As the team moved through the passageway, Quinn began performing localized sweeps with her diagnostic rig. In the tight confines of the ship Rhett wanted any extra advantage he could get. The motion trackers would be mostly useless, given how much background noise there would be with all the debris floating around. Still, the sight of the bloody murder in the staging chamber had rattled him, and if someone out there ignited a heat source or enough things started moving suddenly, he wanted to know.
“No ambient radiation out of the ordinary,” said Quinn as they passed by the sealed doors leading into the first of the engine chambers. “You want to give the engine rooms a visual?”
“Considering what we just saw, I don’t want to get trapped down there. Drago, take overwatch, Vader, back him up, the rest of you, with me,” said Rhett as he swept his rifle through the half-light of the passageway. “We need to make sure there aren’t any containment problems or breaks in the lines. No sense in going through the trouble of getting to the bridge if we are just going to blow out this section of the ship as soon as the power is back on. Quinn, let’s make this fast, okay?”
Dante stepped in front of Rhett as Sparks and Doak pried open the hatch leading into the engine compartments. The gunman clomped over the deck plating and moved into the darkness with his combo-weapon at the ready. Rhett swept in behind him and the two men played their lights over the chamber, both regretting doing so immediately.
The walls were streaked with blood in several places, some of it frozen and hanging in the air, but much of it staining the wall itself. In addition to that, there were a number of spent shell casings that glittered when their lights shone across them and multitudes of tiny metal balls, most of them warped and pitted.
“That blood was spilled before the power went out, before they lost gravity,” observed Rhett as he took in the sight of the room.
“Small caliber impacts on the far hatch and in the floor on your right, naval sidearms, maybe two shooters. Shot clouds are twenty gauge, but clusters are thin so there’s got to be at least two bodies somewhere who soaked up most of the blasts,” Dante said as he toggled his weapon from assault mode to shotgun. The activation indicator switched from the semi-automatic rifle barrel at the top of the weapon to the bulkier shotgun muzzle that protruded from the center. “Pistol shooters were either untrained or desperate, cutting loose without regard for firing discipline, but they hit at least one person before getting blasted by our shotgunner, that’s your exit wound splatter on the left. This was fast and nasty.”
Rhett was impressed at how swiftly the former cultist could judge the room, then again, being a lifelong Fenrir gun worshipper had given Dante an eye for such things.
While murder and violence were not express tenets of the gun cults, a group of people could not hold firearms and the use thereof in such fanatic reverence without eventually getting into a fight with someone. Such was the logical conclusion and bloody end to the Fenrir groups as a rule and it always amazed Rhett in the study of history that the worshippers never seemed to figure out this simple truth.
To watch Dante express his former life path in such moments, there was a kind of mystique that enshrouded the utility of it. Rhett could see why the powerless members of corporate society might gravitate towards the worship of such raw power. Regardless of politics and psychology, Rhett found the twins particularly useful to have around, as did his employers.
Rhett moved into the room as Dante covered him. The trooper discovered that the passageway at the end of the chamber was open, leading to three different smaller engine compartments in addition to the primary machine housing. Rhett gestured for Sparks to move up with him as he directed Quinn and Doak to pair off.
“We’ll take the left, Quinn and Doak the right, Dante, keep an eye on that primary hatch till we’re clear, then we all hit the engine room,” commanded Rhett as everyone filled the room.
Rhett moved carefully through the chamber, taking in the closer sight of the various bullet impacts, shell casings, and blood stains. This had indeed been a furious conflict, even if short, and oddly, it didn’t bear the usual markings of a boarding action. If this vessel had been hit by pirates they would have stripped away every last thing of value by now, and there were far too many pieces of critical systems that remained unmolested for piracy.
Ravagers were known for their bloodthirsty tactics and tendency to slaughter entire crews, though as a rule, they would have hauled the ship back to whatever den of horror they called home and added it to their collection of useful trophies. Slavers would not have been so violent. No, there was something entirely abnormal about the fate of the AG16, and Rhett found himself tapping at the metal above his trigger again.
The trooper entered the side chamber and was met with more signs of intense violence. This time, he could clearly see that several control decks had taken direct hits, and his hope of re-awakening the engine to make for a swifter haul back to the yard began to waver. Without Dante’s keen eyes the trooper wasn’t sure just what happened in the room, but he could see that it had been a close quarters firefight, and nobody wins in such conflicts. Sparks was hyperventilating, Rhett noticed, and the young woman’s eyes were wide with fear.
“Easy, Sparks, easy, whatever happened here isn’t our problem,” Rhett lied, hoping that his cutter’s relative newness to the job, and the fact that she’d never encountered a hostile salvage, might help her believe his fiction. “I know it looks bad, and it probably was, but you see this sometimes. Rough stuff happens in necrospace, but it’s over, this is ancient history.”
“I hear you, Calibos, I do,” nodded Sparks, clearly trying to convince herself to believe her commander, even if the evidence of her eyes insisted that she fear for her immediate safety. “It’s been six months since AG16 went dark.”
“That’s right, Sparks,” assured Rhett as he gently put himself between her and the grisly sight of the room, herding her back into the passageway. “Six months of hard vacuum will pretty much take care of anything.”
“More of the same back there,” said Quinn as she and Doak joined the group. “Somebody ripped out the processors and tried to make a sort of barricade with them, but I don’t think it worked.”
“Without the processors, we won’t be able to control the engine from the bridge,” cursed Rhett.
“I might be able to work a bypass if we run a sync cable over the hull and bring it directly to the engine itself,” suggested Quinn helpfully. “We’d have to drill the hull and put a seal on it, but that’s easy enough. Just have to get the spool from Vulture Six.”
“Which means we’ve got to sweep the ship, now that we’ve been confirmed a hostile salvage, Estrada won’t approach until we have eyes on bodies,” said Rhett as he made his way to the hatch for the prime engine room with Dante in step behind him. “Doak, crack this thing for me.”
4. THE SMILERS
Moments later the group of scrappers stood in the engine room, the massive machine looming ahead of them, easily the size of a small building. Their lights did little to pierce the gloom of the tremendous chamber, though what they could see was enough to make them happy for what they could not.