I’m worried but excited. Given the screw-ups on the last incursion, this next incursion should be kept routine. It should be a supply run to a communication hub and little more. But on the run after my last one, the Frizzies found something that fired them up something fierce—an old battery warehouse!—and they want to go deep right away on this next run.
Normal battery warehouses are heavily guarded and much more than we could take on. But an old, inactive warehouse is no longer guarded, because all it contains are dregs that the HX don’t consider worth transferring. But for anyone else, it’s a bonanza of batteries! It might even have big ones! A world civilization could be changed with a wastebasket-sized HX battery, even if it was five models obsolete.
Going deep again is risky, but who’s going to turn down a reasonable chance at big batteries?
So this becomes a hybrid mission: We drop off supplies at the communication hub, then turn into a scouting party to see if the abandoned battery warehouse really has potential.
The problem is, we aren’t ready to be a scouting party! We’re a gatherer group, traveling comparatively slow and noisy because we talk a lot about the scenery, finding things scouts have missed. A scouting party moves quickly and quietly, with minimal comm capability and maximum stealth and speed. In spite of their trigger-happiness, the Daraks make the best scouts because they’re so damn fast and sneaky. Calling our group a scout group is laughable, if only because it includes humans—the slowest and clumsiest of raiders.
But if it means we qualify to go hunt down batteries, potentially big batteries, then okay, we’re a scout group. In E minor, if that’s what it takes.
Things don’t get better.
The first location is a bust for batteries. But though there’s no battery warehouse, the section is deserted. Whatever else an HX is, it’s partly a machine that changes its function from time to time, utilizing considerable reserve capacities. Sections between one active use and another are prime hunting grounds for the likes of us because they’re lightly guarded, full of scrap equipment that’ll 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 start to do just that—until a Darak finds a clue to where the supposed battery warehouse is … and it’s nearby!
This causes a sharp argument in the group. “Where we are is prime for what our party is designed for, so we should keep gathering,” argue the humans and Frizzies. But the diagram, on the HX equivalent of a human whiteboard, is so obvious that you don’t have to read to recognize it; and disconcertingly, the Daraks do recognize it. We humans have to read the labels, but the Daraks and the Frizzies can both tell it says, “Batteries moved to coordinates XX, YY, ZZ” with a diagram of how to get there from here. How can we turn it down? If we don’t go as a group, some of us will just come back and sneak off singly. I mean, batteries, for God’s sake! We translate the coordinates to confirm the diagram and move on. The site’s close, just around a corner and down a long, winding, dead-end corridor.
This proves, of course, that we aren’t really a scouting group, because we can’t read the incredibly obvious “Trap” that might as well have been written on the whiteboard, or on the walls of that long, winding, dead-end corridor, neither of them natural on an HX ship.
After we open the door at the end of that corridor, it takes less than 15 seconds for the HX security droids to kill every Darak and Frizzie and subject us four humans to some kind of shock that shuts down our suits.
We find ourselves thrown into a pile in front of a huge tank in the center of that room, then some big HX worker bots with something like giant can openers come after us. And whatever the Delphi’s Fortune HX has learned, they don’t apply it to us. The fucking process is learn as you go, as they slice us out of our suits!
Darja’s first, and they tear her into four pieces. She has too much time to scream before she’s dead and they toss her into the tank! They get Markus and Anoush out in one piece each, and they too go into the tank. Then it’s my turn.
I find that Fortune has smiled on me, perhaps. I’m in pain, but my limbs, bones, and ligaments are intact. As I’m thrown into the tank, its door is slammed shut and its temperature and atmosphere are whooshed to human normal.
When my pain has subsided enough that I know what I’m seeing, it’s grim. The pieces of meat that used to be Darja are lying in pools of partly boiled and partly frozen bodily fluids. Markus has several deep burn marks and unnaturally twisted limbs. He’s not breathing, not moving.
Anoush is moving, but I see her stop breathing, gasp, and start again, gasping. Training kicks in and I think only of the drill to stabilize her. I examine her with out-of-body dispassion and scout our surroundings. Amazingly, at the back of the tank is a FirstAid station! Time to think of the ramifications of its being there later. Right now, I need to get Anoush onto its pallet. I try to stand and carry her over my shoulder, but I can’t. Too much pain … too dizzy. I crawl with Anoush on my back. The usual FirstAid brightness keeps me oriented through my dizziness.
It takes some doing, it isn’t graceful, but I get her lying on her back on the station. A big button starts flashing green. What the hell, I push it—then slump back to moan and roll in agony on the floor. Now that I’ve been all the hero I can be, my body is happy to announce it’s in pain! And my mind tries distracting me from that with the horror of the Daraks and Frizzies being wiped out, of the lumps of flesh that were Darja and Markus, of being a prisoner in a holding tank.
Later, I don’t know how long after, a klaxon penetrates my pain haze a bit. Hands help me stagger up and roll onto the FirstAid pallet beside Anoush. I pass out again.