Chapter 1: Let Sleeping Zombies Lie

The sound of my staff clunked in a hollow echo through the corridor. There was no reaction. That was a good thing. Almost twenty bodies lay strewn around the hall in front of me, and not a single one moved. Sometimes being a necromancer really sucked. Scratch that--is usually sucked. I couldn't think of one other unlucky soul who had to crawl through abandoned space zombie-filled ships for a living.

It wasn't like I had much of a choice. The tattoos swirled up my bare arms and across my shoulders, burned into my skin like a metaphysical brand when the magic chose me. I couldn't hide. It was like being the Chosen One, except I got rotten food thrown at me as often as not.

I clunked my staff one more time for good measure, but once again nothing moved. I sighed in relief and lifted the radio to my lips. "The dead are out cold in here."

"Good job, Karla. Now go clear the next sector."

Bradley was a gruff cargo trawler who made his money picking up the scraps left over when the Valraiths shot through a system and torched a half dozen ships along the way. He took whatever was left over and sold it on the nearby planets. He was gruff and shrewd.

Probably the only reason he took me on.

I needed to get across the system to go ferret out where the Valraiths hid their treasure, but it wasn't gold I was after. Those peg-legged plasma-wielding bullies had taken my brother. No one else would risk their reputation or their livelihood, but as long as I stayed below the radar when we made port, Bradley would take me as far as Thalaxi.

I wasn't freeloading or anything. Being able to banish the dead tended to be a very niche job skill, but when your job was to literally pick through torched ships looking for scrap, it came in handy at lowering the threat level. Lower threat meant increased profit because we could hit up some of the riskier opportunities. Riskier like pillaging a Revaulo ghost-ship filled to the brim with space zombies.

Moving past the goopy sleeping zombies, I turned the crank to open the way to the next hallway. This one looked perfectly preserved. I guess the zombies weren't smart enough to figure out a doorknob, or this case a crank. There were a pair of side rooms--living quarters if Bradley's scan had been accurate--on the left side of the hall. On the opposite side there was a mess hall with plenty of moldy bread. That wasn't worth my time, so I moved straight to the bedrooms.

A soft blast of air pressure pushed my light brown hair back and I inched the door open with the end of my staff. "Anyone home?" I asked with, thankfully, no answer. This looked to be the captain's room and it had all the fixings of a well-off trader. Let it not be said I wouldn't loot some old dead guy's jewels to get my brother back. I absolutely did.

The next room boasted the same layout albeit with quite a lower standard of personal effects except for one item. Sitting on the bedside desk there was a book. It was a real book made with real paper. The thing looked vaguely pornographic in nature judging by the shirtless man on the cover with a rather glorious and unrealistic set of abs, but a real book meant real money. I took it too, and I had to say although the plot left much to be desired, the descriptions of some of the more intimate scenes were almost accurate.

"Engine room's clear," Bradley called over the radio. I had the volume turned down most of the way just in case it woke the sleeping horde, but it was enough to hear.

"I'm on my way." The engine room was the real prize here. I could keep whatever I found in the sleeping quarters as my pay, but what we wanted in this case was fuel, Argon to be precise. Of all the different multitudes of fuel this side of the galaxy, Argon was one of the best. All you had to do was throw a little bit out the back of the ship really fast and you get tiny bits of thrust, but it was a pressure-based system and it kept the fire risk low. All it took was a nuclear reactor to power and pressurize the engine. Why Argon and not some other, more prolific element? No idea. I'm a necromancer, not an engineer, but I think it had something to do with making money.

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I heard clanging from up ahead and physically cringed at every sound. "Eventually you're gonna hit that hard enough to wake the dead," I said, entering the engine room at the rear of the ship. The Revaulo generally made their ships with two parallel corridors in case there was ever an emergency decompression, you know like when someone brings a zombie plague fungus onboard and you need to vent them into orbit. For whatever reason they didn't do that and now I got to tiptoe around their sleeping quasi-corpses.

"If you weren't busy picking over the crew quarters you would have beaten me here and I wouldn't have needed to beat on the casing now would I?" Bradley said. He stopped hammering on the locking seal with a wrench he found and leaned against it, scratching his gray stubble and wiping the sweat off his face. "Well I'm not getting any younger. Wiggle your little butt out there and get us some man-power, would ya?"

I gave him a rude gesture and went back to go find the strongest looking zombie amongst the slumbering dead. As soon as I left the engine room the clanging resumed, making me groan. I understood Bradley wanted to get to the tanks inside the security casing, but undead hands would make both quicker and quieter work of it.

"Now which one of you uglies wants to give mama a hand?" I asked the assembled hall near the airlock. I found a larger, hulking Revaulo. I figured it was a male from the furry tail and the spots across its chest. "You'll do," I said, reaching down and touching the thing's forehead with one finger. Pressure seized me, pushing inwards like it was trying to pop me like an oxygen tank, but I fought the urge down. It was simply the manifestation of the dead-thing's will lashing out. I send calming waved of power back along my body and into the being. It was only a vestige of the free will it used to have when it was alive, so it was stupid enough to hesitate in its attack. It left itself vulnerable for just an instant, but that's all I needed. I surged power through out connection and dominated the remnant of the Revaulo. There was a really good reason everyone hated necromancers, and this was it.

"Alright. Up ya get," I called, releasing my dominating touch. It wouldn't matter now. A part of my will held the thing spellbound. It would obey me now without thought or complaint. I led the Revaulo back to the engine room and set him about the task of ripping open the security casing surrounding the Argon tanks.

"Did it, uh, did it give you any trouble?" Bradley asked, sitting down on a metal work table.

"Your attempt to make small talk is terrible."

He just shrugged and scratched his stubble again. "I'm just glad that thing's making faster work of if than I was."

The Revaulo zombie pulled back the casing revealing six pristine tanks of Argon waiting for us to steal. It was quick, clean, and silent. This was just the kind of job I liked. Bradley reached in and grabbed the first tank and put it on a hand cart he had brought from his ship. It looked full if the pressure gauge on the side was accurate. The next five took us a grand total of thirty seconds to load up and then off we went back down the corridor towards the exit.

Everything went along perfectly until the cart hit a bump in the floor and one of the tanks clanged off the cart onto the metal hull. The next sound we heard was the screeching call of the zombies waking up.

Crap.

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