Deathstalker Rebellion

There was no one sitting in the command chair, skeleton or corpse, and the workstations were unmanned. No sign of any crew. No sign to show they'd ever been here. It was just as Silence had expected, but he still felt obscurely disappointed. Something really cataclysmic must have happened on board the Champion, to mean abandoning the bridge like this. And yet there'd been no signs of attack or mutiny, no damage or signs of haste. Cross leaned over the comm station and tried a few warm-up routines, and then turned away.

'Everything's shut down, Captain. Give me an hour or so and I should be able to bring something on-line. Half these systems will have to be reprogrammed from the bottom up, but everything seems functional.'

'The autopilot's still working,' said Frost. 'Someone must have fed in the coordinates that brought the ship here.'

'Hold everything,' said Cross. 'I've got the security cameras up and working. Which shouldn't be possible, but… watch the monitors.'

They all crowded around Cross and stared at the bank of three monitor screens attached to his station. They lit up in swift succession, as though they'd only recently been turned off. Cross switched rapidly from one camera to another the length of the ship, scenes appearing on the viewscreens one after the other, pausing just long enough to give a continuing feeling of emptiness everywhere on board. From corridors to engineering, sick bay to crew's quarters, everywhere was still and silent. It chilled Silence to his bones to see a ship so abandoned, so deserted.

He tried to remember more about the history of the Champion rather than the legend. The Captain, Tomas Pearce, had been something of a fierce officer by all accounts, a strictly by-the-book man, as hard on himself as anyone else. Everyone agreed he ran a tight ship, right up until the day it disappeared. He would never have walked away from his ship, no matter what his crew did. He'd have hit the auto-destruct first. Silence wondered what Pearce would think now if he could see so many posts abandoned, so many stations unmanned. No, he wouldn't have walked. Someone or something must have taken him.

'Hello,' said Cross suddenly. 'What have we got here?' He fussed at the panels before him, muttering to himself and stabbing awkwardly at the controls with his armored fingers. Hard suits weren't meant for delicate work. 'I think I've got something, Captain. The cameras in the main cargo hold are out, but I'm getting some information through the ship's interior sensors. There's something down in the cargo bay. A lot of somethings.'

'Hardly unusual for a cargo bay,' said Frost.

'It is when the computer manifests are convinced the ship isn't carrying any cargo at all this trip. And, even more interestingly, all these somethings are roughly human in shape.'

'Life signs?' said Silence.

'Not so far,' said Cross. 'But whatever these things are, there are hundreds of them.'

'Then, for want of anything better to do, let's go and take a look,' said Silence.

He left four of the security men on the bridge to watch the monitors and run further checks on the instruments, and herded the rest of his team back into the elevator. It was a long way down to the cargo bay, but at least they didn't stop at every floor this time. Silence chose to see this as a good omen. The doors finally opened on the main cargo bay, and Frost made the others wait in the elevator while she checked out the situation first. She kept them waiting an uncomfortably long time before waving them out. The bay was deserted, but the lights had already been on when the elevator doors opened, almost as though someone was waiting for them.

The bay itself was huge, with intricately marked steel walls surrounding a vast open space. They'd emerged at ground level, like mice creeping out of their hole. Frost signaled for the group to stay together, while she locked the elevator doors open, just in case they had to retreat in a hurry. As far as Silence was concerned, she needn't have bothered. He'd never felt less like wandering off on his own in his life. Still, as Captain he was expected to provide a good example, so as soon as Frost gave him the all clear, he stepped confidently forward to take a look around.

Away from the elevator, the sheer size of the cargo bay was almost overpowering, but Silence's attention was drawn immediately to the bay's sole cargo; hundreds of long mirrored cylinders, each the size and general shape of a coffin. They'd been laid out in neat rows, forming a perfect square. Silence checked them out from a cautious distance with the limited sensors built into his suit, but the coffin shapes gave up no information at all. He couldn't even tell what they were made of, never mind what might be inside them.

'That's the crew, isn't it?' said Cross quietly.

'Could be,' said Silence. 'The numbers are about right. Only way to find out is to open a few. Investigator…'

'Way ahead of you, Captain,' said Frost, striding forward pugnaciously.

Silence gestured for Cross and the two security men to stay with him. 'Take it slow and easy, Investigator. There's always the chance those things are booby-trapped.'

'I'll bear it in mind,' said Frost. 'Now, a little quiet, if you please. I have to concentrate.'

She stopped just short of the first outer rank, tried her sensors again, and sniffed disgustedly as they failed to provide any useful information, even at close range. Each cylinder was seven feet long, and the correct proportions for a coffin. Plenty of room for a body inside and any number of unpleasant surprises, too. Frost knelt down by the nearest cylinder and got her first surprise when she realized the mirrored surface wasn't showing her reflection. She examined the edges of the cylinder carefully and got her second surprise. There was no sign of any seals or openings. The entire cylinder seemed to have been produced in one piece. Perhaps… formed around something. The word cocoon occurred to her, echoing in her mind with a significance she couldn't pin down. She straightened up and looked at the rows of cylinders stretching away before her. She had been intending to open one by force, with her gun if necessary, and trust to her hard suit to protect her, but she was beginning to think that was what she was supposed to do. More and more, the whole place felt like a trap. The cylinders were too tempting, and there was too much light, as though the cargo bay was a stage, waiting for the action to begin.

Frost reached out cautiously with her gloved hand to tap the lid of the coffin, and her hand sank through the shining surface as though it was some silvery liquid. And inside the coffin, something grabbed her armored hand and squeezed it hard. She lurched forward, caught off balance, and her arm plunged further through the lid and into the coffin. She quickly braced herself against the steel floor and pulled back, but whatever had hold of her wouldn't release its grip. She could feel the pressure, even through her armored glove. She gritted her teeth, snarling under her featureless helmet, and pulled back with all her strength. The suit's servomechanisms whined loudly. Her arm slowly reappeared from the lid, and then her glove, clasped by a dead white human hand.

The weight on her arm was suddenly lessened as a dead white face appeared through the shining lid like a drowned man's face surfacing in a river, and then the dead man was out of his coffin and standing before Frost, smiling, still holding her hand in his. Her first thought was that it was a Fury, one of Shub's killing machines in a human skin, but then she saw the marks of drastic surgery unhidden on his shaved skull, and she knew at once what had happened to the Champion's crew. He was a Ghost Warrior. All around her, dead men were emerging from the silver coffins, like vile gray butterflies bursting out of shimmering cocoons. The man before her wore a dated fleet uniform, torn and stained with long-dried blood where his death wounds had been. His skin was dead-white, and though his smile was inhumanly wide, there was no emotion in his face and no life in his unblinking eyes. She could hear Silence shouting at her to get away from the dead man, but his gaze held her like a hook she could wriggle on but not escape. The dead men were rising everywhere now, silent and calm, their movements filled with an implacable purpose.

And then the blast from an energy weapon tore away the head of the man before her, and the headless body slumped to its knees. She was suddenly herself again, freed from the dead gaze, and she fell back a step, tugging at her captured hand. The pale fingers still gripped her firmly, despite all her struggles. Frost drew the sword on her hip with her left hand and hacked savagely at the pale wrist. The blade sheared clean through, and she staggered backward, released. The dead hand still clutched at her glove, and she had to cut it away finger by finger as she hurried back to rejoin Silence and the others.

They were all firing now, energy bolts leaping from the disrupters built into their gloves, and dead bodies were blown apart and slapped aside, but still the hundreds of dead moved purposefully forward. Frost took up her place between Silence and Cross, too angry to be frightened or worried. She'd fought every kind of alien in her time, and thought there was nothing left in the Empire that could throw her, but something in the dead man's gaze had held her as securely as any chain. If Silence hadn't blown its head off, she'd have been standing there still, until the dead overwhelmed her and dragged her away to make her one of them. She had no doubt it had been Silence who