Companionship - beyond flesh

Peter and the Parsifal's crew

The Merry Crabbe lay stranded a short distance from the mangled wreck of the Ophiuchian assault craft it had bested in single-ship combat. 

After taking over and saving the Merry Crabbe from the abort omega routine, Emma had explained to Peter that it was too dangerous to dock directly with the failing ship. So she manoeuvred the ship in as close as possible so that Peter could man a field-tethered cargo skiff to the maintenance airlock under Parsifal’s stern. From there he was able to pick up survivors one by one and ferry them to the Merry Crabbe. The cockpit of the skiff was a snug fit for a single pilot, so the passengers had to travel on the external tray in space suits.

Inside the Parsifal, Dr Evenjevy, the sole surviving member of the ship's medical crew, had stabilised the few critically injured survivors too badly wounded for transport and placed them in stasis. The doctor treated the remaining injuries so that the twelve other survivors would be fit for rescue.

Max communicated the plan to the Parsifal's crew via the skiffs comm.  Onboard, the Ophiuchians gathered two salvageable space suits and waited for their turn at rescue.

Its SIS was down, and the battle had taken the Parsifal's engineering specialists, so no one with the required skill was available to manually shutdown damaged systems.  Severely overheated inertial field generators could have exploded at any time and damaged entropy accelerators used to form artificial gravity provided an imminent risk of localised implosion. A bruised Captain Ven Verde and the auger Denver took on the task of working around-the-clock to ensure that the wreckage was stabilised and remained a safe refuge for the critically injured in stasis. 

Denver had received a facial injury during the combat but refused treatment until after the danger had been overcome and the others moved to the Merry Crabbe. The two senior officers remained on the ship for a further eight hours while they identified and took care of the dead they could find.  But eventually the strain was too much for an injured Denver, who passed out. Peter’s final rescue run to transport the Captain and an unconscious auger proved to be the most difficult.

The cargo areas of the Merry Crabbe were full to the brim with supplies for the outpost, so conditions on the circular deck and living space were overcrowded. Peter, the survivors and one cat were stuffed in an area designed for a maximum complement of four. All were dirty and most covered in their own and other's blood -- wounds had opened in the shared space suits, giving new meaning to the term ‘bloodbath’. 

Soon after being moved aboard the auger’s condition deteriorated and the doctor was forced to perform makeshift surgery in Peter’s sleeping berth. 

Needless to say, they were all keen to move on to the outpost where the crew of the Parsifal could surrender officially and receive proper treatment for their wounds. But Peter, who never had active control of the ship in the first place, was now also locked out of SIS including comms. To make matters more uncertain, during the early stages of the rescue, Emma had suddenly ceased all communication.

They had no choice but to wait with their misery and the hum of cleaning modules working overtime to restore sanitary.

***

In the days that followed Peter and his passengers had still not heard any word from Emma.  There was an unspoken assumption by the group that Emma was a representative of the outpost.  Her lack of continued contact had become seriously troubling; the uncertainty unnerving all.

After a day of rest, Denver was back in action as if he suffered no injury at all. His condition had been serious; it was found that his targeting processors had been fried in the battle. These devices had become red hot and toasted his adenoids and surrounding tissue.  The processors and damaged tissue now removed, Dever's face appeared collapsed in at the front. The purely cosmetic condition was more of a discomfort to others than it was to the auger who thought it enhanced his depreciating aspect. C-Buck said the auger looked “like a fish with its head pushed in” and had started calling him 'old fishhead'. 

In the downtime, the Skyean spy had not adopted the stoic discipline that the other survivors were displaying. Instead, C-Buck had been applying his alchemical skills by using the ship's medipax module to experiment with mutations on the chemical compounds of doze. Off his head, C-Buck was in the process of lecturing Denver on the spiritual significance of the koi fish when the deck lit up accompanied by a sharp alert tone. Verde, who had been sitting on the floor against the wall, jumped up and rushed over to the pilot seat in which Peter was resting with his cat. As the startled cat ran to hide, Peter inspected the display and announced to the eager members of the displaced crew “It’s an incoming message from the outpost!”, and then in a less enthusiastic tone, "I can't accept the message. Locked out."

Verde bit her lip and shook her head confounded, reasoning out loud, “So if that was the outpost, then who has left us stranded without control of the ship? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Peter Grimes noticed a new element on the display, “Very odd, sensors have picked up a courier class... “ he paused for a second reading the display then continued jumping up excited, “It’s  Companionship! Max Jones’ ship!” 

Verde asked Peter, “You know this ship?”

Peter nodded quickly, jiggling the flabby jowls around his chin, “Yes, yes, Max and I are good friends. He was the courier before me.  But Max should have left the system weeks before now. Something must have gone wrong.”

Verde turned to Denver, “Is there anything we can do to communicate with that ship? Like use the comm in the space suits or even the skiff?”

Denver, who was now standing in the cockpit with his Captain and the Captain, replied calmly, “On their own those comms don’t have range, but I believe we can re-route a message from the space suits through the main comm on Parsifal.”

“Excellent, but does that mean you'd have to interface directly with Parsifal? We don’t know what we’re dealing with here, and we don’t want your internal systems compromised like  the systems on this ship.”

“Yes, I understand -- Thank you Captain. The process would require the transmission of auth tokens from the suit’s interface, but no internal thread would be necessary for routing via back-up modules. May I ask captain: How do we know the comms on Parsifal are operational? We did attempt to contact the outpost prior to our leaving the ship and received no response.”

"We have nothing to lose D. Just do it.”