Incursion Vector

036

[▲] Derelict Hashemite vessel, Caminha Waypoint

"Well... shit. Let's clear them out of the way."

Keiji turned over his shoulder and motioned the rest of his team on into the bridge. The five women they had left locked on the ship just hours earlier had killed themselves. The jury-rigged computer setup that his team had managed to piece together was speckled in blood and brain matter from where they had obviously slammed their heads against the sharper corners in a suicidal frenzy. They were slumped in a pile in various stages of rigor, telling him that they hadn't all decided to kill themselves at the same time, though it was hardly much consolation.

It made him wonder how bad things would be in the subdeck if the women had killed themselves over something as stupid as a functioning computer screen. All of the explosives they had left in place to corral them were still registering as live, so they hadn't committed suicide by throwing themselves at the ordinance. That meant that when they finally got around to securing the subdeck again they at least wouldn't have to do it wading through charred bits of cloned fanatics.

"What the hell is wrong with these people," muttered Vic as he crossed the bridge with two of Tiaha's marines in tow. They began picking up the bodies one-by-one and moving them to the front of the bridge, well clear of the area where the remainder of the task force would be working.

Standing apart from the rest of the marines in his rust-red exosuit Rashid asked, "All of them have been blinded?"

"Yes," replied Keiji.

A disgusted puckered-lip look similar to the one Leo had been wearing the entire time he had been on the bridge earlier formed gradually on his face. "Interesting."

"Is that significant?"

"There is a place in Paradise reserved for the blind." Rashid shook his head. "I would not have interpreted it as meaning one willingly has their eyes... removed, but perhaps this is what they did. Asking them will be impossible now they are dead, however."

"It would have been impossible even were they still breathing," said Leo. "They were utterly mad. And I doubt the... clones in the subdeck can speak with any sort of intelligence."

"We are left to search for personal computers, then." Rashid turned to speak to the six Tiaha marines that had accompanied them. After a brief exchange with the man Keiji assumed was their leader due to the fact he was the only one in the squad with his right arm colored green instead of gray, he motioned to the rigged computer and nodded. "Hasib and his men will begin searching the bodies in the corridor. I will let you know when they find anything."

The green-armed man bowed to Rashid and five of the marines departed the bridge with him to spread out along the corridor and police the bodies. One man stayed, ostensibly to guard Rashid from Heinlein's own marines. Logically Keiji understood the reasons behind it but really didn't see the need to waste manpower on protecting a person who was clearly capable of his own self-defense, equipped with an assault-grade exosuit armed with a shotgun, assault rifle, and a pair of fixed-bladed knives as he was. Leo had said it would be because the man was a hafiz, someone who had memorized the entirety of their holy scriptures, and thus he simply never would be without his own guard while on foreign soil as he was considered an invaluable asset to the fleet. Apparently memorizing scripture went hand-in-hand with reading and writing the myriad of Arabic dialects they might come upon sifting through information on the ship.

Learning that particular bit of information was the first time it had occurred to Keiji that whatever data they could end up finding may have actually been written down instead of digitized within a computer somewhere. Tracking down something that emitted no electrical signal whatsoever in the cold of space was going to be problematic, and that was if anything like that left could have survived the psychotic crew, explosions, and atmospheric venting that had already happened on the ship.