The “Ghost” of Chelsea Orlova

Here’s another one that breaks my personal guidelines about not killing off a character’s parents. It’s a trope that happens often enough that you can usually see it coming miles away, but it can still work every now and then. I was planning to talk about this one in my previous post, but there was so much stuff that it would’ve made an already-too-long post twice as long, and I really need to work on my brevity.

So we’ll dive right in here …

Chelsea Orlova arrived at the pirate safe-haven space station (discussed in the post linked above) shortly after the Specialists and complicated their rescue mission by fighting her way through hordes of spore-zombies to plant a bomb on the reactors at the station’s core. Much like Billy Dalton (also discussed briefly in the same post), she lost her parents when she was young and is driven by a lust for revenge mixed with a need to prevent the same thing from happening to anyone else.

A different version of her already existed, having appeared in an early chapter of Freelancers and popped back up again a couple dozen chapters later. This version, some of the main characters discover eventually, had parents who worked for Cerberus in a small outpost on the colony world of Mindoir. They were studying a handful of devices that turned humans into mindless husks … only they didn’t know what the strange alien tech did until the devices did it to them. Chelsea had to witness her parents and everyone else in the outpost turn into Husks … and then they tried to capture her and impale her on one of the Dragon’s Teeth. She had to kill the things her parents had become just to escape the same fate.

When she was eight years old.

She made her way to another settlement, checked herself into the hospital and recovered from her injuries … the physical ones, at least. She had endured the kind of trauma that leaves all its scars on the inside and never goes away. Some time later, she found her way to another Cerberus facility, convinced the team to load her up with all the cybernetic augmentations they could get their hands on, and set out on a quest to hunt down every piece of Reaper technology she could find and destroy it. The Cerberus team tried to keep her in their base and turn her into another of their experiments, but as she said at one point while talking with some of the main characters, “I gave them my opinion” — after which the survivors were too terrified to try it again, and supplied her with all the gear she needed in exchange for letting them live.

When one of the protagonists asked her what her name was, the only answer she would give was, “Ghost.” Perhaps she felt like she’d died that day on Mindoir and transformed into a sort of avenging angel. It wasn’t until much later that they learned her actual identity and backstory.

When I had the idea of using a porting her over to the Uncharted Territory universe, I decided to age her up a bit. So here she’s around twelve … and she was with her parents in an outpost on one of the outer planets in this system when they were studying a handful of alien pods they’d discovered there. As you might expect, one of the pods opened, a massive load of spores got into the ventilation system and dosed everyone except Chelsea, and she had to kill her parents after they turned into spore-zombies before they could kill or infect her.

Similar events to the Freelancers version played out at an accelerated rate, with Ghost finding a black site that could give her the cybernetic components and weapons she wanted, and dedicated herself to tracking down more of the pods and other alien biotech — and it creators — and utterly wiping them out. She appeared out of nowhere early in their rescue mission and … spiced things up a bit, as you’ll see in the following excerpt.

Another alert came from the Booger Hollow’s sensor suite and Jud moved around the console for a better look at the info coming in.

What the hell? An explosion had just been detected on the surface of Apollyon h. From the readings, it had been a nuke.

“What’s that alarm?” Zaara said, and Jud relayed the scans to the whole team.

“Looks like the detonation was around sixty or seventy megatons. And at the distance that planet is from here, it happened about four hours ago.”

“Terrific,” Mala grumbled. “What’s on Apollyon h that somebody would want to nuke?”

Jud brought up the data on the Apollyon system, skimmed it, and raised an eyebrow.

“There’s a handful of old research outposts that were taken over by pirates and several facilities that have been redacted. There’s no info on them at all.” Jud took a slow breath and ran a hand through his hair. “One of those bases was ground zero.”

“Black sites, probably. Could be any number of reasons someone would want to blow one of those up, including the people running it. Or it could’ve been an accident. Something that got out of control.”

“Jud,” Zaara cut in, “see if there are any such sites on Apollyon f.”

“On it.” Jud checked the records for the planet beneath him. “Two sites are just like the others I found on h – everything’s been redacted.”

“Oh, great,” Kala said, “nothing bad could possibly come out of that, could it?”

“Kala,” Mala grumbled, “shut your sass-hole before …”

The sensors picked up something else and another alert flashed in the holofield. Mala let her comment trail off and finished with an annoyed grunt while Jud took in the readings.

“A ship just dropped out of hyperspace. From the size, it looks like a scout. One or maybe two-person crew.” He frowned at the readings and shook his head. “There’s no ident transponder. Also, I’m having trouble keeping a lock on the ship. Stealth tech, I’m guessing.”

“So.” Kala fired off a nervous chuckle. “What’re the odds of that ship having nothing at all to do with the black site getting nuked?”

“Well, it seems to be heading straight for the station, so …”

“Wonderful.” Zaara let out a sharp sigh. “We need to hurry.”

That was Ghost arriving in orbit after obliterating the outpost on one of the outer planets. In the rough draft of the story, the pirate station was orbiting another of the outer planets of the Iota¹ Scorpii system, though that will likely change when the story is reworked into a sequel to Uncharted Territory.

The team gradually learns more about her in bits and pieces as they continue their rescue mission …

“Well,” Demi said after several minutes of silent walking, as the team tried to get over what they’d just witnessed while escorting the survivors back to the airlock they’d used to get in. “This is interesting.”

She sent the feeds from a specific set of security cameras to everyone. Jud watched them appear above the circular console and cocked his head. The first image was a small storage room. A shower of sparks sprayed from the ceiling and moved quickly in a circular pattern until it returned to the starting point. A round section of the hull rocketed to the floor, propelled by a kick. Someone in an armored spacesuit dropped through, shoved the piece of metal back into place, and welded it shut just as quickly.

Must be whoever was piloting the approaching ship.

He noticed a large backpack attached to the suit. Extra oxygen, maybe, or equipment for whatever this person was up to.

Something seemed off about the figure, Jud realized suddenly. The overall shape looked female but the figure was … small. A kid, maybe a teenager at most.

Huh …

The girl strode out of the room and a hallway camera picked her up, then another and another.

“The internal scanners detected an explosive device in the backpack,” Zaara said as the cameras continued tracking the girl. “She appears to be moving deeper into the station. I bet she’s heading for the reactors.”

“Oh, hell,” Kolya muttered. “Maybe she’s the one who blew up that base.”

“If so, we’re on a clock, here.”

Everyone increased their pace. Jud tried to keep his attention on all of their feeds and the ones tracking the new arrival. The kid entered a huge chamber that looked like it was a hydroponics facility before the spores worked their way in – and ran straight into a half-dozen zombies. They’d already been marching in her direction, as if they’d made a conscious decision to intercept her.

The kid didn’t even flinch. Without breaking her stride, she drew a pair of small pistols that Jud hadn’t even noticed before. She drilled every zombie right through an eye socket in about two seconds, nailing three shots with each gun, her arms appearing to aim independently.

Huh. Must be cybernetic enhancements. Maybe even a full cyber body.

The zombies staggered and resumed their attack – and their heads exploded in sequence according to when they’d been shot, scattering fragments of bone, blood, what was left of their brains, and streams of spores all over the room. Jud guessed the ammo was small caliber but contained enough explosives to do what he’d just witnessed. The kid holstered her guns and continued walking as if nothing had happened, and another shiver ran up and down Jud’s spine.

Fuuuuuuck …

A short time later, the mysterious intruder does what she went there to do … and then makes a quick gesture that indicates she knows she’s being watched.

He turned to check on the unidentified kid who’d boarded the station and found her in the reactor section. She took the backpack off, placed it in between the four reactors, and reached into it. He couldn’t see exactly what her hands were doing from this angle, but it wasn’t hard to figure out.

“Hey, everybody, you might want to pick up the pace.”

“Almost there, Jud,” Demi said as the group continued moving forward, stepping around or over corpses and vines. “We’re keeping an eye on her. It’s unlikely that she’d set that thing off without getting back to her ship first.”

Just hurry anyway. Please! Jud kept watching and had to force himself not to start pacing around the console. In the feed keeping track of the kid, she finished what she was doing, stood, and brushed spores off her hands and arms.

“I’m ready to push the engines to maximum burn the instant they’re aboard,” Boner said.

“Thanks.” Jud managed to smile and made an effort to take a deep, slow breath.

Almost there. Almost there …

The kid turned and stared straight into the camera, and another cold surge rushed through Jud’s guts. She raised two fingers to her helmet and tossed off a jaunty salute before marching out of the room and appearing on another camera. Jud shook his head slowly and crossed his arms over his chest to stop his sudden trembling.

After the team and the survivors get back to the Booger Hollow and begin the decontamination procedure, the kid sends them a bunch of files as a way of introducing herself and letting them in on a bit of what’s going on before her ship jumps away. The scene needs some editing and probably should be broken up into at least two or three smaller scenes because it goes on and on … and on … but sometimes you need to just get the ideas out of your head and worry about prettying it up later …

Data flickered through the girls’ feeds indicating another wireless conversation. The holographic bubbles cleared and then filled with a sequence of files, and Jud realized they’d discussed the info and settled on a specific order for displaying the files.

The first video showed a scene at an outpost on Iota¹ Scorpii h with the date stamp labeling it as the location of the detonation the ship had detected. The first thing Jud noticed was a row of the leathery black pods sitting on a table surrounded by scanners and other devices. Humans stood at consoles around the room and a handful gathered around a bank of monitors – and to their credit, all of them wore spacesuits designed for hazardous atmospheres. If they’d stuck to the strictest decontamination protocols, they would’ve been okay … until the facility got nuked, at least.

Another video had one of the pods opening and sprouting several vines that stretched across the floor and up to an air vent on the wall. They grew with alarming speed, but the playback hadn’t been sped up. The way they moved reminded Jud of The Thing – one of the movies he’d found in an archive and watched when he was way too young not to be traumatized by it. He shuddered and crossed his arms tightly over his chest again as the vine pressed against the vent until it punched through and snaked its way inside.

The next file showed a laboratory where other artifacts were being studied. Jud couldn’t identify any of the metal objects but there was something sinister about the jagged shapes and the black coloring. In fact, the coloring reminded him of the pods and vines and spores.

I wonder if there’s a connection. Maybe it’s a natural life form on that planet, or wherever the hell the builders of those artifacts came from.

Four people stood around the room, touching controls and staring at monitors for a few seconds and then talking softly with one another. A hatch at the far end of the room opened and a kid in an armored spacesuit stepped out of the airlock. She took her helmet off and tucked it under her left arm, revealing a red-haired girl with freckles and bright, curious eyes and an excited smile. She looked around eleven or twelve years old.

“Assignments at that outpost must’ve lasted long enough for a few of them to bring their families along,” Kolya said. “Damn, I hope everybody evacuated before the place blew up.”

The girl walked over to a man and a woman and spoke to them. The man said something back and the girl laughed and nodded. She walked toward the inner hatch while talking and gesturing in its general direction.

Clouds of spores sprayed suddenly from the air vents. A startled and then horrified expression crossed the girl’s face as she slammed her helmet back on and sealed it. She pulled the other two toward the hatch but they’d already gotten a massive dose from the vent directly behind them. Both of them fell to their knees, gagging and choking, and then flopped over and convulsed. The girl’s face could no longer be seen but the way she flailed her arms and hunched forward several times suggested that she was screaming.

The other two people had gotten a faceful of the spores, as well, and collapsed while scrambling for the inner hatch.

“Jesus,” Kolya blurted. “That poor kid!”

“Yeah,” Demi said. “The people she was talking with were probably her parents.”

The woman, presumably the kid’s mother, managed to wave her off and point frantically at the inner hatch. The girl shook her head, but then she backed away, turned, and bolted in a panic.

“How horrible,” Rahiba whispered. “I can’t even imagine …”

Interjecting here to break up the wall of text, but also … here’s what happens when your characters don’t take precautions. That’s something I see on Star Trek all the time, among others — they bring something onto the ship to examine it and they’re usually wearing their normal uniforms. Only rarely do I ever see them wearing specialized protective gear and keeping the object contained until they know more about what it is and what it does. Here, the girl just happened to be prepared because moments earlier she was outside where there was either no atmosphere or whatever atmo it had was toxic or otherwise harmful. No one in the lab even had anything within reach that could’ve protected them.

The time stamp on the next video was two days later. In it, the girl was still in her spacesuit but now she also carried a pistol on her belt and an assault rifle clipped to her back. She entered a supply storage room, took her breather pack off, removed its tank, scanned everything for spores, and replaced the tank with a new one. She put the pack back on, darted into a walk-in vault, and reappeared with cases of ammo, grenades, and larger explosives on a cart.

Goddamn. I wonder if she even had anything to eat or drink. Or if she was able to get any sleep over those two days. Probably not. Jud shivered again and glanced at some of the other files that had come through. He focused on the personnel files of the two people the girl had spoken with and saw that she was, indeed, their daughter.

Chelsea Orlova, age twelve. Christ, what an awful thing to go through at any age, let alone twelve. Her parents had worked for Galactic Expeditions and had been sent to Apollyon h after automated probes detected a number of artifacts and biologicals. Well, that figures. The company knew that stuff was there and sent someone to study it. Probably to find a way to weaponize it.

Jud shook his head slowly and wondered what the company already knew about those pods and what happened to people who were exposed.

The next file played. This one was an exterior shot of the outpost, the typical pressurized modules exploration crews set up in hostile environments, with a half-dozen black towers in the distance, all arranged in a circle and leaning toward the center. The time stamp was within minutes of the previous video. The image cut to another camera, closer, showing the towers and several nearby consoles in greater detail. A group from the outpost, half of them wearing armored spacesuits with security markings, kept shifting their attention back and forth from the consoles to the towers and back. Given the time stamp, Jud guessed they’d been camped out here while studying the towers.

Oh, hell, they may not have even known anything was wrong back at the outpost.

“The towers and control panels look like they’re made of the same metal as the artifacts we saw in one of the earlier videos.” Min-Zhou shook her head. “That can’t be good.”

The image blurred slightly. Jud stared, wondering what the hell had happened, and then he figured it out – the ground must’ve started shaking enough to affect the camera.

The people in the image exchanged a series of startled glances.

A bright light washed everything out for a fraction of a second and everyone was still flinching when it faded. A rippling portal had appeared in the circle formed by the towers. Everyone took a few steps back and the security people snapped their rifles up to point at the disturbance. Jud leaned closer and kept staring. At first he’d thought it was a circle, but now realized it was spherical. The edges appeared blurry, and this time he didn’t think it was from the ground shaking. Inside, though … it just looked like billowing black smoke.

Or spores? Oh, shit, what if that thing’s about to pour an ocean’s worth of those goddamn things out?

The smoke oozed out of the portal but didn’t disperse or rise into the sky. It just collected on the ground, forming a cloud taller than the average human. It spread out to the sides but, again, didn’t dissipate. It continued clinging to the ground.

“What the hell?” Rahiba whispered.

Something appeared inside the clouds, fading into view as if coming from deep within and making its way to the outer edge. At first it appeared to be four or five globs of sickly yellow-green light, but as they neared the edge of the smoke, each light turned out to be six individual lights, three pairs stacked one on top of another.

Something else faded in around the lights. Vaguely round but with sharp angles and corners … maybe. He couldn’t tell what the shapes were. A few more black shapes appeared under them, some of which seemed to be moving. Long, thin, jointed … arms?

Arms, bodies, heads. Jesus Christ, those lights are eyes!

I remember mentioning in at least one or two other posts that these aliens were inspired by an image I barely remembered from my childhood. The art book Aliens in Space: An Illustrated Guide to the Inhabited Galaxy had one particular painting in it that, even though many of the details had faded over the years, remained lodged in my mind since the 1980s. I remembered a sinister alien with glowing eyes emerging from clouds or fog, and when coming up with a hostile alien species for Uncharted Territory, my memory of it morphed into these beings with six eyes and an unknown number of limbs who always kept themselves shrouded in smoke.

It could be technology they use to surround themselves with their own breathable atmosphere or it could be part of a weapons system they carry around somewhat similar to the nanotech used by enemy forces in gen:LOCK, I suppose. Or it could be something they use to terrorize their targets. Or simply a natural function of their bodies. Or something else entirely that hasn’t been observed by the characters yet.

These same aliens made a few appearances in Somewhere Out There as well, and figuring out a way to deal with the spores they created became a major plot thread. Now that the sequels to Uncharted Territory will have the protagonists venturing into unexplored space, the chances of them encountering these beings are pretty good.

A few years ago I happened across the image that inspired these sinister aliens, and it’s no less unsettling now than it was back then. The glowing eyes, the face that’s kind of a cross between a monkey and a skull, the hazy background, the dreamlike (more like nightmarish) look of the overall picture, and the fact that it appears to be dressed as a sort of alien monk or sorcerer, and is carrying a knife which implies that the tome in its other hand is its species’ idea of a holy book … it’s all very creepy. The whole picture is spooky enough, but anyone who walks around carrying a huge fuckin’ knife and a holy book simply can’t be up to anything good.

So the ideas forming in my head for this species were that they’re incredibly hostile to all other forms of life and fanatical about wiping out every other species aside from their own. Which might be too similar to the Daleks, I suppose, so I’m considering a few ideas for their motivations in case they’re actually revealed in one of the novels. But then again, there are plenty of examples of this exact kind of behavior in real life, and the Daleks were written to be, basically, Space Nazis for a reason. Just looking at current and recent events, it’s clear that those who are so hell-bent on taking rights away from women and minorities, and doing everything they can think of to hurt “the other,” are motivated by hatred and also fear of anyone who isn’t them. Anyone who is different is wrong and shouldn’t be allowed to exist, so it’s okay to hurt them until they go away or are all dead. The cruelty is the whole point.

So maybe the motivations of these hostile aliens don’t really need to be all that nuanced, after all …

“Oh,” Jez groaned softly, “that shit ain’t right.”

“Oh, fuck,” Kolya said. “I’ve seen these things before.”

Everyone turned to stare at her and she nodded.

“Long story short, I was with a crew investigating ruins on Gamma Orionis b. We found some recordings of a tower on another planet pumping out black smoke just like that. It filled the atmosphere and blocked out all light from the star, and gradually all life on the planet died off. Then, in one of the recordings, the tower opened and aliens emerged and …”

The smoke finally split apart, remaining around each of the alien bodies, obscuring them. Jud caught fleeting glimpses of spiky hands, arms, maybe a shoulder … and something that looked like rods or staffs. Each of the aliens held one.

“They looked just like those things,” Kolya continued. “I’ll never forget those eyes – or what happened next. If these people didn’t turn and run like hell, they all died right there.”

The aliens seemed to notice the security personnel aiming rifles at them. The smoke swirled around them and their arms thrashed, poking out of the smoke momentarily and then vanishing again. They raised the staffs and pointed them at several nearby humans.

Get the hell away from those things! Just run! Just …

“Those rods they’re holding are weapons,” Kolya said. “No idea what type, exactly. Directed energy of some sort, but I’d never seen anything like it before.”

A beam that reminded Jud of a black-light lamp fired from one of the rods and struck a nearby security guy in the midsection. He let out an agonized scream that the camera mic picked up through his spacesuit and the thin, unbreathable atmosphere – and his body folded in half. Jud couldn’t get a clear look, but the part of the armored suit struck by the beam had melted. Or maybe warped.

Naturally, being completely intolerant of the mere existence of any life form other than their own, the weapons they use have the cruelty level dialed up to eleven. They could’ve designed something that would kill instantly and painlessly, but they chose not to. Another similarity to the Daleks, obviously, but even their weapons took “only” a few seconds to kill their victims. The unnamed aliens here, however, built directed-energy weapons that cause damage by distorting and disrupting targets at the cellular or atomic level, similar to Warp in Mass Effect. Or perhaps the horrific and fatal distortion the crew of the USS Glenn experienced when their spore drive malfunctioned in a first-season episode of Star Trek: Discovery.

Scaled-up versions of these weapons were mounted on the hostile aliens’ ships in Somewhere Out There and had similar effects on other ships that were hit, “softening” their hulls and inner structures and causing the ships’ own momentum while maneuvering to buckle the hull, in some cases causing the ship to fold nearly in half. And it takes their victims several minutes to finally die. So … yeah. Those aliens are mean as hell.

And, honestly, I’m a little disturbed that I even thought up something like this …

“Oh god,” Rahiba blurted.

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I saw in those recordings, just in a different location.” Kolya turned away and crossed her arms over her chest. “Those beams seem to warp their targets at the molecular or atomic level.”

“Looks like it had that effect on the armored spacesuit and the person inside it,” Tazanna said softly. “Fucking hell …”

In the video, the security guards and the  rest of the aliens opened fire at the same time. One of the civilians caught a beam square in the chest as she turned to run, and her torso twisted as she fell. She kept screaming weakly after hitting the ground, somehow still alive – as was the first man who’d been shot. The rest of the group was mowed down in seconds as they fled, each of them taking it in the back and crumpling.

“We’ve seen enough of that,” Zaara almost sobbed, ending the playback and skipping to the next file.

This one showed Chelsea at a reactor console, skimming something on her comm and then touching sequences of icons and pushing sliders on the control panel. She kept at it for several more seconds, entered one last sequence, and warning lights flashed on every display in the room while alarms blared. The girl bolted through a nearby hatch and the clip ended.

“I guess that explains the detonation,” Billy said. 

“Yeah.” Demi winced and wrapped her wings around her shoulders like a cape. “I guess so.”

Another video file began. This one showed Chelsea backing into the frame and spraying something off-screen with her assault rifle. Jud noticed a backpack slung over her left shoulder. She stared for a moment, turned, and marched on to the far end of the corridor. Jud caught a glimpse of a guy wearing a security uniform and tactical gear tumbling into view – missing the top part of his head. Among the things one would expect to find inside a skull, Jud also saw thin vines, tendrils, black spots that looked almost like pepper, and grainy black fluid pouring from the wound.

He turned away, retched, and held his breath for a moment while trying to think of anything but what he’d just watched.

Chelsea jogged through another hatch and into a hangar bay where three shuttles had been parked. She darted around the nearest, inspecting it visually, appeared to find something wrong and moved on to the next. This one seemed to satisfy her. She rushed back to the first shuttle, pulled something that looked like a pipe bomb from her backpack, and planted it under the pilot’s console. She ran to the third shuttle, planted another bomb, and returned to the second. She opened the rear hatch and stepped onto the ramp.

Two more figures entered the frame and Jud recognized them immediately as her parents. Both of them were covered with spores and had ridges under their skin just like some of the victims the team had found on the pirate station. The girl spun around, spotted them, froze, and shook her head frantically. The pair charged her and Jud got a clear look at their eyes. Lifeless, yet something behind them was clearly thinking.

The girl let out a scream that the camera mics managed to pick up through her armored suit – then she fell silent, snapped the rifle up, and plugged the male zombie right in the face, blasting its head apart and dropping the rest of its body. Jud tried not to look at what was left of it.

The gun stopped firing, either jammed or empty. Chelsea didn’t even hesitate. She let the rifle dangle from the strap over her right shoulder, drew her pistol, and delivered a Mozambique Drill to the thing that used to be her mother. She watched it crumple to the floor, stared, and walked over to the bodies. She double-tapped both of them, watched them for a few more seconds, and returned to the shuttle.

“Goddamn,” Jez muttered. “That kid’s cold.”

“That’s probably what kept her alive,” Mala said. “It’s a good bet that most of the people she knew in that place turned into those things and she had to off ‘em to avoid being killed or turned into one of them, herself.”

“Yeah.” Jez shuddered. “That’s a bit much, even for me.”

Chelsea glanced down at her suit, noticed spores and black fluid on its surface, and appeared to panic for a second. She pulled herself together, glanced into the shuttle, and took a long look around the floor, walls, shuttle exterior, and seemed to even give the air itself a thorough look-over. Not that Jud could blame her. The spores had been pumped through the air circulation system into the whole base, so they could still be floating around. He couldn’t find any in the image, but that maybe the camera simply couldn’t pick them up.

The girl braced herself visibly, took a breath, and popped the seals on her helmet. She threw it across the room and shed the rest of her spacesuit, still holding her breath, and charged into the shuttle. The ramp raised, the rear hatch closed, and the engines activated. It lifted off and the outer doors opened, pulling a brief rush of wind through all the open hatches in the outpost, sending a stream of spores after the shuttle until the air was spent. The spores drifted back to the floor as the shuttle passed through the open doors and soared away.

A trio of spore-zombies stumbled through the inner door, staggered, appeared to gasp for breath, and collapsed.

“Okay, that’s interesting,” Mala said. “They still need an atmosphere.”

“I guess, technically, the host bodies are still ‘alive.’” Kolya shrugged. “Without air, they can’t function. If the whole place hadn’t been vaporized, I’d hope they actually died instead of just gone dormant until something revived them.”

“That’s a thought I didn’t need in my head,” Kong said under her breath, and Kolya chuckled.

“Sorry. At least there wasn’t any chance of that happening after the reactor popped off.”

The bombs planted in the two remaining shuttles detonated, ripping both entire cockpits apart and mangling the dead zombies with shrapnel.

The next clip was only a few seconds of the reactor room before it blew and took the camera with it. Another clip followed, showing the smoke-obscured aliens rushing one of the outpost’s main doors – and then a blinding light washed everything out a split-second before the camera was destroyed. Following this was another clip from a satellite almost directly above the outpost, its camera aiming down at an angle, capturing the entire settlement vanishing in an enormous ball of plasma hotter than a star.

“I hope some of the blast got through that portal and fucked up a bunch of those bastards,” Jez snarled.

One last clip began, captured from a low angle as Chelsea slipped on a spacesuit that she must’ve found onboard the shuttle. Her movements were almost lethargic, but she clearly wasn’t infected. If she had been, she wouldn’t have been around to enter the pirate station.

Jud realized suddenly that the POV was from a helmet cam and it was resting on the floor.

Chelsea dropped onto the pilot’s seat and stared off into space for a long moment. Then she sobbed, sucked in a deep breath, and burst into tears.

“Poor girl,” Billy said. “I can kinda relate to her.”

Zaara reached over to pat his shoulder and glanced around at the others.

“Heh. The decontamination cycle ended a few minutes ago and none of us noticed. We’re all clear. You guys can take off the suits and we’ll loan you some clothes. If you want, we’ll get you something to eat or drink while we figure out our next move.”

“There’s a lot more files we need to go through,” Mala said.

“In a bit.” Zaara sighed and headed for the inner hatch. “I think we all need a break after what we just saw.”

And … that was as far as I’d gotten when I found out that the publisher I planned to submit the story to was too shady to be worth the risk. The story was going to go on from here to have the team investigate nearby outposts and search for spore-zombies that had escaped on other pirate ships they’d taken over, and probably would’ve wrapped up there. But now that I’ll be expanding it into a full novel …

It’ll still include the investigation mentioned above, but will also have the team checking into Galactic Expeditions and trying to find out how much they already knew about the pods and spores and whether they had intentions to weaponize whatever their teams found. Plus more character-development of the Specialists and the survivors they rescued, as well as the POV shifting to the main characters of Uncharted Territory and continuing their journey, since a full novel will have plenty of room for that.

Also, more encounters with non-zombie pirates, since hunting them down became Billy’s reason for living over the years. He, Rahiba, and Jez will likely continue working together, which should make things interesting for them because she pretty much ran the whole pirate-haven station before everything went to shit, her minions abducted him and Rahiba, and she didn’t intend to let either of them go … until there was simply no reason to cling to her little empire once everyone else on the station either died or turned into spore-zombies.

Despite everything, I’m thinking that Billy and Rahiba find her kind of likable and are willing to give her a chance. However, Billy might also want to stay with her just to keep an eye on her and stop her if she tries to go back to her old ways.

And Ghost will keep popping up whenever the hostile aliens or their bioengineered spores and zombies show up. I’m thinking an interesting thing to explore with both her and Billy is that, as driven as they are by a need for revenge, it might be only a matter of time before they figure out that there has to be more to life than the next battle. I don’t see either of them giving up their fight, but how long will it be before they realize that’s not all they want?

And that’s where I should wrap things up so I don’t end up writing the entire novel right here. As usual, this has gone on too long as it is.

Time for me to get back to work on finishing Uncharted Territory, anyway …