Serial - Part 6 (OC)

Serial (Part 6 – Exodus)

“What a dump,” Decaz said, leaning back on the balls of his feet and eyeing Hermes. The ship was half a kilometer long yet it looked almost like a toy beside the other ships parked in the yard. Its hull was warped, entire panels missing or perforated by micro-meteor strikes. It had been one such strike, he knew, that had decompressed the aquaponic module and caused the starvation issues that had nearly wiped out everyone on board. “How the hell did you all make it this far in that wreck?”

His human companion, known as Gus, smiled, crinkling up the leathery skin around his mouth. “She isn’t as fragile as she looks. Best minds of my generation built her and her sisters.”

And those great minds died on them, Decaz added internally. They started the long walk towards her, navigating around Consortium Destroyers and impounded smuggler barges towards the human ship, going slow for the sake of the aged human at his side. “Sisters?” Decaz asked and Gus nodded, wetting his lips before he spoke.

“When the calamity came we launched twelve ships. Each designed to hold five thousand. I think the original plan had been to fill them up with colonists and shoot em off distant worlds but things went bad too fast. Half of em launched with the wrong people on board, or worse, not enough people. Most didn’t even have destinations charted, we just pointed ourselves in a direction and hoped for the best.” Gus paused for a moment, long enough to rub a cramp out of his leg. Gus was disastrously old by human standards, his face a highway map of wrinkles and faded scars. What hair he had was white and clung to his liver spotted scalp in dry patches like grave moss. He righted himself and continued, “A few, Aphrodite and Poseidon, didn’t even break atmo before the fires got them. Another handful went off the wrong way, hell for all we know they are doing just fine on the other side of the galaxy.”

Decaz eyed the ship with growing suspicion the closer they got to it. It was crude. More of a tin can with thrusters than a proper ship, armor plates haphazardly welded onto weak joints in whatever final panicked hours the builders had had before calamity struck. Of course, he had to admit, he may be a little biased. He was Lenti and shipwrights were in his blood. Half the warships in the Consortium’s thirty fleets were of Lenti design and each was a work of art. It was unfair of him to expect the same elegance and precision from a species that had just begun to field interstellar craft when they were wiped out. “And the rest?” he asked.

Gus shrugged, “The rest didn’t make the trip. Hades lost power and went dark. Hera had some kind of malfunction in the fuel line that blew her in half. Worst was Zeus. Their reactor shielding cracked and they didn’t have anyone on board who knew how to fix it. Enough hard radiation and most were dead in a day. Those that weren’t either went mad or just decided to end it and vent themselves out the airlock. We bumped into more than a few corpses following in their wake.”

Decaz gaped at the old man, falling a half step behind. Then, he looked back to the ship. He had been wrong. It wasn’t a wreck. Wrecks could be salvaged, or even sometimes flown. If it ever was a ship, it was a tomb now. Hell, maybe that’s always what it was. A shot in the dark, build in desperation and populated by the soon to be dead. He couldn’t imagine the terror of wandering the endless black, never sure if you would find what you were looking for, not even sure if what you were looking for existed. Unconsciously he whispered a short blessing to his gods, thanking them for having born in the civilized portion of the galaxy and moved to catch up. “So what are we doing with this thing again?” He asked, afraid of the answer, afraid of the ship which looked more and more like a haunted ruin the closer they got.

Gus shrugged again, pausing a second time to massage his leg, “Councilor Miller wants her stripped of anything too dangerous. Word is she wants to ship her over to Zerha, make a monument of her. We’re going to catalogue anything that might go boom and take it out. Hard drives too, which is where you come in.”

“Weren’t all the data files transferred into Consortium data banks?” Decaz asked. He was, in part, a data migration expert. It was standard procedure when any ship entered Consortium custody to dump their drives into the Consortium’s data quarantine where it was translated into galactic standard formats and archived.

Gus nodded, “They were,” he said, “But the drives still got copies on em. History, languages, religions, the kind of stuff people feel a bit sentimental about.”

“But not you?” Decaz asked.

The elderly man smiled thinly, “Well, no, I suppose not. I figure the past ain’t got much in it for me. Problem is I’m thinking I got far more yesterdays than I do tomorrows. There is one thing on there I wouldn’t mind taking a look at though. See, when they got to planning these things they knew that chances were the colonists, if they ever reached their destinations, would be so far removed from Earth that they wouldn’t be able to easily communicate. So, they made sure to pack each of em with the combined intellect of humanity, alive and dead.”

Decaz frowned, “I don’t follow.”

Gus grinned at him and tapped his head with a single withered finger, “The brains, boy. I mean it ain’t got shit on that Live Mind thing the Inquisitors use but we weren’t complete idiots. We figured out how to take a snapshot of the human brain and create a copy of it in the drive. They can’t think or really even talk that well but that way, if the Colonists need be, they could possibly seek some guidance from those who came before. All our best inventors and scientists and poets, they are all in there,” he gestured towards the ship which had grown until it dominated their entire field of view. “But,” Gus continued glumly, “I don’t think the damn things ever worked right. I tried talking to a Jazz man I saw live once but it couldn’t string together much more than a few words before the simulation collapsed. Still, be a nice thing to keep around, don’t ya think?”

Decaz had stopped walking again, this time staring up at the Hermes. The door to the main cargo bay was open, it’s marred by deep dents and rust, entire sections of steel plate hanging dangerously from the ceiling like fangs. It’s a mouth, he realized, his apprehension turning to fear. The mouth of a dead beast, still venomous despite the rot.

Gus marched right up the ramp and inside and, absurdly, Decaz felt the need to flee. It’s just a ship, he told himself, but something in him wouldn’t let him believe that. The Hermes had set out from earth packed with 4,800 lives. By the time it arrived, a half generation later, it had carried only 450. Who knew how many bones were hidden inside or what kinds of things all those dead minds whispered from inside their hard drives? There was something more to this place, something wrong and foul.

Here, Decaz knew, there were ghosts.

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Link to Part 7 - Strike Two

Link to Part 5 - Dogma

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