“Drago, Sparks, and Doak take the pilot’s deck, the rest on me,” ordered Rhett before adjusting his rifle and stepping up the sloping deck plating that lead above.
Rhett crested the top of the slope and peered at the command deck through the iron sights of his compact rifle. He sucked in his breath as his eyes took in the sight of a person in a void suit slumped over in the captain’s chair. The only reason the body had not floated from the chair was the safety belt slung across the person’s chest. A shotgun was tethered to the chair, though it drifted out of easy reach, as if the person had not bothered to pull it towards them in response to the Vultures penetrating the sealed off part of the ship.
“Calibos, switch to theta frequency, channel forty-seven,” ordered Captain Estrada suddenly. “Mons is picking up a short-range repeater signal, not connected to ship’s power so it’s on a cell.”
Without hesitation, Rhett keyed his comm-bead over to the channel, carefully picking his way towards the captain’s char.
“All hands lost,” said a thin voice through the comm-bead. “No escape. On the drift. Nobody left to save.”
The same message kept repeating over and over in Rhett’s bead, and now that he knew he was looking for something not connected to the ship’s systems it was easy to identify the black box set haphazardly against the command deck. It was an emergency model, but so far out of date it had to be a collector’s item owned by a crew member, no way a theta frequency box would be part of standard ship kit on a modern vessel. Rhett found himself making a note to talk with Bella Mons, the ship’s tech officer, about making theta sweeps part of their standard operating procedure. Not that the bounty scrappers would have done anything differently, but at least they would have known there was something foul aboard the AG16 before putting boots on the hull.
Rhett and Dante exchanged a concerned look and then moved to flank the person in the chair.
The person suddenly exploded into action, pulling the shotgun into waiting hands and turning the chair to face the vultures who approached. Without hesitation, Dante put a round through the person’s mid-section, then a second through the action of the shotgun itself, just in time to cause the weapon to backfire as the person squeezed the trigger. When the person in the void suit recoiled in pain the voice on the other end of channel forty-seven screamed, and Rhett realized he was listening to the person in the chair.
“Dante, stand down!” shouted Rhett. To the vulture’s credit, he pulled his finger from the trigger just before firing a third round.
Rhett rushed over to the person in the void suit and assessed their wound, seeing that Dante’s shot went cleanly through the thin material and back out the other side of the chair.
The person in the suit was a man who looked middle aged, though he was haggard from six months of whatever nightmare fate had befallen this doomed ship, and looked to have been on death’s door regardless of the bullet wound. The man did not seem to share the same white and green ergot growths on his face, though from the look of his wide eyes he had certainly lost his mind anyway.
“All hands are lost,” the man spoke emphatically as he gripped Rhett’s arm weakly, though he winced from the pain as Rhett moved him slightly to check the man’s chemical mix on the tanks that fed the void suit. “No escape. On the drift. Nobody left to save.”
The man tried to speak again, but this time he was interrupted by a fit of coughing that ended in him spitting up enough blood to cover the bottom of his faceplate. The man’s body, now that he was close enough Rhett could see, was somewhat wasted away from lack of fluids and nutrition, finally gave up.
“All hands are lost,” the man gasped before slumping over once again in the chair.
Rhett stood back up and peered over the edge of the command deck to see that the other part of his team had secured the pilot’s deck without incident. He could see several spent heat lamps and dozens of chemical heat pouches, and surmised that these and the man in the suit were the heat sources picked up by Vulture Six on the long-range sensors. Judging from the sheer volume of discarded ration packets, breathing tanks, and filled waste sleeves floating throughout the sizeable deck, Rhett began to understand how this man had survived for six months out here.
“AG16 bridge secured,” said Rhett in a haunted voice, “Calibos out.”
5. RAVAGERS
Despite the fact that his port had been properly lubricated and was kept pristine with routine cleanings, Sokol still winced as the neuro-link slid into the base of his skull. The grim-faced man had intentionally cranked the nerve dampeners on his bio-feedback loop down to their minimum functional setting. He wanted to feel as much of the machine as he possibly could, and to do so meant he had to endure the pain of that heightened awareness, for no human body was ever meant to withstand the sheer amount of neural input data generated by the Coyote class mech-warrior, or any other mech for that matter.
The mech’s name was Ogre One, and for Sokol Targe, being as intimate as he could be with the holy war machine was the greatest sensation a man could hope for in this short and brutish existence.
Except, of course, the intoxicating rush of using that same war machine to lay waste, the single purpose for which it was built.
Sokol found that when he was part of Ogre One, the world became a profoundly simple place, freed from the bondage of currency, corporation, or creed. In those moments of blistering warfare, Sokol felt as if he and Ogre were one entity, a pure being made of an amalgamation of meat and metal. That feeling was always gone again when he disconnected from the mech, and though many pilots throughout corporate space described similar experiences, Sokol’s bond felt, to him at least, much deeper. Every second he was not within the cold metal womb he felt naked, small, and so very powerless.
That truth would have come as a surprise to most, as Sokol himself was a large man, especially for a mech pilot. He had grown up on one of the dozens of agri-worlds that fed the perpetually compounding population of Helion Corporation, and all the whole food and fresh air had given young Sokol a chance to grow up healthy and strong. Sokol thought back to his childhood as the mech’s systems booted up and began to meld with his own awareness of the various inner and outer workings of the war machine.
He had come a long way from the wheat and soy farms that his family, and countless others, had dutifully tended for the socialist masters of Helion. It had been a good life, he reflected grimly, before the harsh truth of the world had made itself all too apparent.
Sokol was young and adventurous and sought to experience life away from the farm, to see what the vast empire of Helion had to offer a dutiful citizen. His parents had not attempted to stop him, apparently convinced that upon his first glimpse of the greater corporate world, Sokol would return with all haste.
Unlike other corporate societies, the people of Helion were free to move about the various planets held by the empire, so long as their mobility papers were stamped approved and they had the funds to afford transport and expenses.
What factors made one person eligible for mobility and another ineligible was something of a mystery to the average citizen, though for most everyone there were still a great many places they were allowed to travel, and people accepted whatever access was granted with dutiful and quiet grace.
Sokol’s mother, however, was barred from receiving a mobility pass off world, due to several poor decisions she’d made in her youth. She had been an environmental activist, something only moderately tolerated in Helion society. She and several dozen of her comrades had taken things a step too far. They had assembled, as a single group, on the steps of the planetary governor’s capital building, demanding a cessation to the wetlands devastation being caused by a rapid increase in required soy output. That increase had caused many thousands of acres of wetlands on their home planet of Yurimax to be drained and converted into production fields, causing the extinction of several wild species of birds, fish, and reptiles.