Mune'stahr and Pylott: HELLMARROW, a tale of the Ventriculum

Part 11, "To All Shadows, An Ending in Fire..."

Uriok Be Damned to His Dark, Frozen Hell...!

Inertial gravity was failing and the massive vessel was beginning to tilt dangerously to port as it lost stability along its horizontal axis. As the stabilizer-thrusters failed, uneven internal loading had caused the ship to list to one side even as it was sliding along a navigational path forty-five degrees off course.

He couldn't smell the smoke billowing from the half dozen or so electrical fires he could see ravaging the compartment and the outer corridor and that was a bad thing. The grinding, vibrating rasp coming from the atmospheric circulatory system's air scrubbers was tremendously loud and alarmingly asynchronous, its usually monotonous regularity gone since critical mechanical damage resulted in climature spewing rapidly out a hole in the fore section of the ship.

The lights illuminating the ship's interior flickered in spastic bursts as a series of minor brown-outs ran through the electrical system. Out the corners of his vision, he noticed people running back and forth from out the pitched battle. They'd begun tripping over the dead bodies of crew members littering the deck as the rocking, shuddering vessel lost its horizontal true.

The crew were horribly frightened, panicked, and driven to paranoid over-reaction as they'd realized, too late, that the insurrection against the First Speaker had accidentally freed the Beast. The Aingyll, Zahmmael, had escaped from his prison and was running amok throughout the craft.

They had unintentionally unleashed a homicidal juggernaut.

A sudden muscular convulsion gripped him and he fought not to vomit blood all over himself.

He cursed his foul luck and the effects of even worse timing. This wasn't supposed to have happened.  Since the start of the insurgency counter-action, the Second Speaker had lost eleven members of his personal executive services squad along with the Engineering Security Sub-Lieutenant, the Network Communications & Signals Commander, the Third Ship's Mate and the Deck Department Boatswain. These were major negative impacts to his attempt at retaining a grip on command order in the aftermath of the revolt. Meanwhile, the Principal Overseer, commonly known as the First Speaker, still had control over the majority of the Command Staff, not including the Engineering section and Calculatory Node & Access Authorization Management staff, and they had both checkmated one another in vying for mastery over the Deck Forces Security Brigades. The Ship's Captaincy Counsel had declared themselves independent of either faction and were openly calling for loyal crew members and passenger citizenry to help quell the revolt, citing the ancient Genus High-Doctrine stating it was forbidden for Ascendent Integernarians to engage in violent insurrection while aboard extra-orbital Colonizer ships downspace from the nomadic rogue planet Bayeshenibal, the artificially-constructed Nebulancer homeworld.

The plan, although hastily developed, had been logical and methodical in its construction. It was the execution of that plan that had fallen down. People had not done what they'd been tasked to do. They hadn't properly committed to their roles in the greater scheme of things. The Second Speaker, known as The Common Lector, and his cronies hadn't planned a mere mutiny --- they had planned a revolution and no one had truly been ready for the fallout. Mistakes had stupidly been made due to hidden agendas, mistrust, cowardice and betrayal. The coup d'etat had fallen in on itself, crumbling into chaos and murder. Things weren't supposed to have fallen apart like they had.

He wasn't supposed to be leaning against a wall, trembling, with a las-blaster clenched in one fist as he bled from a shoulder wound that had immobilized his other arm. That wound did not trouble him nearly so much, though, as the ragged rip across the lower right-hand quadrant of his abdomen. Debris shrapnel from a small explosion had caught him in the wrong place at the wrong time...