Given the screw-ups on the last incursion, this next incursion should have been kept routine. It should have been a supply run to a communication hub, and little more. But apparently I was not the only one that got special gifts. On the run after ours, the Frizzies found something that fired them up something fierce, and they wanted to go deep, right away.
"There's a battery warehouse! An old one!"
Now batteries get everyone excited. No world outgrows it's need for HX batteries. Normal battery warehouses are heavily guarded and much more than we could take on. But an old warehouse... one that was no longer active... was no longer guarded, either. It might have what HX considered dregs, but what we considered a bonanza of batteries! It might even have big ones! A world civilization could be changed with a wastebasket-sized HX battery. Going deep again was risky, but who was going to turn down a reasonable chance at big stored batteries?
So, this became a hybrid mission: we would drop off supplies at the communication hub, then turn into a scouting party to see if this "abandoned battery warehouse" really had any potential.
The problem was: we weren't ready to be a scouting party! A scouting party moves quickly and quietly. It is light on communication and heavy on stealth and speed. In spite of their trigger-happiness, the Daraks made the best scouts because they are so damn fast and sneaky. Our group was a gatherer group, not a scout group. We traveled slow and noisy because we talked a lot about "the scenery" as we traveled. We found things scouts missed. Calling our group a scout group was laughable. We were a mixed group, and we had humans -- the slowest and clumsiest of the races.
The problem was: this was batteries, potentially big batteries. No one gives up on a good chance to get batteries. So, if it took a "scout group" to go hunt down these batteries, we were a "scout group."
Things didn't get better.
The first location was a bust for batteries. It was a deserted section of HX, all right, but not a battery warehouse. Whatever else an HX is, it is partly a machine that changes it's function from time to time, and a machine with considerable reserve capacities. The "deserted" sections are sections that are between one active use and another. They are prime hunting grounds for the likes of us because they are lightly guarded, and full of what HX considers "scrap" -- equipment that is not currently functioning, and will be replaced when the section becomes active again. We can mine a lot in these areas without setting off alarms and provoking HX responses.
And we started to do just that... until a Darak found a clue to where this supposed battery warehouse was... and that was nearby.
This caused a sharp argument in the group. Where we were was "prime" for what out party was designed to do! "We should keep gathering." argued the humans and Frizzies. It was also disconcerting that the Darak found the clue, not the Frizzies. But there was, on the HX equivalent of a human "whiteboard", written in simple HX maintenance language: "Batteries moved to location XX, YY, ZZ."
How could we turn it down? If we didn't go as a group, one or another of our groups would sneak off singlely to check it out. This was batteries, for God's Sake! We moved on.
The other reason we were not a good scouting group was we couldn't see "TRAP" when it was stamped on our forehead! In retrospect... no one has ever seen a message like, "Batteries are moved to location XX, YY, ZZ" written in simple HX maintenance language on a whiteboard. In retrospect... a long, winding, dead-ended corridor is not natural on an HX ship.
In real time it took less than fifteen seconds for the HX security droids to kill every Darak and Frizzie in our group when we opened the door to the room at the end of that dead end corridor.
It was not a pretty sight, but at least we humans got to see it. We humans were subjected to some kind of shock that shut down our suits. The four of us were thrown into a pile in front of a huge tank in the center of the "trap room." Then some big worker HX's came after us with giant can openers. Our suits were unceremoniously sliced open; we were dragged out; and thrown into the huge tank through a huge door.
Worse than that! The fucking process was LEARN AS YOU GO! Ronnie was first, and she came out of her suit in four pieces, quite literally! Such screams!
Fortune smiled on me... perhaps. I was last. Not only was I taken out of my suit with limbs, bones and ligaments in tact, as soon as I was thrown in the tank, the door was slammed shut and the temperature and atmosphere were "whooshed" to human normal.
When my pain had subsided enough that I could look around meaningfully... it was grim.
Ronnie was lying next to me, but just as pieces of meat lying in a pool of partly boiled and partly frozen, bodily fluids.
Jacobs was one piece, but slashed in several places with deep burn marks and unnaturally twisted limbs. He was not breathing... not moving...
Jackie was moving, but not breathing...
Training kicked in. Thoughts of the horror of the Daraks and Frizzies, thoughts of horror of the lumps of flesh that were Ronnie and Jacobs, thoughts of the horror of being a prisoner in some sort of HX holding tank... vanished. I thought only of the drill to stabilize Jackie. I examined her with out-of-body dispassion. I scouted my surroundings. Amazingly! At the rear end of the tank, was a FIRST AID STATION!
Time to think of the ramifications of that later. I got Jackie over my shoulder, and discovered I wasn't unharmed myself. I couldn't stand... too much pain.... too dizzy. I crawled with Jackie on my back... I was so dizzy only the brightness of the first aid station kept me oriented.
It took some doing, I wasn't graceful, but I got her laying on her back on the station. When I did a big green button started flashing. What the hell, I pushed it, slumped back to moan and roll in agony on the floor. Now that I been all the hero I could be, my body was happy to announce: I WAS IN PAIN!
Sometime later, I don't know how long, a klaxon penetrated my pain haze a bit. Hands helped me stagger up and roll on to the first aid station. I passed out again...