After the alien attack: I punched the heading into my touchpad.
"Being a Scotsman in Space in't really all its cracked up te be,
Pal," said Dave Fraser, puffing on a cigarette.
"It's no like Mr Scott
on the Enterprise, God naw. It were more like being a stableboy, really.
Muckin' out cages and hosin' down wee beasties. Och, it were a shite
job."
Dave Fraser is the only surviving crew member of a deep space
transport vessel known to frontier authorities as K147729. Prior to its
wreckage being discovered by a naval patrol, it had been observed and
scrutinized intermittently by customs. However, despite suspicions of
smuggling, there were never any obvious transgressions of the law that
could be proved against her.
Dave is a short, wiry man with cropped hair and a straggly growth
of beard. His eyes are darting and haunted, and he drags heavily on the
cigarette he wields in a shaking hand. This is a hardened space veteran
who has seen much, but now perhaps, has seen too much. He has walked on
the surface of strange, lawless worlds where humans have been abandoned
and left to themselves for centuries. He has witnessed wonders and
events that belong in some old-fashioned sword and sorcery fantasy
rather than in an ordered, sane universe.
I'm told the authorities don't seem to know quite what to do with him. Until they rule out the possibility that he murdered his crew-mates
himself, he'll stay right here on the interrogation block.
"I didn'y murder anyone! If ye're lookin' fer someone to put in
the picture for murder, it'd be that wee Zarrian bastard, Seamas. Aye,
Zarrian! Don't look so skeptical, Pal. It's a real place."
Dave states that on board they had a number of non-coalition
citizens working, with fake papers and passports. One of these was a native
of the planet
Zarr yet no record of any such world exists. He was taken
aboard as a boy, to provide help with menial tasks and to facilitate transfers between ships and various on world traders.
"The wee scrote was voracious! He was like a fucken termite! He
burrowed through our entire library in under two years, but when he came
aboard he was a dirty barefoot farm lad who could'ny read. At the end
he knew more about the ship's systems than anyone except the skipper,
and mebbe one or two others. And then there were the disappearances. The
mutilations. The bizarre occurrences that just happened to benefit one
person. Aye, him. I'm tellin' ye, the lad was evil like. Son of the
devil or something."
Dave paused for a moment and drew longingly on the cigarette until it was exhausted. He looked up and began to recount the final hours of
the doomed ship.
I hammered the information into the system as he spoke:
The cage was broken, its seams had been burst by its
introduction to a bulkhead. The alien creatures that had been in the
cage were now long gone. Not that Dave was sad to see them go. They were repulsive, pale things that looked for all the
world like todgers with legs.
"Who stowed the cage?" the Skipper demanded, upon being notified of the escapees. Today he was wearing
his long mustaches plaited, and had on his sparkling South Seas pirate
suit. Old Wang had turned a bit eccentric in his long years in space.
"I stowed the cage, Skipper," Dave said to him. "But I stowed it
correctly. All proper. There must've been a weak link in the chain or
something. A fault in the tie-down!"
The Skipper looked him in the eyes; they'd shipped together for a
lot of years, and Dave could tell he was believed. He knew Dave did his job
well; it wasn't the best job in the world but it was important and
rated a high cut of the loot.
"Find out what these creatures can do and if we can catch them easily. If there's no way to catch them, we exterminate them!"
Captain Wang had spoken. Dave sought out the resident expert
on the native life of the planet
Zarr, himself a native. Young Seamas was an unremarkable looking fellow.
Brown hair, blue eyes and about 6 foot of lanky frame. His manner was
quiet and brooding, and often he would break into fits of rage and
yelling over seemingly inconsequential things. Once he had had to be
stopped from clubbing another crewman to death with a support strut
pulled from a table. He was always watching, always sneaking up on the crew
when they least expected to find him there. Out of all the things Dave had seen, it was this simple looking boy that made his hair tingle, ready to stand on end.
Dave found Seamas working on some
electrical equipment in the loft.
"Hi there, Seamas. Hows it going?" Dave greeted him in a friendly fashion.
"Dave," he nodded in reply.
"Just a quick question, mate. Do you know anything about the wee creatures we're carrying, the ones that look like todgers?"
"They're called 'Knobuloc's Folly' or Knobmice. They'll eat
anything. They'll chew through copper and insulation. They don't die
easily, 'cos they eat poisons and don't breathe."
As he spoke, Seamus
kept working on the complex electronics with a deft touch. Dave could see
why he wasn't cleaning out muck for him down in the cargo spaces.
Skilled technicians were a rare and valuable breed out here.
"Dammit. So how do I get rid of them?"
"You hit them. With one of these," he replied, handing Dave a 12 pound lump hammer. "Hard."
So off he went around the ship tracking the little bastards down.
They were hard to find, and they did indeed eat anything and everything.
The first one he smashed with the hammer was surprisingly hard to
kill....it was like hitting a rubber tyre. The hammer
bounced back, braining Dave in his thick forehead. It occasioned much amusement
from the crew, watching old Dave crawl around the deck after these things.
Especially Seamas.
The mirth died off quickly enough when serious
things started to get eaten. Valuable mementos, cargo, the captain's
furry rug and the ships store of flour. The captain assigned helpers,
and Dave coordinated the search for the remaining beasts. Finally the body count against the cargo log showed they were down to a single fiend. Somewhere.
Panic erupted at
the loss of sensors. All the techies were clustered around the
stations in the control centre scratching their heads and talking
hysterically. It appears the final beastie had been found. It was fried and
blackened inside the racking for the sensor control equipment.
There wasn't much Dave could do at this point. The ship was drifting
sightless through dangerous unpatrolled space, crippled by small
penis-like creatures. Dave reflected on the insanity of it all, but insanity is commonplace
when you deal with the company he keept.
Cargo was now running smoothly, so he
wandered away to let the boys do their jobs and headed for the mess.
Passing the junior quarters, something strange happened. The
air became warm, tinged with a metallic smell he couldn't identify.
Colour began to leach out of everything as if the very reality of
timespace
was being disturbed and strange
blaafing noises echoed around the
walls like the mating call of some deranged walrus.
Dave staggered, rubbed his eyes, thinking he'd overdone it crawling
around after the beasties. When he opened them, that strange bastard
Seamas was standing barely a foot away looking at him as if he was going
to cave his head in.
"You right, Dave?" he asked innocently.
"Yeah thanks mate," he replied, pushing past him quickly. He'd had all he could take of Seamas's company for one day.
With the techies working non stop to rectify problems, the skipper
paced around the place in a barely concealed rage, kicking people and
smashing breakables. Not happy.
When it happened, it happened fast. The crew had barely enough time to arm and prepare before the
boom.
Abominable aliens swooped
down on Dave and the crew, seemingly out of the walls of the bulkhead. In the confusion, Dave thought he saw a strange figure standing unscathed out in the midst of
it, laughing with one of the crew in pieces at his feet.
Shots went in all directions; a giant morass of confusion, screaming and
blood.
"Fuck you beasties!!" yelled Dave at their chaotic heads as they came for him.
They were doomed. They couldn't win against sheer numbers. At the last it was some freak of the cosmos that saved Dave. Just as
the last of his comrades fell dead from being gouged by some enormous
spiked beast apparatus, strange
scythe-blades started
flying out of nowhere. They had knobby weights on their ends that sliced and diced in some impossible, yet clever articulated fashion.
"One minute: extremely humongous army of bad tempered big fanged
beasty fuckers, next minute swiss dicer and chip maker has visited and
it's bony beastie salad all around," Dave concluded, breathlessly.
"I tell ye, I haven't seen a retreat
that quick ever. As those alien bastards fucked off they left the big hole in tha
side of our ship, rendering it fucked. Everyone was dead. I lived for
three days in that fucken' suit before the navy boys showed up and
dragged my arse here. And that's where we're at, Pal."
He finished recounting the story like he'd just relived it. I couldn't help thinking there was something nasty out there, beyond the rim, that we'd had no prior knowledge of.
Ranted by Doomboy
