Chapter 4: 'Halycen' (3905 words)

Having barely survived a Dwurkn attack, Vievel and Halycen continue their journey into the dying starship. Follow me on twitter (@NorthDT)!

“Vievel-” Halycen rested a hand on her cousin’s shoulder. She could feel his heartbeat pounding away as he knelt on the floor, pumping so quickly that she almost flinched from the beat. Her own heartbeat thundered a similar raucous sound, adrenaline crashing against her chest without any outlet. It was only years of study and focus that saved her from sitting paralysed as well; she had to keep moving, her momentum was all that sustained her. “Vievel, get up”. Staring out through the chamber threshold, Vievel hadn’t said a word in the moments since the Dwurkn had fled. He had to move. They both had to move. Halycen gripped his shoulder, pinching it unkindly.

“Ow-” Vievel yelped. He dipped his shoulder and pulled away from her. “Hallie, what are you-”

“Viev, get up”. It was just like him to leave her to lead.

There’s no time for sitting and thinking, Halycen thought. She took stock of the room as quickly as she could. Her flashlight was already retrieved and in her hand, her knapsack slung over her shoulder and her revolver holstered. Vievel muttered something under his breath, too muffled for Halycen to hear. He was still wearing his knapsack but everything else was missing. Frustration overpowering her instincts, Halycen grabbed Vievel by the arm and pulled him forward; he stumbled to his feet and snapped at her.

“Get off of me-”

“Viev, we have to leave,” Halycen said, firmer than she would’ve liked. Her heart thumped against her chest, so harshly she thought that it might escape. Halycen exhaled and tried to focus her attention elsewhere. Softening her tone as she spoke again, Halycen attempted to calm herself and to comfort her cousin. “We have to go. Get your things”. Vievel shot a sullen glare back at her as she spoke, but a spark of something else seemed to register. He nodded and adjusted his knapsack, slinging it over his shoulder. Halycen stepped over to the chamber threshold so she could peer through and into the ship beyond.

“It’s clear,” Halycen said, sweeping her flashlight across the corridor and parting the darkness. There were no shapes in the gloom, no shadows that begged to be seen as something else. A few openings on the opposite wall suggested other rooms in this part of the red ward, but as Halycen listened she heard nothing but the dull background humming of the ship.

“It took my gun”. Halycen turned around to see Vievel staring at the stone cabinets embedded into the wall. “It took... my gun,” he repeated flatly.

“Have you got everything else?” Halycen asked. When Vievel didn’t react Halycen strode over to him and grabbed him by the arm. The contact seemed to wake him, stirring Vievel from whatever distraction was dominating his thoughts. “Vievel-” At the sound of his name Vievel turned to look in Halycen’s direction. His eyes seemed to travel past her, fixating on nothing in particular. “Have you got your flashlight?” Vievel shook his head, glancing toward the stone basin where he’d grappled with the Dwurkn. Halycen followed his eyes until she spotted the tell-tale light of his dropped flashlight. It was damaged, from either the scuffle or the fall to the floor. A large crack cut across the exterior plastic cover, and the internal emitter barely seemed able to illuminate the immediate area.

Halycen pressed her own flashlight into Vievel’s hand.

‘Take that, you can be in charge of the light”. Vievel nodded, still staring off into the distance.

We can’t leave anything behind, Halycen thought, ticking off a mental checklist of everything they’d brought with them. She retrieved the damaged torch from the floor, feeling an ache in her side as she stooped down to grab it; as she stood she swept it across the room, scanning for anything else on the floor that they might have dropped or forgotten. The light didn’t even reach the chamber walls, seeming to diminish with every second spent; after a moment’s hesitation Halycen pulled her knapsack from her shoulder and deposited it inside, twisting the flashlight off as she did.

“Let’s go,” Halycen said, turning back to Vievel. “We need to get further into the ward”.

“Further?” Vievel asked, confused and wide-eyed. “You want to keep going?” His initial shock collapsed into indignance. “We can’t keep, we can’t-”

“Viev!” Halycen snapped. Whatever comforting tone she’d summoned before now felt elusive and impossible to grab. “We can’t go back the same way, the Advance were in that direction. If they heard your gunshot, anything…” Halycen let her words trailed off and hoped Vievel’s imagination would do the rest.

“It almost killed us”.

So? Your father will kill us.

“I know V but we have to go,” Halycen said, stressing the word.

“But-”

“I promise once we’re safe we can turn around”. As the words left her mouth Halycen wasn’t sure whether she believed them. They’d seen so little, found so little. It felt like a waste of the opportunity to leave so soon. Dwurkn ships were becoming fewer and farther between. Vievel seemed to trust the words though, trudging reluctantly out of the room. As she followed him her eyes grazed the blackened mark on the chamber threshold, where Vievel’s revolver had blasted the stone and made a new chip in the red rock.

A quiet melancholy settled over the pair as they left the small chamber and continued down the red ward’s central passage. They didn’t exchange words but they walked closer together, Vievel’s light keeping the breadth of the corridor illuminated whilst Halycen trained her weapon on the darkness. At each turn or twist, whenever some gloom-cloaked shape of the rock managed to present itself in a threatening manner, the two would freeze. Every time the ship would make a strange noise, or a shadow would hang a little loosely, the two would jump and try to make out the source. One particular sound made Vievel flinch so dramatically that Halycen burst out laughing, and that was enough. Their shared restlessness began to lessen, the journey only providing surprises of the same safe sort. A large stretch of the ward seemed barren and empty of rooms, no part of the passage sharing in the intersections that had so frequently decorated the previous charcoal-black corridor. After a few minutes more the ward again began to be populated by the carved archways, each leading into their own distinct small rooms. Halycen stepped closer to the first that rose up on their left, taking the opportunity to peer through. Looking inside she was unnerved to notice that it was almost a picture-perfect copy of the chamber in which they’d been ambushed. Stone cabinets on the north wall, a sloping roof, stone basins with adjacent metal tables; it was as though the room had been duplicated in its entirety and transported further up the red ward. Three times more Halycen peered past the new thresholds, and three times more she was stunned to notice that each room was identical. A series of indistinguishable recovery rooms.

“That thing,” Vievel said, as Halycen turned away from the fourth chamber. His breathing sounded uneven and he drew ragged breaths in between his words. “It… it ran away, didn’t it?” he asked. Halycen nodded, glancing uneasily at her cousin, unsure of what to say. The Dwurkn’s flight had been weighing on her mind as well.

It ran away. Dwurkn didn’t flee. Dwurkn were bred, quite literally born and engineered to fight and war for what they wanted; born, cloned - Dwurka took their first breaths in vats, programmed from before birth to hate Aælfir, to fight and to kill. They all looked the same and they all thought the same. It would’ve felt ludicrous to even consider a cowardly or merciful Dwurkn, yet she’d seen one with her own eyes. They were supposed to be killers, all of them. They were killers. Everyone said so, all the stories and the warriors and... Halycen felt her head throb, both from trying to wrap her mind around the Dwurkn’s behaviour, and from her earlier collision with the ground.

“At least it wasn’t a hu-”

“Viev-don’t!” Halycen drew to a halt and spun around to face her cousin. “Don’t say that-” She stared at Vievel, glowering and daring him to continue. Vievel shrugged his shoulders.

“What? It’s just a word,” he said.

Andlátta bidja.

“It’s not a word, it’s a curse-” Halycen sniped. “You’ll bring them down on us”. As the word passed over her mind it made her hands tense up involuntarily. Her memory started to recall combat drills unbidden.

“You’re so superstitious,” Vievel mocked. He turned to carry on walking.

“You’re Dwurkabrained,” Halycen retorted. Feeling for once that Vievel had actually come out ahead, Halycen lapsed into a surly quiet.

Vievel’s stupid obsession is going to get him killed. It was one thing to hunt Dwurka, to raid for their salvage. It was suicidal to think you could steal from a- you-know and survive.

The red ward shrunk as the two continued, the corridor drawing narrower, and as it did the pair were soon forced to walk in sequence again. Vievel walked ahead of her, his light occasionally dazzling Halycen as he turned to check she was still behind him. His movements were twitchy, but he seemed to be in better spirits since teasing her. Halycen sighed. As much as he frustrated her, she was glad for his company. As Vievel wheeled the light back in front of them, Halycen let herself relax a little. Her torso ached again, and she could feel her tunic beneath her armour sticking to her skin. A tremor, one that had been biding time since the Dwurkn attack, suddenly rocked her body; a feeling of helplessness, the same that she had felt when the Dwurkn had fallen atop her and pinned her to the ground, chilled her breath and soured her thoughts.

I should’ve thought that through, Halycen chided herself. If I had been alone- the thought hung unfinished for a moment before she pushed it away. She hadn’t been alone, it didn’t make sense to dwell on it. Still, a bitter taste hung over her mistake. It was hardly cadet behaviour. Do better, she silently resolved. Be better.

A noise from further inside the ship suddenly shook the corridor, a crunching grating sound so monstrous that for a moment it made Halycen imagine that the ship was digesting something deep within it. The sound echoed along the internal maze of walls and corridors for a few seconds after it ended, a fearsome death rattle that shook the ship.

“What was that?” Vievel asked. His voice was alert and worried. “Why is everything quiet now?” The dull background humming of the ship had vanished, and with it so had the gentle breeze that Halycen had taken for granted. In its absence was just silence and stale air. She could hear naught but the faint clipping of their metal boots upon stone, and she could feel nothing at all.

“It’s just the backup generator kicking in. Give it a moment,” Halycen lied.

It was most certainly not the backup generator kicking in, she thought. It was the backup generator dying. The oxygen field and gravity stabilisers would drop out the second their internal batteries ran dry, which could be hours from now, or it could be-

A second noise echoed through the walls of the red ward; the sound of a series of unseen large turbines beginning to spin up and heave themselves to life, accompanied by a rushing of air throughout the corridor. Vievel and Halycen drew to a halt, standing nearby one of the walls from which the noise seemed to be emanating.

“See?” Halycen said. She paused, cautiously waiting in case the sound suddenly stopped. “It’s okay”. The noise continued, tapering off until it became the same dull humming that had been present before.

“Right,” Vievel replied, nodding. He smiled, relief palpable upon him, before his face suddenly shifted back to the same defeated mask he had been wearing before. Before Halycen could ask if he was alright Vievel strode away, continuing down the corridor.

Perhaps we should cut this expedition short. The ship was already dying. If the generator was struggling, before its time, then the Dwurkn frigate might be closer to the junkyard than she had previously thought.

As Vievel paused beside a chamber door-arch, Halycen glanced behind them. With the light turned ahead and facing down the red ward’s corridor Halycen could make out little, the darkness swallowed everything.

Good, she thought. There were no lights in the darkness behind them, not even tell-tale distant lights that would suggest someone had heard Vievel’s gunshot.

“Hallie!” Vievel whispered excitedly. “Look in here”. Halycen stepped over to the door-arch beside Vievel. Inside it was much the same as the chambers before, but where the others had been devoid of anything bar furniture this room was covered in tools, debris, and possible salvage. Halycen cast a second quick glance over her shoulder, inspecting the darkness one last time, before stepping inside.

“See, I told you it was worth sticking around for a bit,” Halycen said. She felt a grin break out across her face, doubt ebbing away until she couldn’t feel it anymore. Her gaze followed a narrow crack in the floor, so thin that it was almost imperceptible to her naked eye. She traced it from beside the threshold until it reached the base of a metal table, upon which sat three distinctive tools. The first was a metal pinwheel, almost three quarters the length of her forearm, with small points spaced evenly upon the wheel. The second was a pair of forceps with spikes running along the grips, with a latch built into the handle so the forceps could be locked into position once extended. Halycen spent only a few seconds looking over the first two tools before her eyes were drawn to the third, an oversized pair of serrated scissors, with teeth as sharp as any Halycen had seen before. Stepping over to the metal table Halycen gripped the scissors with both hands. Each of the three tools were sized for a Dwurkn grip, with handles much wider than an Aælfir’s hands could stretch, but the scissors were particularly unwieldy. Her arms shook as she raised them, trembling slightly under the weight as she tried to stop them from dipping forward. She brandished them out, holding them like she would a heavy-weighted sparring sword. For a moment she was back on the home-ship, fencing with, and defeating, all the older cadet hopefuls. Drawing her hands together she closed the scissors shut carefully, watching as the spikes on each blade nestled together and formed a tight toothy maw.

“That thing looks ridiculous in your hands,” Vievel said. He was holding a small tablet in his hands and tapping on its dull computerised display, his flashlight tucked beneath his underarm. The exterior of the tablet seemed to be carved from a smooth black rock, polished until it gleamed. As Halycen looked toward the tablet its screen flickered and then turned off entirely. Vievel prodded at it and then murmured a noise of disappointment.

“I think they’re brilliant,” Halycen said. The scissors were polished and unblemished, much cleaner than most of the metal tools in both the room and elsewhere on the ship. The metal caught the light in a pleasing manner. “They look like they’d hurt,” she said, drawing the scissors open again so she could snap them shut forcefully. Snikkt. The blades chopped through the air with a mechanical clap.

“This thing-” Vievel started. He tapped again on the now-dead tablet. “-said the room should be stocked with meds, maybe there’s something valuable or something the ship can use”. Halycen felt the weight of the scissors beginning to become too much for her, the blades beginning to pitch themselves forward as her arms tired. She drew them back and placed them on the metal table, taking her knapsack off of her shoulders once her hands were free.

A crash of metal on stone snapped Halycen’s attention toward Vievel again. He was now standing beside one of the chamber’s long basins, digging through a pile of metal tools and boxes. Several tools were strewn across the floor beside him, with a round polished tray riding a circle along its own edge until it ran out of momentum and fell flat against the floor.

“Sorry,” Vievel said, without looking up from his search. As he reached the bottom of the pile he moved from his basin to the next in the sequence, beginning again with a separate pile. Halycen sighed.

“Try the cabinets,” she said, gesturing toward the stone doors set into the north wall of the chamber. Vievel glanced over his shoulder for a moment and then snapped back to his own search, a reddish tinge to his cheeks.

“Yeah, sure, let me finish this-” he mumbled.

Halycen set her knapsack on the stone basin beside her. The scissors were neither short nor slim enough to fit inside her bag. Imagining all the different angles she could try and squeeze them inside her knapsack was enough to dissuade her from trying, and instead she reached into her bag. Pushing past some drybread and spare autoloader clips her fingers closed around a coarse-surfaced ball which she promptly retrieved. The fibre-twine was strong enough to bind the scissors to her knapsack. As Vievel made his way toward the middle of the three stone cabinets Halycen began to loop twine around the handles of the scissors, and through the decorative metal loops attached to her knapsack. When she’d completed three knots and pulled the final loop of the twine taut Halycen stood back, admiring her handiwork. The scissors would stay pressed tight against her knapsack now. She took a deep breath and shuddered slightly. A growing exhaustion nagged at Halycen as the pain in her side began to ache a great deal more.

“Yup,” Vievel said, speaking loudly to the chamber. “Plenty of meds here,” he said. One of his hands flew backward, clutching a white plastic box labelled with Dwurka-scribed runes. He waved the box around without turning his head.

“Any medigauze, or bandages?” Halycen breathed heavily, the words difficult to pronounce under influence of the pain. She slipped a hand beneath her hauberk and tunic, lifting both slightly as she pressed it to her side.

“Why medigauze?” When Halycen didn’t reply Vievel turned from the cabinet and began to repeat himself. “Wh-Hallie!” he cried as he caught sight of the oozing red wound on Halycen’s side.

“By Gany- How long have you had that?” Vievel started, his mouth agape. “Are you okay? What happ-was it the Dwurkn?” he asked in quick succession. Halycen shrugged.

“The rocks on the floor, I guess. When it tackled me,” Halycen said. “It’s just a scratch, it barely hurts. It’s not a big deal,” she lied. With her hauberk raised and the edge of her tunic balled together in her fist, the blood-stained gouge on her waist stood out. She kneaded her knuckles against the edges of the wound. Pressing against it alleviated some of the pain.

"Andlátta fool-” Vievel murmured, purposefully loud enough for Halycen to hear. “You should have said something. Let me look”. Vievel noisily rummaged through the stone cabinet shelves as he spoke, knocking several boxes to the floor in one large sweep. “I’ve still got that cloth if you want to tie that around it?” he offered.

“Your sneeze rag? No thanks”. Halycen let her hauberk and tunic fall again and moved toward the cabinets. She stepped to the right of Vievel and grabbed the edge of the third cabinet’s door, heaving the already-ajar door toward her with all her might. It resisted the movement at first but then began to swing open more readily as it gained momentum. Inside she caught sight of a great many plastic boxes, the same as the med-boxes inside Vievel’s cabinets, another stone tablet with a cracked screen, a series of flasks and beakers, and, taking up the majority of the bottom shelf, a large pile of linked chain. Halycen ran one of her fingers against the chain, feeling the cold wrought metal beneath it.

“Ah, here!” Vievel said. A second later he thrust a thin grey mesh square in see-through plastic packaging toward Halycen. She tore open the packaging with both hands and peeled an adhesive-guard strip away from the edges of the square, then lifted her hauberk and tunic slightly so she could press the mesh against her bare skin. As she waited for the mesh to attach her eyes travelled across the plastic boxes in the cabinets. All were marked in the crude Dwurka script that the wall-etchings had been written in, runic symbols that made no sense to her. Some, however, were marked with pictures of plants and even colourful symbols that she recognised, giving clues to their purpose. Halycen winced slightly as the medigauze adhesive began to work; looking down she saw the mesh square’s edges bubbling as it affixed itself to her skin and cleaned the wound.

Beside her Vievel had begun gathering up some of the nearby boxes, dropping them into his open knapsack.

“Some of this could be useful for the home ship,” he said, paying a great deal less attention to the symbols and pictures, emptying everything he could grab into his bag. Halycen nodded, her eyes closed. She began to feel slightly giddy as the medigauze’s painkiller effect kicked in, the ache on her side alleviating as it did. The absence of the sensation was louder and more agreeable than the presence of it. A noise echoed out across the chamber and she opened her eyes again, ready to chide Vievel for his clumsiness. As she came to look at him she instead noticed a sharp look of alarm on his face.

“What was that?” Vievel whispered. He glanced toward the open chamber threshold. Halycen cupped a hand to her ear, placing a finger against her lips to prompt Vievel to stay quiet. The noise came again, closer but also softer, as though the source of the sound was being a great deal more careful.

Halycen placed a hand on Vievel’s flashlight. He glanced down at it and then looked to her as she mouthed off. His hand twisted the flashlight grip and the light went out, dropping the room into a sudden darkness. In the absence of Vievel’s flashlight Halycen noticed a dim and distant light coming from the doorway.

Illandr, she cursed silently. Something was following them, but what? She moved toward the chamber arch, stepping past Vievel carefully and watching her feet as to not trip over any of the debris strewn across the stone floor. As she passed her cousin he frantically shook his head, wordlessly pleading for her not to continue. A spark of paranoia at the back of her head begged the same, but she continued onward nonetheless. As she reached the doorway Halycen ducked down and dipped her head around it, out into the corridor.

At once the no-longer distant light flared and intensified, bathing her in a bright white glare. A number of flashlights came to bear on her face, blinding her and obscuring the group of figures standing in front of her.

“Halt!” cried a familiar voice.