First draft - p1.2

***

Suffocating heat, rolling blackouts and the awful cries of the damned filled the abandoned hallways of his metal cage, a nightmare scene from a madman's dream. His fists clenched and unclenched in fingerless leather, roped into place at the back of his chair. Sweat shimmered the cheap florescent lighting on his neck and grit stained arms. Shouting and laughing filled out his hot little room, all it muffled and none of it interesting.

The room was a little smaller than most, about six foot wide by eight feet. Barely room for a man to think in this heat. The man in front of him had been laying it on thick for about twenty minutes, he was in poor shape and breathing far heavier than he should be. Another man leant against what could be called the far end of the room, two steps away. He was thinner, better dressed with a crew cut and a slight twitch in the corner of his mouth when he smiled, which he didn't. Save to enjoy a cigarette. The man with the heavy breathing gave a little cough. Problem?

The smoke built quickly, another blackout cut the scene and brought out more cries from the inmates. Everything came into focus and unravelled like the ropes at his wrists.
A swift knee robbed the first man of his breath quick fingers robbed him of a wrought iron belt buckle. A second later it found its way into the throat of the smoking man. His cigarette caught as it fell, the only light in the room the prisoner flicked it in the direction of the larger man as the smoker chocked. The lit end sparked as it hit home, marking the target and lighting up his confused and uncomfortable face with a slight glow. A bare knuckle brought him down a second later and another put him out for the count.

The lights came back on, flickering pathetically. The smoker sat chocking on iron and blood, unable to do much of anything. The prisoner lent in and pulled a pack of cigarettes from the man's pocket.
“You know, you're ruining your friend's health with these.” Bloodied hands balled the packet up and let the bits drop to the filthy, tiled floor. “You tie knots like a little girl. Bye.”
Only a few steps out of the room and he heard the buckled clang on the ground followed by a raspy voice, barely audible over the shouting of the inmates and the buzzing, broken fan motors in the vents. “Dumb.” Wretched coughing filled the gap. “Dumbest thing you've done so far. Can't get off, can't leave or hide. We've got you forever, didn't you know? Grim! You're fucking ours!”
Grim could feel that twitch, even with his back to the spluttering. “But I have dinner plans with a beautiful woman. A man doesn't make plans he doesn't intend to follow through with.”
“Hit you too hard...Screws loose.”
“Yes, well...you're ugly.” Grim proceeded to unlock all of the inmates down the hallway, most of which took to heading towards his former cell and beating the two guards to death.

The upper floor had a balcony, though there was nothing much to see other than rocks and close up shot of the sun. The room he stood in had a mural painted of green rolling hills and a lake with the sun reflecting off it's surface. Grim turned to it, closed his eyes and took in a deep, expensively filtered breath of air, held it for a moment and exhaled. Calmness was the key to success. What he planned for escaping was something he'd never dreamt he'd be doing.

Vanquish is the name of the planet he is currently stuck on. Why the prisoners have never made any attempt to escape was simple once you knew the background of the place. The solar system was the staging ground of a fierce battle hundreds of years ago. After the war went sour for the enemy; once their general went down, he was buried in an asteroid field spanning the system. His fleet of AI guided ships followed him into the field, his personal guard. They continue to protect the remains from tomb raiders and thieves alike. They've been dubbed the Terracotta army and the only way into the system is by being shot through the field in a capsule carrying little to no electrical equipment.

Vanquish had old pre-war era ships and hollowed out cargo ships used for housing. We've got you forever. “You haven't seem my big trick yet.” He turned his head to face the balcony, squinting his eyes against the bright red of the sky. In the distance a huge canyon cut into the earth, from orbit it looked like a scar.

Along with the legend of the general and his Terracotta army, there was another. That one of the seven great ships lay beneath the surface of Vanquish. Hidden within a gash dug out of rock by it's own guns. This legend brought Grim here. Likely a fools gambit he thought but one worth following.

Outside the room shouting and gunshots crawled closer.


***


Inside the chewed up remains of the firebird the long corridors flickered into life. The wall panels lit up with a white, crisp glow. Roman admired the design, it was easy to look at and energy efficient. He considered prying off a few bits for himself for a moment before outer wall twisted about and sealed itself after detecting his presence. The innards filled with atmosphere and a single line of panels on the floor changed colour and led his eyes further into the ship.

It was still very quiet; nearly all of the systems had shut down and the panels gave off no noise. Nothing in the ship went to waste, he noted. Bits of earth and lose personal items floated about through the hallways. Some rooms had been left open when the ship crashed, some people had been caught in doorways or objects large enough to jam doors open had been left out.

There were few bodies though. Where there aught to be survivors in the rooms with closed doors there were none, the few bodies that had been unlucky enough to be on board were all out in the halls. Broken necks, contorted bodies and torn out insides painted the beautiful white glowing canvas walls.

It wasn't long before he's managed to find the centre of the ship and rather than follow this line to an obvious conclusion, dashed in and up a broken ceiling tile, behind which lay enough space to squeeze through to the upper level. A single shot from his pistol sent the floor panel spiralling up into the dark hallway, bits of flickering plasma hovering in zero gravity.

Running further into the ship would mean heading towards the engine room, going higher up meant finding the firebird's weapons platforms. He guessed that the cargo rooms would be mostly empty judging by the lack of passengers. The engine rooms would have expensive parts he could scavenge, once that was taken care of he'd head up to the bridge where his guide was now frustratedly waving his arms in the air.

The Engine room was easily found; Solus leave a lot of information boards around their ships to help new passengers become accustomed. The room itself was pristine, multi tiered and a work of art. Solus were made up of an amalgamated old earth governments and ideals, the sum of their principles demanded that all things Solus must be both ergonomic and aesthetic. You know; so it's clear they are the best government. Unfortunately this meant that most of their equipment took a rather long time to make and quite a lot of money to build.

Roman beamed at the plethora of high-end technology. Coiling about in their tubes of thermoluminescence were blood red fractures, tied in to power the ship's drives. Four in tubes strapped in vertically at the centre of the room. One to power each of the four drives outside the firebird. Each one had been overused though, the fractures were huge, the bigger they were the more useless they became as fuel as they take almost as much power to contain as they put out.

Scattered around the silent room were catalysts sat inside their own smaller tanks. A blue one nearby caught the captain's eye. It shimmered and bubbled in it's cage, sitting away from the others it seemed lonely. He liked to think Catalysts could hear him, recognize his voice. The Kinoform spluttered a little as he tapped the tanks wall. His pistols and suit were charged with a purple catalyst, one that reacted violently to oxygen and made it a good weapon indoors. There were red catalyst's near the fracture tanks that would be dumped into the fractures to expand them and fuel the ship onward. Green catalyst's would create temporary mass for use in sealing hull breaches and shielding the ship from damage. Yellow ones tend to be unpredictable, used for speeding up systems and electronics they could sometimes increase and decrease density which made it a liability in less than ideal situations, though there were a handful of these tanks laying about.

The blue chap now leaping about in it's cage however, he had no idea about. Which instantly made him want it. The metal tag read Kinoform 05 and there was a smaller test tube transport tank floating about above the table. Roman slipped the shutter out and screwed the tube into the side of the tank. As the aperture opened the blue catalyst zapped into the tube and the shutter closed on it. He popped the tube into the chest panel of his suit and pushed off the floor and floated to the upper levels of the engine room.

Near the top of the room was an open platform of interlocking panels, one end cut off just short of the four fracture tanks and the other led to a pair of shut double doors. There was no sign of power coming from them. Fitted to the side of the door frame was a tall screen that tapered toward the top of the door. Roman played with the panel on his suit for a second, finding a thin line reach the door's screen. He pulled a glove from his hand with teeth and, running bare fingers up and down the screen, found a tiny jack to connect to.
The screen hummed to life, vibrating in two short bursts as it sung a melody to signify it had powered on. The background image on the panel was a green vector in the general shape of plant stem, stylised with two dimensional leaves. The doors unlocked and withdrew from sight. The corridor ahead came to life also. As he stepped foot in the room beyond the floor panels lit up, a message relayed in them: If you are quite done stealing from your government we kindly request your assistance. The message faded away and was replaced with yet another glowing line to follow.

first draft - p1

Two hundred units of Industrial Mode in cargo shelves rattled, riding the vibrations in the wall. There wouldn't be enough to trade to get him where he needed to be. It wasn't that they were cheap, he just knew he'd never find a buyer. The best he could do was sell them individually, marked down of course. There were maybe another three days until the ship had to dock, even then it would take an ambitious technician to attempt to fix the drives so he didn't leak an entire week of fuel every time he docked. It was only by avoiding docking until he was out of fluid that he managed to avoid fines for spilling over the the docks.

The walls thrummed from the movements the engines made. The inner workings twisted and the modular outer pieces swivelled and punched the air so fast they made threatening whooshing sounds when you got too close.

The bunk clicked and creaked under the weight of the Captain as he shifted to raise a knee into a more comfortable position. The cabin had been much bigger in the past but he'd made a few changes since acquiring the beautiful Rusalka. She had been a cargo shuttle, disposed of before her time but salvaged by her new owner to swim into the darkest depths of the galaxy.

The cabin had been shrunk to make room for a massive addition to the engine room, many other areas were also reduced or even removed all together to fit in many upgrades that would be better suited to a battleship. One at a time all of the frills and extra space were traded away or swapped out to make room for much larger equipment. At one time he even had some semblance of a crew but a man makes a point of flexibility when it comes surviving the unknown.

Perhaps it was paranoia, maybe it was just eccentricity. Whatever cost a man can afford for piece of mind should be paid, his fathers words tickled him. A man of many fine sayings, also a man with many debtors. A paranoid man.

He thumbed the pad, turning the page to a list scrawled on yellow lined paper, tiny doodle man included. Another to-do list. It seemed like there was no end to the things he needed to get done. More charts needed to be picked up, the files he had were ridiculously out of date and there was no way he was turning back for a refund; the seller was either gone or beaten to death for selling worthless wares.

The wall of the cabin was covered in sticky-notes and scribbles of white ink on the black marble interior. He really had trashed the décor in the name of brutal efficiency. There was little room in here for computers and he only had one tablet that had broken months ago and now served as an expensive food plate.
In the dull lamplight he read the first line written on the wall, the single destination on his list that would finally let him end this stupid journey, at least he hoped so, the rest of the destinations all had a purpose. He'd added to the list as he came across problems such as the incorrect scale and wrong turns many charts inevitably held. Not to mention the few short cuts that ended up causing damage and putting his ship off-course.

The Captain turned back to the trade list and put the pad down on the compartment just behind his pillow. Reaching into his shirt pocket he pulled out a matchbox and slid out the cardboard drawer to reveal a tiny white pill with blue tips and two blue lines running parallel across its length. He looked at it with furrowed brows, tilting the box to watch it roll along the insides. This could fund at least four months of travel if he could get a good price and a buyer worth his time. The poor bastards this side of the galaxy wouldn't be likely to have ever seen something of this strength. An S-class drug that makes changes on a genetic level. The tiny signature on the skin of the pill claimed the handiwork, Permatech. With their A-class drugs the effects would last years, until the body started replacing its cells with new ones, slowly lessening the effects until you were just another face in the crowd. S-class drugs became a part of the system and would replicate rather than degenerate, making you stronger with each passing day and giving you the ego of a Rockstar with it.

This drug was expensive and very rare in this end of space. So were buyers.


The hum of the engines on his wall had cut out and a little led bulb above his head started flashing green. He pulled himself up, knocking scraps of recycled paper and shortened pencils all over the floor. His bare feet touched the icy black floor and left ghostly footprints as he left the room, bumping into the wall as did. The steps up to the converted bridge were narrow and tended to trap a lot of heat as the vents were now used for other things. As he reached the top he'd already started to sweat and his thick black hair was getting itchy. Backing against the side and clutching a dull green jacket and cigarettes in one hand he scratched furiously for a moment before twisting and fumbling for the pack of thin white sticks as they left his grip and their container to scatter generously down the stairs.

This was never a bridge, just a large cockpit really. At one time it was a little bigger and could have about five people sharing the space but that was all over once the crew were taken out of the picture, only one other man ever seemed to come back to the ship every now and then and even so they would merely take turns in here. The room had been outfitted with many more systems to compensate for the lack of a crew and many of the upgrades to the inherent equipment were actually older and so needed a little more space to house.
One of the screens jumped to life as he sat down in front of it, smaller ones also popped up with little models of asteroids and bits of debris. The larger screen however showed a handful of images of a huge ship torn to pieces. His brows furrowed and his cigarette tilted down ninety degrees. It reminded him of something, the thick red lines running parallel down the hull gave away it's identity. The Firebird, it's massive drives striking out behind it like a fist-full of plumage and it's nose shaped like the beak of an eagle, now lay in two, it's innards spilled out for all to see.


There would likely be enough spoils left over to live like a prince for a few weeks, even fix up the drives. He pulled on the leathery brown suit and clipped on the helmet. A green LED patch lit up first as the helmet filled with a slightly smoky gas that twisted about in its fish-bowl prison. The wall next to the suit rack held two small pistols, metallic and purple in colour. As the captain filled his hands with them a second LED patch below his green life patch lit itself accordingly, glowing purple. He placed the two side-arms at his waist and moved toward the hatch. The dull orange of the door was scratched and chipped from years of abuse and neglect, the paint had never chipped but the scratched held fragments of items that were never secured properly or absent-mindedly left out as people came and went via the hatch.
One heave of the lever popped the hatch open, nothing moved in the airlock. The captain was one of the few who treated his ship right, did everything with a little love. As he stooped under the door a glitchy tag on his back lit up. Roman, it read.

The scene was quiet, small scraps tumbled about, knocking into other bits and pieces but otherwise mostly calm. He had a fairly good idea of what happened here and how long ago. If it were recent the firebird would still have a lot of momentum and the debris wouldn't have settled so soon. Glancing north of the ship he took in the trail of breadcrumbs that were it's innards. Too far out in the woods, no one's coming.

Pushing off the space junk was a little fun; Roman needed to stretch his legs every now and then. In his haste he knocked his ship with a bit of frozen dirt from one of the firebird's disembowelled gardens. He knew this because after the twenty seconds it took for it to float to it's target it thumped hard against the hatch and set off a siren in his helmet. Being alone in space makes you a little twitchy and Roman tended to act first rather than think; quick fingers had let off half a dozen shots of indigo fire that pounded on the hatch and spun the spaceman into the mess of debris and raised the alarms in his goldfish bowl of a helmet.

Fucking sirens, he thought, or at least tried to think but megaphone interrupted any ideas other than tearing off the glass sphere and breathing relief. He flung the apparatus forthwith and took in the silence of space. Fucking antique, he thought. Under the drop in pressure and temperature a micro-hexagonal mesh raised itself on his skin. A pattern within a pattern; tiny six-sided lines reflected like little glass scales. The hair on his head was already brittle. It had taken months to get it back to that length, a personal triumph. When he first realised the failings of the spectral mesh (all sales are final) he'd invested in a space suit. Unfortunately the many failings of cheap suits are a constant surprise.

The captain ran gloved hands through a frozen mane, brushing it off like a black diamonds.