Add The Aven

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$-- Copyright (C) 2019 Jason Self <j@jxself.org>
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> "Space isn't lonely; it's all about perspective. You run a ship long
> enough, and you're bound to collide with something out there in the
> dark." --Captain Isaac Marshal, 1091 kNA.

Third shift was always a pain as far as Hector was concerned. It was
bad enough to miss out on precious sleep while the rest of the ship
dozed comfortably in their bunks, but what really killed him was how
boring it was. No coordinates to plot, no adjustments to make, no
orders to follow. I can't believe I'm wishing for someone to order me
around, he grumbled to himself mentally. Telltales flickered on the
control station in front of him indicating the ship's status.
Everything was running smoothly, just like it had been yesterday, and
the night before, and the one before that. He leaned back in his chair
and propped a foot up on the console. Napping on watch was strictly
forbidden, but it wasn't like anything was going to happen anyway.

At least, that's what he was in the middle of telling himself when the
beeping started. A light changed from green to pulsing yellow, and two
more that had been previously unlit now highlighted the contours of
his face with a bright blinking red. The sound of his feet hitting the
floor echoed through the small bridge as he began to manipulate the
controls. Something had set off the proximity alarm. They weren't due
at the trading post for another week, so this was definitely a
problem. Passive sensors couldn't tell him anything he didn't already
know - there was something out there big enough to endanger the ship
and it was statistically likely that they were going to hit it if he
didn't do something. Reaching across the console, his first order of
business was to get a second pair of hands at the controls. And heap
this responsibility on someone else, he thought, cursing his earlier
desire for something to do. "Captain to the bridge. I repeat, captain
to the bridge," his voice echoed through the ship's PA system. To his
credit, his tone sounded much calmer than he felt.

Cry for help accomplished, he began to frantically flip switches
across the board. Screens lit up as the active lidar scans began
reporting a more detailed picture of the space around the ship. Not an
asteroid or a comet, Hector confirmed. Not a planet, either, which at
least meant they hadn't accidentally drifted off course during his
shift. He couldn't decide if that was a silver lining or not.

"Status," came a gruff voice from over Hector's left shoulder as he
continued to probe the system.

He didn't have to look back to recognize who it belonged to. "Unknown
contact, sir, tripped over our passive sensor bubble one minute and
thirty-seven seconds ago. Might be space debris, or a derelict, but
all I know so far is that it's not natural and it's on a collision
course," reported the watchman.

"Well get us off a collision course, then. We can worry about what it
is after," the captain replied. Grey haired but physically fit enough
to make anyone give second thought to antagonizing him, the man held
an imposing presence.

"Aye aye, captain. Adjusting course by two degrees, vertical," Hector
acknowledged. Turning left or right would have potentially served the
same purpose, but even small changes in angle would exponentially
increase their travel time to the trading post over a long enough
distance. Better to go above or below whatever this object was and
recalibrate their y-axis accordingly later.

Another body plopped into the seat at the station to Hector's right;
this one a mess of gangly limbs and thick-rimmed glasses. "Can't leave
you alone for more than a few hours without you getting bored and
putting us in a game of chicken with the nearest planet, can we,
Hector?" taunted the crew member.

"Shove off, Liz, it's not a planet and I didn't do anything," retorted
Hector.

Liz, short for Elizabeth - although she would try and convince anyone
she met it was short for Lizard - snorted in amusement at Hector's
exasperation. "Enough of that, you two," reprimanded the captain.
"Hector, you're chair one. Maintain pilot's duties. Liz, chair two,
scanners. Tell me what we're dealing with here."

A chorus of "Chair one, aye," and "Chair two, aye," met the captain's
orders before the bridge fell into a professional silence. They
weren't a military vessel by any means, but there was a discipline to
the crew that came innate with the hazards of running a salvage ship.
It was dangerous work. People died with little to no warning when care
and attention to detail weren't heeded. Jokes and a lack of formality
were tolerated but, when necessary, the Aven became the tightest run
ship in the sector.

"Might be another ship, captain," Liz reported after just a few
moments.

"Distress signal?"

"Negative, sir. There's no emissions coming off that boat. No beacon,
no communications, nothing. Their engines aren't even lit - that's why
the computer had to take a minute to decide what it even was. The
non-organic shape triggered the funny-business alarms, but whatever's
over there is cold as a rock," she explained.

Sensing a bonus payday, Hector turned to face the captain. "Sounds
like a salvage opportunity to me, sir," he said, hopefully. "Should I
slow us down?"

Sitting with his chin resting on one hand like The Thinker made flesh,
the captain didn't reply immediately. Expectant silence filled the
bridge. Finally stirring, he shrugged slightly and said, "Bring our
relative velocity to zero, match course, and give me an estimate on
how much time this is going to add to our delivery date."

"Aye, aye, sir," Hector replied with a grin. Bending to the task, he
began to manipulate the flight controls. From an outside perspective,
the Aven made a sharp 145 degree turn before flipping backwards and
firing its boosters to apply the brakes. Inside, they felt no shift in
gravity from their seats. "Computer says that - not counting any time
we spend salvaging - re-accelerating and course correcting will add
roughly two days to our trip, sir," the pilot reported as they
completed their maneuver.

"Hopefully this is worth the delay," the captain mumbled in return.
Neither Hector nor Liz knew if he was speaking to them, or to himself,
so they agreed through their silence as they continued to monitor
their respective stations.

Time seemed to slow down now that the initial rush of activity had
passed. It would be a couple hours until they came alongside the ghost
ship. Liz had wandered off somewhere, only to return with half a
ration bar between her teeth. "Mith anthn?" she tried to vocalize.

Not bothering to look up from his console, Hector asked, "What?"

"I said, did I miss anything?"

"Nadda. We're still pinging 'em every fifteen minutes or so, but
nobody is picking up. Starting to look like she really is abandoned."

"Did we ever think she wasn't?" Liz replied.

"We shouldn't take anything at face value out here," interjected the
captain. "Liz, go wake up Chen and fill him in." Liz looked like she
was about to protest the fact that she'd just sat back down, but
thought better of it. Leaving the cabin, she went to wake the final
member of the salvage ship's crew. Chen was, for lack of a better
term, the muscle. Any operation that put suits outside the airlock had
Chen in the lead. He'd grown up on a heavy gravity world, and while he
wasn't the smartest spacer in the sector, his reaction times and his
considerable strength had saved everyone's life at least once.

A fresh beep came from Hector's station. Glancing down, he pressed a
few buttons before turning to address the captain, "Sir, the derelict
is in visual range."

"Shunt it over here, then," the old man replied. Moving a gimbal that
contained a screen towards himself, he waited for the relevant data to
appear on his command station. Numbers began to pour across the
display. Swiping away from the hard data on ship mass and other
minutiae, he brought up a graphic of the ship itself. Stubby and
bulbous, it reminded him of a collection of mushrooms growing off of
some central log structure. There was no obvious front or back, or any
visual place for any kind of thruster or engine. Stranger still was
the color. The nearest star shining light on their little piece of the
galaxy was a yellow dwarf a few hundred million klicks away, and it
bounced off the hull of this ship like an iridescent beetle. After a
moment of additional calculation, the computer suggested a depression
in the hull that was - as accurately as it could guess - a point of
entry. "This thing smells fishy as all hell, but anything this weird
is probably worth a decent chunk of coin, too," the captain thought
out loud.

Before Hector could discuss the suspicious nature of the vessel
further, Liz and Chen returned. Suited in standard EVA gear, the bulky
white outfit made the small bridge seem even more crowded than it
actually was. "We're ready whenever you are, captain," Liz said.
Grunting in acknowledgement, the old man stood and made his way
towards the back of the ship to find his own suit. Standard procedure
would have one man remain behind to mind the Aven, in this case
Hector, while the rest performed an initial valuation and then got to
looting.Silently happy to be the one left behind, Hector wanted
nothing to do with the strange ship now that he'd had time to study it
more. Humanity knew that they weren't alone in space. Encountering the
unknown wasn't the issue, not exactly. There was just something
unsettling about the design of the ship. Something inherently wrong,
like how certain patterns and colors would awaken an instinctual
wrongness - a genetic memory to ward off dangerous behavior. Stay away
from that poisonous creature, the brain says, you've never seen one
before, but you know it's trouble.

Liz and Chen wandered back out of the bridge as the moment of truth
drew nearer. "Testing, one, two, can you hear me, Heckler?" Chen's
baritone voice came through the console.

"Don't call me that," Hector replied, holding down the transmission
button.

No laughter came through the comms to taunt him, but he knew that Chen
and Liz were having another chuckle at his expense. Being the newest
member of the crew came with the expected downsides, but he couldn't
help acting the way he did. Heckler had stuck as a nickname after his
second ever salvage job, when he constantly tried to warn Chen how
irresponsibly dangerous he was being. The captain would have probably
reigned the behavior in eventually, but it was obvious that he
wouldn't get involved if he didn't need to. Chen wasn't entitled or
inherently rude, but it was easy to lose his respect by over-managing
him. The captain knew that. "Thirty seconds until airlock cycles,"
reported the familiar, commanding voice. Speak of the devil. "We won't
be deploying the tunnel or trying to pressurize against their hull.
Too uneven, and we don't even know if their atmosphere plays nice with
ours. Suits will be on tethers until I say otherwise."

Hector didn't need to reply unless he was asked a specific question or
the computer provided him with data the captain needed to hear, so he
kept the line clear and just listened. Mentally counting down the
seconds, he imagined he could feel the airlock opening as he hit zero.
It would have been entirely in his imagination, of course. Small white
figures emerged from the side of the Aven as he watched on one of the
close-range visual sensor screens. Each suit trailed a braided metal
harness that connected them to the open airlock door. They could
retract themselves manually at any time, or Hector could choose to
pull everyone back with the big red emergency button on his console.
It had been drilled into him over and over that no matter how anxious
he got, he shouldn't touch that button unless he was ready for the
captain to physically obliterate him. So far he'd managed to resist
the urge.

"Door's locked. Should we try knocking?" Chen asked as they
congregated around the area the computer had decided was an entrance.
Without waiting for an answer, he pulled a small laser welder from his
tool belt and ignited the tip.

"Careful, if that ship's pressurized, you might blow yourself away
when you put a hole in the hull," Hector reminded him, unable to
resist his need to interject on the quiet comm line.

A hand waved on the tiny screen, and Hector was pretty sure that Chen
was flipping the camera the bird. "This is why you're a heckler,
Heckler."

"The door, Chen," the captain's voice overruled any dispute before it
could escalate. Hector stilled in his chair, and Chen went back to
preparing his welder. Once he had the beam tip at a satisfactory
length, he went to work, cutting along a slight depression that could
have been the seal of a door. Or it could have been a fancy engraving
of the ship's name, for all we know, Hector thought to himself. The
Aven had actually been the Scavenger at one point in time, after all -
at least until the paint had worn off the front and back ends of the
label.

A few tense moments later, and a man-sized hole had opened up on the
side of the foreign craft. If the interior had been pressurized,
they'd either cut into a pocket of empty space between the hull and an
interior hallway, or the pressure was so low that it had simply leaked
out through the cut. One by one the shapes of the three salvage
operators disappeared into the hole, leaving Hector to stare at their
tether cables. "Hallways are empty. Clean, though, almost like they've
been recently maintained. Everything's that same strange rainbow hue
in here," Liz narrated for Hector's sake. "Doors every twenty meters
or so. Slightly smaller than human average. Good thing Chen's head
isn't too full since he's likely to knock it at least a couple times
in here."

"At least I don't go to school for eight years only to end up on a
salvage ship," Chen retorted.

"Low blow!"

Chuckles ensued as the good natured ribbing subsided. Hector was glad
they were having a good time, because he was a ball of nervous
anxiety. After a few moments of radio silence, he began to grow even
more uneasy. "Guys, you still there?" he asked.

Static crackled for a second before the response came though. "-at the
end of the hall. Going to crack it with the welder and hope the bridge
is on the other side," Chen said through the fuzzy connection.

"You're breaking up," Hector advised, "Partial copy on your last."

He was greeted only by more static, with the occasional flare of
volume. This is absolutely the last thing I need, he thought, glancing
at the big red emergency button. They weren't quite in 'worth getting
obliterated over' territory yet, but the urge was definitely rising.
After another two minutes of no contact, he stood from his chair and
began pacing. With the captain's chair and the two console stations
jutting up in the middle of the room, there wasn't much room to work
off his stress. As he lapped the room for the third time, "Hector!"
shouted out over the speakers, followed by garbled white noise.

Three quick, long strides put him in front of the console. Slamming
his hand down on the transmit button, he asked, "Say again, I repeat,
say again." Looking frantically over his screens while he waited for a
response, movement caught his eye on the visual of the outside of the
ship. Something dark was crawling around on the outside of the other
ship's hull. What the hell…? he thought, moving to try and adjust the
zoom. Before he could refocus the camera, however, one of the tethers
went slack, and his attention was drawn back to the entrance. Someone
slowly drifted out. Maybe they knew about the dark figure too, and
were going to investigate? No… there was something too stiff about the
way they were floating. Then their figure rotated, and Hector saw the
large red blotch on the front of the crisp white suite. "Oh, fu-"

A loud bang on the Aven's hull interrupted him. Flinching, he glanced
at the door leading towards the back of the ship. His first instinct
was to seal the compartments between him and the airlock. Halfway to
the first set of doors, he realized he was acting out of order in his
panic, and turned back to slam the retracting button on the tethers.
The other two lines hadn't gone slack, and he could only hope that he
was rescuing live people right now and not reeling in corpses. This
was so not part of my contract, he whined to himself as he ran towards
the back of the Aven. Through the galley, crew bunks, and medical,
each room passed like a blur before he arrived at the airlock.
Engineering was on the far side of the hall, but there wasn't anything
he could do to seal that without locking himself in the back of the
ship. Each section was divided by a large bulkhead door. Normally,
these doors would automatically seal in the event of an atmospheric
breach to a part of the ship. Now they would act as buffers between
himself and whatever was out there.

Yanking hard on a bright yellow handle caused a cacophony of gears and
counterweights to groan momentarily. Each door started to slide shut
slowly at first, then picking up speed to slam closed after a few
seconds. When was the last time these things got serviced? Hector
wondered. His fear was making his reactions sarcastically inane, but
he couldn't help it. How was he supposed to process what was going on
outside? Making his way back through each individual area, he repeated
the routine. Pull the lever, confirm the door seals, move on.

Once he made it back to the bridge, he went back to the screen showing
him the situation outside. The outside of the other ship's hull was
now covered in dark figures. It almost looked like they were a part of
the iridescent pattern; like black polka spots swarming and coalescing
along with the rainbow hues of the smooth, bulbous exterior. "Screw
this," Hector said out loud, grabbing at the pilot's controls.
Engaging the thrusters while people were still outside on tethers was
a big protocol no-no, but he didn't care at this point. Engines flared
and the ship kicked away from the assumed derelict. "Can anyone hear
me? Are you guys there?" he asked as he flew, hoping that whatever had
been jamming their communications wouldn't affect them any more.

Only silence replied, and a grim expression set itself on Hector's
face. He could check the airlock camera later. His first priority was
getting the hell out of Dodge. Another bang sounded somewhere against
the hull. Had one of those things managed to jump between the two
ships before he'd escaped? The Aven didn't have any guns on board.
Hyperventilating, Hector decided to try and run a series of sensor
scans on his own ship's hull. There would be some interference from
the overly short range, but he should still get something. Data began
scrolling across his screen. Metal composites, radiation, things that
you'd normally find on the surface of a spaceship. There. Something
organic, carbon-based, unknown origin. Whatever that was, it was
hitchhiking, and he wanted it off.

"Did you seal these doors, you asshole?" Liz suddenly shouted through
the comm net.

Nearly jumping out of his seat at the sudden sound, Hector yelped
embarrassingly. Good thing he wasn't transmitting unless he had the
button held down. He cleared his throat, and replied, "You're alive!
Yeah, I sealed them. I don't know what you guys found out there, but I
didn't want one of them getting in here."

"Well we are out here and we want in," Liz said angrily.

Hector wanted to snap at her for laying into him when they were
obviously dealing with bigger problems right now. Instead he asked,
"Who's hurt? I saw someone was injured on the video feed before I
pulled you all in."

Quiet filled the bridge and Hector was afraid that the radio had cut
out again when Liz finally said, "Chen didn't make it. I'm fine. So's
the captain, but he's unconscious. Knocked his head when you yanked us
out."

Hector took a deep breath. He was prepared to face casualties as a
part of life on a salvage ship, but not like this. Not from a hostile
force. Speaking of hostile forces… "Liz, one of those things is on the
Aven's hull, I'm pretty sure. Close that outer airlock door if you
haven't already. I'll come back and let you farther in soon."

"Soon better mean 'I'm walking back there now and the only reason I'm
not replying is because I can't stay and press the comms button'," she
replied, a note of fear undercutting her snark and anger.

Manually unsealing each door took a lot longer than closing them
initially had. Each one struggled to fully open. The one between the
bunk room and the infirmary didn't want to open at all, and Hector had
to scrounge around for something to pry at the gap with. Settling for
a metal tube that had originally acted as a curtain rod to separate
the ship's restroom from the common area, he managed to make a gap
wide enough to slip through. Please, please don't close again, he
prayed as he finished crossing through to the other side. These
bulkheads didn't have portholes, but he could imagine Liz standing on
the other side of the door fidgeting impatiently. He pushed the
emergency lever back up into its cradle and waited. At first nothing
happened, then the servo-mechanisms cranked to life and began to
retract.

Liz had already moved Chen's body and the captain's unconscious form
from the airlock proper to the small hallway between medical and
engineering. "About time," she said critically. Her helmet was off,
but she was otherwise still dressed in her bulky EVA suit. Same with
the captain. She hadn't bothered to remove Chen's, and Hector decided
that was fine by him.

"Let's get the captain on the other side of this door, and close it up
again," he said as he moved to position himself by the older man's
legs. Liz took his arms, and together they hobbled him through the
door. More banging echoed through the hull, and Hector crossed his
fingers that this thing didn't have the strength to breach the metal
shell on its own. "What happened over there, anyway? I lost contact
with you guys and the next thing I know Chen's body is floating out in
front of my camera."

Liz's gaze was unfocused, and when she started to reply it sounded
almost detached. "We started cutting on a door we thought might lead
to the front of the ship, but it was filled with these creatures. We
don't know if it was the bridge, a dormitory, or even a brig, but they
moved fast. Chen was at the front, of course, and one of them stabbed
him with a spear-looking thing. The captain threw a salvaging charge
at the entrance and we started booking it back down the hallway.
Explosion must have taken out at least ten of the suckers, but after
they regrouped they started coming after us on the floor, the walls,
the ceiling…" She stopped talking, staring down at the captain's limp
form. "He started pulling on Chen's tether, trying to get him out from
behind the swarm, but we took a wrong turn and got herded deeper into
the ship, so he gave up. I guess the swarm must have finished carrying
his body the rest of the way out the front door. Then you pulled us
back, right through the pack. It was like a haunted house roller
coaster."

Hector didn't know what to say. Deciding to focus on what he could do
here and now, he gestured towards the medical exam table in the middle
of the room. "Let's get the cap up on there and make sure he doesn't
have a concussion or anything." Liz nodded wordlessly. He'd need to
keep an eye on her, too. Watch for deeper symptoms of psychological
shock. But right now he needed her help, and maybe giving her
something to do would help distract her. More banging against the
hull. "Liz, I need you to take care of the captain. I'm going to try
and throw our hitchhiker off the ship."

She nodded again, moving mechanically as she pulled up a diagnostic
screen to check the captain's vitals. Hector quickly walked back
towards the bridge, determined to do whatever he had to to shake their
unwanted guest. Settling into the pilot's seat with a calm smoothness
that concealed the knot in his gut, he began flipping switches to warm
up various thrusters. Salvage ships were built to make minute
adjustments while working around dangerous conditions, and he was
going to abuse that fact now. Putting the Aven through an evasive
course of twists, rolls, and other high-g maneuvers was easy enough to
start. The hard part came when the internal gravity generators
couldn't keep up with the quick and random changes that he was
initiating. He began to feel his body being pulled around as he bucked
the ship like a wild bronco. Inertia strained, and warning lights
began to flicker on as he kept stressing the system. Maneuvering
thrusters burned out when they competed to push the ship in opposite
directions, victims of Hector's inability to precisely keep track of
every switch he was flipping in an effort to move as randomly as
possible. The hull itself began to groan. Another warning light
flickered red; this one telling him that if he kept his antics up,
he'd lose integrity.

Forced into easing up on his whipping about, he flipped a master
switch. All of the thrusters killed themselves at once, and the ship
settled into calmness. They were probably rotating wildly, but it was
all in one direction and the internal gravity could handle that. No
banging greeted him when he listened intently. Time to run another
scan of the hull. Fingers crossed, he started the process. "Well?" Liz
asked as she appeared behind him.

"We'll know in a second. How's the captain?"

"He's going to have one hell of a headache when he wakes up, but he'll
be fine," she said. Between riding out the gravity dancing, and
working the medical systems, she appeared to have recovered some of
her composure.

Data once again streamed onto the console screen, and Hector looked
for the telltale organics. Nothing. "We're clear," he breathed a sigh
of relief as he leaned back in his chair.

"Thank God," Liz said, echoing the gradual relaxation that seemed to
sweep throughout the ship.

Bending forward to work the console once more, Hector began the
arduous process of resetting their destination. After their impromptu,
erratic, off-course trip, the computer struggled to re-calibrate their
ETA to the trading station. "Might be two weeks instead of one, at
this point," he mused out loud.

Liz settled into the chair next to him, closing her eyes and propping
her feet on the console. "It could take a month, for all I care, as
long as the trip is nice and boring," she said idly. Amen to that, he
thought, glancing at a blinking light on his console. Labelled
'Transmitting,' it sat next to a looped video recording playing
innocuously on his screen. Bulbous shapes of rainbow sheen stared back
at him, along with bright green text showing a set of coordinates, and
a warning. Hopefully no one else would run afoul of the hostile
species any time soon. Chances were low that the message was even
necessary. Space was a big place, after all.