Starship Repo Ch 16-17 (plus Current Full File)

Starship Repo is NOT an erotica story. If it ever gets completed, it will be a Science Fiction novel intended to be suitable for mainstream publication. This is also only Draft 0.5 since it is incomplete, so while it is fairly clean with spelling and grammar, it will likely see major changes before a ‘final draft’ ever comes about. I hope you enjoy it!

Chapter 16

Emerald groaned as she felt the sharp, stabbing pain above her right eye suddenly swim into focus out of the black. That black turned into bruise-like purples and greens as she squeezed her eyes shut harder, wanting to force out the sting with sheer will, but scrunching up her face only made it hurt all the more.

Slowly her thoughts defragged and bounced out of their jumbled mess in pieces.

The run for the planet.

The flying boulders soaring through the air in waves like flocks of birds.

The crashed UEN ship getting stripped for parts.

Rake.

The impact of the boulder. The warning sirens. The damage klaxons. The smoke filling the bridge. Something had shorted out down in the guts of the ship.

The mountains ahead. Flying - no, gliding towards them. The engines barely keeping them aloft.

The booming echo of the ship as it flew between two peaks, spotting the valley.

Oh Suns, Rake.

The ground. Too close.

Emerald gasped, managed to inhale some of her own spit, and had to cough hard as the throbbing sting above her eye was joined by a half dozen other aches in her joints and across her chest. She’d never crash-landed a ship before, but this definitely felt like she would have imagined.

She coughed again and managed to blink open her left eye, but the right one was wet and sticky. With her one eye, she could look ahead and up - no, it was down - at the shattered front cockpit panel. The heavy-duty polysteel glass could withstand orbital re-entry, laser blasts, extreme radiation and even small meteorite hits just as easily as the rest of the ship’s armoured panelling. What it couldn’t do was resist the unforgiving weight of the ship slamming it into a jagged rocky ridge.

The SolaRepo II had hit the ground hard, and at some point the anti-grav generators had cut out, the rolling and smashing hitting her with full effect until she’d blacked out. Now she was looking at a brown, jagged rock line that creased both sides of the SolaRepo’s cockpit hull and jutted within a foot of her upside-down face.

There was blood on it, and noticing that made her realise that she was bleeding. That explained the sharp pain in her forehead, but more of the biting stings peppered her shoulders and chest. She cried out in a wordless grunt as she raised - or lowered, depending on the perspective - her arms from where they were dangling over her head. The arms of her flight suit were chewed up and blood was dripping down her hands. It was still wet, still fresh, so she hadn’t been out too long.

Widget.

The kid was Emerald’s first priority. She reached for her crash seat harness and grunted again, biting down hard at the sharp pain in her shoulder. Tucking her chin, Emerald was able to see a shard of the polysteel glass stuck in her, piercing under her clavicle.

“Engh!” she moaned, gritting her teeth as she tested it with one hand. Taking it out could make things even worse if it had cut an artery but was pinching it closed for now. It also explained where the entire side of her face was covered in dripping blood.

It took Emerald a moment to glance around, trying to figure out her next step, before she reached for the emergency repairs box strapped under the pilot seat. She had to wriggle her other arm out from the harness and was panting from the effort and pain by the time she got her hand into the box, but she found the roll of space tape and pulled it out. The stuff was designed to quickly seal a hull breach or crack in polysteel - it better be able to keep that glass in her.

Another minute of work had Emerald’s flight suit shoulder ripped open and she taped the glass to her body, tearing the dense adhesive weave with her teeth. She had no idea how deep it went, but at least it wasn’t likely to get ripped out too easily. She also slapped smaller pieces of tape over several other cuts on her arms and thighs, all much smaller and not looking like they were hosting an unwanted shard of polymer. 

“Now for the harness,” she whispered, closing her eyes and counting herself down before tensing and triggering the release on the harness.

Emerald didn’t fall. It was more of a controlled collapse.

“Eight Moons of Gath,” she swore, wincing as she rolled her lower body off of the rock ledge and got upright.

It took effort to stand, her legs wobbly. The ringing in her ears was slowly dissipating, making her realise that she hadn’t actually been hearing anything other than the ringing. There was bright sun coming from slim gaps between the bulkheads and the rock that was creasing the ship, so it was still day.

Crawling up what had once been the ceiling of the cockpit, she got to the hatch and had to crack open the manual lever to work the pneumatic seal open. She gave up at halfway, which was wide enough for her to climb through without smacking the glass in her shoulder.

“Widget?” she called, coughing again as she squinted into the darkness. “Brick? Talk to me.”

She heard a cough, and it was deep enough she was pretty sure it was Brick. Every damn light in the ship seemed to be off, even the emergency ones, which was strange. And concerning. Something would have had to have zapped the batteries dry, or they’d hit some sort of an EMP field that had fried all the circuitry in the ship.

Actually, that might have explained the antigrav generator cutting out. But why would there be an EMP field or blast up in the mountains of a - It didn’t matter right now.

Emerald found the cupboard panel in the short gangway corridor between the cockpit and the core chamber of the ship, needing to give it a good thump with her fist before it popped open. She fished out the first aid kit and cracked it open one-handed, pulling out the emergency light and thumbing it on.

Dead, just like the rest.

Grunting, she tossed it aside and slammed the first aid kit shut, carrying it with her deeper into the ship and looking up into the communal space towards the meeting table, the galley and the ‘entertainment’ area. It was in complete darkness up there, just a glimmer of light from the cockpit even reaching where she was standing.

“Brick, Widget,” she said. “Let me know you’re alive. Suns, please be alive.”

The Yauk mechanic gave a grunt in the dark.

“I need more than that,” Emerald said. “Do you know where Widget is? Or was, before the crash? Where was she strapped in?”

The Yauk said… something. It was a series of hoots and grunts, completely unintelligible.

“Oh… no,” Emerald said, her eyes widening. “My Universal Translator is fried, Brick. I can’t understand you.”

He said something back, completely unintelligible.

This wasn’t good.

- - - - -

“Come on, kiddo,” Emerald said, rubbing Widget’s chest. “Come on, wake up.”

A clanging from inside the ship echoed out from the open airlock door. She and Brick had managed to lever it open - or more, Brick had used his wiry muscles to lever it open while standing on Emerald’s shoulders. That had been after she’d helped the Yauk into the cockpit so she could treat the nasty-looking impact gashes from getting thrown around the hold. She could only guess that he’d been trying to keep Widget in her seat when the crash landing started and hadn’t been strapped in himself. Once he’d been patched up with bandage paste that would be clinging to her orange fur for weeks he’d set to work on her shoulder and she’d managed to stay conscious as the glass was removed and he pinched the wound closed and smeared bandage paste on it too.

Emerald had never really realised how completely dependent her working friendship with the Yauk was on her universal translator. She’d heard his language before; she always did when he spoke. She was just used to it being in the background compared to the Translator inserting itself over top. Considering the Translator wasn’t something that needed batteries, running off of a truly minuscule electrical draw from her nervous system, even an EMP blast shouldn't have been able to knock it out. That meant something else, something she couldn't even guess at, was shutting off… almost everything. Or everything that wasn’t organic or purely mechanical.

After getting the airlock open the main cabin had been flooded with light, and they’d been able to see that Widget had been unconscious and dangling from her crash webbing in her seat. Emerald had been relieved that there wasn’t any blood, but it had taken almost twenty minutes for her and Brick to rig up a makeshift stepladder so he could climb and dangle from the bench seating and carefully release her.

With few options once he had her in his arms, Brick had fallen towards Emerald and the two of them tried to cushion the fall as best they could for Widget. Then they’d gotten her outside and into the fresh air, checking her for broken bones and finding nothing. Emerald had started cracking open instruction manuals from the front pocket of the medkit and Brick had headed back into the ship.

Before that moment, Emerald had thought she knew first aid pretty well. She knew how to use all the tools in the kit, and knew the basics of care. In a pinch, she was pretty sure she would even be able to treat a laser burn like she’d been taught in UEN Basic Training way back when.

The problem was the Scanner was digital. The Pharma-shot was digital too. The bandage paste was mostly a chemical reaction once she stripped off the dispenser tip, but Widget didn’t need bandaging.

So she’d dug into the field manuals and managed to pry off the utility access for the load chamber on the Pharma-shot. The thing was built so that a being of most types could insert an appendage into the circular cuff and receive the programmed dose of medicine required based on an interface with a Med Scanner. Without the interface, but with a hard copy of the manual, Emerald managed to piece together a chemical compound from the dozens of little capsules that would create ‘a release of ammonia that triggers a reaction in most oxygen-breathing organic species.’

The first whiff of the reaction had made Emerald’s eyes go wide with shock, and she’d waved the chemicals under Widget's nose as directed. If it didn’t work, the next try was going to be a dose of adrenaline.

Widget coughed, sucking in a hard breath through her mouth and wriggling away from the smell.  

Emerald tossed the ammonia compound away and kept rubbing her chest. “That’s it, Widget. Come back to me, kiddo. That’s it. Deep breaths.”

The kid was blinking at the bright light, wincing at what was probably the same number of deep aches as Emerald was feeling, as she swam back to consciousness. “Emmie?” she asked drowsily, blinking rapidly.

“I’m here, Widge. I’m here,” Emerald said.

Widget sucked in another big breath through her nose, then looked around in confusion. Emerald couldn’t blame her - they were in the middle of a mountain range, the local sun beating down from high in the sky and casting a white-gold light across everything that made the brilliant white peaks difficult to look at. They were on a sort of rocky stretch of jagged ridges, each one several metres from the next like something had caused waves in the rock of the valley. The strangest thing, to Emerald, was the thick, lush grass covering much of the space. Not only grass but trees and shrubs and all sorts of green plant matter soaking up the sun rays in a space she would have expected to be relatively barren. Somehow the long valley was filled with life, which begged the question of who might live there.

But Widget wasn’t looking around at the scenery. Not really. She looked at the ship.

And then she burst into tears. Sobs wracked her body as she covered her face with both little arms.

“It’ll be OK, Widget,” Emerald said, reaching out to encircle the girl in a hug. “We’re OK, the ship will-”

Widget thrust her arms at Emerald, pushing at her chest and making the woman front hard at the sharp pain from her wound. And Widget did it with shocking force. “You left him!” she screamed. “You left him! You left Rake!”

Emerald swallowed the hard, hard stone in her throat. She’d inserted her foot into her own mouth royally. “Widget,” she said, taking her arms in both hands so that she couldn’t get hit again. “He told us to run. Rake wanted us to get out of there. We couldn’t do anything to help him.”

“You left him,” Widget sobbed, struggling weakly against her grip. “You left him all alone. How is he supposed to escape if we can’t even get him now? You crashed the ship and you killed it and you left him…”

Emerald’s heart hurt. It ached. She felt like she’d been punched in the damn ventricle.

There were several loud clangs as Brick came back out of the ship, tossing emergency packs and some other gear ahead of him. When he heard and saw Widget was up he rushed over, hooting and grumbling in his native language. And then Widget responded, hooting and grunting and grumbling through her sobbing.

The kid could speak Yauk.

Emerald let her go as Widget pulled away and reached for Brick, and the hairy simian picked her up with a concerned look on his face and set her down on her feet, brushing her off and looking her over as they kept talking while the tears ran down her face. How the hell had Widget learned Yauk? She wasn’t even sure humans had all the right vocal structures to make the right sounds. And with universal translators being almost foolproof, the kid would never have ever needed to bother.

Brick suddenly hooted loudly, his concern changing to frustration, and Emerald watched as the conversation between the two got more animated. Gesturing at the ship, at the mountains. Widget’s little lower lip was still stuck out like she was ready to start crying again, but she wiped her face with her sleeves. Then she shook her head at something Brick said, and he said it again and pointed at Emerald.

“Brick wants to know what happened,” Widget said, a little petulantly.

Emerald sucked in a breath. “Widget-”

“Brick wants to know what happened, and you don’t know Yauk so I need to tell him,” Widget cut her off.

Clenching her jaw for a moment, Emerald knew that arguing with the kid now would only delay things more. She hurt all over and wanted to just lie down and sleep for about 72 hours or so, but they had work to do. So, trying to keep things concise, she told Widget and the kid told Brick about the flight after entering atmo, and spotting the downed UEN vessel and how the native population seemed to be stripping it down, and the waves of flying boulders that had come out of nowhere even though they’d been a good five kilometres up from the ground. She didn’t talk it out through Widget with the other adult in the conversation, for a planet with almost no technological signs, it would take one hell of a catapult to send boulders that size flying - and they must have had dozens set up in bunches all through that jungle to send up volleys like that.

“Brick thinks we need to leave the ship,” Widget said sullenly, her lip quivering again. “In case the people come to find it.”

“I know,” Emerald sighed in frustration. “We don’t have the tools or the space to flip her over, let alone fix the hull and the engines. And the pirates are afraid of this little patch of green in the middle of a brown dustball planet for some reason, so we may not want to stick around to find out what the native species think of us.”

“But we need our ship,” Widget said. “We need to fix it to go get Rake.”

Emerald swallowed hard. “We can’t help Rake until we help ourselves, kiddo.” She didn’t say the other parts, like how Rake was probably already dead. Or how they might not ever get off this planet.

Widget wasn’t happy about needing to translate between the two adults, or leaving the ship that had been her home - her real home, the one that Rake had made for her - and that she’d kept flying and treated like a whole extra member of the crew. At times it had been like a pet, or an imaginary friend, for her. Now the tug was a carcass of memories and hard choices.

They couldn’t take her toys. They couldn’t take Rake’s foot locker ‘because he might want it when we rescue him.’ Emerald prioritised memories she hoped Widget would appreciate in a few years over stuff she thought was important right now, if she could keep the kid alive that long. The few pictures printed out on flimsiplast that had been stuck to the wall in Rake’s little cabin, and a couple more from Widget’s. The ship’s personnel memory core, if it wasn’t friend and dead. She put on one of Rake’s jackets that he used for his ridiculous disguises to scout out potential Repo jobs and stowed one of his shirts deep in her bag so Widget would have something that smelled like him, at least for a while.

Brick did what he could to supplement the underwhelming emergency gear he’d found. Seller Solar had skimped out there just as much as he had a half dozen other places on the ship, meeting the bare minimum standards for what could even be considered an ‘emergency kit.’

“On the ship his own kids were on,” Emerald grimaced to herself as she sorted through the packs. Brick had added more foodstuffs from the galley, several battery packs that he hoped would be chargeable with the single solar array if either it or the batteries could be convinced to work ever again, and some tightly bundled tarps, more space tape and other manual tools from the repair kits that might be useful.

Widget didn’t like it, but she let Emerald help suit her up in her outdoor gear and get her pack on. The kid glared at her through the whole process, and Emerald wanted to say something a half dozen times but could never find the words that would help. Not wanting to make things worse, she bit her tongue for now.

When Brick came out of the SolaRepo II for the last time he was carrying the plushy Torannian Toodlegop from Widget’s cabin. She’d been inseparable from the thing when she’d first ‘joined the crew’ and Rake had moved her onto the ship, and it had probably seen every nook and cranny of the engine compartment as Widget had explored every bulkhead, stud and moving part of the ship. The thing had several permanent grease stains, and Brick had patched one of its five tentacles where it had gotten scorched off halfway down when he’d been left a little too close to an engine heatsink that overclocked. The little monster still looked cute, though, with its one big eye, little mouth with one pointy tooth and stubby little legs. Actual Toodlegops were considered a dangerous, over-populated pest on the core world of Toran, but a children’s ‘Net program had made them into a viral, lovable creature across the Cluster, forcing hundreds of worlds to pass strict laws forbidding importation of them and banning them as pets for fear of the tentacle monsters becoming invasive species. It had worked, mostly, but kids of all species still seemed to love the little suckers.

Brick glanced at Emerald as he climbed down from the airlock, and Emerald nodded slightly. He hooted and grumbled and offered the Toodlegop to Widget, but she shook her head and said something back. Emerald couldn’t understand the language, but she sure understood the kid’s tone. ‘Emerald says I’m not allowed to because she’s the worst person ever.’

Emerald sighed and stepped between them, taking the stuffed animal from Brick and kneeling down in front of Widget. “I didn’t mean none,” she said. “I’m sorry if I said that wrong. He’s important.”

That damn lower lip on the kid stuck out and quivered again, threatening more tears, and Widget grabbed the Toodlegop and hugged it to her, crushing the soft toy to her little chest wordlessly.

“If we need to do any climbing, or you want your hands free, I can strap him to the back of your pack so he can watch your back, OK?” Emerald offered.

Widget nodded, not saying anything. Her quiet spoke volumes to how upset she truly was.

“OK,” Emerald said, wanting to pull the kid into a hug but knowing she wasn’t ready for that. She stood up instead and picked up the toolbox that she would be carrying along with her pack. Brick got his pack over his shoulder and picked up a toolbox as well. “It’s been two hours since we crashed, maybe a little longer. We don’t know how much of the day we have left, or what night is like here, or how far away will be safe if the native species comes looking for us. What we do know is if they are coming our way, they’ll be coming from down the mountain.” She gestured towards the lower end of the long valley they were in. They couldn’t see the end of it since it curved around a mountain and was hidden by the overabundance of bright green flora down that way. “That means we should head up.”

Widget mumbled her translation for Brick, who looked up the valley. It ran for a few kilometres in that direction, slowly getting higher and higher. They would have to climb through some more dense areas of high grasses and shrubs, and the very farthest end looked like it terminated in some sort of rock face. Not quite a dead end, but close to it.

Better than walking right into the teeth of the people who had knocked them out of the sky, though. Especially without the translators working.

Brick nodded and gestured for Emerald to go first, and then nudged Widget to follow so he could take up the rear and make sure the kid didn’t fall behind.

It had already been a long day, and it was only going to get longer.

Chapter 17

Rake felt his teeth clack together as his chin hit the cold metal edge of the broken pipe, but he was dragged forward until it was pressed into his chest and he was leaning out of the dark space. He only stopped sliding because he managed to dig the toes of his boots into one of the weld points that he’d been dragging his stomach over for the past half hour.

“I’ve got you,” he groaned through his clenched teeth, already feeling his fingers starting to slip.

The crash of the two broken sections of pipe hitting the floor somewhere far below was a double boom that echoed through the big chamber.

“Don’t let me go!” Ruby hissed. “There’s something down there!”

Rake clenched his fists, holding on to the ankles of her already torn and damaged flight suit and tried hard not to think what ‘something’ could be. He looked up at the other end of the broken ventilation pipe where Midnial was currently unable to even turn around to check on them, her legs dangling as she scrambled up from her own precarious position.

The plan hadn’t started out too badly. Mindial had a vague understanding of how the ventilation system organised itself, and how the primary pipes worked in a checkpoint system from one hub to the next. She’d apparently climbed through them a lot as a kid, escaping her parents’ supervision on a regular basis without them ever realising she was using the access point in her room to slither into the system and go exploring. The pirate captain had even remembered that the pipes were big enough, from her memory, that all three of them would be able to fit through.

The first problem was that ‘fit’ was a relative term. They’d all been on their bellies, using knees and elbows to crawl through the pipes and over the ridged weld points that seemed to be part of Nuthonian construction. There wasn’t room to turn around, and they only had one light so Mindial had taken it in the lead, leaving Ruby with less to follow and Rake with almost none behind her.

Then there was the collapsed pipe. It took about twenty minutes of crawling and scrambling to get from one ventilation substation to the next, and Rake hadn’t been expecting a stop after the third substation so he’d run his nose into Ruby’s UEN-issue boots.

“We have to go back,” Mindial had said from ahead of them.

It took even longer to go backwards than it did forwards, and climbing out of the pipe system backwards was a hell of a lot harder to do than climbing in head first.

The pipe system, Mindial had explained once they were all out of the pipes, had opened up into a dark room of some sort and when she’d flashed the light down to try and get a look at the floor, she hadn’t been able to see it.

“I thought you knew this place better than anyone?” Ruby had asked. “You’ve never seen it before?”

“I must have been behind one of the locked areas,” Mindial said. “I guess they aren’t all open to vacuum, some of them are just blocked off. The fact that I couldn’t see the floor makes me think that spot was dug even deeper into the moon though.”

In the end, they’d decided to try sneaking through the main corridors to the next substation. They weren’t near one of the tight checkpoints but were still at risk of running into Pirates, so it had been a quiet, mad dash until they came to a lit T-intersection. The left path led towards the sounds of some sort of argument between several people, likely over a game of Tiles, so Mindial had quietly led them to the right and through a winding route that squeezed behind a big piece of machinery that had some unknown purpose before it had ground to a halt untold centuries earlier. 

They’d made it to the next substation without any more danger and had gotten back into the ventilation system and hopped to more substations before the painful-sounding groan of metal and then the collapse underneath Ruby.

The pipe had split right under her, both ends folding downwards, and Rake had managed to grab the woman’s ankles before she fell along with the severed sections of pipe, leaving them both dangling.

“Are you both alive?” Mindial whispered sharply.

“Ow,” Rake groaned.

“Pull me up!” Ruby hissed.

Rake tried, but the angle and lack of leverage had him feeling like he’d lose his grip - either on her or the pipe - before he got her any higher. “Trying,” he grunted. “Can’t.”

“Oh, suns,” Ruby whispered in a panic. “It sees me.”

“What sees you?” Mindial asked.

“The thing down there!” Ruby whispered in a panic.

Rake couldn’t see anything past Ruby’s dangling body, but in the quiet after she said it he heard it. A rattling sound, like an engine ticking as it cooled down, except it just kept going. He had no idea what that could mean.

“What is it?” Mindial asked

“Well, Nuthonians had six limbs so this thing is either about fifteen of them all sewn together or it’s- Oh, suns it’s climbing the walls!” Her voice raised into a panicked shriek at the end. “Pull me up!”

“Blaster,” Rake grunted, putting all his effort into trying to lift her high enough that he could hook his elbows on the edge of the pipe. “Use the blaster.”

He almost lost her as she shifted in her hands, her entire body swinging as she grabbed for the blaster hooked to the hook on her suit waist. She got it in both hands and pointed it straight down, firing off three blasts that painted the chamber in red bursts of laser light. It was just enough for Rake to see the insectoid creature crawling up the wall on at least twenty spindly legs, its hard carapace head studded with a half dozen black, shimmering eyes and sprouting four antennae that seemed to be searching in front of it. The rest of the chamber below had to be about thirty feet down and was covered in rubble and ancient sheet metal grating along with some sort of… Rake really hoped that wasn’t a nest or eggs like he thought it might be.

Thirty feet sounded like a lot until you were looking at a sinuous insect monster that might have been fifty feet long.

“Nope,” he grunted. “Nope-nope-nope.”

“It’s just making it angry,” Ruby said in a panic, firing off another two shots.

The thing raised up, backing away from the wall and letting out a horrible hiss. That fast clicking noise happened again as its many legs rattled angrily in waves, and the front part of its face opened up to unfurl four jagged mandibles that rattled as well, adding to its hiss.

Ruby fired again, blasting into its underside, and the thing reared back a little more but didn’t fall backwards, and didn’t seem to care much about the scorching its carapace was taking.

“Get her up, Rake,” Mindial called from the other side of the pipe. “Get her out of there!”

“I’m- fething- trying!” Rake gasped, hauling on Ruby’s ankles. He got one elbow up on the pipe, feeling the jagged edge dig into his skin through his flight suit.

“Screw this,” Ruby said. “Fire in the hole!”

“What?” Mindial asked.

Then Rake heard the very distinctive whine of a powerpack about to overheat.

“Oh, crap,” Rake grunted, leaning into the pain of that one elbow as he twisted and pulled.

Ruby let go of the blaster directly towards the mouth of the insect creature and Rake got his other elbow up. He could feel his arms getting cut up but it didn’t matter because he had the leverage now to pull Ruby higher and back into the tunnels. He twisted her in his grip so that the back of her legs would be to the pipe and heaved with all his might, pulling her up. Once her knees were at the edge she heaved as well, bending at the waist to catch the top of the pipe and push herself in, wedged right next to Rake with her legs somewhere around his waist, his face in her stomach and her arms pushing against the pipe to try and force them both deeper in.

The pipe shuddered with a screech of chitin on metal as the creature wrapped its mandibles around the edge of the pipe. Hot, acrid stink came oozing out of it.

“Oh, dark moon’s luck,” Ruby moaned. They both knew what was about to happen.

The sound of blaster fire echoed, muted, from beyond the creature and it pulled away from the pipe, turning towards the stinging needles as Mindial fired from her back in the other pipe. It hissed again and looked like it was ready to lunge.

“If I die here, it’s your fault,” Ruby grunted to Rake.

“If I die here it’s your fault,” Rake shot back. “We only came to rescue you!”

“...Fine, we’re even,” Ruby grimaced.

Boom.

The blaster erupted.