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The Avalon is a Golden Age space station in a decaying orbit around Mercury, the life support systems are on their very final legs and the inside is more akin to a red sand desert than anything that could ever keep things alive with the thin air and blistering heat. Centuries of rusted grit crunch underfoot as the guardians step forward, the last vestiges of a transmat fizzing out around them.
It’s a ghost town in every sense of the archaic word.
The sun beats down through the busted solar shielding, bleaching everything it touches and bringing sweat to the brows of the two living dead that have boarded her.
“Why are we even here again?” asks one, a hunter with jittery nerves and a scout rifle held tightly in his hands.
“Because we were assigned to make sure there’s nothing of value aboard before it crashes into Mercury’s surface.” The warlock looks up, optics narrowed against the blinding light even through their shaded visor. An analogue clock stands just behind the fractured plex doors of the docking bay, reading out a perpetual high noon.
“Imagine the kind of place this must have been in its hay day. A never ending view of the garden world below, the sun above, and space everywhere in between,” their third says, her wide-eyed wonder audible behind her flat black mask. “Too bad its a wasteland now.”
The hunter just shifts the rifle in his hands, shoulders squared. “Let’s just hope there’s something worth the gallons of sweat I’m losing.”
The Avalon groans around them as they slip deeper into her depths. Once upon a time she was a research station, full of bright minds and eager hearts that reached for the stars until the things beyond reached back. All that remains of them are rusted machines and spiderweb fractures.
“Can’t believe no one’s ripped this place apart yet,” the hunter whistles lowly, pushing aside another plasma converter with the butt of his rifle. This one’s just like the rest, corroded and spent. Worthless.
“Why would they? Half the station’s been blown to bits, there’s probably nothing left.” The other hunter pulls off her helmet for a moment, the heat even down away from the direct sun is too much for the busted cooling system to handle. She wipes her face with the hem of her cloak, leaving a dark splotch on the rust red fabric.
“Would you two shut up, I think I found something.” The warlock is crouched over by a set of doors stuck halfway open.
“What is it captain?” she asks, helmet clicked back into place against the hypoxic atmosphere.
“Don’t call me that.” They hold up a shell casing, shotgun it looks like, and nod to pellet spray in the wall not four feet away. “I don’t think we’re the only ones here. Ghost scan for any lifesigns.”
“The only lifesigns aboard the Avalon are the three of you,” the ghost reads off mechanically. “Whoever was here before us is long gone now.”
They follow the signs of violence, solar scorch marks and branching lightning burns alongside stray bullets and discarded magazines . Whoever it was hadn’t tried to keep the fight clean. The only saving grace as the fireteam pushes into the heart of the station is the lack of corpses, but something hangs wrong and heavy in the scalding air all the same.
Soon their trek inwards becomes a trek upwards through the spiraling catwalk of an elevator shaft. Their ghosts tell them they’ve made it to the heart of the station, just above the slowly dying anti-grav engines.
“I don’t like this.” He’s got the rifle strapped across his back after they all had to leap over a rusting chasm in the scaffolding and watch as the closest section fell away behind them.
“You don’t like anything that isn’t poker or us.”
“You know exactly what I mean.” His hands shake, but they both pretend not to notice.
They find the elevator at the top after kicking through a safety hatch. The room they step into is almost blinding, sunlight streaming in through the floor to ceiling windows that overlook the central square of the station. A semi-circle table stands at the center, the chairs are all scattered to the corners but the rooms use is obvious.
“A control deck?”
The warlock shakes their head. “I think it’s a tomb.”
They nudge the broken remains of a shattered ghost with the toe of their boot. It’s guardian sits not even a foot away, cloak tangled around her knees, holster empty as she reaches out. A hand cannon sits limply in the hand by her side, the barrel shines white under the strong light.
Their living hunter crouches down to look at it. “Tex Mechanica,” she says. “Looks like a custom piece.”
Her ghost floats gently over and scans both corpses and the gun. “There’s a data pack attached to the gun. ‘ My hand is fate, my word is law - Guinevere-17.’ Egotistical.”
“Seems like she wanted to be remembered.” She takes the gun from pliant fingers. Exos aren’t affected by the same sort of rigor mortis that humans are.
“You can’t be serious,” her companion says, horrified, awed.
“She has no use for it, and it’s such a pretty piece.” She runs a thumb along the cannon after checking the chamber. It takes high impact special ammo if she had to hazard a guess.
“There’s more, her ghost recorded their final moments. I think you should hear it.” The ghost interrupts before playing the recording.
“We don’t need to do this.” A woman’s voice rings out, tinny through Ghost’s small modulator. “We can find another way.”
“It has to be me, Gwen. I think it always had to be me,” says another, male voice. Sad, resigned. “I love you both so much.”
“Bullshit,” comes the third and last voice of the recording, the action of a rifle is heard in the pin drop silence. “We can find another way. We can get the Vanguard involved. Let them take care of whatever that thing is.”
“I can’t risk anyone else getting hurt. Look what it did to this place.” An inhale and pained exhale. “If my death can keep you and the rest safe, then it’s not really a choice.”
“Arthur.”
“I have to take it.”
“Together, we’ll take it together.” There’s the sound of a gun being slung across his shoulders. “I’ve got your backs until the very end. Both of you.”
There’s a pause, as if both of them have turned to Guinevere, awaiting an objection.
One doesn’t come.
A door slams open.
The recording ends in gunfire.
Silence rings like the tolling of a clocktower in the wake of all the noise.
“Damn, what do you think it was?” The second hunter asks, hand still idly around the grip of her newfound cannon.
“Darkness, probably an artefact.” The warlock is standing in the dead center of the room, hand resting on an empty pedestal. Only now do they notice the bleached shadows radiating out from the center of the room and snaking like tendrils across the floor and up the walls. Almost a sunburst, but far too sinister. Their words are hollow when they say, “I found the other two guardians.”
They send their ghost out to scan the bodies, two more hunters. Their cloaks like burial shrouds where they’re forever laying one over the other. Forever just out of Guinevere’s reach.
Another gun lays off to the side, a shining silver inlaid sniper rifle. Dropped or forgotten it’s hard to tell.
“Come look at this.” The warlock hefts the gun up and shoves it into their companion’s empty arms.
“I’m not taking that, it’s a dead man’s gun.” But he’s already looking it over with a critical eye. Reverent fingers touching the signature Tex Mechanica plate on the stock, running over the engraving on the barrel. He holds the scope up to his eye. “ Incredible. ”
“Look like it’s already yours.”
The hunter glares, but his grip on the rifle is protective. There’s no way he’s putting it back now.
His own ghost hover out in the open for just a long enough moment to scan the gun before slipping back into the unphysical. “This one also has a data tag. ‘Aim true and always have your partners’ back - Lancelot,’” it says over the comm line. “I don’t think they were planning on coming back out of this alive.”
“We know one of them wasn’t, so where is Arthur’s gun?”
A wheeze, or a sigh startles them all back into silence. The sound comes again, barely any louder than the ambient humming of the Avalon.
It’s a ghost, broken bits of its shell lie around it like a halo where it lies beside the fallen hunters. “The Grail,” it rasps with the cadence of someone dying, it’s golden eye flickers. “He took the Grail.”
The room falls silent once again.
The warlock picks up the dying ghost. “I think it looks like we’ve got ourselves another hunt.”