The Outer Rim Braves Chapter 1: Excursion

A beacon of hope for a shattered people

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Isaac took long, careful breaths in a bid to stifle panic as he stepped into the darkness. He abandoned any hope of igniting the twin helmet lamps above his visor. Their light reflected off the dust wafting around the desolate hallway, blinding him. The small mercy granted by the overhead emergency lighting was dashed by what it revealed: the desiccated corpses of long-dead marines slumped in front of blood-spattered metal walls. The bodies lined both sides of the double-wide hall. Their weaponry was ancient, and their white unarmored first gen suits bore the markings of the failed First Expedition: a green and purple triangle behind a downward pointed gladius. Isaac was still uncertain that whatever got them wouldn't get him and his team too.

From the insertion team, Isaac took an escort to search for a lone reactor core still active on this abandoned battleship. The rest of the crew searched for desperately needed supplies. He would have gone with them, but they had little time before their only Maintenance Excursion Unit would run out of fuel. The core was just as vital to keeping the lifeboat going as anything else. If they hoped to survive on the outer rim, they needed a dependable source of power.

He was escorted by his own detachment of marines, a portion of what few made it off the colony ship Endurant with the rest of the Phage survivors. The thought of hundreds of thousands of lives lost because of infestation, in such a short amount of time made Isaac shudder.

Staring at the dead bodies as the group traveled down the hall, Isaac turned his helmet radio up from the holographic display on the underside of his wrist. "Looks like a nasty way to go."

"It was quick. Lucky bastards." Erik's grizzled voice boomed over the radio. He was the marine taking point. Erik's metal-plated suit was charcoal with a thick red stripe down the middle of his helmet, signifying him as squad leader.

"Looks like they each took a shot square to the skull. Execution?" Ivar's baritone voice followed up. The marine to Isaac's left. His suit was like Erik's but lacking a red stripe, a private new to the unit.

"Nah. They all had their rifles. Unless you're saying they just stood there and took it." Arne called out. He was the marine to Isaac's right. His suit had a thick green stripe—a tech marine, the one who was to help Isaac with the potential reactor extraction.

Still moving down the hall, they passed by an open sliding door. Inside was a dusty but unbloodied living area. The four stared inside as they passed. Isaac's stomach growled as he looked, fighting the urge to seek out nourishment. Food was scarce and he hadn't eaten in days. The hope that the scavenging team would be successful in finding nutrients was the only thing keeping him going.

"Maybe they all went mad and shot each other." Ivar piped up, breaking the pregnant silence.

"They all gathered in a circular formation, and squared up a perfect shot straight to the dome, then everyone each somehow pulled the trigger at the exact same time?" Arne's skepticism wafted over the radio.

"It's possible." Ivar responded with a bittersweet tone.

"C'mere, stand across from me, we'll test this theory." Arne reached behind Isaac and smacked Ivar on the shoulder.

"N—no I don't think—"

"Cut it out." Erik's voice was partly irritated, partly angry. "If I get my ass blown off because you two are fondling each other, I'm going to be pissed."

"Sorry sarge." Arne called out.

Isaac felt left out by the banter. The marines tended to keep to their own clique, and ignored those they protected in the same way a shepherd didn't bond with the sheep. His brother, Jakob, was the same way. The minute he joined the military, Isaac's brother became cold and distant. Aside from just losing his home ship, Isaac's only living family member treating him like a guest was among the bitterest moments of his life. Being among this interaction was like reopening an old wound.

After the sergeant's scolding, the four continued down the macabre corridor in silence, the marines scanned their surroundings with measured motion.

"How far are we?" Erik impatiently broke the silence.

Isaac flipped over his arm and pulled up a blueprint of the ship. "On the other side of the bulkhead at the end of this hall is a tram station. If we follow that line, we'll end up at the second bank of reactors. The second slot was detected active."

"And if we're lucky there will be a tram waiting. Not hoofing it three klicks would be nice." Arne called out, hopeful.

"Would you know how to run the tram?" Isaac cocked an eyebrow, impressed.

"Nah, I'd figure it out. Go slow, go fast, stop. It's not like controlling a reactor array."

Isaac smiled. "Even those you can wing if you really try hard enough. Or don't mind getting a bit of exposure. To explosions." He radiated a smile and chuckled at his own joke. Manipulating a reactor array was a precision operation that required dozens of techs to get it right or risk a catastrophic failure that could result in the loss of an entire ship. Luckily the group was only after an individual isolated core, or this entire trip would be fruitless.

Arne choked in surprise. Isaac leaned forward and gave a knowing smirk, to let Arne in on the gag. The marine let off a deep belly laugh. Then Isaac couldn't help but partake and the group's icy demeanor towards him eased. But Erik pivoted at the hip and cast a baleful glance toward Arne, who snapped his mouth shut the moment the two marines locked eyes. Just like that, Isaac was secluded once more.

They reached the end of the hall which opened to a wide and tall room, a pneumatic delivery depot. Huge spherical carts lined tracks leading into clear tubes embedded into the wall. The diameter of each tube was several times the height of even the tallest of the marines. This ship was so large that it needed to move things around with internal mass drivers. Isaac let off a scoff in disbelief. He knew this ship was massive but didn't grasp its scale until then.

The bulkhead was at the end of the unlit depot. A small slit in the two cruiser-sized armor plates that composed the bulkhead, emitted a dull violet glow from beyond. As the group got closer, they spotted a mass piled on the deck, blocking the slit, several meters high. And the gap in the bulkhead was vast, more than twice as wide as the hallway the group just departed. The marines raised their rifles, and the squad leader readied his light machine gun.

Closing in, they found the mass to be a pile of dead bodies stacked higher than the group was tall. Bullet holes riddled the corpses. The bulkhead itself was peppered with impacts and char spatter, indicative of kinetic round and laser fire impacts.

"How about these guys, did they all decide to jump in a pile and shoot themselves?" Arne harassed Ivar.

"Well, no, I don't see any guns anywhere. Maybe the guys that got headshots did thi—"

"Climb over and scout it out." Erik cut him off and shook his head in disappointment as he gave the order to Ivar.

"Yes sarge." Ivar deflated and began to scale the mountain of dead bodies.

Isaac shivered as the private's hands and feet sunk into the mountain of dried, papery flesh. This section of the ship must have decompressed shortly after this happened; these bodies hadn't decomposed, just dried out. There was no atmosphere in any of the sections of the ship they'd traveled besides the one long hallway they took to get here.

As Ivar pushed forward and skirted the pile to see what was on the other side of the bulkhead, he shouted in a panic. Shocked by the response, Isaac retreated, and the marines readied their weapons. Ivar's weight caused the mountain of bodies to shift and slide towards him. The motion was so sudden that it carried Ivar away in the corpse avalanche. He tumbled end-over-end with the mummified corpses, launching mountains of dead skin flakes up into the air before they dropped back down like damp bark.

"Have a nice trip?" Erik goaded Ivar.

"See you in the fall." Arne followed up, not skipping a beat as he stepped forward to help Ivar, gun trained forward through the bulkhead, ready for threats.

Isaac followed Arne and the two began to extract the private from the mummies. Erik followed and swept his gun around, searching for threats.

"I hate this. It's too quiet." Erik muttered as he scanned by pivoting his hips, gun aligned with his movement.

Finally, the two pulled Ivar out of the corpse pile and the group moved toward the tram station almost a half a klick away from the bulkhead. The marines were on high alert as their defense vector became far more complicated. This section of the ship was a huge cityscape, complete with paved roads, tall concrete and glass buildings, even old billboard advertisements were plastered along the highways suspended from the ceiling far above them. Mummified leaves remained on the trees and shrubs of the planters that dotted the stone walkway to the tram station.

Along the path, scattered around them were more corpses, all shot dead and sprawled atop dried pools of blood where they died. Isaac wondered what did this. Was it a mutiny?

"Contact bearing 042 far." Arne spoke with intensity, grabbed Isaac by the collar and pulled both of them to a knee, into cover behind a stone planter.

The other two marines took cover and trained their weapons in the direction, slightly off to the right of their position. A shadowy figure stood upon a raised platform overlooking a set of terraces beyond the tram station, pivoting at the hips with a long gun in the violet rays of the signage above.

"Alucar." Erik spoke in a hushed tone.

Isaac gasped, terrified. Alucar were the reason why AGI, artificial general intelligence—strong AI, was permanently banned among the flotilla. They were the only explanation for who stacked all these bodies. And the bipedal drone on the platform was suspect number one.

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