Adrian Saunders always took a particular Hunter vessel when the time came to restock his food supplies, and had come to call it the ‘Shopping Trolley’. There was really no reason why it had initially been this ship, excepting perhaps that it had been closest to the edge of the flight deck, but Hunter vessels were equipped for hauling large amounts of meat, and had the facilities available to let them keep it fresh. He knew these facilities had previously been used by the Hunters to keep the flesh of sapients in, but that hadn’t bothered him after he’d given it a good scrub. Not like it had bothered the others.
He always kept the cloaking system activated, just in case he came up against something he really didn’t want to deal with, but today he was also scanning for other vessels in a way that would allow anyone who was looking for active scans to find him. It was important that he find someone to inoculate Jen before she went and caused an outbreak somewhere else.
He had already been out one more time to flush the ship she had been on before. He had considered sending the ship, full of plague corpses, straight into Hunter territory, but he hadn’t been ready to start engaging in bio-warfare. You never knew where a weapon like that could spread to, and the Hunters weren’t ones to go down without taking a lot of innocent people with them.
Today was focused on food gathering, however, and he still visited Affrag for that purpose as he already knew what was worth eating there. A straightforward run, with the likely fruitless search for other ships directly after.
He dropped out of warp straight into low orbit, and his scanners lit up on a dozen scouts throughout the system. His active scanners pinged them all before he could shut them off.
“Shit!” he cursed, switching the scanners back to passive. “Fuck! Shit! Fuck!”
It felt good to swear freely again. He’d been doing his best to keep a civil tongue since Jen had arrived, a holdover from his upbringing that tolerated no foul language in the company of women. His father had not been a good man, but that was one rule that Adrian couldn’t fault him on.
He clenched his teeth into a frustrated grimace as the detection systems started reporting active scans pounding the Shopping Trolley. “Can’t go back to the Zhadersil like this,” he said to the ship, although it was not about to respond. “There’s not even a way to send a proper fucking message to Jen…”
He looked down at the planet, marking out the familiar land masses, marking out the places where the clouds were heaviest. It looked as though it was time for some more camping, but if he was going to be expecting company he figured he’d make sure they knew they were unwelcome.
He just hoped that nothing happened to Jen or the Zhadersil while he was away.
Chir had borrowed a vessel after lodging a fake flight plan with the administration. It was a small vessel, capable of accommodating both himself and Trycrur, but was expensive enough that once upon a time he would have balked at the cost. He’d have balked at it now, if he hadn’t known where to find a medium-sized fortune in unused Hunter ships and known a guy who’d buy just about anything.
“We’re going to start by looking in Krditl and tracing a direct line back towards Affrag,” he had explained to Trycrur. “My hope is that we’ll find the Zhadersil somewhere along that path, but we’ll just need to keep hopping in short distances.”
“Tiresome,” Trycrur had replied. “But I see your reasoning. Do you think we will find it?”
“I hope so,” Chir replied. If only for the sake of his own bank account he hoped so. At this point having Adrian alive on the Zhadersil would be a happy bonus.
“Me too,” she said. “If the Zhadersil had been destroyed around Affrag it would have left a lot of debris, and it didn’t dump into Krditl along with the Hunter ship. A lot of sensors would have gone off if anything the size of the Zhadersil had passed through inhabited zones, and even if the military tried to black it out there’s no way they could keep it entirely secret.”
“So my hope is that the Zhadersil stopped somewhere on the same route, and remains in one piece,” Chir continued. “We’ll either find the Zhadersil, a Zhadersil-sized debris field, or nothing.”
“And if we find nothing?” Trycrur asked.
“Then we’ve wasted our effort,” Chir said grimly. “I know nowhere has put out notices of detecting an object of that size. So that would mean that it’s gone somewhere in uncontrolled space outside of scanning networks. Out here there’s no end to the possibilities.”
“And if we find the Zhadersil?” Trycrur asked. “What’s the plan?”
“We’ll land and tell Adrian that people are coming to take his ship from him,” Chir explained bluntly.
“You think he’ll be happy to see us?” Trycrur asked. “We didn’t exactly leave in the best way…”
“Adrian is not a fool,” Chir told her. “He won’t hurt us, although he may be a touch belligerent, or perhaps a bit smug. Clearly we were incorrect in that the Zhadersil had no hope of ever moving again.”
“What do you think he’s doing right now?” she asked Chir. “I’d bet he’d be building more weapons.”
“He’s probably doing something stupid,” Chir replied. “Since we’re not there to stop it.”
+++++
Adrian was doing something stupid. He was flying through Affrags lower atmosphere and periodically actively pinging the vessels in the system. By now they’d have recognised his vessel as not having any business there, although whether they’d know it was a Hunter ship was another matter.
There were two possibilities: either they’d leave him well enough alone, in which case he’d know he could warp out and take a round-about way back to the Zhadersil – which, now that he thought about it, was what he should have done as soon as he saw them all – or they’d follow him down to the surface in the attempt to take him out, and he’d have to hope they were as completely fucking useless on a Deathworld as Chir had been that first time.
Right now the ship was shuddering as he was flying it through a heavy rain storm, en route to get just ahead of it in order to land. The eyes in the sky would know the general vicinity of his landing zone, but they wouldn’t know his location well enough to paint it from orbit.
He set the ship down on a flat plain just before the storm hit. Passive scanners were already picking up objects entering geosynchronous orbit above him.
“Such a fucking idiot,” he said to himself. Some days he really did wonder how he managed to put his trousers on in the morning. “Oh well, at least if I’m going to be killed I’ll make it fucking entertaining.”
+++++
Dominion Cruiser Itrz, Geosynchronous Orbit of Deathworld
Ship Master Drzzk surveyed the deathworld below, taking into view the roiling mass of clouds that were surging steadily towards the last contact point they’d had on the unknown craft.
“Have we got an ID on that ship class yet?” he asked, turning to his systems crew, and paused as he saw the looks on their faces. “What is it?”
“The most likely match is a Hunter craft,” Systems Superior Clklict reported. “As to why it was behaving in that way, I cannot possibly hazard a guess.”
“It may be a trap,” one of his subordinates suggested, earning a hiss from Clklict to inform him to keep his mouth shut.
“It might be,” Drzzk agreed. “I’ve never heard of Hunters doing anything like that however.”
“With all due respect, sir,” Clklict said, “I haven’t heard of a Hunter ship being piloted by a Corti, either. There may be something going on down there that we need to deal with.”
“I don’t doubt that there is, Systems Superior,” Drzzk replied irritably. “I hesitate, however, to send a force down onto a Deathworld after an unknown target. I do not think so little of my peoples’ lives as to throw them away in such a manner.”
“We can’t just-” Clklict started again, stopping only as his Ship Master eyed him venomously.
“I will send down a few soldiers in a scout,” Ship Master Drzzk decided. “They will find the vessel, and when they have found it they will mark it as a target for orbital bombardment. I do not want to risk more out here than we already are.”
Zhadersil
Jennifer Delaney was busy cleaning. There was a lot to do, Adrian had certainly not lied about that – she’d have to ask him why there was a bucket of dried out shit in a prison room – and she could see that this would be the kind of work that may take days or weeks to complete. Obviously there had been the sixty-five million years without any form of cleaning, but aside from that Adrian had a tendency to make enormous messes and not clean them up.
If she was going to be stuck out here with him, that was going to have to be one habit she broke him of. She wasn’t his wife, and she wasn’t his mum, and there was no way in all of Heaven and Earth that she’d be doing whatever passed for his laundry. If he thought anything different, that man had another thing coming!
The rest she could understand. It wasn’t as though he had ever seemed to be simply taking a moment to relax when he wasn’t eating. There was always some work being done, be it hunting for food, cooking that food, or repairing the million and one things that were undoubtedly wrong with the ships. It was, to her mind, fairly astounding that he was even capable of doing anything with the ships. He had not exactly struck her as the sort of man who thinks with his head, given all his muscles and perfect physique.
Jennifer Delaney forced herself to think of something else. She knew she was attracted to him, that had been the case since she’d gotten an eyeful of him hard at work and straining his wonderful muscles, and she suspected that he’d glanced away from her before she’d caught him looking a few times. She also knew that she wasn’t about to start a relationship with a man just because he was the last possible prospect in a hopeless universe.
Although as reasons went…
She shook her head. No, that would just be mad! What would happen if it didn’t work out – as it was almost but not entirely certain to – would they just part ways with ‘Oh well, it didn’t work out, maybe I’ll see you around some time’ and leave it at that?
There was every possibility that he was the last other human she would ever meet and she wasn’t about to mess that up by complicating things. Scratching that particular itch just wasn’t worth it.
She sighed as she scrubbed. It certainly would have been nice though.
“Think about something else, Jen,” she told herself. “Like the old fat bloke in marketing. Not attractive at-“
She was interrupted by the Zhadersil’s alarms going off as a Saurian voice provided some sort of message. She didn’t need to understand it to know that something was wrong.
She froze where she was, like a deer in the headlights. Alone on an ancient dinosaur spaceship with all sorts of unintelligible alerts going off. “Oh shit biscuits…”
++++
Affrag
The sub-tropical rain was wet, warm and heavy, and an absolutely wonderful sensation to a man who’d spent his last few months washing out of a bucket. Adrian roamed the cloud-shadowed darkness of the alien forest that edged the plain where the Shopping Trolley had landed. Over the thunder he could hear the sound of spacecraft; it looked as though they had at least gone so far as to start sweeping the area by air.
But they couldn’t have had any sort of success yet. If they’d found the Hunter vessel, he was confident they would have hit it from orbit. That’s what he would have done, and he didn’t expect they were all as thick as each other.
He was about to give up on them ever coming to ground when a transport lander finally descended from the clouds, sending them roiling around its bulk as it slowed its descent. It splashed down in the mire where the water of the plains ran off onto lower ground. Just about the worst place they could have picked to land.
Just about the best place they could have picked if you were Adrian. He worked his way through the forest, drawing closer and closer to the sound of urgent, angry voices shouting above the roar of rain and thunder.
He slipped into cover behind a deadfall that dropped from forest to murk, and peered out from behind the debris. Several aliens were standing around in the mud, clearly about as fucking pissed off as they could be at this state of affairs.
“Eight outside the craft,” he mumbled to himself. “Likely to be a couple more inside.”
He figured he’d wait until the guys outside had moved off on whatever adventure they intended, then work his way in to attack the landing ship itself. From there he could get creative.
The guys on the ground appeared to finally give up shouting in disgust, and moved off as a commendably tightly formed unit in the direction of the plains and higher ground. They weren’t complete idiots, and if left to their own devices they’d probably locate the Shopping Trolley.
Adrian grinned evilly to himself. They’d be distracted long before that ever happened.
He dropped down into the muck once they’d moved out of view, then engaged the hover suit. With that he was able to float a small distance above the surface of the mire, and with a small amount of propulsion he could drift, mostly unseen, towards the landing craft.
He was there within a few minutes, with no sign of any alarm having been raised and was pleased to find that they’d left the hatch door down as a result of it being half submerged upon opening. No wonder the away party had been so mad; he didn’t even need to try as he slipped inside.
The alarm went off and two aliens – more of the Blue fucking Giraffes, the ‘Rickle-prickle’ if he recalled the name of their species correctly – spun to face him. Their faces were masks of pure horror as they laid eyes on him, although he supposed he must look more like the monster of the black lagoon at this point than any sapient being.
“Right you tall fucksticks,” he said, enjoying their reaction as they realised he was intelligent. “I’ve got two options for you.”
They drew on him and fired their kinetic pulse guns. The shots felt like slaps on his wet skin.
“First option,” he continued as their horror visibly mounted. “I kill the absolute shit out of both of you.”
They fired again, more half-heartedly this time as he advanced on them. The shots hurt slightly more as he moved closer, but Adrian had been in too many brutal fights to even pay them much notice.
“Second option,” he said, now pointing his own gun at the nearest of the two. “You do one thing for me, and I let you go.”
+++++
Dominion Cruiser Itrz, Geosynchronous Orbit of Deathworld
“Lander is returning from surface at high speed,” reported Systems Superior Clklict. “They did not report any engagement with the enemy.”
Ship Master Drzzk looked at the console, his face contorting into thoughtful consideration. “They may be fleeing Hunters. Try and get them on the link. How long before they connect with us?”
“(Thirty seconds),” replied Clklict with some confusion, that was an awfully fast return from planetside, even from a Death world with a possible Hunter infestation. “I don’t see anything chasing them…”
Drzzk looked troubled. “Get them on link!”
“They’re not answering,” Clklict replied. “Could it be full of Hunters?”
“Deny it dock until we’re sure!” Drzzk commanded. “I won’t have-“
He was cut short by the impact of a landing pod ramming through the docking bay. The ship shuddered violently as the inertia system fought to reduce the vibrations. All manner of alert began to sound as the ship detected damaged system after damaged system.
But they didn’t need the damage system report; the view-screen told enough of the story that they could guess the rest. A section of the hull had been cleaved away by the force of the blow and air, plasma and debris gouted from the broken part of the ship.
“We’ve been hit by the lander!” Drzzk spat angrily. “Somebody shot us with our own landing craft! What’s the damage?”
“We’re damaged, with several key systems crippled,” Clklict relayed. “We’d never stand up to a Hunter attack right now. Sir, I suggest we warp out.”
“I don’t want to leave those men behind!” Drzzk told him. “I won’t leave them behind, Systems Superior!”
Clklict felt heavy with the knowledge of what needed to be said. “Sir,” he said slowly, “it is likely that your son is already dead.”
Drzzk’s expression darkened. “This is not about my son!” he said through clenched teeth. “This is about leaving men behind!”
“I understand sir,” Clklict continued. He had expected this excuse, but he did not relish what he did now. “In that case I must relieve you of your command.”