Chapter VI
BR3ACH
Nia’s head was still spinning, and her body was following with it. They were in the middle between the REACH and BOTON VIII-M, and Nia was struggling to orient herself in the limited gravity and the thoughts racing in her brain. Greck pulled her by their tether line, bringing her within arms’ reach, and straightened her out.
Jet thrusters fired from Greck’s suit pack, stabilizing his massive frame as the three tethered salvage crew steadied their descent down to the surface of BOTON VIII’s moonlet, a hundred-kilometer-sized rock with a smooth, eroded surface.
Carter looked down at the surface, his helmet projecting a holographic schematic overlay that showed their landing target zone. A series of three-dimensional gridlines rendered onto the nearby surface, revealing a large square platform beneath it.
“We’re on target,” Carter said through their comm link.
Greck groaned at Nia, a low rumbling in her comm, and she nodded back to him. Greck gave her some slack on the tether, and she steadied herself with some distance between the two of them.
As the propulsion thrusters fired against the moonlet surface, a steady strip of haze and icy particulate floated in the air in a stream, masking Carter’s boots making landfall. Carter grunted as his hips absorbed the new gravitational balance, and he started making light steps toward the buried platform.
The gills under Carter’s tentacles fluttered, bubbles swirling around the water-based helmet, and filtering back through the system. He braced his slight frame as Greck stuck the landing behind him in their tether line. Nia shakily dropped as well, feeling her knees dip and the tether line vibrate without sound as the slack rolled like a floating noodle from one crew member to the next. Carter grabbed the flowing line and offset its rhythm.
“Landfall,” Carter murmured through his water filtration block that also housed his translator box.
“Good. How’s the platform?” Bolt’s garbled voice quivered through the water ripples.
“Smooth as a seal pup,” Greck retorted, pushing past Carter and pulling up the blueprint overlay on his helmet display. The gridlines lay out over the smooth surface, but then rotated 45 degrees, lopsided against the original layout. Greck smacked his helmet. OMNI VOX’s screen icon flipped up, covering Greck’s entire helmet view.
OMNI VOX: THANK YOU FOR WAKING ME! :) IT APPEARS THAT YOU ARE ATTEMPTING TO UTILIZE MY TOPOGRAPHIC RENDER ENGINE WITHOUT THE PROPER CREDENTIALS. COULD YOU PLEASE PROVIDE YOUR LOGIN KEY?
“No,” Greck hit his helmet again, and the icon skewed, then twirled off-screen, and the gridded angle view re-adjusted.
Greck went to one knee and brushed his large hand across the surface, pushing a stream of dust particulate away to reveal a small square box. He pulled the handle, lifting the hatch away, and grabbed the large industrial handle inside. He twisted the handle, and the land around them began to vibrate. They couldn’t hear anything, but the tremor worked its way up their legs and rattled Nia’s helmet. Nia reflexively reached out her hands to try to steady her balance, but it was easier said than done.
The entire platform rose up, pushing a haze of loose ice and rock outward. Nia lost her balance as her back leg had been off the hidden platform, and Carter reached back and grabbed her hand before she could fall. She widened her stance and looked up to get her bearings. The sudden jolt had finally knocked the mental fog from her mind… for the time being.
Greck closed the panel hatch and stood back up. The entire platform had an inner, higher platform, with an interior cut-out tunnel leading straight down to the presumed flight deck.
All four corners of the elevated platform square were capped with boxes bearing small emergency lights whose bulbs had long since died. Each side of the platform had three cylinder openings with coupling ports for ship docking, save for one side - the one next to Greck’s closed panel - that included a ramp up to the elevated platform. Nia looked back and saw that they were standing in the outer platform, a flat permacrete molded into the moonlet surface that had been hidden by centuries of ice and rock.
Greck pointed to the far corner of the platform.
“We’ll need to check the couplings,” Greck explained, and he unhooked his carabiner from the tether and lumbered his way over to the side of the platform.
The coupling ports, riveted to the platform, appeared to house the necessary cabling, but they were locked behind a passcode-protected panel on the platform’s side. Greck took one glance at the passcode prompt line and waved at Nia to walk over.
“OMNI,” Greck groaned.
No response.
“O-M-N-I V-O-X!” he yelled, and Nia tried to cover her ears to no avail.
The chummy OMNI icon jumped up in Greck’s face, and he grimaced.
OMNI: HELLO! :D IT APPEARS THAT YOU ARE ATTEMPTING TO CIRCUMVENT PG36XZ-
“That’s not what it is…” Nia rolled her eyes and sat up on the elevated platform across from Greck.
OMNI VOX: YOU ARE CORRECT! THAT WAS AN ERR-ER-RROR ON MY PART. THIS PANEL IS NOT INDEXED IN THE OMNI WEB NETWORK DATABASE. WOULD YOU LIKE TO TROUBLESHOOT OR CONNECT ME TO YOUR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR?
“No system administrator. Troubleshoot,” Nia grumbled.
…
OMNI VOX: OKAY! TROUBLESHOOTING NOW…
…
Greck looked up from the passcode prompt with narrowed eyes as Nia stared wide-eyed back at him. She tapped her booted foot on the permacrete platform.
OMNI VOX: OKAY! IT APPEARS THAT I AM MISSING SOME CRITICAL INFOR-
“Skip,” Nia cut off the incessant chatbot.
OMNI VOX: - YOU SEEM TO BE RUNNING A -
“Skip.”
OMNI VOX: - I CAN REACH OUT TO OUR DATA RESOLUTION TEAM TO PINPOINT AND DEFINE THE -
“Skip.”
OMNI VOX: :) :| THANK YOU! I AM STILL MISSING VITAL CONTEXT, CAN YOU -
“Skip.”
The OMNI VOX icon on Nia’s display morphed into an X_X emoticon and then minimized out of view, leaving behind a command prompt synced to the passcode panel in a small text box window.
“OVERRIDE RUN: dot-suit… C-M-D Space O-V-R Space P-K-G… dot-executable,” Nia dictated to OMNI’s prompt window.
A vibrating, whirring noise spun up from Nia’s suit backpack, and the hardware override took momentary control over OMNI’s background tasking map.
Carter leaned over the platform and looked down into the cut-out at the closed-off port. The metallic iris diaphragm was sealed airtight.
“Check the port’s iris control, too.”
Nia nodded as a scroll of code cascaded down her helmet view. As soon as the REACH crew knew they would be breaching the older installation, Nia took a deep dive into the OMNI WEB archives to search for older RHYNO coding systems. Most of the older protocols were available in academic papers, and it was rare to find functioning imperial equipment to stress test them on. She was hoping her executable would find a vulnerability and breach the platform’s security. At the very least, they might be able to access the utility handshake protocol.
Her view window punched back several lines of red-colored code, then some green lines, then red replies, then green, then red.
“The iris is shut tight. We need ‘sec’ clearance. But I was able to pull some admin docs, and there is a reference to a utility hatch protocol. Opening it now,” Nia explained, and she blinked at the highlighted code text on her viewing window.
The lower base platform rumbled, and a small section of the permacrete rotated downward, forming a narrow ramp leading into a cavernous interior adjacent to the flight deck tunnel system.
“You two can handle that,” Greck grunted, and he took his secondary tether line and attached himself to an industrial loop next to the passcode panel. “I’m going to get these couplers primed for the REACH.”
Nia and Carter stepped down the newly formed ramp, which zigzagged downward, carving its way through rock and ice, a fog of dust hanging in the vacuum. Nia led the way down, with Carter gripping the railing shakily behind her.
Every step down the ramp shook Nia’s slight frame. The aging permacrete had given way to a skeleton of metal stairs and scaffolding.
After about two revolutions winding downward, the ramp lead out to an open area, a cavern featuring stalagmites and a thick haze of stale vacuum. The ramp itself terminated in a balcony affixed to the port tunnel structure. The balcony wrapped around the massive boxed tunnel that stretched straight downward into the core of the moonlet, disappearing behind the powdery rock.
Nia could feel Carter tug at the tether binding them together.
Worse still, she could feel his anxious thoughts pelting her in the back of the head. The thoughts were beginning to leak into her lattice, reigniting the unsettling memories around Bolt—thoughts she did not want to consider when any mistake or errant slip might send them both crashing down onto the stalagmites in the cavern below.
“Would you just relax?” Nia snapped at Carter over a private channel.
The outburst startled Carter, and his hands shook the ramp railing, which made Nia shake. Nia heard bubbles flutter over the comm link.
“I wasn’t the one who went slackjawed during the disembark.”
“That was … different.”
“Not from where I’m standing,” Carter jeered. “What was that, anyway?”
Dunny was behind her sticks on the DEEP REACH’s bridge, prepping telemetry governance with landing package instructions.
Bolt was supposed to be in the engineering bay, inputting the fuel system translations she had specified. But when she had passed him the instructions, Bolt had grumbled something and walked off, so Dunny was starting to think he had just gone off to drink over the side of the HUB railing instead.
“CAP,” Dunny said over the comm box.
Silence.
“CAP’IN?” Dunny groaned.
“WHAT?” Bolt snapped gruffly over the crackling comm box.
Dunny rolled her eyes, “How’re those fuel lines doing?”
“FINE.”
“They SHOULD be doing ‘done’,” Dunny sneered.
“IN A MINUTE.”
Asshole. Dunny thought about the last look Nia gave her as she dropped into BOTON VIII-M. What was THAT all about? Is she oka-
Bolt slammed Dunny’s notepad down next to her flight controls. Dunny sucked in a nervous gasp.
“I can’t read this [redacted]!” Bolt shouted. “Is this a 1 or a 4?”
Dunny looked down at the paper out of the corner of her eye. “4,” she managed through an itchy throat. Bolt ran a hand through his tingling mane and snatched the paper back up with the other, storming off in a huff.
To either side of the ramp exit were two separate rooms, with room names labeled in an ancient Rhyneese variant that Nia and Carter could barely recognize.
“I think this says Utility Room?” Nia said, her tone reaching a higher pitch at the end like a confused question.
Carter shrugged, and they looked at the doorframe. The doors met in the middle, a long vertical seam that their padded gloves could barely grip. The two managed to get their gloved fingers around the metal, and they pulled in unison, scraping sounds barely a murmur. They tugged a few times, then finally the rusted door scraped open enough for them to slip into the small compartment.
The room was indeed a utility room, with a wide console at their hip level against the wall facing the tunnel and a large, thick glass panel looking inward into the shuttle entry tunnel. The room had a few scattered pieces of scrap metal and wires, and a tall locker in the far corner that reached the ceiling.
Nia leaned forward over the console and looked down. The tunnel was pitch black, save for the small beams of light from their suits’ equipment packs. There was nothing. No bottom. Just hazy dark with little flakes of particles barely illuminated by her suit light.
Carter was busily looking around for any additional equipment to scavenge. He flipped on the circular flashlight taken from his utility belt, and the beam split the morass of icy particles in the air. A tattered poster, some ancient Rhyno Imperial Propaganda, stared down at him from the top of the locker door. He pulled the handle and brought the door back, the metal components scraping against its dying hinges.
Nia leaned back from the console and ran her hand across the thick layer of frosted dust caking the controls. A metal cup, half-full with some dark liquid and filmy residue, still rested on the top ledge of the console.
“Probably tastes like Bog Water,” Nia joked.
“Delicious,” Carter hummed as he peered over into the cup, and Nia mockingly gagged. “Nothing in the locker unless you like archived entry logs.”
“More bad news. There isn’t any computer system here. I can see a few monitoring devices—an old screen—but no inputs.”
“This says elevator,” Carter motioned to the far side of the console.
“That’s a maintenance elevator,” Nia said, wiping some of the grime away from the switches. She pointed past the observation glass. “This is just one long shaft down to the flight deck: no lift.”
“Well, there is this,” Carter motioned, and he flipped a switch.
“What the [REDACTED] was that?” Greck’s voice crackled through the comm link. “The couplers all started flashing orange. You guys do somethin’ down there?”
“That was us,” Nia replied. “It looks like we can get the power and O2 scrubber relays communicating with the REACH, but we have to take a maintenance elevator down to the flight deck to get the iris open and the landing systems back online.”
“Fine,” Greck grunted, and the two could hear him fussing with the coupling cables.
The elevator door was covered in a film of thick dust, and stale particles hung in the vacuum. The utility room and elevator appeared sealed, but the dormant systems had long since evacuated most of the artificial atmosphere. A small red button was bracketed on a panel next to the elevator doors. Nia wiped her gloved hands across the button, revealing a small, faint light emanating from behind the plastic cylinder.
“Hopefully, we don’t get stuck,” Carter fluttered, his mouth tentacles floating in the water of his fishbowl helmet.
The elevator cabling stuttered behind the flimsy metal sheet door, giving Carter a jolt of anxiety. He took a small step back as the elevator door screamed open, the old gears grinding and waking back to life. The elevator was dimly lit, with three skinny light tubes affixed to the ceiling. Carter nodded for Nia to enter first.
Nia swung her flashlight over the small car, a cloud of particles dancing in the light beam and rolling out of the elevator like a gang of commuters.
“Sure. Why not?” Nia sighed under her breath and landed one boot onto the elevator floor, her hips widening into a stance to ensure the floor would not drop out from under her. The elevator creaked, but accepted her weight, so she stepped fully in. A couple of ventilations pops and creaking metal later, and Nia was waving for Carter to join.
Carter slowly blinked translucent orange lids over his onyx eyes and stepped in as well. He shuddered as the elevator floor felt flimsy under his slight frame.
“I hate this,” Carter groaned.
“Just think: with all of our illgotten salvage gains, you can retire to some boat on the digital sea and become a Light Racer patron.”
Carter’s tentacles fluttered again, a Nothonian smile.
“The dream…”
Nia pushed the only lit button available: DOWN. The elevator shook, a low rumbling cascading below them, reverberating down the shaft—announcing their presence to the flight deck below.
OMNI VOX: YOU SEEM TO HAVE ACTIVATED AN ELEVATOR. PLEASE MIND THE LIFT!
Nia felt her heart jolt as the elevator began moving down. Combined with the memories still swimming in her brain, the little shit chatbot, and a rickety old imperial elevator, Nia was on edge. Whether the memories were real, hallucinations, or somewhere in between, Nia was certain that something was deeply wrong with her.
“Shut up, OMNI,” Carter replied, exasperated and unnerved. He held his hands out to grip the elevator’s railing, which was not designed for his slender, tall frame. Carter’s eyes darted across his HUD and selected the ALL CHANNEL. “We’re headed down to the flight deck. Standby.”
“Standby,” Dunny mocked, eyes crossed, and hands flying across the REACH’s controls.
Bolt was - to quote Nia - “buls1 at ship systems”, and it was showing. The combination of not knowing anything about REACH’s engineering systems and his egotistical leadership style caused Bolt to act like he knew everything… and he wouldn’t take notes. Dunny pulled up her microphone to her mouth.
“What’s the status, sir?” Dunny asked, the sir dripping with sarcastic mock-fealty.
She could hear his low growl rolling around in his chest, heavy bass notes humming across the comm box feed.
“I’m getting weird readings up here, Bolt. Did you check the subspace drive? It’s still running idle from our plots.”
“I -,” Bolt sighed, his voice muffled… probably covered in wires and technical manuals. “Just give me a [REDACTED] second.”
“We need to calculate our landing controls.”
OMNI VOX: YOU APPEAR TO BE CALCULATING A LANDING VECTOR. I CAN PROVIDE ASSISTANCE WITH YOUR APPROACH. PLEASE SUBMIT YOUR ITINERARY.
“Shut up, you [REDACTED] bot!” Dunny yelled, and she flung her microphone headset onto the flight control panel. “Damned chatbot is going to kill us all. That’s it, I’m just going to fix this myself.”
Dunny slid out of her flight chair and made her way down through the HUB, past the holo table, across the industrial walkway, and through the door to the engineering bay’s second floor. She looked down over the railing at Bolt, who was lost in a schematics search query on the REACH’s engineering computer.
OMNI VOX: YOU APPEAR TO BE HAVING TROUBLE FINDING ENGINEERING PROTOCOLS. I CAN PROVIDE ASSISTANCE - WHAT SEEMS TO BE THE PROBLEM WE ARE SOLVING?
Bolt ran his hands through his thick mane, a low rumbling growl picking up speed as if downhill. Dunny stifled a laugh. The captain normally ran hot, but something was different. He was becoming unhinged.
“I don’t need your help. I know what I’m doing. Half of these [REDACTED] menus are blocked behind the engineering bypass. You need to patch me through to the subspace systems, telemetry, and logistics algorithm. And I need you to access my log files.”
Something was different. Bolt sounded angry… but competent?
“What are you doing?” Dunny asked, genuinely confused. Bolt whipped his body around and looked up at the diminutive Eukary leaning over the rail. His reddened eyes stared daggers at Dunny, his canine teeth tapping at each other. Dunny recoiled.
The elevator jolted to a stop, and Nia and Carter almost stumbled forward if not for the railing.
“Okay,” Nia exhaled deeply and waited for the elevator door to open out to the flight deck.
It did not.
“What the [REDACTED]? What now?” Carter grumbled.
“You alright down there?” Greck’s voice crackled over the comm link.
“The door is stuck,” Nia explained.
“Shoulda’ brought the stronger Nothonian,” Greck jeered. Carter clenched his jaw.
“Not really the time, shark,” Carter snapped back.
Nia stuck her three fingers into the slight crease in the elevator door where the panels met in the middle, her pincer thumbs pressing together and turning white. Her helmet fogged as she pushed hot breaths through clenched teeth.
The elevator door scraped, the metal slats giving just slightly. The bottom part of the elevator door wrenched back a dozen centimeters, and an object fell through, sending Nia falling backward to the floor. Carter bent down to help her up, and they looked at the crack in the elevator door. A chalk-white skeletal hand lay in pieces on the elevator floor, the arm bones pinned in the door crevice.
“What the [REDACTED]?” Nia gasped. Carter shakily stood up.
OMNI VOX: THAT APPEARS TO BE BIOLOGICAL REMAINS.
“No [REDACTED], OMNI,” Nia snapped back.
“I’m starting to ascertain why we haven’t heard about this place before,” Carter said.
Nia grabbed onto the elevator railing and wrenched a part of the metal cylinder loose from the wall. She slammed it into the gap and curved it back, the loud screeching noise of metal-on-metal hitting their eyes in the flight deck’s artificial atmosphere.
The rest of the arm fell through onto the floor, along with the rest of the skeleton. An Orgrimp by the looks of it. A primate skeleton, with hunched, powerful shoulders, extended arms, and long fingers. But the skull… the skull was —
“Where’s the rest of its head?” Nia fought back vomit. She stumbled back, and Carter put a hand on her shoulder to keep her steady.
“The rest of its WHAT?” Greck’s voice whined through the comm link. “What the [REDACTED] is going on down there?”
Nia looked up from the slouched skeleton at the nearly pitch-black flight deck. Carter reluctantly leaned out the elevator door, and his hands found a panel and a series of switches. He flipped one, and a series of dim, red emergency lights bathed the massive flight deck in their foreboding crimson wash.
To their right stood a hexagonal tower that rose to the 15-meter ceiling, with thick glass panels that appeared to be where the control tower commanded flight deck operations. In the center of the room, a perfect square of red light beamed down through the entrance port for the drones and manned shuttles on the flight deck.
Carter’s eyes adjusted to the dark quickly, and he scanned leftward, taking in permacrete floors with rounded white painted squares on the ground for shuttles and drones to park. To the far left of the elevator, there were a handful of flight drones and two shuttles parked with thick layers of dust covering them as artifacts dug out of ancient ruins.
“I don’t like this,” Carter swallowed the air bubble catching in his throat. Nia leaned forward with him and looked over to the right.
“Oh, now the payday doesn’t seem so sweet?” Nia questioned, and she hesitantly stepped over the skeleton strewn across the elevator doorway. “That’s the control tower. We can get the port open there.”
Nia made her way over to the control tower, her eyes darting back and forth from the looming hexagonal permacrete and the ghostly shuttle equipment on the far side of the flight deck. Carter’s attention went to a series of lockers and what appeared to be computation server racks to the right of the control tower, fastened to the wall. He walked over to them while Nia continued to the control tower.
The hexagonal control room didn’t have a door, but had a long strip cut out of the glass and permacrete surface on opposite sides, one facing the wall their elevator was on and one facing the opposite wall where another door led out into the facility. The tower had been built to extend from the midway point of the wall facing the shuttle garages, with the port opening in convenient view of whoever would be operating flight plans and security.
Aside from the red lights, everything was dark. The server racks were solid black textured metal, horribly outdated components, and covered in dust that would make any InfoSystems professional twitch.
Carter wiped a gloved hand across the server panels, revealing the massive red star emblem and the words in the same ancient Rhyneese, blazoned in a chunky block type: RHYNO IMPERIAL FLIGHT CONTROL SYSTEMS. Something about it brought feelings of awe bubbling to the surface in Carter. The facility wasn’t just a salvage with lucrative tech to pilfer; they were standing in the midst of an archeological find of the century. The scientist in him was fascinated.
Nia flipped a switch, and the control panel popped, and lights cascaded from her index finger to the far side of the board. The server rack in front of Carter roared to life, its lights blinking and humming. Ancient, yet powerful and resilient, the Rhyno Imperial technology was waking from its nearly-eternal slumber.
A computer monitor whirred, a cursor blinked, then started rifling text back.
OMNI VOX: WIRELESS SIGNAL DETECTED. CONNECTION REQUEST HAS BEEN SUBMITTED. FOREIGN SIGNATURE NOT RECOGNIZED. RHYNO R-I-F-S OS COMMAND CONTROL INITIATED. ALL OTHER PROTOCOL AND PERMISSIONS RESCINDED.
OMNI’S voice was a low, bass-heavy tone, not like his usual high-pitched sycophantic hum. He was talking in Assembly Command Speak. Nia sometimes used the ACS’s staccato, shorthand language, to try to circumvent OMNI’s chatbot veneer, but it usually didn’t work. But this? This was a full-on takeover from the flight deck’s command OS. OMNI VOX’s friendly green screen icon had been replaced with a red pixelated rectangle with a white star in the middle.
OMNI VOX: VERBAL INTERFACE APPROVED. SYNCING. PROVIDE IMPERIAL TRANSPONDER CODE.
Nia stammered. “C-code? We don’t have a code. We are guests of the Rhyno Empire.”
OMNI VOX: GUESTS DETECTED.
INITIATING VISITOR PROTOCOL SCAN…
NON-CODED ORGANIC LIFE FORMS DETECTED…
FIVE.
PLEASE RENDER DISPATCH VISITATION CODE IMMEDIATELY.
“Uh, Carter, you got anything for this?” Nia asked nervously. Carter’s eyes darted across his HUD, trying to find a workaround. Between the ancient Rhyno dialect and its complicated codebase, the server interface was unrecognizable.
Panic vibrated down Carter’s spine, a wave of red tinge rippling across his dimpling orange skin. He turned his body back and made eye contact with Nia, who was already picking up on his distraught anxiety through her lattice.
“What is this buls!” Dunny yelled, her arms cast down at the engineering bay computer monitors. “Why are you pulling up the subspace drive, Bolt?!”
Bolt’s muscular torso heaved as he breathed chestfuls of hot air, his hands flicking bay switches as if his entire body was being piloted by an expert engineer.
“H-have - guh - leave,” Bolt was shaking, his mane frizzing out.
Dunny dropped down to the first floor, and she felt her right knee buckle - definitely a sprain or worse - in her suit. She pulled her helmet off and grabbed Bolt’s shoulder.
Bolt roared, and he shoved Dunny away, sending her flying back under the balcony and into the wall of data cables and patches that lined the back wall of the engineering bay.
Dunny looked up and watched in horror as the engineering bay screen flashed bright red text: SUBSPACE DRIVE WARMING.
OMNI VOX:
ACCESS TOKEN REQUEST REVOKED.
SUBSPACE SIGNATURE DETECTED.
NEUTRALIZING HOSTILE SIGNATURE.
“What the [REDACTED] does that mean?” Nia shouted at OMNI. No response.
The BOTONVIII-M platform erupted as multiple hatches opened up and a long gun unfurled itself. The concussive blast of the hatch opening sent Greck floating into the air. His tether snagged and whipped him away as the gun fired a large metallic rod ordnance.
The gun was so old that the ordnance’s shockwave shattered the gun platform’s base, sending shrapnel and the gun out into space. Some of the debris pelted Greck, tearing his tether line, tiny strings barely holding him to the splintering port platform. As his body rolled over, losing sight of the moonlet surface, Greck looked up as the gun round collided with the back engines. An explosive shockwave erupted from the DEEP REACH.
Greck felt the shockwave and debris ripples rumble over him, and his mind went dark.
TO BE CONTINUED!
THE CREW OF THE DEEP REACH
buls is LongShot Pirate slang for “shit”