A more technologically equiped expedition [i]might[/i] have fallen for the rouse; After all, in the poor lighting and some distance, they [i]looked[/i] like people.

…If the expedition was completely idiotic and failed to account for where they were, anyway. The air wasn’t breathable, blood dripped from the walls and roof of a ship structure so warped by its time as part of this tortured hulk of metal that it seemed to have grown flesh… and what data they were able to glean suggested that this section of the ship had once, logically been the sump.

No living people would be found here.

Which made the fact things in a human shape were actively moving around all the more alarming. 

Rik… needed a moment to process what his senses and sensors were telling him, because logically it made absolutely no logical sense at all: In the chamber in front of him, shambling through waist deep waste were creatures that had clearly once been human beings… but all sensors indicated that there was not a single life sign among them. 

No detectable pulse. Their temperature was the exact same as the room around them. [i]Some[/i] of them were breathing, but it seemed more out of some long forgotten impulse that raised it’s head in a haphazardly random way rather then out of necessity. Motion was the only sensor that reliably picked them up… and that depended on them actually moving. 

By all sensor accounts, they were all dead. Visually, they looked it. Bloated, covered in tumours and boils where skin hadn’t just rotten off in a horrific green puss. Some still seemed to be wearing clothing, but it was little more than rotten rags clinging to their frames by chance rather than anything else.

They hadn’t been detected by the things yet. The idea of these things being able to detect anything was madness in Rik’s mind, but their very existence had already that they had left the sane laws of reality behind when they boarded this broken, twisted vessel. 

Records from Pentious had indicated that warp travel had its dangers. The reanimation of the dead appeared to be one of them. 

Figuring out the intent of these creatures was simply not something that Rik was confident in guessing at. Intention required intelligence and impulse… and these unnatural things didn’t seem to possess either that a living creature would have. He wasn’t about to risk the lives of his expedition for the sake of these misbegotten creatures and they needed to traverse the chamber they were currently gathering/standing around in. 

With a signal, his forces formed a firing line. These creatures seemed to be physically slow to move normally, let alone wading through the refuse of the sump. But they didn’t have life signs and any that fell below the muck might not be confirmed kills. 

This was going to be a time consuming pain in the ass.

Rik gave the command. The battle began.