Chapter 11: Phaon

"Lock and Load! Lock and Load, Buddy! Solo signing off."
As the voice cut off, Leon nodded to Raymont and the two walked down the hallway. Leon led, his laser rifle held ready while Raymont covered their rear. Elsewhere in the ship, Thorn, Joe, and Solo were exploring the upper decks while Tessa and Bug remained to guard the camp and what booty they had salvaged thus far. To Leon and Raymont fell the task of inspecting the aft sections, engineering, the equipment repair shop and the largely intact "barracks" chamber, housing the cryo frozen D.K. marines.
They were in the barracks now.
Leon, surveying the hundreds of cryoberths, looked around shaking his head. The impact of all those bodies was overwhelming.
"Didn't Solo and Joe say that a lot of these guys were still alive?" Leon asked.
Raymont nodded.
"Well, are we just going to leave them here?" Leon continued to look around. "They're not dead, they're not alive - not really. I just sort of feel sorry for these guys. I don't know what kind of men they were like, but this just being stuck here until their juice runs out and they die"he didn't bother finishing.
"Look," Raymont told him, "these guys are trained killers. Any one of them that got out could and probably would snuff us in a heartbeat. They came here as invaders and they lost in a war. It's no different than if they were K.I.A. The reality means that that status just takes longer to take affect."
"But they're not dead," Leon told him. "You've obviously never been in the military. I could be in one of those coffins. And I can't help thinking that these are all just people, like me. Each one has a life, dreams, hopes, problems, joys, all of which are frozen and cut off now. If there is a rest in death, then they don't have it - yet."
"I don't think the people of Phaon would sympathize with you. They'd see it as justice, these killers ending up like this." Raymont wiped something off the bottom of his boot. Bending down, he sniffed at it.
"Hey, this is shit!" he protested.
"Tell me about it," Leon agreed, still looking at all the cryoberths. "I couldn't agree more."
"No," Raymont corrected him, pointing down at his boot, "No, I mean this is really shit. Someone took a dump here."
Leon looked over. "Really Raymont, must you find the mundane in everything we do. Just wipe it off your shoe."
"Dia! I hate this!" Raymont yelled out. "Dia, I think there's a hole in my boot! All that friggin walking to get here!" Damn Solo and his friggin thirty days! I bet it's his shit!"
Leon walked back to Raymont, a puzzled look on his face. "Wasn't Solo the one who insisted that we use one of the rooms as a latrine and not deviate?"
"Yea," Raymont nodded. "Some friggin argument about sanitation. Obviously he's a hypocrite. I've got the proof on my foot. I'll make him smell it when we get back." Raymont had taken off his boot and sock and was wiping his bare foot on a piece of cable.
"What if it's not his?" Leon asked.
"O.K, so it's Grange's shit. Big deal. It still stinks." Raymont grimaced and replaced his soiled sock. "Do you mind if I go back and change socks at least? I hate to walk around the rest of the day like this."
"I don't think it is Joe's," Leon told him.
Raymont looked over at him. "But he and Solo were the only one's who checked out this area."
"Exactly," Leon replied.
Raymont's eyes grew wider. Looking around, he espied his struptor rifle and immediately picked it up, scanning the rows of cryoberths for signs of an intruder.
The other party checked in on the radio, but Leon just replied that they had found some evidence of someone onboard and were checking it out. Leon had suggested keeping their communiques brief, in case someone else was listening.
Leon nodded. "Let's go." Going on ahead, Leon danced through the wreckage like a cat while Raymont separated from him. Yet the two each always managed to keep an eye on his partner. Whenever one of them slipped on wreckage, sliding down the incline of the floor, a silent curse was muttered and fearful eyes darted towards every shadow that their lights illuminated.
"Maybe we should douse the lights," Leon suggested. "Anyone would see us coming with them on."
Raymont nodded. "I have my ultra-lenses. I'll be able to see fine, but what about you?"
"I'll be fine," Leon answered. "Don't worry about me."
"Really? So what're you hiding up your sleeve?" Raymont chided suspiciously. But Leon didn't answer him and the two continued onward.
Following Solo's instructions, the two crawled far aft of where the party was camping out and made their way down a service tube, back farther than even Solo and Grange had come, searching for signs of the main engineering section. As they progressed, using their multiscanners as maps, they could feel the deck beneath them vibrating and ahead, down yet another tube, they thought they could see a glow. Turning off his light, Leon confirmed that there was indeed a light and slid down the tube. Following his lead, Raymont did the same, though his progress was more tortured as he scraped his chest on a jutting piece of torn plasteel. (Loose 1 hit) Grimacing with silent pain, Raymont dropped down beside Leon, staring both directions in the corridor which they found themselves.
As they neared the light source, the vibration in the deck grew louder. Both of them suspected they had either found or were very near to the engineering section. And though the wreckage in the area made them doubt that the ship was serviceable, the thrumming vibration made them think that perhaps at least one of the ship's engines was still running. If so, it could be tapped to power their salvage needs.
Raymont tried to raise the rest of the party on his com mike. They had checked with them at intervals. There was nothing but static. He tapped Leon on the shoulder to tell him that he couldn't get through to the others.
"Probably stray noise from the engine," Leon whispered back. "Perhaps some of the shielding around one of the engine's has been damaged."
Raymont didn't like the sound of that. Dying from radiation or energy poison was not what he had in mind.
Then they could hear a sound. It was a voice. Though they recognized it as a voice, they couldn't quite make out what was said through the echoes of the corridor, though the voice seemed to come from ahead of where they were going, where the purple glow seemed to emanate.
The voice seemed to be repeating itself. As they got nearer, they could tell that is was male and that it sounded like a recording. As they got even nearer, almost halfway to what looked like a room beyond the corridor, they could start to make out what it said.
"WARNING! THIS SHIP WILL AUTO-DESTRUCT IN TIME MINUS ONE HUNDRED AND THREE POINT ZERO TWO HOURS. WARNING!"

"Lock and Load! Lock and Load, Buddy! Solo signed off to the other hunting team with an archaic slogan whose meaning was lost in time. The other hunting team consisted of Leon and Raymont. Tessa and Bug were babysitting the campsite, lest any unwanted should show up and rifle through their carefully gathered hoard of weapons and armour.
Seeing Joe remove what looked like a metal box with filaments of optic cable attached all over it, Solo kneeled down under the same console, to better ascertain what Grange was up to. Thorn stood on guard.
"What's up, professor?" Solo asked Joe.
For an answer, Joe showed him the box. "I don't know what it is," Joe told him, "but it's got enough MIRRC chips in it to pay for my grandfather's farm about two hundred times over. And it's attached to the navigational backup - I think."
Solo stared at him blankly, then said, "Well since I don't know what a Merc chip is, then maybe you'll tell me its significance?"
Joe chuckled. "You guys keep stockpiling weapons and petty cash as if they meant something. I mean, if these are MIRRC's, then this is where the real money is.. Supposedly they have something to do with interfacing an A.I's ability to run a ship, essentially letting it become a ship."
"You mean, turn a ship into a living thing?" Thorn had listened to their conversation and couldn't help commenting.
"Yep, something like that," Joe agreed. "Supposedly, MIRRC technology allowed advanced interfacing of more mundane circuitry with a central processor, taking all the thousands of decisions in running a ship like this and converting it into a more streamlined process. Of course it takes an incredibly powerful computer to run it all."
"And these things are worth something?" Solo asked him.
"Well, I'm just guessing, of course," Joe pointed out. "But, whatever these things are, they seemed to be tied into many of the main circuit paths governing these control panels and they seem to have a lot of computer conduit attached to them as well. I'm probably holding a fortune in my hand, and there are probably other boxes like this under each of these console stations."
Solo nodded approvingly. "Well, that sounds really promising. Advanced tech. that's portable and valuable. But evenso, I'd have to say we're wasting our time for now. If we do have an intruder onboard,"
"We're the intruders, remember," Thorn told them.
"Fine," Solo agreed, "But if this righteous crewmember, or whoever it is, if he's also the same one who killed those miners, then don't doubt that he's going to do the same for us if we don't get him first."
"Or her," Thorn pointed out.
Solo exhaled and looked at Thorn sternly. "Are you done yet? If so, I think we should get going."
Thorn nodded and let Solo lead the way. Joe, dusting off his pants, followed well behind the other two, stowing his find enroute.
The three of them progressed onwards. Solo had procured an armoured exoskeleton off one of the dead D.K. marines and was fitting pieces onto himself each time the party made a rest stop, eventually with Joe's help. Fairly soon, encumbered and obviously unused to the unwieldy bulk, Solo was clanking along looking like a giant robot.
"Did I ever tell you how sexy I think a man looks in generic plasteel?" Thorn mocked him at one of these rest stops. "Solo, you don't know what you're doing to me, towering over me like that."
A voice com clicked on and Solo's voice came out of the suit sounding a little tinny since he hadn't adjusted the pitch controls. "Shut up Thorn! You're not funny and I'll have you know this thing's damn uncomfortable. Anyone know how to pee or sit down in one of these things?"

Joe and Thorn laughed uproariously. They were totally unprepared when Solo raised his struptor and fired past a wall of wreckage. The answering retort bracketed the wall, disintegrating plasteel into molten chunks of flying debris. Joe was hit in the left cheek, a burning ember melting into his skin until he tore it away. Thorn was pinned for a moment when a chunk of bulkhead collapsed onto her foot. She screamed out and managed to kick it away and then picked up Joe and the two of them scrambled over some cables and around a corner.
Taking a quick glimpse back, they could see that the section in front of where Solo had stood had been disintegrated by what must have been a blaster cannon, judging by the extent of the damage. All that was left of Solo was one dismembered arm, encased in plasteel, it's hand still gripped around the melted stump of a struptor rifle.
Levitating around the corner, the overlarge form of a combat droid hovered into view, the barrels on one of it's gattling blaster arms still glowing. The collapsed deck above it, resulting from its firepower, impeded it slightly and smaller radial lasers set about cutting through the cables and torn bulkhead to create a path in the direction that Joe and Thorn had fled. It must have sensed the two of them for, though it was unable to pursue them for the moment, there was a whooshing sound and a small cannister was ejected to land, pinging onto the deck.
Joe, recognizing the grenade, threw Thorn back behind some more debris and then dived for cover himself. The blast saturated the air in a misty cloud of fine shrapnel that would have shredded them had not Joe's instinct saved them.
Not waiting for a repeat, Joe sporting a single shrapnel wound on the bottom of one foot, limped with Thorn's help back in the direction of their camp. When they were far enough away, they screamed into their mikes to warn Tessa and Bug what they had found and of Solo's death. Ominously, neither Raymont or Leon could be hailed. Only static answered on their channels.

Joe and Thorn started to laugh uproariously but Solo ignored them. From one of the side corridors, from where neither of the others could see, a large combat droid hovered into view. It fit the description that Raymont had given of the ones that he had found unpowered. One multi-armed appendage was already turning to target on Solo when Solo fired first, his blast being absorbed by an energy shield that appeared to envelop the droid, outlining the deflected struptor energy as a shimmering eggshaped sheen that disappeared the moment the thing returned fire. Solo remembered the impact of being hit, but strangely there was no pain. Just total darkness and nothing, like a switch turning off.

Pain, enduring overpowering pain, was the first thing he felt. Only after he screamed did he even bother to think that he must still be alive. Then, just as soon as it had hit him, like with the flip of another switch, the pain was gone.
He was lying in a dark room. There was sonorous chanting as if from a hundred voices. But one stood out over all the rest. It was immediate and sounded very real.
"Be at rest, my son," the voice told him. "You have been injured but you will soon be better. You must sleep."
Solo could feel someone lifting off his chest armour. He tried to raise his right arm, but couldn't, though his left seemed mobile.
"Where are the others?" He was surprised how cracked and dry his voice sounded. "If he hadn't felt the words, he would have been sure the voice was someone else's. He sounded a hundred years old.
A hand was laid on his shoulder and a strong yet gentle squeeze given. "They are gone my son. One of the Guardians killed them. Now, time for questions later. You must sleep."
There was a hissing sound and then Solo once again found himself drifting down into the open arms of waiting darkness.

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