Vanguard Word Update

2k words. I made a mistake naming Kazlu and Kurtis - the first initials shouldn't be the same - and I'm going to rename one of them in the revisions phase. But for simplicity I'll keep their names as is for now.

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“Just cause you can fly don’t make you any better,” Cadell pointed out. “a single shot from a rifle and you’re clipped. Yeah you’re bigger than me, but that makes you a bigger target too, how’s that an advantage?”

“We have ways to circumvent such things,” she replied, and it seemed that was the end of that.

There were no more missteps for either of them the rest of the way, and up ahead, an alcove of metal gradually appeared over the sloped horizon, the sight of an outer airlock inside its hollow a welcoming sight. The rest of there squad were already there, as was Marek, the Lieutenant waving them over as he and Samiha crossed the last couple meters of the track, if one could call it that.

“And here you are at last. What took you so long?” he asked, glancing between the two.

Cadell looked up at Samiha, who met his eyes with her own. There was a measure of unease about her, as if she expected Cadell to spill the beans about her little tumble.

“Samiha was just giving me some tips on how to keep my breakfast on the inside,” Cadell explained. “Permission to go inside and get this helmet off, Sir?”

Marek turned from him to Samiha, giving her a look of appraisal.

“Granted. Don’t forget to clean that crap off,” he said, pointing to the bile on the visor. “I’ve got another wave of recruits coming up for their walks soon, so you’re dismissed. Don’t get too comfy,” he added when Hunter voiced his appraisal through the local channel. “This will be a weekly drill for all of you, and it’ll stay that way until I’m satisfied you’ve all got your space-legs. Dismissed.”

With that, the squad filed into the airlock, the doors sealing shut with a thunk. Marek didn’t join them, probably to see off the next batch of recruits. When the room was pressurized and the inner doors swung open, they removed their stuffy helmets, Cadell taking in a nice gulp of recycled air. He still wasn’t used to the coppery after taste of the station’s air, but now that the dread of vacuum was lifted, even the smell of his puke was sweet.

“Fuck everything about that,” Hunter said diplomatically, leaning one hand against the bulkhead. “That felt like a hundred miles, not a hundred meters.”

“You did very well,” Kazlu added, giving him an encouraging pat on the shoulder. She wasn’t aware of her own strength and the blow sent the smaller human lurching forward. “I was a lot worse my first time about a spaceship. Just try not to look straight ahead so much or you’ll just confuse yourself. I find that looking at a point two meters before your feet is a good place to focus.”

“Wish you’d told me that way earlier, mate,” Hunter muttered.

Beyond the airlock was a secondary room, the walls lined with lockers with spacesuits hung up behind glass cases. Two of them were far larger than the rest, the Balokarids moving over to them and beginning to strip down.

Cadell moved to the other side, shedding his own suit. He was a lot sweatier than he realised, the sleeves sticking to his arms on the way out. Kazlu wasn’t kidding, he felt like he’d just hiked a mountain.

“You looked pretty comfortable out there, Kurtis,” he began, the man on his immediate left. “You were way ahead than the rest of us for most of the walk.”

“I cheated,” Kurtis answered. “I’ve got spacewalk experience under my belt. Used to be a shipbreaker, years ago.”

Cadell whistled his appraisal, noting that Samiha’s tail twitched at the noise. “No kiddin’? This must be child’s play compared to that.”

“Ship-breaker?” Samiha asked from across the room. “What is that, some kind of saboteur?”

“Miner,” Kurtis corrected. “When starships need to be scrapped, they send out teams of shipbreakers to whittle down the usable components into giant recyclers. Since most ship types don’t make landfall unless in extreme circumstances, the scrapping is done in shipyards in high orbit.”

“No wonder you looked as though you’ve walked on the outside of a hull before,” Kazlu noted. “I’ve seen pictures of your starships. Breaking them down must take months, or years. It must be very dangerous to spend that much time in vacuum.”

“That’s why everyone calls them crackers,” Hunter added. “It’s a nickname, because you’d have to be nuts to work your arse off ten hours a day holding a plasma cutter that burns at a few thousand degrees Celsius.”

“You said that around a group of Breakers, and your skull would be crackers,” Kurtis replied. He was smiling, but it wasn’t the jovial kind.

“You must have got some decent hazard pay,” Cadell noted.

“Let’s just say that if I’d stayed for another year, I could probably buy out your farming colony, boss.”

Cadell raised his brow at that, not quite used to being called that by his friends. “So why didn’t you?” he asked.

The smile faded at that. “On my last job, they sent us out to scrap a Colossus wreck. I don’t believe in the supernatural or anything, and I still don’t, but there was something off about that thing.”

Samiha and Kazlu exchanged a look, and a few words in their native, warbling language. “You’ll have to explain what a Colossus is,” Kazlu prompted. “that word is new to us.”

“That’s what we call those giant, ancient wreckages floating around in the Milky Way,” Kurtis explained. “You’re a spacefaring species, aren’t you? Surely you’ve run across one before? They’re in practically every other star system in both the Inner and Outer Reaches.”

“I believe I know what you’re talking about,” Samiha answered. “There was one such construct in the Balokar system. Whoever created it, they weren’t around when our survey ships came across it. Harvesting its components greatly accelerated our Clan’s pursuit of exploring the cosmos.”

“Same story with us,” Kurtis continued. “The wreck was composed of a metal that didn’t exist on the periodic table, but once a sample of it was shipped back to Earth, it basically replaced steel. We call it C-loys, short for Colossal-alloys, and you can find it anywhere these days. Ships, spacesuits, the hull of the station, you name it. There’s a constant demand for the stuff, and most of the supply comes from Shipbreaker companies who go out looking for other wrecks.”

“Still haven’t said why you left,” Cadell reminded him.

“Have you ever been inside an abandoned alien craft before?” Kurtis asked. “one that’s been drifting along in space for thousands, maybe ten of thousands of years? There’s nothing inside them. No screens, no terminals, no controls of any kind. Just long tubes of darkness that don’t lead anywhere.”

“Does not sound so intimidating to me,” Samiha remarked. “Only hatchlings would fear the darkness.”

“It’s not about the darkness,” Kurtis replied, struggling to find the words. “It’s the… the sense you get. A wrongness that seems to radiate off the alloy. I was a sound sleeper up until that first night we spent on site, then I started having nightmares, and people I knew to be good guys started getting more agitated and picking fights. Five days of that and I knew I had to transfer or I’d go mad.”

“I don’t remember any of our surveyors recalling anything going amiss,” Samiha noted, turning her beak up at the human.

“Did you actually step foot onto the wreck?” Kurtis asked. “It’s not something you can easily explain without seeing it for yourself.”

The aliens didn’t seem very convinced, and Cadell couldn’t blame them. Kurtis was basically describing seeing ghosts, but having grown up on a colony where bone-knockers were once called the same thing, Cadell was skeptical at best.

When they were stripped down to their fatigues, Hunter suggested they go to the mess for some lunch, and the squad agreed. As Cadell made to join them, however, Samiha pulled him aside, checking to make sure the others were out of earshot.

“Cadell? I wanted to say something,” she began, the feathers on her arms standing on end. She was down to a singlet and a pair of knee-length shorts, the garments fitting her tight enough that he could admire her hourglass profile, though he dared not look for more than a moment. “Thanks for catching me back there. The Lieutenant would have had a shuttle to come pick me up, so I wasn’t in much real danger, but the effort is appreciated.”

She folded her arms together, smoothing out her ruffled feathers with her palms.

“Yeah, you’re welcome,” he said, not sure what else to say. She looked like the most uncomfortable alien in the world. She’d started off well enough, but he got the inkling she wasn’t being entirely sincere, like she was forcing herself to say it. He wanted to ask her straight what he’d done to earn her ire, but he just couldn’t find the right words.

“You comin’ with us to the mess?” he asked instead, pointing a thumb over his shoulder.

“Later. I left something at the other airlock. I’ll join you soon.”

“Sure,” he said. He turned to leave, following after the others, but at the end of the hallway he looked back, noting that Samiha was still lingering in the airlock. Curious, Cadell hid himself behind the wall, exposing just his one eye as he waited to see what she was doing.

The alien returned to the locker where she’d placed her suit, Cadell quirking a brow as she lifted it off the rack. Was she about to put it back on? It seemed not, her attention turning to one of the pouches on the left thigh, Samiha peeling open the pocket and delving inside.

When her hand came back, she had something clutched in her fingers. Cadell thought it might be a bag, but he couldn’t get a good look, Samiha turning her body in a way that he couldn’t see what she was doing. She produced something from whatever it was, something metallic, and shiny enough to reflect the light from the bulbs above her headdress.

She pushed her fist against her shoulder, the barest whisper of a sigh carrying down the hallway. Samiha nuzzled the place she’d touched with her beak, Cadell ducking away quickly when her amber eye scanned her surroundings.

Had she seen him? Cadell didn’t stop to check, hurrying down the bend, making sure his boots didn’t clock against the deck too loudly. There hadn’t been any classes for the humans to study the Balokarids yet, but it didn’t take a genius to know Samiha was hiding something from the rest of them. What that was, he couldn’t be sure, but what he could be sure of, was what she had been holding in her hand just now.

It was a needle.