Deathstalker 02 - Deathstalker Rebellion

Captain."
    Of course. She knows what she's doing. Let her get on with her job. Silence took a deep breath and let it out slowly as he straightened up. He looked about him and scowled inside the safety of his helm. It wouldn't do any good for the others to see how frustrated he was getting. They'd ended up in one of the main control centers on the second floor, and it was even more of a mess than anywhere else, if that was possible. Most of the instrumentation had been ripped out of its settings and partially dismantled. As though the dismantlers had never seen anything like it before. Perhaps they hadn't. Not for the first time, Silence remembered the alien ship he and Frost had found crash-landed on Unseeli, with its strange and unnatural biomechanical systems. A ship that had been grown as much as made. The single alien from that ship had killed every human being in Unseeli's Base Seven and transformed the Base itself in horrid alien ways. Hopefully, that wasn't what they had here. The signs were different.
    "Stelmach, try and find a computer terminal you can access. I need the Commander's log."
    "I'm doing my best, Captain. There are some working systems still on-line, but reaching them's the problem. Whatever came through here really trashed the place."
    I want results, not excuses! Silence nearly snapped, but kept it to himself. "Do your best, Stelmach. We won't leave here till you've exhausted every possibility." He looked around as Cross came over to join him. "Anything new?"

    "Not exactly, Captain. There's something wrong here. Apart from the obvious.
    There aren't enough bodies."
    "Explain."
    "Given the size of the contingent running this Base, we should have encountered far more bodies than we have. Unless they're all piled up somewhere we haven't found yet, I'd have to say as many as seventy to eighty per cent of the Base personnel are missing. Which suggests to me that the invaders may have taken the surviving personnel with them when they left."
    "As hostages."
    "Or specimens."
    "But there is a chance they could still be alive?"
    "Unknown, Captain. They could have been taken to the alien craft for… study."
    And that was an interesting choice of word, Silence thought unhappily. It could mean anything from observation to vivisection. Either way, it was a complication Silence could have done without. He came to Gehenna to investigate what had happened at its Base, not go chasing blindly off after missing personnel. But he couldn't just ignore them. Not if there was a chance, however small, that some of them might still be alive. He scowled, torn over what to do for the best. His duty was clear; discovering what had happened in the Base had to have top priority Whatever had trashed the Base so thoroughly could be a threat to the Empire itself. Just at the time when the last thing it needed was another threat. But he couldn't abandon people to death or worse. He couldn't. He made himself stop frowning. His head was beginning to ache again. Facts. He needed hard facts to help him make his decision.
    "Stelmach…"
    "All right, all right! I think I've got something…"

    Silence and Frost moved over to join Stelmach and Cross beside a comm panel that didn't look quite as wrecked as the others. It still looked pretty bad, and from the way Stelmach and Cross were fiddling about with its innards, there was clearly still a lot wrong with it.
    "Bear with us for a moment, Captain," said Stelmach without looking up from what he was doing. "I've cobbled together parts from a dozen panels, and if we're very lucky, it might just condescend to work for us."
    "I helped," said Cross.
    "All right, I was going to tell them. This man's wasted in Communications, Captain. He knows more about the inside of comm tech than I do, and I thought I knew everything. Ever thought about a career in security work, Cross?"
    "Save the recruiting speeches for later," said Frost. "What have you got?"
    "If we're extremely lucky, access to the security systems. There are surveillance cameras throughout the Base, and their files are kept separate from the rest, hidden away for obvious reasons. Apparently, the aliens didn't dig deep enough to find them."
    "Yeah," said Silence. "Right. That sounds like Security."
    "You'd better hope I'm right, Captain," Stelmach said stiffly. "Whatever happened here, it's over. The attackers are long gone. These security files could be the only records of what actually happened here."
    "We'll applaud later," said