Great! Now We Can All Die Together.
Posted on Mon Apr 23rd, 2018 @ 4:13am by Captain Remas McDonald & Lieutenant Commander Shadi Zatra
2,491 words; about a 12 minute read
Mission:
S1:2: Rubicon
Location: Zheng He, Wreck Interior.
Timeline: MD 14, 16.15PM
The Beta Away Team awkwardly worked the brass cube down the crawl space and into the brass corridor, careful this time not to touch the ladder rungs that had caused Bryan so much hue and cry. The cube's inertia felt off like it was far denser than its size suggested one moment and the light as a feather the next.
"Beck to Team Beta, we're heading back to you now for a fast evac back to the Traveller! Got some weird shit going on here!" the usually collected and calm voice of the Traveller's helmsman shouted back. Remas had no time to respond as the away team drifted out onto the landing platform and into a world transformed.
What had once been an empty and dark expanse of space within the wreck was now filling with light and shadow. Narrow pointed streams of brass metal could be seen lancing out of the surface of the habitation drum, pinning down or bouncing off jagged columns of black crystal that were slowly sprouting from deep within the wreck. The brass metal of the ark seemed to be fighting back to constrain or burn away the crystalline growth, and maybe the battle was not as one-sided as he thought it seemed.
The landing deck under their feet rocked drunkenly to one side as the tower they stood on was impaled on an extrusion of the glossy black material.
"Everyone hold on!" Remas shouted, clamping his boots to the deck as the illuminated white spec of the runabout drew closer. Beck might have sounded panicked and feared, but his skills were not bowed. He brought the Zheng He right up to them, tilting her back on her tail to align her large crew airlock with the tilted deck. From within the open hatch members of the Alpha, Away Team could be seen.
"Help get everyone on board! Dr. Kal, we have a patient for you."
"Get in line!" Rena snipped, probably a little harsher than intended. She was in the process of getting parts of the EV suit off of Shadi so she could see the damage. The black crystalline material was spreading steadily up the remainder of her leg, as well as a couple areas on her hands. "It will take a lot of control to not kill you if you survive this..." she muttered, beginning her assessment.
“Thou shalt do no harm Doctor,” Remas said as he passed her.
Rena glared at the patient in front of her, ignoring the remark as she got to work.
Vic setup point at the hatch as he instructed everyone to pile in ahead of him"Go go go go! I got your six!" he said aiming down sights at seemingly nothing
With both away teams now collected the runabout sealed its hatches and pressurized, allowing everyone to breathe a little easier with their helmets off.
"We'll settle for a debrief after we get back to the Traveller," Remas said, ushering the core of his brain trust towards the command section. "Bryan I want you on sensors. With all of them, what did Clee'san call it? Malignant Matter? With all that crap flying around I want to make sure our sensors can see it. No idea if it can get through a shield bubble, but best not take a chance."
“Yup, malignant matter and on it, Captain,” Bryan nodded, moving quickly and activating a console to bring up the sensor arrays. His glasses kept sliding down his nose and he pushed them up periodically as he concentrated on the readouts on the screen in front of him. His hands… he hadn’t done more than glance at them when he’d taken his gloves off… were burnt. But they weren’t bleeding or leaking and he could use them. That was all he was interested in.
"Victor, get on weapons. Zheng He might be small, but she packs in the surprises. Dorsal and ventral mounted phaser turret operated from that console," he pointed to one to Beck's shoulder. "Get on it. Black and crystal shoot, brassy metal try and leave alone. I think that's the AI that's been keeping this all in check before we arrived."
"Aye, sir." He said quickly walking to the console and getting the systems online."Weapons on standby."
Remas fell into the copilot's seat beside Beck and surveyed the scene outside. More towers of crystal were sprouting at odd angles from all sides of the habitation drum. Bands of brass could be seen glowing around them, trying to constrain them or direct them.
"Can you get us back to the hull breach?" he asked quietly.
"Probe beacon's still pinging us, so yeah," Beck said, beginning to move the runabout at a fast pace through the winding branches of death.
"Remas to the Traveller," he said, leaning into the comm pick up as he tried to drill a signal through to the outside universe. "We've encountered some sort of Self Replicating threat. We might need help making an escape and ensuring zero contamination to the Traveller."
"We hear you, Captain," Arivek's voice came through the comm system crystal clear. "Traveller moving into position to assist."
“Bingo!” Bryan fist pumped in triumph as the console in front of him chirped, then quickly checked he hadn’t almost knocked someone out. Again. “Captain, sensors reconfigured. I think we can track it now.”
“Bloody well done!” he crowed as the canopy before them lit up with the false colour sensor feed. There was a lot more to the Malignant Matter’s growth than simple exponential consumption. Bunching electromagnetic field lines, like the flowering heads of solar flares, spiked out from patches of brass metal where crystals would flourish. There was going to be a lot of data to sort through. “Begin streaming this all to the Traveller. Something should come out of all of this if we don’t make it.”
“Feed already up and running,” Bryan replied, his voice professional and to the point. “It’ll take a moment to start extrapolating the matter’s next movements.”
"Lutko, Loren, get over here, stat!" Rena called out, summoning them to the back of the shuttle. " I need you two to help me analyze this stuff, sooner than later," she gestured to the crystalline stuff. "Be careful avoid touching it, it looks like it's consuming organic matter, which means we need to find a way to remove it before it kills her." While the process was slow, if one looked closely they could see the black material creeping up Shadi's leg. At the moment, it was just above her knee, and Rena set it in her mind that she would amputate if it reached mid-thigh.
Careful not to touch the material the Captian had indicated, Loren ran his tricorder over it, examining the results carefully to ascertain the results.
The Zheng He violently rocked to port as a stream of Malignant Matter gave them a glancing blow, offset by a close shave interception from more brass.
“This is not the rough weather I am used to!” Beck snarled, tipping the runabout down so its nose pointed down towards the wide gap in the hull: there one and only escape. A cats cradle of brass and obsidian strands seemed to be fighting over the opening, lashing back and forth like slow motion lightning. In one moment golden light would vaporise a Malignant Matter growth, whilst in another, a brass trunk would erupt in jagged spurs.
“Traveller…we could use your help opening the door for us,” Remas said, seeing the blood draining from Beck’s face at the prospect of flying through that. “Anyone got any bright ideas?”
Shadi woke up hissing and screaming. "Famine take you, milk-drinking son of a mammal!" Looking around, Shadi realized she was in a runabout. "What... what happened..." Then her eyes fell to her missing foot. "... to my starving leg?!!!"
"Someone keep her from trying to help more than she already has!" Remas said, eyeing the screens, "Okay, Victor I want you to plow us a path with the phaser turrets. Keep on firing whilst we dive through. Beck try and keep us from the larger concentrations. Bryan keep the Chief's targeting computer updated as best you can"
He reached out and tapped the comm.
"Ari, we're going to shoot our way out. Anything comes flying out after us I want you to give it both of the bow mounted cannons. And...if you see the Runabout exit the Ark with any sort of black crystalline growths attached to it, fire on us. Do not let us land," Remas said gravely. "Confirm you understand and we'll get started."
The comm was silent for a few moments. Remas glanced over at Victor, before looking back at the console, verifying that the channel was open.
"I uh..." Ari's voice sounded confused, and just slightly guilty. He audibly cleared his throat. "Aye, Captain. The canons are charging now. Your orders are understood."
For just a moment Remas closed his eyes and thought. He looked back along the path that had been made for him. From the failed colony ship Belle Terre that fell among orphaned stars three centuries before, bringing the Rish to life as wanders bound to their ships and wills. And then to the final meeting between his father and himself, where he had forsaken a name for a uniform. That path was long, and lead to here and now. And by Blue Fire, it would not end here.
Maker Of Ways, place before me a path which sings to a wanders heart. Show me to you.
"Bryan call out targets as they come! Victor shoot us clear of this!" he turned his head to look at Beck. "Punch it."
And Beck did. The twin impulse drives that ran flush along the fuselage where the wings met the hull roared. The inertial compensators lagged as untamed gee forces pulled at the crew within, as the ship began a spiraling dive towards the sealing hull breach.
"Impact in ten seconds, Victor make me a hole to fly through!" Beck shouted as a network of black crystal strands began to grow across the breach like a scab.
"With pleasure!" Vic retorted as the hull whined from the phasers and reverberated from the launching of micro-torpedoes. "How's that?!"
"IT'S ALL TERRIBLE!" Beck yelled, and the Zheng He barreled into the aftermath of the explosions. With twists and turns, the runabout threaded the needle of the hull breach, wretching around as trunks of black matter lanced out to bar their way. All the while the phaser turrets spat fire, clearing a path.
And then there were stars...and then the alarms started.
"What now?" Beck groaned.
Behind the runabout, as it powered away towards the Traveller, the furthest of the engine nacelles of the Ark began to crumble. Panels buckled and were forced inward, terrible gashes in the hull began to open. Along the hull nearest the engine debris began to spiral up towards it, finding these opening's in the nacelle and jammed into it.
With a final heave, the metal shrunk inwards, twisting around as untempered gravity waves rocked local space. A glowering black void could be seen, the curtain behind which a singularity lay in rapturous hunger.
The Ark was coming apart, its engines once harnessing a pair of black holes how releasing them to finish off both the Ark and the Malignant Matter.
"I am not kidding. Where the shit is my leg?" Shadi snapped. Her head whipped around back the way we came. "Did he... did he eat it?" The mere thought visibly incensed her. "And great Goddess does it itch." She reached her claw down to scratch at the nub.
As if on due the black crystal beginning to aggregate around the stump of Shadi's leg reacting to her present, sensing a new and exciting vector to further assimilation of raw material. Like a ferromagnetic fluid, it began to bunch up, slipping through the broken flesh like it wasn't there until clusters of razor-sharp matter reached for probing fingers.
Rena quickly reached up and slapped Shadi's hand away. "Don't touch it! It appears to consume organic matter." Turning to the two working nearby, she urgently asked, "did you find anything??"
Onir looked up at the doctor and shook his head. If they had more time, maybe, but everything was going so quickly that he barely had time to scratch the surface of this thing, let alone help find any potential weaknesses.
"Fine. Get me the emergency kit and load a hypospray with 2ccs of acetaminophen. We need to amputate, it's spreading too quickly," she said. To Shadi, she added, "I'm sorry, this is probably going to hurt."
Loren hated what he knew was coming, what he knew was necessary, "Once the leg is off," he said dispassionately, "we may need to burn it. I know that doesn't sound right, but it may be the only way to stop it from spreading. And a prosthetic leg might take some getting used to, but you can make the adjustment and might even be an improvement in the long run."
Shadi crossed her arms in a huff. "It's just like puberty all over again. Do what you must. Make it clean so the new one will grow back evenly." The unspoken truth was that Saurians often suffered dual amputations for proper alignment of regrown extremities. If the Blood Goddess favoured Shadi, that would not be necessary.
Beck pushed the engines to their maximum output, but even that was not nearly enough to give them much acceleration. His once glance at Remas told him everything he needed to know.
"Zheng He to Traveller, lock a tractor beam on us and prepare to go to warp! The Ark's coming apart and once the engines come offline the dampening field should stop. But, downside, a pair of artificial black holes are going to want to collide! I don't think the resulting detonation will be to our benefit," Remas said, leaning his head back to shout to the rest. "Everyone hold on to something!"
"Why don't we have seatbelts!!?" Vic said as he gripped the panel in front of him as hard as he could, his knuckles turning white.
With a suddenness that only an astronomic event can have, the world behind the runabout and the Traveller was illuminated by a ghostly blacklight. Streamers of black crystal shattered under the assault of titanic gravity waves and the brassy remains of a civilisations hope melted beneath the glare. The two black holes met, and for a brief moment, something very wrong began to happen to the universe.
And then there was nothing...
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