridors of a hostile vessel. Another discrepancy I added to the growing list, as the kid traced around the edge of the door with a plasma cutter.
Once he was done, the kid slipped the cutter back on his belt, and in a fluid lithe motion, he had kicked off the deck in his mag boots, swung out 90° to the side and planted his feet back down on the wall. Then, securing his grip on the door, he used his legs to push the door "up" and open.
I started laughing, and the kid turned his head sharply to the side as the sound fed through his headset.
"Clever move kid, but it just got you killed."
The kid tensed, but held still, through the side of his remlok I could see his eyes narrow slightly, preparing for a fight.
"Not me, you muppet," I laughed, and then laughed harder as he visibly relaxed, and then seemed to crumple in on himself.
"I mean in the door. You get extra credit for conservation of energy, pushing a door open with your legs is much easier than dragging it to one side, but it also means that you're exposing your waist and chest to whatever is on the other side. A booby trap in there would have done wonders for ventilating your intestines. Containment breach on the other hand, might have left you with glow in the dark swimmers or worse. Hell, if it had been pressurised you could have been left getting intimate with anything that hadn’t been bolted down. Safety kid. Payday only happens if you make it there in the first place."
He dropped his head and slumped. I expected him to get petulant, the rookies usually did, but he just nodded. Message received. Good kid.
I reached out and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and twisted, pushing him back down to the floor and through the door. No nonsense, just part slap on the back, part 'get back to work', and we took in the scene in front of us silently for a moment.
"Tai Kong Suo You Di Xing Qui Dou Sai Jin Wo De Pi Gu," whispered the kid.
"You ain't wrong" I replied sourly.
The room couldn't have looked worse if someone had set off a grenade in there, to be honest. Actually if I'm really honest, it was very possible someone had. The space was full of a cloud of particulates, more like fine gravel than dust or gas, but it peppered the space uniformly. Except where we had disturbed it, the stuff hung there motionless. It had obviously been ejected into the room somehow after the atmosphere had already vented, or it would have been carried away by outgassing, but it had bounced around the room enough to give up most of its kinetic energy to the ship around it.
On one side of the room, the entrance to the cargo bay. The door was open and through it a couple of dozen red tendrils reached out and surrounded a handful of motionless bodies, carrying a motley assortment of non-lethals and weaponised tools. Slavers then, non-lethal weapons to subdue and capture any stray personnel they found. Weaponised tools for those that either couldn’t afford them, or for those that just wanted something that looked more threatening.
I prodded at the nearest of the bodies with my foot. They all wore light armour, but not the stuff the local Crimsons wore. This stuff was mottled grey, with some kind of spider insignia similar to that worn by Archon Delaine's followers, but without the skull shaped thorax. The armour was barely heavier than an environment suit, likely worn for mobility over longevity. The bodies were just goons. Hired cannon fodder who relied on force of numbers to overwhelm unwary miners. More here than normal though, someone put up a fight.
"Boss?" came the kids voice over the comms.
I looked up to see him looking at something high up on the opposite side of the room, and I followed the direction of the beams from his remlok.
She was suspended there in a ring of ghostly blue tinged remlok light, like some avenging angel caught in a lepidopterists specimen case. Long hair, freed from gravity drifted like a halo around her masked head and face. Limbs akimbo, her fine, light dress swam around her like frozen ripples on some ancient pool. Where the dress touched her body, it looks a grisly, moist red, whilst elsewhere it was plain and silver. In stark contrast to her angelic bearing, in each hand a heavy shotgun, undoubtedly the reason for all the dead goons, and at the center of it all, just below her sternum, where the dress was darkest, the heavy jutting end of an industrial stem bolt.
My mind took in the picture, and immediately ran it like a holo-fac simulation.
The ship crippled, the goons had swarmed through the cargo bay and up here to main engineering. The woman, possibly the mother of the child from the locker, had sealed herself in here to wait them out, maybe protect what was left of her family, not realising a stray shot had already resolved that concern, when they burst through.
One of them had let off a shot with a hull sealant gun, pinned her to the bulkhead with the stem bolt, but driven by mothers’ instincts and adrenaline, or just raw grit, she'd unloaded those hand cannons into the swarm whilst bleeding out, and made them pay for every step they gained on the deck of her ship.
"Kid, lets clear this deck a bit so we can work. Separate out any equipment that looks like it’s worth a few credits, and then secure them to the bulkhead with some webbing. The corp bio farms can always do with the extra biomass. I'll cut our girl down and deal with her, she deserves more than being dumped or recycled."
I gently tugged the guns from her hands, and set them on deck before turning my attention to her body. I tried to lift her slightly, to reach a plasma torch behind and sheer the bolt off the wall, but to my surprise the movement lifted her further than intended and she slid cleanly off the bolt instead. Her hair and dress flowing around us both, I swung her down and laid her on the deck gently, and held her there with one hand across her chest as I reached into a pocket for a strip of webbing and clipped it to the floor across her torso with magnetic clamps. I folded her arms across her chest giving her some semblance of peace after the violence of her death. Then I reached out, my hands stopping short of the release mechanism on her remlok visor. I should have confirmed her ID with an iris scan, but something held me back. I'd find her in the ship records, no doubt, so the scan wasn’t really necessary, and there was something peaceful in the mirrored visor that I didn’t want to steal from her now.
With that done, I turned my attention to helping the kid manhandle the pirate corpses into another corner of the room and we ran a couple of web straps across them from one wall to the other to hold them upright. With the bodies safely stowed, we collected their weapons and tools together in slipped them into a mesh salvage bag which we clamped to the floor. All of our movement in the room had disturbed the particulate matter and blood trails, but there was no way to prevent the waves of material washing across the room or to secure it in any meaningful way without re-establishing either gravity or atmosphere first, so we did our best to ignore it.
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