The Six-eyed Beast
Copyright© 2025 by BenLepp
Chapter 3: The Uniformed Man
January 11th, 2279
Basil was looking up the fastest way down to hangar 19, which turned out to be right next to the storage compartments of the station, but far off the much larger hangar 6. He had his pathfinder tell him the fastest way – down a level and into the freight elevator that ran alongside of the inner hull of the station. As he left hangar 6, one of the guards from earlier was still sitting there watching an old movie. Someone was yelling at a white whale.
Basil was trying his best not to sprint, taking large strides through the corridor towards the freight elevator. His pathfinder was counting down the minutes, Basil being keen on beating the estimated time of arrival as a great start to his next chapter. The corridor felt like a kid’s nightmare revolving around an infinite path and doors being exactly 8 paces away from each other to his right and for every 4 doors on the right there was one large gate to his left. Finally, he impatiently tapped the controls for the giant elevator. It felt like a waste of resources to move a platform capable of comfortably transporting 3 shuttles just for one man, but there was no faster or more direct way down to the storage section. Basil was unhappy to see his pathfinder correcting the time to arrival down to whatever time he made up before, whilst the slow elevator neared his level. It clunked into place and the barndoor slowly lifted, with Basil ducking below it and getting in in a clear violation of health and safety protocols.
- Hangar 19!
The shocked face of the hairy elderly man standing in the middle of the elevator came as a surprise to Basil as well. From graybeard’s perspective, a sweaty man had just stopped the elevator, ducked into it and screamed “Hangar 19” right at his face.
- Apologies.
Graybeard was shaking, but Basil had the impression this was more due to his advanced age than his ambush. The old man wore a tatty hooded robe over a well-tailored suit with golden flowers stitched into it, which made no sense to Basil. He leant on a minimalistic cane, looking way too modern to combine with a suit or robe like this. Everything about the man ‒especially his presence in the freight elevator ‒ was completely out of place. But that wasn’t Basil’s problem.
- Is there an emergency, young man?
Basil chuckled. Not a single cell in his body felt young, but this guy had to have been comfortably in the triple digits of human life, so it sort of made sense.
- Apologies again, I didn’t expect anyone to be in here.
Basil was in a much more talkative mood now.
- You seem agitated, wouldn’t you agree?
- All is well, I’m just having an intense day.
- What’s in hangar 19 that is so important?
The newly-promoted captain did his best to not look as smug as he felt.
- My ship.
By the Gods, saying this feels good.
Graybeard nodded knowingly.
- They say part of a captain’s soul never leaves his first ship.
Basil was staring at the elevator panel showing the number nine slowly making way for the number ten. The elevator was rattling more than it should, it was clearly worn out from decades of heavy use. It was weird that greybeard had correctly guessed his rank as Basil’s 6th stripe was still in the unassuming box in his pocket Hays had presented him with. Basil could just be any crewmember getting to his ship, and why would he assume it’s his first command? Then again, a century of experience was not for naught. He had said my ship with so much pride that the story was pretty clear.
- Aye, can’t wait to find my soul a new home.
Basil must have looked pretty strange to greybeard, as he still was staring down the panel and grinning from ear to ear, the sweat having to go around his stretched cheeks.
- A home in the endless void. Beautiful, isn’t it. Infinite forks of the river to choose from. Do you think you’re ready for what lies ahead?
The strange line of questioning was conflicting with the intense counting Basil was performing in his head, trying to find an average time per hangar level and estimating his time of arrival. But that last question was an easy one.
- We do not descend twice into the same river.
Basil had taken to quoting ancient sayings a long time ago, first, to impress people but he had faked it till he made it and become quite proficient in history overall, which also betrayed his age, as middle-aged human males often found history to be a way of living a life that wasn’t theirs to achieve.
- How very true. But I am sure you will be ready when the time comes.
The elevator stopped in hangar 14 and the barndoor started lifting painfully slowly. There were two engineers waiting to get on, but hesitated for a moment when Basil gave them a glance of pure hatred for messing up his timing. They shuffled to the far corner of the platform, exchanging confused faces by widening their eyes and slightly tilting their heads backwards.
The elevator creaked into motion and Basil was throwing internal insults at the barndoor, since it hadn’t fully closed. Often, such things led to service interruptions, when the safety system’s sensors picked it up. Luckily, these were also broken on the aging station. Ultimately, after what seemed a torturous hour, the number 19 appeared on the panel and the rumbling platform came to a halt, the barndoor now creaking upwards louder since it was no longer levelled. Basil nodded goodbye to greybeard and slipped under the opening door, the health-and-safety schooled engineers shaking their heads and rolling their eyes.
- Be sure to always listen to the stars, captain.
Greybeard’s last words to Basil were of no interest to the latter man quickly making his way towards a bulkhead sporting the number 1 on the left and the number 9 on the right door as the barn door screeched downwards again. 2 minutes to arrival the pathfinder said as Basil entered the access code he had gotten from admiral Hays.
The hangar was pitch black. Some automated weak lights started flickering on when Basil strode onto the catwalk that led him into the darkness. The hangar’s ceiling was not visible, neither was the floor - the walkway was dead center of a very tall and wide space. Basil could see the bow of a massive vessel ahead of him. He stopped walking, narrow-eyed and a cruel grim in his face. When the echo of his footsteps subsided, all he could hear was his mechanical heart providing a high pulse.
- Lights.
For each of the long lightbars that were recessed into the hangar walls, floor and ceiling, there was a pinging noise when they switched on. Only the cruel part of the grin now remained in Basil’s face.
When admiral Hays had mentioned the ship had been used for weapons testing, Basil would have never guessed that his ship had been the designated target.
On top of that, G-3477 was by far the strangest vessel Basil had ever seen. The Senatorial Fleet had for almost two centuries built ships with a simple formula: A long, wide hull with a trapezoid front profile, the quantum entanglement singularity engines forcing energy into large plates attached at an angle of 45 degrees on either side narrowing to the rear and a heavily armored and armed wide frontal section that extended beyond ‒ and protected ‒ the hull in all 4 frontal directions, usually called a hammerhead. Over time, and especially after the war, the various designs had ballooned in size and weightiness, looking more and more solid with fewer spaces in between the basic components – and they had gained not only frontal but also sideward weaponry to fight in the new doctrine of the battle wall if a large conflict arose once more. With this, they had lost all the thin elegance of the bright era, but provided fewer obvious weak points, a lesson earned way too late by losing way too many lives.
G-3477 was none of that. Basil immediately thought of a cross between a Peregrine falcon in a stoop and a stingray. Or horseshoe crab. The whole thing was of one largely oval shape, a wide, swooping body narrowing towards the end in a long fin. The frontplate Basil was looking at was almost vertical, bending down into a belly below. A body line in the center ran below the ship. Atop the frontal plate was a ledge overshadowing it, as if to provide cover for whatever was supposed to be in the 4 holes triple Basil’s height that gaped at him from the frontal plate. The ledge had an open area, likely the place for the sensor array over almost the whole width of the ship, above which it smoothly bent backwards, disappearing from his view. The thing looked like it had been built for very high speeds and low friction in an atmosphere, clearly not the raison d’etre of the vessel. The only immediately recognizable parts were the two large plates, diagonally growing from either side of the upper oval section downwards, smoothed into the hull and slightly curving inwards, narrowing towards the rear fin, like the tucked wings of a falcon, if said falcon had lost its wingtips crashing through blades.
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