War Fleet: Fugitives by Daniel Young

Author:Daniel Young [Young, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-12-13T16:00:00+00:00

21

Schmidt panted as he navigated through the first module, heading towards the shield module. He had a sinking feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach, and part of him wanted to throw up. But he carried on towards the doorway, regardless. His pistol was drawn, but the grip felt clammy in his hand.

Part of Schmidt didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He’d just volunteered himself for a death trap—literally. He had seen what had happened to the mutants on the trawler at Capstan III, and he remembered the view on the screen of their warped bodies floating out into space. Now, he knew what would happen. Redrock or one of the Marines would find him, they’d knock him out, and eventually Olsen would be forced to lure them into the shuttle bay and open the doors, also ejecting them into space. In other words, he was about to die.

He entered the habitation module, the one containing what used to be Captain Kraic’s four-poster bed. It now had some red curtains drawn across it, and Schmidt wondered if they concealed anything. He stepped forward and drew the curtains quickly, his pistol ready to shoot at anything he might find inside. But he only saw the pillows propped up, the bed neatly made. Schmidt swallowed, imagining the ghost of the old Arstan captain lying there, foaming at the mouth after his suicide.

“Okay. I’m at the first bunk module, and it’s clear,” Schmidt reported over his wristwatch intercom. “Moving into the next module now.”

“Anything unusual yet, Schmidt?” Olsen asked.

“Nothing abnormal at all, sir,” Schmidt said. But part of him thought the modules looked darker, the spaces inside them more cavernous, as if each one was the stomach of a great beast ready to swallow him. This could be his imagination, maybe. Or maybe the radiation from the spatial detonator stretched out further across the modules than he realized, and was affecting him in unexpected ways.

He moved to the end of the room, into a storage module. “Okay, I’m leaving the bunk module and entering the storage module,” he reported.

He passed down an aisle between a set of metal shelves, with boxes of ammo and Arstan bayoneted rifles on one side, and cans of meat and nutrition bars on the other. Seeing the food made Schmidt suddenly feel hungry. But this was Arstan food anyway, and the hormones they put inside were poisonous to humans. Olsen had told the crew he’d wanted to eject the supplies into space and replace them with proper space rations, but they’d been far too busy lately to do any of that.

Schmidt progressed a little further down the aisle, and suddenly he heard something move behind it. He turned around to see nothing. “Who’s there?” he asked. He looked down into the bright lights coming from the module beyond, but couldn’t see anyone.

Then came a clank—something falling off the shelves in the aisle to his right. “Shit,” Schmidt said. “Sir, I think there’s someone in here.

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