Zombie Starship by Rok Chillah

Author:Rok Chillah [Chillah, Rok]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Clocktower Books
Published: 2019-07-28T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

The canister sailed through dark space inside the void hold, with its lid hanging open. It sailed through the air on some trajectory Ridge could not understand anymore than he could figure out the canister's purpose. "You okay?" he said, trying to separate his heavy male bulk from the longer but also heavy bulk of Tomson.

"Yeah," Tomson said. "I think I have a sprained ankle, that's all." His face looked ashen, but his eyes were alert and bright. "This thing wasn't meant to hold a couple of big bucks like us."

"More like a pair of little tiny elves or something," Ridge said. They both laughed. "Oh no," Ridge said, "here we go." The canister was sailing on its merry path, which had a slight curvature implanted by the ship's spin. The ship's inner hull curved inward at the rear half, and right about there the canister sailed through that faintly glowing coppery light and impacted near the base of a rocky looking mass of slag and rust and burned out carboniferous material. The canister hit, rolling, made a sound like that Victorian milk canister being tossed empty out the kitchen's back door, and it then rolled a bit and ended up stuck in a crack between two humps of shattered coal. Ridge and Tomson were bashed around inside, but gravity was light until the moment before impact, and the hit was a glancing one whose spin left them more dizzy than its shock made them stunned. After a moment, as he heaved himself out by pushing against the "Must be some old cargo transport tube," Ridge said. He reached in to help the other man out. "Can you make it?"

"I'm fine," Tomson said as he heaved himself out and lay on his side favoring his sprained leg. "This does hurt a bit. If we see any mudmen, just shoot me because I can't run."

Ridge looked worriedly about. "I'd shoot us both because I don't want to be alone with these freaks." He didn't want to say the other thing out loud, which was that, with Brenna gone, he really had little desire to live.

Tomson seemed to sense his feelings. "Don't give up on that woman yet, Ridge. If the mudmen ate them, then they are at peace. Otherwise if they are alive it's our duty to find them."

"Spoken like a great general," Ridge said.

Tomson grinned. "With all that crap Venable was talking, who knows what sort of stock we sprang from."

"Good stock," Ridge said. "They wouldn't have used weak stock." He helped Tomson up and together they clambered and crawled and inched their way up the wet surface. There was a lot of water in the ship's ecosphere, Ridge thought. The seals separating the ship from space must be really tight. Water hung in the atmosphere like a haze. Water made the rusty, slaggy, crushed-coal and onyx-glowing waves and ripples of the hull surface slick. Puddles like rusty milk lay in low spots. In the humid air, the decaying metal sweated moist rust.

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