Strange Company by Nick Cole (best way to read ebooks TXT) 📗

crawling down a couple of decks to reach what looked like some kind of docking port for small craft. The hull doors had been left open here. We opted for no access points in the damaged areas as the hull was too ragged. Getting cut up trying to go through hull breaches filled with jagged hull plating, possible live currents, and twenty other dangers was a great way to end up dead. Or wounded and useless. A drain on the little of which we had none to spare. Plus, the company had enough experience with breaching operations to know such maneuvers took time. Lots of time to do right. Explosives. Even in deep space. And time was a luxury we currently did not have. And an underground bottomless pit, clinging to an immense alien starship, seemed like a bad place to play with high-ex. The lack of forgiveness was stunning.

I crawled down toward the docking port, never minding the vertigo of the cyclopean dark tube the ship had created when it slammed itself in long ago.

“… the entire ship sacrificed itself to save the lifeboat,” continued the Monarch over our comm. This had happened at least ten thousand years ago. Long before Earth’s first moon landing.

Okay, I thought. So the engines are still lit ten thousand years later? Power?

I concentrated on not falling as I worked my way down the slick hull, looking for handholds where I could find them. Getting a weird feeling about all of this. Why was it weird? I didn’t know. Not then. But I put it down now because it was the first time I had begun to feel it. As I crawled across the hull trying to get to the breaching point two decks below where we’d landed.

Punch was silent as he worked along behind me. Choker was hyperventilating behind Punch. But that was just SOP for him.

“How do you know all this?” he asked, gasping and struggling with the vertigo of the fantastic cyclopean surroundings and what it did to small minds like ours.

“As a Monarch,” she answered across the ether of our comms, “I’ve had access to the science team and their reports. Most of that comes from up near the engines. In the hundred years since the teams first arrived at the colony and started working the wreck, we’ve only managed to make it through main engineering up near the surface and down into the mass tanks. And a few decks below that, which is nothing more than some sort of empty stores section that’s been held by the apes. That’s the best we’ve been able to do. Other teams have spelunked and tried breach points farther down the hull, but we’ve lost contact with them. We even sent in a combat cyborg extermination team. The best we’d ever developed. Omega Six models. Lost contact once inside the hull and never recovered them. Officially.”

“How come the ship is still burning?” asked Choker.

He thinks for us all, I muttered to myself as I slowly inched closer to the top of the cargo port. I was crawling down laterally at close to a fifteen-degree angle to reach the entry point. It felt like crawling down a cliff. If I let go now, I’d tumble and bounce off the hull for miles. I’d find the bottom eventually. But I’d be dead by then.

I took a deep breath and studied our position. Scanning up-hull back toward the engines. Going up-hull would be like going uphill all day long. Down-hull, toward the bow, once we were inside, would be like running down a steep hill real fast and probably braining yourself. Our muscles were already at the edge. They’d turn to jelly in just a few decks of humping uphill with plates, weapons, and a combat load. Plus whatever she’d sent us in to recover.

But of course, that’s how an NCO thinks. He thinks about his knees.

“The ship’s reactor, it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen, and still burning mass,” she said calmly in our ears as we studied the next bit of hull we needed to navigate. Clinging where we were clinging like our lives depended on it. Because they did. “It boils out of the main fissure. The science team tunneled in from a few kilometers away just under the surface. Then they set up the base alongside the fissure and established a rail line into the ship under the engineering decks behind the engines. We’ll exit there once we retrieve what I came for.”

I made the lip of the port bay and peeked over, hanging upside down as I did. I didn’t know what I was expecting to see in there. But what I saw I wasn’t prepared for. The bay was dark. And with a ship, hull down at this inclination within atmo, or on a world, everything not secured would be clumped into a corner forward in the space. Smashed and destroyed by such an impact. Gravity was unforgiving to anything inside starships once the grav-decking had failed.

What I saw was a normal human starship-looking docking bay with most everything where it should be. Though much of it looked pretty rough and broken. Mounts had broken loose and some things hung at odd angles from the impact. There was even some kind of shuttlecraft anchored into the docking slots. The anchors had warped as they tried to maintain hold long ago during the crash. They’d held. But the shuttle was ruined.

“Here goes nothing,” I grunted and heaved myself down and over, and then in. Keeping my core tight and preparing to land on the canted tilt of the deck. But then something wonderful and comforting washed over me as I got that momentary disorientation and stomach drop of being under the influence of grav-decking.

I landed on the bay floor.

Though the ship was tilted bow down at the steep angle of fifteen degrees, I was standing straight up. My thighs and leg muscles rejoiced that we wouldn’t have to climb out of here