Mary had a little lamb
it ran right up a pylon
3,000 volts went up its arse,
its wool was turned to nylon.
Gunship - Kule Space
Firlotte had been doing his best to avoid Mrs. Drake. That had involved him spending a lot of time down in the engineering spaces in the bowels (literally now, given his understanding that the Gunship was in fact alive) of the ship, crawling into nooks whenever he heard the familiar clip-clop of high-heeled shoes heading his way.
And naturally the one time when he actually wanted Katz to come to his rescue, sure enough, Katz was nowhere to be found.
It was hot as hell on the Gunship, sweat sticking his hair to his head and soaking through the work coveralls he was wearing, the only things he had on given the damn heat. Yet another reason to avoid Mrs. Drake, who would have a few ideas on how to cool him down that would do anything but actually cool him off.
Why him?
He was a plain technician. Sure, he worked out, you had to on the Excalibur with all the marines around and the amount of missions he'd been 'drafted' to go on; he'd taken to doing push-ups every morning and sit-ups before he went to sleep. He didn't have abs yet, but damn he was going to. That made him feel good. The problem was that it made sexual predators like Mrs. Drake want to feel him good as well.
They were laying in wait, the gunship hovering at the edge of its sensor range, well beyond the Amsus search RADAR, while the Command and Control Frigates began their delicate ballet with the supply ship. The nuclear warhead sitting on the bridge was timed to go off the moment the last vessel docked. The hope was that the weapon would incinerate the vessels, and, should any get out of the blast radius they would be shredded by the debris before they got too far.
A simple and effective plan, the problem was it seemed to be taking forever.
"Hurry up and explode already," he murmured, closing his eyes and tapping his head back against something warm and squishy in the wall.
He rubbed his head and tucked his knees up under his chin, taking a moment to himself. They were all tired. The constant non-stop flow had frayed the nerves and Firlotte sincerely longed for a quiet night in a real bed, on solid ground. A chance to stop his head from whirling. His personal life was a mess, he craved a cigarette and a chance to not have to worry about other people trying to get inside his pants.
They'd unloaded anything of use from the supply ship, crates of weapons and rations tucked into the cargo bay and secured in the unused cabins, as well as personal equipment and bedding, which would make the habitability of the ship at least bearable, about as bearable as an Amsus cot mattress could ever be.
His TAC-link chirped and warbled for attention. He lifted the device to his ear. "Yeah?" he asked, not even bothering with rank - he was too tired to care.
"We're firing up the Far-step drive," Masconi responded through the device, "Haul ass."
Firlotte's head fell forward as he grunted his acknowledgement, slipping the device back into his pocket, rubbing his head and vowing that as soon as he could, he'd go back to working on tractors on his Dad's farm, wars, fighter jocks and giant space whales be damned.
* * *
The detonation was spectacular. Ten Amsus frigates caught in a brilliant shockwave that ripped through the supply ship cascaded through it's their ordinance supplies, shredding the cargo modules and ripping the ship apart as the blast roared along the support spokes of the docking ring. The Amsus frigates attempted to get free, caught in the blast radius, dying in the nuclear conflagration a moment later..
Standing wrapped in a blanket, Lauren smiled tightly, coughing and sniffling, and wiping her nose on the back of her hand. The mission had been a success, and yet still she couldn't get the nagging feeling inside her head that something was wrong. Maybe it was just her being sick.
Shale spun the control ball navigating the ship about, seeming more at ease in the oversized command chair than she had been. But that was Shale, quietly confident; he knew what he was doing, and he made sure that those about him knew it too. Their task done it was now for them to go chasing after Darien's wild goose, Shale set a course for Kule space.
She wondered if this particular goose was the one that laid golden eggs, or if they would find something nothing like she expected.
The Gunship's drives powered up to full, the ship using a protracted jump. Everyone on the ship felt the lag caused by the time dilation effect. Shale guiding the Gunship through a series of complicated course corrections inside the turbulent and violent hyperspace realm. The ship responding to the touch, intuitively seeking the eddies and currents as it rode them swimming through the storm as it pivoted again. And in a burst she catapulted out of hyperspace across the vast distance, sliding down and into the ruined star system of Kule.
The Kule system was a sea of devastation.
Clouds of nebulous gas drifted across the system, weaving its tendrils through the asteroid plains that stretched across much of the system. Rocks crashed and careened off of each other as a bright blue star burned furiously, flaring and igniting gas that strayed too close to it in bright flashes of blue light.
"It was a dark and stormy night..." Masconi murmured, her hands balled at the small of her back as she stared tight eyed into the tempest.
Shale snorted his scepticism, accessing sensor panels, as he called up detailed scans of the system sorting through the mire of data, searching for a needle in a haystack.
"So what's the story?" Masconi asked, turning her head back to look at Lauren, the flicker of another detonation lighting the bridge eerily.
Lauren shivered as she drew her blanket about her, staring through the window for a long moment. She saw her own reflection in it before she turned her eyes away. "I only know fragments," she confessed. "That the Kule were once a powerful civilization. That they were at a pinnacle of scientific breakthroughs, able to do things that just astounded the Orion traders who dealt with them. For such a... limited race, they had evolved so quickly that there were rumours they had Polian assistance."
"That doesn't sound like the Polians," Masconi observed dryly. "They don't assist races outside of their alliance."
"The Amsus," Lauren pointed out, disproving Masconi's argument, taking a moment before she continued, "The stories are really horror stories told by drunk Orion merchants to scare inexperienced crewmen. But they say that the Kule reached to far, that they attempted something... and that they destroyed their own world. Other rumours say that their world just vanished, and that the energy unleashed from that did this..." she nodded to the destruction.
"Ghost stories," Masconi folded her arms and shook her head, the brim of Darien's red cap swaying from side to side.
"There is one other rumour," Lauren cleared her throat, "That there is a lost library, guarded by a war god named Titan..."
"Not very original." Masconi observed again.
"It's a translation," Lauren explained, "T'ouagh m'wani bek: Titan, last of the War Gods."
"Great," Masconi sighed apathetically, "I'm going to get some sleep. Wake me if we find anything."
* * *
The Gunship slipped slowly through the debris field, swimming through the pea-soup fog of the blue gas, curling around rocks as she searched the darkness for any sign of what the Kule might have left behind, anything that would provide the all-important clue as to the location of the Rock of Braal.
Firlotte was on the bridge, setting up a pair of portable Imperial translation computers on an Amsus folding field table recovered from the Supply ship's stores. He was crossing the computers with a holographic projector trying to attempt to give a real-time translation of the Polian displays by superimposing English holographic projections on top of the Polian ones.
So far he was making progress, painfully aware that Mrs. Drake was watching him from the doorway. She stood with her dangerous curves leaning on the bulkhead, waiting for an opportunity to pounce. However, much to her frustration, Shale remained on the bridge, leaving her devoid of her moment.
Firlotte spliced a couple of wires together and threw a thankful glance back at the Taïrian Captain, who pretended not to notice the indomitable woman lurking behind him, barely contained in her suggestively tight uniform. Firlotte paled and returned to his work.
He reached out and tapped the computer's keys, accessing the program and looking over pressing the button and hoping it worked. The sensor display changed, resolving in and displaying data that the translation computer laboured with a second. Firlotte turned as Shale tapped the controls and angled the Gunship in to give the sensors a chance to gain better readings.
They collectively held their breaths as the sensors resolved data, the gunship sweeping through a thick cloudbank. the ship curved up and along a massive monolith of black crystal that hung darkly amidst the debris. The enhanced Polian sensors quickly identified that it was different from the debris around it. With the density of the gasses floating around even the Polian sensors seemed to struggle, but they locked onto the mineral components of the crystal and the ship board AI began to filter out the distortion effect caused by the refractive properties of the gas, yet, even they had nearly missed the structure.
"What is that?" Mrs. Drake asked, her voice purring as she walked forward.
"I don't know..." Firlotte replied, looking back towards the Captain, who was sitting in his chair looking thoughtful, a claw stroking the end of his bushy moustaches as he stared, recognition in his eyes.
It was Lauren who shed clarity on why when Mrs. Drake had roused her and set off to fetch Masconi.
Lauren stood leaning on the arm of Shale's chair, staring at the monolith in surprise for a long moment, before she pointed. "That's..."
Shale nodded.
"What is it?" Firlotte pressed, hoping that someone would fill him in.
"When we found VonGrippen and the lost fleet," Lauren said, nodding out the window, "VonGrippen was enshrined in one of those..."
"It's a tomb?" Firlotte gasped, tilting his head. The shape of the monolith from the angle he was standing in looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn't fathom where he'd seen it before.
The sensors warbled and adjusted again, zeroing in on another reading, identical to the monolith they were floating beside. The Computer continued, registering a third, and then a fourth. The displays projected the relative positions of the new monoliths around the Gunship.
"Four monoliths?" Lauren wondered, staring at the co-ordinates. They were arrayed oddly, seemingly unaffected by the stellar drift. "What...?"
Firlotte absently tugged at his ear and bit his lip. He'd seen this pattern before, he was sure of it. The four monoliths were positioned on a level veritable plane, almost evenly spaced. If he calculated a central point, they were exactly seventy-two degrees apart, except for the last, one that sat at one-hundred and forty-four degrees... meaning that one was missing...
"You said VonGrippen was buried in one of these?" Firlotte glanced up from his scrap of paper, holding it up for them to see what he'd sketched.
"Yes," Lauren nodded as Masconi and Hobbes joined them on the bridge, "The Excalibur was docked to it."
"Then if that's the missing one," Firlotte said adding in the last one to his diagram, "These make the focus stones for a massive Propylon system..."
"What?" Lauren stepped up beside the technician, who was already resolving the sensor data into a scale image for them. Standing there, Lauren gaped at him. "They are Propylons..."
"Big enough to transport a planet anywhere in space, so long as they know the co-ordinates," Firlotte tossed the paper back down onto the low table.
"Now I see what Katz sees in him," Masconi nudged Shale.
Shale blinked and inclined his head in agreement.
"So we have to dock with one of these and..." Lauren faltered, sniffing against her cold, realizing that she still had no real idea of how to proceed from there. They'd found giant Propylons, but that didn't help them, did it?
"No," Firlotte replied, wiping the sweat off of his neck as he tried to think, "Propylons don't work on their own, they need a control device. We use an Amsus computer..."
"How do we find that?" Lauren asked. The Propylons remained standing still, almost indistinguishable from the other debris around them... immobile. She turned and hit the sensor display, punching in commands and waiting for the translation as she computed the drift vectors of the debris around them... searching for the one that would stand out...
She found it, reaching out to tap a round planetoid about five miles in diameter. "The Rock of Braal," she said triumphantly.
Hobbes adjusted his pulse rifle. "I'll rouse the men." He excused himself and headed below.
* * *
The Gunship pulled its outriggers in close against its body as it curved about. It's drives keeping it steady as it began descend to descend towards the massive stone hatch s atop the rock. They parted for the approaching vessel rotating open and flexing ready to swallow the ship that slipped in too close. As it dropped through and into the darkness below, the ship extended its gears as above it the iris closed again, swallowing them whole sealing them inside.
Shale piloted the Gunship through its descent. Strange green, bio-luminescent lights lit the cavernous bay that had been hewn out of the rock. The ship passed outcroppings, shadows that seemed to coalesce and dance as the armoured ship slid past them. The ghosts of a lost race, gathering to see who had disturbed their slumber.
"There's air," Firlotte surmised, checking the Gunships displays, "Mean temperature is... minus ten degrees Celsius..."
They passed markings on the walls, the Polian displays analysing them, seeming to have been written as a warning thousands of years before. Shale sat forward in his chair as he stared, watching the glowing markings flare with light. The tunnel about them crackled, energy arcing through the air as it flickered and jumped across the ship, causing Firlotte to jump as the display he was working on flickered, and went dead, the electro-magnetic pulse sweeping the ship stem to stern.
The thump echoed through the ship.
Masconi drew her Kill'a'ma'jig and stared up at the ceiling. "Auto defences?" she demanded.
"I don't..." Firlotte turned, blinking, "EMP!"
"Get us out of here!" Lauren ordered as the flash and a second thump followed the first and the gunship, plunged them all into darkness.
The small ship hovered a moment on its gravitic drives before the power gave out on them and the ship plummeted, smashing into the dust alongside the shadowy hulks of other vessels who had met the same fate as they had. Fallen into a millennia old fly trap.
Inside the ship, Firlotte was flung crashing into something solid. He lay there, flat on his back, wondering if that was what it felt like to be dead; it sure hurt a lot...
There was a rustle, and Firlotte felt a hand straying up his leg towards his.... "Mrs. Drake!" he yelped, taking two quick steps back and bumping into something.
"Lights!" Masconi commanded, shielding her eyes as Hobbes switched on the TAC-light on his pulse rifle, the lance of light sweeping to and fro, the Sarge making sure that they were all right.
"Firlotte?" Lauren looked over expectantly.
Firlotte looked uncertain. "What?"
"Ship?" Lauren prodded.
"R-right..." Firlotte balked, "P-Polian ships were notoriously ill-equipped to deal with close range EMP strikes, it was one of the tactical edges House Kardiac had when it launched the invasion. They shield the systems by enabling an auto-shutdown when they detect an imminent EMP blast... I..." he sighed, "I don't have the first clue how to restart this ship after being hit by one."
Masconi rolled her eyes as she lifted her weapon. Sighting in and pulling the trigger, she incinerated a section of bulkhead. "Weapons still work," she muttered angrily.
"That was one time I forgot to tell someone," Firlotte replied defensively, "Besides, those were pretty messed-up circumstances, this..." he shook his head, "I don't know."
Shale stood and retrieved his shotgun from where he had left it propped, tugging on his Dragoon jacket.
Lauren nodded in agreement. "We need to... get ready in case that was the precursor to an attack. Firlotte, check the hyperspace relay and make sure that it's still workings. Masconi..."
"On it," Masconi replied, already jogging down towards the lower decks, "Up and at'em boys!" she called, rallying the marines and ensuring that everyone was equipped and armed.
It took them about ten minutes, but soon they were forming a protective semicircle around the main hatch, the cluster of Marines waited patiently, all done up in their winter gear, gloved hands tightening and flexing around the trigger guards of their pulse rifles, ready for anything. The time ticked away on their watches as minutes stretched into an hour, crawling steadily towards two.
"We can't stay on this ship," Lauren pointed out to Shale as they conferred on the bridge.
The portable lantern shed some light on the darkened bridge, spilling over the two friends as they stood quietly looking into the green-lit cavern outside.
Shale took a long rumbling breath as he reluctantly agreed with her. "Darien needs something here," he said slowly.
"Something that's precious enough to nuke a Polian Gunship over," Lauren replied pacing to the windows as she looked out into the darkness, "we should split into two teams. One stays back to guard the FTL relay, the other presses on, into that..." she nodded into the gloom.
"No, bring the relay," Shale stated flatly, turning to march off, his shotgun resting upon his shoulder as he walked.
Lauren nodded her head, seeing the wisdom in keeping them all together. The Gunship was useless, at least until they could figure out how to reactivate it, and if there was the threat of attack, one mobile unit would be better able to defend itself than two smaller ones.
* * *
All too easy, Lex Talionis mused from inside the Gunship's computer core.
* * *
The hatch still worked. A hiss of escaping air made them all cringe as the plates slid away and the hatch dropped like a ramp to the dusty ground below. The chill immediately elicited a shiver from Masconi, used to the warmer climes of Tempus, envying the Karin Marines who seemed quite used to the cold air.
She kept purposefully alongside Firlotte, the technician struggling under the weight of the hyperspace relay on his back as he looked up at her for reassurance. She gave it to him with a sharp nod of her head as she dropped down to the ground, waiting patiently for him to join her.
Firlotte gripped the Polian kill'a'ma'jig in is hand, remembering what had happened the last time he had ventured into a dark and forbidding place.
There was an ominous feeling of stillness. The immense chamber was shrouded in a thick coating of rock dust that their feet sank into like sand, making their passage difficult as the marines fanned out, Sergeant Hobbes approaching a wrecked ship and looking back anxiously.
"It's Imperial, pre-fall," he called back, shining a light over the Imperial assault craft that was decayed and rusted through. He stopped when his TAC-light settled on the two corpses behind the controls, the bleached bones in Imperial flight suits bearing the VonGrippen Striking Falcons on their arms.
Firlotte turned the collar of his ascent jacket up and shifted the relay on his back, hoping to god that he'd set it to standard jump mode. He'd hate for the thing to blast off while it was still strapped to his back. He paused when he thought of the futility of the gesture; the FTL relay would still jump, and if he were still strapped to it, he would jump as well. He began to fidget nervously, wishing that someone else were carrying the deadly device.
Mrs. Drake was having problems negotiating the dust in high heels; she'd zipped her jacket up and had tugged on a woollen toque over her bleach-blond hair, every so often using the Marine assigned to protect her as leverage, her finely manicured nails slipping to feel the Corporal's muscles while each time apologizing about her clumsiness.
Lauren walked a little behind Shale, having picked up one of the Amsus DT-09 rifles. She kept the Captain covered, her eyes probing through the murkiness, seeming to recognize some of the ships that lay around them. Firlotte did as well. There were Orion vessels going back easily five hundred years, treasure seekers trying to find out what had happened to Kule and falling into the same trap that had snared the Gunship. An Amsus Raptor lay broken and shattered, the black burn marks indicating that its missile battery had detonated when it had crashed. The likelihood of survivors was...
The empty circle cleared of sand, sat just before a large set of ornately carved open doors. Firlotte paused looking at the clearing and upwards again, realizing that it was a cleared landing zone, and as the Marines lights danced over the walls and settled, they lit up two statues on either side of the open portal. Each stood five stories high, carved with fascinating detail into figures with, their hands held up as if in warning, or to hold back some gigantic force. Their faces were gone, shot away many years past, pitted from bullet holes and scored with energy-weapon discharges, but there was no doubting the two battle standards that stood before them.
Trimmed in gold, the white flag s hung down from their chest height. The sigil with its red sun was unmistakably the VonGrippen Striking Falcon. The painted kanji upon each flag indicated the unit markings, VonGrippen's personal guard, the Geldan Irregular.
"That's..." Masconi shivered in the cold, looking about her and back up at the ceiling, "This area's been recently cleared," she murmured, "Someone has been here in the last few weeks."
Shale tested the air, crossing the loading area and dropping to a knee as he extended one of his claws to examine the dust. "Polians," he rumbled, standing again, clicking the safety off of his modified twelve-gauge, his long claw curling through the guard to rest, like a finger, on the trigger.
Lauren swore as around her the Imperial Marines shouldered their pulse rifles and drew their Kill'a'ma'jigs. Sergeant Hobbes dropped to a knee and fished duct tape out of his pack, taping his Kill'a'ma'jig to the underside of the pulse rifle, just below the forward handgrip, making sure that he could reach the actuator as he rested it in his hand like an under-barrel grenade launcher.
His men, catching sight of his plan, quickly copied him. Improvisation in the field was a Marine tradition going back centuries, and they weren't about to turn their noses up at a good idea.
Mrs. Drake had walked forward, her hands on her hips as she pursed her beautiful lips, staring up at the statues and down towards the Imperial battle standards that fluttered in a barely perceptible breeze of air rising from the tunnel.
"God, I wish Darien were here," Masconi eased her grip on her weapon as she edged around looking uneasy.
Firlotte silently agreed. If he was going to meet an untimely death at the hands of a Polian, at least he'd feel safer with Darien around. The man had an uncanny knack when it came to 'big and scary'.
Mrs. Drake reached out to touch the material of one of the flags. The material had decayed after three hundred years, and as she touched it, she felt the delicate fibres tear as the disturbed flag disintegrated, falling to the dust with a quiet rustle.
"Well we at least know we're on the right track," Masconi observed dryly as she moved to the doors, a couple of Marines lifting their rifles to cover her, the lights probing the blackness ahead.
"The hieroglyphs almost resemble Egyptian," Mrs. Drake said as she ran her hand over the delicately painted marking son the wall. Looking up as she staring through at the carved stone pillars lining the broad halls inside, small altars in recesses painted with odd styled hieroglyphs standing with bizarrely shaped statuettes atop them, odd figures that seemed to be offering prayers to a shrouded figure.
"An archaeologist might be able to make sense out of them," Lauren replied unnerved by the depictions of death and destruction on the walls. All the myriad of odd creatures on bended knee before a skull faced creature holding up a strange circular object in his hands. She gestured for the Marines to advance, "Right now we don't have the time. We need to press on..."
Masconi eyed the Commander for a moment, looking back at the statuettes and the wall fresco. She held back and glanced at Firlotte. "This feels like a tomb..."
Firlotte shrugged in his backpack. "Last time I was in a tomb, a ghost beat me against a torpedo..."
Masconi nodded her head warily. "Stay low and keep that relay handy," she ordered keeping close to Firlotte, watching every shadow cautiously.
Up ahead, a Marine dropped to his knee, holding up the flat of his hand, indicating that they should stop. Rifles lifting as they swung to and fro, studying the darkness. Sergeant Hobbes moving a step or two down the hallway and pressing his back to one of the pillars to see what the Private had spotted.
The bodies lay across from one another; a fresh Polian corpse slumped on one wall, a human trooper from an era before lying across from him. Their weapons lay in their grips, the pulse rifle in almost the same position as the Polian's 'boom stick' as if mirroring each other's death.
Hobbes eyed the corridor, shining his light from the corpses up towards the ceiling and back again to the stone floor. "Trap of some kind," he murmured, advancing slowly, searching for the trigger, looking up again as he reached the dead Imperial, turning the Falcon patch outward. He looked over at the Polian and reached down to lift the boom stick, tossing it back to one of his men, who caught it and slung his pulse rifle, hefting the polearm while Hobbes liberated the Polian's kill'a'ma'jig and clipped it to his belt.
"This one's been here a week or two at most," he replied, as Shale moved up to see for himself. The big Taïrian nodded his head. The Polian's equipment was still intact, there were no indications that he had been in a battle, and none of the Marines wanted to consider what could kill a Polian before he could act.
Walking, unconcerned, past Shale, Mrs. Drake pointed to markings on the wall "There's something written in Polian," without thinking she moved forward as Hobbes turned.
"No..." but His warning came too late, as the bright flash of light erupted between the two pillars. The walls flared as the Polian devices on the wall rematerialized, projecting a lattice of purple light that criss-crossed the hall and flared back across the human woman. Carving her into cubes as the devices deactivated and flickered out of existence.
"Polian Maser Wall!" Hobbes cursed, too late to save the woman, neatly dissected by the Polian trap, collapsing into a pile in the middle of the hall.
Lauren took a step forward, but Shale's large hands restrained her, pulling her back before she could cross the deadly threshold. She stared in shock at the fallen woman, and gestured. "We have to get her out of there, she'll die!"
"She's dead already," Hobbes bit back, looking dumbstruck at the walls, "We have to shut it off..."
Masconi levelled her Kill'a'ma'jig and coldly shot at the wall. The first blast crumbled stone, the second sank deeply into the invisible machinery hidden secured to the façade, and with an explosion of sparks the booby trap was disabled.
She lowered her weapon. "Easy," she replied, walking past the others to kneel beside the dead linguist, "Civilians," she growled; mad at herself for not anticipating it would happen.
"Wait," Firlotte called, "Hang on... A maser-wall didn't kill these two..." he pointed to the dead Imperial and the Polian.
Masconi glanced up at the walls around her and shook her head, "Well that means that whatever did is still down here somewhere."