I'm having this piece where the characters spend half a chapter preparing to board a ghost ship, and then they meet no ghosts, and I'm worried that it'll be a letdown to the readers too and not only Sterling.
The trip is short and uneventful. You land in one of Eraser’s hangar bays and climb out, floating around in the zero gravity checking safety of the room before you let the other teams do the same. Everything is dark and silent, all sounds you can hear come inside your helmet, which comes as no surprise since the readings clearly indicated the ship had no atmosphere left. You find nothing dangerous (apart from the lack of livable conditions, but that’s what your suits are for), but that doesn’t change the fact that the ship is just plain creepy.
You give the all clear signal.
“Such a nice party spot,” Sterling says in your comms, appearing beside you with somewhat graceful moves. “Do you think they’re just waiting to turn the lights on and tell us surprise?”
“I sure hope not,” you say.
Sterling nods. His armor is also sleek, like his ship, unlike your heavier combat suit – you guess it’s fitted more for agility than protection – and he’s strapped a long sniper rifle at his back.
“You know that isn’t going to be of much use in close quarters, right?”
“Are you afraid I’ll breach the hull? Atmo’s already escaped.”
“No,” you say. “But you’ll be vulnerable while you aim.”
“I have a knife. And a personal stealth field. And if we have wraiths, which seems most likely if we have company, nothing I have on me is going to help anyway. Apart from the rocket boots, I guess. For running away as fast as I can, that is. It might help. It’s not likely, but it might.”
You nod grimly. Most people, mostly those who don’t spend half their time in deep space, think wraiths are just wild sea tales (well, space tales, as the better term might be), but you know better – everyone here does – you’ve seen them first hand often enough. There are hungry things in the dark. “Well, at least Ekström can hear them before they swarm us.”
“Good. Do you think she’s going to stab me in the back while she’s playing as IFF radar?”
“Stick with other people, just in case.”
The emergency generators whir to life, and portable lights turn on, drawing a light sphere around the shuttles. You know the floodlights are powerful, but in the oppressive darkness of the dead ship they seem weak, like they were in the wrong place and aware of it.
“All right, people,” you say. “Look alive.”
The sounds of your breathing in your helmet, the team trailing behind you, and the lights in your armors on (you notice Sterling has one as well), you move further in, dreading what you’ll find. Everyone is silent and on edge; while the eyewitness accounts talked of purely mundane slaughter, and while dead people themselves aren’t a reason to be cautious (apart from trying to avoid smashing on them), such things tend to draw in the wraiths and other beings.
Technicians carry their equipment with them. Medics are alert and standby. Your security team has weapons drawn, eyes in every direction. Sterling moves like a hunting predator. Sea predator.
Bodies litter corridors and rooms, floating everywhere.
“Look at that,” Connor says. “What happened here?”
“That’s what we’re here to find.”
“How? We can’t comb the whole ship, not without much more people. This isn’t Producer, but not a small ship either. It’d take way too long.”
“This is still a USF ship,” Ekström says. “We need to find the black box.”
“You think that helps?” Connor asks.
“Systems must have been still running when the mutiny happened,” Ekström says. “So the flight recorder’s been doing its job and recording the flight. It should be enough. Unless it’s wiped.”
“Is that possible?”
“Anything’s possible. Whether if it’s likely or not is another story.”
“And if it is wiped?”
“Then that tells us something, too.”
“What,” Sterling says, “are we supposed to do with the ship?”
“It’s we now, is it?” Ekström grunts.
“We are here together,” Sterling says. “I don’t know what your problem with me is, sunshine, and I wish you’d get over it, but in my book, that makes us a ‘we’.”
“We can’t really tow her, can we?” Connor says, desperately trying to switch the discussion from becoming a full-scaled hand-to-hand contest. “What’s our cargo space?”
“Definitely not enough for a ship this scale,” Ekström says. "We need to bring the bodies – "
“Sssssh!” Sterling hisses, punching closed fist in the air.
You stop, straining your ears. Behind you, your people fan out; even Sterling has his rifle in his hands. But no matter how much you try, you can’t hear anything. Well, apart from the noise your team is making. So you look at the agent; he notices, and speaks to you with silent hand signs you know as well as your letters. You nod and deliver the information to your team, then glance at Ekström; she shakes her head slightly, so whatever the thing alarming Sterling is, it’s either not a wraith, or it is further down the ship than her brain range allows her to hear. Then you move, silently and carefully, around the corners and along the corridor, prepared for the worst.
It is not the worst. Which, frankly, is a relief.
You round the final corner, weapon at the ready, and find the source of the noise – you finally hear it yourself – a completely normal emergency generator that is still running, after all these years. You force your body to relax and lower your weapon, but can’t help your unease.
“What a letdown,” Sterling mutters from behind Leif. Both seem to still be on edge. You can’t blame them, although you also can’t help wondering if they hear something you don’t (you know Leif has heightened senses due to him being a wolf-shifter, and Sterling clearly has better hearing than you, too, blocked by a power limiter as your senses are), or if they simply are more visibly rattled than you.
The thing with ChoiceScript’s arrays is, as far as I’ve understood, that it’s just a shorthand for some variable names, where array_var[1] is the same thing as array_var_1, so it’s not really anything that special unlike in heavier languages.
and then refining them on my laptop. The only thing I managed to refine though are my character sheets. So, I have bunch fleshed out characters floating in the void without a plot for them to stay and make them move lol
