[b]Space, ~9 AU From Brahma[/b]

"You wear that pistol all the time?" Eury asked, glancing at the silver faux-leather holster that hung at Laz's side. "I thought you were off duty today."

It was true that, on a mission like this one, he wasn't required to go armed when he was not working. In fact, they were encouraged not to. There was more risk in off-duty guards drinking while armed and starting fights than there was a chance of one needing a weapon for professional reasons on their time off. He had gotten bad looks from the Cantina guard when he walked in, and the barmaster had been eying him suspiciously ever since. He could feel their glances itching at the back of his neck from time to time, and we he glanced back he thought he saw them turning their heads away quickly. It did not matter. They could think what they wanted to. 

"It's my grandfather's." Laz said. "He gave it to me as a memento. I try to wear it as much as I can." He rubbed the grip of the weapon, feeling the hand-worn steel beneath his fingers. He wanted to try shooting with it, but sonic weapons weren't for target shooting. In a sense, they were more similar to musical instruments than they were ballistic weapons. When not properly calibrated, they could react unpredictably. Too soft, or too lose, and you had a trumpet with a trigger. Too tight and it wouldn't affect a large enough area to do any real damage. His grandfather had taught him how to keep it tuned, and he had warned that unnecessary use would require him to retune it all over again.

"So... do you wear it to, like, bed?" she shyly asked. She made it painfully obvious that she was trying to flirt with him, and it made her all the more cuter. 

He chuckled. "No." he said, "That would be ridiculous." Looking into her eyes, he saw that she was falling for him. 

"//[i]Do you require an alcoholic beverage[/i]//" A buzzing electronic voice interrupted.

The servebot was a child-sized white-plated cylinder on treads. In place of a head, it had a circular silver tray that was nearly level with the height of the table, and single red eye staring up from the center of its chest. It waited patiently as it was programmed to do, its eye switching focus from him to her, and than from her back to him, in a way that would have conveyed nervousness in humans.. Thy way it stood there gave Laz the same feeling of being rushed that he would have gotten if it were a human waiting beside them. It was a strange feeling to get, the urge to avoid hindering what looked like a garbage bin on wheels. 

"Water." Eury answered. "//[i]Water[/i]//" the servebot replied mechanically.

"Spiked lemonade." Laz said.

The servebot paused for a moment, staying completely still. Its innards buzzed, as if the wheels of its mind were audibly turning. When it spoke, its voice sounded more authoritative, though it was stll the same electronic hum. 

"//[i]The Myers Ruling requires me to inform you that alcoholic drink impairs human thought and response time. Do no partake in alcoholic drink under the following circumstances. When: Going on duty as an employee of the state. When: Operating heavy equipment, vehicles, or spacecraft. When: Programming a bot who either handles or acts as the equivalent to heavy equipment, vehicles, or spacecraft. When: Programming a bot that operates as an equivalent to an employee of the state. When: Handling weaponry. When: In the vicinity of dangerous chemicals, radiation, or active combustion. When...[/i]//"

The robot continued, but Laz had heard the Myers warning before. He looked out through the glass wall that opened the pallidly lit beige panels and stoic black floors of the cantina to the panorama of space. Millions of stars peppered the black. In some places they were thin, each star an island plunged in a sea of infinite shadow. In other places they clustered, and their glow lit the space around them so that they looked as if they were set in a purple haze. The coppery expanse of a solar sail split the view of space in half, and the floodlighting on its edges making it the brightest thing in view. There was a certain aesthetic to the sails. Though they only supplied a fraction of the vessel's power, they were one of the most noticeable things about it. They encircled the cylindrical spaceship like two pinwheels, fanning out in all directions. 

"I bet you can name them all." Laz teased, looking out at the stars. Behind them, the servebot rolled away. 

"I never could." she said. "If you give me a map, maybe..."

Laz grinned. "I could name them all if you gave me a map. That's cheating."

"No." she teased. "You don't know what you are looking for."

"It can't be that hard." he replied. "They are all named after the same old Germans. I bet I could close by eyes and start naming them and get at least one right."

She laughed. "I'd like to see that."

He covered his eyes and, making a show of dragging his arm across the starscape in front of them, he settled on one spot and pointed. "That is Berliner 12. They named all the planets after Germans. A race of tiny bloodsucking bugs live on Bismark." He could hear Eury snorting with laughter. He grinned and continued, pointing blindly somewhere at the stars that he could not see. "That is Heiney 12-65b" 

"B?" Eury interjected, "That mean it's another star in the same system."

"In the same system?" Laz said. "See, I told you I was good at this."

"Wait." he heard Eury say, her tone no longer playful. He opened his eyes. His vision was blurred from the game, but as the stars came into focus he saw it. A star, moving quickly against the rest.

"An asteroid?" he asked.

"No." she said. "That's a spaceship."

Laz chuckled. "Imagine that. Near infinite of miles of space and we somehow run into another vessel. Like finding a needle in the clouds of Indra."

"It's not too surprising, actually." Eury replied. "Most vessels travel roughly the same routes. There always is a quickest way to get to somewhere."

"Even with the planets moving along their orbits constantly?" he asked. "I would assume the routes have to change."

"The adjustments still bring them pretty close." Eury responded. "On the day-to-day, at least"

They had came near to other vessels earlier in their voyage. It had happened several times when they first embarked, when they were in the relatively busy portion of space near Brahma. Laz could imagine what was going on in the bridge now from his experiences then. They would orient their communications array toward the other vessel in order to direct a message. It was a slow process. There were few things that the IU cared about, and one of them was the regulation of communication. When it was posited that the Listeners followed communication signals in order hunt human civilization, the IU responded by restructuring the way humanity talked to itself. There were very few changes to how people communicated on-planet, but messages between planets, or in space, were heavily regulated. The most common form was pin-pointed, directly aimed signals sent from a series of bowl-shaped disks on the craft itself. They had to be aimed at the target of the communication and calibrated so that they compensated for speed and motion of both vessels. It was tiresome, but it was one of the few laws that the IU cared about. If they found evidence of a vessel allowing signals to escape into general space, the punishment would be severe. For accidents, massive fines. For negligence or sloppiness, it was decades in prison for those deemed responsible by the courts. Both cases often saw a persons license to buy, captain, or participate in the operation of a space vessel taken away for good.. 

The mysterious ship was heading in their direction. Laz could see the light reflecting off their sails, and it obscured the vessel's shape. It looked like a growing ball of light, as if one of the stars had decided to leap out at them from their perch.

"I wonder what their mission is." Laz said.

"Let's make a game." Eury piped, "I think it is... a supply vessel on its way to supply one of the moons of Indra."

Laz frowned. "That's boring." he said. The vessel was close enough that he could make out a few basic details. "It's a small ship..." he said, "A cruiser. Looks old. Possibly... two generations old? Could be a model that predates the destruction of Earth... It is a ghost ship, lost during the war with the Listeners. It arrived in this system but lost life support before it reached Brahma. Now the animated corpses of its old crew haunt its bridge, still tracing its steps through the system hoping to find the planet is came so far for."

"Ooh." Eury chirped, "I like that. It looks creepy now." The mysterious vessel had pulled up near to the Aro, close enough that Laz could study it in detail. It did look ghoulish, the sun washing its grey fuselage in a glaring white glow, so much so that, much like a planet, it seemed to give off its own light . There were no markings, suggesting a privately owned craft. On the top, a communications array had been haphazardly attached to its old body. That was no surprise. IU regulation Comm arrays were unheard of on pre-destruction vessels. Laz had been right - it was a really old vessel.

"I know." Eury said, "Once they arrive on Brahma, after all this time, their skeletons will disembark and wander the streets of Nai Kolkatta, looking for their friends and family." 

"Spooky." Laz pretended to shiver. "And if they find their family?"

"They will..." she was cut off by the sudden squelching of ship-wide alarms. Laz's heart dropped. In a single moment, everything changed. Lights began to flash, from red to blue to green. He heard the door swash open, and the cantina guard dash into the halls. 

Shuttles began to dispatch from the belly of the mysterious ship. There were dozens, taking to space like mosquitoes departing one host for another. A directed particle beam lit up from the side of the vessel and struck the Aro, causing the entire ship to shudder. Eury screamed. Laz stood, stunned and unable to move. The IU had no enemies, not in the traditional sense. An attack on an IU ship was unheard of. That it was happening only confused, and terrified, him. Only a moment ago it had been a friendly ghost. Now it was a horror.

Ugly steel plates abruptly snapped shut over the window toward space and blocked out the sight of their attackers. The sound of the plates slamming together caused Eury to squeal with fear. Now only the alarm lights lit the room, pulsing and changing hue as the alarm bells rang. 

"What do we do?!" Eury begged. "What do I do?1" 

"Go to your room." Laz said. He rubbed the grip of his grandfather's pistol. "I have to do something."

They parted ways.

Laz watched as Eury ran, the barmaster following her into the core of the ship. They would be safe there. There was no safer place in the ship, after all. The Aro shuddered again. Were any of them safe? It was all a blur.

"//[i]Armed personnel report to the portside life-support maintenance corridor. All other passengers evacuate to the core of the vessel. This is not a drill.[/i]//" the intercom read out. It was echoed word for word by the harsh buzzing voices of the cantina's servebots, whose repetition of the warning filled the room with an eerie electric harmony. He could see their dead, red eyes glowing under the changing colors of the room's alarm-system lightning. They were extensions of the warning system now, and anything that had once resembled life in them was replaced with undead panic.

"//[i]Armed personnel report to the second-level portside maintenance corridor. All other passengers retreat to the core of the vessel. This is not a drill.[/i]//" the intercom repeated, alongside the chorus of servebots. Laz unholstered his weapon, disengage its safety, and ran. 

The halls were chaos. Every robot he passed echoed the intercom's message as it was repeated, in chirping voices and soothing ones, sing songy and monotone. More people were clamoring toward the core of the ship than were rushing to meet the threat. Did they have enough men to fight off these attackers? Who were they, anyhow? His mind spun through the possibilities, and it kept coming up with the same frightening conclusion. [i]The Listeners.[/i]

They wouldn't be manning a human ship though, would they? Certainly not one with an updated communications array? His grandfather had always described the Listener vessels as 'Shards'. They had been, according to most people who had seen them, asymmetric and sharp, like a fleet build from the remnants of a broken black obsidian. Who else would attack an IU ship, though? Laz had never taken an interest in politics, but he had heard rumors. There where always whispers that one of the independent states of the Safe Zone wanted to supplant the IU. Was it the Coalition at Ephyra? The Martian monarchy in the west who's name Laz could not remember? He was angry at himself for not understanding. If he was suddenly a participant in some civil war, he wanted to know what it was about. Was this how wars started? Not in the clearcut context of history lessons, but in a mass of confused men and women coming to grips with something they did not understand?

 The maintenance corridors were ugly and unattractive in comparison to the main halls. There were no lighted panels here. The naked walls were covered with wires and tubes crossing each other in a labyrinth of complex infrastructure. The floor was perforated steel, and he could hear the halls echoing with the desperate tap of a dozen bootfalls. A second sound began to echo as well - the discharge of weapons. It started with the sonic crack of railguns as the fighting started. And than it was shouting, and the clashing of metal. Laz had never been in a battle. His heart pounded and his limbs felt numb, but something drove him forward.

He fell in line with another guard. Before they turned a corner, the second man grabbed Laz by the collar and pulled him back. Dazed, Laz watched as the guard peered around the corner. He slowly held up six fingers. Laz understood, and nodded. The other guard pulled a small polished metal orb from his pocket. He kissed it, pulled a pin from its side, and tossed it underhand. Laz watched as it came alive and whizzed along the floor with a high pitched buzz. When it turned the corner, it didn't lose speed. 

Laz heard the invaders shout before they were silenced by a muted explosion. It sounded like distant thunder, followed by a brief but violent outburst of metallic hail . The second guard peeked around again, motioned for Laz to follow, and then bolted into the hall.

There they were, the remains of those attackers who had wandered down the wrong hall. There were six of them, and they were human. Beneath the gore left by the other man's grenade, the attackers were dressed in black space-suits. There was no uniform, and the suits differed from corpse to corpse. On their heads, each man wore a mask that obscured their entire face. Each mask had on it an image that, smeared with homemade paint, looked monstrous. Laz could not make out what any of them were supposed to be. They were hideous, like the visages of ancient demons. Claws and bones, horns and sharpened teeth, every exaggerated detail sprang up from places in in their faces where they should not have been. They were unnatural, sick, and... alien. Even though the wearers had definitely been human, there was something clearly Brahman about the images they had painted on their masks. 

Shrapnel had torn their bodies. The flesh closest to the blast had been rendered into bloody strips of pink and red. Dark blood clung to the steel floor and flowed into the ducts below. Laz felt a lump rising into his throat, and he could taste the vomit as he walked over the disembodied arm of one of the men. It smelled of piss, and blood, and the horror death.

"Huh!" he heard a grunt in front of him. He watched as his comrade pulled a falchion from its sheath and prepared to defend himself from an attacker. The guard swung, but the foeman deflected him with his arm. As he delivered a quick exchange of spinning blows, Laz saw the shark-fin steel blade strapped to the raider's arms. Laz pulled a knife from his belt, but he was too late. The raider opened his comrade's neck with the sharpened edge of his fore-arm blade. He turned to Laz next, blood dripping from the razor-sharp edge of the enemy's weapon while the fallen guard gurgled and drowned in his own blood. Laz dropped the knife and, instinctively, raised his grandfather's sonic pistol.

He pulled the trigger.

There was no kick back. The weapon didn't seem to move at all. The sound it made was like the blast of a ballistic bomb so far away that his ears couldn't make sense of it. What it had done, however, was clear, and it was devastating.

Black-red blood gushed from his enemy's eyes , which had been rendered pulpy pink pits by the sonic force of the weapon. The same liquid, mixed with cloudy hunks of flesh, dripped from his ears and nose. The body had been tossed back, his motion as boneless as an eel. Laz nearly doubled over, each breath exploding within him as if his lungs were trying to escape him. He had seen violence. He had seen death. He had never, however, seen them in this way.

He soon began to realize that his hyperventilating was not simply panic. It was something else. His lungs grasped for air, but they could not find it. Every breath was poison. His head spun. He looked at the mask of the man he had just annihilated, and for the first time he noticed a feature he had missed before, and it brought him more fear than the evil faces. 

A respirator.