The Derelict

[Ismene (Quirk)]

Unknown Space
0142 Hours
8 hours since departure



The derelict ship loomed into view, shadow darkening the viewscreen. It was large, a frigate of some kind, with a boxy body that narrowed into a long tail that gave it a vaguely piscine look. The hull was scored with laser fire and the ravages of space debris, but almost completely intact. Near the tail, the ship wore what Darth Noor took to be the remains of a blue Republic insignia and some smeared marks that might have once been its designation. Both looked as though they’d melted, imprecise and impossible to read.

Noor glanced at her crew, their faces outlined in the red auxiliary lights that had come on when she’d turned off the engines. The Calumny was still and silent except for their breathing and the faint, dying hum of the life support. A quiet ship in space was never good. Quiet meant problems, and they had plenty.

“It’s a Heraklon-class,” Vette said softly, still staring out the viewscreen. They’d been speaking in whispers since the derelict had pinged on their sensors, although Noor wasn’t sure why. “Looks Republic, but old. Not kitted out for frigate duty.”

“A freighter, then,” Quinn said, and even he seemed more subdued and guarded than usual. He peered out at it with his hands clasped behind his back. “Promising.”

“I don’t like it,” Noor murmured. “Something seems odd.” The truth was, she had a bad feeling about the wreck. Damned if she was going to admit it, though.

Her crew shifted around her, equally uncomfortable. No one spoke, which meant they had the same misgivings. To find a salvageable ship out here when they most needed one, deep in unknown space, was so convenient that either the Force was guiding them or something else was at work. She was too wary to believe in coincidence.

“No signs of life,” Vette said. “No radiation signatures, no debris, no entry marks, no lights. No one’s been on this ship in a long time.”

“With all due respect, my lord, what choice do we have?” Quinn, being practical. Noor had noticed that his instinct for self-preservation was nearly infallible. She could trust that, if she could trust nothing else. She fought the urge to sneer.

He was right in any case. They’d been shunted out of Chiss space after a dogfight had taken out an engine and reduced their stabilizers to fused blocks of alusteel. Vette and Two-Vee had managed to put out the electrical fires and save the auxiliary power generators, but otherwise they were dead in the water and out of communications range. A long, cold decline into hypothermia and asphyxiation was a bad way to die, and they had been staring at the likelihood head-on before the derelict had drifted into range.

“Very well,” Noor said. “Vette, mag-grapple us to the hull. Quinn, suit up - you’re with me. TooVee, see if you can find a Heraklon-class schematic in the databanks.”

Her crew scattered. Noor followed Quinn into the cargo hold, where they struggled into their external suits. Noor pulled the helmet over her head with a grimace, her peripheral vision and hearing instantly impaired. She clicked it into place. Her own breathing filled her ears until she switched the suit on and external sound filtered in. Lights flickered on slowly in the overlay as the suit pressurized.

“It’s been some time since I partook in a salvage operation, my lord,” Quinn said, voice coming in through the helmet speakers. Not just making conversation, that wasn’t his style. He was wondering why she had chosen him. “I would have thought Vette better suited to the task.”

“A lot of things can go wrong on an unknown vessel,” she said only, pausing to meet his gaze.

His brow furrowed as he puzzled out whether her words were a threat or not. Good. Let him wonder. She had no desire to allow him any feelings of security. They finished the last of their preparations in silence.

The Calumny shuddered underfoot, which meant Vette was reeling in the mav-grapple. The shuddering stopped and a heavy clunk rumbled through the floor.

“We’re here,” Vette announced. “Door to door service, courtesy Vette’s taxi service.”

“Excellent.”

[Ismene (Quirk)]

Hour 9


Noor’s helmet lamp illuminated a very narrow section of the corridor in front of her. Everything else was darkness. The silence coming in through her helmet was overwhelming.

They’d managed to short out the external airlock on the freighter and wrestled the door open. The interior airlock opened more easily, and Noor was startled to find that the gravitational field was still working inside. They could walk instead of float, which suited her just fine. It didn’t really make sense, though, and Quinn was still puzzling over it.

“The hold is still somewhat pressurized as well,” he continued, sounding bemused, “unless the suit readings are incorrect. The ship’s seals must be quite good.”

“Scanner shows fairly decent hull integrity,” Vette’s voice came through their suit short-range, metallic and distorted. “I don’t see any damage to the engines out here. You might try to see if anything still works. Light and breathable atmo would make this a cakewalk.”

“To the bridge, then,” Noor said. “Perhaps we’ll get more information about what happened to this ship.”

Their footsteps were muffled as they headed towards the front of the ship. The corridor was empty under their helmet lights, shadows flickering as they walked. Noor’s sense of unease was stronger now, something that shivered just past the edges of her Force-awareness. She half-expected something to be revealed by their lights as they walked forward. She wasn’t the only one. Beside her, Quinn rolled his shoulders, hand by his blaster.

“Alright?” She asked him.

“Of course, my lord. This ship is a little eerie, that’s all. I feel as though we’re being watched, which is patently ridiculous. I-”

Noor cut him off with a fast movement, placing a hand on his shoulder and jerking him to a halt. They both froze, Quinn looking at her with a question on his face.

An extra footstep echoed from behind them, exactly where it shouldn’t have.

Noor spun to look, light and shadow dancing crazily with the abrupt movement. Nothing but darkness as far as her light shone, and a crawling feeling up her spine. Her Force senses pressed the desire to flee on her, although she could feel nothing palpable but Quinn’s unease.

“Eerie,” Noor repeated. “I’m in agreement with you there, Quinn.”

“Old ships,” the Captain offered weakly. “Sound does all sorts of strange things. Acoustic distortion...”

He was scrambling to reassure himself as much as provide some kind of explanation. Noor felt no need to reply.

The bridge was dark and somewhat hazy, a fine and unidentifiable fog settled over the station and controls. It swam in the fuzzy beam of their lamp lights, sluggishly eddying in their current. She fought the impulse to try and clean her helmet’s viewplate.

“We’re picking up some substance in the air,” Quinn reported back to Vette, as Noor looked around. “Smoke, perhaps. Very fine.”

“Let’s see if I can find the power,” Noor murmured to herself, heading to the navigator’s station. Her gloved hands trailed over the buttons, all in their recognizable places. Except...She frowned.

“Quinn? What language is this?”

He walked over, peered over her shoulder for a long moment. Bewilderment resonated between them.

“That’s very odd,” he said at last. “It’s not in any language per se. Those look like random basic letters. See? This is almost a word, but they've melted or smeared, or...” He frowned. “None of these words are legible, my lord. Perhaps acid...?”

“Well, the startup sequence shouldn’t be terribly different than The Calumny’s,” Noor said. She began pressing buttons, not entirely sure what she was doing.

From deep in the ship’s interior, she heard a heavy click and a low growl like an Akk dog winding up. Both she and Quinn flinched and turned. The engine engaged and came to life with an unsteady whine. Lights blinked, flickered and finally stayed on, and the reassuring hum of air being blown through the ship ducts eased the tomb-like silence.

Noor sighed, surprised at how relieved she was now that there was light to see by.

“Too bad,” Vette said. “I thought that might have worked.”

“Hang on,” Quinn said, confused. “It did work. Perfectly, in fact. The lights are on, life support on full blast. I’m showing an increase in air pressure as we speak.”

“Really?” Even distorted, Noor could hear the surprise in Vette’s voice. “I’ve got a view of the bridge from here and it still looks dark to me.”

“Tinted viewscreen?” Quinn suggested. “I hear they used to use those before photochromic transparisteel became popular.”

Vette snorted.

“Right, back in the ancient days when you were still in droid charm school,” she said. “Seriously, they haven’t used tinted windows since like Alderaan was a colony.”

Quinn took an indignant breath.

“This is a decidedly odd bridge,” Noor said, interrupting the invariable tide of quips and barbs before it got started. She turned, putting the viewscreen behind her and studying the bridge with her arms folded. The basic layout was familiar, but none of the stations had actual computers. The stations were empty and pristine, as if no one had ever sat at them. No wear and tear, no initials carved into the plasteel by a bored freight-jockey, nothing but blocks of illegible buttons that appeared to do nothing.

She considered for a moment.

“I think this is a dummy vessel,” Noor said. “A training mockup for space fights, perhaps.”

“Well, the engine’s working,” Quinn said, “so some of the ship is functional. But this...you’re right. This feels more like a holofilm set than a working bridge.”

They met each other’s gazes for a moment, unwilling to admit out loud how strange the ship truly was. Tension shivered over Noor’s skin like the faint touch of unseen fingers.

“If the engine’s working, that means there are parts we can salvage. Let’s worry about the mysterious ship after we save ourselves from becoming little blue sith-cicles.” Vette’s voice made them both jump. She sounded anxious. It must be getting cold on The Calumny.

“We’ll head there now.” Noor said.

[Ismene (Quirk)]

Hour 10


“Of course engineering would have to be in the stern,” Quinn muttered as they walked down the hallway. He glanced at her, moving his head to see her beyond his helmet. “Pardon my outburst, my lord.”

Noor didn’t answer, focused on the corridor ahead of them. Featureless, but for the oddly soft grey flooring, which her feet sank into. She paused and took an experimentally heavy step, driving her heel into the floor. The floor gave slightly and stuck to the back of her boot. She pulled her foot away with a jolt of effort, disconcerted.

“Decay,” Quinn surmised, but his heart wasn’t in it. “Old rubberized tiles, no telling what they’ve been made out of.”

“I like this less and less,” Noor growled. Her hand itched to hold her lightsaber, and all her Force-driven instincts told her that this place was wrong...but she couldn’t sense why. Though the corridor hadn’t changed, it felt as though it were growing smaller and closer. The floor was soft as beach sand, making walking difficult. Noor had the irrational desire to stab it.

At the end of the corridor was a security door, which slid aside for them with an easy mechanical hum as they approached.

“Hello,” Noor said, stopping dead. “This looks like it’s seen better days.”

Beyond the door, the ship was a different place. The lights were haphazard, mostly absent, and the few that worked flickered off and on dimly in a random pattern. The spotty lighting revealed a place that must have been crew quarters, if there had ever been a crew. A bare table sat in the middle of a large common room, which broke off into smaller rooms that held bunk beds, each neatly made with almost mathematical precision. No personal effects decorated the cubbies or the floor, no hint of anyone ever calling the ship home.

Noor turned her helmet lamp back on, and after a moment so did Quinn. Her suit told her it was colder here, with less pressure.

There was no visible damage to anything, other than the strange behavior of the overheads.

“I can’t account for the light failure in this section, my lord,” Quinn said, fixating on the same problem. “Some loose wiring, perhaps.” The lights flickered like distant strobes, leaving gleaming, ghostly afterimages.

“Status?” Vette asked. “Are you entering the tail?” Noor could hear her teeth chattering over the com.

“Yes,” Noor said. “Not much further to the engine room.”

“Good. Getting a little brisk in here. Too-Vee’s schematics say you’ll want to hang the first left, then make two rights. Should be at the end of a small corridor there.”

It was a struggle to make herself step over the threshold of the security door. Beyond the instinctive unease brought on by the uncertain darkness, the feeling of being watched was stronger here. Noor’s shoulders tightened and she fought the urge to hunch them protectively.

“If this is a trap,” she said to Quinn, annoyed, “I’ll really have to hand it to the Republic for the effort they’ve gone to. Watch for anything that might be mined or wired.”

“Very good, my lord.”

The ship lights dwindled the further in they trekked. Noor couldn’t shake the feeling that something was hovering just out of the range of the light, following them. She grit her teeth and ignored it, as no matter how she swung her lamp the light showed nothing but shadow and emptiness.

A sound filtered in through Noor’s helmet, a low rumbling gurgle that sounded like a distant snarl. She and Quinn both whirled to face each other. No need to ask if he’d heard it too; the stricken look on his face spoke for him.

“Hull shifting,” Quinn murmured. “Must be.”

“Repeat...your position...?” Vette’s voice was distant and crackling, parts of her question eaten up by static. Noor tapped her helmet.

“Say again, Vette?” She said. “You’re breaking up.”

Noor waited for a moment before she repeated the question.

Only static answered.

[Ismene (Quirk)]

Hour 11


They were no longer in contact with The Calumny. Noor had tried several times to raise Vette again, with no success. She could think of no good reason why the signal had been lost; they were still well within range. She had no desire to prolong their time inside the derelict by backtracking to try and test the new communications deadzone, however: they pressed on.

Past the crew quarters, the ship finally showed some evidence of life. The next section was scattered with debris, empty shelves on the floor, chairs and lamps overturned. One lone section of lights still worked listlessly, fading in and out as if on a slow dimmer. Noor found the scene slightly reassuring, until she realized the chairs and scattered debris had fused to the floor.

She tried picking up a chair, but it was stuck. The boundary between the chair and the floor no longer existed, less as if it had melted than as if it were all one piece. The further they went, the less the debris was recognizable, until the chairs were only soft-looking lumps that were vaguely chair-like and the shelves had become soggy discolored mounds. It looked like everything had taken a fast wash of acid or extreme heat, although her suit showed no acid in the atmosphere. Noor kicked one of the melted shelves with her foot. She hissed and jumped back when it yielded, vibrating slightly.

“I’m starting to see why the place was abandoned,” she said through the dryness of her mouth. “Curious how the furniture is melted and warped, but the walls and floor are unscarred.”

“Although they are slightly affected,” Quinn reminded her, reaching down to poke the floor with a gloved finger. It dented slightly under the pressure. “Perhaps whatever melted these objects also caused the surfaces here to grow soft and tacky.”

Another growl sounded through their helmet, this one so loud and close Noor expected to see something loom out of the darkness at them. She ignited her lightsaber, the orange light of the blade warm and reassuring, and waited to meet whatever was coming. The Force hummed with anticipation.

Nothing materialized. She noticed Quinn didn’t try to stick to his “hull shifting” theory. In fact, he seemed quite content to maintain a listening silence, his face pinched with unease. Noor didn’t put her lightsaber away, either.

“The corridors are getting smaller,” Quinn said after a moment. “The ceiling is definitely lower here than behind us.”

The walls and floors had constricted, and had lost any semblance of actual corridors. The square corners had become rounded, the floor uneven and almost lumpy. A thin layer of slime covered everything. Noor reached to touch the wall and the slime trailed her gloved fingertip in a thin rope.

“Eccch.” She made a noise of disgust and wiped her gloves together to clean them.

They found the engine room at the end of the last right-hand corridor, which was completely dark save for faint yellow auxiliary lights coming from the room itself. Unlike the rest of the ship, the engine room was like any other she could have imagined, completely prosaic and normal. The engine looked exactly like an engine should, spinning gently. The hyperdrive, quiescent, lay in its own little channel, the motivator in its casing. If she didn’t turn around and look at the corridor behind her, she would think this was a regulation vessel.

The only thing that seemed different was that everything was the same color. Odd, as most parts were made out of the metal that suited them best, but not as weird as the rest of the ship. And after the rest of the ship, it was almost anticlimactic to find the engine room so normal. Quinn’s relief was palpable, although the disquiet she felt remained.

“Everything on Vette’s list is here, my lord,” Quinn said, pulling a datapad from his backpack. “We’re extremely fortunate.”

“I’ll agree with you once we’re out of here,” Noor said.

She lifted her saber and cut free the casing on the motivator as well as the stabilizers in three quick strokes. They lay on the floor, like normal engine parts, except for the fact that they began to bleed an oily grey substance. She picked them up with distaste and stuffed them in her backpack.

The ship shuddered around them. A deafening metallic squeal echoed through the walls, sounding very much like a cry of wounded fury. The floor heaved, nearly pitching them flat. Noor’s Force sense went haywire with the recognition of unknown danger.

“What-?” Quinn shouted over the noise, bewildered

“Our cue to leave,” Noor replied, pushing at him to get him to move. “Run.” He needed no encouragement.

There was no shame in fleeing something that the Force didn’t recognize; they had what they had come for. Running was awkward in their external suits, and the tacky, soft floor only made it more difficult. It was like running in a nightmare, hard to pick up her feet. The lights waxed and waned in random bursts. Behind them the squeal had become a roar, cavernous and angry.

The security door, when they reached it, refused to open. It looked less like a door now and more like a mishapen slab of melted grey plasteel, although it was still hard under Noor’s gloves.

“I don’t think the derelict wants us to leave,” Quinn panted as he faced the way they had come. “The jig, as they say, is up.”

Noor glanced back to see what had caught his attention.

The common room behind them had disappeared, replaced by another slick corridor that ended in...nothing. A blank, undefined dark space hovered where the rest of the ship used to be - Noor didn’t need to reach out with the Force to feel the cold burn of absence where something should exist.

No light penetrated the square, from which a soft humming noise emanated. Noor took a step forward, morbidly fascinated. The darkness almost hurt to look at, and made her heart pound in the kind of brain-scrambling terror she hadn’t felt since Korriban. What could create such complete, impenetrable shadow? The noise coming from it was strangely appealing.

Quinn closed his hand around her arm, unusually intrusive. She turned to him with a frown.

“Be careful, my lord,” he said. “That looks like an unhealthy place to venture.”

Noor looked down. She had stepped forward further than she had thought. She shook her head to clear it of the humming noise.

“I hate to turn my back to...whatever that is,” she said. “I have a very bad feeling. Do you see a security panel anywhere?”

“Negative, my lord. I doubt it would work even if we found one.”

“No help for it.” Noor ignited her lightsaber and plunged it into the middle seam of the door.

The derelict screamed. There was no other way to describe the sound, which was grating and high-pitched and seemed to come from all around them. The floor buckled and began to slant steeply downhill towards the nothingness, which yawned wider and impossibly closer; Noor caught Quinn instinctively with one arm before he went tumbling into nothing and held him against the door, her feet braced against the changing landscape.

“Gravity shift,” Quinn gasped, scrambling for purchase. “I didn’t feel the ship move.”

She finished cutting through the door, arms shaking with the effort, and it slid reluctantly, messily open. Grey slime made thick ropes between the sections, which Noor disintegrated with her saber. Another angry metal snarl echoed around them. They stepped through.

The scene on the other side of the door had deteriorated to a wide grey landscape, wholly unrecognizable as the interior of a ship. Everything gleamed in their lamps under a thick ooze of slime, which dripped in long ribbons from the ceiling and puddled in unhealthy-looking depressions in the floor. Smooth white objects also lay scattered across the floor, and for a moment she thought they were the remains of the furniture until she prodded one with a toe and it rolled over to reveal a bleached near-humanoid skull.

“Bugger,” Quinn said, succinctly.

“We always wind up in the most romantic places, Quinn,” Noor said, using the old Sith trick of combating nerves with sarcasm. He blinked at her then chuckled gamely. He cut himself off with a sound like a muffled hiccup, staring past her.

“Don’t look now, but I think the darkness is stalking us,” he said.

The nothingness lay just on the other side of the singed and ragged security door, no longer separated by the length of a corridor. Everything else had disappeared into the yawning blackness. The compelling hum was louder, loud enough that Noor could feel it vibrating in her bones, threatening to make her muscles relax completely.

They turned and ran together in unspoken agreement, splashing their way over the sticky floor. The ship groaned and the floor began to slant again, growing steadily steeper the further they went until Noor’s legs burned with the effort of running up the grade. Her breath came in harsh pants, the sound loud in her ears and trapped by the helmet. She could see the entrance hatch ahead, not far but growing more difficult to reach every moment the ship tilted.

Almost there. A leap would reach the door. She braced herself, gathering the Force.

Quinn stumbled and slid backwards across the floor until the stickiness caught him. Fighting the incline, he tried to scramble to his feet. Behind him the darkness had grown larger and closer, a closet door thrown wide to reveal an unnameable terror. It was nearly close enough to swallow Quinn, who couldn’t seem to gain his footing.

“My lord,” he said, meeting her eyes. His were round, the whites clearly visible. “A little help?”

She took two steps towards the entry hatch before she stopped again and turned around. It would be easy to leave him behind. She in no way wanted to get close to that empty maw. At any rate, the ship wanted him. He almost deserved that fate.

“My lord...please?” Quinn’s voice didn’t tremble although his fear was a maddening beacon through the Force.

She sighed. He was extremely competent at his job, and good help was so hard to find.

Noor leapt to Quinn and hauled him to his feet with panic-driven strength. The hum was deafening, all around them, loud enough to turn her knees soft. She snarled wordlessly and leapt again for the door, dragging him with her.

“Thank you,” he breathed, helmet mic picking up his grateful whisper. If Noor hadn’t been busy saving them both, she might have had time for disgust.

The entry hatch had started to close over, like an old wound, slime sticking the edges of the door together where they had forced it open before. Noor ignited her saber and attacked the door viciously until it slid apart, oozing and torn. She Force-threw the outer door, and it broke like bone fracturing, leaving them enough room to flee into the docking arm. The metal under their feet was reassuringly, prosaically, solid.

In the escaping atmosphere that went with them, she thought she could hear a faint, shrill shriek of rage.

[Ismene (Quirk)]

Hour 12


“...Hello?” Vette’s voice whispered from their short-range. “Anybody?” She sounded defeated and small, teeth chattering violently.

“Vette,” Noor replied. “We’re out. We have the parts. Open the entry bay door.”

“Oh, thank goodness,” Vette sighed in relief. “We’ve been trying to raise you for the last hour without luck. We’re down to about half a day’s worth of air.” She paused. “I can’t tell you how good it is to hear your voice.”

“Not half as good as it is to be out of there,” Noor said gravely, turning to stare at the ship. Faint tendrils of slime oozed from the dark doorway behind them, a little like blood.

Soon Noor and Quinn sat on the freezing floor of The Calumny’s airlock, waiting for re-pressurization and decontamination to finish up. She was exhausted, and it felt good to sit down. She could feel Quinn’s attention on her, however. It pressed on her awareness.

“Speak, if you have something to say,” she said.

“My lord, I have a theory about the derelict.”

“Go on.”

“Well, it may seem crazy. I’m sure of it, in fact. But I think that thing wasn’t really a ship.”

“A trap,” Noor said. She hesitated, knowing it was more than that but unable to put it into words.

“Not just a trap. I think it was some sort of....life form.”

Noor raised her eyebrows. Taking this as invitation, Quinn cleared his throat, now eager to explain his reasoning.

“The ship's appearance was a decoy, meant to lure us in. It wasn’t perfect, obviously, as we saw - but it was quite good. Excellent camouflage for its purposes. That would explain why things looked almost right, but not quite. It was just good enough to keep us exploring.” He paused. “Except at the end, where it started to break down. I think hunger began to interfere with its deception.”

“And the darkness?” Noor asked. “The...nothingness?” Thoughts of the dark that had nearly swallowed them both made her shiver.

“The maw itself,” he said. “What else could it have been?” Quinn hesitated. “Forgive me, my lord, but speaking of the maw...for a moment back there...I thought you were going to leave me to it.” He chuckled at the ridiculous notion, but it was forced.

“For a moment, so did I,” Noor replied, meeting his gaze directly. He paled slowly, then nodded in glum recognition of his place.

“I’m glad you reconsidered,” he said.

“I’m glad the derelict did not eat us,” she said. “As soon as The Calumny is operational again, we’re going to destroy that thing.”

“That might be a little difficult,” Vette’s voice came over the ship’s com and shattered any illusion of privacy. “It just disappeared into hyperspace.”

Noor sighed.

“I expect we should report it to Intelligence,” she said, “but I doubt they would ever believe us.”

Quinn let out a weak chuckle, shaking his head.

“If I hadn’t seen it myself, my lord, I wouldn’t have believed it either.”



Darth Noor