Things happen to you when you die in vacuum. Flesh freeze-dries, lung tissue explodes in a thermobaric horror show hinted at in so many bad space operas. Worse still is what can only can be seen when the body is brought back in to warmth and gravity. The corpse starts to relax. Crackling comes from the joints like an old scroll unwinding. That soundless scream from the rictus that used to be a mouth. Sometimes the eyeless sockets weep from the greed of bacteria reasserting their right to decompose.
And above all, the look of hysterical terror on the face from the victim's brief struggle for life.
In my investigations I've scooped more than one cadaver. So it's no surprise I've lost more than one crew member to the shakes. They say we capsuleers are all crazy...
But the Hydra was different. To the untrained eye it was yet another empty wreck drifting between two Federation worlds. It wore the usual micro-meteoroid impacts, carbon scoring indicating weapons fire. The drive engines were gutted, salvaged by scavengers or owners so convinced of the big sky theory that another hulk in space was nothing to them.
It didn't take me long to see what I'd really found. A scan of the hull showed idents that were too old for freebooter or Serpentis garbage, more than a mere century or two adrift. Something that went back almost to the days of the construction of the first Gallentean stargate. Back in the days when explorers were seen as more than glorified scavengers by the ignorant mass of Mankind. Days when humans actually weren't afraid of the Unknown.
SR666 - Hydra.
Six hundred, three-score and six. They say the number is cursed, that it brings with it an age-old evil. What possessed some bureaucrat to allow his algorithms to assign this ID code to this vessel was lost to time; but the stories of the ship and crew remain, whispered by grizzled spacers deep in their cups. Loss in space. Madness. Something unexplained and dark that walked in airless corridors.
And, God help me, I'd found it. The tales now awoke to reality. Naturally, I kept the scan results to myself.
You'll recall I wrote of bodies earlier, the terrible fascination of explosive decompression. There were bodies here too, floating like a cloud of desiccated angels about their lord. Male or female, it was hard to tell. Some wore uniforms out of history texts. Most were naked.
None of the faces bore the breathless failed cry of death. Instead their mouths were lit up with the rays of manic hilarity, as if their breath had been not so much stolen as forcibly banished by the greatest joke they'd ever heard.
As if they'd all died laughing.
I suppose most commanders would have been content to let the benighted vessel drift forever unremarked and uninvestigated, rightly surmising that some things are better left alone. But my curse is to be curious. I aligned my frigate to the nearest inhabited station and made preparations to warp out in case one of my fellow immortals discovered my position and succumbed to the allure of an easy gank. Then I willed my relic analyzer to life.
A decent relic analyzer is the only piece of deep-scan equipment capable of interpreting the data networks of systems so obsolete. Its rudimentary AI is almost as inquisitive as I am, able to burrow its way past old firewalls, evolving its methods to adapt to electronics its own makers had never seen.
What it found was a cache of data recorded by humans generations dead. I read it, listened to distorted recordings of a mission to deep space: official logs, the hopes for success, heartfelt notes to loved ones no one would ever see again. The brief white noise of signal distortion.
Then came the screams, the hysterical giggles, the invocations to something I still hesitate to name. Coordinates that made no sense.
These days, discounting fanatics, few believe in absolute evil. They say there's no Devil.
They say a lot of things.
My crew will never know what I saw and heard that day. The data is encrypted, eyes-only access. Only I and my mysterious benefactor will ever see it. Just as well. What I discovered has no place in the human world.
I considered contacting Signal Cartel with a request for demolition but thought better of it. What I found should never have been found. It had no right to be found. Better it be left for the void to devour.
Somewhere in the back of my perceptions, I thought I heard a laugh...
