Gothic Space Horror

#161

Pliers quirked a brow at the warning sounds and signals, and after a half a second, jumped into action. Though a grumpy, withdrawn man at times, he knew what to do when it came to trouble, and he studied the data readouts and understood the problem - a dangerous problem, but with a rather simple answer.

A first, small button was pressed on the main console, and Pliers watched the readout drop as the secondary reactor was isolated from the power system.

Perhaps twenty seconds later, once all power was isolated, a second button was pressed, and those still onboard the Ballard would hear an audible metallic 'clang' reverberating through the ship as the outer hull plate which covered the second reactor was blown.

Pliers exhaled as his finger hovered over the third and last button which would Fire the explosive bolts connecting the reactor to the ship. It was fortunate the removal was such a simple procedure. About five seconds after he pressed his finger against the button, those in the ship would feel the rattling shake of the bolts firing and disconnecting.

Another two seconds on from that, however, an audible screeching sound of metal grating against metal would be heard. Pliers cringed painfully - that sound was NOT supposed to happen. A new warning light blinked brightly on his work panel, indicating a good amount of the bolts had not been fired, and thus the reactor had merely jolted itself, but was still hanging onto the Ballard.
Pliers stared at the readouts for a few seconds longer before reaching for the comms button to send a message.

"Er, it appears, Captain, that there has been a malfunction in separating the bolts from the secondary reactor. Only a third... perhaps a quarter of them were released..." Pliers wondered whether the radiation leakage was too great to get close enough through the maintenance shaft to attempt to ignite those bolts by another means.

Gothic Space Horror

#162

The captain sat pole-axed in his chair. The mission had gone from cut-and-dried to a disaster in the making in only a few seconds. He reconfirmed the situation with the assistant engineer before cursing.

"All hands, prepare for emergency evacuation.' he said, hitting the intercomm key. "Kim, we might need to get all of the rad-poisoning kits from the med bay before we leave the ship, no telling what is left on the Celeste." he said with a haggard tone. It would be a cramped evac as the remaining crewmen made their way into the two salvage shuttles, and over to the Celeste.

"Is there any way we could send someone into the thing, and fire the rest of the bolts?" he asked, seconding Pliers sentiments.

Marney shook her head, having been a junior engineer before gaining admittance to medical training. "There is no way for a person to manually discharge the bolts, and if they did, they would as likely be killed by the reactor shifting, as from the radiation leaking from the damn thing." she said.

For a moment, the captain looked to entertain the though, one crewman for the safety of his ship. "I hope the Celeste is in better shape, or we are all screwed." he said. He punched in the code to power down the ship, and put her in stand-by. Hopefully, she would be rescued herself.

Aboard the Celeste
Pockets found her way to the main engineering compartment, a shining cubicle of dials, and computer screens, an engineers dream and a mechanics nightmare. A few minutes work showed that the reactor was purposfully powered down, and was set in stand-by, with the solar arrays on the outer hull providing most of the residual power.

The power core, obviously more advanced, and ten times more engineer friendly than the MMCRV-1 reactor on the Ballard. As the core returned to operational power, more than a dozen screens read out data to her, from the broad strokes of megawatts generated per second to the minutae of power transfer through the couplings, and vibration in the reactor housing.

At the Airlock
As Hue and Tagget were about the leave, the light fixtures in the airlock blinked on, and the door, reading positive pressure and motion inside, opened. The lights inside of the Celeste were still coming on, running lights, as well as the persistant hum of air recirculators coming back on line.

The air, if it was breathable would be stale, and lord only knew what smells wafted on the frozen breezes, perhaps a virus, or some other invisible pathogen that decimated the crew. There was also the reassuring whine of the O2 heaters warming the ship back to human inhabitability from the constant and penetrating cold of space.

Gothic Space Horror

#163

"Lt. Marney...how well can our suits shield us from the radiation?" Micky's mind was working quickly. There had to be something they could do. She didnt like the thought of abandoning ship if they could save it somehow. She knew the suits could be modified partially to decrease it's size. The Ballard was a good working ship, the Celeste was still unknown...she didnt trust unknowns. "How much radiation is leaking out?" She looked to Pliers. Micky had an idea, she just wasnt sure if it would work.

Gothic Space Horror

#164

"YES!" Tagget exclaimed. "The aux power is on. Now we won't go bumping in the dark."

Tagget began to cycle through the lock. Thinking about it, he went back for his crowbar and tool kit. Eventually the iris opened. No signs.

"NG".

His companion looked at him quizzically.

"Not Good. Now don't go taking off that helmet, for all we know it was something biological that took out the crew. Not that makes too much difference in the low volume air. And its colder than a CO's heart. The Rad count is okay for the moment."

"Hey. The relay to the Ballard is down. Just Frick'n great. Probably the damm super ship hull. So, after you."

Gothic Space Horror

#165

Hue nodded reflexively, the threat of a pathogen seemed to be likely considering the functioning state of the ship and the absence of the crew. "Good thinking. If the relay to the Ballard is down, that could mean any number of things, but shit happens in space. Maybe a metorite sheared off their com array, maybe the reactor is critical. Whatever it is it's out of our hands. We should try to make it to the bridge from there we can access the sceurity terminal and crew logs. Find out what the hell what happened here."

The way the ships lights came on and the utter emptiness of the ship reminded him of certain events. Things before had started jsut like this...

"It can't be them.." He said to himself, he proceeded down the corridor to the corridor intersection. "Warship's bridge is usually towards the center of the ship where the most protection from hard space is. Unless you have the floor plan with you."

Gothic Space Horror

#166

Hue's instinct paid off, and the two men found the bridge in short order. The ship remained cold as they progressed deeper into it, but the temp was slowly rising. It had come up ten degrees since they had cycled through the airlock. It was still cold enough to kil, but it would take a minute now rather than the span of a single breath.

A gruesome sight awaited the two men as the door to the bridge opened. It was nearly a hand's length thick, and double reinforced. The holovid screens were on, the computer cycling through its warm-up operations, assessng basic functions and the status of core systems. Apparently it had been shut down in standard order.

A man sat in the command chair, his face drawn into the rictus of pain and death, his seemingly last act was a snarl of defiance...or was it horror. The features of the frozen face were hard to discern with absolute clarity. The skin was pale as alabaster, the eyes bulging, with visible ruptures where the cornea had split when the vitrious gel inside of the eyeball froze and expanded. Blood ran down his face, dried to paper crispness in the absolute cold of the bridge.

All of the death and suffering at Diamunde seemed to pale in comparison to this single corpse, drifting in the dark beyond the inner reaches of the solar system, waiting for them. Like a macabre sentinel, or doorman to the darkness...

Gothic Space Horror

#167

Hue didn't even flnch at the dead body he had been expecting it, in this cold someone had to die of the cold. "This confirms my suspicion, whoever did this it was maliscious radical drop in temputure doesn't just happen. It looked he was frozen in a span of short miuntes. I can't be sure. Nothings can be confirmed untill Marney can perform an atopsy. Here help me bag him. " Hue pulled out a black rubber bag.

Gothic Space Horror

#168

Ao, having followed the two onto the bridge, gasped and dropped behind a bank of controls. He clawed at the facemask of his suit.
Breathe! Must breathe!
He stood, bracing himself against some machinery.
"Wha... What? What is this?"

Gothic Space Horror

#169

Pliers Shook his head faintly at Micky in disapproval. "If I thought there was anything I could do to save this ship right now, I would be on it. Radiation density is enough that within the core channel, exposure for three minutes would be more than enough for death. And that is rising rapidly. Captains approval or not, I will not allow anybody to risk anything. And the suits in their current state would not offer extra protection over more than thirty seconds."
The engineer had taken all that was not bound down in the engineering compartment, including all the tools. Though he was retreating for the moment, he was not about to give up on a ship - he was perhaps almost as fanatical about the Ballard as pockets, if not as verbal about it.
"However, I am hoping that the Celeste will have suits better equipped for radiation. Or at the very least, given the time I will have on the Celeste, I may be able to modify our own suits for aided protection." If he could find or make proper protection on the Celeste, he thought may be able to come back and operate a salvage ship to see if he can't get out there to separate that reactor. He paused a moment, before glancing to the captain "Do we have time to take rations? There is no telling how much is left on the Celeste..."

Gothic Space Horror

#170

"Not a bad idea, sir." the captain said as he was preparing his logs and charters to be transfered to the Celeste. "We will still need to eat, hopefully they will have the ship warmed up enough that we will be able to open our suits to eat." he said.

Gothic Space Horror

#171

At the airlock:
Tagget pulled out his PADD and pulled up the schematics. He pointed and grunted in his articulate way.

****
AT the Bridge..
"Cool", Tagget said when they saw the dead captain. "Brave Stupid CO, dying with his ship for no reason than tradition."

*****
"Yah, sure. We can bag him. We need to hurry. With any more air and heat, he will begin to expand and... well if you never seen a recompressed body... it is kind of messy. "

*struggle * "TANJ! they say these bags are one size fits all, but they really arn't. You know, I am not doing the mop duty on any of the other bodies once lifesupport kicks on full force."

"Once the computers come up, we can check the logs." After unceremoneously tossing the captain's bag off to the back of the bridge. Walking around the bridge, Tagget checked his pressure gague.

He drops back into the captain's previously held chair. He flipped on his suit "ears". There was enough air now to carry sound efficently. He was hoping to hear the familiar boot up beeps of the computer systems. What he heard was an odd rhymic rumble.. a ping of rumbles.

"What the tanj is that? No ship is supposed to make that kind of noise. Turn your ears on. What do you make of it?"

Gothic Space Horror

#172

A search of the Celeste proved futile, the unknown body in the command chair was the only one aboard, grinning with its frozen grin of death. Perhaps something in the last few seconds of life had proven funny to the man as he froze to death. The body was stowed in a the body bag, and the ships cold storage proved to be amply sized to hold the body.

Things seemed amiss aboard the ship. Personal belongings were still laying out, photographs and holos still rested on bunks, clothes were folded, some half folded in the laundry hold. Food, frozen harder than stone was still sitting on the tables in the mess. As the various systems came back on, holovids in private quarters remembered their last setting and resumed play of whatever was in them to begin with.

The ansible feeds remained blank as the bulk of the gas giant blocked most all signals from Earth. It would be three hours before the ship was habitable again, and by four hours it would be back at normal temperature.

Gothic Space Horror

#173

Micky sighed. "You guys go ahead. I will be over shortly." She went and found her space suit. She slipped it on, clasping latches, checking it's hoses and such. She would put the helmet on last. Micky returned to her post and punched in the remaining commands. It would keep the ship at a holding position until the others had evacuated. She drummed her fingers lightly on the armrest of her chair. Micky had a plan...or at least she was working on one.

Assessing the Situation

#174

Captain Stern glowered through the face of his helmet, his breath hissing in his ears. The thermo on his suit registered the mess of the Celeste in the area of -200 degrees. It would be long before it was habitable again, unlike his own ship. The thought of an overdue reactor inspection made him want to throw up in his suit.

Marney and Severin were unloading the last of the supplies from the Ballard for their stay onboard the Celeste. It was primary to find out what happened to the Celeste, so that it didnt repeat itself, then they could worry about either repairing the Ballard, or using the Celeste to pull the Ballard back to a safe port of call. It would take some time to inspect both ships.

Marney would autopsy the body of the unknown man, and hopefully that might shed some light on what happened aboard the ship, and maybe give a clue to where the other 79 bodies vanished too.

Gothic Space Horror

#175

Hue booted up the terminals on the bridge and started a diagnostic of the ship, the screen moved extremely slow as the ship did an interior scan.

Gothic Space Horror

#176

After five minutes, the scan registered complete, and the answer shed no light on the situation. There were no more people aboard the Celeste other than the crew of the Ballard and one corpse. Lt. Marney had already moved the body to the medbay, a spacious facility that could accomodate the entire crew of the Ballard with ease, but might have felt crowded when a full crew compliment was aboard.

All interior sections read clear, with biologic and chemical sensors reading nothing but stale air, with trace amounts of ozone from the reheaters running at full power. Atmospheric pressure was at normal levels, and the power core was operating in the nominal band.

*****
The Engineering compartment was massive, feeling nearly as large as the entirety of the Ballard, but wreathed in sensors, pressure and power relays, and computer screens. There were more safety systems, and redundancies in the third generation fusion core than either engineer had ever seen. There were five pressure release systems, and it would take the near complete destruction of the ship to cause a critical meltdown within the shell of the core.

The power output was staggering. According to the power projections, the core could fuse not just hydrogen into helium, and could continue in a hotter, more violent reaction fusing helium into heavier beryllium. The power produced by the hybrid reaction was magnitudes greater than what the Ballard could produce, and a standard fissionable reactor was a candle compared to the engine.

There were some strange power relays, they resembled the heavy plasma conduits that ran to the array of ion engines, but they ran forward through the ship and were heavily armored, with an aligned crstalline steel. The metal was not horribly strong, but it could conduct heat much better than traditional hardened steel.

*****
Computer readout on bridge

TACTICAL WEAPONS STATION
STATUS: LOCKED
SYSTEM STATUS...
ALL MISSLE CORES GREEN
ALL WARHEAD CORES GREEN
TARGETING AND BALLISTIC SYSTEMS GREEN
ENERGETIC WEAPON SYSTEMS GREEN
ACCESS CODE:_ _ _ _ _-_ _ _ _ _

Gothic Space Horror

#177

Ao uneasily paced the deck of the bridge, scanning the floating holoprojected screens as they slowly glowed into mid-air life. He put his fingertips to one and brought it closer to him, reading the monologues of the wakening Celeste.
There ain't no justice, he thought, and turned to the others on the bridge.
"She looks completely undamaged. All systems green. Everything's fine. There's not a weapon fired," he said, "So what the tanj happened?"

Gothic Space Horror

#178

Accessing Ships Log...
Captains Log: Locked
Operations Log: Open

Last Operational Event...
Shutdown Sequence initiated by Executive Officer James M. Raynor
All primary systems in shutdown
All power systems in standby
Life Support in hibernation/standby

Captains Log locked by Executive Officer James M. Raynor
Override code _ _ _ _ _-_ _ _ _ _
...
...
...
Coronal Mass Ejection Alert
Danger to Uranian Space, decrypted by standard ansible transmission
Plasma Dynamo activated
Anomalies detected in synthetic magnetosphere, radiation protection incomplete.
...
...
...
...file not found
...file not found
...file not found
...computer systems error...authorized by Executive Officer James M. Raynor

Gothic Space Horror

#179

Pockets scurried around engineering, taking in all of the systems. She could spend hours here, just investigating. But not now. She had done all she could for the moment. All systems were green; making an educated guess, she thought that someone had actually shut down the system manually. Well, everything was up and running; it would just take a little while to come back to full power. She did wonder what those strange power relays were, but decided she could find out later. She really needed to go back and check-in, as she couldn't raise the Ballard on her comm. Probably the hull of the Celeste was interfering. She headed back toward the airlock.

Gothic Space Horror

#180

Pockets arrived at the main airlock in time to meet Captain Stern, and the rest of the crew of the Ballard offloading supplies such as food rations and medical supplies from the ship. Given the pell-mel nature by which the shuttle was packed, it seemed that they had not given any time to loading and had been in some sort of hurry. The fact that every other breath brought another curse from the captain.

"The Fission reactor had a breach, Ballard is uninhabitable unless we can find a way to completely dump the fission core. Oh, explosive bolts, only about half fired, and the core is hung up in the dump channel." He decorated the rest of the speech with maledictions to god, promises of eternal punishment to the techs who said the fission core didnt need maintainence, and just general obscinity.

Pockets, and now the present Pliers noticed that the strange, thick power cables that began in the engineering compartment also ran near the airlocks, where the hull was double layered thick, and quite impervious.

Ambient Temperature -80 degrees F

Gothic Space Horror

#181

Pockets stood perfectly still for a minute, before she automatically started grabbing at something to help carry it. Then she burst into a stream of profanity that was not only surprising, coming from her, but rivalled the captain in impressiveness. Her tirade went on for a good seven minutes, all the while helping haul stuff into the Celeste. She was winding down, though. Finally, she stopped and caught her breath. "This pisses me off. Usually there's some kind of warning when a core is about to go fubar. I have never seen something of this scale that only had a single blip on the power readout as a warning. If I'd had some actual Goddamned warning, this wouldn't be a problem. When we get back planetside, I'ma find those thrice-damned techs and do something unpleasant."

Gothic Space Horror

#182

Hue looked at Ao, he unfamialer with most of the terms on the screen, he could handle human biological terms, but these dealt with astro physics or something not his department. "Hmm wonder what type of energetic weapons are aboard this thing? Still is -80 F though wish that atomosphere control module would hurry up, recycled air is getting stuffy." Hue sack down at the terminal and brought up another picture of inside the ship. One of the cameras showed Captain Stern and the rest of the crew. "That is odd, Ao, the rest of the crew is aboard the Celeste now."

Gothic Space Horror

#183

Ao's mouth was a glum line.
"Yes. Looks like the Ballard has seen her last flight."
He turned his attention to the holoscreen that Hue was looking at.
"I'm not sure about this," he said, pointing to the warning about the coronal mass ejection and the danger to Uranian space. "But what it looks like to me is that the magnetic protection shut down and radiation entered the ship. But if that's so, why would they freeze it?
"I wonder what this James Raynor fellow's job was on the ship. Maybe I can access the crew-logs."

Gothic Space Horror

#184

Micky sighed as she finished adjusting her suit and pressed the com button. "Captain, awaiting final command. Ship is programmed to move to a safe nearby vector in a holding pattern. Far enough that we wont be affected by the radiation, but close enough that we will be able to return to her once we figure out a way to repair her."

Gothic Space Horror

#185

"Good work Micky." the captain said, sitting in one of the seats, his pressure suit making the task at best difficult. After a while, the thermo clicked over into the green area, the temperature having risen rapidly once the hard cold was defeated. The captain reached up and disconnected the latches on his helmet and removed it with a pop and a hiss.

"Still damn cold, but no worse than winter in Moscow." he said with a laugh, mostly since as a South African he had never been to Moscow.

"I am going to take the body to the medbay, I am going to do an autopsy to see what killed him, maybe match his DNA against records find out who he was." Marney said as she removed her own helmet. THe air was sharply cold, but not so bad, about the same as her native Washington in the heart of winter, and it was still warming up. Either way, the air inside the Celeste smelled fresher than her own recycled body odor inside the suit.

(Will post more later, out of time, must return to salt mines)

Gothic Space Horror

#186

Hue grabbed his kits and walked with Marney, "I'll help with autopsy." The corridors were eerily quiet except for the thrum of the reactor. When the two reached the medical bay in the celeste Hue laid the body on the examination table and removed it from the body bag. "Ready?"

Gothic Space Horror

#187

"I'm ready," Marney said as she pulled out a small laser scalpel and began to remove the clothing from the corpse, being careful not to score the still rigid flesh underneath. The medbay had superior life support, owing to its use, than the rest of the ship. It was nearly 40 degrees F.

"Subject is male, caucasian in his mid to late forties, brown hair, brown eyes, teeth in good condition. Shows no evidence of signifigant invasive surgery, residual scarring from what appears to be appendectomy, and normal scar associated with the D-12 vaccine given to soldiers serving in the Martian campaigns. So our body was a soldier at one point." she said, the computer ticking softly as it recorded her comments.

Gothic Space Horror

#188

Micky set the final controls, making her way to the last pod. The coordinates were on a delay. She had time to strap in and manuever the small ship to the Celeste before the Ballard initiated its new programming and moved to a safe distance from the other vessel. After docking, Micky made her way through the Celeste, to where the Captain was. Noting the Captain had removed his helmet. "Sir, have they done a viral sweep of the ship?" Some viruses could remain dormant in the cold and come back to life as the ship heated back up. She wasnt sure she was ready to breath the air in the Celeste until they had a good idea that it was safe to breath.

Gothic Space Horror

#189

"Yes yes, Marney did a viral sweep of the ship, the air is clean, and the filtration system is still uncompromised. Whatever happened here wasnt some mutant virus. If it was, it's gone now." Stern said, his breath coming out in a white plume in the cold dry air of the mess.

The Ballard waited, approximately two kilometers away from the Celeste. The radiation hemorraging from the rescue boat was signifigant, but the heavy hull shielding of the Celeste made any worry more procedure and protocol than actuall concern.

*****
"This is interesting." Marney said as she continued deeper into the examination, now making small incisions into the cold flesh of the dead man. "I see signs of some sort of pressure trauma. The flesh under his eyes shows signs of having been disrupted before the blood pooled out in his body. The same in the eye scan." she handed the retina scanner to Hue. The retina was a mess, structures badly disrupted and capillaries were burst, but didnt show the long splits and cracks of cryogenic ruptures but larger ruptures commonly seem in epileptics, and high pressure events.

*****
No one else had seen it. His eye had moved, stared directly in that direction. It was no mistake, the eye moved and had settled, two eyes locked with one dead orb, milky with death and frost. A breath, a whisp of white in the brittle cold had breathed between his lips.

James Raynor, Jimmy to his friends, one hell of a soldier, top ranked marksman, decorated by the damned Frenchie President of the UE for bravery above and beyond at Diamunde. How many lives had this man saved? How many had he killed...

What secrets had he taken to his grave?

Gothic Space Horror

#190

Severin slumped against the wall, his helmet making a clunking sound against the metal. It looked like he had been crying and his hair was tussled. He often looked that way, and when asked about it, he just grunted something about his mother and some kind of personal business. He had not talked much either, and had kept a deliberate low profile while observing the experienced veterans. Or so he was telling everyone.

He dropped the navy coloured bag with his personal belongings gently to the floor and scanned the crowd, finally resting his eyes on Doctor Marney. He smiled softly while he spoke: "So the questions we are faced with are the following: Why did the Captain power down the ship, where is everyone and who or what did this to the captain?" Severin shrugged while shaking his head.

"I worry most about what Micky just said" he exclaimed and nodded approvingly to the helmswoman. "Let's just hope this corpse here does not harbour any dark secrets".

Gothic Space Horror

#191

"Good questions, ones that I would like answered as soon as possible. I want to know that this ship is stable enough to support us while we rescue the Ballard. I'm going to trade in one ship for another." Captain Stern said.

"The matter of the missing bodies is a paramount concern, I am afraid we are going to find them all together in one compartment, like an insane morgue, and the corpse was the last survivor." Stern said, his head leaden knowing that his daughter was very likely gone forever.

"Now that everyone is aboard, I want the engineers to start working on a plan to get that damned posion reactor out of my ship. We arent leaving it here. According to our information, this ship is fully fitted with machine bays, plus we have two salvage shuttles. Make it happen." Stern said.

"Hue and Marney will finish up working on the stiff, report your findings as soon as possible. If this is biological, I want to know ASAP," he said.

"Everyone else, I want you to start searching this ship from top to bottom, and I mean checking inside the air ducts, the trash compactor, and the damned pantry lockers." Stern said, a hint of hysteria in his voice, his conscience cried that his daughter was safe, that she was overlooked, or had escaped on a lifepod, anything but a lingering death in Uranian space.

Gothic Space Horror

#192

Severin bolted forward and saluted the Captain with an eagerness only rookies can show. Then he picked up his belongings and slung them over his shoulder before he strutted out of the room.

He pondered the orders given by the Captain. The air ducts were out of the question, as his size would not easily fit into those, so he made his way towards the trash compactor. He would search that area properly and perhaps he would find some survivors?

Between daydreams of victory and grateful young women, troubling thoughts emerged. Thoughts about the Captain and about lost family, thoughts about the Celeste and what really happened here.

"I'm heading for the trash compactor" he yelled from the corridor.

Gothic Space Horror

#193

Severin continued further down the corridor before he halted. The cold temperature, the strange corpse, the darkness, he jumped slightly when he saw movement in a corner, but it was only his shadow. No matter how hard he wanted to prove himself, he could not do this alone. Actually he was... afraid.

"Micky, Pliers, Pockets... Does anybody want to follow me to the compactor? This ship is kind of scary, you know! Ao? Taget?" the trembling in his voice revealed his fear.

Gothic Space Horror

#194

Ao sighed.
"I'll vellow... I mean, I'll follow you. Sorry, Lunar English has a way of sneaking into your mouth, you know?"

Gothic Space Horror

#195

Game temporarily on hold...will resume on Wednesday

Gothic Space Horror

#196

Autopsy wasn't Hue's specialization he worked with the living, sure he;d had his share of deaders but he usually didn't have to deal with the after job work. He helped Marney the best he could handled the cleaning and tool work. He admired her smooth confidence working with the kadaver.

Gothic Space Horror

#197

Micky followed Ao and Severin. "After we check the compactor I'll check the airducts." In truth she was just small enough to fit in the small crawl space. Along the way she undid the helmet on her suit. No use in wasting the oxygen supply. She might need it later anyway. Micky sighed, allowing Severin and Ao to lead the way.

Gothic Space Horror

#198

The Access tunnel to the trash compactor was small and cramped, not large enough to let two people through at a time. The three explorers made their way down one at a time. Above, a large display marked the system Emergency stop activated. It wouldnt do for the compactor to sense them inside and activate. The smell was bad as they opened the access door to the compactor room itself.

Near the core, the compacter had already thawed, and was fetid with the smell of garbage. After comaction, most the waste would be processed, and reduced to organic matter, recycled through the hydroponics section, and non-organic, which would be either ejected, or fed to the ion drive as fuel stock. There were one hundred and one stories of ensigns and other non-officers getting eaten by compactors, and recycled. Each was likely as true as the stories of ghosts in space, or the knockers, who inhabited the bowels of ships and knocked on the pipes, and caused mischief.

The compactor had a vaulted ceiling, and the ground was thick, with two feet of slurry water and sewage standing. The smell was the breath of an open sewer. There were no mangled and crushed bodies, no gore, no patina of blood and guts stained to walls. Water dripped from the ceiling, nearly 10 meters above, each drop echoing in the chamber.

There was a loud pop, and the hiss of hydraulics activating...

Gothic Space Horror

#199

The smell was horrid. She bit back the wave of neusea that hit. There came the loud pop. Micky jerked towards the sound. "No!" She began to backout of the compactor as quickly as she could, being the last person to enter. Since she was smaller she was able to move faster in the small space. Micky emerged from the corridor and ran for the compactor controls. Had they been activated by accident? God, dont let Ao and Severin be crushed in there.

Gothic Space Horror

#200

Micky was halfway out of the compactor when the hydraulics recycled and stopped. The main terminal of the compact showed a standard reset of the hydraulic pressure settings once every twelve hours. The display blinked at eleven hours, 59 minutes until the next reset of pressure. The Emergency stop was still engaged.