Chapter 20: Chapter 20: Derelict

"You know what I don't get?" Yvian stared down the scope of the sniper rifle. What she'd thought might be a planet was just...well. A shiny dot of some sort. Probably a star. Lissa had rigged some simple radios and attached them to the inside of their helmets, so she knew the human could hear her. "Computers don't work here, right?"

"Seems that way," Mims sighted down his own scope.

"Then how come our translators work?" she asked. "Translating multiple languages and calculating the nuance of words and tones requires some super complex programs. Do you think whatever did this let translators work on purpose?"

"The translators don't work." The Captain told her. "I'm speaking your language."

"You know plavdi?" Yvian looked over at him in surprise. He continued aiming his scope at the void.

"I know the other two pixen languages, too." He shifted the rifle. "I speak nearly every language in the Confed."

"How?" She had a better question. "Why?"

"The Terran Federation didn't have access to translator implants until a decade ago. I had to learn." He lowered the rifle. "Wasn't that hard. A good QUICKLEARN program can make you fluent in a week or so. There's nothing out here. Lets head back in."

As they walked back to the airlock, a thought occurred. "If you know all these languages," she asked, "How come you can't read Krog?"

"The Federation doesn't have it in their lexicon," he grumbled. "And the Confed never bothered with language programs. You just use your implants."

"Couldn't you just get a Krog to teach you?" Lissa's voice piped in. Yvian had forgotten that she could hear them, too.

"If I told a Krog I couldn't read they'd try to shoot me." The Captain took one last look around before opening the airlock. "They think incompetence is a mortal sin."

Yvian and the human went back to the bridge. Mims piloted the ship another quarter of the way around the planet, keeping far away from the Vore infested world. They met with Lissa for a quick lunch before they went back out into the void.

"What makes you so sure something's out here?" Yvian asked after a few minutes of looking down her scope. "Something close enough that we could see, I mean? If I had a weapon that shut down everything in a sector, I wouldn't have come close before I tried to use it."

"The Vore were reaching for something." The Captain stared into the emptiness, then pressed his armored cheek against the stock of his gun. "That implies there was something to reach for. Besides, we've got nothing better to do. Lissa's still working on the drone, and she wants us out of the way."

"Nothing personal," Lissa piped in. "You're just not engineers."

After two fruitless hours, they decided to move again. As she was walking back to the airlock, a tiny glint in the distance caught Yvian's eye. She brought her sniper back up and looked through the scope. The glimmer was an object. Oddly shaped. "Mims," she called. The human turned with a questioning grunt. "I think I found it."

The ship grew in the viewport as Mims brought them closer. Yvian thought it was a Quig, at first, but as they grew closer more Xill ships came into view. One of them was a Quig, and it was dwarfed by the larger ship.

"What is that thing?" she asked. "It must be twenty kilometers long."

She hadn't realized she was speaking aloud until Mims answered. "I think that's a Yig. Xill destroyer. There've been rumors, but I've never seen one before."

The Yig was flanked by three Quigs. As they got closer, more glints appeared. Yvian scoped them with her sniper rifle, finger carefully off the trigger. Fighters. She found over a dozen of them, and another dozen clouds of debris. She scoped in on the Quigs. They appeared heavily damaged.

Mims grunted. "Looks like a big fight. Even the Yig's got some holes in it."

"What the Crunch could do that to a fleet of Xill?" Yvian's scope centered on another ship. Large. Not Xill. "I see something. Bring us closer."

"Don't give me orders," the human admonished her. "I'm the Captain. I decided whether we get closer or not."

"But you're going to bring us closer, right?"

Mims sighed.

The ship took the shape of a long crystal. If not for the large holes in its hull, revealing decks and walkways, Yvian wouldn't have guessed it was a ship at all. It was large, about the size of a Quig. It was not alone. Eleven more just like it formed a perimeter around a smaller ship shaped like an upside down diamond. The bigger ones were all badly damaged, if not outright destroyed. The small ship was less so, but still missing chunks of its crystalline shell.

"That's weird," said Mims.

"Yeah," Yvian agreed. "I've never heard of a crystal ship before."

"Not that," Mims paused. "Well, also that. We've stopped moving."

"Why?" Yvian asked. "I thought we wanted a closer look."

"I didn't stop us," Mims stared out the viewport. "Something else did."

A shot of nervous anxiety threaded its way through Yvian. "Can you get us moving again?"

Mims worked the controls. The Encounter moved forward.. Mims took his finger off the accelerator. The Encounter stopped. "Huh." The human tried again. The results were the same. "Now that I think of it, that explains a few things."

"What?" Whatever was killing their momentum had to be coming from the crystal fleet. The Xill were dead in space, probably from the same effect that had stopped the Vore and the Encounter's computers. "What things?"

"Why all these ships are still here," The Captain got back on the controls. They started moving again. "I was hoping to find something in high orbit around the planet. These guys are too far away for that. The only way they should still be anywhere near it is if the planet isn't orbiting around the star, or the ships are matching it's movement somehow. I'm betting there's some kind of field keeping all these poor bastards in place in relation to that planet down there."

"That's..." Yvian trailed off. Between the computer shutdowns and the anti-momentum field, the crystal fleet had shown technology she'd never heard of. It had also beaten The Crunch out of a fleet of Xill. Damaged as they were, the crystal ships were still active. "We should leave."

"I know." Mims kept accelerating the Encounter towards the ship in the middle. "But that's not what we're gonna do."

The Random Encounter stopped a mere ten meters from the upside down diamond. The crystal ship was much smaller than its obelisk escorts, a mere half kilometer in diameter. It was still much bigger than the human's craft. Yvian had switched her bulky and uncomfortable Confed suit for her trusty GR17 voidarmor. In addition to her standard blaster, she carried a KL53 assault spiker and had her sniper rifle strapped to her back. The human was similarly armed.

"Alright, said the Captain. "We're going in through that hull breach." He pointed. "We want intel more than anything else. Don't touch anything unless you have to. Don't shoot anything unless you have to. If we break the wrong thing it might stop jamming computers, and then it's a race between the Xill and the Vore to see who gets to kill us first." He released his grav boots and jetted for the opening. "'And be extra fucking careful. Our medpods aren't working right now."

"Got it." Yvian followed. It felt different from the other times she'd walked the void. Each movement was met with resistance, like she was moving through heavy liquid instead of empty space. She didn't like it.

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They reached the hull breach with no trouble. After passing into the ship, Mims fell, muttering a curse. The ship had gravity. Forewarned by the human's fall, Yvian was ready for the sudden shift, and landed on her feet. She'd just started to offer Mims hand when her HUD came back to life.

Mims waved her away and climbed back to his feet. "Interesting," he said. "Looks like there's no anti-tech field inside the ship."

Yvian's HUD showed all systems normal. She took a look at her surroundings. The floors and walls were of crystal, just thick enough to be opaque. They gave a gentle light. Oddly shaped clusters of different colors of crystal lined the walls at regular intervals. A few feet from where they'd entered she saw an opening in the floor. Metal rings formed a ladder leading down. Ten meters down the hall another ladder led to an opening leading up.

There were bodies everywhere.

Yvian saw three types. Metal chassis and hunks of melted slag that must once have been Xill boarding troops. Squishy lumps of pixenoid shaped organic bipeds, clothed in shimmering metal that lay like cloth over their bodies. Larger pixenoids, made of the same crystal as the ship. All dead. Most in pieces.

A year ago Yvian might have vomited at the sight of so much gore. Now she just felt a little queasy. She reached down to pick up an object lying next to one of the pulped squishy organics. A weapon, she was sure. She decided touching it was a bad idea, and settled for just giving it a look. "Looks like quite the party," she remarked as she examined the weapon. It was similar in shape to her own assault rifle, but made of a substance she didn't recognize. Black, but shiny. Obsidian was the closest thing she could think of, but it wasn't quite that, either.

"Odd," Mims replied. "The Xill aren't known for using boarding parties. Before we saw the Hub, I didn't know they had the capability."

"They must have really wanted this ship," Yvian agreed. "Or wanted to stop it."

"Wanted to take, it probably," Mims agreed. "Let's look around."

The walls opened at regular intervals, leading into chambers and hallways. The walk was surprisingly difficult as they were forced to clamber over bodies and chunks of crystal and the twisted metal of dead Xill. The corpses were not continuous, and they traversed several sections that were startlingly clean and free of debris. Eventually, they made their way to the center of the ship.

The room at the center was a nine sided pyramid. Another nine sided pyramid was at its center. A steady beam of pulsing blue light reached from the tip of the pyramid to the tip of the room's ceiling. Nine oddly shaped chairs lined the pyramid. Each chair contained a dead pixenoid. As Yvian drew closer, she saw that each creature, no. Each person had his or her hands wrapped around a different colored crystal attached to the spire. Cause of death was easy to determine. A large chunk of each person's head was missing.

Three dead Xill lay in the room. They were the same model as the ones that had been guarding the Hub. Hulking brutes with extra arms and arms that were cannons. They had been torn apart. Nine crystal guardians were in pieces around them. No, eight. There were eight. Shouldn't there be nine?

"Look out!" Mims shouted, crashing into Yvian. His jetpack shot the two of them across the room, narrowly missing the spire and it's bright blue beam. They crashed against a wall. Mims let out a grunt. Yvian looked up to see the ninth guardian.

It was very much alive.

Sound does not carry in the void, but she felt the floor vibrate as it took a step. The thing didn't seem to be in a hurry. The guardian was roughly pixenoid in shape, but its head was a curved crystal devoid of features. It hulked three meters in height, and its four digits tapered to needle points.

"What do we do?" she asked Mims. She tucked the stock of her KL53 to her shoulder, but did not raise it to point at the guardian.

"If it attacks we kill it," the human decided. "But watch your fire. We can't risk damaging any of this stuff." He holstered his weapons. "I'm going to try to communicate. Be ready if this goes south."

The human raised his hands and stepped forward. "Hello," he said through the radio. "I don't know if you can hear me, but we're not here to- SHIT!"

That guardian was much faster than its size implied. It shot forward in the blink of an eye. Mims barely avoided losing his head to a swipe of its claws. He kicked the thing with the full force of his voidarmor enhancements. The guardian was unfazed, but the kick propelled Mims across the room again.

Yvian opened fire. Her KL53 vibrated, magnetic accelerators launching steel projectiles at three times the speed of sound. The bullets sparked as they struck the crystal body, then ricocheted. Yvian stopped shooting as soon as she realized, but not before two rounds had bounced back and struck her armor. Fortunately the voidarmor held.

The gunfire hadn't hurt the guardian, but it did get its attention. Crunch, it was fast. Yvian dropped her gun and jumped sideways, enhancements keyed. She careened off a wall, but managed to roll back to her feet as she struck the ground. She had no idea how close the thing had come to striking her, and she didn't wait to see where it was. She jumped to the other side of the room as fast as she could manage.

She needn't have bothered. Mims had caught its attention again. Bolt after bolt of red light flashed out of his blaster. They didn't seem to have any more effect than the bullets. The guardian stood, considering. It turned towards Yvian.

Mims rushed it. "Sniper!" he yelled over the comms. The guardian turned back, needle sharp claws lashing out in a blur. Mims danced in close, ducking under an appendage and wrapping his own arms around its torso. He heaved upwards and fell back, suplexing the thing. Yvian felt the vibration through the floor as she brought her sniper rifle to bear.

Mims shot back to his feet the second the move was completed. Not fast enough. Crystal claws tore through the back of his voidarmor, spinning him through the air in a spray or blood. Yvian wanted to cry out, but she couldn't spare the time.

She checked targets first. The gardian didn't have anything but wall behind it. No risk of damaging anything if she missed. Of course, if she did miss, she was probably dead. Crunch, she might make a perfect shot and still die. Yvian didn't bother with the scope. At this range the magnification would be more a hindrance than anything else. She felt the hum of the machine as it charged. It needed three seconds to be able to fire. Two had passed.

The BFSR4 was a Terran weapon. Like the KL53, it used railgun technology. While the KL53 was designed for combat inside a ship, the BFSR4 was made to bring down ships by itself. It fired rounds of tungsten augmented by SHIELDBREACH technology, accelerated to ten kilometers a second. The weapon was equipped with its own inertial dampeners, and could only be used in the void. The shockwave of the round would kill anyone who fired it in atmosphere.

The guardian turned to Yvian. It had noticed her pointing the weapon. A bolt of red light struck it in the area where its face should have been. Mims, trying to buy time. It worked. The creature paused. Yvian's gun finished charging. She squeezed the trigger, begging the Bright Lady to let her aim be true.

She didn't feel anything when it fired. She squeezed the trigger and the guardian just exploded. So did the wall behind it. And the wall behind that. The tungsten round had shattered its way through the ship, leaving holes big enough to walk through all the way through its hull. Shit.

Did she just break the ship? She looked around. The spire's beam remained unchanged. The dead people still sat in their chairs, gripping their crystals. The slight hum of the ship could be felt through her boots. Everything seemed to be ok.

Relief and adrenaline and joy surged through her. Yvian crowed, "WOOO! This gun fucking ROCKS!" She took a quick look around for more threats as she shouldered her rifle. Then she hurried to Mims.

He wasn't moving. "Mims?" Three long stretches of lighter material marked where the guardian had ripped through his voidarmor. The lines stretched from the small of his back to his left shoulder. The armor had sealed itself, so he should still have air. "Mims?" He didn't respond.

Yvian pulled a connector out of her GR17 and plugged into the human's. She pulled up his status.

WARNING! CRITICAL DAMAGE! SEVERED SPINAL CORD. HEART DESTROYED. MULTIPLE ORGAN FAILURES. SEVERE INTERNAL BLEEDING. MULTIPLE BROKEN BONES. INJURY STABILIZATION PROTOCOLS ACTIVE.

WARNING! DAMAGE EXEEDS INJURY STABILIZATION PROTOCOLS. EMERGENCY MOBILITY PROTOCOLS INACTIVE. LIFESUSTAIN PROTOCOLS ACTIVE. USER'S LIFE FUNCTIONS WILL CEASE IN 1:27:48

1:27:47

1:27:46

"Oh, fuck..." Yvian whispered.

"What?" Her sister's alarmed voice radioed in. "What's happening?"

"It's Mims," Yvian told her. "He's dying."

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