EliteCommander

Price of Life (EliteCommander and Cath)

Despite the impact, the other ship was still flying, though it was worse for wear than Light’s. A few pieces of their ship were torn from the hull and dropped to the planet below, but it still managed a relatively quick turn to follow Light’s path. His sensors showed them lining up behind his ship...then simply lingering. For about ten seconds they followed, with neither a hail nor a shot fired, during which time they likely ran their own damage assessment. During the impact, Light had struck their ship’s primary, and only, weapon.

“Looks like they’re breaking off.” Jess’ voice chimed in through their comm channel. She had not gone up to the cockpit, but instead had instead strapped herself in to the first seat she had been able to reach before they launched. The acceleration, and the impact, had rattled her, but she had been secured. She was patched in to the ship’s computer and was following along through its sensor readouts. “I don’t know if you’re that good, or just that lucky Light, but let’s get out of here before that luck gets tested again. Here’s the coordinates for the system we need to head to. It’s on the way back to Korit, about a day away from here. We’re heading to an asteroid orbiting the star, between the second and third planet in the system.”

The star system Jess had marked for them was uninhabited, and of little interest to any major power. It had no habitable planets, no strategic position, and no remarkable quantities or types of resources. Such places were perfect for outlaws, or any others who needed a secret outpost or base, as finding them by chance was like finding a needle in the largest haystack imaginable.

Price of Life (EliteCommander and Cath)

Senjen tucked himself in a corner of the cargo bay with his pistol at the ready, but no one approached their ship. Not before Light managed to get it off the ground. The incoming ship had been trying to stay out of sight and was just about to come into view over the ridge at the edge of a crater. Since Light’s ship had it tagged for a while now on approach, there had been no hiding for it. Though, the other ship’s crew would have no way of knowing that.

Scans from Light’s ship would have been able to reveal a bit more about it by now. He still did not have enough detail to identify a model, nor whether it was armed, but he could tell the ship was smaller, and almost certainly not of Tindrel make. By its size and shape, it was probably more agile, but would not have as robust of a hull.

Light was coming up on the ridge quickly, and the other ship would not be far beyond.

Price of Life (EliteCommander and Cath)

Senjen opened the compartment on his upper thigh and drew one of his pistols. It was the energy weapon he had been using for a few years now. Walking over to the loading ramp, he peered outside and tried to get a good look out over the area. Higher gravity meant flatter terrain overall, but this was a planet with neither geological activity nor an atmosphere. Craters from asteroid impacts remained pretty much permanently, and they created plenty of uneven terrain through which one could hide their approach.

Jess stayed back in the cargo hold, well-away from the entrance. Her breaths were starting to get quicker, which could be heard through the radio. “I hope you know what you’re doing. Your ship isn’t armed, but theirs very well may be.”

Being that Light’s ship was close, it only took a few moments for it to set down just outside. It would make for a much easier and quicker time moving the crates, though as expected, Light soon received an alert that his ship’s sensor array was picking up the other ship taking off as well. They would just have a few minutes to load up the crates.

Price of Life (EliteCommander and Cath)

“I...wait, hold on! Need to think about this.” Jess shouted, rather unnecessarily loudly through their radio channel. “A ship? And you said it’s parked nearby…” She looked out towards the cargo ramp, then around the hold. It was hard to tell at a glance what might be in the hold with the mess of crates that had been flung around everywhere in the crash, but that did not seem to be what Jess was focusing on. She had already seen the manifest, and she knew there was nothing there that could help them.

“Damn it, could be scavengers, maybe even pirates. Might not be too much of a difference, really. If they’re parked out of sight, that means they’re trying to sneak up on us, and I doubt it’s for anything good. If that’s how they’re doing it, then they’re probably coming over land, trying to get the jump on us. If you call over the ship, then they’ll know they’re out of time, and that will pretty much force them to bring over theirs too. Might be able to get out in time, but it’ll be up to you and your ship to get away with them chasing us.”

Senjen’s hand was hovering over his holster, despite the fact that there was still no signs of life anywhere near them. “You could have she ship set back down, pretend it didn’t detect anything. They’ll probably think they’re still hidden. If we can push the crates out to the ship before they get here, then we could just take off and get out of here without giving them any time to react. We’d definitely be in the clear then.”

Jess shook her head and crossed her arms. “If we can load up the crates in time. That’s one hell of an ‘if’. Because if they manage to get to us first, then we could get caught in a bad position. If we know where their ship is parked, though, then we can make a pretty good guess as to what route they’ll take to get to us. We could find a good ambush point to give us the advantage when it comes down to a gunfight.”

Price of Life (EliteCommander and Cath)

As it turned out, performing another scan of the area was a wise decision. With an expanded scan, the ship’s sensors picked up on an anomaly. There were traces of propellant byproducts the sensors could detect, indicative of a ship that had been boosting quickly. It had not come from their own ship, nor was it left over from the crashed freighter. The only remaining option was that another ship had been nearby, and a more focused scan in that direction would reveal it. It blended well into the terrain, but there was another ship, comparable in size to Light’s, hiding out in a crater a fair distance away. Based on the byproducts the scans detected, it had come in after Light had landed, so the fact that his ship’s passive scans had not detected it meant that it had been trying to approach stealthily. Likely, it had gone wide around the planet and approached from very low altitude to hide itself on sensors. It was out of sight, but close enough that its crew could feasibly reach them over ground, especially if they had vehicles.

Price of Life (EliteCommander and Cath)

“They could, but I’m pretty sure subtlety is the point.” Jess remarked. Once the crate was back closed, she put in the code to seal it up again. “They’re meant to be hidden. They can blend with other electronics, or just get tucked somewhere out of the way where no one can see ‘em.”

Senjen was nearby, between their crates and the exit, looking for a good way to clear their path. In this gravity, it would be a massive hassle to try and move their prize over the other crates blocking their path. “I still don’t really get why these things are even here. I mean, they’re obviously for smuggling, but this freighter belongs to an actual, big company, right? Was it an employee that sneaked them on, or did the actual company send them?”

“Almost certainly the company.” Jess answered. “These are top-of-the-line. Expensive, and effective. If they’re sending them out to the frontier, that means they’re bringing back something they’d rather keep quiet.”

Senjen still appeared somewhat confused. “I wouldn’t have thought big, proper companies like this would get involved in smuggling.”

This time, Jess laughed. “Oh please, after centuries of optimizing efficiency, they’ll take any scrap of profit they can get their hands on. If they find something restricted, they’ll sell it where its legal. Sometimes, what they’re smuggling is legal, but they don’t want their competitors to catch wind of what they found or where it came from. Out at the edge of settled space, it can be hard to enforce property claims. Almost all the companies push beyond the bounds of the territory in their charters when they’re prospecting, so they take secrecy as a first choice.”

“Well, as long as they never learn we took them. “Senjen shrugged. Once he had scoped out a path he was satisfied with, he turned back to Light. “I think what we do is push aside the crates over here and make space. It’s a bit longer of a path, but there’s less in the way.”

Price of Life (EliteCommander and Cath)

From a bit of investigation, it seemed clear that no medical records, nor any other ship records Light could access, had been manually updated since the disaster that crippled the ship. Automated logs were still being made, but with the number of damaged systems and sensors, those were scarce too. It was possible that he might be able to glean more information from them, but not from a cursory glance. He could make a copy of the ship logs, at least.

The personnel files did give Light more context for what he could see in the crew quarters. Now that he knew what their rank insignias meant, he could tell that the man who had been stabbed in the back had been the captain. Nothing in the medical records of the crew showed anything particularly unusual that would be related to the disaster. The only preexisting condition listed was a shellfish allergy for the engineer, and there was no report of disease or other contamination on the ship. What happened to them seemed to have come exclusively from after the disaster.

---

Jess motioned for Light to come to her as soon as he opened up the door into the cargo hold. She and Senjen were near the back of the hold, opposite from the loading ramp and near to the door Light had entered through. As he approached, she typed a code into the crate’s keypad. Its lights flashed green for a moment, and it unsealed. “Yeah, take a look at this.”

“Where’d you get the code?” Senjen asked.

“Looks like the captain appended it at the bottom of the manifest. They’re definitely not supposed to do that, but I’m gettin’ the feeling they might have been a bit careless.” She shrugged. “Whatever. Saves me needing to bypass it.”

Jess pushed the crate’s top partially aside so she could retrieve one of the tightly-packed rectangular cases from inside. “At least they’re properly packed. A solid crate, with individual protective cases for each device. All of that should have shielded them from the radiation and impact both.” Opening up the case, it contained a simple, unmarked polymer disk that could fit in a Human’s palm. “And here they are. This crate here, and the one next to it, have what we’re looking for. They’re more valuable than all the rest of ‘em in the hold combined.”

Turning her head, Jess looked out in the direction of the cargo ramp. Between here and there, they had the whole, disorganized mess of crates that had been knocked around the hold in the crash. “We just need to clear the way to get our prize out of here.”

Price of Life (EliteCommander and Cath)

In trying to get the console to work, Light would be able to get a sense for how inspired some of the repairs really were. Cosmic radiation had caused severe damage to may of the electronics, and the fact that the Human had managed to cobble together something that could even access the system was impressive enough. Not only that, but she had managed to use it to bring in the ship to a relatively safe crash landing.

Light would be able to hear that Jess was a bit winded when she replied. Despite Senjen’s teasing, it did seem that she was helping in the search. “Great, that’ll cut down a bit on the search. Send it here and I’ll comb through it. We’ve already searched through the crates closest to the door and, unfortunately, it’s none of those. No matter where it is, we’re probably gonna have to push a lot of crates out of the way just to get the damn things out of here. Might need your help with that.”

Aside from the cargo manifest, the ship’s database had also revealed some extra information, especially about the crew. None of it was of any immediate, practical use to their salvage operation, but it did give some additional context about the ship and crew. He knew their names now, at least, and it did tell him the meanings of the symbols on their uniforms. Notably, despite his initial assumptions, the Human in the cockpit was not the captain, nor the pilot for that matter. According to her rank, she was the ship’s engineer. As well, there had been a security warning he had to close when he accessed the system about a safety protocol having been bypassed about three days ago. It implied that the crew quarters had been depressurized manually.

Price of Life (EliteCommander and Cath)

The door leading out of the crew quarters was powered, though the cockpit module beyond was not. Just like the other door, there was no lockdown, so he was able to head through without issue. The cockpit was large enough to have some room to walk around, with multiple seats and consoles. The pilot’s seat was front-and-center. It was blocky and mostly metal, with just a few thin cushions for some comfort when flying in a gravity well. Though, since ships like this spent most of their time in space, one could easily strap themselves down into it. As such, everything the pilot would need was easily in arms’ reach. All of the controls and consoles were either built into the chair, or adjustable screens just in front of it. A ship of this size was designed to be possible to fly solo, but was ideally aided by other crew members at the similar, smaller workstations to the left and right.

The question of who owned the last bunk in the crew quarters was quickly answered, as there was a corpse slumped over next to the pilot’s station: a Human woman in a full environment suit. It was easy to see why, as there was also a rather sizable hole in the floor of the cockpit off to the right. It was surrounded by twisted metal, likely from the spacetime warping of their uncontrolled drop out of FTL, and went straight through the hull into space. As it was on the bottom of the ship, they had not seen it from the outside. As soon as the ship had dropped to sublight speeds, the cockpit would have been depressurized, and bathed in an even greater doses of radiation than the rest of the ship.

Light had already recognized the signs of radiation poisoning in the other Humans, and just from what he could see through the visor of this last corpse, her case had been even more severe. It could be hard for one to even stand to look at. Her suit was not compromised, so she had almost certainly died of the radiation exposure. Yet, from the look of the work she had been doing before her death, it had not been immediate. The pilot’s station had multiple panels removed to expose the internals. High energy cosmic radiation could fry electronics, and it seemed the Human had pieced together so many haphazard, jury-rigged repairs to get the station working that it was hard for Light to even make sense of them. Wiring and cables were strewn about, disorganized, connecting to three different tablet devices scattered around on the floor. It looked like some components had been stripped out and replaced with others taken from the copilot’s station. While the cockpit module was not powered, the pilot’s station itself was hooked into a portable power cell that was still active. Since the station was mostly shut down, it had not been drawing much power.

It was easy for Light to recognize the systems that the Human had been working on before death, which was communications. The ship was not broadcasting any sort of distress beacon, and it looked like she had been trying to get it working. It was hard to say from first impressions if it had been a doomed effort or not, but in any case, it would take some time to try and make sense of the repairs if Light wanted to try and use the console.

Price of Life (EliteCommander and Cath)

There was a bit of a delay and some hesitancy in Jess’ voice when she replied. “Shit, that’s…” Her voice trailed off for a moment. “Look, if you don’t want to go digging around corpses, I understand. We’ll figure it out down here eventually.”

It was hard to say how long the bodies had been here, exactly, as being in a vacuum would prevent any decay from taking place, and indeed there were no signs of it on either of the bodies on the floor. Although, Light could spot some early hints of decomposition on the covered body with the stab wounds. The clothes they wore were company-issued, and they had symbols on them that likely denoted position or rank, but as they were symbols instead of translatable words, Light did not know which was which. In any case, the manifest was not on any of the three bodies.

Aside from the bodies themselves, there were compartments near each of the four bunks with space for belongings. There were also stacks of boxes in one corner of the room, though based on the opened ones he could see, it was likely they contained rations and medical supplies. He could spend some time searching the room, or move through the door on the far side of the module to the cockpit.