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FedGrav Corporate Report:
Agent: Reginald Strife
January, 2394
Mission: “Find and observe the faction ‘Electric Mayhem’ to verify their claim as effective combatants for the coming war.”
Just under a month after leaving Earth I managed to make contact with the formerly considered terrorist, now considered freedom fighting movement known as Electric Mayhem, to see if they were, as they had declared themselves last month, an ideal candidate for corporate investment in the war against the Shi. I found that money was worth a lot more than my contacts with Earth out here, so I have attached an expense report, have fun with that. The entire moon of Europa was preparing itself for what the people believe to be an inevitable war; I saw propaganda posters on every surface flat enough to bear one, many of them praising the associates of Electric Mayhem. All this made me very excited to meet with them. After countless bribes I was able to secure a position on a resupply ship scheduled to dock with the “Muppet of Time” a Corsair-Class Cruiser that Mayhem is rumored to use as their center of operations. There I stayed two days and saw more than I neither needed to see nor ever wanted to see.
Rumor had it that the Muppet never stops moving. The rumors were true. My supply ship had to be flown in at an intercept trajectory and was brought into the hanger by the Muppet’s tractor beam, all while maintaining full speed. I thought that after a month of working my way into the Cartel’s system that the difficult part of my journey was over. It had in fact only begun. Upon arriving on the hanger’s deck I asked around for a deck officer. Most of the crew seemed to ignore me, but eventually one pointed to a man on the far side of the deck, talking with another crew mate. “Be careful though,” he warned, “he’s chewing out Cory again.” I approached the man, but the closer I got the more I could see that he wasn’t yelling at the lad, but calmly and politely explaining what seemed to be proper protocol for transport of rockets on the hanger deck. He was an older man, and likely Gongen by the looks of him, but while he talked he held a lit cigarette in a sleek robotic hand, which I guess made him a Maverick by nature. Eventually they finished their conversation and Cory walked off muttering dejectedly about the man being a “hard ass” and making him out to be the bad guy. I then approached him, the first, as I would soon find out, of the members of Electric Mayhem that I would soon meet.
“Greetings.” I said politely, “My name is Reginald Strife and I represent FedGrav’s interests in the coming war. I have come to meet Electric Mayhem as an official attaché and write a report that will help determine FedGrav’s interest in corporate sponsorship of your…” I took another look around at the cluttered hanger deck. “Organization.”
He stood there for a second, moving slowing as he puffed on his cigarette. Then in a soothing, accented voice chirped “It is very nice to meet you, mister attaché, my name is Oiji.” Then nothing. He just kept staring at me, smoking, like he was waiting for me to do something in particular.
Eventually I asked “Is there any chance I can meet with Radical Doitzel, he is your commander, correct?”
“Yes.” He said and continued to stand there.
“Preferably soon?”
“Why are you in such a rush, you are on the ship, he will not be running away from you. Come have some tea, would you like a cigarette?”
“No thanks,” I didn’t want to explain that he shouldn’t be smoking in an oxygen rich environment.
“Well then, the least I can do is introduce you to the rest of the crew.”
I didn’t want to follow him, but I had no real choice, and if Doitzel was on the ship, as Oiji had suggested then I was bound to see him sooner or later. Walking through the decks I was amazed at the size of the ship. Although it was Maverick built, the ship’s size was on par with many of Earth’s dreadnoughts. Eventually we arrived at a door that opened into something that was very much not a ship at all, but rather on the other side of the door I was suddenly in a war zone; a desolated city covered with contorted bodies. The low rumble of fire and plasma bursts filled the air. I nearly panicked at the sudden transition, but Oiji only stood there.
“Celeste!” he cried out, though when I say cried, really he only reached normal human volume. “There is someone here who needs a tour!”
Responding to the noise a Shi warrior charged over a pile of debris in front of us floating with incredible speed towards me; a staff blazing with electrical energy in one hand.
Out of nowhere a plasma blast caught the Shi in what I would say was its chin, stopping it in its tracks. This was followed by a continuous burst of automatic fire which riddled the Shi, forcing it to the ground. A Maverick woman stood up over a piece of rebar and cement, continuing to fire on the Shi as she slowing walked towards it, the massive ammo clip on her rifle running out only once she had reached the tattered corpse. The Shi was obviously dead, but she then replaced the clip and fired point-blank into its head for another 20 seconds sending bits of flesh and bone skipping across the ground before she turned to meet us. She smiled offhandedly at Oiji.
“Morning, Cabby.”
“You know that there are not mornings in space, Celeste.”
“It’s a phrase you goofy shit. Who the hell is this?”
“Oh, this man is another representative from Earth here to see us fight the Shi.”
My heart was still racing, “I’m pretty sure I just saw enough.”
Both of them started laughing. At that moment the entire warzone disappeared and slowly melted away into a grid pattern. It was all a holographic simulation, a big one. I was stunned at the level of technology these Mavericks possessed.
“How, and why did you built such a thing?”
It’s a holodeck. Doitzel designed it, and like everything Doitzel makes, he did it, as he says; “because I could.” When she quoted Doitzel, I couldn’t help but notice a slightly pompous tone. This Doitzel character was looking more and more like the sort of person who needed to be in the report.
“So, when do I get to meet this commander of yours?” I asked Celeste.
“Oh, he’s no use to anyone for a while still, sleeping off another hangover, but if you’re interested in this sort of tech you should really talk with Sparky.”
Without a word Celeste led me out of the holodeck and down another series of corridors. I was beginning to feel a bit nervous, like I was lost, doubly so after I noticed Oiji was no longer there. So far I had seen no form of organized logic on this ship; no one who could really point me to who I really ought to be talking to, or where I ought to be, but then perhaps this “Sparky” fellow could help me make sense of a few things.
He didn’t. Sparky, or as the plaque on the door to the science lab said, which by the way was the first time I have ever heard of a science lab being on a warship, “Sparky, Lord of Science and Keeper of the Ancient Scrolls of our Greater Lord and God, David Bowie,” was, in the best words I can muster, clinically insane. A second plaque on the door read 0 days since last major explosion. The doors to the lab opened and a scorched man wearing the remains of leather armor and a loincloth walked out, wiped the zero off the sign, and carefully drew another zero in its place before stomping back into the lab. A small hoard of creepy robotic spiders with bright red eyes swarmed out into the hall during the few seconds the doors had been open. Celeste was completely unphased by all of this.
“Huh, he’s wearing the barbarian suit, must be casual Friday again.” And with that she led me into a room littered with the most terrifying display of unregulated science I have ever seen. From beneath a pile of scrap I could hear what I assumed was Sparky’s voice:
“HOW DO THEY EXPECT ANY PROGRESS, BOWIE-DAMNED BADGER’S ALWAYS GETTING IN MY WAY! BOWIE-DAMNED BADGER’S IN MY SOCK DRAWER!”
I definitely did not want to meet this person right now; I needed to find someone logical, someone who didn’t have anything to do with the machine on the wall next to me that, if the control settings were accurate, was able to slice, dice, and/or peel an armadillo in less than a minute. With my life flashing before my eyes I quickly turned to Celeste. “I seem to be feeling a bit sick, is there a medical quarters on board, a medical quarters with a doctor?”
“Probably the adjustment to the Grav 5 system,” she replied “Hey Sparky, this guy needs medical treatment!”
“Put him on the slab, I still have those robot cat legs for Doitzel!”
The feeling of defeat and utter fear I felt in that moment was truly the touch of death. Celeste looked at me and laughed.
“You honestly thought that Sparky was the medic didn’t you? What do you think we’re crazy or something? Let’s take you to see Natsu.”
My body was so badly shaken that Celeste had to help me to walk out of the lab and down the hall. As we moved away I thought I heard an upset Sparky shout back:
“Fine! Guess I’ll just be hanging on to these perfectly good cat legs then!”
When we arrived at the medical bay, I slowly came to ease, putting aside the panic attack that I had been bordering on. The facilities there were clean, white, and as far as I could tell, up to Earth and Gongen standards, maybe even a bit more. Celeste stopped at the door and rapped her knuckle on a sign that read; “No one except Fei enters Medical Quarters without the presence of Dr. Natsu.” Inside I could see a young lady cleaning medical equipment but no one else, I could only assume that she was Fei. I was also beginning to assume that Electric Mayhem had some strange fascination for communication with signs.
Eventually a young man, who again looked like he came straight from Gongen walked up to the door, opened it and turned to us.
“The doctor is in, how can I help?”
“This man is another Earther representative here to review us, says that he’s got Grav sickness.”
Natsu took a quick look at me. “No he doesn’t.”
“Hrm, well, I’m feeling much better now, thanks.” I muttered, amazed at the skill that this doctor possessed. “But while I’m here I was hoping I could take a look around your station for my report. Is that alright?”
“Of course,” said Natsu passively, “come on in.”
Upon entering the bay Fei looked up for a moment to see who I was, went back to cleaning a scalpel, and then her eyes quickly shot back up to me and glared with intense hostility. I could tell that she was straining herself to lower the scalpel in her hand and place it on the table.
“Umm, Hi,” I said, feeling very much in the spotlight, though I quickly realized that Natsu and Celeste didn’t seem to notice that anything had happened. Fei just backed away, glaring at me, then turned and started cleaning something on the far side of the room. I decided to address Natsu instead.
“This is an incredible station you have here, doctor, even by hospital standards this place is very well kept.”
“Yes, well, I do what I can; it’s not up to par with my hospital, but close. Doitzel and I spare no expense to keep this place loaded with the finest medical technology in the system. If only he would stop to resupply every once and a while….”
“It seems very well stocked to me,” I said picking up a bottle of medicine and observing the label. “Ah, penicillin, an oldie but a goodie. You know I studied a bit of medicine myself, back home and…”
I noticed a look of distress on Natsu’s face. He wasn’t even looking at me anymore, rather staring at the bottle of penicillin. With shaking hands and a painful sigh Natsu reached up and took the bottle from the shelf, placed it back, took it again, threw it angrily into a biohazard disposal bin and then turned to me and growled:
“Get the hell out of my infirmary, before I have to break my oath! Karsu!”
On the last words Natsu snapped his fingers and I felt a sturdy hand grab the back of my collar and drag my confused self back out into the hallway. There I was dropped and Celeste came out to help me up. I looked back into the infirmary to see Natsu in a panic scrubbing down the entire shelf. Fei stood in the side window glaring at me; a big grin on her face.
“You know you’re doing much better than the last attaché that Earth sent,” Celeste said.
“And what happed to him?” I had no idea that there had been others before me.
“He pissed off Michael, then accidentally fell down the elevator core and landed on some bullets.”
This didn’t sound good. My mind quickly went back to the transport that brought me here. I wondered if there was a chance that they hadn’t left yet, or for that matter if I could even find my way back to the hanger through those twisted corridors.
“If it was an accident, they why did you mention that he angered, Michael was it?”
Celeste slapped me on the back. “I see that look, you worry too much. I tell you what, let’s go get some lunch, I’m starving.”
We started down to what I assume was the mess hall, but then turned a corner to face something that instantly set me back on edge, ready to panic. There in front of us was a Quay. I had heard a rumor that a Quay had spoken on behalf of Electric Mayhem during the Earther-Gongen negotiations a few months ago, but I thought they had been only that; rumors. The Quay seemed to be arguing with another crewmember, it’s bone-chilling roar echoing down the hall. I couldn’t believe that anyone would be brave enough to stand before such a huge, spiderlike creature and argue with it. Just then the Quay turned, saw me and raced down the hallway, it’s spiky legs denting the walls and floor as it took footholds on whatever it pleased. Just before plowing into me, which I’m sure would have turned me into a fine, red mist, it abruptly stopped.
“You! Swishy Earth-spawn! You are not a crewmate,” he growled. “You will settle our dispute.”
My blood froze, I did my best to manage a nod in agreement. I was wrong before. This was what death felt like.
“Am I, or am I not, a bunny?”
“Umm… no-not a bunny?” I stammered.
With a roar the Quay angrily punched a hole into the wall with its claw. Several of Sparky’s spider robots fell out and immediately set to work repairing the hole. I was terrified, everything about this ship was madness. And why the hell were there so many spiderlike things here. If I were arachnophobic I would have had a heart attack by now. Then again, that seemed like a good alternative at the time as the Quay raised its claw as if it might strike me down. Just then Celeste jumped in the way and patted the Quay on the claw.
“There, there, Aequitas, you are a beautiful, fluffy bunny. This man is confused, please don’t kill him.”
“But Doitzel said we could kill not-crewmates.” He growled.
“Doitzel said we could not kill crewmates. It doesn’t always apply the other way around. The important thing is that you are a bunny. Right?” She looked at me. “Right?”
“Yeah, right. A bunny.” I managed to blurt out.
Aequitas slowly lowered its claw, seeming, as far as I could see for a Quay, a bit perplexed. As he walked off I could see the other crewmate from before had already left, maybe he wasn’t so brave after all. We continued on to the mess hall. This ship was a nightmare. I could only hope that there would be no surprises at lunch.
“Mess-hall” was the right word for it. The place was cluttered with unwashed dishes and more than a few drunken crew members. On one side of the room there was a group of mean looking Maverick soldiers being scolded by a young Gongen girl. The mess covered every inch of the long table.
“I don’t see a place to sit.”
Celeste rolled an unconscious crewmate off the table.
“There we go,” she chirped and motioned for me to sit down.
Lunch was stew and a Twinkie, which was actually a little better than I had expected, but still very strange, however all the fear and confusion had made me very hungry. I had just started eating when another member of Mayhem joined us; the young Gongen girl. I never came to understand why it was this girl was on that ship, but she seemed to be the only member of the crew that displayed both sanity and civility.
“Good day, sir, my name is Hotaru, it is very nice to make your acquaintance.”
Her courtesy caught me off guard, I had not expected it in a place that looked just like a spacer bar on the rim.
“Umm…Reginald Strife, I’m reviewing Electric Mayhem.”
“Oh…” She paused for a bit. “Please stay away from the elevator.” She paused again. “Actually, maybe you should stay away from Electric Mayhem all together.”
“As much as I wish I could it’s my job,” the truth was at the time I was beginning to feel a little more confident in my survival rate. After all, if it was possible to find someone as cooperative as Hotaru on this ship, perhaps there was hope that there would be others that would be as friendly. “Besides, I doubt things can get too much worse.”
For a moment it looked at me like she was going to say something, but then she picked up her dishes and stood up from the table.
“Sorry about the mess, I try to keep this place clean but…” she glared at the other group of massive cyborg soldiers who looked very much emasculated and tried to avoid eye contact with her, “some people need to learn how to have respect for where they live.”
“Are you leaving?” She had only just sat down, and hardly eaten anything.
“Be careful, she mumbled, looking scornfully at the floor. “If you haven’t met Doitzel yet then there is good opportunity for things to get worse.” Then she walked away with her dishes.
I looked down and noticed that my Twinkie was gone. That was odd.
“Well, I see you’ve finished your food.” Celeste said.
“But, I didn’t…” She grabbed my arm as pulled me from the table, leaving our dishes behind.
“No sense in waiting around, still plenty of things to see.”
She took me back into the kitchen where I was introduced to an eighth member of Electric Mayhem; the ship’s cook and chief engineer. Needless to say I didn’t eat anything except some protein packs I had brought along for the rest on my stay on the ship.
“Morning Ellodie!” Celeste called.
“Hey Celeste, but you know there’s no such thing as mornings in space.”
“You’ve been talking to Cabby again haven’t you? What’s cookin’?”
“Are you asking about the food or the toxins?”
At first I thought she was joking. I should have known better at this point. It was difficult to tell for sure underneath all the oil on her face, but Ellodie appeared to be very young. With one hand she stirred a kettle of stew and with her other, robotic arm stirred something that had a biohazard label on it.
“Are you sure that both of those should be cooking on the same stove?” I asked nervously.
She laughed. “Like a little arsenic ever killed anyone.”
Just then one of those creepy spider-bots scampered in. From a speaker somewhere on it came Sparky’s voice, which still gave me chills.
“Hey Ellodie, can you make me some of that iocane tea again? Stuff was delicious.”
“You know we have an intercom Sparky, you don’t need to keep sending eye-ders to make orders.”
“No, I took my intercom apart. I needed the parts to build a working mini model of the Large Hadron Collider.”
Ellodie laughed again. “Alright, I’ll send some on up, right after I finish Doitzel’s order for that engine-stilled moonshine, ‘Brain Grease’ he calls it, loves the stuff.”
“Well at least that makes two of you.” The voice called as the spider ran off.
Ellodie went back to work stirring the pots, and I couldn’t help but notice that it looked like she had switched the spoons that she was stirring each with. Suddenly my lunch wasn’t sitting so well with me and I asked Celeste to take me somewhere else.
At this point it was difficult to say whether any member of Mayhem was better or worse than the others, except Hotaru of course, but the next one I met was certainly different. Celeste took me up to the secondary command deck. “Command” wasn’t a word I would have used to describe the place. The room was cluttered with massive computer terminals and communications equipment. Teams of engineers sat around playing games, chatting and drinking coffee.
“Hey Kalingkata!”
“Oh, hi Celeste,” he grumbled, “we’re out of milk, tell Doitzel.”
“I’ll let him know. Listen, this here’s one of those Earther diplomats that want to review us, his name’s… wait, what was your name?”
“Reginald Strife, from FredGrav I tried to say as respectfully as possible, despite the fact that obviously no one here was returning the favor.”
“Oh you’re from Earth?” Kalingkata droned. “We were just talking about Earth. I have a question for you; so I know on Earth you guys totally murder babies with money, right? So, like, how does that that work exactly? Do you stuff the creds down their throats or is it, like, some kind of social program?”
“What!?” This fellow was so fresh out of Gongen that his footprints were still probably red. It seemed like there were as many Gongens on this Maverick ship as there were Mavericks. Either way there was obviously no talking to this man. I started looking around at the other people on the deck. That’s when I saw it. There was what appeared to be a Shi floating next to the coffee maker, a mug in it’s three-fingered hand. I wasn’t sure if this one was a hologram too, but I had to admit, I didn’t see any reason why someone would make a hologram of a Shi drinking coffee.
“I don’t want to alarm anyone, I whispered, but I think there might be a Shi right over there.”
“He looked over at it. Oh, yeah, Ed, well, we call him Ed, his real name is a series of psychographic symbols that give you a headache to read and give you the urge to tear out your left eye, only the left eye for some reason. Yup, but we call him Ed. He’s okay, except when he gets drunk, ‘cause you know, he’s a Shi, makes everyone within thirty yards drunk too. Plus Aequitas wouldn’t like it if he knew we had a Shi on board so we have to hide him a lot.”
“I came here to review Electric Mayhem’s ability to fight the war against the Shi, and you are telling me that you have a Shi working right here on your ship?!”
An alarm went off. Immediately everyone on the deck dropped what they were doing and swiveled around on their posts, running commands through their terminals and chattering into their commlinks. Kailingkata sighed, put down his mug of coffee and picked up his own radio set. With all the enthusiasm of a corpse he spoke into the mic.
“This is Kalingkata. Reporting secondary command ready for action.”
I had no idea what was going on, so I turned to Celeste.
“Are we going to war?” I asked.
She looked at me like all of a sudden she had never seen me before. “Proximity alarm, unidentified vessel has entered sensor range.”
“Just sensor range, so we’re not under attack right?” I said, trying to suppress my nervousness. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid to see action, but after what I had just seen of this ship I didn’t believe this crew could handle a real fight.
“You haven’t seen much combat before have you? This is space. If you can see it you can shoot it.”
Celeste started heading for the door and motioned me to follow. “You better come along, best not to get in anyone’s way.”
We ran back through the same halls we had seen over the last few hours, but it was like being in a totally different place. Crews were running through the halls to gun decks and the engine room, trying to fit on space suits as they went. I looked up to see hundreds of eye-ders racing across the ceiling, running towards what looked to be one of the air locks. We passed Natsu’s infirmary. All the supplies that had been tediously arranged on the tables and counters were being cleared off to make room for incoming wounded. As I passed one of the gun batteries I saw a snare drummer rolling a call to arms, a low rumble under that prang of the constant proximity alarm. Everywhere loose items were being stored and bulkheads sealed up.
By the time Celeste stopped running I was out of breath. We stood before a thick blast door.
“This is primary command deck.” She said, her voice stern. “Don’t touch anything.”
The door opened to a scene not too much unlike the one we had left in the first place. This deck was bigger, but all the personnel were still typing away into computers and talking on commlinks, everyone except for a child who ran up and down the deck shouting orders.
“We shall be to quarters! Who is this?”
“Another Earther diplomat, he’ll be out of the way.” Celeste replied.
“He better be.”
I looked around. Aside from this kid there was so sign of command here. The alarm rang in my ears. Where was Doitzel? Everyone on the ship knew him. Every member of Electric Mayhem had mentioned him. Where was he? I had had enough of this madness. I wanted to talk to the man in charge, and now was the time for a person in charge to make themselves known.
“Where the hell is Doitzel?” I cried.
Celeste rolled her eyes and sauntered over to an overhead cargo cabinet on the wall, knocked on it twice and then opened it to reveal a man sleeping in a hammock inside. Was that him? The man who outwitted the Gambler and Ebenezer Sarkosi? I could hardly see him from where he was, but what I could see didn’t exactly look heroic.
“Hex is here.” Celeste said. With that Doitzel sprang to life shrieking as he rolled out of the cabinet and fell to the floor, landing with a painful thud. He was a bit scrawny and looked like he hadn’t washed or shaven in a week. Tools and empty bottles of alcohol dropped and clattered around him, followed lastly by a small jug of Ellodie’s “Brain Grease” which rolled out of the cabinet and smacked him on the back of the head. The child snapped to attention.
“Commander’s on deck, motherfuckers. All bitches to their posts!”
“HEX!” Doitzel screamed, sitting up abruptly.
“Only a dream, Doitzel,” Celeste said. “We have proximity alert, all stations report ready for action.”
In the blink of an eye Doitzel was on his feet. “Terran, give me our coordinates.”
“Four clicks past the Europan shipping lanes, doubt that it’s a trade ship.”
“Mikey?” Doitzel turned.
It was the child that replied. “They haven’t hailed us, Kalingkata says the ping returned; non-human IP address.”
“Engage light screen, and tell Cabby to scramble support fighters.”
Over the intercom I heard Kalingkata groan, “Doitzel, we are picking up incoming missiles. Bearing mark six.”
Doitzel’s eyes lit up, with what was either pride or joy, I couldn’t tell, but the thought of either frightened me. He pulled down his goggles, and clicked on his magboots. Looking back I feel like a complete idiot for this, but at that moment I could have almost believed that Doitzel was actually some kind of leader.
“Alright Muppets, here we go. Engines to full! Pull us about Terran, I want to look these bastards in the eye. If Kalingkata hasn’t already run a return-to-sender on those missiles have him do so, and let Aequitas know he’s free to fire at will.”
The hull screamed as the massive ship pulled a u-turn and came around to face a Shi battle cruiser. I had never seen one before. The ship looked like some sort of bluish-gray blob, like a bunch of mercury floating freely in the void. But this blob was the size of a large city. This ship was obviously much larger than the Muppet, we were horribly outclassed. All over the Shi vessel spots lit up as plasma weapons opened fire. This thing was brimming with firepower.
“She’s setting up a parameter.” The pilot said.
“You’re a leaf on the wind, Terran, take us through their fire solution.” Doitzel coaxed. “What’s the status on those fighters Cabby?
“We’re starting our attack run now,” went the calm voice of Oiji from the intercom.
The ship coursed through the blasts of plasma, diving and dodging as it went. The ship was incredibly maneuverable, or the pilot was remarkably good, or both. Soon the Muppet was right up next to the Shi ship, flying right over their bow.
“Strafe ‘em! On the down turn, all batteries fire at will!”
The ship shook as the main cannons opened up, blasting the Shi cruiser with massive salvos of energy. Just as the guns fell silent and we passed over the ship again, the ship shook once more, but the last one felt different.
“That wasn’t a laser blast; something hit us!” Doitzel exclaimed.
Ellodie’s voice came in over the intercom, “Umm… Doitzel, here’s something. Report from engineering; we’ve just lost much of the power from the main reactor core.”
“What? Where the hell’d it go?!”
“I dunno, but definitely not the engines, and not the light screen generator.”
“We’re fucking visible!?”
From where I sat I could see that we were dangerously close to the Shi vessel, you didn’t have to be an Admiral to see it. There was no way they could have misused us, and they didn’t miss us. Not a moment later the Shi batteries opened up, tearing into the Muppets hull. All at once damage reports were coming in.
“Sparky says his eye-ders can’t keep up with how fast their wearing our armor down.”
“We have a hull breaches on plasma battery 4 and cargo bay 2.”
All of a sudden I found myself crippled with a horrible headache. It seemed as if all the pain was centered behind my left eye and I couldn’t help but fell like if I only ripped it out the pain would be released. Text scrolled over my strained mind:
“That’s where the booze was, they knew just where to hit us!”
“Damn-it Ed, words! Type your words!” Doitzel shouted into the intercom.
Terran spun around in his seat shrugging. “Doitzel, we’re drifting, I have no engine response.”
“At least we’re drifting fast, use the maneuvering jets for control and for the love of Bowie don’t slow us down. Kalingkata, do you still have power?”
“Yeah, we’re fine, what’s wrong with you guys.”
“Never mind that, get Ed to hack into that battleships mainframe, give them a sensor ghost to follow instead of us.”
“Ugh. Fine.”
“If we keep drifting like this they’ll just trace our trajectory and catch up.”
“No they won’t. Radio Cabby, tell him to break off the attack, launch Tuggy to pick up drifting survivors. I want his fighters to pull around to the front of the ship. Oh, and tell him not to freak out. This will be a bit unorthodox. Patch me through to the hangar; I want to speak with Queequay”
Over the window a hologram image of the hangar deck that I had landed on lit up. A Quay rushed up from the background until it filled up the monitor. This Quay was much smaller than the one I had met earlier in the hallway. How many aliens did they have on this ship?
“Yesssar?” it hissed.
“Queequay, I need you to harpoon our fighters without knocking out their engines, it’s a tough shot, can pull you it off?”
“Of course.” It growled, and the monitor flickered out.
“Are the Shi breaking off yet?”
“Looks like they fell for it, they’ve broken away two points off the stern.”
“Lovely, tell Queequay to fire at will.”
In quick succession two thick metal cables were fired over the bow each one striking the star fighters escorting the ship.
Doitzel laughed, which was a bit maniacal in nature. “Great shot kid, that was one in a million. Alright, boys, pull us the hell out of here, two points to starboard, change our trajectory.”
Oiji’s calm voice came in over the intercom, “What the fuck, Doitzel, you could have warned us…”
After a few strained minutes of waiting for another change in development someone spoke.
“We’ve left sensor range.”
“Damage report.”
“We report 6 missing, 2 dead, the corpses on are their way to Natsu, Tuggy should be returning soon.”
“Wounded?”
Natsu says, “shut up, Doitzel, I’m saving lives.”
Doitzel smiled. “Good. Alright crew. The Muppet never stops, let’s refit and be right back at ‘em.”
Maybe it wasn’t the best time, but I decided to pick that moment as the one where I confronted Doitzel. If anyone could give me the information I needed to make the day’s report anything short of a horror story it should be him, and maybe, just maybe he could fill me in on when the next transport would come to take me off this riddled scrap heap. I walked up to where Doitzel stood.
“Mr. Radical Doitzel, a word if you please.” I said sternly. I reached out to tap him on the shoulder, but before my hand got there my arm was twisted painfully backwards by something.
“Oww! What was that?”
Doitzel spoke. “Oh, that’s Shadow, you probably shouldn’t try to touch me.
“What is Shadow?”
“She’s my bodyguard; a full time job too.”
I looked around the room. There was no one anywhere near close enough to have assaulted me, though many of the crew members had turned to glare at me, hands on knives and pistols. Young Mikey looked like a cat ready to pounce, perhaps a bit too literally so, since he had now grown a series of vicious looking claws from the fingers of his right hand.
“Is Shadow in the room?” I asked nervously, wondering why a captain with such cult-like fanaticism with his crew would need a bodyguard.
“I don’t know. Probably.” He clicked off his magboots and then turned to face me.
“I’m guessing you’re another envoy, huh? Well, let’s get you a room, I’m sure you are tired and can’t wait to get started writing about how awesome we are, and all the great uses we have for your company’s money. Michael, take care of this guy.”
A man with no less than a dozen firearms strapped to his body stood up from one of the gunnery seats.
“Take care of, how?” he snarled.
“Exactly,” and with that he started heading for the door. Mikey followed him.
“Where are you going Doitzel?”
“The author needs me to leave so that this story doesn’t end up being about me, like all the other crap he writes.”
“Doitzel, we’re not allowed to talk about…”
“Fine, I’m off to see what happened to the reactor linkage. I’ve got a bad feeling about what evil did this.” On his way out Doitzel stopped by the cabinet he had been sleeping in and pulled out a poncho.
“Yay, milkshakes!” Mikey cheered.
The walking armory, otherwise known as Michael, led me to the crew quarters grumbling the whole time. “You’ll be sharing a bunk with ‘Sprocket,’ but don’t worry; he’s on the repair shift now, so you should have a few good hours’ sleep before he bursts in drunk and angry. I’ll have some idiot bring up your bags.”
The room was small and messy. If I had to guess anything about this crewmate who lived here, I’d say he had a thing for hoarding bits of junk, but the battle had tossed everything in the room all over creating a terrible mess, assuming it hadn’t already been like this. I sat down on the bed and began writing down this report, taking more care to detail than I had ever before, just in case I didn’t survive to turn it in. Hotaru had been right, things were definitely worse, but I had to believe that this was the bottom of the barrel. I mean, the ship wasn’t even operational anymore, everything that could go wrong short of a painful death by explosive decompression in the bowels of space had already happened, right? Surely things couldn’t get much worse from here on out, I thought. In retrospect I think I should have actually just gone for the painful death by space option. It would have been much healthier for me than what actually happened.
After a couple of hours I awoke with a jolt. Literally a jolt; I had been shocked with several volts of electricity. I sat up to see a man in a crude bear suit holding what appeared to be a handmade taser.
“I’m in your room,” said the man. It was Sparky’s voice. I could have sworn that I had locked that door.
“Yes, yes you are.”
“I’m in a bear suit.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Anything could happen.”
“No, no it couldn’t. Get out of my room!”
Surprisingly, Sparky turned and left. I quickly checked to make sure he didn’t steal anything then went back to sleep, from which I didn’t wake until I was thrown out of bed by another tremor. It felt like the ship was already firing again. Had they caught up to us? Or was Doitzel really stupid enough to have run straight back into battle with a crippled… I considered that for a moment. Yeah, never mind. It was definitely that one.
I ran to my door, but couldn’t get it open again. Someone, probably Sparky, had changed the security code on the lock. This was bad. If the ship was destroyed, which I very much believed would be the outcome of the fight, I wouldn’t have a chance of reaching one of the escape pods. After giving up on the code I slowly sat down on my bunk ready to accept my inevitable fate.
The door opened. Hotaru stood in the doorway.
“I thought Sparky might lock you in here.” She looked sadly at her feet. “I have to go, we’re fighting again, be safe.” And she walked off down the halls crying that she was sorry for leaving.
I stepped outside. I was certain that I had seen some escape pods when Celeste was dragging me around before. I ran down the halls, trying to keep my footing every time one of the gun batteries fired. Soon I was hopelessly lost, these halls had been difficult to navigate before, but I now had a feeling that the very structure of the ship had changed a little since I went to sleep. What was wrong with this ship? Eventually I found a landmark that I actually recognized; the thick blast door to the primary command deck. The doors flew open as a wave of personnel hurried out of the command deck, putting on space suits and breather masks. Celeste grabbed me as she passed, handed me a mask of my own and gave me a look that pierced my very soul.
“Back of the ship. Engine room. Now.”
“What? Why?”
She never answered. She didn’t have to. I saw that behind her, on the deck, in an overly dramatic fashion Doitzel drew an antique saber that for some reason he had now attached to his tool belt, and shouted:
“Bring us closer, Terran! I wish to hit them with my sword!”
In the view screen I could see the same Shi ship from before, and I could see that we were coming up on it, heading straight for it, very, very fast. That was all I needed to see to be convinced; Doitzel was obviously about to kill us all. Celeste didn’t have to tell me twice, I ran as fast as I could towards the back of the ship, and as far from the control deck as possible. The crew had packed themselves into the engine room like condensed protein bars. Someone’s elbow was in my face but I couldn’t move at all to get comfortable. For where I was stuck I could see a Shi figure covered in a blanket floating in the corner of the deck. It was clearly Ed. The Quay saw it and roared.
“Who is that?”
“That’s just a ghost, Aequitas. It’s always been there.”
“Oh.”
I would have been shocked at the idiocy of this moment had the next moment not been the one where our ship collided into a bigger one. All at once everyone on the crowded deck was thrown forward as the hull screamed with the sounds of bending metal. Circuit boxes on the walls and ceiling were blowing faster than the eye-ders could scamper around and fix. Ellodie clung to one of the engines with her robotic arm while her human arm worked on rewiring a blown fuse. She cried at a team of Maverick engineers trying to do the same with the other engine.
“I don’t care how many of the fail safes fail, we are not losing core containment on this boat!”
Eventually the hull ceased to quake and everything was still. I couldn’t believe we were alive. For a minute there was an uneasy silence as everyone waited in confusion for another order. The air was getting thinner, I saw that everyone else had put on breather masks and I decided to do the same. Seconds felt like hours, no order came. Then out of nowhere a man dressed in full Gongen battle regalia dropped from what I assumed was the ceiling, I have no idea why he was up there, and screamed “HIROKAWA!” before revving up his jetpack and flying with suicidal resolve down the corridor back to the front of the ship.
There was a pause where no one was sure what to do, before people started to whisper;
“Oh, my god he just went in.”
“What do we do?”
“Stick to the plan!”
With that the mass of people rushed forward, frenzied screams echoing within the narrow hallways, guns and blades of every shape and size waving above their heads. I ran with them, it was all I could do to keep from being overrun, but I had a bad feeling that whatever lay ahead was far worse than being trampled to death. I have no idea where it was the Muppet ended and the Shi warship began, but apparently the Muppet had stuck with enough force to lodge itself within the hull of its massive opponent, and at some point the mob had crossed over through a breach and was on the offensive.
Even if I had wanted to fight the Shi, which I didn’t because I’m not hopelessly suicidal, I wouldn’t have been able to. Through my mind coursed the battle cries of hundreds of Shi soldiers as they met the Muppet’s raiding party. The pains of the visions were so severe that I couldn’t even manage to stay on my feet, and when I fell I tried my best to fall over out of the way so that I wasn’t trampled by the battle. In the pandemonium of the brawl I thought that I could have gone unnoticed but before long a large robotic arm came down, grabbed me by the collar and hauled me back to my feet and further down the hall as the raid progressed through the Shi vessel.
“Come on, you piece of crap, I’m missing some good kills here.” It was Michael. “And I’m not helping you because Doitzel told me to. Understand?”
I tried to focus my eyes enough to look around. No one else seemed to be affected by the painful, alien texts that raced across my mind.
“Am I… the only one… who sees the… feels the…” I stammered, unable to focus any of my thoughts.
“The death cries of the Shi?” He stood proudly, and pulled a second gun from one of the dozen holsters on his person. “Music to my synapses.” Then he jumped back into the fray.
In this manner the whole rest of the fight played out; me being knocked around and pulled back up by Michael. Each time his massive robot arm grabbed my collar to drag me along he smeared the blood of slain Shi on my suit. I can’t tell you how many Shi or how many humans were killed in those few minutes, but the carnage was beyond sickening, and most of what I can recall is vague, with the exception of a few things that I would love to have forever scrubbed from my mind. At one point I was nearly run over by the Quay, Aequitas, as he rushed a Shi soldier, tore it in half, and used the still living upper half to beat two others to death. I took that moment to break away and try to make it back to the safety of the Muppet’s command deck. As I left mayhem behind me I heard someone scream; “Damn it Sparky, watch it, we’re more conductive than they are!”
As I stumbled back through the destroyed halls of the Shi warship I was picked up by a man, or at least I think he was once a man, racing through the halls. From the waist up his skin was covered in scales and from the waist down he was a giant mechanical spider. He charged through the halls back towards the Muppet with a fury that reminded me of a rampaging Quay. In two of his robotic spider legs he carried a surprisingly large pile of human corpses. He placed me on that pile.
“Hop on or get out of the way,” he said, as if I still had a choice in the matter. “Sweet Alabama Liquid Snake has got to get the bodies back, pronto!”
The strange spider-reptile man dumped the pile of corpses in front of Fei who was tending to wounded from the command deck, bodies lay strewn across the floors and terminals.
“Just put them there, Alabama, I’ll get them right back in the fight, Natsu’s busy with Doitzel.”
At the time I didn’t think about what was implied in what Fei had just said, because when I turned to where she had gestured I saw Doitzel. He hung four inches above the floor of the command deck, sword still in his hand, with part of a support strut running through his neck and torso, impaling him to the wall. One of the lenses on his goggles had shattered, revealing the cold, dead eye within. The frame of the goggles dripped with blood in a way that almost made it look like he was crying, but on his face was a big grin, the overall image clashing in a strange and daunting way. Natsu stood there looking at him like he was critiquing a piece of art.
“Damn it, Doitzel, I’m a doctor not a janitor. I swear, one of these days he’s going to do something like this and there won’t be enough of him left to bring back.”
A team worked with welding torches to cut Doitzel down and set his body on the floor. I didn’t know what to feel, the man may have been an unhinged maniac, but I had to figure that he had at least died sticking to his principles (whatever the hell those might be) and I had to give him that.
Just before I could finish a thought of respect for the dead captain, Natsu rubbed his hands together and chanted over and over;
“Yu Mo Gui Gwai Fi Di Zao, Yu Mo Gui Gwai Fi Di Zao.”
His hands began to glow with an eerie light as he placed his hands on the gaping holes in Doitzel’s neck and chest which healed up instantly. Doitzel coughed up a large mass of clotted blood and began to gasp in the thin atmosphere; Natsu slipped a breather mask over him.
“Already?” he rasped. “I was having tea with Rasputin.”
Good God, Natsu was a kisen. They knew it too; they were actually okay with having a dangerous mutant on board their ship. As if he was a normal person. That was when I had to give up. Everything I had come to believe in recently, the power of a greater united humanity against the Shi now had been utterly destroyed. I had been sent me to turn in a logical report on a crew of psychotics, aliens, cyborgs, and mutants who sailed a starship with experimental technology that they were far too irresponsible to be using. There was no sense to be made in this. I couldn’t possibly represent what I had seen in any kind of organized summary, and I now felt like a complete idiot for nearly thinking that Doitzel had given his life believing in something worthwhile. Clearly this man didn’t have an honorable bone in his body. I was beginning to question whether or not I was on the right side of this war.
As Natsu helped Doitzel back to his feet I felt a hand on my shoulder. When I turned I saw one of the ship’s ensigns next to me. I could have sworn I had seen her before on the ship, but even now I cannot recall what post she worked at.
“Rough day huh? You know you can stop it right now, end the madness so that these people never hurt anyone again.”
“What? How?”
“Self-destruct button is right there.” she said pointing to one of the control consoles. “It’s the right thing to do.”
As Doitzel got to his feet she smirked, I saw the look of both satisfaction and abhorrence all rolled into one gleam for an instant in her eyes as she saw the battered captain, and then she casually walked off the command deck. Doitzel pulled off his broken goggles to reveal the black eye and moustache that someone appeared to have drawn on him with a marker while he was temporarily dead. A couple of ensigns on the crew stepped on board the Muppet from the Shi ship.
“Doitzel, all decks are secured.”
“Good, how many prisoners did you manage to save from Aequitas?”
“Two.”
“Out of, what, one hundred of fifty? Not bad, you guys are getting better at that.”
He stumbled up to the jagged hull breach where his ship ended and another began. Standing at the edge of the ship he gave his sword a half-hearted swing, tapping it against a shredded part of the hull of the Shi battleship.
“Huzzah,” he coughed, and then pointed the sword at me. I tried hard not to laugh at how ridiculous he looked with the markings on his face.
“Well, are you coming along or not? I’m sure your boss would like to hear about effective ways of negotiating surrender with the Shi.”
Again, it didn’t seem like I had much of a choice, and I certainly wasn’t going to stay here with a kisen, for all I know he might turn me inside out with his mind or something. I decided that I’d rather take my chances with the Shi. Doitzel led me through the halls of the Shi warship, the thin blue bodies of the crew strewn all over the floor, contorted in every way imaginable and unimaginable. At one point the strange spider-reptile man ran past us with another load of human corpses. Doitzel saluted him as he flew by.
“Great job, Alabama.”
“That’s the only kind of job Sweet Alabama Liquid Snake does.”
Doitzel chuckled a bit at the remark but when he did one of the Shi on the ground quickly rose up and lunged at him with some strange kind of blunt looking knife. An image flashed in my mind that seemed to contain in itself all the hateful passion of genocide. I can’t recall if I blinked or if Doitzel was really that fast, but either way the Shi never hit its mark. Rather it quickly fell back to the ground, dead, with two fresh bullet holes in its head.
“Ziggy H. Tap-dancing Stardust,” Doitzel sneered, an Earther sidearm in his hand. “How many times have I told them; zombie rules, damn it. Zombie rules apply.”
We were uninterrupted for the rest of the walk to the bridge of the Shi vessel which was considerably bigger and better organized than the one on the Muppet, even with the corpses strewn all over the place. Much of Electric Mayhem was there trying to hold back Aequitas who was doing all he could to not attack the two Shi ensigns who were kneeling, or at least for a species without knees seemed to be doing their best at kneeling, on the floor in front of Michael, the child Mikey, and that odd Gongen man who had started the charge. Doitzel approached the captives, but addressed Mikey.
“Mikey, how many men does it take to send a message?”
“Only one?”
“That’s right, but these are not men, kill them both.”
Young Mikey raised up one of the energy staffs the Shi use and from it fired two blasts that burst open the chests of each of the captives. I decided not to ask how it was that the child had somehow learned how to use Shi weaponry; I knew that I would not like the answer.
In the 12 hours that followed their victory Electric Mayhem briefly considered fixing up the Muppet, but rather decided to drink what was left of the alcohol on the ship and celebrate. Ultimately the ship was fixed up enough to fly again and dislodged from Shi battleship, which in turn was overhauled and sent to Europa to be refitted for the war effort. All of this was done while much of the crew was intoxicated; Doitzel had managed to make a drinking game out of it. It wasn’t until six hours after the last shots were fired that Mikey finally told Doitzel that someone had drawn on his face. He screamed about Hex again, whoever that was, washed his face and passed out on the floor of the command deck. I heard from Oiji that he had woken up some hours later with new drawings on his face and a hangover, but by then my bags were packed and I was standing on the hanger deck as a new supply ship arrived on the Muppet, this one mostly loaded with alcohol to replace what had been drunken and/or blown up. Needless to say I took this opportunity to leave the ship and consign myself to a lifetime of night terrors and therapy. In all my days as a corporate envoy I have never had the dishonor of reviewing such a crew. Electric Mayhem should never have had their status of “interplanetary terrorists” revoked, with only a few exceptions the team is made up of combinations of all the most dangerous aspects of society that had ever had the justice inflicted upon them to be declared public menaces; murderers, psychotics, spliced cyborgs, kisen, and aliens. For the sake of public safety I recommend that not only should Mayhem not be financed but that they should be declared criminals once again and hunted down. However this choice is not up to me, and in accordance with my post I must reluctantly admit that in following the FedGrav standards for combat review, Electric Mayhem passes with flying colors as a prime candidate for investment. In a battle with a with a Shi warship well above its class the Muppet inflicted 100% casualties without losing any crew members, seeing as for all appearances it seems the ship is crewed by the closest thing to the undead as has ever actually existed.
Despite passing the standards, I beg of you at FedGrav not to give any support to Electric Mayhem, but regardless you can consider this my two weeks’ notice, as the things I have seen cannot be unseen.
-Professionally Yours,
Reginald Strife (Corporate Envoy, FedGrav, Retired)
Agent: Reginald Strife
January, 2394
Mission: “Find and observe the faction ‘Electric Mayhem’ to verify their claim as effective combatants for the coming war.”
Just under a month after leaving Earth I managed to make contact with the formerly considered terrorist, now considered freedom fighting movement known as Electric Mayhem, to see if they were, as they had declared themselves last month, an ideal candidate for corporate investment in the war against the Shi. I found that money was worth a lot more than my contacts with Earth out here, so I have attached an expense report, have fun with that. The entire moon of Europa was preparing itself for what the people believe to be an inevitable war; I saw propaganda posters on every surface flat enough to bear one, many of them praising the associates of Electric Mayhem. All this made me very excited to meet with them. After countless bribes I was able to secure a position on a resupply ship scheduled to dock with the “Muppet of Time” a Corsair-Class Cruiser that Mayhem is rumored to use as their center of operations. There I stayed two days and saw more than I neither needed to see nor ever wanted to see.
Rumor had it that the Muppet never stops moving. The rumors were true. My supply ship had to be flown in at an intercept trajectory and was brought into the hanger by the Muppet’s tractor beam, all while maintaining full speed. I thought that after a month of working my way into the Cartel’s system that the difficult part of my journey was over. It had in fact only begun. Upon arriving on the hanger’s deck I asked around for a deck officer. Most of the crew seemed to ignore me, but eventually one pointed to a man on the far side of the deck, talking with another crew mate. “Be careful though,” he warned, “he’s chewing out Cory again.” I approached the man, but the closer I got the more I could see that he wasn’t yelling at the lad, but calmly and politely explaining what seemed to be proper protocol for transport of rockets on the hanger deck. He was an older man, and likely Gongen by the looks of him, but while he talked he held a lit cigarette in a sleek robotic hand, which I guess made him a Maverick by nature. Eventually they finished their conversation and Cory walked off muttering dejectedly about the man being a “hard ass” and making him out to be the bad guy. I then approached him, the first, as I would soon find out, of the members of Electric Mayhem that I would soon meet.
“Greetings.” I said politely, “My name is Reginald Strife and I represent FedGrav’s interests in the coming war. I have come to meet Electric Mayhem as an official attaché and write a report that will help determine FedGrav’s interest in corporate sponsorship of your…” I took another look around at the cluttered hanger deck. “Organization.”
He stood there for a second, moving slowing as he puffed on his cigarette. Then in a soothing, accented voice chirped “It is very nice to meet you, mister attaché, my name is Oiji.” Then nothing. He just kept staring at me, smoking, like he was waiting for me to do something in particular.
Eventually I asked “Is there any chance I can meet with Radical Doitzel, he is your commander, correct?”
“Yes.” He said and continued to stand there.
“Preferably soon?”
“Why are you in such a rush, you are on the ship, he will not be running away from you. Come have some tea, would you like a cigarette?”
“No thanks,” I didn’t want to explain that he shouldn’t be smoking in an oxygen rich environment.
“Well then, the least I can do is introduce you to the rest of the crew.”
I didn’t want to follow him, but I had no real choice, and if Doitzel was on the ship, as Oiji had suggested then I was bound to see him sooner or later. Walking through the decks I was amazed at the size of the ship. Although it was Maverick built, the ship’s size was on par with many of Earth’s dreadnoughts. Eventually we arrived at a door that opened into something that was very much not a ship at all, but rather on the other side of the door I was suddenly in a war zone; a desolated city covered with contorted bodies. The low rumble of fire and plasma bursts filled the air. I nearly panicked at the sudden transition, but Oiji only stood there.
“Celeste!” he cried out, though when I say cried, really he only reached normal human volume. “There is someone here who needs a tour!”
Responding to the noise a Shi warrior charged over a pile of debris in front of us floating with incredible speed towards me; a staff blazing with electrical energy in one hand.
Out of nowhere a plasma blast caught the Shi in what I would say was its chin, stopping it in its tracks. This was followed by a continuous burst of automatic fire which riddled the Shi, forcing it to the ground. A Maverick woman stood up over a piece of rebar and cement, continuing to fire on the Shi as she slowing walked towards it, the massive ammo clip on her rifle running out only once she had reached the tattered corpse. The Shi was obviously dead, but she then replaced the clip and fired point-blank into its head for another 20 seconds sending bits of flesh and bone skipping across the ground before she turned to meet us. She smiled offhandedly at Oiji.
“Morning, Cabby.”
“You know that there are not mornings in space, Celeste.”
“It’s a phrase you goofy shit. Who the hell is this?”
“Oh, this man is another representative from Earth here to see us fight the Shi.”
My heart was still racing, “I’m pretty sure I just saw enough.”
Both of them started laughing. At that moment the entire warzone disappeared and slowly melted away into a grid pattern. It was all a holographic simulation, a big one. I was stunned at the level of technology these Mavericks possessed.
“How, and why did you built such a thing?”
It’s a holodeck. Doitzel designed it, and like everything Doitzel makes, he did it, as he says; “because I could.” When she quoted Doitzel, I couldn’t help but notice a slightly pompous tone. This Doitzel character was looking more and more like the sort of person who needed to be in the report.
“So, when do I get to meet this commander of yours?” I asked Celeste.
“Oh, he’s no use to anyone for a while still, sleeping off another hangover, but if you’re interested in this sort of tech you should really talk with Sparky.”
Without a word Celeste led me out of the holodeck and down another series of corridors. I was beginning to feel a bit nervous, like I was lost, doubly so after I noticed Oiji was no longer there. So far I had seen no form of organized logic on this ship; no one who could really point me to who I really ought to be talking to, or where I ought to be, but then perhaps this “Sparky” fellow could help me make sense of a few things.
He didn’t. Sparky, or as the plaque on the door to the science lab said, which by the way was the first time I have ever heard of a science lab being on a warship, “Sparky, Lord of Science and Keeper of the Ancient Scrolls of our Greater Lord and God, David Bowie,” was, in the best words I can muster, clinically insane. A second plaque on the door read 0 days since last major explosion. The doors to the lab opened and a scorched man wearing the remains of leather armor and a loincloth walked out, wiped the zero off the sign, and carefully drew another zero in its place before stomping back into the lab. A small hoard of creepy robotic spiders with bright red eyes swarmed out into the hall during the few seconds the doors had been open. Celeste was completely unphased by all of this.
“Huh, he’s wearing the barbarian suit, must be casual Friday again.” And with that she led me into a room littered with the most terrifying display of unregulated science I have ever seen. From beneath a pile of scrap I could hear what I assumed was Sparky’s voice:
“HOW DO THEY EXPECT ANY PROGRESS, BOWIE-DAMNED BADGER’S ALWAYS GETTING IN MY WAY! BOWIE-DAMNED BADGER’S IN MY SOCK DRAWER!”
I definitely did not want to meet this person right now; I needed to find someone logical, someone who didn’t have anything to do with the machine on the wall next to me that, if the control settings were accurate, was able to slice, dice, and/or peel an armadillo in less than a minute. With my life flashing before my eyes I quickly turned to Celeste. “I seem to be feeling a bit sick, is there a medical quarters on board, a medical quarters with a doctor?”
“Probably the adjustment to the Grav 5 system,” she replied “Hey Sparky, this guy needs medical treatment!”
“Put him on the slab, I still have those robot cat legs for Doitzel!”
The feeling of defeat and utter fear I felt in that moment was truly the touch of death. Celeste looked at me and laughed.
“You honestly thought that Sparky was the medic didn’t you? What do you think we’re crazy or something? Let’s take you to see Natsu.”
My body was so badly shaken that Celeste had to help me to walk out of the lab and down the hall. As we moved away I thought I heard an upset Sparky shout back:
“Fine! Guess I’ll just be hanging on to these perfectly good cat legs then!”
When we arrived at the medical bay, I slowly came to ease, putting aside the panic attack that I had been bordering on. The facilities there were clean, white, and as far as I could tell, up to Earth and Gongen standards, maybe even a bit more. Celeste stopped at the door and rapped her knuckle on a sign that read; “No one except Fei enters Medical Quarters without the presence of Dr. Natsu.” Inside I could see a young lady cleaning medical equipment but no one else, I could only assume that she was Fei. I was also beginning to assume that Electric Mayhem had some strange fascination for communication with signs.
Eventually a young man, who again looked like he came straight from Gongen walked up to the door, opened it and turned to us.
“The doctor is in, how can I help?”
“This man is another Earther representative here to review us, says that he’s got Grav sickness.”
Natsu took a quick look at me. “No he doesn’t.”
“Hrm, well, I’m feeling much better now, thanks.” I muttered, amazed at the skill that this doctor possessed. “But while I’m here I was hoping I could take a look around your station for my report. Is that alright?”
“Of course,” said Natsu passively, “come on in.”
Upon entering the bay Fei looked up for a moment to see who I was, went back to cleaning a scalpel, and then her eyes quickly shot back up to me and glared with intense hostility. I could tell that she was straining herself to lower the scalpel in her hand and place it on the table.
“Umm, Hi,” I said, feeling very much in the spotlight, though I quickly realized that Natsu and Celeste didn’t seem to notice that anything had happened. Fei just backed away, glaring at me, then turned and started cleaning something on the far side of the room. I decided to address Natsu instead.
“This is an incredible station you have here, doctor, even by hospital standards this place is very well kept.”
“Yes, well, I do what I can; it’s not up to par with my hospital, but close. Doitzel and I spare no expense to keep this place loaded with the finest medical technology in the system. If only he would stop to resupply every once and a while….”
“It seems very well stocked to me,” I said picking up a bottle of medicine and observing the label. “Ah, penicillin, an oldie but a goodie. You know I studied a bit of medicine myself, back home and…”
I noticed a look of distress on Natsu’s face. He wasn’t even looking at me anymore, rather staring at the bottle of penicillin. With shaking hands and a painful sigh Natsu reached up and took the bottle from the shelf, placed it back, took it again, threw it angrily into a biohazard disposal bin and then turned to me and growled:
“Get the hell out of my infirmary, before I have to break my oath! Karsu!”
On the last words Natsu snapped his fingers and I felt a sturdy hand grab the back of my collar and drag my confused self back out into the hallway. There I was dropped and Celeste came out to help me up. I looked back into the infirmary to see Natsu in a panic scrubbing down the entire shelf. Fei stood in the side window glaring at me; a big grin on her face.
“You know you’re doing much better than the last attaché that Earth sent,” Celeste said.
“And what happed to him?” I had no idea that there had been others before me.
“He pissed off Michael, then accidentally fell down the elevator core and landed on some bullets.”
This didn’t sound good. My mind quickly went back to the transport that brought me here. I wondered if there was a chance that they hadn’t left yet, or for that matter if I could even find my way back to the hanger through those twisted corridors.
“If it was an accident, they why did you mention that he angered, Michael was it?”
Celeste slapped me on the back. “I see that look, you worry too much. I tell you what, let’s go get some lunch, I’m starving.”
We started down to what I assume was the mess hall, but then turned a corner to face something that instantly set me back on edge, ready to panic. There in front of us was a Quay. I had heard a rumor that a Quay had spoken on behalf of Electric Mayhem during the Earther-Gongen negotiations a few months ago, but I thought they had been only that; rumors. The Quay seemed to be arguing with another crewmember, it’s bone-chilling roar echoing down the hall. I couldn’t believe that anyone would be brave enough to stand before such a huge, spiderlike creature and argue with it. Just then the Quay turned, saw me and raced down the hallway, it’s spiky legs denting the walls and floor as it took footholds on whatever it pleased. Just before plowing into me, which I’m sure would have turned me into a fine, red mist, it abruptly stopped.
“You! Swishy Earth-spawn! You are not a crewmate,” he growled. “You will settle our dispute.”
My blood froze, I did my best to manage a nod in agreement. I was wrong before. This was what death felt like.
“Am I, or am I not, a bunny?”
“Umm… no-not a bunny?” I stammered.
With a roar the Quay angrily punched a hole into the wall with its claw. Several of Sparky’s spider robots fell out and immediately set to work repairing the hole. I was terrified, everything about this ship was madness. And why the hell were there so many spiderlike things here. If I were arachnophobic I would have had a heart attack by now. Then again, that seemed like a good alternative at the time as the Quay raised its claw as if it might strike me down. Just then Celeste jumped in the way and patted the Quay on the claw.
“There, there, Aequitas, you are a beautiful, fluffy bunny. This man is confused, please don’t kill him.”
“But Doitzel said we could kill not-crewmates.” He growled.
“Doitzel said we could not kill crewmates. It doesn’t always apply the other way around. The important thing is that you are a bunny. Right?” She looked at me. “Right?”
“Yeah, right. A bunny.” I managed to blurt out.
Aequitas slowly lowered its claw, seeming, as far as I could see for a Quay, a bit perplexed. As he walked off I could see the other crewmate from before had already left, maybe he wasn’t so brave after all. We continued on to the mess hall. This ship was a nightmare. I could only hope that there would be no surprises at lunch.
“Mess-hall” was the right word for it. The place was cluttered with unwashed dishes and more than a few drunken crew members. On one side of the room there was a group of mean looking Maverick soldiers being scolded by a young Gongen girl. The mess covered every inch of the long table.
“I don’t see a place to sit.”
Celeste rolled an unconscious crewmate off the table.
“There we go,” she chirped and motioned for me to sit down.
Lunch was stew and a Twinkie, which was actually a little better than I had expected, but still very strange, however all the fear and confusion had made me very hungry. I had just started eating when another member of Mayhem joined us; the young Gongen girl. I never came to understand why it was this girl was on that ship, but she seemed to be the only member of the crew that displayed both sanity and civility.
“Good day, sir, my name is Hotaru, it is very nice to make your acquaintance.”
Her courtesy caught me off guard, I had not expected it in a place that looked just like a spacer bar on the rim.
“Umm…Reginald Strife, I’m reviewing Electric Mayhem.”
“Oh…” She paused for a bit. “Please stay away from the elevator.” She paused again. “Actually, maybe you should stay away from Electric Mayhem all together.”
“As much as I wish I could it’s my job,” the truth was at the time I was beginning to feel a little more confident in my survival rate. After all, if it was possible to find someone as cooperative as Hotaru on this ship, perhaps there was hope that there would be others that would be as friendly. “Besides, I doubt things can get too much worse.”
For a moment it looked at me like she was going to say something, but then she picked up her dishes and stood up from the table.
“Sorry about the mess, I try to keep this place clean but…” she glared at the other group of massive cyborg soldiers who looked very much emasculated and tried to avoid eye contact with her, “some people need to learn how to have respect for where they live.”
“Are you leaving?” She had only just sat down, and hardly eaten anything.
“Be careful, she mumbled, looking scornfully at the floor. “If you haven’t met Doitzel yet then there is good opportunity for things to get worse.” Then she walked away with her dishes.
I looked down and noticed that my Twinkie was gone. That was odd.
“Well, I see you’ve finished your food.” Celeste said.
“But, I didn’t…” She grabbed my arm as pulled me from the table, leaving our dishes behind.
“No sense in waiting around, still plenty of things to see.”
She took me back into the kitchen where I was introduced to an eighth member of Electric Mayhem; the ship’s cook and chief engineer. Needless to say I didn’t eat anything except some protein packs I had brought along for the rest on my stay on the ship.
“Morning Ellodie!” Celeste called.
“Hey Celeste, but you know there’s no such thing as mornings in space.”
“You’ve been talking to Cabby again haven’t you? What’s cookin’?”
“Are you asking about the food or the toxins?”
At first I thought she was joking. I should have known better at this point. It was difficult to tell for sure underneath all the oil on her face, but Ellodie appeared to be very young. With one hand she stirred a kettle of stew and with her other, robotic arm stirred something that had a biohazard label on it.
“Are you sure that both of those should be cooking on the same stove?” I asked nervously.
She laughed. “Like a little arsenic ever killed anyone.”
Just then one of those creepy spider-bots scampered in. From a speaker somewhere on it came Sparky’s voice, which still gave me chills.
“Hey Ellodie, can you make me some of that iocane tea again? Stuff was delicious.”
“You know we have an intercom Sparky, you don’t need to keep sending eye-ders to make orders.”
“No, I took my intercom apart. I needed the parts to build a working mini model of the Large Hadron Collider.”
Ellodie laughed again. “Alright, I’ll send some on up, right after I finish Doitzel’s order for that engine-stilled moonshine, ‘Brain Grease’ he calls it, loves the stuff.”
“Well at least that makes two of you.” The voice called as the spider ran off.
Ellodie went back to work stirring the pots, and I couldn’t help but notice that it looked like she had switched the spoons that she was stirring each with. Suddenly my lunch wasn’t sitting so well with me and I asked Celeste to take me somewhere else.
At this point it was difficult to say whether any member of Mayhem was better or worse than the others, except Hotaru of course, but the next one I met was certainly different. Celeste took me up to the secondary command deck. “Command” wasn’t a word I would have used to describe the place. The room was cluttered with massive computer terminals and communications equipment. Teams of engineers sat around playing games, chatting and drinking coffee.
“Hey Kalingkata!”
“Oh, hi Celeste,” he grumbled, “we’re out of milk, tell Doitzel.”
“I’ll let him know. Listen, this here’s one of those Earther diplomats that want to review us, his name’s… wait, what was your name?”
“Reginald Strife, from FredGrav I tried to say as respectfully as possible, despite the fact that obviously no one here was returning the favor.”
“Oh you’re from Earth?” Kalingkata droned. “We were just talking about Earth. I have a question for you; so I know on Earth you guys totally murder babies with money, right? So, like, how does that that work exactly? Do you stuff the creds down their throats or is it, like, some kind of social program?”
“What!?” This fellow was so fresh out of Gongen that his footprints were still probably red. It seemed like there were as many Gongens on this Maverick ship as there were Mavericks. Either way there was obviously no talking to this man. I started looking around at the other people on the deck. That’s when I saw it. There was what appeared to be a Shi floating next to the coffee maker, a mug in it’s three-fingered hand. I wasn’t sure if this one was a hologram too, but I had to admit, I didn’t see any reason why someone would make a hologram of a Shi drinking coffee.
“I don’t want to alarm anyone, I whispered, but I think there might be a Shi right over there.”
“He looked over at it. Oh, yeah, Ed, well, we call him Ed, his real name is a series of psychographic symbols that give you a headache to read and give you the urge to tear out your left eye, only the left eye for some reason. Yup, but we call him Ed. He’s okay, except when he gets drunk, ‘cause you know, he’s a Shi, makes everyone within thirty yards drunk too. Plus Aequitas wouldn’t like it if he knew we had a Shi on board so we have to hide him a lot.”
“I came here to review Electric Mayhem’s ability to fight the war against the Shi, and you are telling me that you have a Shi working right here on your ship?!”
An alarm went off. Immediately everyone on the deck dropped what they were doing and swiveled around on their posts, running commands through their terminals and chattering into their commlinks. Kailingkata sighed, put down his mug of coffee and picked up his own radio set. With all the enthusiasm of a corpse he spoke into the mic.
“This is Kalingkata. Reporting secondary command ready for action.”
I had no idea what was going on, so I turned to Celeste.
“Are we going to war?” I asked.
She looked at me like all of a sudden she had never seen me before. “Proximity alarm, unidentified vessel has entered sensor range.”
“Just sensor range, so we’re not under attack right?” I said, trying to suppress my nervousness. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid to see action, but after what I had just seen of this ship I didn’t believe this crew could handle a real fight.
“You haven’t seen much combat before have you? This is space. If you can see it you can shoot it.”
Celeste started heading for the door and motioned me to follow. “You better come along, best not to get in anyone’s way.”
We ran back through the same halls we had seen over the last few hours, but it was like being in a totally different place. Crews were running through the halls to gun decks and the engine room, trying to fit on space suits as they went. I looked up to see hundreds of eye-ders racing across the ceiling, running towards what looked to be one of the air locks. We passed Natsu’s infirmary. All the supplies that had been tediously arranged on the tables and counters were being cleared off to make room for incoming wounded. As I passed one of the gun batteries I saw a snare drummer rolling a call to arms, a low rumble under that prang of the constant proximity alarm. Everywhere loose items were being stored and bulkheads sealed up.
By the time Celeste stopped running I was out of breath. We stood before a thick blast door.
“This is primary command deck.” She said, her voice stern. “Don’t touch anything.”
The door opened to a scene not too much unlike the one we had left in the first place. This deck was bigger, but all the personnel were still typing away into computers and talking on commlinks, everyone except for a child who ran up and down the deck shouting orders.
“We shall be to quarters! Who is this?”
“Another Earther diplomat, he’ll be out of the way.” Celeste replied.
“He better be.”
I looked around. Aside from this kid there was so sign of command here. The alarm rang in my ears. Where was Doitzel? Everyone on the ship knew him. Every member of Electric Mayhem had mentioned him. Where was he? I had had enough of this madness. I wanted to talk to the man in charge, and now was the time for a person in charge to make themselves known.
“Where the hell is Doitzel?” I cried.
Celeste rolled her eyes and sauntered over to an overhead cargo cabinet on the wall, knocked on it twice and then opened it to reveal a man sleeping in a hammock inside. Was that him? The man who outwitted the Gambler and Ebenezer Sarkosi? I could hardly see him from where he was, but what I could see didn’t exactly look heroic.
“Hex is here.” Celeste said. With that Doitzel sprang to life shrieking as he rolled out of the cabinet and fell to the floor, landing with a painful thud. He was a bit scrawny and looked like he hadn’t washed or shaven in a week. Tools and empty bottles of alcohol dropped and clattered around him, followed lastly by a small jug of Ellodie’s “Brain Grease” which rolled out of the cabinet and smacked him on the back of the head. The child snapped to attention.
“Commander’s on deck, motherfuckers. All bitches to their posts!”
“HEX!” Doitzel screamed, sitting up abruptly.
“Only a dream, Doitzel,” Celeste said. “We have proximity alert, all stations report ready for action.”
In the blink of an eye Doitzel was on his feet. “Terran, give me our coordinates.”
“Four clicks past the Europan shipping lanes, doubt that it’s a trade ship.”
“Mikey?” Doitzel turned.
It was the child that replied. “They haven’t hailed us, Kalingkata says the ping returned; non-human IP address.”
“Engage light screen, and tell Cabby to scramble support fighters.”
Over the intercom I heard Kalingkata groan, “Doitzel, we are picking up incoming missiles. Bearing mark six.”
Doitzel’s eyes lit up, with what was either pride or joy, I couldn’t tell, but the thought of either frightened me. He pulled down his goggles, and clicked on his magboots. Looking back I feel like a complete idiot for this, but at that moment I could have almost believed that Doitzel was actually some kind of leader.
“Alright Muppets, here we go. Engines to full! Pull us about Terran, I want to look these bastards in the eye. If Kalingkata hasn’t already run a return-to-sender on those missiles have him do so, and let Aequitas know he’s free to fire at will.”
The hull screamed as the massive ship pulled a u-turn and came around to face a Shi battle cruiser. I had never seen one before. The ship looked like some sort of bluish-gray blob, like a bunch of mercury floating freely in the void. But this blob was the size of a large city. This ship was obviously much larger than the Muppet, we were horribly outclassed. All over the Shi vessel spots lit up as plasma weapons opened fire. This thing was brimming with firepower.
“She’s setting up a parameter.” The pilot said.
“You’re a leaf on the wind, Terran, take us through their fire solution.” Doitzel coaxed. “What’s the status on those fighters Cabby?
“We’re starting our attack run now,” went the calm voice of Oiji from the intercom.
The ship coursed through the blasts of plasma, diving and dodging as it went. The ship was incredibly maneuverable, or the pilot was remarkably good, or both. Soon the Muppet was right up next to the Shi ship, flying right over their bow.
“Strafe ‘em! On the down turn, all batteries fire at will!”
The ship shook as the main cannons opened up, blasting the Shi cruiser with massive salvos of energy. Just as the guns fell silent and we passed over the ship again, the ship shook once more, but the last one felt different.
“That wasn’t a laser blast; something hit us!” Doitzel exclaimed.
Ellodie’s voice came in over the intercom, “Umm… Doitzel, here’s something. Report from engineering; we’ve just lost much of the power from the main reactor core.”
“What? Where the hell’d it go?!”
“I dunno, but definitely not the engines, and not the light screen generator.”
“We’re fucking visible!?”
From where I sat I could see that we were dangerously close to the Shi vessel, you didn’t have to be an Admiral to see it. There was no way they could have misused us, and they didn’t miss us. Not a moment later the Shi batteries opened up, tearing into the Muppets hull. All at once damage reports were coming in.
“Sparky says his eye-ders can’t keep up with how fast their wearing our armor down.”
“We have a hull breaches on plasma battery 4 and cargo bay 2.”
All of a sudden I found myself crippled with a horrible headache. It seemed as if all the pain was centered behind my left eye and I couldn’t help but fell like if I only ripped it out the pain would be released. Text scrolled over my strained mind:
“That’s where the booze was, they knew just where to hit us!”
“Damn-it Ed, words! Type your words!” Doitzel shouted into the intercom.
Terran spun around in his seat shrugging. “Doitzel, we’re drifting, I have no engine response.”
“At least we’re drifting fast, use the maneuvering jets for control and for the love of Bowie don’t slow us down. Kalingkata, do you still have power?”
“Yeah, we’re fine, what’s wrong with you guys.”
“Never mind that, get Ed to hack into that battleships mainframe, give them a sensor ghost to follow instead of us.”
“Ugh. Fine.”
“If we keep drifting like this they’ll just trace our trajectory and catch up.”
“No they won’t. Radio Cabby, tell him to break off the attack, launch Tuggy to pick up drifting survivors. I want his fighters to pull around to the front of the ship. Oh, and tell him not to freak out. This will be a bit unorthodox. Patch me through to the hangar; I want to speak with Queequay”
Over the window a hologram image of the hangar deck that I had landed on lit up. A Quay rushed up from the background until it filled up the monitor. This Quay was much smaller than the one I had met earlier in the hallway. How many aliens did they have on this ship?
“Yesssar?” it hissed.
“Queequay, I need you to harpoon our fighters without knocking out their engines, it’s a tough shot, can pull you it off?”
“Of course.” It growled, and the monitor flickered out.
“Are the Shi breaking off yet?”
“Looks like they fell for it, they’ve broken away two points off the stern.”
“Lovely, tell Queequay to fire at will.”
In quick succession two thick metal cables were fired over the bow each one striking the star fighters escorting the ship.
Doitzel laughed, which was a bit maniacal in nature. “Great shot kid, that was one in a million. Alright, boys, pull us the hell out of here, two points to starboard, change our trajectory.”
Oiji’s calm voice came in over the intercom, “What the fuck, Doitzel, you could have warned us…”
After a few strained minutes of waiting for another change in development someone spoke.
“We’ve left sensor range.”
“Damage report.”
“We report 6 missing, 2 dead, the corpses on are their way to Natsu, Tuggy should be returning soon.”
“Wounded?”
Natsu says, “shut up, Doitzel, I’m saving lives.”
Doitzel smiled. “Good. Alright crew. The Muppet never stops, let’s refit and be right back at ‘em.”
Maybe it wasn’t the best time, but I decided to pick that moment as the one where I confronted Doitzel. If anyone could give me the information I needed to make the day’s report anything short of a horror story it should be him, and maybe, just maybe he could fill me in on when the next transport would come to take me off this riddled scrap heap. I walked up to where Doitzel stood.
“Mr. Radical Doitzel, a word if you please.” I said sternly. I reached out to tap him on the shoulder, but before my hand got there my arm was twisted painfully backwards by something.
“Oww! What was that?”
Doitzel spoke. “Oh, that’s Shadow, you probably shouldn’t try to touch me.
“What is Shadow?”
“She’s my bodyguard; a full time job too.”
I looked around the room. There was no one anywhere near close enough to have assaulted me, though many of the crew members had turned to glare at me, hands on knives and pistols. Young Mikey looked like a cat ready to pounce, perhaps a bit too literally so, since he had now grown a series of vicious looking claws from the fingers of his right hand.
“Is Shadow in the room?” I asked nervously, wondering why a captain with such cult-like fanaticism with his crew would need a bodyguard.
“I don’t know. Probably.” He clicked off his magboots and then turned to face me.
“I’m guessing you’re another envoy, huh? Well, let’s get you a room, I’m sure you are tired and can’t wait to get started writing about how awesome we are, and all the great uses we have for your company’s money. Michael, take care of this guy.”
A man with no less than a dozen firearms strapped to his body stood up from one of the gunnery seats.
“Take care of, how?” he snarled.
“Exactly,” and with that he started heading for the door. Mikey followed him.
“Where are you going Doitzel?”
“The author needs me to leave so that this story doesn’t end up being about me, like all the other crap he writes.”
“Doitzel, we’re not allowed to talk about…”
“Fine, I’m off to see what happened to the reactor linkage. I’ve got a bad feeling about what evil did this.” On his way out Doitzel stopped by the cabinet he had been sleeping in and pulled out a poncho.
“Yay, milkshakes!” Mikey cheered.
The walking armory, otherwise known as Michael, led me to the crew quarters grumbling the whole time. “You’ll be sharing a bunk with ‘Sprocket,’ but don’t worry; he’s on the repair shift now, so you should have a few good hours’ sleep before he bursts in drunk and angry. I’ll have some idiot bring up your bags.”
The room was small and messy. If I had to guess anything about this crewmate who lived here, I’d say he had a thing for hoarding bits of junk, but the battle had tossed everything in the room all over creating a terrible mess, assuming it hadn’t already been like this. I sat down on the bed and began writing down this report, taking more care to detail than I had ever before, just in case I didn’t survive to turn it in. Hotaru had been right, things were definitely worse, but I had to believe that this was the bottom of the barrel. I mean, the ship wasn’t even operational anymore, everything that could go wrong short of a painful death by explosive decompression in the bowels of space had already happened, right? Surely things couldn’t get much worse from here on out, I thought. In retrospect I think I should have actually just gone for the painful death by space option. It would have been much healthier for me than what actually happened.
After a couple of hours I awoke with a jolt. Literally a jolt; I had been shocked with several volts of electricity. I sat up to see a man in a crude bear suit holding what appeared to be a handmade taser.
“I’m in your room,” said the man. It was Sparky’s voice. I could have sworn that I had locked that door.
“Yes, yes you are.”
“I’m in a bear suit.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Anything could happen.”
“No, no it couldn’t. Get out of my room!”
Surprisingly, Sparky turned and left. I quickly checked to make sure he didn’t steal anything then went back to sleep, from which I didn’t wake until I was thrown out of bed by another tremor. It felt like the ship was already firing again. Had they caught up to us? Or was Doitzel really stupid enough to have run straight back into battle with a crippled… I considered that for a moment. Yeah, never mind. It was definitely that one.
I ran to my door, but couldn’t get it open again. Someone, probably Sparky, had changed the security code on the lock. This was bad. If the ship was destroyed, which I very much believed would be the outcome of the fight, I wouldn’t have a chance of reaching one of the escape pods. After giving up on the code I slowly sat down on my bunk ready to accept my inevitable fate.
The door opened. Hotaru stood in the doorway.
“I thought Sparky might lock you in here.” She looked sadly at her feet. “I have to go, we’re fighting again, be safe.” And she walked off down the halls crying that she was sorry for leaving.
I stepped outside. I was certain that I had seen some escape pods when Celeste was dragging me around before. I ran down the halls, trying to keep my footing every time one of the gun batteries fired. Soon I was hopelessly lost, these halls had been difficult to navigate before, but I now had a feeling that the very structure of the ship had changed a little since I went to sleep. What was wrong with this ship? Eventually I found a landmark that I actually recognized; the thick blast door to the primary command deck. The doors flew open as a wave of personnel hurried out of the command deck, putting on space suits and breather masks. Celeste grabbed me as she passed, handed me a mask of my own and gave me a look that pierced my very soul.
“Back of the ship. Engine room. Now.”
“What? Why?”
She never answered. She didn’t have to. I saw that behind her, on the deck, in an overly dramatic fashion Doitzel drew an antique saber that for some reason he had now attached to his tool belt, and shouted:
“Bring us closer, Terran! I wish to hit them with my sword!”
In the view screen I could see the same Shi ship from before, and I could see that we were coming up on it, heading straight for it, very, very fast. That was all I needed to see to be convinced; Doitzel was obviously about to kill us all. Celeste didn’t have to tell me twice, I ran as fast as I could towards the back of the ship, and as far from the control deck as possible. The crew had packed themselves into the engine room like condensed protein bars. Someone’s elbow was in my face but I couldn’t move at all to get comfortable. For where I was stuck I could see a Shi figure covered in a blanket floating in the corner of the deck. It was clearly Ed. The Quay saw it and roared.
“Who is that?”
“That’s just a ghost, Aequitas. It’s always been there.”
“Oh.”
I would have been shocked at the idiocy of this moment had the next moment not been the one where our ship collided into a bigger one. All at once everyone on the crowded deck was thrown forward as the hull screamed with the sounds of bending metal. Circuit boxes on the walls and ceiling were blowing faster than the eye-ders could scamper around and fix. Ellodie clung to one of the engines with her robotic arm while her human arm worked on rewiring a blown fuse. She cried at a team of Maverick engineers trying to do the same with the other engine.
“I don’t care how many of the fail safes fail, we are not losing core containment on this boat!”
Eventually the hull ceased to quake and everything was still. I couldn’t believe we were alive. For a minute there was an uneasy silence as everyone waited in confusion for another order. The air was getting thinner, I saw that everyone else had put on breather masks and I decided to do the same. Seconds felt like hours, no order came. Then out of nowhere a man dressed in full Gongen battle regalia dropped from what I assumed was the ceiling, I have no idea why he was up there, and screamed “HIROKAWA!” before revving up his jetpack and flying with suicidal resolve down the corridor back to the front of the ship.
There was a pause where no one was sure what to do, before people started to whisper;
“Oh, my god he just went in.”
“What do we do?”
“Stick to the plan!”
With that the mass of people rushed forward, frenzied screams echoing within the narrow hallways, guns and blades of every shape and size waving above their heads. I ran with them, it was all I could do to keep from being overrun, but I had a bad feeling that whatever lay ahead was far worse than being trampled to death. I have no idea where it was the Muppet ended and the Shi warship began, but apparently the Muppet had stuck with enough force to lodge itself within the hull of its massive opponent, and at some point the mob had crossed over through a breach and was on the offensive.
Even if I had wanted to fight the Shi, which I didn’t because I’m not hopelessly suicidal, I wouldn’t have been able to. Through my mind coursed the battle cries of hundreds of Shi soldiers as they met the Muppet’s raiding party. The pains of the visions were so severe that I couldn’t even manage to stay on my feet, and when I fell I tried my best to fall over out of the way so that I wasn’t trampled by the battle. In the pandemonium of the brawl I thought that I could have gone unnoticed but before long a large robotic arm came down, grabbed me by the collar and hauled me back to my feet and further down the hall as the raid progressed through the Shi vessel.
“Come on, you piece of crap, I’m missing some good kills here.” It was Michael. “And I’m not helping you because Doitzel told me to. Understand?”
I tried to focus my eyes enough to look around. No one else seemed to be affected by the painful, alien texts that raced across my mind.
“Am I… the only one… who sees the… feels the…” I stammered, unable to focus any of my thoughts.
“The death cries of the Shi?” He stood proudly, and pulled a second gun from one of the dozen holsters on his person. “Music to my synapses.” Then he jumped back into the fray.
In this manner the whole rest of the fight played out; me being knocked around and pulled back up by Michael. Each time his massive robot arm grabbed my collar to drag me along he smeared the blood of slain Shi on my suit. I can’t tell you how many Shi or how many humans were killed in those few minutes, but the carnage was beyond sickening, and most of what I can recall is vague, with the exception of a few things that I would love to have forever scrubbed from my mind. At one point I was nearly run over by the Quay, Aequitas, as he rushed a Shi soldier, tore it in half, and used the still living upper half to beat two others to death. I took that moment to break away and try to make it back to the safety of the Muppet’s command deck. As I left mayhem behind me I heard someone scream; “Damn it Sparky, watch it, we’re more conductive than they are!”
As I stumbled back through the destroyed halls of the Shi warship I was picked up by a man, or at least I think he was once a man, racing through the halls. From the waist up his skin was covered in scales and from the waist down he was a giant mechanical spider. He charged through the halls back towards the Muppet with a fury that reminded me of a rampaging Quay. In two of his robotic spider legs he carried a surprisingly large pile of human corpses. He placed me on that pile.
“Hop on or get out of the way,” he said, as if I still had a choice in the matter. “Sweet Alabama Liquid Snake has got to get the bodies back, pronto!”
The strange spider-reptile man dumped the pile of corpses in front of Fei who was tending to wounded from the command deck, bodies lay strewn across the floors and terminals.
“Just put them there, Alabama, I’ll get them right back in the fight, Natsu’s busy with Doitzel.”
At the time I didn’t think about what was implied in what Fei had just said, because when I turned to where she had gestured I saw Doitzel. He hung four inches above the floor of the command deck, sword still in his hand, with part of a support strut running through his neck and torso, impaling him to the wall. One of the lenses on his goggles had shattered, revealing the cold, dead eye within. The frame of the goggles dripped with blood in a way that almost made it look like he was crying, but on his face was a big grin, the overall image clashing in a strange and daunting way. Natsu stood there looking at him like he was critiquing a piece of art.
“Damn it, Doitzel, I’m a doctor not a janitor. I swear, one of these days he’s going to do something like this and there won’t be enough of him left to bring back.”
A team worked with welding torches to cut Doitzel down and set his body on the floor. I didn’t know what to feel, the man may have been an unhinged maniac, but I had to figure that he had at least died sticking to his principles (whatever the hell those might be) and I had to give him that.
Just before I could finish a thought of respect for the dead captain, Natsu rubbed his hands together and chanted over and over;
“Yu Mo Gui Gwai Fi Di Zao, Yu Mo Gui Gwai Fi Di Zao.”
His hands began to glow with an eerie light as he placed his hands on the gaping holes in Doitzel’s neck and chest which healed up instantly. Doitzel coughed up a large mass of clotted blood and began to gasp in the thin atmosphere; Natsu slipped a breather mask over him.
“Already?” he rasped. “I was having tea with Rasputin.”
Good God, Natsu was a kisen. They knew it too; they were actually okay with having a dangerous mutant on board their ship. As if he was a normal person. That was when I had to give up. Everything I had come to believe in recently, the power of a greater united humanity against the Shi now had been utterly destroyed. I had been sent me to turn in a logical report on a crew of psychotics, aliens, cyborgs, and mutants who sailed a starship with experimental technology that they were far too irresponsible to be using. There was no sense to be made in this. I couldn’t possibly represent what I had seen in any kind of organized summary, and I now felt like a complete idiot for nearly thinking that Doitzel had given his life believing in something worthwhile. Clearly this man didn’t have an honorable bone in his body. I was beginning to question whether or not I was on the right side of this war.
As Natsu helped Doitzel back to his feet I felt a hand on my shoulder. When I turned I saw one of the ship’s ensigns next to me. I could have sworn I had seen her before on the ship, but even now I cannot recall what post she worked at.
“Rough day huh? You know you can stop it right now, end the madness so that these people never hurt anyone again.”
“What? How?”
“Self-destruct button is right there.” she said pointing to one of the control consoles. “It’s the right thing to do.”
As Doitzel got to his feet she smirked, I saw the look of both satisfaction and abhorrence all rolled into one gleam for an instant in her eyes as she saw the battered captain, and then she casually walked off the command deck. Doitzel pulled off his broken goggles to reveal the black eye and moustache that someone appeared to have drawn on him with a marker while he was temporarily dead. A couple of ensigns on the crew stepped on board the Muppet from the Shi ship.
“Doitzel, all decks are secured.”
“Good, how many prisoners did you manage to save from Aequitas?”
“Two.”
“Out of, what, one hundred of fifty? Not bad, you guys are getting better at that.”
He stumbled up to the jagged hull breach where his ship ended and another began. Standing at the edge of the ship he gave his sword a half-hearted swing, tapping it against a shredded part of the hull of the Shi battleship.
“Huzzah,” he coughed, and then pointed the sword at me. I tried hard not to laugh at how ridiculous he looked with the markings on his face.
“Well, are you coming along or not? I’m sure your boss would like to hear about effective ways of negotiating surrender with the Shi.”
Again, it didn’t seem like I had much of a choice, and I certainly wasn’t going to stay here with a kisen, for all I know he might turn me inside out with his mind or something. I decided that I’d rather take my chances with the Shi. Doitzel led me through the halls of the Shi warship, the thin blue bodies of the crew strewn all over the floor, contorted in every way imaginable and unimaginable. At one point the strange spider-reptile man ran past us with another load of human corpses. Doitzel saluted him as he flew by.
“Great job, Alabama.”
“That’s the only kind of job Sweet Alabama Liquid Snake does.”
Doitzel chuckled a bit at the remark but when he did one of the Shi on the ground quickly rose up and lunged at him with some strange kind of blunt looking knife. An image flashed in my mind that seemed to contain in itself all the hateful passion of genocide. I can’t recall if I blinked or if Doitzel was really that fast, but either way the Shi never hit its mark. Rather it quickly fell back to the ground, dead, with two fresh bullet holes in its head.
“Ziggy H. Tap-dancing Stardust,” Doitzel sneered, an Earther sidearm in his hand. “How many times have I told them; zombie rules, damn it. Zombie rules apply.”
We were uninterrupted for the rest of the walk to the bridge of the Shi vessel which was considerably bigger and better organized than the one on the Muppet, even with the corpses strewn all over the place. Much of Electric Mayhem was there trying to hold back Aequitas who was doing all he could to not attack the two Shi ensigns who were kneeling, or at least for a species without knees seemed to be doing their best at kneeling, on the floor in front of Michael, the child Mikey, and that odd Gongen man who had started the charge. Doitzel approached the captives, but addressed Mikey.
“Mikey, how many men does it take to send a message?”
“Only one?”
“That’s right, but these are not men, kill them both.”
Young Mikey raised up one of the energy staffs the Shi use and from it fired two blasts that burst open the chests of each of the captives. I decided not to ask how it was that the child had somehow learned how to use Shi weaponry; I knew that I would not like the answer.
In the 12 hours that followed their victory Electric Mayhem briefly considered fixing up the Muppet, but rather decided to drink what was left of the alcohol on the ship and celebrate. Ultimately the ship was fixed up enough to fly again and dislodged from Shi battleship, which in turn was overhauled and sent to Europa to be refitted for the war effort. All of this was done while much of the crew was intoxicated; Doitzel had managed to make a drinking game out of it. It wasn’t until six hours after the last shots were fired that Mikey finally told Doitzel that someone had drawn on his face. He screamed about Hex again, whoever that was, washed his face and passed out on the floor of the command deck. I heard from Oiji that he had woken up some hours later with new drawings on his face and a hangover, but by then my bags were packed and I was standing on the hanger deck as a new supply ship arrived on the Muppet, this one mostly loaded with alcohol to replace what had been drunken and/or blown up. Needless to say I took this opportunity to leave the ship and consign myself to a lifetime of night terrors and therapy. In all my days as a corporate envoy I have never had the dishonor of reviewing such a crew. Electric Mayhem should never have had their status of “interplanetary terrorists” revoked, with only a few exceptions the team is made up of combinations of all the most dangerous aspects of society that had ever had the justice inflicted upon them to be declared public menaces; murderers, psychotics, spliced cyborgs, kisen, and aliens. For the sake of public safety I recommend that not only should Mayhem not be financed but that they should be declared criminals once again and hunted down. However this choice is not up to me, and in accordance with my post I must reluctantly admit that in following the FedGrav standards for combat review, Electric Mayhem passes with flying colors as a prime candidate for investment. In a battle with a with a Shi warship well above its class the Muppet inflicted 100% casualties without losing any crew members, seeing as for all appearances it seems the ship is crewed by the closest thing to the undead as has ever actually existed.
Despite passing the standards, I beg of you at FedGrav not to give any support to Electric Mayhem, but regardless you can consider this my two weeks’ notice, as the things I have seen cannot be unseen.
-Professionally Yours,
Reginald Strife (Corporate Envoy, FedGrav, Retired)