Dyson's Game

Book 1: Salvage Claim

Chapter 4

Efraim

Klathi, Shisholi, and I stare at the corpse currently in our little vehicle’s storage room. It wasn’t really a corpse, given how Klathi had apparently read bio-signs on it, but it certainly looked and acted like one.

The head crest meant a male. Its underlayer wraps were intact, but the layers on top of it looked like they’ve been scored by gunshots. Most of them narrow misses, some of them direct impacts, but those didn’t even put much of a dent on the metal. Then of course, came the main problem – tubes sticking out of the kal’dari’s arms and legs, that circled back to a machine strapped to its back. The tubes themselves certainly looked like they were haphazardly jammed underneath the scales, and were translucent at the very least. And it seems to be pumping a sedate, yellow liquid...

Well, that had been Klathi’s assessment. And while all of us were trained for first aid, there’s no doubt that he had more experience in the matter, what with being part of base security and all that.

“He wouldn’t be waking up anytime soon.” Klathi sums up, leaning back against the unknown kal’dari on the floor and pocketing a flashlight back into his suit’s pockets. “At least, they’re relatively intact. Bio-signs all but says that they’re supposedly fine. If we could find out what those tubes are for...”

“No augs like that on the market, the last time I checked.” Shisholi hums, a hand scratching the underside of her head while the rest of her arms form into a thought-cant, “Current augs on the catalogue prefer to keep it hidden. Surgical implants and the like. Not something as... overt as this. I’ll try and find a match anyway, see what I could do.”

She brings out her pad, and begins browsing through the System Weave, leaving me to pick up the conversation. “What were they even doing in the ship?”

“Certainly not there to mingle with the crew, that’s for sure.” Klathi replies, pointing towards the unconscious kal’dari’s bloodied hands. Nothing more than flakes now due to exposure of course, but we could still see it under the cargo room’s light. “They’re either security againt boarders, some kind of VIP, or a boarder themselves.”

Shisholi puts down her pad, meeting both of our knowing stares. The blood on the kal’dari’s hands was a dead giveaway on what category they fit in. “The Accords say that we’re free to chuck pirates into the sun, so I don’t know why you’re having second thoughts about this.”

“Put a bullet in their head first.” Klathi suggests, before turning back towards the kal’dari on the floor and narrowing their brows. “... Or make that an entire magazine.”

“If they’re a criminal.”

“Whatever floats your boat.” Klathi replies with a jovial shrug. “I’m just here as security just in case something happens...”

Thud.

The Kal’Dari splayed out on the floor begins to twitch, with the distinctive whir of a pump causing the liquid within those translucent pipes to move like jelly. Slowly, ever-so surely, the yellow tinge of the liquid was slowly being replaced by green, coupled with a few globules of what I can only assume is blood stuck in the mix.

Needless to say, I scurried the fuck away from the body. Shisholi did the same, and within seconds we were at the door, MMIs all but flaring as we forced the damn thing to open.

Thud. Thud.

On second thought, we really shouldn’t have done that. The door hissed, apparently registering our attempts to get the door open as a DDOS attack, and slides outwards to allow us both entry into our vehicle’s main control area. And then promptly locked itself open, as a standard safety measure.

I stared blankly at the door, even as Shisholi rushed over towards the comms and began contacting Bossman. There was only really one word I could say in this situation.

“Fuck.”

“Save the curses for later.” Klathi immediately cuts in, shoving me towards the airlock before whirling around and training his gun on the cargo room. “For now, get in your vac suits. Just in case our little visitor gets hostile the moment they wake up.”

“Which they probably are!” Shisholi frantically calls back, all but jamming her fingers on her screen before letting out an aggrieved sigh. “Comms are down! How the fuck does that happen?!”

“Check the weather.” I immediately blabbered out, even as I drag Shisholi over towards the airlock just as she snatches her pad away from her workstation, “Any solar storms in the area? Bries’ magnetosphere being fucky again?”

“Ephraim, comms are down. All I get is static or white noise, and I’m pretty sure there’s no pretty lights right above us.” Her gaze shifts towards the cargo bay just as the airlock door closes upon us both, and she chucks me the underlayer wraps of my vac suit. “... I’ll bet my krannts that it probably has something to do with what we brought back.”

“We don’t know that for sure.”

Shisholi rolls her eyes. “Our comms were working just a few moments ago, and now it’s not. The only thing that’s changed is... whatever that thing is.”

I finish wrapping the underlayer around me, and quickly began putting on the rest of the vac suit. “So...”

“They’re a criminal.” She drawls, “Hard to believe what with the literal blood on his hands and all that, plus the fact that they’re some kind of walking ECM generator. You won’t need that sort of thing if you’re part of the ship’s crew, right?”

... It made a frightening amount of sense.

As I put on my helmet and began checking the seals, the door to the airlock hisses open, and Klathi immediately slides inside, shutting the door behind him a second later. With the three of us here, it was a bit cramped, but he nonetheless managed to slither through Shisholi and I to snatch his helmet and put it on.

“Klathi”, Shisholi called out, “I’m pretty sure it’s a criminal.”

“Great. All of us are the same page, then.” He mumbles in response, before switching to his short-range radio. It was... well, my ears certainly hurt from the sheer amount of static that poured through my earpiece, but it still delivered Klathi’s voice nonetheless. “Both of you, take a gun and make a break for the ship.”

What.

“What?!”

Yeah. What Shisholi just said. “Are you fucking insane?!”

“I know both of you louts aren’t rated for handling guns or any kind of weaponry for that matter, but you could still put a bullet in whatever that thing was supposed to be.” Klathi grumbles in response, swiping his credentials to unlock a cabinet that slides open. “Take your pick. At least you know the basics, right?”

Shisholi shuffles her feet. There wasn’t enough space in the airlock for her to do an embarrassment-cant. “Point the gun at whatever I’m trying to shoot and pull the trigger, right?”

Klathi sighs, shaking his head before snatching the weapons in the cabinet and slapping it into our hands. “Disengage the safety, before you point the gun and pull the trigger. But otherwise, pretty much spot-on. Don’t worry about needing to reload them.”

Because we’re more or less dead anyway if we run out of bullets. Got it. “Anything else?”

“You have 150 rounds per magazine, and these things fire on five-round burst.” He mutters. “Gives you 50 shots, so don’t fucking waste it.”

I absentmindedly nod in response, taking a look of the gun even as Klathi slammed his hand to cycle the airlock. Even as the air pressure dropped and sound started to fade away, I could still hear a scream coming from where the cargo bay was, and I couldn’t help but shudder as I silently bid the airlock to cycle faster.

The fact that Klathi took a step back was the only warning that Shisholi and I got before the door that led into our vehicle’s control area suddenly caved outward, the viewport showing a snarling, screaming kal’dari that didn’t seem too amused at waking up. The liquid that ran through its pipes wasn’t yellow any longer. Nor was it jelly-like green laced with tiny globules of blood. No – what I can see through the pipes was now a dark, churning liquid that had to be hi– it’s blood all throughout its body.

Oh, and the eyes. Couldn’t forget the eyes of course. They were all but blank, a milky white thing that showed that whatever this thing was, it was blind.

It certainly didn’t stop it from punching the viewport and shattering the airlock's window, though.

Shisholi screamed. I screamed as well. I could already feel a certain wetness making its way through the underlayer of my vac suit, but I was all too busy to be embarrassed by it. What with you know, the fact that there’s a kal’dari that just punched through a fucking airlock HOW–

“STAND BACK!” Klathi snapped, as if it we weren’t already doing it anyway. He raised his gun, aimed it against the thing’s hand that was trying to grab one of us, and fired.

The muzzle flashes lasted for but an instant before the airlock beeped, and it finally finished cycling. Shisholi was out first – screaming all the way – and I was right on her tail, quickly followed by Klathi who was still firing at the damn thing.

Not that it did much damage that I can see. Or well, it punctured one or two of the pipes that were connected to the arm that just punched through the airlock, but it looked like the damage hadn’t really stopped the thing from trying to kill us. In fact, judging by the way that it grabbed onto the metal and began to wrench the airlock door apart, we – only Klathi, actually – hadn’t really done much damage to the damn thing.

Also, if I wasn’t already peeing my suit’s underlayers, just the sight of that arm alone wrenching through alloyed metal would be more than enough incentive to unleash my bladder.

“To the ship!” Klathi roared, a hand snaking back towards his pack to reload his gun while the rest of his arms were focused on holding off that damn thing. “Get to the damn ship, and try to get a message out! I’ll distract it!”

“What?!” I screamed back, watching as Klathi winced from the feedback that was no doubt amplified by whatever ECM that thing had on them. “Are you fucking insane?! We can’t fight against that thing!”

“Why do you think I’m leading it away?!” He shouted back over the radio, already veering away from the both of us while still keeping his finger on the trigger. Already, I could see that the barrel of his gun was glowing, which wasn’t really a good sign. “Just go! You can figure something out!”

There wasn’t really that much time to argue. Especially since the airlock door that led to the outside was just... wrenched open by that thing once more, its three pairs of milky-white eyes staring at Shisholi and I... right before one of the pipes that connecting its head to whatever contraption was shot off, and it swiftly turns around towards Klathi.

Before it all but sprints towards him, far faster than it had any right to be.

I looked away from the sight, heart pumping in my chest as Shisholi and I entered the ship and started sprinting towards... somewhere. We didn’t really know. But anything to put some distance away from that thing was more or less a given.

As for Klathi... we didn’t hear him. It was hard to get sound to travel through Bries’ atmosphere, after all. Or lack of one, for that matter.