The Grand Mariner, Part 2

The stale air inside the Grand Mariner shifted, a faint, mechanical wheeze through long-forgotten vents.

Cathbad’s voice slid into their comms, suspiciously neutral. "Atmospheric processors active. Trace oxygen, acceptable pressure. Initial analysis suggests... breathable conditions."

Caitlin adjusted her rifle grip. "And? We’ve all seen that movie…"

There was a pause. A very Cathbad sort of pause. "I am now scanning for industrial toxins, airborne spores, and any residual designer plagues your illustrious ancestors thought amusing."

"Good man yourself," Caitlin said. "In the meantime, vacc suits stay on." 

Ahead of them, the corridor opened into a wide reception hall. Half the lights buzzed uncertainly. A cracked marble floor stretched out, littered with debris and long-dead decorative plants. Gilded pressure dials, long since abandoned by sense or need, adorned the cracked walls. Some still twitched faintly. 

Above them, a gilded sign flickered: “Welcome, esteemed guests. Please proceed to the Grand Feasting Hall.”

A shape moved near the far wall, slow, shuffling, unsteady.

Maltz raised his rifle reflexively.

Caitlin squinted.

It was a butler, or the memory of one, a skeletal automaton wrapped in tattered velvet livery. One hand held a tray with dusty drinks. The other clicked uselessly, trying to perform a forgotten gesture of greeting. Behind the velvet livery, brass plates and winding clockwork cogs ticked out a rhythm no one had listened to in centuries.

It glided forward on creaking grav-repulsors, bowing stiffly, voice-box glitching into half-sung scraps of ceremony: "Honoured guests... refreshments... eternal loyalty... spleens…"

The repulsor unit gave a shriek and surged forward too fast.

Caitlin threw herself sideways as the thing clipped the ground, spun, and crashed into a decorative column with a sound like a drunk accordion exploding.

Dust rained down. The butler twitched, tried to pour a drink onto the broken marble, and quietly shut down.

Cathbad’s voice drifted back in, dry as bone. "Toxin scans complete. The atmosphere remains marginally less hostile than the staff."

Maltz hauled himself upright with the grim determination of a man rescuing his dignity from a ditch. "I miss when the decor wasn’t actively homicidal."

Caitlin brushed debris off her helmet, scowling up at the blinking welcome sign. "Don’t take it personally," she said. "It’s probably just the warm-up act."

Maltz straightened slowly, dust still clinging to the seams of his boarding suit. "Lovely," he said. "First thing to greet us was a mechanical waiter with a death wish. That’s not a metaphor for the whole job at all."

Caitlin tapped her rifle against her helmet with a hollow thunk. "Relax. That was probably just the starter course."

"You dragged us onto an 1,800-year-old floating deathtrap based on a map you bought for the price of two drinks and a bad decision."

"Correction. Two drinks, a bad decision, and a winning smile."

Maltz’s tail lashed once behind him, slow and sharp. "You owe me so many apologies when we get eaten by the carpet."

Caitlin kicked a chunk of marble aside and strode on. "That's defeatist talk. It might be the curtains."

--- 

The iris door fought them. It hissed, juddered, and finally gave up, opening just enough to admit two stubborn idiots and one very bad idea.

Caitlin ducked through first, rifle ready. Maltz followed, ears low, tail stiff.

The atrium yawned out before them, a grand space of cracked marble and hanging vines. Shattered balconies leaned drunkenly over fallen brass statues. Above, stained glass domes caught the ochre haze and spilled broken colours across the floor. A fountain sputtered weakly at the centre, coughing mist that smelled of copper and old funerals. 

Motion sensors whirred into life, unfurling a banner so rotten it tore itself apart halfway down, trailing mildew and faded slogans no longer readable. Holographic servants flickered into being across the floor, bowing stiffly before collapsing into static. Music stuttered from unseen speakers, strings rising, breaking, rising again like something drowning.

Caitlin whistled low. "Feck me, they had style."

Maltz made a sound somewhere between a cough and a whimper. "This place is... still running. It thinks the party's still going."

Caitlin slung her rifle across her back and sketched a mocking bow. "Then let’s mingle."

She strode toward the nearest busted balcony like she already owned the place. Maltz cursed behind her, every few steps louder.

Above them, somewhere in the tangle of dust and banners, a cracked holo-empress smiled down, welcoming them to their doom. A long-dead speaker croaked out half a welcome, realised it had no one to address, and politely shut itself off.

Caitlin clicked her helmet mic. "Cathbad, scan for bio-contamination."

"Active," came the bard’s voice. "No toxins detected... yet. "I shall continue scanning for plagues, curses, and other charming farewell gifts.”

At Maltz’s increasingly frantic gestures, Caitlin finally stopped inspecting a half-melted crown abandoned on a toppled pedestal.

"Fine," she sighed. "More for later."

Maltz’s voice was tight. "Later assumes we survive this madness."

"That’s the spirit."

She swung her rifle lazily over her shoulder and headed for the next door, half-torn open, leading deeper into depths of the Grand Mariner. Already calculating salvage values.

Already forgetting, just a little, to watch her six.

---

They worked their way through the ship like two highly suspicious archaeologists who had lost their guidebook, their patience, and possibly their sanity. A battered grav trolley floated after them with all the enthusiasm of a hungover duck

Caitlin looted with enthusiasm, cataloguing every vaguely portable relic, gleaming bauble, and mildly haunted trinket she could shove into the increasingly overloaded trolley.

Maltz, for his part, added a new grievance to his mental list roughly every five meters.

He fretted while Caitlin rummaged through a ceremonial vault, tossing a humming sceptre, a shivering knot of silver wire, and a gilded dagger into the trolley. She held up a cracked glass locket and studied it. 

The locket wept a dark droplet across her glove. Caitlin froze, frowned, and flung it down the corridor in a smooth underhand toss. Then she pulled a cleaning cloth from her vac suit pocket and wiped her glove with slow, deliberate care. “I’ve read the book,” she said. “We all know how that ends.”

After a few hours, and the nagging feeling that things were going far too easily, they herded the trolley and their first haul back to the Morrigan’s airlock.

The atmosphere had stabilised enough, according to Cathbad, who sounded as enthusiastic about the fact as a man diagnosing a house with chronic mildew, that Caitlin made the executive decision to ditch the vacc suits near the airlock.

They peeled them off with the weary relief of people who had forgotten what it was like to sweat freely in low-grade, second-hand air.

Breathing inside the Grand Mariner now tasted faintly of metal, ash, and mould.

"Progress," Caitlin said, clapping Maltz on the back hard enough to make him stumble.

"Progress toward a headline that reads 'Idiots Found in Space Wreck'," Maltz winced.

Time, as it tended to do in places where nothing alive should technically exist, began to stretch. Hours blurred into each other under flickering chandeliers and corridors that all smelled faintly of broken promises and mildew.

By the time Cathbad’s voice whispered into their neural comms again, they had long since stopped counting the hours. They had survived another mechanical butler attack, dodged several near-misses, and left good sense far behind.

"Captain," Cathbad said with the air of a man announcing that the bottom had fallen out of the soup bowl, "I am detecting minor atmospheric disturbances aft of your current position."

Caitlin slung another Sindalian tiara into Maltz’s bag without missing a beat. "Define minor."

"A distinct temperature shift. Slight particulate displacement. Possible anomalous signatures. Or as you might phrase it, 'someone else might be breathing the air.’

Maltz froze. "You said this place was dead."

"I said it mostly resembled death," Cathbad corrected. "I did not claim it wasn’t occasionally theatrical about it."

Caitlin straightened. "Right," she said softly. "Time to stop shopping."

Somewhere deep in the broken halls of the Grand Mariner, another door hissed open. A faint draft stirred the dust, curling it into uneasy shapes.

Maltz caught it first, a shimmer in the stale air, just ahead. He lifted his rifle instinctively. "Something moved."

Caitlin slowed, scanning. Nothing but dust and the distant wheeze of failing life support.

Then it fluttered into view.

Link to Part 3: https://soren-boye-petersen.itch.io/tales-from-the-morrigan-the-grand-mariner-pa...