HULL SCRAPPERS

  Volume 2: Liminal Marches

  By Andrew Seiple

  Cover by Warren Design

  Edited by Beth Lyons

  Text copyright © Andrew Seiple 2023

  All Rights Reserved

  OTHER BOOKS BY ANDREW SEIPLE

  Blasphemy Online Volume 1: Dragon Hack

  Blasphemy Online Volume 2: Occult Place to Die

  Blasphemy Online Volume 3: Dragon Drop

  Threadbare Volume 1: Stuff and Nonsense

  Threadbare Volume 2: Sew You Want to be a Hero

  Threadbare Volume 3: The Right to Arm Bears

  Threadbare Volume 4: Friends With Bunny Feets

  Threadbare Volume 5: The Phantom of the Lop Ear

  Threadbare Volume 6: An End to All Tails

  Small Medium: Big Trouble

  Small Medium: At Large

  Small Medium: Well Done

  DIRE: BORN

  DIRE: SEED

  DIRE: TIME

  DIRE: WARS

  DIRE: SINS

  DIRE: HELL

  Core Control Volume 1: Bunker Core

  Core Control Volume 2: Nomad Core

  Hull Scrappers Volume 1: Shattered Diaspora

  For Rachel, who’s living the dream.

  Table of Contents

  PRELUDE: THEN 5

  CHAPTER 1: NOW 17

  CHAPTER 2: DINNER 25

  CHAPTER 3: ERID 32

  CHAPTER 4: REGROUP 44

  CHAPTER 5: HARD ENTRY 50

  CHAPTER 6: UNDER THE GUNS 55

  CHAPTER 7: DARK FOREST 60

  CHAPTER 8: SALVAGE 67

  CHAPTER 9: GRAVE 74

  CHAPTER 10: DEAD FLESH 80

  CHAPTER 11: TRIN 87

  CHAPTER 12: REVELATIONS 100

  CHAPTER 13: COVER 109

  CHAPTER 14: MEMORIAL 116

  CHAPTER 15: SORROW 122

  CHAPTER 16: INCARNATION 127

  CHAPTER 17: BASQUE 134

  CHAPTER 18: RINGS 140

  CHAPTER 19: FERNY 148

  CHAPTER 20: CAGED DARKNESS 156

  CHAPTER 21: THE SORROW OF THE LFS 163

  CHAPTER 22: INTO THE MAW 169

  CHAPTER 23: LYSANDA 177

  AUTHOR’S NOTE 183

  PRELUDE: THEN

  It was hot in the lifeboat.

  They’d turned off climate control after the first week, to try to make the power supply stretch. That was what the data sheet recommended.

  In fact, there were a number of recommendations on the data sheet, each listed with a chronological recommendation. Do this on THIS cycle, do another thing on THAT cycle. Everything was synched up with a date that similar procedures had been successfully used to maximize the chances of rescue and surviving until help arrived.

  The first week of the schedule was full of recommendations and fleet doctrine. They’d followed it as best they could. First, they’d waited two hours past what they thought was the end of the battle, to make sure they wouldn’t be a target. Then they’d managed to steer the ’boat free of the wreckage of Megalodon and popped the beacon. Kril had done that, since Trin was unconscious at that point. The mix of drugs and electronic stimuli from her augs meant that she crashed hard after she’d been spun up to fly.

  While she was snoring away in the purified air of the lifeboat, Kril had read the data sheet over and over, until he knew it by heart. It had a shutdown order for non-essential systems that the two survivors had followed with grim efficiency, as the first few hours turned into the first day, then turned into the next few days.

  There were a lot of little tips and tweaks for keeping this model of lifeboat going for the duration.

  But most of those procedures were keyed specifically for the first three days. And Kril didn’t have to think hard to know why.

  If you weren’t found and rescued in the first few days, then you probably wouldn’t be rescued at all.

  And as the third day closed, without signal or sight of help, Kril and Trin shut down the sensors and killed time by sorting out the rations. On this, they were lucky. The lifeboat was built to hold an even dozen and had enough food and water for that dozen. More than enough for them. And the air supply was similarly scaled, so there was little chance of suffocation.

  The problem was power.

  The lifeboat didn’t have a full reactor, just solar panels and batteries. And those were not at all suited to the Coronal Bleed.

  The Coronal Bleed is a vast dust band around the sun, diffusing Beryl Nine’s rays and swirling in eddies and vortices driven by solar wind and the pressure of unseen forces from the Hot Gates. Three hundred and six years back, the hyperspace gate had opened unbidden and poured out a nebula’s worth of dust and shards of minerals, vomiting it out unceasing for decades and decades, sealing off the system, and junking up the sky, turning the rays of red old Beryl into a rainbow slick of colors.

  But that wasn’t the main problem.

  The main problem was that the dust was clingy as shit.

  And without a proper suit, Kril couldn’t get out there to clean the solar panels.

  After the first day, the efficiency was down by twenty percent. After the second, it was down by forty-three.

  By the fifth, they were only getting a trickle of power, and Kril felt a lump in his throat on the twelfth hour, as that trickle slowed and stopped, and the lifeboat flipped over to a full battery dependency.

  “You think there’s anyone left?” Trin broke the silence, as the charge flipped from one hundred percent to ninety-nine.

  “Got to be someone,” Kril said. “Fleet Beta’s still out there.”

  “We don’t know that,” Trin said, rubbing the sockets where her legs were cut off short, just above where a regular person had knees. “Those weird ships came outta nowhere. And they teleported. Who’s to say they didn’t teleport out into the far patrols and shoot up Beta, too?”

  Kril didn’t have an answer to that.

  Whoever they had been, however they’d pulled off their tricks, he was pretty sure that if they knew about Beta and set their sights on Kildane’s main fleet, then Beta would cease to be.

  Still, they weren’t invulnerable. Megalodon had taken one out before the inevitable end. The fact comforted him.

  But it was small comfort, as the days went on, and the procedures on the data sheet became fewer and farther between. They were well past the date when rescue was likely, and Kril didn’t like to think of the odds. But there was nothing else to think of, and so he swallowed his nutria paste and lukewarm water chaser at every designated mealtime and tried to ignore a churning and sour gut.

  But when they finally had to shut down the heat exchangers, it became impossible to ignore the inevitable.

  It was as simple as it was inescapable.

  The radiation from the sun was constant, and the dust coating the reflective outer layer meant that the radiation heated the lifeboat.

  The heat had nowhere to go. Without a working exchanger, there was no way to shed the excess.

  And so, it built up, until the temperature in the shuttle was sweltering.

  It was ironic, that the hungry dark was pure cold, and here they were baking to death.

  They ended up at the far end of the craft, where they’d pushed in a few of the seats to make bunks and lay there unmoving. Kril stared over at Trin, and she stared back, her metal eyes blinking with a click-click, every minute or two. She stunk; he was pretty sure he did, too. Her blonde hair was growing fast; back when they’d last been on Megalodon it had been stubble, now it was almost a fingers width high.

  “You look after your sister, Mister Granger,” he remembered Mom had told him, the day he got the word Trin had been accepted into the Fleet. “I can’t stop her following you, but I sure as shit can beat your ass if you don’t watch her back.”

  “Sorry,” he muttered.

  “What?” Trin blinked, frowned at him.

  “Sorry I got you here.”

  “Pffft. I seem to recall saving your ass first. That missile would have taken out the bridge if I hadn’t dodged it.”

  “No, I mean...” Kril waved an arm, regretted even that small motion as new sweat sprang out on his face. “Here. You could have done anything, planetside. Now you’re literally in the same boat I am. ’Cause of me.”

  She poked him in the nose, and he flinched back. “Hey.”

  “Kril... ain’t everything’s about you.”

  “Believe me, I know—”

  “No, I don’t reckon you do. I washed out of my finals.”

  Kril blinked. “The fuck?”

  “I washed out of—”

  “No, I heard that, what do you mean you washed out? How’d you get into fleet?”

  Trin pointed at her eyes. Then she turned her head, gestured at the ports and sockets in the back of her skull.

  Kril inhaled. He’d heard rumors about the augmented personnel, but he’d written it off as jealousy and spite. “They let you in with flunked finals ’cause you let them augment you?”

  “More to it than that,” Trin said. “Doesn’t matter now, though.” She closed her eyes. “Thing is, there wasn’t anything for me that wasn’t... this.” She tapped the back of her skull. “Not good, anyway.”

  “You’re a hell of a pilot. You could have flown anything you wanted to. There’s money for good pilots.”

  “Good pilots who pass their finals.” Trin grimaced. “And
you know how I get with tests.”

  Kril did. Ever since she hit the middle grades, his folks had called on him to help her study. She did well with the homework, but it took her twice as long because she kept getting distracted. Her brain just wasn’t built to focus; she leaped from distraction to distraction. And no matter how much she studied, every test was a tram wreck.

  “So there’s no civvy pilot postings unless you’ve got the grades to back it up?” Kril asked.

  “None. Could maybe be a bush flyer, but there ain’t much private hunting ever since the Shrivers got religion and the war made prices stupid high. Now that there’s no more off-world tourists, only ones hunting are the super rich. And they got their own people for that.”

  “Shit,” Kril said and let his head thump back against the folded seat. “Here we thought...”

  “We?”

  “Never mind.” Kril shut his eyes.

  “No, who’s we? Because if it’s Mom, she can frag off.” Kril could hear the edge in her voice.

  “She’s not to blame, Trin,” he told her. “She’s not to blame for Dad.”

  “Then who is?” she snarled.

  Kril opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling. He thought about lying, but what did it matter, now? Nobody was coming. “I’ve been looking into that,” he said, slowly.

  She was quiet for a moment. “What?”

  “Dad was doing a lot of talking about the war. Saying things that weren’t too popular with the Unifiers. But there’s no way he’d go after a polsec patrol with a gun. Not against those odds.”

  “You don’t think he’d try to change things?” Trin’s eyes clicked, as he heard her looking at him, looked him up and down.

  “Oh, he was trying to change things,” Kril said. “But he wouldn’t have gone about it stupidly. Thing is, I needed leverage on Polsec. Needed a higher position and friends. And a lot of Fleetsec officers come from Polsec backgrounds or Polsec families.”

  Silence. And a beat later than he thought, she finally spoke. “You were thinking I was in the Fleet because of you. And here you are, joining the fleet because of Dad.”

  Kril laughed. “Put it that way, it’s kind of pathetic, yeah?” Laughing was a mistake, though. The air was scorching on his throat, and chuckles turned to coughs.

  Gods, it was hot. And it was about to get worse. He spared a glance to the side, to where the battery indicator was down to three percent. Soon they’d have to kill the gravity field, and when that happened, the natural circulation of the air would cease. The air would stop being a natural buffer to the heat, and that would be the final spike in the coffin.

  “Ain’t pathetic,” he heard Trin whisper.

  “Thanks,” he said, when the coughing stopped. “So, should we—”

  Kril was about to suggest that they get it over with and just open the airlocks. But he never finished the sentence. He was interrupted by the sound of metal on plasteel, as someone knocked on the airlock.

  He sat up, regretted it as his vision spun and everything went dizzy for a moment. Blinking it away, he stared at Trin, who stared back with her mouth open in an ‘O’ of surprise. “Did you hear...”

  “I heard,” Trin said. “Did we hit something?”

  Tang, tang, tang, came the knocking.

  Kril threw himself upward, and half-stumbled, half ran to the airlock. He hit the intercom, remembered at the last moment that they had disabled it, and almost shouted in frustration.

  Tang tang, came another knock.

  “We’re here!” he croaked, coughed some more, then grabbed one of the seat struts they’d pulled lose, and knocked right back.

  And after a few moments of tanging back and forth, relief turned to trepidation.

  Whoever they were, they didn’t know Fleet tapcode.

  But Kril knew they couldn’t exactly be choosy. And they didn’t exactly have a way to stop whoever was out there from coming in. So, after the knocking stopped, he backed up to where Trin sat, put his arm around his sister, and waited for whatever came next.

  They didn’t have long to wait. The lifeboat shuddered, and something clunked against the door. Squealing then, of plasteel being rent apart, and Kril bit his lip as a drill augered through the door, then cycled backwards and withdrew.

  There was no hiss of escaping vapor. There was no horrible, ripping explosive decompression. Kril let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

  In the silence, came a babble of voices, muffled by the airlock.

  “Hello?” Kril called. “There’s two of us!”

  The babble stopped, then a woman spoke. It sounded like she had her mouth up to the hole in the airlock. “Wen nais ear?”

  “Please tell me you ain’t Shrivers,” Kril called.

  “Wir akan iv spem can dell foos.”

  “Is this good?” Trin asked. “I can’t tell if this is good.”

  “They ain’t killed us yet,” Kril said. He stood and moved up to the airlock, tried to peer through the hole. It was blocked. “I’m going to open the airlock. Please stand clear.”

  As luck had it, they’d managed to damage the mechanism when they drilled. It took a lot of hauling on the manual release, swearing, and working the thing back and forth once there was a gap big enough to fit his hands. Midway through they got the idea, and he saw gloved hands grab it from the other side. Two sets, that he could see.

  Once they had a meter’s worth of gap, he took a breath and stepped back, staring at what lay before him.

  They sure as fragg weren’t Shrivers.

  There were two of them, wearing cream-colored suits of overlapping plates that resembled chitin on fabric. They wore helmets with full face masks that had two stalk-like protrusions round about where the eyes should be. The overall impression was insectile, inhuman. But their gestures and body language as they waved at him and beckoned him out was familiar. Simple. Friendly, even.

  Then he looked past them, and for a split second, he thought he was hallucinating.

  The other door of the airlock was open, and stars twinkled in the gap, blurred and oil-slick rainbow-hued from the dust.

  Then he looked down, down at their feet, and saw the slight crinkle caused by their weight, the slight distortion that showed some kind of transparent fabric or plastic, or something very much like it. A glance back up, and now that he knew what to look for, he could make out the walls of a tube.

  “They got some kind of umbilical,” Trin said, and he realized she’d moved up to join him, hauling herself over the seats and peering out as well. “Must have another ship near.”

  They did.

  The plastic-like substance was completely transparent, and some part of his mind expected it to be slick, told him he’d fall if he didn’t watch himself, but there was friction there. He could have been walking on grass back in the downs of the bush country. The two strangers walked ahead, out of the air lock and kept beckoning him forward.

  Kril poked his head out of the airlock and looked up at a ship that filled the entirety of his field of vision.

  “Shit,” he whispered, looking at the massive conglomeration of shapes and angles. It was asymmetrical and filled with winking lights. Long metal tubes twisted between blocks of plasteel and metal, with the occasional glowing sphere breaking up the circuit-like pattern.

  “Modular,” he heard Trin say next to him, felt her tug on his trouser leg as she steadied herself. “Got to be modular. I’d guess they stack on bits on as they need, take it off as they don’t,” she said.

  It sure as hell didn’t look anything like the glowing ships that had blown Fleet Gamma out of the sky, and that eased Kril’s worry a bit.

  As he watched, the first stranger moved up the twisted, translucent tube and strolled into a hole in the bottom of one of the blocks. The other stranger beckoned them forward, then set their own feet on the way up.

  “Carry me?” Trin asked. “Just ’cause I don’t know if it’ll work if I don’t have feet.”

  Kril nodded, reached down and hauled her up onto his back. She was heavy, and he was weak from the heat, sweat coating the inside of his clothes as he settled her into place and felt her arms clamp around his neck. Then he walked forward, following the strangers.

  There was a little bit of vertigo, when Kril stepped up onto the wall of the tube, but there was no other effect. From his perspective, he was walking on one continuous surface. This was... considerable. Kril was no scientist, but Fleet basic classes had drilled in that the gravitational fields and dampeners that most vessels used were built for safety, not comfort or seamlessness. And to extend them this far from a vessel’s hull, over some sort of umbilical passage that didn’t have any visible circuitry or machinery... it was a thing that made him question if his saviors were actually human after all.