We’re back with a fresh new chapter of The Serpent’s Garden. Taking a little more time off from Red One and her actions in Meer Colhara to remain with Yttin-Than in Three Oceans and Sabein upon the wrecked explorer. The former has only just begun to scratch the surface of a matter bigger than he can imagine and the latter has to confront an unseen adversary aboard a dead starship. There’s a snippet of that below, with the full text at the link above. Hope you enjoy!
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Never ask for a boon too loudly, an old saying went. You might just get it. “Contact,” Sabein whispered, a faint yellow icon appearing on the scanner on her vambrace. “Just now, and it’s on this level.” Throne, it was within thirty meters. That was closer than any of the others and she still couldn’t get a good read on it. Then, like a curious animal peeking over shrubbery and ducking back out of sight, it was gone again. “Are you sure that Pledge of Sedulous Ascendancy doesn’t have anyone working here on Pillar of Silver Leaves?”
“We’ll double-check,” Elint promised. “Stand by.”
“Right,” Sabein muttered to herself. “I’ll do that.” Moments later there was a sudden flicker of light as the stairwell’s light came on, paired with the feeling like she’d just stepped off a cliff and begun plummeting. It lasted for less than a second before all but a handful of floor-mounted footlights went out and the falling feeling disappeared, though a sense of dizziness and disorientation remained.
She knew what that was; she’d felt it many times before. So had her comrades during disaster preparedness training at the Academy. That was artificial gravity coming online at full and then immediately cutting out. Standard practice was to shift from zero-g to standard gravity over several seconds to allow crew and passengers to acclimate.
Somewhere on this keel, power to this section had just come on and then been immediately redirected. There was no system malfunction or technical error that she was aware of that could cause that. Someone or something had to turn those systems on. On her vambrace scanner, a kaleidoscope of signals appeared. Power was surging through long-dormant systems. Somewhere out there, someone was bringing Pillar of Silver Leaves back online. Those fluctuations hadn’t been false positives from a corrupted security net or damaged battery packs; they’d been Pillar of Silver Leaves’s power grid getting a jump start.
“Elint,” she said into her comm. “Pillar of Silver Leaves is being re-activated. Please tell me someone from Ascendancy on this vessel and performing unauthorized service.” No answer. “Elint?” she asked again, but all she heard was the crackling of static across dead air.
She didn’t know who was on this vessel and she didn’t know why they were doing this, but unless she heard back from Elint that this was all a big misunderstanding, she had to consider their actions a hostile. Which put her, a woman less than a year out of the academy, alone on a vessel with person or persons unknown.
Watching over an out of the way storage depot was supposed to be a safe assignment. Too safe. Sabein remembered thinking that this posting was going to be boring.
Right now, she wished it was.
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