This post was inspired by a prompt in the Worldbuilding Community - Worldbuilding Prompt #923 - Chirp
Enjoy !
Image created by AI in NightCafe Studio
Chirp
"Uhhnn..."
Chirp, Chirp
"Wha..."
Chip ! Chirp ! Chirp !
"Lemme sleep... damn it..."
But Lieutenant Solivan couldn't ignore the increasingly insistent alert any more. Reluctantly, he opened eyes gummed shut by something sticky, something almost solid.
Redness. Blood, his blood. On his face and splattered across half of the inside of his visor.
His bleary vision stabilised. Despite a large crack, his visor was somehow still airtight.
Outside his visor and armoured suit, things weren't looking so rosy. For starters, there was no part of the ship's bridge which should have a clear view of open space. Nor should it be missing it's front half and ceiling. Most of the screens and controls were blank, shattered or entirely missing.
The situation of his crewmates was even worse.
It was clear none of them was still alive. The comms team were draped over their stations, held upright by a single spear of jagged metal that impaled all three of them and held them half-slumped in place.
Arvald Miriggal the weaponmaster was spinning above Solivan with a corona of frozen blood where his head used to be, thus confirming that the anti-grav was out of action.
Captain Gorbald was still sitting in his chair. Or at least, his legs were. His torso was smeared across one wall, and his arms were drifting in a gruesome orbit around Miriggal's corpse.
Chirp
Solivan's attention was drawn back to that annoying alarm. He felt ridiculously fuzzy headed and tired. Loss of blood from his painful broken nose. No wait... he knew what the annoying chirp meant. Low oxygen.
No wonder he was drifting in and out of focus.
He looked down and saw that his air line had been severed at some point and was just flopping around uselessly. He reached down and pressed the button on his right hip that activated the reserve air tank in his suit. Then he pressed the button to silence that damned alert.
With a quiet hiss, he felt cool fresh air waft across his face. Breathing deeply, it was like a veil had been lifted. The fogginess faded, only to be replaced by the realisation of how bad his situation really was.
It was a situation that became instantly worse, as a metal dome rose from the bottom of one of the huge rents in the ship's bridge. Something outside, climbing in.
The front of the dome was filled with sensors, inputs and outputs in a grim mockery of a human face. Two optical sensors rotated in and out, blinking at him. Gripping pincers with sucker cups appeared next, hauling the war machine into the broken wreckage of the ship.
Solivan fumbled to release the restraints that pinned him to his chair, horror filling him as the Einheriar salvage unit halted in front of him.
A tinny, staccato voice emerged from the speaker in his helmet. A voice that spoke as if each syllable was a separate recording, stitched together without too much care for smoothness of flow or cadence of speech.
"Hello Enemy Lifeform. This unit has been sent to the wreckage of your vessel. Mission is assess condition of ship and crew. Your alert chirping told us not all lifeforms had been eliminated. This was helpful. Enemy Lifeform oxygen tank estimated to supply one hour of life. Einheriar are merciful. You will be saved from death caused by inability to function without oxygen. You will be saved from one hour of mental anguish."
A hatch in the machine's shoulder slid open. It revealed the stubby muzzle of a plasma blaster. It fired once at point-blank range, melting a large hole through the cracked visor and Solivan would never need to worry about the alert starting up again.
"Salvage Unit FG-7765!^5 to base. Confirm final lifeform on hostile cruiser eliminated. It did not beg for survival. Record this fact as most unusual."
Chirp
