[JE] [JEF #2] Attack of Nerves 2/5
Title: Attack of Nerves (2/5)
Series: JE Fleet
Fandom: JE (specifically, KAT-TUN)
Pairing: Akame, though others are mentioned
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 20,000
Genre: AU, sci-fi, crack, comedy, fluff, angst, you name it...
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the bands, individuals or songs mentioned within.
Summary: The crew of the JE Fleet ship KAT-TUN are given a new mission, to boldly go where several men from Osaka have gone before, and find out what attacked the K8. The answer lies somewhere in Jin's murky past, and only Kame, with the help of an advanced video game console, can save the day.
Chapter 2
It was an uncomfortable trip out of the Milky Way. Nakamaru's estimation of a three-day trip was an accurate one, but every second dragged on for an eternity for the crew of the KAT-TUN. Not even Junno was happy, and he could usually be relied upon to produce a smile no matter how dire the situation.
Kame had locked himself in his cabin, which, like all the others, was equipped with a replicator so he didn't need to bother coming out to find food. No one knew for sure what he was up to, but the portable holoprojector and accompanying headset and gloves were missing, along with every baseball game on the ship.
Jin spent his time on the bridge looking hangdog and miserable until Koki and Ueda contrived to carry him out to his own cabin so he could get some sleep. His presence was having a detrimental effect on the morale of the crew, they insisted, and Kame was never going to want him back if he looked like a zombie.
He had to admit, he needed the rest. In deference to Kame's two-year confinement aboard ship, the KAT-TUN had spent less time planetside or at orbital stations, and more time out in space. Even when they were docked, someone had to stay on board with him at all times, and Jin usually volunteered for the role. As a result, he'd spent less time off the ship in the last year and a half than anyone else in the crew bar Kame himself, and it was starting to get to him.
Jin considered himself a fairly active kind of guy, ready to tackle life head-on and challenge the unknown with a sense of adventure. That was why he'd left Earth in the first place, running away in his early teens and joining Yamapi as a runner for old man Kitagawa. By the time their paths had diverged, Jin already had himself a ship, a crew and a whole new career, and he'd never looked back. He liked where he was, part of a family who looked out for him and needed him.
He needed them just as much, because he didn't want to be alone.
Jin had just finished dressing when his comm badge, a small pin in the shape of a bulldog, chirped noisily from its position inside his shirt pocket. Nakamaru's voice, slightly muffled by the flannel, informed him that they would be in range of the coordinates within an hour and would he consider getting himself back to the bridge because Kame wasn't responding and if one of the captains didn't show up in five minutes Ueda was going to make them turn around and go home again.
For a moment, Jin considered staying in his cabin and practising guitar until the five minutes had long since passed and Ueda had made good on his threat, but reality wasn't going to go away just because he wanted it to. He had responsibilities to live up to, after all, and he was curious to find out what had happened to the K8.
Besides, if he came back with the answer, maybe even a way to help the comatose Osakans, there was a chance Earth President Tsubasa would be grateful enough to cut Kame's sentence short and allow him off the KAT-TUN. That, Jin was sure, would go a long way to solving their problems.
He cast a rueful glance at Kame's locked cabin door and hurried to the bridge.
The mood had changed drastically since he'd been carried out by Ueda and Koki, and the room was in a frenzy not seen since President Imai Tsubasa and Admiral Takizawa Hideaki had married one month earlier. The trainees were scurrying like small, particularly good-looking mice, and Junno was practically tap-dancing on his console.
"What did I miss?" Jin asked in bewilderment.
"Other than Kame storming in here, rooting around for the CNS Plus and storming out again, not much," Koki informed him.
Jin stifled a groan. If Kame was plugging himself into the latest in virtual gaming systems, they weren't going to be able to get through to him until he'd drained all the power from the ship or won the Inner Planet Series, whichever came first.
The CNS Plus had arisen from medical technology, originally used as a means of stimulating damaged nerves in a patient's body by acting as an external translator for brain impulses. One such patient, an enthusiastic gamer with a paralysed leg and more degrees than a circle, had seized the opportunity to modify the device to enhance his gaming experience, combining it with VR gear to accentuate the effects of the virtual world. The result, after some user-friendly modifications, had sold throughout the Sol System.
A gamer playing with the CNS Plus had his body tricked by the device to the extent that he could take a bite of a hotdog in the stands at a baseball game and feel it sliding down his throat. It was addictive - Jin was especially fond of the low-gravity soccer - and it was often the case that a player wouldn't emerge from the game-state without outside help. Clearly, Kame wasn't planning on rejoining the crew any time soon.
Fine. Jin would take care of it himself, the way he had before Pi had brought him the mission that threw Kame back into his life.
"There is one thing, though," Ueda said as Jin assumed his usual position. "I've been studying the K8's logs and they definitely ran into something while they were out here."
"Yeah, they were attacked," Jin said with a shrug. "We knew that."
Ueda tapped a couple of buttons on his console and a static image popped up. "This is from their radar mapper. You see that grey dot?" He pointed to a small blob in the upper left quarter of the screen.
"What about it?"
"That's the only object in the area for light years around. There are no stars nearby, no debris large enough to show up on the scanner, nothing that could possibly have attacked them except that."
"So?" Jin said impatiently. "Then we know what to shoot at."
Ueda jabbed the console again, and another image appeared - this one, from the KAT-TUN's own systems. "I'm not saying it's harmless...but it was stationary when they arrived, and it hasn't moved since then. If it was a ship, don't you think it would've left by now?"
"True. Who attacks people and sticks around to wait for reinforcements to show up?"
"Somebody who's very confident in their ability to take out anything that comes their way," Koki opined.
"Or it could be an unmanned station with an automated defense system," Nakamaru added. "We don't know that there's any life out there and we're not going to know until we get closer."
"Uh, guys?" Junno interrupted. "There might not be life out there but there's definitely something. I'm picking up all kinds of crazy signals."
Sure enough, strange noises and random blips of light were emanating from his station, none of them remotely familiar. The command crew stared in alarm. Were they about to come face to face with an unknown enemy, or was it just that Junno had forgotten to switch off his games again?
"See if you can get anything from that," Jin said at last. "It's not Japanese, it's not English, and I'm pretty sure it's not rap. Beyond that, I have no idea."
"It's not French either," Ueda offered.
Nakamaru was shaking his head sadly. "Worst attempt at beatboxing I've ever heard," he murmured.
"It does sound awfully garbled," Jin agreed.
"Well, at this speed..." Nakamaru suddenly abandoned the rest of his sentence and slammed his fist down on the controls. The ship lurched violently, causing everyone who was still standing to hit the deck.
"What did you do that for?" Jin spluttered, trying to fix his hair.
The pilot grinned apologetically. "Sorry about that. I thought if we dropped to sub-light speeds again we might get better reception. We were moving so fast it's almost impossible to pick anything up."
Ueda, who'd been unlucky enough to get hit in the face by a flying trainee, clambered dizzily to his feet and pressed a tissue to his bleeding nose. "A little warning would've been nice."
"There wasn't any time," Nakamaru explained. "When we slowed down earlier to get an accurate fix on those coordinates," he pointed at the image still on Ueda's screen, "we were a lot further away and I had time to take us down slowly. But at this distance, every second counts. Do you have any idea how powerful our new drive is?"
"Uh..." Jin hadn't been paying close attention when the fleet had offered him a free upgrade as a reward for his part in the war against the Fahngarlians. It had sounded impressive, but when the technicians started talking about anti-matter and crystals he'd tuned out and agreed to have whatever they wanted to give him. "Not really, no."
"Neither do I - I'm still learning! But it's amazing." Nakamaru sighed happily. "In the old days we'd have had to steal one, and now we get given incredible technology like this for free!"
Hardly for free, Jin thought, considering what they'd had to go through to earn it, but before he could say anything an incoming message blinked on Junno's console.
"Dropping to sub-light speeds hasn't cleared up the mysterious signals, but a message caught up to us from Arashi," Junno said cheerfully. "They've made some progress with the K8 crew! Somehow, Aiba's cracked the problem of Captain Shibutani's wailing - he thinks he's an enka singer!"
Jin pursed his lips and considered this. "That would explain a lot, actually..."
"Poor guy," Koki sympathised. "He's pretty tough, too. What could have scared him so much he got delusional?" Underneath the compassion there was a faint hint of smugness, the implication that he, Lieutenant Tanaka Koki, would not be so weak as to fall victim to the same fate.
"We're about to find out," Nakamaru said, and hit the shipboard radio so he could reach everyone not in the room. "Strap in, everybody, I'm going to speed us up again. We'll be in visual range in about five minutes."
Everyone scrambled to secure themselves on the bridge, and Jin called a warning to Kame via the comm link. He didn't know if the other man would be able to hear him or not, but figured he wouldn't appreciate being thrown around in the middle of his game.
Much to his surprise, he received a response, and it wasn't something he'd ever have said in front of his mother.
"Let's take a look at our mystery, shall we?" Ueda said, politely ignoring Jin's stricken expression. "I'd like to at least know what it looks like before we fire up the large plasma accelerator."
As the KAT-TUN slowed and stopped just inside the maximum visual range, the main viewscreen changed to give the crew their first proper glimpse of the target. No longer a small grey blob, now it was a large grey wheel.
"Hey," Junno pointed at the screen, "doesn't that look like the orbital stations?"
"One without all the insignia, yeah," Koki said, removing his sunglasses for a better look. "I think I even see an airlock."
"All the way out here?" Ueda shook his head. "I don't like it. Where there's a station, there should be people."
"I don't think it's people making these sounds." Junno looked warily at his instruments. "It's more like a radio station for pets, or something."
While the others were discussing what might or might not have been a station, Jin was hunched over in his chair, one leg crossing the other, looking for all the world as if he was about to expire from sheer misery. "He hates me," he wailed to the empty air. "Kame hates me and now he's probably going to spend the rest of his confinement locked in his cabin and I'll never see him again because the moment he can go free he'll leave!"
"But he can't go anywhere yet," Ueda argued, proving that he was actually listening, after all. "So you have to stop worrying about him. Worry about what's out there, instead."
Jin blinked away the moisture that was starting to gather in his eyes, and stared at the viewscreen. "Isn't that an orbital station?" he said dully, only to be met with a chorus of "We've already established that!" from the rest of the crew.
"If we go with that theory, what do you want me to do? Turn around? Move in closer? Stay right where we are while you complain about your love life?"
Jin fixed Nakamaru with a baleful glare. "Since you asked, you can take us closer. We're at maximum zoom as it is, and I want a better look at this thing."
If only because dealing with an unknown danger was probably easier - and safer - than trying to fix things with Kame.
As the KAT-TUN slowly approached the station - for indeed, a station it was - the tension level on the bridge rose. Closer and closer until...
"STOP!" Jin yelled in English.
Nakamaru groaned. "You want to stop *now*?" He continued to grumble but managed to coax the engines to a halt. "Why now?"
Ueda hit on the answer immediately. "Because now we're in teleport range." He looked accusingly at Jin. "You want to go across there, don't you?"
Jin looked coyly out from under his fringe. "Maybe."
The others weren't impressed.
"All right, yes, I want to go," he admitted. "When they debrief me and ask what we blew to smithereens, I'd like to be able to give them an answer. Not to mention that if we knew what had affected Subaru and his crew, we might be able to help them. It's worth trying to find out, isn't it?"
"It would be kind of pathetic if we didn't even attempt it," Koki said.
"Right," Nakamaru agreed. "We've come all the way out here - and we were supposed to be investigating anyway, unless you read between the lines of the mission and work out that we're only here to blow things up..."
"The transmissions aren't getting any clearer, but I think we should try too," Junno chimed in. "It's probably some scrambled automated systems - could even be a distress call and we'd never know."
Ueda still looked doubtful. "Remember the damage to the K8's hull? What's to say we're not about to get attacked at any moment?"
"I have a theory," Jin announced. Koki and Nakamaru exchanged glances and burst out laughing, but he refused to be deterred. "How long would it have taken the K8 to fly back, given their engines?"
Nakamaru stopped laughing long enough to answer. "About a month. They were on autopilot the whole time, but it's an old model, doesn't compensate for obstacles well."
"There," Jin said triumphantly. "They could've picked up the damage in collisions on the way home."
"And the missing first scientific exploration vessel before the K8 was sent? The second drifted back without an autopilot, but the first vanished entirely."
Jin wasn't going to let Koki shoot down his theory. "Either it drifted further out into space or it docked and it's inside that thing somewhere. Only the fleet ships have teleport technology - I bet the K8 crew teleported onto the station to investigate, and someone on the ship managed to bring them all back and hit the autopilot before they all turned into zombies."
"And exactly how does our lovesick Captain Akanishi think we're going to avoid the same thing happening to us if anyone teleports over there?" Ueda asked.
Jin had an answer for that as well, though he knew no one else was going to like it. "We don't teleport. I'm taking a shuttle, and I'm going alone. You all wait here and if I don't contact you or return within an hour, you assume I'm dead, blow the whole thing to pieces and get back to Earth as fast as you can."
He winced when Ueda slapped him. The normally serene commander was infuriated, and Jin's smarting cheek told him exactly how much.
"You think doing something suicidally stupid is going to impress him?" Ueda said quietly. "Or maybe you just want a distraction, I don't know. But you can't go by yourself. At least take someone with you."
"Like you said, it's suicidally stupid, and that means I'm not going to let any of you risk yourselves." Jin was adamant on this point. "Somebody has to go but there's no sense in risking the entire crew."
"So the captain goes instead?" Nakamaru sounded almost disgusted.
"A captain. If anything happens to me, you guys have a spare." Jin giggled, slightly hysterical. "You might even be better off that way."
"Not if he never comes out of his cabin again," Ueda muttered.
They did their best to talk him out of it, but Jin would not be swayed. Part of him was excited - the part that enjoyed the kick of danger, the thrill of staking his life on his own abilities. The rest of him, however, was scared stiff, and kept coming up with perfectly sane, logical reasons why they should send one of their two mobile probes onto the station in his stead, and explore through the safety of the camera's lens.
But that would be boring, and more importantly, the probes were very limited in the information they could record. A human had to go, and if Jin didn't leave soon someone was going to succeed in talking him out of it.
"I've made up my mind," he said, and that was that.
-----
Less than an hour later, Jin was sitting in the cockpit of a small, two-man shuttle, clad in his snazzy silver-and-black space armour, and grateful that the automatic doors on the station's airlock appeared to be in perfect working order. Forcing them open would've been unnecessarily risky, not to mention a waste of time, and he'd left Ueda with explicit instructions on what to do if he neither returned nor contacted the ship after an hour.
Jin fervently hoped it wouldn't come to that. He'd checked his comm link four times on the flight, only to be greeted on each occasion by a distressed trainee. He'd briefly considered leaving a message for Kame but the other captain was bound to ignore it, or perhaps make a suitably scathing remark, so Jin figured it could wait until he got back.
Because he was definitely going back, oh yes.
The inner airlock doors opened to reveal a clear, lighted path to a landing bay, and Jin steered the shuttle smoothly down to an empty spot next to a ship bearing Earth insignia and a Terran Institute of Exploration logo. He opened his armour's comm link for the fifth time, and without waiting for an answer, said, "No doubt about it, guys, I've found the missing ship. It's sitting right next to me in the landing bay. There are dozens of others here but that's the only one I recognise."
Static filled the line for a moment; when it cleared, Junno was on the other end. "Is there anyone in it?"
There was the sound of a thump, followed by Koki's voice in the background. "That ship's been there for months! If there's anyone in there they're probably dead by now."
"I'll let you know when I take a look inside," Jin said, and cut the link.
Not that he particularly wanted to check for corpses, but he knew if he didn't at least take a peek, the curiosity would eat him alive. Besides, someone back at HQ was bound to ask.
He double-checked the armour's seals and life-support systems, made sure his weapons were within easy reach - not, alas, his favourite blaster since he couldn't use the gene-locked trigger without removing the space armour - and popped the hatch on the shuttle. He clambered out, keeping a close watch for any signs of movement in the deserted landing bay.
There were none, nor were there any sounds, not even the usual whine of machinery that no orbital station was ever without. The artificial gravity was working perfectly, Jin was pleased to discover - he had a nasty tendency to get disoriented in freefall - but the generators were totally noiseless. Despite the comfortably warm temperature inside the armour, he shivered. The well-lit landing bay was eerie without the customary commotion, the roar of the ships' engines and the banter of crews as they disembarked. So many ships, all with different styles and markings, most unknown to him, and all abandoned.
Not for the first time in his life, Jin wondered if he'd gotten in over his head. It was all very well acting courageous in front of the crew and vowing to take on all the responsibility himself, but he'd have felt a lot better right now if he'd had someone with him. A silent station was a dead station, and it was easy to lose yourself in the gaping emptiness where life should have flourished.
And human life could have flourished with few problems, he discovered, as the systems in his armour fed back results from atmospheric tests, with a bleep that indicated that the information was being sent to the KAT-TUN as well. The oxygen content of the air was a little on the low side, but no more so than some of Earth's mountains, and conditions were such that he could actually have removed the helmet and breathed without much difficulty.
Tentatively, Jin approached the other vessel, slightly awed by the clomping of boots on the bare floor. Under normal circumstances, he'd never even have noticed. The exploration ship had to have an entrance somewhere; Jin wished he'd paid attention when Ueda had tried to show him the specs. It was a long, narrow craft that showed little wear - no hull scoring here - and he thought he might have been right about the origins of the damage done to the K8.
The port side was clear and Jin was just moving round to check the starboard side when he caught a whisper, the faintest murmur in his helmet's speakers. He shook his head, wondering if he was hearing feedback from the comm link, or someone in his crew was playing tricks on him.
He dismissed it...until it happened again, just as he was about to force the entrance. Jin abandoned the ship and did a quick circuit of the landing bay to assure himself that he really was alone. Just in case, he checked in with the KAT-TUN.
"You guys aren't trying to scare me by whispering down the comm link, are you?" he asked.
"If we were trying to scare you, we'd come up with something a lot more creative," was Nakamaru's reply.
Satisfied, Jin turned back to the exploratory ship. He didn't get very far. A door at the far end of the landing bay, which had been closed since he'd arrived, now rested half-open, the sliding metal doors caught midway. As he watched, they struggled the remainder of the distance and closed the gap.
"What the..." he muttered. "Must be one of those that opens when you approach it, and takes forever to close."
He tested out this theory, not without some trepidation, by marching up to the door; contrarily, it refused to open. Instead, the next door along slid open with a gentle whirring noise, revealing a brightly-lit corridor beyond. As with the landing bay, the corridor was empty.
"Ueda," Jin called down the comm link, "you can track my movements from the armour, right?"
"Right," the commander confirmed. "Why?"
"Don't be alarmed, but I'm just about to leave the landing bay. There's this door...oh, never mind." He signed off before anyone could ask him to explain why he suddenly felt the need to ignore the missing ship and head down an unknown corridor.
Jin didn't think he could explain it. But the closer he got to the door, the louder and more frequent the whispers became. No words, yet. Sounds that, when he paid closer attention, were similar to the bizarre transmissions Junno had been picking up on his instruments. These were bolder, though. More insistent. Downright pushy, even.
It didn't surprise Jin in the least when the doors slammed shut behind him. The corridor looked to be a long one, traversing the length of one of the wheel's spokes, with other - closed - doors set into the wall at intervals. He didn't bother trying any of them. As he walked, the odd squawks, whistles, bleeps and fizzes evened out into a single tone, a pulse that beat an unsteady rhythm inside the helmet's speakers.
It wasn't until Jin neared the wheel's hub that he realised the pulse wasn't in his speakers - it was in his head.
Series: JE Fleet
Fandom: JE (specifically, KAT-TUN)
Pairing: Akame, though others are mentioned
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 20,000
Genre: AU, sci-fi, crack, comedy, fluff, angst, you name it...
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the bands, individuals or songs mentioned within.
Summary: The crew of the JE Fleet ship KAT-TUN are given a new mission, to boldly go where several men from Osaka have gone before, and find out what attacked the K8. The answer lies somewhere in Jin's murky past, and only Kame, with the help of an advanced video game console, can save the day.
Chapter 2
It was an uncomfortable trip out of the Milky Way. Nakamaru's estimation of a three-day trip was an accurate one, but every second dragged on for an eternity for the crew of the KAT-TUN. Not even Junno was happy, and he could usually be relied upon to produce a smile no matter how dire the situation.
Kame had locked himself in his cabin, which, like all the others, was equipped with a replicator so he didn't need to bother coming out to find food. No one knew for sure what he was up to, but the portable holoprojector and accompanying headset and gloves were missing, along with every baseball game on the ship.
Jin spent his time on the bridge looking hangdog and miserable until Koki and Ueda contrived to carry him out to his own cabin so he could get some sleep. His presence was having a detrimental effect on the morale of the crew, they insisted, and Kame was never going to want him back if he looked like a zombie.
He had to admit, he needed the rest. In deference to Kame's two-year confinement aboard ship, the KAT-TUN had spent less time planetside or at orbital stations, and more time out in space. Even when they were docked, someone had to stay on board with him at all times, and Jin usually volunteered for the role. As a result, he'd spent less time off the ship in the last year and a half than anyone else in the crew bar Kame himself, and it was starting to get to him.
Jin considered himself a fairly active kind of guy, ready to tackle life head-on and challenge the unknown with a sense of adventure. That was why he'd left Earth in the first place, running away in his early teens and joining Yamapi as a runner for old man Kitagawa. By the time their paths had diverged, Jin already had himself a ship, a crew and a whole new career, and he'd never looked back. He liked where he was, part of a family who looked out for him and needed him.
He needed them just as much, because he didn't want to be alone.
Jin had just finished dressing when his comm badge, a small pin in the shape of a bulldog, chirped noisily from its position inside his shirt pocket. Nakamaru's voice, slightly muffled by the flannel, informed him that they would be in range of the coordinates within an hour and would he consider getting himself back to the bridge because Kame wasn't responding and if one of the captains didn't show up in five minutes Ueda was going to make them turn around and go home again.
For a moment, Jin considered staying in his cabin and practising guitar until the five minutes had long since passed and Ueda had made good on his threat, but reality wasn't going to go away just because he wanted it to. He had responsibilities to live up to, after all, and he was curious to find out what had happened to the K8.
Besides, if he came back with the answer, maybe even a way to help the comatose Osakans, there was a chance Earth President Tsubasa would be grateful enough to cut Kame's sentence short and allow him off the KAT-TUN. That, Jin was sure, would go a long way to solving their problems.
He cast a rueful glance at Kame's locked cabin door and hurried to the bridge.
The mood had changed drastically since he'd been carried out by Ueda and Koki, and the room was in a frenzy not seen since President Imai Tsubasa and Admiral Takizawa Hideaki had married one month earlier. The trainees were scurrying like small, particularly good-looking mice, and Junno was practically tap-dancing on his console.
"What did I miss?" Jin asked in bewilderment.
"Other than Kame storming in here, rooting around for the CNS Plus and storming out again, not much," Koki informed him.
Jin stifled a groan. If Kame was plugging himself into the latest in virtual gaming systems, they weren't going to be able to get through to him until he'd drained all the power from the ship or won the Inner Planet Series, whichever came first.
The CNS Plus had arisen from medical technology, originally used as a means of stimulating damaged nerves in a patient's body by acting as an external translator for brain impulses. One such patient, an enthusiastic gamer with a paralysed leg and more degrees than a circle, had seized the opportunity to modify the device to enhance his gaming experience, combining it with VR gear to accentuate the effects of the virtual world. The result, after some user-friendly modifications, had sold throughout the Sol System.
A gamer playing with the CNS Plus had his body tricked by the device to the extent that he could take a bite of a hotdog in the stands at a baseball game and feel it sliding down his throat. It was addictive - Jin was especially fond of the low-gravity soccer - and it was often the case that a player wouldn't emerge from the game-state without outside help. Clearly, Kame wasn't planning on rejoining the crew any time soon.
Fine. Jin would take care of it himself, the way he had before Pi had brought him the mission that threw Kame back into his life.
"There is one thing, though," Ueda said as Jin assumed his usual position. "I've been studying the K8's logs and they definitely ran into something while they were out here."
"Yeah, they were attacked," Jin said with a shrug. "We knew that."
Ueda tapped a couple of buttons on his console and a static image popped up. "This is from their radar mapper. You see that grey dot?" He pointed to a small blob in the upper left quarter of the screen.
"What about it?"
"That's the only object in the area for light years around. There are no stars nearby, no debris large enough to show up on the scanner, nothing that could possibly have attacked them except that."
"So?" Jin said impatiently. "Then we know what to shoot at."
Ueda jabbed the console again, and another image appeared - this one, from the KAT-TUN's own systems. "I'm not saying it's harmless...but it was stationary when they arrived, and it hasn't moved since then. If it was a ship, don't you think it would've left by now?"
"True. Who attacks people and sticks around to wait for reinforcements to show up?"
"Somebody who's very confident in their ability to take out anything that comes their way," Koki opined.
"Or it could be an unmanned station with an automated defense system," Nakamaru added. "We don't know that there's any life out there and we're not going to know until we get closer."
"Uh, guys?" Junno interrupted. "There might not be life out there but there's definitely something. I'm picking up all kinds of crazy signals."
Sure enough, strange noises and random blips of light were emanating from his station, none of them remotely familiar. The command crew stared in alarm. Were they about to come face to face with an unknown enemy, or was it just that Junno had forgotten to switch off his games again?
"See if you can get anything from that," Jin said at last. "It's not Japanese, it's not English, and I'm pretty sure it's not rap. Beyond that, I have no idea."
"It's not French either," Ueda offered.
Nakamaru was shaking his head sadly. "Worst attempt at beatboxing I've ever heard," he murmured.
"It does sound awfully garbled," Jin agreed.
"Well, at this speed..." Nakamaru suddenly abandoned the rest of his sentence and slammed his fist down on the controls. The ship lurched violently, causing everyone who was still standing to hit the deck.
"What did you do that for?" Jin spluttered, trying to fix his hair.
The pilot grinned apologetically. "Sorry about that. I thought if we dropped to sub-light speeds again we might get better reception. We were moving so fast it's almost impossible to pick anything up."
Ueda, who'd been unlucky enough to get hit in the face by a flying trainee, clambered dizzily to his feet and pressed a tissue to his bleeding nose. "A little warning would've been nice."
"There wasn't any time," Nakamaru explained. "When we slowed down earlier to get an accurate fix on those coordinates," he pointed at the image still on Ueda's screen, "we were a lot further away and I had time to take us down slowly. But at this distance, every second counts. Do you have any idea how powerful our new drive is?"
"Uh..." Jin hadn't been paying close attention when the fleet had offered him a free upgrade as a reward for his part in the war against the Fahngarlians. It had sounded impressive, but when the technicians started talking about anti-matter and crystals he'd tuned out and agreed to have whatever they wanted to give him. "Not really, no."
"Neither do I - I'm still learning! But it's amazing." Nakamaru sighed happily. "In the old days we'd have had to steal one, and now we get given incredible technology like this for free!"
Hardly for free, Jin thought, considering what they'd had to go through to earn it, but before he could say anything an incoming message blinked on Junno's console.
"Dropping to sub-light speeds hasn't cleared up the mysterious signals, but a message caught up to us from Arashi," Junno said cheerfully. "They've made some progress with the K8 crew! Somehow, Aiba's cracked the problem of Captain Shibutani's wailing - he thinks he's an enka singer!"
Jin pursed his lips and considered this. "That would explain a lot, actually..."
"Poor guy," Koki sympathised. "He's pretty tough, too. What could have scared him so much he got delusional?" Underneath the compassion there was a faint hint of smugness, the implication that he, Lieutenant Tanaka Koki, would not be so weak as to fall victim to the same fate.
"We're about to find out," Nakamaru said, and hit the shipboard radio so he could reach everyone not in the room. "Strap in, everybody, I'm going to speed us up again. We'll be in visual range in about five minutes."
Everyone scrambled to secure themselves on the bridge, and Jin called a warning to Kame via the comm link. He didn't know if the other man would be able to hear him or not, but figured he wouldn't appreciate being thrown around in the middle of his game.
Much to his surprise, he received a response, and it wasn't something he'd ever have said in front of his mother.
"Let's take a look at our mystery, shall we?" Ueda said, politely ignoring Jin's stricken expression. "I'd like to at least know what it looks like before we fire up the large plasma accelerator."
As the KAT-TUN slowed and stopped just inside the maximum visual range, the main viewscreen changed to give the crew their first proper glimpse of the target. No longer a small grey blob, now it was a large grey wheel.
"Hey," Junno pointed at the screen, "doesn't that look like the orbital stations?"
"One without all the insignia, yeah," Koki said, removing his sunglasses for a better look. "I think I even see an airlock."
"All the way out here?" Ueda shook his head. "I don't like it. Where there's a station, there should be people."
"I don't think it's people making these sounds." Junno looked warily at his instruments. "It's more like a radio station for pets, or something."
While the others were discussing what might or might not have been a station, Jin was hunched over in his chair, one leg crossing the other, looking for all the world as if he was about to expire from sheer misery. "He hates me," he wailed to the empty air. "Kame hates me and now he's probably going to spend the rest of his confinement locked in his cabin and I'll never see him again because the moment he can go free he'll leave!"
"But he can't go anywhere yet," Ueda argued, proving that he was actually listening, after all. "So you have to stop worrying about him. Worry about what's out there, instead."
Jin blinked away the moisture that was starting to gather in his eyes, and stared at the viewscreen. "Isn't that an orbital station?" he said dully, only to be met with a chorus of "We've already established that!" from the rest of the crew.
"If we go with that theory, what do you want me to do? Turn around? Move in closer? Stay right where we are while you complain about your love life?"
Jin fixed Nakamaru with a baleful glare. "Since you asked, you can take us closer. We're at maximum zoom as it is, and I want a better look at this thing."
If only because dealing with an unknown danger was probably easier - and safer - than trying to fix things with Kame.
As the KAT-TUN slowly approached the station - for indeed, a station it was - the tension level on the bridge rose. Closer and closer until...
"STOP!" Jin yelled in English.
Nakamaru groaned. "You want to stop *now*?" He continued to grumble but managed to coax the engines to a halt. "Why now?"
Ueda hit on the answer immediately. "Because now we're in teleport range." He looked accusingly at Jin. "You want to go across there, don't you?"
Jin looked coyly out from under his fringe. "Maybe."
The others weren't impressed.
"All right, yes, I want to go," he admitted. "When they debrief me and ask what we blew to smithereens, I'd like to be able to give them an answer. Not to mention that if we knew what had affected Subaru and his crew, we might be able to help them. It's worth trying to find out, isn't it?"
"It would be kind of pathetic if we didn't even attempt it," Koki said.
"Right," Nakamaru agreed. "We've come all the way out here - and we were supposed to be investigating anyway, unless you read between the lines of the mission and work out that we're only here to blow things up..."
"The transmissions aren't getting any clearer, but I think we should try too," Junno chimed in. "It's probably some scrambled automated systems - could even be a distress call and we'd never know."
Ueda still looked doubtful. "Remember the damage to the K8's hull? What's to say we're not about to get attacked at any moment?"
"I have a theory," Jin announced. Koki and Nakamaru exchanged glances and burst out laughing, but he refused to be deterred. "How long would it have taken the K8 to fly back, given their engines?"
Nakamaru stopped laughing long enough to answer. "About a month. They were on autopilot the whole time, but it's an old model, doesn't compensate for obstacles well."
"There," Jin said triumphantly. "They could've picked up the damage in collisions on the way home."
"And the missing first scientific exploration vessel before the K8 was sent? The second drifted back without an autopilot, but the first vanished entirely."
Jin wasn't going to let Koki shoot down his theory. "Either it drifted further out into space or it docked and it's inside that thing somewhere. Only the fleet ships have teleport technology - I bet the K8 crew teleported onto the station to investigate, and someone on the ship managed to bring them all back and hit the autopilot before they all turned into zombies."
"And exactly how does our lovesick Captain Akanishi think we're going to avoid the same thing happening to us if anyone teleports over there?" Ueda asked.
Jin had an answer for that as well, though he knew no one else was going to like it. "We don't teleport. I'm taking a shuttle, and I'm going alone. You all wait here and if I don't contact you or return within an hour, you assume I'm dead, blow the whole thing to pieces and get back to Earth as fast as you can."
He winced when Ueda slapped him. The normally serene commander was infuriated, and Jin's smarting cheek told him exactly how much.
"You think doing something suicidally stupid is going to impress him?" Ueda said quietly. "Or maybe you just want a distraction, I don't know. But you can't go by yourself. At least take someone with you."
"Like you said, it's suicidally stupid, and that means I'm not going to let any of you risk yourselves." Jin was adamant on this point. "Somebody has to go but there's no sense in risking the entire crew."
"So the captain goes instead?" Nakamaru sounded almost disgusted.
"A captain. If anything happens to me, you guys have a spare." Jin giggled, slightly hysterical. "You might even be better off that way."
"Not if he never comes out of his cabin again," Ueda muttered.
They did their best to talk him out of it, but Jin would not be swayed. Part of him was excited - the part that enjoyed the kick of danger, the thrill of staking his life on his own abilities. The rest of him, however, was scared stiff, and kept coming up with perfectly sane, logical reasons why they should send one of their two mobile probes onto the station in his stead, and explore through the safety of the camera's lens.
But that would be boring, and more importantly, the probes were very limited in the information they could record. A human had to go, and if Jin didn't leave soon someone was going to succeed in talking him out of it.
"I've made up my mind," he said, and that was that.
-----
Less than an hour later, Jin was sitting in the cockpit of a small, two-man shuttle, clad in his snazzy silver-and-black space armour, and grateful that the automatic doors on the station's airlock appeared to be in perfect working order. Forcing them open would've been unnecessarily risky, not to mention a waste of time, and he'd left Ueda with explicit instructions on what to do if he neither returned nor contacted the ship after an hour.
Jin fervently hoped it wouldn't come to that. He'd checked his comm link four times on the flight, only to be greeted on each occasion by a distressed trainee. He'd briefly considered leaving a message for Kame but the other captain was bound to ignore it, or perhaps make a suitably scathing remark, so Jin figured it could wait until he got back.
Because he was definitely going back, oh yes.
The inner airlock doors opened to reveal a clear, lighted path to a landing bay, and Jin steered the shuttle smoothly down to an empty spot next to a ship bearing Earth insignia and a Terran Institute of Exploration logo. He opened his armour's comm link for the fifth time, and without waiting for an answer, said, "No doubt about it, guys, I've found the missing ship. It's sitting right next to me in the landing bay. There are dozens of others here but that's the only one I recognise."
Static filled the line for a moment; when it cleared, Junno was on the other end. "Is there anyone in it?"
There was the sound of a thump, followed by Koki's voice in the background. "That ship's been there for months! If there's anyone in there they're probably dead by now."
"I'll let you know when I take a look inside," Jin said, and cut the link.
Not that he particularly wanted to check for corpses, but he knew if he didn't at least take a peek, the curiosity would eat him alive. Besides, someone back at HQ was bound to ask.
He double-checked the armour's seals and life-support systems, made sure his weapons were within easy reach - not, alas, his favourite blaster since he couldn't use the gene-locked trigger without removing the space armour - and popped the hatch on the shuttle. He clambered out, keeping a close watch for any signs of movement in the deserted landing bay.
There were none, nor were there any sounds, not even the usual whine of machinery that no orbital station was ever without. The artificial gravity was working perfectly, Jin was pleased to discover - he had a nasty tendency to get disoriented in freefall - but the generators were totally noiseless. Despite the comfortably warm temperature inside the armour, he shivered. The well-lit landing bay was eerie without the customary commotion, the roar of the ships' engines and the banter of crews as they disembarked. So many ships, all with different styles and markings, most unknown to him, and all abandoned.
Not for the first time in his life, Jin wondered if he'd gotten in over his head. It was all very well acting courageous in front of the crew and vowing to take on all the responsibility himself, but he'd have felt a lot better right now if he'd had someone with him. A silent station was a dead station, and it was easy to lose yourself in the gaping emptiness where life should have flourished.
And human life could have flourished with few problems, he discovered, as the systems in his armour fed back results from atmospheric tests, with a bleep that indicated that the information was being sent to the KAT-TUN as well. The oxygen content of the air was a little on the low side, but no more so than some of Earth's mountains, and conditions were such that he could actually have removed the helmet and breathed without much difficulty.
Tentatively, Jin approached the other vessel, slightly awed by the clomping of boots on the bare floor. Under normal circumstances, he'd never even have noticed. The exploration ship had to have an entrance somewhere; Jin wished he'd paid attention when Ueda had tried to show him the specs. It was a long, narrow craft that showed little wear - no hull scoring here - and he thought he might have been right about the origins of the damage done to the K8.
The port side was clear and Jin was just moving round to check the starboard side when he caught a whisper, the faintest murmur in his helmet's speakers. He shook his head, wondering if he was hearing feedback from the comm link, or someone in his crew was playing tricks on him.
He dismissed it...until it happened again, just as he was about to force the entrance. Jin abandoned the ship and did a quick circuit of the landing bay to assure himself that he really was alone. Just in case, he checked in with the KAT-TUN.
"You guys aren't trying to scare me by whispering down the comm link, are you?" he asked.
"If we were trying to scare you, we'd come up with something a lot more creative," was Nakamaru's reply.
Satisfied, Jin turned back to the exploratory ship. He didn't get very far. A door at the far end of the landing bay, which had been closed since he'd arrived, now rested half-open, the sliding metal doors caught midway. As he watched, they struggled the remainder of the distance and closed the gap.
"What the..." he muttered. "Must be one of those that opens when you approach it, and takes forever to close."
He tested out this theory, not without some trepidation, by marching up to the door; contrarily, it refused to open. Instead, the next door along slid open with a gentle whirring noise, revealing a brightly-lit corridor beyond. As with the landing bay, the corridor was empty.
"Ueda," Jin called down the comm link, "you can track my movements from the armour, right?"
"Right," the commander confirmed. "Why?"
"Don't be alarmed, but I'm just about to leave the landing bay. There's this door...oh, never mind." He signed off before anyone could ask him to explain why he suddenly felt the need to ignore the missing ship and head down an unknown corridor.
Jin didn't think he could explain it. But the closer he got to the door, the louder and more frequent the whispers became. No words, yet. Sounds that, when he paid closer attention, were similar to the bizarre transmissions Junno had been picking up on his instruments. These were bolder, though. More insistent. Downright pushy, even.
It didn't surprise Jin in the least when the doors slammed shut behind him. The corridor looked to be a long one, traversing the length of one of the wheel's spokes, with other - closed - doors set into the wall at intervals. He didn't bother trying any of them. As he walked, the odd squawks, whistles, bleeps and fizzes evened out into a single tone, a pulse that beat an unsteady rhythm inside the helmet's speakers.
It wasn't until Jin neared the wheel's hub that he realised the pulse wasn't in his speakers - it was in his head.