Syberian Sunrise (2 page)

He fired up the shower, setting it to as hot as he could stand it, and slipped in. For a long moment, he just stood there. There was some primal pleasure in showering, some simple, thoroughly invigorating comfort in it. Enzo spent a few moments losing himself in the warmth, then felt the press of time. He grabbed some soap and spent a few quick moments cleaning himself up, getting the blood and dirt and ash off.

When he was finished, he stepped out and grabbed a towel. After drying off, he took a moment to examine himself further. There were a few cuts and scrapes on his body that he'd have to deal with, but for now he focused on his artificial arm. It looked like a normal limb, wrapped in synthetic skin that matched his own. It felt real to the touch and could even heal at normal rate. It didn't, however, feel pain. He'd made sure to disable that function.

The arm looked good. He rolled it around, flexing it, testing all of its motor functions. It still seemed perfectly functional. Which was good, he'd hate to be on an overrun prison ship and have a dead arm. Enzo spent a moment hunting through the various cabinets for things he could use. After a moment, he happened on a uniform. It was a simple black jumpsuit that bore no insignia or any other affiliate markings. It came with a pair of solid combat boots, black socks and boxers. He gathered these items up, (first pulling on the boxers), then set them on the counter. He then turned his attention to the medical kit he'd previously ravaged.

Enzo spent a few moments applying the proper medical attention to himself. Disinfecting and bandaging his wounds, all the while his mind working, formulating some kind of plan. He'd have to be sneaky, get to the bridge, maybe play guerrilla warfare on the prisoners. Although the possibility of cutting some kind of deal with them might not be out of the question. He supposed he'd just have to scope the situation out from a distance.

He finished with the medical stuff, then dressed in the salvaged uniform, finishing up the whole thing by tightly lacing up the boots. He stood, feeling much more ready to face the situation, whatever it might be, than he had when he'd first woken up. Enzo took a moment to consider his situation further, studying the infirmary.

He happened on two more things that might help him in his current predicament: a portable medkit and an extremely sharp scalpel. He found that the various pockets that came on the jumpsuit were padded, so he slipped the scalpel tip-first into one and left the handle poking out, then cinched the zipper up against it so that he could grab it quickly if need be. He took one more look around the derelict infirmary.

There was nothing left for him here.

Enzo set out.

Chapter 02

–
Enigmas
–

Now that his head was clearer, Enzo wanted to find a map of the place. Something to give him some kind of idea where the fuck he was going. Stepping out of the infirmary, he looked left, then right. Right would take him back the way he'd come, the crossroads of corridors. Left was the unknown. For the moment, he went left. The light was still very bad, but his eyes were already adjusting to it.

Up ahead, he could see that the corridor made a left hand turn. He passed more doors, all of them marked for storage. As Enzo walked, he began to pick on things. Inconsistencies, things that just didn't add up. Like the walls, for example. And the infirmary. It finally clicked for him that they only looked old and abandoned because of the shadows, and probably his own bad mood and misery. But closer inspect revealed that they were, in fact, new. The metal hadn't been scarred by years of time, by guys walking around carrying crates, accidentally bumping against the walls and leaving minute dents that accumulated over time.

They were smooth and still relatively fresh, as if they'd been constructed within the past six months or so. The same for the infirmary. It looked new and unused. How was that possible? The prison transport, little more than a gutted and overhauled freighter, had been ancient, built in the last century, likely. The hull had been pitted and scarred, chewed by micrometeorites and space junk. The interior hadn't been much better. The windows fogged with a million little scars, the walls and floors scuffed from decades of wear and tear.

He came to the end of the corridor, finding nothing but storage rooms, and took the left turn. The corridor continued on for another ten meters, then stopped. More storerooms, nothing of interest. Enzo sighed, turned and retraced his steps. His shoulder was hurting again, though now it had been reduced to the background rumble of pain that spiked only occasionally. It approached being tolerable, but never completely left his sphere of awareness.

Enzo came back to the crossroads and looked around. Just to double-check, he hurried back down the corridor he'd originally come from and confirmed that it, too, was a dead end. He jogged back and this time to the right hallway. None of them were labeled. Would, for some reason, the bowels of the ship be significantly less-traveled? Or had they been renovated recently? He doubted it. As long as the ship ran, they didn't seem to care.

The engine on that vessel had been pretty shitty. He could hear the damned thing while he was trying to get to sleep and-Enzo froze. He couldn't hear the engine anymore. In fact, all he could hear was a very soft hum of power, a very quiet whisper of oxygen and, somewhere distantly, a constant dripping noise that was faintly ominous. But no engines. Were they off? He supposed it was entirely possible, but...

Something was off here, very off.

Looking at the architecture, Enzo didn't feel like he was on a ship. Or, at the very least, he didn't feel like he was on the same ship. Recalling the industrial yellow, rust orange and dull, weathered gray of the prison transport did not match up with the brushed silver of stainless steel he was currently seeing all around him.

He passed several more storage bays, a pair of maintenance rooms and a bathroom along the way. Enzo took the opportunity to stop in the bathroom. He needed to take a piss. He stepped in, flicking the lights on. They hummed weakly to life, illuminating a row of stalls and urinals, and a handful of sinks. The mirrors above the sink were sleek, clean and framed in bright chrome. Enzo moved swiftly through the room, checking all the stalls.

He was utterly alone.

After taking a moment to piss in one of the urinals, he moved to the nearest sink and washed his hands. After studying the water for a moment, he took a lengthy drink from it. The quality of the water surprised him as well. It was very pure, almost enough to be entirely tasteless, not like the awful crap on the prison transport that had left a bad taste in his mouth. He finished, dried his hands and headed back out into the corridor.

This one was a dead end as well, so Enzo returned to the crossroads one more time and headed forward. Logic dictated that this would have to lead
somewhere
. If it didn't, he'd soon find himself crawling up through the vents. Something he'd had experiences with, and something that was never very pleasant.

So if he wasn't on the prison transport anymore, then where was he? Where could he have possibly gone that he'd ended up in a furnace? He supposed it was possible someone, mercs or raiders, had come across the vessel and opted to kill everyone onboard, steal it, toss the bodies down their own furnace...but that didn't quite scan. It'd be easier to just space them...unless they were in an area where you couldn't get away with that.

So why not throw them down the prison ship's own burn units? Way easier...unless they didn't have one, or it was broken...Enzo sighed, frustrated. Too many unknowns. Either way, he had to get up and out and see the lay of the land. The final corridor ended in a large brushed silver door. Enzo moved over to the control panel and hit it, ducking along the side of the passageway, fingers on the handle of his scalpel.

The door slip open with relative ease and noise. After a moment of tense silence, Enzo peered around the doorway that fringed the corridor and stared down an empty length of metal walls. Nothing waited for him. He stood, stepped beyond the doorway...and paused. Something like a shiver rattled through him and made him draw his scalpel. Visibly, absolutely nothing had changed in the corridor. No noise had been made.

But his combat instincts, something that had been honed and sharpened to a fine point over the decades, were whispering to him.

He was not alone.

Perhaps it was the smell. In the incineration unit, he could smell the harsh reek of death and burnt meat. He'd been too distracted to really smell much of anything until now. And here, in this next section, the smell of death was more powerful. Decay and spilled blood. It was a reek he'd become particularly familiar with in his line of work. Enzo licked his lips, the machine adrenaline coming back, preparing him for war.

He set off down the corridor. After a dozen meters, the walls tattooed occasionally with more storage bays, the hallway terminated into a huge, open room like a cavern. The walls extended away from him, the roof high overhead, lost in the darkness. On either side of him, just barely in his field of vision, he saw ranked rows of huge metal cylinders. Vats of some kind, storage containers for liquid. He'd seem them before, all ships, stations and colonies had them in one form or another. They were almost always meant for storing sewage and waste.

These, too, were brushed clean, neat and new. Each sported a terminal at its base that gave off a faint glow in the gloom. Enzo moved over to the nearest one, keeping a watch eye out for whoever might be down here with him, and activated it. Maybe he could get some hints about his new locale. Or maybe not. After a moment, he saw that it was just a waste unit, meant to hold what appeared to be regular runoff that all human settlements produced. Enzo turned away from the unit, abandoning it in favor of a path down the center of the room.

It offered the most cover, as it was furthest from the light.

Moving down the room, he finally came to another large door, set in the exact center of the immense wall. It was shut firmly and, when he tried to activate it, he discovered it was also locked. Enzo spent a moment at the control panel before realizing that he wasn't getting the door open, at least not without some kind of security clearance or a lot of luck. He'd never been particularly good at hacking these things.

He sighed heavily and considered his options. There hadn't appeared to be any other doors in the room, as all the containers were side-by-side, pressed up against each other, no room for anything else. However...he saw that the routine glow of the ranked control panels was broken on this end of the room. In the far corners, there didn't appear to be any containers. So maybe there were doors. Enzo went right at random.

He froze as some distant noise came to him.

Dropping into a crouch, the scalpel seemed to flash into his hand. Not in the room with him, well, probably not, but somewhere nearby. The sound was too distant, too indistinct to pick up, but it seemed intentional, not artificial or machine. He continued along his path, as silent as possible now, scalpel ready for action. As he drew closer, he saw that his instincts were correct: there was a doorway over here. It was open.

He passed through it and bristled as the stench of decay became more powerful. The corridor was a carbon copy of the ones he'd explored not ten minutes ago. More doorways stamped into the walls, and...Enzo glanced down as he spied something on the plate metal floor. Some dark liquid among the endless fields of silver.

Blood.

Enzo felt a chill of anticipation. The blood led away in a trail. He began to follow it, opening himself up to the world via his senses more so than before, letting it all come to him. After a second, he heard something shift up ahead. He stuck to the left wall, moving in the shadows, trying to force his eyes to adjust further to the low light level, knowing it was a fruitless effort. For the moment, the pain in his shoulder fell away.

This was wonderfully distracting, and he managed to put his whole mind behind the effort. The trail of blood, little more than a scant handful of drips, led him to an open door. One of the storage bays. Enzo slid up to the door, scalpel gripped tightly, and peered into the room beyond. It was a standard sized storage bay, a little larger than an average apartment bedroom. The walls were lined with shelving units and stacked crates, leaving a broad, open space in the middle. The blood trail led to the center of the room.

Someone stood with his back to Enzo.

It was a man and he wore the ragged remains of a blue jumpsuit and a bulletproof vest. Security, then. He was very bloody, and it looked like his arm had caught on fire at some point. He was muttering to himself. The sound sent Enzo's instincts on edge. There was something inherently inhuman about the muttering. Something other. The figure took a few listless steps forward, swaying slightly, as though drunk.

Enzo hesitated. It wasn't just this man's (security guard's?) battered appearance, there was something more subtly disquieting. Perhaps it was the way he was standing, or the awkward movements that switched between sluggish lethargy and awkward twitches. And the sounds, definitely. Enzo decided he was going to take this one very carefully.

He stepped into the doorway, scalpel still palmed but out of sight.

“Hey,” he said.

The muttering stopped. The man slowly began to turn.

“Hey, are you all right?” Enzo asked, figuring it was a good a thing to say as any. He prepared himself for the worst, held out a grim hope for the best.