Rollie and Bujdoso had rejoined Dirk's team, the general consensus being that there was safety in numbers, although what threat they might face on a derelict ship, adrift in a far flung system, and open to space like this, was up for debate.
"So how can you be sure this is the same guy? You said that he got out the year after you got in." He asked Dirk, as they stood around the body, "Including the last three years with us, that makes, what, almost eight years since the last time you saw him."
"Trust me Rollie, its him. The real question is: Who killed him, and why?" He replied, his voice hard, leached of all feeling. "Bull was as good as they get, but someone broke his arm, ripped his face up, and put a knife in him where it would do the most damage without having to get through his body armor. That takes a hell of a lot of skill, considering how well trained he was, and how heavily enhanced his reflexes were."
"Maybe Doc Ujio can do an autopsy, or something; either way, we have to report this back to the Captain, don't we?" Interjected Hicks, her voice sounding haunted.
Xu decided to get his own ideas in the open. "Look, what do we really know right now? We have a man who appears to have been murdered, but no idea why, or by whom, right? The Captain's going to want more information anyway, so why not finish our job, then report? Maybe we'll find out something along the way." He stopped to gesture at the drifting corpse, "It's not like he'll mind waiting."
Rollie watched for a reaction from Dirk at the casual lack of respect being displayed for his late friend, but it was difficult to gauge what he might be thinking since his face was behind the solid faceplate of his helmet. He was relieved when Dirk appeared to shrug his shoulders, and said: "Xu's right, let's finish what we came to do; trust me, if Bullard was able to talk, he'd tell us: 'mission first', but let's all stick together for now, the forward sections can wait."
They made their way aft through the ship's 'Broadway' maintenance/transfer tube, and Rollie could see that the bulkhead doors heading aft were only partially shut, which made little sense, unless they had been forced open after the power was lost. The corridor was as dark as the rest of the ship, and their hand held flashlights, and suit mounted spotlights, threw noonday circles of light around them with almost no peripheral illumination in the airless vacuum. It wasn't until the beam from his own flashlight washed across a dark blotch on the floor, however, that he began to see any cause for concern. The spot looked suspiciously like dried blood, but it was smeared along the floor as if someone had dragged a body away. The smear came from the forward area of the ship, which they had reserved for later inspection, and Rollie was just as glad they were headed toward the stern.
Dirk and Hicks led the way to the next set of doors which, while partially open, were still too close together to let them through in vacsuits. The two of them grabbed a door each, and with their feet braced against the opposite, used the augmented strength of the exos they wore to force the doors open enough to let them pass. Without waiting for instructions, Bujdoso and Xu joined in, adding at least something to the overall effort. Rollie hung back to observe, since there wasn't any more room for another body on the doors, and he would need to activate the manual lock that would keep them from slamming shut when they let go. He could imagine the racket that the pneumatically actuated mechanism being forcibly reversed would have made if the ship had air.
"OK guys, that should do it." He told them, once they had gotten the doors apart wide enough, and pulled the lever under the control panel locking them open.
They moved into the next section, focused on finding the access stairwell to the areas below Broadway, and as a result, they had ignored the dark corners of the corridor. A sudden hint of movement caused Monika Bujdoso to pan her hand held spotlight above her head, and she found herself less than half a meter away from the outstretched arms of a nightmarishly grotesque figure drifting in her direction.
Her screams came one after the other, as her hands battered the controls of her vacsuit's EVA flight pack in a panicked effort to get away. Her thrashing had the opposite effect, and she sent herself careening right into the figure's waiting embrace. In the seconds of confusion that reigned, as everyone else tried to understand what was happening, Bujdoso suddenly went silent, her voice drifting off to a murmur, then stopping entirely.
Rollie quickly maneuvered over to her, and pulled her away from the body with which she had collided. The body was a frightening patchwork of cybernetic grafts, implanted demal enhancements, and Saints only knew what else, but it was as dead as the rest of the ship. He looked at Bujdoso through the clear visor of her helmet, then checked her vitals using their suit's emergency communications network, but her life signs were reading within acceptable limits.
"I overrode her suit's medical support unit, and pumped her full of sedative. She'll be out for a while. As of right now, I'm putting the survey on hold, and you're all heading back." Dirk told them, while carefully examining the latest gruesome find in the house of horrors in which they had found themselves.
"Wait just a second, what do mean 'you're'? Just what do you think you're gonna do?" Rollie asked, acidly. "And another thing, how the hell did you override Bujdoso's MSU? That's supposed to be impossible."
Hicks was clearly shaken, but managed to interject: "Who cares? Let's just get out of here, this fucking ship is creeping me out."
"I have to agree, Rollie," Said Xu, "something's definitely weird about all this. And that - thing, is not what I'd have expected to find here."
Rollie, fuming in the relative privacy of his own vacsuit, wasn't giving up without making one last argument: "OK, fine. But DJ, you know as well as I do that you can't go on alone without violating at least a dozen safety regs; so Xu, Hicks, you two get to tow Bujdoso out to Mule-1 and wait. DJ, I'm coming with you." He ended with finality.
"Rollie, I don't think you underst -"
"Forget it pal, you ain't gonna go alone, and that's that. If you wanna stop me, shoot me." He said, cutting off any further argument.
"Suit yourself, but I have a feeling you'll wish you'd gone with them." Dirk said, pointing at their crewmates, who were wasting no time getting underway.
Rollie had no real desire to continue further into the ship's interior, but he wasn't about to allow his friend to risk himself, alone, in the most hostile environment known to humanity. He decided to err on the side of caution, and issued one last instruction to the others: "Xu, start a countdown clock; if you haven't heard anything from us in six hours, then call the Captain and tell him what happened."
"Last chance to back out, Rollie." Dirk said, as the two of them watched the others head back.
"Fuck you, DJ. Let's go." He replied, caustically, still annoyed with Dirk for trying to shut him out of whatever was going on.
Dirk didn't say a word, he simply headed for the stairwell that gave access to the central areas of the ship. With only the two of them, Rollie now found that the shadows seemed deeper, and the darkness enveloping them more profound. His Davis-Arctica vacsuit lacked the LIDAR, radar, and image enhancement of Dirk's Baccardax exo, but he really didn't need any, since the amps in his cybernetic eyes gave him full low light vision. He placed a diffusion filter over the front of his flashlight, and dimmed it until he fount a level that optimized his eyes' abilities, without compromising their image resolution. His immediate surroundings became clearly visible, and he saw a few scattered objects drifting weightlessly in the stairwell. His eyes were recording an image of each object he saw, just in case it was necessary for later reference.
Their descent was interrupted by the hatch that sealed off this part of the ship, which was sealed shut, and resisted their efforts to open it. After five minutes of trying, and little to show for it, Rollie was becoming frustrated with the idea of continuing further.
"This is pointless. Why don't we go back up, and move on to the next section?" He suggested.
Dirk didn't appear to hear him, instead he pulled an interface cable from its compartment on his exo's forearm, and plugged it into the socket on the door's control panel. Rollie couldn't see the point, there was no power to move the door. After half a minute, Dirk detached the cable, and retracted it back into its compartment.
"Satisfied? Now can we move on?" Asked Rollie.
"Let me borrow your hooligan bar for a second."
Rollie shrugged his shoulders and handed it over, watching as Dirk jammed its flat end into the slot in the door designed to accommodate it, and braced himself while pushing on the opposite end, using the frame of the door as a fulcrum. He was about to point out the futility of further effort, when the door slid open a few centimeters
"OK, that shouldn't have happened. What did you do?" Rollie demanded, incredulously.
"Used my cranial interface to disable the lock, the exo's cable can run enough power to the systems to make them work as long as they're plugged in. An old Marine trick. Give me a hand with the door." Dirk explained, handing back the hooligan bar.
They pulled on the door by hand, opening it enough to allow them through, and found themselves in a room unlike any either one of them would have expected to find on a colony ship. It was an open area with two sets of elevator doors opposite a sealed hatch between two security desks. Rollie moved to the sealed hatch, which had 'LAB 03' stenciled on it, and a small window inset at eye height, to try and see what lay on the other side.
"Uh, Dirk? Something's blocking the window, want to try your voodoo on this one?"
Dirk didn't say anything, but he didn't hesitate, and plugged into the data port on the coded entry panel next to the door. He remained still for more than a minute before the door popped open.
"Whatever's behind this thing, somebody didn't want unrestricted access to it. I almost didn't think that my old military overrides were going to work." He said, grabbing the edge of the door and forcing it back into its recess in the wall.
"Holy vestments of the Saints! What the fuck is this?" Rollie asked, looking into the room ahead.
The open hatch revealed a room populated only by the dead. It was full of bodies, and parts thereof, all of which were distributed randomly throughout the space beyond. Random objects drifted among the bodies, giving the whole scene the look of a twisted and macabre piece of modern art.
Rollie stood there, motionless, trying to unsee the horribly mutilated corpses in front of him, swallowed nervously, and said: "You were right DJ, I wish to hell I'd gone with the others."
Dirk was silent as he stepped into the chamber of horrors.
"So how can you be sure this is the same guy? You said that he got out the year after you got in." He asked Dirk, as they stood around the body, "Including the last three years with us, that makes, what, almost eight years since the last time you saw him."
"Trust me Rollie, its him. The real question is: Who killed him, and why?" He replied, his voice hard, leached of all feeling. "Bull was as good as they get, but someone broke his arm, ripped his face up, and put a knife in him where it would do the most damage without having to get through his body armor. That takes a hell of a lot of skill, considering how well trained he was, and how heavily enhanced his reflexes were."
"Maybe Doc Ujio can do an autopsy, or something; either way, we have to report this back to the Captain, don't we?" Interjected Hicks, her voice sounding haunted.
Xu decided to get his own ideas in the open. "Look, what do we really know right now? We have a man who appears to have been murdered, but no idea why, or by whom, right? The Captain's going to want more information anyway, so why not finish our job, then report? Maybe we'll find out something along the way." He stopped to gesture at the drifting corpse, "It's not like he'll mind waiting."
Rollie watched for a reaction from Dirk at the casual lack of respect being displayed for his late friend, but it was difficult to gauge what he might be thinking since his face was behind the solid faceplate of his helmet. He was relieved when Dirk appeared to shrug his shoulders, and said: "Xu's right, let's finish what we came to do; trust me, if Bullard was able to talk, he'd tell us: 'mission first', but let's all stick together for now, the forward sections can wait."
They made their way aft through the ship's 'Broadway' maintenance/transfer tube, and Rollie could see that the bulkhead doors heading aft were only partially shut, which made little sense, unless they had been forced open after the power was lost. The corridor was as dark as the rest of the ship, and their hand held flashlights, and suit mounted spotlights, threw noonday circles of light around them with almost no peripheral illumination in the airless vacuum. It wasn't until the beam from his own flashlight washed across a dark blotch on the floor, however, that he began to see any cause for concern. The spot looked suspiciously like dried blood, but it was smeared along the floor as if someone had dragged a body away. The smear came from the forward area of the ship, which they had reserved for later inspection, and Rollie was just as glad they were headed toward the stern.
Dirk and Hicks led the way to the next set of doors which, while partially open, were still too close together to let them through in vacsuits. The two of them grabbed a door each, and with their feet braced against the opposite, used the augmented strength of the exos they wore to force the doors open enough to let them pass. Without waiting for instructions, Bujdoso and Xu joined in, adding at least something to the overall effort. Rollie hung back to observe, since there wasn't any more room for another body on the doors, and he would need to activate the manual lock that would keep them from slamming shut when they let go. He could imagine the racket that the pneumatically actuated mechanism being forcibly reversed would have made if the ship had air.
"OK guys, that should do it." He told them, once they had gotten the doors apart wide enough, and pulled the lever under the control panel locking them open.
They moved into the next section, focused on finding the access stairwell to the areas below Broadway, and as a result, they had ignored the dark corners of the corridor. A sudden hint of movement caused Monika Bujdoso to pan her hand held spotlight above her head, and she found herself less than half a meter away from the outstretched arms of a nightmarishly grotesque figure drifting in her direction.
Her screams came one after the other, as her hands battered the controls of her vacsuit's EVA flight pack in a panicked effort to get away. Her thrashing had the opposite effect, and she sent herself careening right into the figure's waiting embrace. In the seconds of confusion that reigned, as everyone else tried to understand what was happening, Bujdoso suddenly went silent, her voice drifting off to a murmur, then stopping entirely.
Rollie quickly maneuvered over to her, and pulled her away from the body with which she had collided. The body was a frightening patchwork of cybernetic grafts, implanted demal enhancements, and Saints only knew what else, but it was as dead as the rest of the ship. He looked at Bujdoso through the clear visor of her helmet, then checked her vitals using their suit's emergency communications network, but her life signs were reading within acceptable limits.
"I overrode her suit's medical support unit, and pumped her full of sedative. She'll be out for a while. As of right now, I'm putting the survey on hold, and you're all heading back." Dirk told them, while carefully examining the latest gruesome find in the house of horrors in which they had found themselves.
"Wait just a second, what do mean 'you're'? Just what do you think you're gonna do?" Rollie asked, acidly. "And another thing, how the hell did you override Bujdoso's MSU? That's supposed to be impossible."
Hicks was clearly shaken, but managed to interject: "Who cares? Let's just get out of here, this fucking ship is creeping me out."
"I have to agree, Rollie," Said Xu, "something's definitely weird about all this. And that - thing, is not what I'd have expected to find here."
Rollie, fuming in the relative privacy of his own vacsuit, wasn't giving up without making one last argument: "OK, fine. But DJ, you know as well as I do that you can't go on alone without violating at least a dozen safety regs; so Xu, Hicks, you two get to tow Bujdoso out to Mule-1 and wait. DJ, I'm coming with you." He ended with finality.
"Rollie, I don't think you underst -"
"Forget it pal, you ain't gonna go alone, and that's that. If you wanna stop me, shoot me." He said, cutting off any further argument.
"Suit yourself, but I have a feeling you'll wish you'd gone with them." Dirk said, pointing at their crewmates, who were wasting no time getting underway.
Rollie had no real desire to continue further into the ship's interior, but he wasn't about to allow his friend to risk himself, alone, in the most hostile environment known to humanity. He decided to err on the side of caution, and issued one last instruction to the others: "Xu, start a countdown clock; if you haven't heard anything from us in six hours, then call the Captain and tell him what happened."
"Last chance to back out, Rollie." Dirk said, as the two of them watched the others head back.
"Fuck you, DJ. Let's go." He replied, caustically, still annoyed with Dirk for trying to shut him out of whatever was going on.
Dirk didn't say a word, he simply headed for the stairwell that gave access to the central areas of the ship. With only the two of them, Rollie now found that the shadows seemed deeper, and the darkness enveloping them more profound. His Davis-Arctica vacsuit lacked the LIDAR, radar, and image enhancement of Dirk's Baccardax exo, but he really didn't need any, since the amps in his cybernetic eyes gave him full low light vision. He placed a diffusion filter over the front of his flashlight, and dimmed it until he fount a level that optimized his eyes' abilities, without compromising their image resolution. His immediate surroundings became clearly visible, and he saw a few scattered objects drifting weightlessly in the stairwell. His eyes were recording an image of each object he saw, just in case it was necessary for later reference.
Their descent was interrupted by the hatch that sealed off this part of the ship, which was sealed shut, and resisted their efforts to open it. After five minutes of trying, and little to show for it, Rollie was becoming frustrated with the idea of continuing further.
"This is pointless. Why don't we go back up, and move on to the next section?" He suggested.
Dirk didn't appear to hear him, instead he pulled an interface cable from its compartment on his exo's forearm, and plugged it into the socket on the door's control panel. Rollie couldn't see the point, there was no power to move the door. After half a minute, Dirk detached the cable, and retracted it back into its compartment.
"Satisfied? Now can we move on?" Asked Rollie.
"Let me borrow your hooligan bar for a second."
Rollie shrugged his shoulders and handed it over, watching as Dirk jammed its flat end into the slot in the door designed to accommodate it, and braced himself while pushing on the opposite end, using the frame of the door as a fulcrum. He was about to point out the futility of further effort, when the door slid open a few centimeters
"OK, that shouldn't have happened. What did you do?" Rollie demanded, incredulously.
"Used my cranial interface to disable the lock, the exo's cable can run enough power to the systems to make them work as long as they're plugged in. An old Marine trick. Give me a hand with the door." Dirk explained, handing back the hooligan bar.
They pulled on the door by hand, opening it enough to allow them through, and found themselves in a room unlike any either one of them would have expected to find on a colony ship. It was an open area with two sets of elevator doors opposite a sealed hatch between two security desks. Rollie moved to the sealed hatch, which had 'LAB 03' stenciled on it, and a small window inset at eye height, to try and see what lay on the other side.
"Uh, Dirk? Something's blocking the window, want to try your voodoo on this one?"
Dirk didn't say anything, but he didn't hesitate, and plugged into the data port on the coded entry panel next to the door. He remained still for more than a minute before the door popped open.
"Whatever's behind this thing, somebody didn't want unrestricted access to it. I almost didn't think that my old military overrides were going to work." He said, grabbing the edge of the door and forcing it back into its recess in the wall.
"Holy vestments of the Saints! What the fuck is this?" Rollie asked, looking into the room ahead.
The open hatch revealed a room populated only by the dead. It was full of bodies, and parts thereof, all of which were distributed randomly throughout the space beyond. Random objects drifted among the bodies, giving the whole scene the look of a twisted and macabre piece of modern art.
Rollie stood there, motionless, trying to unsee the horribly mutilated corpses in front of him, swallowed nervously, and said: "You were right DJ, I wish to hell I'd gone with the others."
Dirk was silent as he stepped into the chamber of horrors.
