Chapter Five
“His voice calls to me from across the void. Whispering promises of restored glory and unmatched splendor. But first he says there is something he must show me. A simple truth he calls it. Whatever he has in store for me, I have to see it with my own eyes. This crew is a means to an end. Mina’s death was a regrettable, but ultimately acceptable loss. After all, what are a few lost souls along the road to perfection.”
–Excerpt from the personal log of Nolan Montgomery, CEO of Montgomery Holdings.
Duncan “Deadeye” North stepped down into the dusty hangar of the old Maur frigate. They’d run nine different simulations over the three day journey out to this gravesite. Gravity was out in most of them, so at least they were prepared for that. One of them had actually involved a collision with a giant asteroid, though the circumstances had been a bit different. None of those simulations had accounted for this whole corvette-within-a-frigate bullshit.
Another day, another shitshow.
He drew his dual pistols with a bit of flair, twirling them around his trigger fingers and letting them both settle into a sturdy grip before he deactivated the safeties and prepared to dance. But there wasn’t anything for him to shoot. Not yet at least.
Felix and Blue dropped down right behind him.
Felix cradled a heavily customized assault rifle which had pieces of at least seven different models connected to it. He referred to it as his babydoll and loved it more than life itself. He’d been that way for as long as Duncan had known the Maur, going back nine long years now. Countless lifetimes by the standards of runners.
Blue was a practical behemoth. He carried a massive shield that Duncan probably couldn’t have lifted in the first place, along with a tactical shotgun and a Maur-designed machete strapped to his back. The Maur didn’t call it a machete, but it was a short sword meant for chopping, so Duncan called it like he saw it.
Gunner dropped down behind them toting a rotating blaster cannon. Opposing bandoliers of knives and grenades crisscrossed his chest, and he carried a battle axe strapped to his back.
Nolan stepped down beside the orc, toting a single holdout blaster. He appeared to have enough blaster safety training not to point it at any of his companions, but Duncan doubted the CEO was going to hit anything he shot at if it came down to a firefight.
Sybil and Squint came last, neither of them bothered to carry any weapons. Squint was followed by a swarm of small tactical drones which he sent out ahead of them with a gesture. Sybil kept her hands empty and prepared to utilize her psionics.
“Silent running from here to our objective,” Duncan announced. “Unless you’ve been running sims, hang back and let us take point. Boys, we know what to do. Let’s clear a path to the bridge.” Duncan led the other three warriors forward and let the trio of non-combatants fall behind.
Corridor by corridor, airlock by airlock, they swept through the vessel without incident. Every fresh bend in the path carried with it the possibility that this was it and the fighting would start. But nothing crawled out of the shadows. Nothing.
The altered megastructure itself told a story of two vessels. One torn apart and disemboweled to make room for the other. Both welded together with a support system that looked like it was meant to detach. Every portion of the frigate was separated and ready to be shed like a snake skin if the corvette needed to abandon the disguise and enter real combat.
They found an access point in the frigate’s cafeteria that linked up to the corvette’s hangar and started the process over again.
Squint released a second swarm of tiny drones out into the corvette’s empty corridors, and Duncan led the way towards the bridge.
Again. Nothing.
By the time they entered the bridge, it was almost a relief to find a Maur skeleton waiting for them in the captain’s chair. No one jumped.
Gunner and Sybil both posted up by the door and played guard.
Blue stepped over to the captain’s chair and rested his mighty shield on the ground, where it remained upright even without his touch. He then set a gentle hand on the skeleton’s mostly intact uniform and mumbled out a soft prayer for the departed.
Squint and Nolan both made a beeline for the command consoles.
Duncan and Felix made eye contact and nodded. Years of fighting side by side had them in perfect sync. Neither of them liked this shit.
Too easy.
“I’ve got it,” Squint announced within seconds of slotting his data cable into the console.
The ship’s lights hummed to life all at once, drawing everyone’s eyes up and around. The first thing they noticed was the blood staining the walls and spelling out a single phrase in the language of the Maur. An alphabet of diagonal slashes only made the blood pop out that much more against the bulkhead. Duncan’s HUD offered up a translation for the phrase, but Felix was quicker on the draw.
“‘Beware the deceiver,’” he said soberly. “Well that sounds suitably ominous. Any clue what he was talking about?”
Gunner took a step closer to the blood, frowning.
“She,” Blue corrected, rising from where he had been kneeling before the captain’s bones. “The Captain was a she.”
“Some bitch named Asamba,” Squint added for context. “I’ve got the mission reports. They tried to scrub them from the data drives but luckily for you, I’m a genius. Sorry, mister Montgomery, this ship has never fired a shot. Straight from whatever shipyard it was built in until it arrived here in its final resting place, these guns have never so much as warmed up aside from whatever testing they were put through before launch. It was a recon mission only. They wanted to gather intel on how the Terrans conduct their wars, and they got it. That’s all this was.”
Nolan turned away from the console and stared at the bridge’s main screen, hands balled into fists and body coiled like a snake.
Duncan and Felix exchanged a glance once more, and the Maur subtly shifted his weight to keep the business end of his rifle ready to draw a bead on the CEO if the man turned on them.
“She died for nothing,” were the words that spilled from Nolan’s mouth. Nothing about his family’s legacy. Nothing about the conspiracy he’d clung to all this time. Just that. “They all did.”
Duncan’s eyes knit together. “‘They,’” he echoed, “who’s they?”
“Guys,” Gunner said warily. “This blood is still wet.” He held up two fingers to reveal red marking the tips. The warning scrawled in the Maur language was written recently.
Duncan’s pistols came up to level at Nolan. “What’s going on, Monty? Tell me the truth. All of it. Now. Or I’ll ventilate your cranium faster than you can say ‘it’s not as bad as it sounds.’”
Nolan sighed heavily and dropped into the navigator’s chair. “Fine. This may come as a shock to you, but my station is not as heavily populated as it seems.”
Duncan flashed a warning look Squint’s way to prevent the hacker from revealing their hand. The less Nolan thought they knew, the better.
“The vast majority of my crew were sent here several months ago. Two weeks ago, they all went missing. As did the security team I sent out to check on them. We got some intel back. None of it made sense. That’s when we put out a bounty we knew you couldn’t refuse. Life-changing money for a simple job. And you stepped right up, eager as can be. Damn fools.”
“Says the man surrounded by six armed mercenaries he just insulted,” Gunner noted.
Nolan shrugged. “I don’t give a rat’s ass if I live or die anymore, pig. I’ve lost everything. My family’s legacy shall remain tarnished. My House shall remain forgotten. My planet shall remain an irradiated wasteland. I’ve lost every last man, woman, and bot who was loyal to me. I lost Mina. What’s left? I’d like to know what happened to them. Where they went. Hacker, you’ve got eyes all across both vessels by now. You picking up any life signs?”
Squint shook his head. “Just us here on the bridge.”
“Then where the fuck did my people go?” Nolan demanded of no one in particular.
“The asteroid itself?” Sybil guessed.
Nolan dismissed this suggestion with a wave of his hand. “Ridiculous. My people tried mining it for resources, but most of the work was just excavating the frigate in the first place.”
“Maybe they found something. We’ve all heard the stories of deep space asteroid mining. It could’ve been a dormant virus or a slab of some Nethrian mineral that fucked with everybody’s heads and made them see shit and wipe each other out. It’s a big galaxy and stranger things have happened.”
Nolan shook his head. “My people were prepared for that kind of shit. They were good at their jobs. They had protection, full quarantine measures, scans, we even had a few psions on staff who assured me there was no Nethrian energy anywhere on the asteroid. I’ve been down the list. This is a fucking locked box mystery and there are way too many missing people for this to be some freak accident.”
“The drones we fought through on our way in might’ve done the job. Maybe someone activated a security measure when they reached the corvette, triggered the swarm?” Felix suggested.
“Then where are the bodies?” Nolan asked.
Duncan holstered his pistols. “Enough. We did our job. Speculation and investigation wasn’t part of the job description. We’re done here. I’m sorry about your people but I’ve got no clue what happened to them and zero inclination to find out the particulars of this little mystery. My crew and I are leaving. You coming with us?”
Nolan pursed his lips. “I’ll up the pay. You can keep what I paid you. I’ll double the second payment if you stay a while. Let me investigate, provide a little security for my peace of mind, and if I don’t find anything in thirty-six hours, we call it. Sound good?”
Duncan’s eyes darted around his crew to gauge their reactions before coming back with a counteroffer. “Make it twelve hours and you’ve got a deal.”
Nolan hung his head. “Twenty four. Final offer. One minute less and you get nothing. I’ll sweeten the pot by throwing in some of my contacts in the major systems. People who can help you make all the newfound wealth you’ve acquired last longer and work for you without getting taxed by the Dorians, the NTA, and whoever else wants a piece. You’ll wind up keeping a helluva lot more of it if you know the right people.”
Duncan lifted an eyebrow. “Deal. But that twenty-four-hour timer started the minute we landed. You’ve got twenty one hours and thirteen minutes left and counting. Best hop to it.”
Nolan gritted his teeth and rose from the navigation console to go stand by Squint. “Alright, first things first, I want all the sensor data from the past six months.”
Squint looked over at Duncan, a silent question gleaming in his three cybernetic eyes.
Duncan nodded his permission, and the hacker began assisting Nolan in his search.
