My nerves still tingle with the electricity of not enough sleep. I’m on edge and everything feels off. I check my watch. 30 hours since we responded to the call. I know we spent too much time finding the ship and teasing my craft as close to theirs as I dare.
My muscles are tight against the controls. I’m muttering to myself as I gently tap the jets again and again. The inertial gyro helps me sync with their tumble. The dashboard final shines green as I match their vector. We’re still 100 feet away from their ship. “Might as well be another galaxy” I think as I tell my hands to let go. They obey eventually.
We’re in the shadow of the Scarlet Arrow; one of the more notorious craft in the sector. The captain, Anthonis Valk, and his crew are good at what they do. We had met in passing a handful of times over the years.
My mind goes back to the readings we were taking in as we hunted for their ship. I’m puzzled. We were getting bizarre readings off the proto-star at the heart of this system. It’s young and barely formed. It seems to be calving copious black matter into the system. Or dark matter. Or anti-solar flares. We couldn’t figure it out. I decided on the scientific “Waves of something” as I focused on finding the ship.
Now we’re here.
I walk to the airlock and struggle into the EVA suit. I vent atmosphere as I trudge to the edge of my craft. I look out at the Scarlet Arrow. No lights. No signs of life. It passes through infinite black back into painful brightness as it tumbles within the sun’s energy. I squint my eyes. My jaw tightens. I take a deep breath of canned air and body odor. I crouch down and exhale.
And I jump.
I regret it immediately. My aim was a little off, and I introduced too much spin. I’m watch the star field rotate around me and the two star craft spinning at their own speeds. My eyes clamp tight out of an instinct to fight off the vertigo, but I force them open. If I’m going to die I’m not going to do it with my eyes shut. If I’m going to live, I’m going to need them open.
The stars are still the only thing I can see when I feel myself hit the ship. I connect with the base of my neck and pain shoots through my whole body. My hands scrabble for something to hold onto. Anything.
I find purchase on the ablative armor, but my forward momentum changes into conservation of angular momentum and I slam into the ship. My arms and legs splay as I fight the ship’s efforts to sling me into the void. Once I was properly wedged in, I spare one hand to unclip my tether from my belt, and snap into the EVA network of cables that every franchise ship comes with.
Now that I’m not worried about tumbling away into nothingness, I take a minute to catch my breath. The adrenaline never comes right away. You’re too busy being scared or heroic to notice. It’s after you’ve done something stupid like jumping from one ship to another that your brain catches up and freaks out. I feel the metallic wave start from my core and splash out to my fingertips. My hands and knees start shaking. I crouch down and wait for it to pass. I take a long slow breath. Hold it for just as long. Then I take twice as long to let it out.
Breath work is the bridge between the mind and body and the only way to ride the wave of adrenaline without spiraling into the shakes. It’s an old technique I learned from Sifu; yet another trick that old bastard taught me.
I crawl the thousand miles it feels like to reach the airlock. I ask LARES, “Can you make connection?”
“The ship is under passive power. It is not responding to our pings. If we can make physical contact, that should wake it up. Of course, that is if it is only in hibernation and not drained nor intentionally powered down or under siege or—”
“Ok, I get it.” I said, cutting him off. Silently happy that an AI trained on your own memories can tell when you’re irritated.
I open the thigh pocket of my suit and extend the cable. I make connection with the data pad by the door. The panel lights up, and LARES does his thing.
“Guess it’s not under siege” I mutter, hoping it cuts the tension.
I feel the slight tremor of the airlock shudder open though my feet and hand against the hull. I heave myself into the ship, and remember to disconnect the data umbilical. I trigger the door to close which is does at half speed; a feature of the hibernation.
I take a quick look around the airlock, top to bottom. Every bay still has its EVA and cubbies full of tools. Nothing seems to be missing.
“Full party, I guess.” I think on our silent channel. I don’t want to announce myself too loudly in case the crew is jumpy around guests who invite themselves aboard.
I notice what could only be called claw marks in the floor. Something massive made those. That had to be a good story.” I say, pointing at the floor. “Remind me to ask the captain about those.”
“Wilco.” LARES says, missing my attempt at ignoring the prickly feeling at the base of my spine.
Suit readings say the ship is holding atmosphere, but the temperature is out of norms. I take off my EVA gear and hang it on extra hooks in a cubby. My skin is already slick with sweat. My flight suit fighting to keep me cool.
We move out of the airlock and the walls fall away revealing the cavernous interior. Most franchise ships are built on patterns that are familiar to any owner. If you can see past the surface level details, you will recognize the same structure to various ships all housing different modules depending on the type of work the captain favors. Captain Valk was widely regarded as a tough negotiator, but it seemed like his heart was in science and exploration. I recognized the symbols for research laboratory units on the ship’s map and directory, studiously placed at the main junction per regulations.
Fingers tapping my leg, I make a decision. Get to the control hub.
People never look up. We humans are remarkably two dimensional creatures. Forward. Back. Side to side. That’s it. I don’t know if it’s a holdover from barely being able to jump, so we ignore the third dimension, but whatever causes it, it’s a bad habit.
I look up. Stop in my tracks.
It’s hard to see much detail with most of the lights off, but what I notice is easy to see. Light reflects off the white material well above head height. My brain refuses to make sense out of it, and I’m transfixed. Unable to look away.
Then it clicks. Breach foam.
My gut continues to find new ways to express its unease.
The edges of the hole look like synthetic material melted with flame. My eyebrows furrow. That doesn’t make sense. These ships are made out of the most durable materials known to mankind. They survive the extraordinary pressures of aether slipping. It can survive atomic maelstroms.
What. Happened?!
I make a smooth, slow 360 turn to take in the whole space. Not noticing anything else noteworthy, I make my way to the door. Pull the release lever.
Nothing happens.
Air leaks out in a sigh. My eyes close. Head sinks. Just awful.
I come back from raiding the EVA cubby toolkits. Found a prybar; hopefully it can stand up to what I’m about to put it through. “Hell,” I think. “Same for me.” I smile. “Time to get to work. Let’s do it.”
I slip the bar into the notch designed specifically for no-power situations like this. I apply pressure and put my weight behind it. My sweaty hand slips and I topple onto the the bar, hitting my sternum on the sharp end. The bar clatters to the floor, hitting my leg on the way down.
I don’t notice. Too focused on the gash to care about blunt force trauma.
I rock back to my knees and pull my suit over the wound to soak up the blood. More painful than dangerous. I smile; barely missed my franchise tattoo over my heart. Just another symbol of my loyalty to join all the others.
Always a silver nebula, right?
I climb my way up the wall and try the bar again. Wider stance this time. Arms closer to my core. Use my legs like I should have. Connect the waist. Transmit power through the hips.
The door jitters open several inches. Not enough to get through, but its progress.
The smell. It’s horrendous. Hits me as the putrid air escapes the forward compartment.
Something rotten has been baking in the heat.
I heave against the bar again. The door makes enough progress that I can slither through.
Moments pass and I realize I’ve taken several steps back. Every instinct telling me to jump back to the Relentless.
My duty keeps me here; I’m Inksworn, and so is this crew.
I step through. My head on a swivel.
Nothing in the room catches my attention, until I look at the door’s control panel next to me.
A hand wrapped around the release lever. No body attached to it.
That explains the smell.
I move closer to a blinking red terminal splashing the wall with light.
“Caution: Manual override engaged. Caution: engines out of tolerances. Please power down and follow proper shut down procedure. Caution: Manual override engaged…”
“We’re standing in a bomb?”
“It would seem so.”
My frown is audible in the vacuum of space.
“We have to figure out what happened. Doesn’t seem to be active. Right? We’re good.”
My voice sounds less reassuring to my own ears than I hoped. I’m not convincing anyone, and my feet drag me closer to the hatch with the bridge on the other side.
The crowbar finds purchase and my sweaty hands make it difficult to move the door an inch. My mind is playing tricks on me, or it has to be flashbacks from the powerful hallucinogens I did in my early twenty’s.
I’m seeing tracers as I take a break and let the bar drop to my side. The bar is motionless along its path. Looks like a strobe light flash-froze it into slices of time that quickly snap together and catch up to where it has been waiting. I blink and shake my head. Focus on my breath and get back to cracking the hatch.
The door finally gives way to Pandora’s Box of chaos.
Sound and movement explode into the silence. It’s a tsunami.
A human shape lunges out of the darkness beyond the door. The movement is all wrong for it to be a person. Too erratic. Shambling, lurching, uncoordinated. Still, it’s moving too fast for my brain to catch up. The contradiction makes it difficult for me to understand what I’m seeing.
Only my reflexes keep me alive.
A knurled hand swipes at my face. Its fingers twisted into claws. Ragged fingernails black with dried blood. The sound coming from the used-to-be human is pure animal. Beastly.
Melted skin of its face pulled back in a snarl. Long teeth glint in the emergency lighting. Boils and growths distort its silhouette.
It’s wearing the tatters of a crew jumpsuit.
Momentum carried it farther into my compartment, away from the space it just came from. Capitalizing on the moment I close distance and take its back. My right arm snaking over its right shoulder, finding the space under its chin. My left elbow up by its left shoulder, ready to cinch the choke into place.
It immediately claws at my forearm. Shreds of skin peeling away. Pain welling up and quickly dialed down by the adrenaline as I shove the creature to the floor.
“OK. Can’t do this the humane way. Shame, really.”
I try stomping its head in, and mostly accomplish the goal, but more power than I’d like glances off its skull. It roars and skitters to its feet.
“You seem to have angered it.”
“Shut up! Let me work!”
A flechette round whistles past my head and clangs into the bulkhead deeper in the compartment. I look back towards the hatch. More of them. I make out three, and they clamber into the space. Two are holding what you’d say are long rifles. They’re actually air powered guns that shoot rounds that won’t penetrate the hull. They will still do a number on the human body.
Their eyes are cloudy. Slow to track my movement as I circle around my dance partner. Aiming to keep it between me and its friends.
“Four on one. These poor bastards.”
I feint right expecting to lash out with my left foot and stop its right knee. It bolts towards me at the same time and we tumble to the floor. I try to roll with the impact but the best I can do is make an undignified sound as the wind gets knocked out of me.
My hands and knees are up, keeping space between us. I see the opening and shoot my hands up. Elbows tight to the center. Right palm cupping its chin. Left hand high on the crown of its skull.
Push the right hand forward in a counterclockwise motion and pull the left in sharply. The neck snaps and the body goes slack. My foot finds the hollow of its hip and I shove its mass off and let it pull me forward onto my other knee. I’m back upright and moving towards the other three.
I’m not too worried about projectiles judging by how bad the first shot was, and they could have taken as much time as they needed. They had the drop on me, and my back was to them. And they still missed.
I notice one is missing a hand at the wrist. Solves that mystery. Kind of. I know where it came from, but still don’t know why it was there. Guess I’ll never find out.
I shrug my shoulders as I peel off to the right. My new monstrous friends are advancing on me in a single line, shoulder to shoulder. As I move to flank them, it means they’re now stacked up one behind the other and I only have to deal with the one closest to me.
It brings the gun up to bear, and I step towards it and to my right. My left hand brushes the barrel offline, and my right arm moves between its hands to knock its head back. I grab the butt of the rifle with my rebounding right hand and pivot with all my strength. The gun comes free and I continue around like I’m swinging a pipe as hard as I can.
It recovers faster than I expected and it’s too close. My hands connect instead of making contact with the rifle, and I simply can’t hold on against that much momentum at play. The gun tumbles to the floor and I’m shoved up against the wall. I windmill my left arm across my body up high into the air and back down from above to break its hold on me. My right elbow continuing the move as it cuts across its forehead.
Viscous black gunk wells up and bubbles out of the cut. Smells like the entrails of a putrid voidsquid.
The thing pushes closer to me and gnashes at my face. I change levels and duck down. Wrap up its right leg and I whistle my right leg between its legs and throw my weight forward. It topples back into the other two and smashes the back of its head on the metal flooring and goes slack. It’s still moving, but doesn’t look like its going to do much else and I’ve bought myself a half second.
I heave myself toward the gun and pick it up. I have just enough time to put it dead on center mass and pull the trigger. It clicks and does nothing else.
Out of ammo.
I curse and throw the damned thing in frustration.
It makes a wet sound as it slams into the third former crew mate. The “thing formerly known as human” gets even more angry, and I find a split second to be impressed. It bobs into clinch range as it lands a nasty stab into my right ribs. I crumple to my side and fight the pure animal instinct to stay curled up.
I swim my right arm in from above and pummel into an underhook that slides up into its left armpit. My left arm takes it by the left knee and it’s coming up off its feet. I pitch forward and it tumbles to the floor at an awkward angle. I can tell its hurt, and it is doing a great job of tripping up the last one and preventing it from getting a bead on me.
Deciding that I’ve had enough with gun shenanigans, I reach over both creatures on the floor and grab the barrel of my last opponent. I jerk the gun towards me by about a foot to trigger it’s flinch response; hoping it was still biologically capable of it.
It was.
Its arms pull back instinctively, and I capitalize on the opportunity by immediately changing my momentum. I direct the butt of the gun straight at its face and it smashes into the bone of its nose. Right between its eyes.
Guttural moans escape from deep in its chest and it stumbles back. I fumble across the two bodies slowly writhing on the floor. I transition my weight over them on my way next to the one closest to me and I snap its neck. Its whole body acts like it remembered something important before forgetting to move ever again.
Tunnel vision.
I realize I was hyperfixated on the four. . . whatever they are, and hadn’t kept my awareness open to the rest of the bay, or the bridge where they had spawned in the first place.
Deep breath in. Slow breath out.
I make the thousand light year journey from the floor to a standing position.
I stop. Look. Listen. Smell.
See nothing.
Hear nothing.
Smell. . . Too much. Shallow breath and I try my best to ignore the churning stomach and tingling fingertips that come with the urge to puke everything from the past 10 cycles.
Enough time passes and I’m confident that nothing is coming to get me. Maybe it’s waiting to ambush me, but at least there’s nothing actively trying to eat my face off.
I take a moment to patch up my cuts and steel myself for what comes next.
Not wanting to test my luck, I decide to borrow a boot from one of the volunteers on the floor. I flatten myself along the wall next to the hatch and lob it into the bridge as quickly as I can. I hear it thunk against something metal and then topples to the floor. A slow count to ten.
Nothing.
I back away from the hatch and move in a slow careful circle around the opening. I’m able to see a sliver of the bridge, and then a bigger slice of the room as I make a wider arc. I’ve surveyed half the room. Three quarters. As much as I can see.
No movement. Something unusual though.
The silhouette of the captain’s chair is all wrong and every cell in my body tells me not to go in.
I walk like I’m trying to avoid quantum detectors that respond to the smallest vibrations in the universe. I place my heel. Slowly inch my weight forward. Toes touch the floor. Transition my weight all the way forward. Move my back foot forward.
Start the process all over again.
I’m in the bridge when my brain finally decides to understand what I’ve been looking at.
It’s Captain Valk.
From the shoulders down.
No head.
And it wasn’t done neatly.
You don’t need to be a doctor to imagine what kind of work a clean cut or instrument would leave behind. Whatever relieved him of his ability to think, or see, or anything else really, left a ragged mess of what used to be his neck.
“Remember to ask him about the claw marks in the air lock.”
“You’re sick. You know that? Disgusting.”
“I can only be as I am, which is how you made me; by being who you are.”
I’m just frustrated LARES made the joke before me.
I sit down in the co-captain’s chair and take a minute to catch my breath. Check my bandages. Look at the console.
Then I look at the front display. At the star. Its surface is roiling. Violet black solar flares a million miles long clawing their way into the system. Feels like they’re reaching for the ship. For me.
My perspective shifts and I’m falling forward through space into tendrils of crackling energy.
They’re waiting to shred my sanity.
I wrench my mind back to my body through sheer force of will.
“LARES. What is going on? Did I leave the ship?”
“No. You’ve been here the whole time.”
I shake my head. “Felt real.” My hands are shaking. Nausea wells up from deep inside.
I bring my attention back to the console and the here and now.
It takes awhile for my brain to settle and my mind to understand what it’s seeing.
“Does this really say that the ship is aimed at the star?”
“It appears so.” It’s silent for moment as its search of the ship continues. “Confirmed. The navigation computations are focused on the dead center of the star. You might also be interested to know they designated it as “the Dark Star.”
“Yeah, that’s not weird at all. What were they doing?”
“Only one way to find out.”
My shoulders sag and I put my face in my hands, knowing that he’s right.
“We have to clear the rest of the ship; might as well go to the research module next.”
I’m surprised how long it takes to get through the ship when you’re stopping to listen to every noise; imagined or otherwise. Fear bolting up from the floor through your whole body. It’s exhausting.
I see the yellow placard next to the door, above the entry pad: Research.
I tap the screen. It brightens.
“Can you get us in?”
A second passes.
“No.”
“Yeah. That wouldn’t be fun.” I look into the darkness. “Let’s wrench it open.”
A futile 10 minutes later. I slump against the wall. Legs give out. I’m on the floor.
“Why won’t it move?!”
“Modules that house dangerous experiments are made from flexsteel; created from studying impervious materials and non-Newtonian fluids in nature and using bio-mimickry to make something that can withstand atomic forces.”
I close my eyes. “I know that. I have my own ship, too, remember?”
“You asked.”
“We’ll have to find an access key. Won’t we?”
“Seems to be the only way in; if you still want to see this through, of course. We can leave now.”
“You know we can’t.”
“It was worth a shot. Let’s go.”
The next logical place to go is the medical bay.
Maybe the ship’s medical crew documented what happened with the transformations? Hauntings? Possessions?
Whatever it is, if there’s anything to help me out, it’s going to be in the med bay. And it’s going to be drugs. Antibiotics, of course. And Uppers. Then more uppers.
The ship is mercifully quiet as we make our way there.
“Maybe that was it. Maybe four crew plus Captain Valk was the full complement?”
“According to the ship’s manifest, there were five crew and Captain Valk. A total of six.”
One more in here somewhere.
“Maybe we’re lucky and they’re already dead.”
“You’re sick.” I say as I flatten my back against the wall next to the med bay entry hatch.
The door slides open, and I’m introduced to a new smell that I can only catalogue as new worst smell I’ve ever encountered. My eyes wrinkle as if the stench is burning my eyes. For all I know, there might be sulphates in the air that are doing exactly that. I fight the urge to move as I try to focus on listening for any signs of movement inside the bay.
Twenty seconds passes. Still nothing.
At least I’m becoming nose-blind to the olfactory horrors of the ship.
I decide to try my luck. “Hello?” I say just above a hoarse whisper. Afraid that I’ll get an answer.
Nothing.
I relax the muscles that I wasn’t aware of tensing in the first place, which is all of them. I consciously tell my body to let go.
I peek around the corner into the module. It’s mostly dark. Hints of emergency lights add islands of color here and there, but it’s mostly just shapes and murky shadows. No movement at least.
I can just make out enough details to identify a couple beds and several stalls in a familiar standard layout. Tough to make out any other details, though. A quick probe with my flashlight shows me cabinets torn open. Materials scattered across the counter. Equipment bent and broken if not completely destroyed.
Looks like whatever was causing havoc elsewhere on the ship paid this place a visit, too. Thankfully it looks like it’s not here.
I move as quietly as I can towards the cabinets in search of anything that might be helpful, but I don’t make it.
I freeze. It’s a sound that’s so low that my ears don’t hear it, but I can feel it in my chest and my whole body cavity resonates with it. My guts light up with the metallic hit of adrenaline.
My head swings around looking for the source of the reverberations and my attention snags on movement in the far edge of the bay.
It’s a bag of writhing snakes, or at least that’s what my mind tells me. It’s a hulking mass fighting the pull of the ship’s down gravity. It’s a solid shadow come to life. Taking shape.
The ships crew uniform helps the pieces fall together into a recognizable yet twisted form.
It has to be the sixth crew member, but there’s nothing human in the room with me beyond the vague memories of a person’s body. What I see now is sickly wet body. Angry red flesh at the edges where components of the ship’s surgery lazers and life-saving machinery are now bent to serve this affront to nature.
Its vanta black eye sockets turn in my direction. Its posture lumbers forward. Its low rumble reaching the audible ranges at an ear-shattering volume.
One hand claps over my ear, and the other hand reaches for the nearest object and flings it at the thing. It flies true and makes impact.
It charges.
Nothing is between us and it moves straight at me. Fast.
Like a bull fighter I wait to the last moment and roll off line of travel. It slams into the wall beside the doorway, and I’m using the momentum of the roll to get back on my feet and pivot to face it. Its claws are scrabbling at the wall. It is biting at nothing.
It seems confused, or it has trouble understanding its environment.
Either way I’m not waiting for it to figure things out.
I move to close distance, and trip over a cable on the floor. I hit hard and I’ve lost sente.
The creature staggers my direction. I try my best to roll out of the way. The best I can do is shift out of the way of its massive foot slamming down next to me. Seeing the opportunity, I grab onto its leg and pull myself around to tangle its leg. My hand finds what I hope is a scalpel and I apply deep pressure and pull across the rotten meat of its calf.
At least it can bleed.
I push away, and it swings its right arm; the one with the surgery components absorbed into it. The extended range is a distinct advantage for it, but I’m too keyed up to get caught flat footed. I duck under with my head but I leave my right arm trailing behind me and above it’s path of travel.
The metal and plastic limb makes impact with my arm and it hurts with a deep wet thud. But it’s exactly what I wanted.
The sudden jerk on my arm pulls my momentum back towards it and I bring my right foot up to its thigh where it meets the torso. It’s a perfect step up to climb its back.
My right leg is wrapped around its body and my left leg is up on its left shoulder. My left arm is wrapped along the left side of its neck and under its slavering jaws.
I raise my right arm high into the air. My fist punching the ceiling of the bay. I slam my elbow down on its skull as hard as I can.
I feel bone give way. I can’t tell if it’s mine or not.
The beast transmuted by the heart of a dark star stumbles.
I disentangle from the beast and make distance.
It is clearly hurt. It’s moving even slower now. The tone of its bellow is lethargic somehow.
It has a hand on the counter as it tries to hold itself up.
It grabs a bag full of fluid.
It puts it in its mouth, and bites down.
I’m too confused to understand.
It’s blood. It just ate a bag of blood. It just ate a whole bag of human blood.
It clearly likes it.
I back towards the door.
It turns. Lowers its head. Blood paints its mouth in a horrific caricature of a smile.
And it charges again.
There’s no room to maneuver. It plows through me and I feel something give. The pain flares white hot through my whole body and I bounce off the wall and slide to the floor.
The thing hits the far side of the corridor and wheels around.
My vision is blurry and my head feels like it’s at the bottom of a black hole.
I don’t see the strike but the pain of the second impact somehow cuts through the fog.
“You need to move!”
“No kidding,” I think to myself, which is the same as responding.
The third strike lands just wide as I’m able to move my head offline. Its arm stays hyperextended for the half second I need to roll my hips into position and flex.
Its elbow snaps and the medical laser absorbed into its flesh slithers free.
I place one foot behind heel of its supporting foot, and the other on its chest. I extend on top and pull back on bottom, taking its balance. It falls backwards and lands in a gangly whomp of uncoordinated limbs.
I grab the laser and line up my shot.
The light blazes. Energy shreds a line of geometric precision through the twisted wreck that used to be a body.
The universe goes black.
When you fall asleep and wake up later, your body has a sense of time passing.
This wasn’t it.
The first thing I’m aware of is nothing and then I’m in the vacuum of space. It’s not empty. It’s full. It’s roiling. It’s burning. It’s angry. It’s aware.
The black sun is beyond massive. It’s everything.
I’m falling away into nothingness faster and faster as my feet stretch away to infinity and my body is warped into strands of disintegrating radiation.
There’s an awareness present to experience sensation beyond words but the self I call “me” is shredded by the universe and I know without question that it is a relentless, ageless, patient malevolence and it wants me dead.
I can hear something in the vacuum, which isn’t right. It’s distorted. Far away but unsettling nonetheless.
Through the tumble and warping of sensation back up to consciousness I realize what it is. It’s an inhuman wailing combined with ear splitting screams.
It’s me.
A split second later I feel the metal grating of the floor against the back of my head. A stomach-churning wave of pain almost pushes me back into the depths of the terror, but I somehow ride it and quickly bob up to the surface and open my eyes.
Big mistake.
The low level of the emergency lights is still enough to sear my eyes.
My body is drenched in sweat. My suit is a soaking mess. The ship’s humidity is a wet rag over my mouth and nose. My breath coming in shuddering convulsions.
It’s a long time before I realize I don’t hear anything. It’s a relief.
“What is going on?”
“You’ve been out for several hours. Your neuralkinetics indicated exhaustion rather than concussion. In light of how long you had been awake already, I thought it prudent to not wake you. Your brain activity spiked in a pattern I do not recognized and you woke up screaming. Do you want a dose?”
“No, it’s good. I just have to sit here a moment. I had a dream where it felt like I was getting sucked into the star and pulled apart like we hit a black hole or something.”
A distant memory interrupts me and cuts through my mind. I remember where I am; what’s next to me.
I prop myself up on an elbow and then sit all the way up. My eyes are locked on the corpse.
No motion. Might as well be a ship fixture.
I lay back down and reconnect with the universe. I still feel “the Flow” as my Master always called it; the cutting edge between advance and retreat. Push and pull.
I open up the space within my body and allow it to flow through me.
I pay attention to my pain, and imagine each kind of sensation as its own note harmonizing with the solid tone of hurt that radiates through my body. As I find each frequency, I image turning down a knob and I feel it recede into the background. It’s still there but quieter.
Now that I have a handle on the shakes, and the adrenaline dump is receding, I can think better.
I look at the body again.
I swipe its badge off the lapel and head back into the med bay for a quick look around. Not much left besides a few unidentified pills which I’m leaving alone. No sense tempting fate. I’m waiting until we get back to our own ship to patch myself up properly.
With nothing else left to look at here, it’s time to get back to the research lab.
The door slides open. No motion. No noise inside.
Light from inside flickers out into the corridor. I’m looking for shadows moving in stopmotion paths against the static shapes.
Nothing.
I peek around the door and see the interior is mostly still intact. Everyone inside must have left and closed the door behind them. Maybe they knew what was coming and wanted to preserve whatever research they had assembled. Maybe they simply got dragged out and the doors were following standard protocol to stay locked down without specific direction to do otherwise.
Either way, it’s looks like we might be able to find out what’s been going on.
“LARES, can you get us started?”
“Already on it.”
As he makes his way into the airgapped network formed by the few units in the lab, I take a look around.
The edges of the module are showing excessive wear. Motion at the edges of my vision that disappear when I look directly at it. This place is freaking me out.
“We’re in.”
I take a seat in front of one of the displays and LARES is whipping through file after file.
“Hey, can you do that in the background, and show me something I might be able to understand?”
All windows close but one.
I read through it.
Or, to be more accurate, I look at words I don’t recognize and try to figure out what they mean within the context of the few that I do know. It’s not working well.
“They were doing research on the star. Seems like they dropped into the sector while on a deep exploration voyage and trouble started soon after they arrived; which has not been all that long, all things considered. Crew members reported disturbing nightmares and waking visions that undermined morale.”
“Yeah, I can understand that.”
“The way they put it, ‘It is pure malevolence and evil. It is not a star. It has to be sentient.’ A few pages later, ‘We have to kill it. There has to be a way.’”
“Wait, is that why the ship is nav-locked on the heart of it? Were they going to, what? Warp into it or something like that?” I interrupt.
“Not something like that. Exactly that. They were completely prepared to aetherslip into the center mass of the star. They were not able to complete the maneuver as crew members were twisted by the radiation and killed anyone who might still have enough humanity left to execute.”
“Captain Valk.”
“Yes.”
“What, exactly, were they going to do?”
“Override mass avoidance systems and overload the engines to three times the recommended limits. From the standpoint of the ship they are warping as usual; slipping through the holofractal aether to another location in the universe without moving. From the standpoint of the star…”
“Its core gets hit by a projectile moving faster than the speed of light,” I cut in, putting all the pieces together.
“Correct. The effect would be catastrophic failure of the ship. Instant death for the crew. Incalculable damage to the star. 76% chance of it going nova, despite not having enough mass to collapse into nova during its normal lifecycle.”
The ship lurches. The valence gravity didn’t dampen the effect, and it’s designed for dealing with relativistic energies.
“What’s going on?”
“The star appears to be increasing its energy output, and doing so in a manner I’ve never seen before. It looks like its targeting this ship. More are on the way. The ship systems seem to be glitching as well as the hull integrity continuing to degrade past allowances.”
“I think we should rig the ship to blow. Can we do it?”
“Technically it is possible. The question you should be asking is if we can do it and survive the ordeal.”
“I would like to amend all future interactions to incorporate the fundamental assumption that I’d like to survive the ordeal when you run probability simulations.”
“Understood. In order to do this we will have to go to the drive and manually decouple the dampeners that keep it from doing the thing we need it to do.”
“Explode.”
“Right. From there we should be able to set a delay for the drive to kick off, make it back to the Relentless, make our way to a safe distance, and then watch the fireworks.”
“Should?”
“There’s always a chance something goes sideways.”
“Isn’t that why we love the job?”
….transmission still downloading.