Frontieria - Part 5

“Of course Wings is there first, but she doesn’t have the medkit!” Patel sighed in frustration.
“Hold your kytaals, Patel,” Solari replied. “Commander, ETA?”
“Right about... now.” The shuttle docked on the other side of the connecting chamber with an audible clunk. “John,” Ness instructed as she flipped backwards out of her seat, “open the door. Chong and Patel, treat the worst injuries first. Solari, Artrin, you’re with me. Grab some O2 masks. We’ll be doing a sweep to make sure no one is left behind.”
Upon completion of docking, the airlock opened with a creak, revealing a connecting chamber dimly lit by red emergency lighting. The angry patter of micrometeorites ripping through the vessel was underscored by the ominous hiss of escaping air; none of the usual spacecraft sounds were present. About twenty-three people were gathered in the room, anxiously waiting. Several of them had red-stained bandages in various places, and a few were floating about on null-gravity stretchers.
Wings had already begun a rudimentary triage, and she ushered the ones who were in the worst condition towards Chong and Patel. Some of the injuries looked downright nasty, as they were festering and infected. What the hell had happened here?
"A lot of people for a fairly small craft..." Linik mumbled under his breath as he scurried around to apply O2 masks. He began herding everyone to one area as he worked on sweeping the rest of the room for stragglers as well.
“We’re missing seven,” Wings muttered back to Linik. “The brief said this ship was carrying thirty people. I count twenty-three. Seven people are still somewhere inside this deadship.”
Patel, overhearing Fletcher and Artrin, nodded. “Several of these injuries are days old, too. Something is very wrong.”
A tall, dark-skinned woman with very short hair approached Ness and her party as they disembarked the shuttle. “Commander Moreva, yes?”
“Da. Captain Mwanu?”
The captain nodded. “Thank you so much for coming to our aid. We were terrified that no one had even received our distress signal.”
“I’m just glad we were near enough to help,” Ness admitted. “I must ask- do you have any idea why or how your vessel failed?”
Numi hesitated for a fraction of a second. “I do not. Our technician may, but he’s still in the engineering section. I’ve ordered him to abandon ship but he refuses to come out. He won’t say why.”
Ness nodded thoughtfully. “We’ll get him. Engineering is that way, yes?” She pointed down a corridor dimly lit by flickering red emergency lights.
“Correct,” Captain Mwanu confirmed.
As the trio began to drift towards the foreboding hallway, Numi grabbed Ness’ arm. Making eye contact, she whispered: “For your own sake, please be safe.” With that, she drifted away to help the others with medical duties.
Commander Moreva stared at Mwanu as she floated off. "That... did not sound good. Fletcher!"
"Yessir?"
"When you're loaded up, take them all to the Asteria. Then come back for us."
"Aye aye, Commander! Good luck!"
—
"Shit!" A man snarled as he stared pleadingly at his computer terminal. Why couldn't he figure this out? He had to unravel the secrets of the strange device before abandoning ship. It couldn't be carried off, as it was too dangerous to handle without the proper equipment, which they didn't have. "Come on, come on, come on!" He growled as he rubbed his temples.
A light-haired woman poked her head through the doorway. "We managed to bar the other one in Subsection C. For now. Anskisov, have you cracked the-"
"NO! Of course I haven't, Hsai!" The man whirled around, putting a momentary pause on tearing at his greying hair. "Nobody's spoken this entire language family in thousands of years, much less used the same binary structure. We'd need the AIs at fucking Chiron to even try to decode it. But this stupid piece of shit-" he pounded the terminal to illustrate his point "-won't finish the download in anything under a century!"
"Damn, okay!" Hsai huffed. "There's a whole shipload of search and rescue on board. We need to go. Like, now. Maybe we can outrun the other one and leave it stranded in this shitstorm."
Anskisov sighed with frustration. “I know, I know. But... we might never get a chance to study one of these again. This is a window into the galaxy’s past that we need to take the chance to look through. Otherwise...” he trailed off, staring at the complex alien machinery sprawled before him. “You know the importance of this... thing as well as I do. Five hundred years of digging into the galactic past with only the barest hint here and there about the satyrs and whoever they were fighting, and suddenly this-“ he pointed aggressively “-literal mortus ex machina shows up on our cosmic doorstep. And we’re supposed to throw it away because, what? Its sibling hurt some people? No.” His face softened a bit. “You can leave if you like. I won’t put anyone else in jeopardy. But I’ve worked too hard to give up now. I stay.”
—
Linik cocked his head as the party made their way down the dim-lit corridor. "What kind of ship is this? Heh, maybe it's like a cheesy movie and they made some sort of monster that's stalking them," he joked, but his voice held a nervous edge.
“We didn’t make it,” a quiet voice coughed from a dark side corridor.
Ness whirled towards the sound, leaping off the wall and rocketing down the shadowy hall. “Who said that? Are you hurt?” She activated her helmet’s spotlights and swept her gaze around. Her lights fell upon a dark-haired young man floating, curled up, near the “ceiling,” deep red staining his sleek white scientist’s jumpsuit.
He stared at her in shock, his eyes pleading. “You-” he coughed again, small droplets of blood floating out of his mouth. “You have to- you have to get me out of here.”