Alarm klaxons were blaring as Denji slammed back into wakefulness. The closet-sized senior officers' mess was empty but for him, and checking his chrono only 20 minutes had passed in his impromptu nap. Leaving his lunch to congeal behind him, he shrugged on his jacket and started loping for the command deck. His shift didn't start for another half hour, but the alarm pattern the sirens were blasting made it clear that every available hand was needed.

As he ran up the corridor, the ship suddenly lurched, groaning and shuddering, and throwing Denji to the floor. He hit the ground rolling and was back up in an instant, sprinting this time. Whatever was happening, it was bad. He pelted around the curve of the ship towards Nav/Com, keying his internal comm to the shipboard frequency as he ran through the door to command.

The ship was a heavily modified Vesper, room enough for a small crew and a research team. By coincidence, the senior officers were both Serco, and the junior was an Itani, but on these deep-distance research missions race meant practically nothing, as trust in your fellows was the only thing keeping you alive. This ship, this crew, were part of the group known as suicide jockeys by those who liked them most, making blind wormhole jump after blind wormhole jump to expand the frontiers of knowledge. The all-UIT research team on board were there to analyze, probe, sample, and classify anything found on the other side. That is, unless what was found didn't want to be analyzed...

"Lieutenant Royhu, thank the Lady, take over at the helm!" Captain Rakkel was rising from the unconscious and battered form of Ensign Melnin, her grim features telling Denji all he needed to know about the severity of the situation. He hopped into the now-empty pilot's seat and returned, "Aye aye, Captain, orders?"

The captain returned to her seat at the comm. "Evade like hell, lieutenant, and get us out of here!" Denji scanned the viewport and the radar and blanched. Two small makeshift ships were dancing near the edge of radar range, at the edge of... It looked like an asteroid cluster, except that the roids were all increasing in speed towards their ship, and the readings from them were exceedingly odd. Already a few had hurtled past the ship, or, in one case, into it. He jacked into the hybrid control station and started the ship through an intricate dance out of the path of the roids.

The ship jerked again as another of the roids, a smaller one, clipped the side. Denji's eyes narrowed. The roids were following the ship, changing course to intercept! Mumbling curses under his breath, he made a quick calculation and wove the ship towards the nearest edge of the cluster, dodging increasingly lethal roids as they hurtled towards the ship.

"Permission to use the springboard, sir?" The captain paused, then nodded decisively. "Permission granted, lieutenant, enable springboard system and fire when ready." Denji fired a thought down the neural jack and heavy restraints sprang from the seats, securing him tightly in their grasp. He spared another thought for Ensign Melnin, currently being treated in a corner by a med droid, and similar restraints secured him to the wall. As they neared the edge of the cluster, he spotted a hole in the barrage of roids, and quickly boosted the ship through, closely followed by a growing mass of whizzing rocks.

"Jump destination is Sector J117BX9, lieutenant, as soon as we reach a safe speed," the captain barked out as the roids closed on them. Denji didn't bother nodding, instead fixing the destination in his thoughts as he simultaneously armed the springboard, waited a moment, and dropped it.

A collection of 200 concussion mines, tightly bound together, launched from the rear port of the ship. The leading roid was only a few hundred meters from the ship at launch; it took barely a second for it to trigger the package. Light and sound seemed to flow into one as the ship was hurled forward at astonishing speed. Denji's consciousness narrowed to an impression of pressure and grey mist for a time that could have been a second, could have been 100 years. As the mist receded and normal faculties of vision returned, he wrenched his mind into gear and jumped the ship to the designated sector, with no chance of their trail being detected at that distance. Safe, for now.

nice one, looking forward for more =)

It took a few hours of work, drifting in the blessed emptiness of space, before the ship was fit for action again. Denji and Captain Rakkel worked silently, devoting all their attentions to the task at hand, as in their line of work a disabled ship often led to a nasty death. The experimental respawn tubes were up and running back at base, but Denji had his doubts, both about their effectiveness, and about their range. Die too far out in the unknown, and you won't be coming back.

When the work was finished, the captain went to check on Melnin, leaving Denji to grill the scientists. He made his way to the aft cargo hold that housed their equipment, wondering just what they'd have for him this time. Judging from their barely controlled glee, they thought it was pretty good.

"Well, Doctor, what've you got for me?" "Oh, Denji, it's glorious, simply glorious!" The slim frame of Doctor Lehan quivered with excitement. "Our readings suggest that the cluster of objects that pursued the ship were not asteroids at all, but were rather distant cousins to the space cows!"

Denji blinked. He'd seen a few space cows in his travels, as had most of the veteran members of the deep-distance research squad, but none of them had ever been hostile, and the mass of some of the objects here easily dwarfed the largest space cow he'd ever seen. "That's...interesting, Doctor. Any thoughts as to why they attacked us?"

The Doctor brought up a vid image of the previous sector, apparently at a time a few minutes before Denji'd arrived at the helm. Highlighting the two raggedy ships near the edge, he rotated the view a few times to reorient it around different axes. "See these two ships? We've analyzed the movement of the, for lack of a better term, space buffalo, and we think we may have found something." Indicating a few formations in one of the views, he continued, "These patterns indicate that the buffalo may have been forming a defensive circle between us and the ships. They only started moving when we approached, and I'd say they were protecting those two for some reason."

Denji frowned. He was no astro-zoologist, but he was pretty certain that no such advanced herd-like behaviour had ever been seen in space cows; in fact, the cows tended to be both solitary and fairly stupid. No wonder the techies were so excited. And yet, there was still the matter of the ships.

"What can you tell me about the ships they were guarding?" "Eh? Well, there's not much to tell. Looked like a couple salvaged hulls and spare parts, mostly an Atlas base but with some Revenant and Wraith additions. Pretty standard for the type of people who make it out here, really."

Thanking the Doctor and his team, Denji made his way back to Nav/Com to report to the captain, stopping on the way to grab a stimulant pack. With Melnin out of commission for a bit, there was no room for the increasing exhaustion that had been plaguing Denji for the last several weeks. Feeling slightly more energized, he arrived at the command deck to find Captain Rakkel at the comm, going over the logs.

"How's Melnin?" "He'll be fine, just a bit of a bump on the head from the first collision. What did the Doctor have to say?"

Denji filled her in, adding his own thoughts at the end. She sat in thought for a moment, digesting it, then turned back to the comm.

"Well, lieutenant, from the comm logs during the incident, it seems like there were some transmissions between the ships and the herd, but only one way, and it's either encrypted or it really does just sound like gibberish. Has the Doctor uploaded the data yet? Ah, good, he has. Yes, the scans of the two ships show their jump drives are heavily corroded, good for in-system hops, but a wormhole would destroy it if it were even able to activate. I've marked the location on our charts, and we'll include it in our report. No way we're going back in there with this ship. We'll let the full recon team handle it."

As he went to jack in at the helm, Denji breathed a sigh of relief. He hadn't thought the captain would want to go back in there, but this far into an exploration mission, you could never tell. Humming a little marching tune under his breath, he shot new coordinates down the feed into the computer, fired up the engines, and set out looking for the next blind jump among the stars.

First couple installments, feedback is welcomed, hopefully more to come if you like it. :)

Like. More. Spacecows made me laugh so hard:) Best thing in a week!!

Hort

"evade like hell" lmao nice

also you mean to say they are flying a modified missile?

Drat, I thought Stingray sounded familiar, now I remember why. Edited to Vesper; it's intended to be a ship that no longer necessarily exists. Thanks for the catch, and I'll hopefully write more soon.

As far as Denji Royhu could see, the gray slime covered every inch of the ship. While it hadn't been able to penetrate the xirite armouring, all colour had been stripped from the hull, and he wasn't going to touch the stuff until the techs had gotten a good look at it. Grumbling to himself, he shouldered his small pack and strode through the bay towards the research entrance on the far side.

It had been four months since they'd last stepped off the ship (not counting the unfortunate incident with the darksider who'd decided a game of hide and seek on the outer hull would be fun), and Denji wasn't surprised to see that Rakkel and Melnin were already out of sight, probably to go enjoy the luxuries of bathing facilities not reeking of burnt hair and plasma. The research team promised to be more careful with samples in the future, and after they'd been forced to scrub it clean themselves he was sure they'd keep their word.

"Lieutenant Denji Royhu of deep-distance team R1732 reporting in." He handed the desk sergeant the data disk with his report, exchanged the customary pleasantries, and finally headed off to his quarters. Sikan Orbital wasn't the largest station by any means, nor the most luxurious, but he had a modest suite to himself with a view of the local roid cluster out a small port. More importantly, he had a non-regulation bed that he'd had made to his particular preferences. On the rare occasion that anyone came to visit, they always remarked that it would've been cheaper just to sleep on the floor with a rock under his head, but he just chuckled and shook his head and offered them a softer chair.

While it was run out of an Axia Technology Corp. research station, the deep-distance research project was actually funded and directed by quite a few of the larger corporations, including TPG and Valent, and operated under the UIT flag. Its official name was the Deep-Space Exploration and Wormhole Discovery Project, but everyone called it the Jellen Project, after its most famous pilot, who was the first to vanish during a blind wormhole jump. Since its inception, it drew in the brave, the reckless, and fairly often the insane to pilot ships into the great unknown for science (and, eventually, profit), at first just from UIT, but eventually from all of known space. The pay was good, the prospects endless, and not everyone minded that they might never come back.

Denji was, if not entirely sane, certainly among the sanest of the pilots there. Having seen too many lives chewed apart by the struggles between Itani and Serco, he had mustered out of the Serco armed forces and set out in search of more space. Granted, he hadn't meant it exactly like this, but the prospects of exploration and discovery kindled hope inside him, hope of escaping the wreckage of lives in his past, hope of finding something out in the deep black that sang to him as the blood between red and blue sang to his old comrades. Each jump held, for him, the prospect of peace, not with the universe without, but with the universe within.

Struggling up from restless, chaotic dreams, Denji rolled over to see a message waiting for him on his comm. "Hey, Denji." It was Doctor Lehan, in front of a group of unsettlingly nervous techs. "When you get this could you head down to the bay? We've finished our analysis of the goo, and, well, we'd prefer to wait until you're here to start removing it. Lehan out."

"It's always something..." Deciding to skip his shower for now, Denji pulled on the slightly bulky medium-grade biotainment suit that was a relic from a mission several years ago (the only other lasting relic from that mission was the outright ban of anything resembling a worm on Sikan Orbital), having judged from the techs' level of jitters on the comm that it would probably come in handy. Slipping out into the corridor and palming his door lock, he headed down towards the docking bay, wondering just what he'd gotten himself into this time.

What has he gotten himself into this time?
More!

I'm working on the next installment, watch this space for developments...

Denji Royhu surged into consciousness, sitting bolt upright and tearing IV-needles out of his access points. It took him a moment to orient himself, until his groggy mind put together that he was in a hospital bed. Judging from the austere building style, he was in a Serco hospital, but he couldn't remember having gotten there at all. A nurse came in with a cart full of nasty-looking instruments, and Denji breathed a sigh of relief when she trundled it over to the room's other occupant. This was quickly followed by a gasp as he realized that his roommate was none other than Captain Rakkel, and she was in far worse shape than he. Before he could ask the nurse what was going on, though, a doctor came in and sat next to his bed.

"Ah, good, you're finally awake! My name is Doctor Protala, your surgeon. You were in pretty poor shape when you came in, but your repairs have progressed nicely, and we should have you out of that bed and back on your feet in a few days."

"Wha..." Denji cleared his throat to smooth his raspy voice, and tried again. "What happened? Where is this? When, er, how long have I been out? And how is Captain Rakkel?"

"All in good time, Mr. Royhu, all in good time. First we must run a few more tests, shouldn't take a moment..." Protala started pressing buttons and reading data off Denji's medi-display, humming absently to himself as he fiddled with a few settings, before turning back to Denji.

"Now then, to answer your questions, Ms. Rakkel there is in critical but stable condition. She should make a recovery, though some of her implants will need to be enhanced to make up for loss of normal function. You have been unconscious for about two weeks, ever since you were brought here. Here is Pyronis Border, the nearest station with appropriate medical facilities to Arta Caelistis. And as for what happened... Well, we were hoping you could shed some light on that. You see, you and Ms. Rakkel are the only two survivors of the incident. You were the only Serco in the area, and your implants helped keep you alive until help arrived. What do you remember?"

Denji sat in shocked silence for a moment. All dead, all his friends, comrades... "The last thing I remember is heading towards the docking bay to help the techs out with my ship. The grey goo was all over it. No, wait, I think..."

The sudden rush of memories pressed Denji back onto his bed, biting his lip to keep from crying out. The doctor seemed to be getting a good show from the display, though he seemed to be intrigued rather than worried.

"Fascinating! I've never seen anything quite like this before, most interesting! I take it your memory of the incident has returned?"

Denji shot the doctor a miserable look. "Yeah, it has. I'll tell you what you want to know, but then I'll need your help assembling a proper death offering for my friends."

"Of course. I'll need to record this for my report, though. Apparently the UIT is not very pleased with the lack of information they've been getting from us, and this should help get them off our backs."

"Alright. As I said, I was on my way down to the docking bay, when the alarms started going off..."

what a cliffhanger...
/me waits impatiently for the next installment

When the alarms started to go off, Denji Royhu was initially confused. He paused on his way down to the docking bay, racking his brains to figure out what that particular klaxon meant. He didn't think he'd heard it since first arriving at the station, many years ago, but when it hit him he dropped the helmet of his biotainment suit and pelted down the corridor as fast as his legs could take him.

Cursing under his breath, he sprinted into the docking bay to the sight of pilots boiling out of every possible entryway, heading for the section of the bay reserved for warships. Whipping his head back and forth, he finally spotted Doctor Lehan, over by the research ship, still covered in goo. Moving across the flow, he struggled his way over to the group of techs.

"Lehan! What the hell is going on?"

"The damn goo had a tracker embedded in it! It's only been transmitting at long intervals, or we'd've caught it before. A goddamn army of darksiders and pirates just jumped in, firing on everything in sight. Hundreds of the buggers!"

Biting off even more expletives, Denji started peeling out of his biotainment suit as fast as he could. He gestured at the ship.

"Anything else we should know about the goo, in case any of them out there have more of it?"

"Well, from what we can tell, it seems to be mildly explosive, but only with a catalyst of some kind, and Del'Noran here thinks it needs a ton of heat, far more than you'd get with most ship-mounted blasters, even. We were gonna run some more tests on it when the tracker transmitted and all hell broke loose."

Finally free from his gear, Denji waved them back to their work on the goo and turned to follow the stragglers towards the combat-prep area. It'd been an awfully long time since he'd piloted a one-man ship, but it looked like they were going to need every able pilot out in defense of the station. He jogged through to the hectic combat side of the bay, passing a comm station blatting out the call to battle stations. A glance at the screen in mid-stride told him all he needed to know about the numbers they were going up against. Swearing didn't do the situation justice.

His somewhat dusty old-model SVG was up against a wall, halfway down the bay, and his path took him past his shipmates, already suited up and climbing into their ships. A quick wave around his eyebrows satisfied the formalities, and he went on to do his own prep.

"...just have to hold the pirates at bay until they arrive. Stick to formation, cover your wingmates when they head back to repair, don't let them get through to..." Denji switched the comm in his flight helmet to his assigned channel, cutting off the directions being given by flight control. Not being a military station, most of the pilots here weren't experienced fighters, but they all had some basic combat skills. Rushing through his pre-flight check, he keyed the comm.

"Royhu here. Almost ready to fly. What's our status?"

Captain Rakkel's voice crackled into his helmet. "Reinforcements have been called, but they're gonna take awhile to get here. Our wing is first defense, we strike the bastards as hard as we can. Lifting in 60."

As former military members, Denji, Rakkel, Melnin, and the handful of other Serco and Itani in the program had been assigned to a single wing together, as trained pilots were far more efficient together than mixed in with the rest. Granted, nobody had ever expected to see any action requiring them, but the UIT are sticklers for contingency plans. Considering the current circumstances, Denji couldn't very well blame them.

His flight check complete, and with Rakkel's "Go!" ringing in his ears, Denji powered up his Vulture's engine and soared out through the one-way force screen to join up with his wingmates. As he passed into vacuum, he saw for the first time the force massed against them, and, jaw set, flipped off his safeties and boosted out.