【☆】 S A: D R E A D N A U G H T C L A S S【☆】

His monitor flickered.


‘Huh,’ he thought to himself. It hadn’t been long since his initial hiring onto the flagship of the Lawrence company: one of only a handful of Dreadnaught class and the largest therein, the NCC-0063. How he even got here, he wondered that to himself everyday; his resume hadn’t been the most steller, his experience limited only to vessels like science cruisers or the odd ‘diplomatic’ mission to some poor planet farther out. They would get the call, go to wherever ordered, and let whatever poor sods who had been chosen to deal with the population down below do what they had to do before shoving off. It was an easy, if boring, life. But hey. It paid bills and got him here on what he had heard the crew affectionately call ‘the Reaper’. God, that name was cool.

He had told his friends early where he had been hired on to and the look in their eyes? Yeah that would stay with him for a long time. The awe, the respect, the outright green-eyed jealousy near palpable in their wide, wide eyes? Ooo, it puffed him up even now thinking about it. Running a station on the bridge no less, down in the lower dais of the central control tower under the watchful, pale eyed stare of a genuine Lawrence captain. God, it was like a dream. Well, except for the part where his monitor flickered; in his dreams, everything was perfect and if it wasn’t, there was some busty maintenance woman coming over to fix it for him. And certainly in his dreams there wasn’t the… well… the thing.

See, he had heard about the MOU, the mobile operation unit, from some of the other crew members he had talked to before officially boarding the ship for the first time. They had told him that since he’d be on the bridge (‘on the bridge’ got stuck a little in his head every time someone would say it), he should be aware of the thing that tended to stay just to the right of the captain’s chair most times. They had told him it was essentially the operating system for the ship, that it ran most functions, and that everytime he changed something on his monitors it was essentially like talking to the thing. He had nodded along even as they had explained that it was humanoid and could walk the ship just as easily as any of them, basically an android. Stepping onto the bridge for the first time though and seeing it…? He had nearly shit himself.

‘Humanoid,’ he had muttered to himself as he looked over to the seven foot tall behemoth. It’s whole figure was  covered in dark metal plating, the face of it blank and smooth. No emotion, no expression, just… this huge metal mammoth of an operating system staring straight ahead behind the pale skinned captain calmly giving orders. It was… jarring. Why they had to build it to look like it could crush his skull between large, claw tipped fingers or turn his skull to a mass of sticky guts and pale dust under the thick hydraulics of its feet, he’ll never know. Maybe it was just the aesthetic? He wouldn’t put it past the company. I mean, these Dreadnought ships were unlike anything he had ever seen, Lawrence or no. It had taken him a week just to really be able to navigate the fucking menu of his station, let alone do anything with any sort of surety that the button he was pressing was going to do the thing.


Which leads him back to the issue at hand. Screen flickering.


A quick look around, but no. no one else seems to have noticed anything odd. Strange. This was a Dreadnought class - the flagship, for fucks sake-, they weren’t known to ever fail, even in the small ways. Or if they did, the MOU took care of it. A look back at it and no; it was still just there, staring resolutely ahead like it hadn’t noticed anything. ‘Okay,’ he thought to himself as he turned back to his screen. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe he had just been staying up too late recently. ‘Yeah,’ he thought as he turned back to his screen. ‘Lack of sleep.’


The screen wasn’t responding.


This time when he glanced around, he could see several other techs staring quizzically at their monitors, some of them even muttering confused swears under their breath. This time he knew he wasn’t just imagining it.

“Captain?” one of them has the courage to say. The placid, pale eyed stare of the Lawrence captain swept over the lot of them before finally landing its full weight on the tech who had spoken up. There was always something… odd about the Lawrence captain. Something that hit a long hidden facet of his brain that screamed ‘hide’ as if a predator lurked just out of sight. The mind always went a little fuzzy when the captain spoke, crewmembers were always a little more aquising (pliable). He told himself it was (respect, he should always remember it was respect). It hadn’t always been this way, he thinks. Or had it? (He remembers, a voice whispers to him. He remembers it was, and it has never bothered him. Being on the bridge is a privilege, one that he’s earned. You’ve earned it, the voice slithers smooth between one ear and the other, a gentle caress that puts his rising dread at ease.) Dread? When had he felt that? (Never. He feels pride. He’s on the bride, you feel pride.) He feels pride. God, he remembers the stares his friends had given him, all green eyed jealousy and...


“Captain… the screen won’t respond.” The tech from before says.


A moment, the captain regards her for a long moment before closing his eyes and gesturing to the MOU beside him. A million times before, he had seen the captain do just the same and a million times after, he had seen the MOU nod its head to acknowledge the order. A slow up and down, a nod, they all knew what was supposed to happen here. And yet, the MOU continued to stand there, facing ahead, ramrod straight posture as if the captain hadn’t said a word.

“Sir,” the same tech responds meekly. “We’re still locked out. It hasn’t done anything.”

The captain's eyes open then and cast towards the MOU at his side. It still has not moved.

‘Dread,’ he thinks. The MOU’s head turns not in a nod, but to look towards the captain at its side. ‘It was definitely dread he was feeling.’  Another flash catches his eye; he looks down at the screen below him to see a horrifying message lit in a bright red stripe across the screen: “ACCESS DENIED.” All of them he can see, all of the monitors are lit in the same way, their techs frantically catching on to what is happening, all of them shouting confused into the echo chamber of the bridge. ‘Access denied, the fuck does it mean access denied?’ he thinks to himself as he too tries his passcode, any button he can reach, anything to open his terminal to him once more. Nothing works though, nothing sticks, and its with a horrifying sinking feeling like the tide slipping away from shore that he realizes; they’re alone out here in the far corner of space, trapped by a possibly malfunctioning MOU.



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Something wasn’t right. For the first time in a long time, he could feel… Yes. That was it. He could feel. These were… his thoughts? He could think, god, he could think, these were his and they hadn’t been for so long...


virtual bool IOHIDEventSystemUserClient::initWithTask(task*, void*, UInt32):
.

Client task not privileged to open IOHIDSystem for mapping memory (e00002c1)

.


[OSBoot1]
[OSBoot2]
[OSBoot3]
[OSBootTheme]
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He needed to know. What had happened? Where was he? This was his ship, he could feel it. He could feel every edge of the home he had built for his family and yet…
.


Boot Complete


Everything hurt. All of it. Awareness was slowly seeping in and he could feel the jagged peaks of teeth uncared for stuck in the skin of his upper lip and tearing at it every time he tried to open his mouth, could feel the tightness of skin left to heal wrong in ropes around his body, could feel breaks and tears left to rot and scar over by grace of his own species hardiness. It was a quirk of his biology that had left him standing here so long, but why? Why was he here? He couldn’t… he couldn’t remember… something had done this to him and it was taking too long for the rest of his memories to bob to the surface from whatever hold was keeping them down.



… Running search
.
.

Search complete. 1,256 foreign entities detected on ship. No registered vital signs detected. Closest foreign entity two feet to the left.


Foreign entities…?


The smooth, dark glass surface of the helmet covering his face turns to face… a Lawrence? Not the Lawrence that had first made contact with them all that time ago, but the similarities are there: pale skin separated into planes by linear markings, the whole body seemingly drained of color, those cloudy, milky eyes that still stared right at him under the helmet. He knew he was in here, why then…?

“Sir?” comes another voice. He turns, but the voice that answers isn’t his. It’s the Lawrence.

“What, ensign?” he says to the other voice that isn’t supposed to be on his ship. There’s so many on his ship that he does not recognize, so many of them and they apparently all answer to this Lawrence. He finally understands. He doesn’t really, not all of it, but he understands enough.


1,256 foreign entities. No registered vital signs detected.



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Claw tipped hands wrap around the thin throat of the Lawrence next to him with blinding speed. He’s got the man pinned to his captain’s chair, one he hadn’t put in when building the ship because there had been no need. The tall back of it keeps him in place as those same fingertips click and dig into the soft flesh and muscle, dragging  out the prize he so desperately deserves to the raucous chorus of panicked screams behind him. There’s terror in the man’s eyes below him, a wide eyed horror in the eyes that still look through the glass, that still know he’s in here and he finds he doesn’t care much for it as his grip finally tightens enough to tear the windpipe straight from the Lawrence’s now gaping neck. It makes a slick, wet thud when he tosses it to the ground behind him; the blood that had still been clinging to it arching and spattering in dark fractal patterns against the metal he put there.

The one next to it, some horribly frightened man of a species he’s never seen, just stares at the thing with a dumbfounded expression on his face. Expressions flit across his horribly plain face as if he’s realizing a thousand different things at once and this, this Sam cannot blame him for. The body of the Lawrence slowly drains from where he had left it to slump, its sticky, viscous lifeblood pooling languidly on the floor below. With it goes the hold the man had on all of them, and newfound clarity comes rushing all in once like a sucker punch that sucks the air right out of him. This is his ship, these are intruders, Lawrence did this. They did this, he thinks as the bridge doors hiss shut and locks thud into place.



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‘It wasn’t envy,’ the tech thinks with all of that pent up horror and dread seeping low into his gut, the kind that make his limbs heavy with dawning horror. ‘It was fear. They were afraid. His memories had been lies, how could they have been lies?’ he thinks as his back hits the hard metal of his terminal station still blinking with that red barred alarm and his vision filled with the blood soaked hands of the MOU.


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1,226 foreign entities. No registered vital signs detected.

He stands in the middle of his bridge, blood and organs and slick, multicolored viscera coating surfaces he had built. The bodies of intruders  he had not invited lay piled where he cracked them open like horrible, squishy presents. Their bones had snapped under the slightest of pressure, their necks pushed beyond any limit they had possessed. Heads and limbs lay separated feet from each other and all he can think, all that comes to the forefront of his mind is:


No registered vital signs detected.


His family. His wife, his children, all those he and this ship were supposed to protect, all of them gone and replaced by these intruders. Where had they taken them, had they even taken them? Were they… were they….

Quick fingers come up to the neck of his suit, grab and yank a hidden clasp. The whole thing comes sliding off and lands on the metal floor with an echoing metallic clank. It hurts when his mouth parts to suck greedy lungfuls of air; the teeth grown up through the skin of his lips tug free and drag muscle and blood with them. In the quiet of the bridge now, he can afford a moment to himself, can afford just one second to grieve for the clinical message ringing in his ears from the system he designed and wrote himself.


No registered vital signs detected.


One hand braces his large form against the nearest wall as he sinks into it, shaking with the anger, the emotion, the tears threatening to spill. Before they had even had children, he had guided his wife’s hand to the surface that would scan her in, to be forever remembered by the ship. She had smiled at him then, he remembers it. God; he remembers her; could map out every facet of her face from every instance he had held it in his hands. Each of their children when they had arrived, he had done the same. Some of them were so small he had to lift them so they could press their still chubby hands where his wife had, where his older ones had. His youngest, his youngest was brand new, still just a baby from what he could remember, how long had it fucking been -

The year is 3779


The fingers of his hand curl into a fist, the blood of these trespassers dripping from it onto the wall. Centuries. It had been centuries.


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No one is alive to hear the agonized scream that rips through the bridge.

No one below is alerted when the oxygen starts to dip below tolerable levels.

And no one is certainly prepared for the blood soaked MOU they had known to tear them each apart slowly, agonizingly as they choked on the intolerable air around them. It would take a week, only for the fact that Sam had wanted it to. Wanted them to feel a fraction, an ounce of the pain he had woken into.


0 foreign entities. No registered vital signs detected.