Adrift

My second day with the girl and old man. Spent traversing catwalks above a four-mile, half-submerged cargo bay. The ammonia-stench burns.

Day Four: Working down through a massive battle cruiser. Upside: open corridors mean easy rappelling. Downside: ship defenses still active.

Backtracking routes for three days now. Can’t find a way past a hard vacuum zone. The girl/guide is puzzled: the atmo loss is recent.

Ninth day. The first time I’ve crawled into a derelict ship and felt as though I should take off my shoes before proceeding. We’re close.

Tenth Day: It doesn’t feel like a ship so much as a vast cathedral. To some, it is; I understand why the Church of Isabel sent Kaetlyn here.

Ship’s systems still work. Impossible, according to everything we know. Then again, ‘everything we know’ was stolen from ships like this.

What now? I explain Kaetlyn used one of the systems here; question is: which? The old man suggests the one with the folded note on top. Oh.

I want the note to be for me; for Kaetlyn to know I’d try to find her. It isn’t – just jotted notes in her handwriting – left behind.

Strange. Kaetlyn knew the ins and outs of nano-crystal difference engines when she was six. She wouldn’t need notes. /I/ probably w – A ha.

I follow the notes as best I can, rolling down through holograph scrolls and tapping glyphs. On the final semaphore, the ceiling explodes.

Amazing holo-nav display – like a planetarium built into a temple. Female voice – unknown language, but the tone says ‘captain’s journal’.

Half-blind from the holonav ‘explosion’, and I don’t understand the words, but I know what I’m seeing: the route this ship took to get here.

So, the Church whose core message is ‘reject the stars’ hires an interstellar scout to backtrack the route of a pre-Scourge survey frigate.

The old man is shaken by what we see. The girl doesn’t care. That difference is probably why she lives and he dies when we try to leave.

He slows on a open catwalk to look back when he should run. The rad-pulse from a shield-stripped engine takes him apart. I suspect he knew.

We make it across the exposed traverse surrounding the ship. Now, the girl looks back; cheeks wet, chin trembling, staring at nothing.

With only Deirdre around I’d forgotten the shock of seeing a girl’s tears. Lacking words, I share my tactic for dealing with loss. Movement.

Our first rest break. Everything I can think to say is asinine, and she wouldn’t understand anyway. I show her a picture of Kaetlyn.

She assumes Kaetlyn is dead, too. I probably get a little too loud correcting her. Another girl I can’t talk to worth a damn. Hooray.

We climb out of the belly – bowels, really – of the Drift. Going up and out is just as hard; I don’t have time to think about what I saw.

We’ve avoided every group of sentients in our way; the girl has a sense for trouble. When the nets fall, she actually looks insulted.

The ambushers are her people, which explains her surprise. They’ve added new traps due to ‘strangers’; strangers looking for me. Of course.

Seems people looking for me are shooting at those who /might/ have seen me. Worrying about Jon, Mak, and Deirdre. And Yoren, I suppose.

The headman anticipates my thoughts; tells me that my original payment – trading credit with Mak – is useless now that Mak is gone. Dammit.

Went to ground. Deciding what to do next. Tried raising the Bingturong on comms; the crew’s either radio silent, fled, or unable to answer.

The girl got me close enough to the Manifold Bazaar to see Five Finger Freight. Gone. Nothing there but rectangular rust stains on the deck.

The tribe, while helpful, doesn’t know what went on in the bazaar; only their territory. I need someone who knows all the Drift’s business.

The only person with their hands that deep into the Drift is Burns, who promised to watch my eyes boil in hard vacuum last time we met. Hmm.

Burns can be dealt with, provided you have something he wants. I don’t, aside from the eyes he’d like freeze-boiled, which isn’t… Wait.

Sitting in the Bazaar where Mak’s shop used to be, eating some meat on a stick. Tasty. If this plan kills me, it’s not a bad last meal.

[[The 3rd month of the story is done. *cheers* Read it top to bottom via the monthly archives here: http://doycetesterman.com/adrift/ ]]