By SCSPIEKER - Dec. 31, 1969 Patwardhan, near the front of the group, looks at Booths and Gonzales with unmasked expectancy. Sato and Schabowski move in to help, and the four men struggle to pull the heavy airlock door aside. They only manage to shift it about fifteen centimeters with their first group shove. Ten more. Five. Three. Two. Heave! It's jammed, crushed against some icy obstruction in its complex gearwork. The opening is just wide enough for one person to slip through, but hardly more than a slit. Still the tracker registers only the slow, agonizingly steady beat, twenty meters off. With a strange sense of responsibility, Patwardhan sticks the nozzle of her flamethrower unit through the gap and slowly pokes a foot over the jamb into utter darkness and freezing cold. "Clear," she reports, after glancing left and right up the corridor. "Sato?" she asks intensely. The tracker is reassuringly unchanged. He wishes he could tear his eyes away from his tracker screen to see with his own eyes if she's alright, but there's nothing to see. It's pitch black. She's somehow relying on the light of her flamethrower in there, already moving forward up the hallway. The signal beeps again, same place, same slow pace, about eight seconds apart. One by one, the heavily-armed marines wedge through the opening, and light floods the hallway. Up and down, the doors are shut tight. There are no obvious black holes in the deck grating, but then again, nobody fired any shots right in here, if Patwardhan remembers correctly. Booths doesn't remember for sure either. Too many painkillers, maybe. Wasting no time, the group edges toward the main bridge hatch. A faint red light indicates its locked status as the marine medtech approaches. She slings the incinerator, careful to avoid its hot blue primer flame, and scowls as the panel refuses her attempts to open it electronically. "Come on, boys, heave to." She steps back with an air of authority as the males move in again. At the rear of the pack, Healy and Mina face the long dark hallway aft. They can easily imagine any of these doors whisking open, something black and terrifying rushing into the hall. But nothing comes. Schabowski stands close to them, feeling as though he might just want to arm himself after all. "What's the matter, fellas?" Patwardhan teases, when their efforts fail to budge the door. "We could try to go around, back through the romper room and up the other corridor. There's a nasty acid spill in there, don't you remember, Booths?" [Booths] Booths releases the breath he didn't realise he'd been holding when Patty up and assumed command again. He really wasn't cut out to lead anybody. As he stood facing the immobile door he remembered how the creatures had cut the power to everything when they had begun their assault and herding. As Patty's voice reaches him, he can't help but shudder visibly. His voice is a little shaken. Its all well and good to talk about going to hell, especially if you've been there already, but going there is an entire thing entirely. "Yeah. I remember." And his eyes unfocus. Rather then beingg drawn back to relatively early in the mission, finding the then acid spill, the shotgun scorings and a single shotgun shell, his mind was drawn back to his desperate hand to hand battle against these alien beings. Caught in a bear hug he remembers bringing his shotgun between the insectile body and himself, and pulling the trigger. The roar of a smartgun assaults his ears, the sharp stench of acid, ozone and propellant... Booths snaps out of it with a sharp breath. Something is stinging his eyes. He raises a hand to wipe away sweat, and possibly a tear. "I remember it was where we first got an idea of something being really wrong on this flying piece of rubbish." He pulls himself together. He doesn't feel the burning anymore, that constant feeling of potence, the feeling the psychologists had written off as dedication. "We'll need to go back a ways." With that the wounded, mentally as well as physically, marine turns his back to the door. [Gonzales] "Damn it, Booths," muttered Gonzales. "I forgot that they stuck to the walls and shit. And I was almost not creeped out by this damn place." He tried, unsuccessfully, to repress a cold shudder that rippled through him. His eyes darted all around, from ahead, to the acid-pockmarked flooring, to the ceiling, then back again as he tried to keep himself from shivering in the frostiness of the ship's confines. Ahead of the group, he could see the large hole in the floor decking. "Did you do that?" he asked, indicating the hole with the muzzle of his rifle and posing the question to Booths. "Hey," says Beaudreaux, standing about halfway down the starboard passage, as something catches her eye. Healy looks sharply at where her lieutenant's flashlight is pointed. "What is it?" someone asks. Schabowski steps toward the jamb of one of the doors further down the hall. It's something very small and bright. He takes it into hand, loose ends of a silver thread danging. Dog tags, transparent impact plastic. He reads out the name on the tag without thinking, without knowing what it would mean to them. "Vitelli." He says it to rhyme with "Italy," but it's close enough. A tear streaks down Patwardhan's face, and she utters something that doesn't make perfect sense. "It's in the cryo bay, one deck down." Her expression sinks with some inner confession. "The tracker's picking up a heartbeat." Booths takes a look at the device, limping in to prove to himself that the thing could be so badly aligned that it would pick up a single heartbeat from twenty meters. Everything's off, he sees right away. RF is plus eighty, ambient filters are overblown. No wonder he isn't picking up residual troop movement, the whole f-cking scanner's so finely-tuned at such an odd range that everything else is practically muted. But how could the Rodina tech have known? "It's one of the colonists," Patwardhan continues. "Sherman. Still in a cryotube. We had to leave him." She looks up at the faces around her. She had said at the first meeting with the board of directors there was no one alive here. No one to rescue. No reason to come back. Blow up the Korea, she had said. But it would have been murder. She turns toward a hatch marked ACCESS between the airlock and the frozen bridge door. "Open it," she says directly to Gonzales. [Gonzales] "I don't think--," he started to say as he turned towards Patwardhan, intending fully to refuse, but as he realized that he was the only fully functioning human without serious damage in the front of the party, he halted his words in midsentence and turned, slinging his rifle to free up his hands. The steel wheel that sealed the hatch was icy cold and Gonzales suddenly wished that he had gloves. Gripping the wheel firmly, he turned his head over his shoulder. "Now you all better damn well cover this doorway in case something freaky comes calling." He turned the wheel. [Schabowski] "Wait!" - cries Chris, as only a whispering man can do - "Let's think about it for a sec, ok? I don't know who this guy was" - he picks up the dogtags - "but I'm pretty sure this thing wouldn't be here if the aliens weren't close". He closes his eyes, blinks and continues - "You knew this man, right? Well, definitely we can't allow our feelings to control our moves. Anger, in small amount, can help, but going berserk because of hatred almost always leads to a failure, in our case meaning our death. Sorry to say that" - he hides his eyes behind his palm - "but right know we have to set our hearts aside. Maybe this way we'll be able to handle what's behind this door, or any other danger or ferocity we will meet - using our brains, not our feelings. If we manage to survive we'll have time to think about... the lost" - he shakes his head slowly... [Booths] Booths eyes had already dried from the last dubious tear that had made its way out of his accursed eye. This time, they did not mist over as had Patty's, when they caught sight of Vito's tags. Emotionless eyes turn on Schabowski, defying Schabowski to call him angry or berserk. Currently, Booths was neither. "He's already dead anyway." He indicated the wheel with the muzzle of the pulser. "Gonzo, keep it turning." He hitched the rifle a pit, settling it into a just as alert, but more comfortable pose. "We've got to go through one way or another, Schabowski, and right now, we're going through here. They'll find us sooner or later anyway." A grizzly, strangely expectant, smile that does not touch the eyes plays across his lips. "Know what a jihad is, Bowski? Its a holy war or path. That's what we are fighting. We are fighting for our lives, not vengeance, land, goods, or water. We are fighting to prove that we are meaner and stronger then those black alien motherfuckers. There is nothing holier than that." He gave a good look at the assembled little group. "The old Afghani have an islamic term that they made famous more then eight score years ago, for what I am. Mujahedin." He took his grip of the grip of the rifle, and patted his injured side. "I'm already dead, and living on borrowed time. Me and Patty both are. So you better hope that we are not angry, not berserk, because no matter what, I'm here to fight for your civilian hide, spending my life for you. There is nothing worse then a berserker that knows that he is already dead." The creepy smile had dissappeared during this even toned recital of truth. Now his eyes burned with the same zeal as they had before, not tainted by insanity, nor grief, or even self pity. "Now turn that wheel, marine." [Healy] Healy shudders at Booths' self analysis, suddenly feeling a lot less safe (well at least losing any false notion of safety she felt before). Slowly she begins moving back up the corridor towards the bridge hatch, nervously watching the corridor behind the small group. Healy's eyes dart from the floor, to the roof, to the walls, to the closed hatches down the hallway, each one threatening to hide something horrid. The pulse rifle in Healy's hands starts feeling a lot heavier. "Booths... Patwardhan... do you want anyone to stay out here and watch the corridor while you're in the bridge?" [Gonzales] Alex barely bit back a smart-ass "aye aye Skipper" as he kept to what he was doing. But Christ, the ice that had fouled up the works of the main door that they had wrenched open to get inside the Korea had done a number on this one. His hands beginning to hurt from not only the cold, but his iron grip on the wheel, he continued the task at hand. The group jostles a bit, taking up better positions as Gonzales pulls the hatch wheel. Everybody wants to be ready for whatever's on the other side of the door, and it shows on their wide-eyed faces. An icy sheen flakes away as the hatch swings slowly to one side, revealing a partially-lit room beyond. Around a circular padded ladderwell, small imbedded floor lights are glowing, flickering, as if newly activated after a long dormancy. Some are burned out, depressingly dark like bad Christmas bulbs. Something in the wall is whirring to life. Everyone's flashlights are moving frantically. But it's only the air conditioning. Already warmer air is blowing into the corridor. More lights are starting to glow in the hallway, in the doorsills. The door control panels now gleam brighter. The ghost ship is coming alive. [Healy] Healy looks up at the hall lights as the dull halogen brown glow starts to appear. She lowers the barren of the rifle a little, suddenly a little more sure of herself. "Could the science team have gotten the power on again? Chris, where in the ship would they need to be to get her running again?" [Sato] Sato looks somewhat relieved as the power goes on. He looks up from the motion tracker and takes a look at the ship. "Could the science team have gotten the power on again? Chris, where in the ship would they need to be to get her running again?", asks Healy. "Yeah, it must be them.", replies Sato. "If they bothered with the power, I bet they'll try to pull logs from the ship's computer. Either that, or they found a door they couldn't open with the power down like we did." Schabowski doesn't have the answer they were hoping for. "Any engineering station along a main power duct will have full control of the ship's systems. There could be dozens of terminals on a ship this size." With Booths' help, Sato quickly gets the tracker back to a normal setting, but in the process the heartbeat signal vanishes. Not because the mystery-man-in-cryo died, but because the fine-tuning required to capture such a signal was excluding anything that might really be threatening. The tracker goes back to an inert, rhythmic ultrasound pulse, picking up no moving signals. "All clear, thirty meters?" Patwardhan asks. Booths nods, and gives the device back to the engineer. Patwardhan leads the way into the small chamber. There are locker doors, some opened and revealing square plastic storage drawers. There are holes in the floor, acid-burns, deep and obvious, burned clear down through to C deck. "Go." Patwardhan tells Gonzales. Feeling outranked, he takes the first climb down the ladder to C deck. Booths stands over him with pulse rifle at the ready. Gonzales disappears into the room below, moving out of their sight. "It's clear." The others follow, entering a room almost identical to the one above. However here the walls are blackened as if by explosives, embossed with charcoal spirals, the residue of a ship fire caused by explosives, from the look of things. Huge chunks of the lockers have been ripped off and now lay in pieces on the deck. EMERGENCY SEAL - PRIORITY OVERRIDE reads a green electronic marquee on the room hatch. This door won't budge for anyone but the captain of this ship. A yellow light gleams like an eye on the door control console. A white blot appears on Sato's tracker screen. The accompanying beep alerts them all to it immediately. Booths does the interpreting. "It's moving. Twenty meters aft. Heading this way." [Gonzales] A white blot appears on Sato's tracker screen. The accompanying beep alerts them all to it immediately. Booths does the interpreting. "It's moving. Twenty meters aft. Heading this way." Gonzales moves past the Rodina cops and staff and kneels beside the door, peering out from the left-hand side to better see the ladder that they had just descended. "Great," he muttered to himself. "The damn things waited till we got ourselves in a dead end. Great plan, guys. Fucking terrific." He stopped his muttering to check his rifle, making sure that his grenade mag was full, as was his ammo clip. Still muttering curses under his breath, he braced the rifle to his shoulder, ready to fire at the first black slimy scaly thing that got in his path. "You want to start trying to open that door, there, Schabooski?" [Healy] Healy sweeps the barrel of her rifle back up the steel ladder and looks up at what little of the room above she can still see. "You guys see what you can do to get that door open, I'll keep the ladder covered." Healy checks her footing on the ragged floor and returns her gaze to the ladder, trying to believe she is ready for whatever hell may choose to throw at her today. [Gonzales] "Hey Sato, what's happening with that tracker, huh? What's going on?" asked Gonzales as he ventured a peek outside the door, rifle to his shoulder. [Sato] "They're are two objects coming towards us slowly, about twenty meters away.", says Sato to the others, speaking quietly as if whatever was on the other side of that sealed door could actually hear them. "There's no way I can get this door open before they reach it, are we sitting tight or what?". [Booths] The peculiar reticience and lassitude which had affected Booths for the last few moment seemed to be wearing off. Whether it was delayed shell-shock, or simply a reaction to the place which had previously cliamed most of his comrades in such a horrendous manner, who knew. The faraway look in his eyes dissappeared, and they began to focus. He remained quiet however. He adjusted the grip on his rifle. "Anyone got some gum?" [Healy] Healy frantically darts her eyes back and forth between the top of the ladder and Gonzales standing at the door. The dull heavy sound of Schabowski banging on the pipe startles her for a moment. "Well.. if anyone didn't know we were here before, you can bet they do now," she quips. [Schabowski] Chris quickly steps to the nearest pipe, while saying "Gonzo, check thru this window what's comming at us". He starts to hit the pipe to create the S.O.S signal. [Gonzales] "What's the deal Alex... what can you see?" [Alex] "A tiny window," he mutters as he still strains to peer out, trying not to alter the image by moving to look through the window at an angle.