The small scout ship's landing gear slammed into the deckplating of the ISCS Venture, forcing Delphi's body against the tight restraints of her cockpit chair. With the Venture's landing guidance system dead, it had been up to her to guide her craft into the tiny port while travelling at several thousand kilometres per second, not an easy manoeuvre at all. But her skill and experience handing crafts like her diminutive scout skiff had made the procedure not only look safe, but easy. Fractions of degrees in any direction and she would have smashed into a docking crane, or careened off the hull itself. Taking a deep breath and a moment to praise herself for a job well done, she scanned her local camera feeds to get a grasp of what the rest of the docking bay looked like.
There was an eerie stillness to the surroundings displayed on each fisheye lens. The Venture was an exploratory craft, so its docking bay should be a bustling part of the ship any time it was out of jumpspace. But there was nothing. No pilots going through systems checks, no mechanics tuning up drive fins...a total ghost town.
Two shuttles, one on each side of the bay, sat in good condition from what she could tell. Another mystery to be solved on this trip, as if the Venture HAD encountered an emergency, those craft would have been the first to disembark and used to ferry survivors away from the danger. There were also escape pods that the crew could use to flee, but her cursory pass of the ship's hull revealed that none of those had been launched either.
"Curiouser and curiouser," she mumbled to herself. The restraints disengaged at the click of a button, allowing her to move to the cabin of her craft to suit up for a little extra vehicular activity. Something strange had happened on board the ICIS Venture, and Delphi was determined to discover what.
The clank of her exosuit's boots onto the deck confirmed to her what the HUD displays had said: gravity plating was at Earth Norm. As was atmosphere and residual radiation. Her suit didn't have a pathogen scanner, so her black-tinted helmet stayed on. She also slid a hand-sized object from a pouch at her side. Twisting the cycler, she armed the Particle Pistol, feeling the familiar whirr transmit through her suit. Something had turned this ship into a crypt, flying through space under inertia alone. And she had to find out why.
She slid through the half-open cargo door and into the corridor. One of the light panels flickered, and Delphi noticed that there had been damage to its control quarkitry. Her HUD lit up, feeding her information. Passive sensors slid over the slight scorch markings and confirmed her hunch.
"Weapons fire," she mouthed. From the looks of it, it was from a Disrupter. Only a few kinds of crew weapons were allowed on starships. Ones that had a chance of rupturing during a jump would have to receive an expensive refit. Disrupters targeted the nervous system, but also played havoc with electronics. Her Particle Pistol was another; a high energy stream of particles that could injure flesh but not damage a hull.
Another piece to the puzzle, and it made her grip the pistol even tighter. She adjusted the exosuit's power levels to their absolute minimum. It turned down her sensor suite's abilities, but it might keep her from being detected if there was someone else around. The bounty hunter took hesitant, slow steps forward down the dimly lit corridor.
The shuttle bay was located at the rear of the ship. From here, Delphi could head in several directions. Up a megalift would bring her to the medical bay, while down would lead her to engineering. Forward would bring her through everything else in the vessel, culminating in the bow-adjacent bridge section. She decided that would be her best bet to determine if the ship was salvageable, and to get access to some more systems.
The clean, spartan corridors looked like just about every other Explorer-class cruiser she'd ever seen. Dull, gunmetal hallways with blue deckplating. Display screens and maintenance jacks mounted into the walls at regular intervals, and occasionally, the corridor would split off and lead to other vital parts of the ship. She was about to reach her second junction when she came to a dead halt. The acoustic sensors in her suit picked up the sound of distant footsteps.
Delphi pressed herself against the nearest bulkhead, PP at the ready. As the noise got closer, she realized it was not the heavy clang of a military exosuit or the skittering of a sapiophage's claws, but the soft patter of standard shipboard footwear. That didn't mean whoever it was wasn't dangerous. Delphi kept silent and waited for whoever it was to come into view.
An enormous pair of tits rounded the corner, followed immediately after by the sluttiest looking woman the pilot had ever seen. She wore the tattered rags of a Spacefleet uniform in a way that concealed only the slightest bit of skin. Long, gorgeous blonde hair spilled down her back all the way to her voluminous ass. One of her pink-nailed hands was squeezing her breast, while the other was stuck firmly between her legs. She was speaking, but it was an incomprehensible word jumble punctuated by moans.
Delphi let the perplexing woman pass, seeing no reason why she ought to have anything worth hearing to say. Either that was some kind of malfunctioning sexbot, or there was something horribly wrong with a crewmember!
She risked the slight power increase and turned on her lifesigns detector. Invisible pulses sweep out into the corridor. The data it gathered bounced back to her wrist-mounted console after an agonizing wait, though her chronometre told her it had only been a few seconds. There were several more human, or humanoid, lifesigns up ahead...but there was something else.
She keyed the display to zoom in, then queried the result that her console was giving her. It looked like there was a life form up ahead, but it was as big as the room itself. Actually, as she zoomed out the map, she chuckled mirthlessly at the idea her readings were correct.
"Either my equipment is messed up, or there's a creature half the size of this ship all around me!" she said with a nervous laugh. Delphi swept her arm around more, and the anomaly faded into a null reading. She sighed. For a moment there, the bounty hunter thought she was in big trouble!
Something in her gut was eating at her about this ship. After a few years as a star hopping bounty hunter, she developed certain instincts that told her when there was something wrong was about to make itself known. This had the feeling of one of those moments, and, much like the tentacle beast emporium on Kraxis, Delphi got the feeling she was going to get wrapped up in it somehow. But she had bills to pay! And if she fled from this contract, who would hire her? She couldn't pussy out...not until she got more information!
The already limited light in the corridor faded further, with some non-damaged luminescent tubes flickering. That could either be a localized collapse of the ship's illumination system...or at the very worst, a glitch in the ship's dark matter reactor. That could be a symptom of a larger problem than just some illumination troubles. If the crew is incapacitated, the reactor could reach negative mass and the Venture wouldn't be worth much to anyone after it disintegrated.
She backtracked to the megalift, which was experiencing its own power-related glitches. Luckily, the adjoined ladder made for an expeditious descent to the reactor level. Strange, almost lurid noises came from the stuck elevator car below her. It almost sounded like someone had left a pornography holo play at full volume. Delphi cracked a smile.
The reactor level was in worse shape than the one above. Her boots landed in roughly 30 cm of pink fluid. It resembled the coolant used in the reactor, but was more viscous and opaque. Delphi trudged through the muck, exosuit making it no less effort than taking a Sunday stroll in the park.
It didn't take long to get to the reactor, as the large amount of space required took up the majority of the deck. The emergency door had been burst open, and more pink fluid was flooding out into the corridor from inside. Great. She didn't have a lot of engineering knowledge, especially on these old reactors. She'd have to rely a lot on her rig, her cranial implant, to provide her with the details.
Once past the door, however, she saw a reactor room that appeared to be functioning in perfect order. The large dark matter reaction chamber was undamaged. Examining the consoles to her left, she saw nothing but stable power readings across the board. Aside from the fluid all over the floor, there were no power problems at all! That was a relief. But what was causing the outages?
The fluid around her feet thickened. At first she thought she imagined it. But it increase its hold on her boots. She stumbled back, but it only gripped more!
"What the fuck?" she gasped. Delphi watched in horror as tendrils of fluid rose out of the morass. The pink goo was ALIVE?! She fired her pistol at the nearest few. Jets of blue light sliced apart those she hit, sending them back into the puddle. But if the whole deck had this fluid covering it...
One tendril lashed out at her, grabbing her left arm. She shot it off with her PP, but more gripped her right wrist and kept her from aiming. She stomped her feet, trying to break free of the muck, but it wouldn't let her get free! The strange fluid crawled all over her exosuit. She thanked the Stars she hadn't taken her helmet off! Though the goo was soon up to her neck, at the very least, she wouldn't be suffocating.
Just as that comforting thought entered her mind, the HUD on her helmet lit up like a Liberation Day fireworks show. BREACH DETECTED. Her heart rate, already increased, hammered in her chest. How was this goop getting through a layer of neosteel?!
All the self-sealing stembolts failed to arrest the flow of intelligent slime as it seeped into the slowly growing cracks in her outer protection. Once after another, systems in the suit failed and showed up on her inner diagnostics as red boxes. Propulsion, low-gravity assist, atmospheric processing, even eventually the HUD itself flickered out of existence, leaving her in a partially transparent helmet.
Wriggle as she might against the pull of the fluid, it refused to let her go. In slow motion, her exosuit dissolved around her. So too did the bodysuit underneath it, leaving her naked and afraid. It took her helmet off with a quick tug from one of the tendrils, spilling her black hair all over her face and removing the last of her potential protections. She looked down at herself and saw her whole vulnerable body on display. The goo was translucent enough to obscure nothing, though the life-or-death situation didn't leave her time to be modest.
A twinge of something at the base of her spine made her yelp! A strong force of pressure, followed by a pins-and-needles sensation around her entire back. It was followed by the sound of static, almost as if her ear was right next to an archaic, malfunctioning speaker.
"Host," a monotone voice said through the haze. "Host connection online." It sounded as if the person speaking was speaking through a fluid, but it was intelligible. Delphi looked around to try to find a source, but all she found was more goo.
"Who's there?" she asked. It made a sound like an unintelligible mass of consonants. Delphi locked on to a single dicernable part of the burst of noise. "How about I just call you Zyx, then?"
"Designation acceptable. Zyx. I am Zyx."
"Where are you, Zyx? I can't see anyone but this goo!"
