A single cryopod sat at an angle in a cramped chamber, illuminated only by an array of attached instruments and a display screen showing vital signs of the occupant. A readout included data for the exterior chamber, indicating low power and dropping life support. Once it hit thirty five percent, the monitor displayed in large, vibrant text: "PRIORITY OVERRIDE, LIFE SUPPORT LEVELS DROPPING TO UNSAFE LEVELS."
Lights flickered to life in the room and several others nearby, their doors opening as group of cryopods started a revivification cycle, venting supercooled gases from the pods with loud hisses. A light ran down the occupant's form, thawing it without damaging the tissues before needles extended from the sides of the pod, injecting the man with a cocktail of medicine and stimulants, causing a gasp to escape his lips.
The cryopod cracked and split open, revealing the man within in a tight, black jumpsuit, still lightly covered in frost. He cracked his eyes open with a moment of panic and confusion, which only intensified when amber alert lights started flashing, a helpful electronic voice stating calmly: "LIFE SUPPORT DOWN TO THIRTY PERCENT."
He stumbled out of the pod, hearing other confused voices and made his way out into the corridor. There were guide lights along the walls and floors, directing the small group of confused people out of the cryochambers to a large staging room with three marked doors: Armory, Equipment and Exit.
No introductions were made, they just each nodded and split up, most of them going to the armory first, while the man went into the equipment room, filling a large backpack with assorted equipment, noting his right hand was flesh like the other, but it seemed to move naturally enough. He passed the others as they entered to get equipment, some of them struggling into various armored outfits.
He found a suit of Second Skin left, as well as a survival knife and two types of energy pistols. He hurriedly pulled the second skin over his jumpsuit, grateful for the added protection and holstered the laser pistol, putting the other in his backpack, settling it onto his back.
"LIFE SUPPORT AT TWENTY FIVE PERCENT."
They gathered at the exit, a motley bunch consisting of the man, a human female with a wild look in her eyes, a female android, a male Lashunta and a…Vesk of some sort… it was hard to tell with the reptilian races.
The exit was sealed, but the man felt sure he could unlock it.
"I think I've got this, give me a few moments…"
He knelt at the controls, his right-hand splitting, an interface coming out to mesh with the door controls. It took just a few seconds before the door unlocked and hissed open. The flashing alert lights stopped as air rushed through the no longer sealed door, startling a group of poorly dressed looters, who dropped their bags full of electronics and power core components.
"Shit!" the man swore, using some of the rubble that had piled against the door as cover, dropping prone as he drew his laser pistol.
The female human with the wild eyes looked like she was going to say something when one of the looters shot at the sleepers. The shot came nowhere close, but everyone could hear the ricochet bouncing off the wall.
The vesk roared a challenge, charging out with a large pike he'd grabbed from the armory, cleaving the first man in his path in half--twisting as another tried firing at him--but the shot never came as the gun fell from lifeless fingers. The next few seconds were a confusion of missed shots on all sides and the Vesk-engine of death, carving a swath through the looters until he stood by one. Two had retreated towards an elevator.
The sleepers had moved up, firing from protected vantages, the only one being hit by the fire from the looters being the massive Vesk who shrugged off the blows like so many gnats. He spoke in a gravelly voice.
"You lot take this one, I'm going for the others." He took off at a run, the looter he'd been standing by cutting across his scales, drawing blood with a survival knife as he made it into the elevator, impaling one of the looters within before the doors slid shut.
The lone looter in the room looked around at the rest of the sleepers and threw down his knife.
"I surrender!"
The android walked coldly up to him.
"You stabbed our Vesk." She pulled the trigger on her azimuth laser pistol, the beam boiling into the man's eye, setting his head on fire with the intensity of its heat. The body twitched and fell, unable to even scream.
The man with the prosthetic limb look at the android.
"Lovely chassis, my name's…" He paused, actually not sure what his name was, "I'll… have to get back to you on that, stasis sickness, maybe."
He looked up and continued: "Should we go after…?"
Then wild-eyed woman interrupted.
"He'll be fine, he's scaled for their pleasure."
They looked around the room and the surrounding rooms, all of them had been stripped clean, everything was either in the looter's bags or already taken. The second elevator was missing completely, as if something had torn at the top of the shaft. The Vesk returned, covered in a little more gore that wasn't his and tossed the two bodies casually out of the elevator.
They dragged the bags to the elevator, the engineer (the human male knew he was that at least) inspected the elevator. They were on the second to the lowest floor, housing main power and R&D, the lowest floor contained storage while three levels above were two floors of administration with the top being the lobby and exit.
The wild-eyed woman, an envoy, spoke some soothing words to the Vesk and he seemed to feel a bit better, color returning to his scales, though he still bled. She looked up and spoke loudly.
"I figured out how to find out who we are, our clothes have our names on them!" She peeked into her jumpsuit. "I am… Hand Wash Only.”
The engineer shook his head wryly and suggested they check the storage below before venturing up into possibly more looters and the exit.
Below was row upon row of crates, all marked with a company's sigil, Dwarf Star Technologies. The engineer spent several minutes scanning all the crates with his wrist mounted computer. His scanner had been wiped, for some reason, so he'd programmed it just enough to be able to retain the scans to try to find more details once connected to the galactic network. Everything was a mixture of medicinal supplies and manufacturing equipment, enough to set up a working lab for almost anything one could imagine. The decision was made to leave the crates and investigate above. The two administration levels were picked clean and the lobby was strewn with rubble. There was a large hole blown in the outer wall, a partially filled truck was parked at it. The sleepers went over and checked it out, noting it was mostly filled with office furniture from the admin levels and some equipment from the power and cryolevel.
They were interrupted by a loud startled voice.
"Hey! What do you think you're doing, get back to… wait, you're not--"
The mad envoy stepped forward.
"I'm so glad you noticed, you may find that we have MUCH more to offer than they do."
The vesk growled and charged, his pike gliding just past the large, barrel-chested man as he neatly side-stepped the strike. The head looter growled and pulled his own massive weapon, striking a massive blow, cutting clean through to bone on the towering vesk. The envoy's eyes widened as she fired a poorly aimed shot at the looter, coming far closer to the vesk than him.
He glanced at her.
"Just hold your horses, darlin', you can leave him to me. I'll treat you right!"
His last two underlings got up from a nearby table in the ruins of a café across the street, one firing a pistol at the vesk, missing, the other coming out the side, nearly running into the android as he had ran to use the cover of the café to flank the leader. His finger twitched on the trigger of his scattergun, catching her with some buckshot. She returned fire, barely grazing him with a slight burn. The Lashunta, most assuredly a Solarion, strode forward, a mote of solar energy forming by his head before flowing down into his hand, creating a dull, glowing red blade. He struck at the leader, searing him with the heat of the blade. The engineer fired once, hitting the café, cursing his poor aim and missed the end of the fight as he ducked back behind the truck for cover. He peered out, the leader and the looter with the scatter gun were down, the last one tossed down his pistol and surrendered.
The envoy walked forward.
"I am Hand Wash Only and I demand answers!"
"Answer and I won't kill you." The engineer added.
“Yes,” 'Hand' replied, "he won't kill you."
The looter revealed his name as Dale. The town they were in, Jael, was attacked by a prototype ship stolen from the only other city on the moon, Colbix, about three months ago. The ship was downed in Colbix and no one who entered that city came back out, the city having been overrun with the dead after the attack. The things they were grabbing were to be used to trade, to try to live like kings until the Company came to rescue everyone. Everyone on the moon was an employee of Dwarf Star Technologies and Dale was positive a retrieval ship would be arriving any week now. He said up north there was a secure compound run by a former company smuggler, going by the name of Grandpa Pewter.
Hand looked around, stating firmly.
"Alright, we'll go up and see Uncle Touchy, barter some of this gear away for more information on that downed ship. We'll use the rest to try to make her space-worthy and get the hell outta here!"
They had Dale load the last of the equipment into the truck before letting him run off, dumping the office furniture as unwanted cargo. The drive to Grandpa Pewter's compound didn't take long and they parked just past a rise a little more than half a mile from the facility to avoid surveillance.
During the trip, the engineer spent his time reassembling a hover drone taken from the equipment room that had been dismantled for repairs. He inserted a vocal chip into it, a female one, and powered it on. It hummed to life, control servos whirring as it went through its initial startup checks. It's single ocular sensor irised open and focused on him.
The engineer looked at it.
"You are a Mark II Hover Drone, Bouyant, Obervation, Battle, Intel and Exploration… BOBbIE for short. Recognize command sequence eight seven Kilo fife niner Quebec two zero. Acknowledge."
Bobbie chirped, setting its command code before speaking in a abrupt, feminine voice.
"Acknowledged."
The team of sleepers spent a few minutes discussing their options, finally decided on sending a message with Bobbie to the guards, requesting a meet and trade, preferring not to be shot on site. Hand recorded a message on Bobbie and the engineer sent her on her way, the drone being gone for only ten minutes before returning with an answer from Grandpa Pewter.
They were to send people to discuss terms for trade, but not bring any weapons with them. Everyone leaving divested themselves of their weapons, though Hand took a bit longer, retrieving acquired weapons from the looters from her bra, tucked into her panties and other varied locations on her person. The vesk with the large pike stayed with the truck, as did the engineer, putting his new drone on a defensive patrol after programming everyone in the group to her friend or foe matrix. The engineer wasn't quite sure how long everyone was gone before his communicator, built into his prosthetic arm, chirped, Hand telling him to bring the truck in for trade.
After parking the vehicle, they were taken to an office and shown a video of the prototype ship crashing into downtown Colbix. The engineer paused it and set it to go through the frames slowly, analyzing the damage.
"It looks like there is just damage to the lower deck in the prow of the ship… if we were able to get its power core, main computer, thrusters and shields online, we should be able to move her someplace safe to fix her up."
"What'd I tell ya?" Hand said proudly. "My team can fix her up, it looks large enough to carry folks off this rock, so whaddya say you help us retrieve her, Uncle Touchy?"
Grandpa Pewter mulled it over a moment, "If you can recover her and get her to fly, my men and supplies are at your disposal. So, what do I call you all?"
"Oh!" Hand said, pointing to the Vesk, the Android, the Solarion, the Engineer and finally to herself.
"His official name is Kiltak the Aggressor, but his unofficial name is Kiltak the Sexually Frustrated, our android is Eileen Dover, the Lashunta Solarion is Mr. Fluffypants, that guy with the drone is Mike Litoris and I am Hand Wash Only." She proclaimed proudly.
The Engineer, "Mike" shook his head and helped the others devise a plan to leave the barren rock, agreeing with the grizzled smuggler's assessment that there would be no retrieval boat for the survivors.
They unloaded most of the medical supplies from the truck, leaving a lot of the engineering and power components from the looted research and development center. Pewter supplied an armored vehicle with a strike to assist getting to the vehicle and had a StarFury fighter on hand for aerial support. It had apparently come from the downed ship and he'd had the time to use the wreckage of two of them to get this one operational.
They didn't wait long before heading out, opting to get started sooner rather than wait for the situation to change for the worse. The streets for the first two miles into Colbix were quiet and deserted, but when they drew closer to the town's center, Mike spotted a lone, gray figure standing on a rooftop overlooking the road they were on. He pulled over, pointing the figure out to Eileen, who had an azimuth laser rifle, far more capable of hitting the figure than he with his pistol. The shot went wide, making him groan in dismay,
"We are -really- bad at this."
The figure didn't stir until the team decided to push on. It sprinted away from the edge as they made the turn onto the main road towards the crater and stopped. Stretched completely across the street, four or five rows deep, were the corpses of the townsfolk, their gray skin belying their nature, many of them wearing hardly a scrap of clothing.
They remained unmoving, maintaining the picket line. The decision was made to try to find another way around, but all paths in towards the city center were blocked. They attempted to contact Grandpa Pewter for some air support, but any communication further than a block were jammed by an odd signal. Eileen and Mike worked together, identifying the signal and making a makeshift signal booster to cut through it to reach the compound, setting the coms up to perform an automatic triple burst of signal to ensure all data got through.
They got the two vehicles ready, waiting just a few blocks away from the nearest line of undead, waiting for Pewter's StarFury to make a clean sweep. After a few minutes, they heard its screaming engines as he flew past, the ground rocking with explosions as mini missiles tore holes in the ranks of the undead, scattering bodies, pavement and limbs in every direction. The ship made two more passes, finishing almost all of them in the area and clearing the taller buildings of their watchers, the buildings collapsing as they lost too much support. The armored car drove through the mess first, clearing a path for the truck, only stopping when they were a few blocks from the crater, as they saw scores of gray bodies around the crater's exterior.
Thinking ahead and using the signal booster, Eileen sent a signal to the downed craft, finding that it was the ship's main computer sending out the signal as an anti-hacking deterrent, but with the booster, she made it through with no issues, cutting through the ship's ICE like a hot knife through butter, adding the sleepers to the ship's roster to protect them from its anti-personnel defenses.
They drove cautiously up to the craft, seeing a heavily damaged android trying to make repairs on the ship. The android was missing the majority of one arm and one leg, moving with a jerky motion that showed it likely had cortex issues as well. The android, a female named Nova, welcomed the group like returning crew and informed them she had just initialized and was working on routing power back to the main controls for the bridge, to connect the AI with the diagnostics core.
Mike busied himself with downloading the deckplans from the ship's A.I. and made his way to the engine room and main power core. He found it was barely functional and would not be able to run all systems, but with the parts of power cores they'd taken from the looters in the facility they'd awoken from, he should be able to get it back online. He ran outside to get the necessary parts and saw several of the dead stumbling towards the ship.
Nova calmly stopped her repairs on the ship's exterior and walked over to what looked like four azimuth laser rifles strapped together and connected to a large power conduit. She hoisted the massive construct with ease, firing a searing beam at the approaching corpses, leaving quivering, burnt chunks in the wake of the pulse. Afterwards, she calmly set the thing down and resumed work, just to shudder and power off and back on. She glanced up.
"Welcome back, crew, I am downloading the diagnostics from the computer."
She seemed to be on a looping circuit, forgetting the earlier sequences and resetting every half hour. He and Eileen could fix it, but it was a secondary issue to getting other things operational. By the time night fell, he'd gotten power restored to the bridge, Hand had thoughtfully put blankets from crew bunks over the large viewports of the bridge until power was restored and blast shutters could be lowered, otherwise it would act as a beacon to the undead in the night with all the lights coming back on.
They all pulled up spots in different places in the ship, except the majority of the crew quarters in the lower decks to the fore of the ship, much of them being missing from the crash. They did discover that the hole made had burst into an underground manufacturing facility and it might be able to assist them in completing repairs, they'd check it out in the morning, Mike was already asleep in the ship's lounge after putting in a 12 hour day just on the ship alone.
They all woke early the next day, not quite able to sleep well with a gaping hole in the ship and the corpses outside, even under Nova's protection. They gathered what gear they thought they'd need and headed down the rubble strewn crater, dropping neatly into the facility. The first room they came to seemed to be a storage room with a conveyor belt coming in from an adjacent room. Apparently products were made elsewhere and brought here for storage, the corridor leading away from both rooms was collapsed by the ship's haphazard entry. The doorway leading to the production floor was locked so Mike knelt at it, waldos springing from the fingertips of his prosthetic hand and started picking the lock, easily turning the tumblers and opened the door with a wide smile on his face.
The look soon changed when a security bot turned to face him.
"UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY NOT PERMITTED."
He quickly ducked aside as the lumbering form of Kiltak moved past him, slamming his pike into the construct, the robot giving a few sparks in protest before falling over backwards.
The mighty vesk grinned just before amber lights started flashing, other security bots coming online. A quick inspection showed most of them had retraint casters and pulse pistols to incapacitate trespassers…. Except the two further into the room manning turrets. Kiltak strode forward through a hail of fire and up onto a catwalk overseeing the room, going after the next closest bot. As he ran up to it and opened a port on its chest and coated his legs with a layer of foam that quickly hardened to a near cement-like consistency.
Eileen and Mike both took cover and furiously worked on hacking the factory's employee logs, while Bobbie hovered higher, it's light tactical pistol in the weapon mount putting dents in the bot’s chassis by Kiltak. Less than ten seconds later, the robots stood down, many returning to charging/ready stations, accepting the crew as high-ranking members of Dwarf Star Technologies.
Several hours of cataloging later, they were able to determine the factory had enough raw material within to manufacture all needed components to get the ship, the Mourning Wolf, space-worthy and even get two of the turrets online with light replacement laser canons. The original shield emitters were completely shot, but Mike was able to get a low-quality emitter built with remnants and the last of the scrap from the factory.
It took them nearly a week of hard labor, ferrying in workers from Grandpa Pewter's compound in to get the Wolf operational, but she'd fly and get them to where they needed to go.
The onboard A.I. updated itself with the moon's databases once the jamming signal from the ship was turned off and the crew were able to get their dossiers from the company database. They were criminals, incarcerated and intentionally memory wiped for charges of murder, sedition, piracy and theft.
"Mike," now knowing his name was Chip, doubted some of the claims, thinking they were more dangerous to bulkheads than people with their marksmanship. Hand turned out to be named Blair Hartwick, the Android Eileen was Sable, Kiltak was known as Terikoraz, but it was agreed upon by everyone else without asking him, that they'd call him Terry. The Lashunta Solarion, Mr. Fluffy pants, was Aroshok.
They now had at least an inkling of who they were, or at least who they were supposed to be. Blair invited "Uncle Touchy" to stay aboard, but he just wanted a ride to a nearby station with his crew, using his StarFury and armored vehicle as payment and thanks for getting them off the rock before the corpses came for them.
