The Age of Scorpio

4

A Long Time After the Loss





It took a long time to convince the Black Swan’s systems that the mating with the other ship/thing was safe enough to open the airlock. The docking system was too strange, too organic. Eventually Nulty had to override the system himself.

They were not shy. One of them was waiting in the docking tube for them. He looked like an eccentric soft machine sculpt. Except the alienness seemed less forced. He – they were pretty sure it was a he despite a degree of androgyny – had pale skin with lines traced over it. Eden magnified her vision. They weren’t lines but the outline of delicate scales. His eyes were black pools, no visible iris or pupil. His neck seemed to palpate slightly and his head, utterly hairless, looked swollen. Webbed fingers with black sharp-looking nails were wrapped around a staff which looked like it was made of a material somewhere between bone and pearl. He wore a scaled robe of silver-coloured material that seemed to move of its own accord.

When he opened his mouth, they recognised the noises as words; the syntax was familiar but even so it strained their neunonics’ translation routines. Behind the strange, nominally human, man they could see a soft pearl-like luminescence. It smelled, not unpleasantly, of the sea, and they could hear the sound of water gently lapping against something. Their suit sensors showed that the atmosphere was apparently breathable. If there were any toxins the sensors couldn’t pick them up. The sensors also told them that the atmosphere was warm and damp.

‘I am Ezard,’ their translation subroutines finally came back. ‘I am the speaker. You are welcome here.’

‘First contact?’ Brett asked the others over the interface.

‘He’s human, or was once,’ Eden replied.

‘Follow me,’ Ezard said. The translation was coming faster now. He turned and walked down the tube of flesh. With a degree of trepidation, the four followed. Eldon was last. He waited until the Swan’s airlock closed behind them and then sent a neunonic command to set off the viral canister that Brett had attached to his suit. He had expected some sort of warning siren and to then be torn apart but nothing happened.

‘The environment is clean here. You can take your helmet suits off if you wish, although we will not be offended if you don’t,’ Ezard was saying when Eldon caught up.

‘It’s as much for your protection as ours,’ Brett was explaining through the translator interface with the suit. ‘We come from a culture with a great deal of nano-technology pollution.’ They walked out into an open area. ‘Seeders.’ There was awe in his voice.

Eldon looked around, struggling to cope with what he saw. He did not even notice that they had lost contact with the Swan.

It was clear that, allowing for the thickness of the hull/skin, the chamber was as wide as the craft and almost as long, though either end seemed to be packed with interconnected biomechanics that were neither quite machines nor internal organs.

The chamber – Eldon struggled not to think of it as a wet cave with ribs – reminded him of the texture of the inside of his own mouth. The suit sensors told of a warm wind blowing through. The wind seemed to blow one way and then be sucked back. There was no visible floor; it was mostly clear water. The same omnipresent pearl-like luminescence that illuminated the rest of the cavern lit the shallows. There were much darker areas that were obviously a lot deeper.

The water was broken by islands which looked like a mixture of bone and some unknown type of flesh. On the islands there were more people like Ezard. They appeared to have binary male and female sexes and only a very few of them were clothed as Ezard was.

‘I assure you it did not look like this when we started. It was far more utilitarian. We sculpted this over the many generations that we’ve lived within the Mother,’ Ezard told them.

‘Where are you from?’ Eden asked, awe in her voice.

‘Earth,’ Ezard answered.

‘You don’t happen to know where it is, do you?’ Eldon asked.

‘If it exists still it will not be as it was.’

Eden glanced at the others questioningly.

‘They could know so much,’ Brett said over the interface.

‘Yes, alive they would be of incalculable worth to the uplifted races but nothing to us,’ Eldon told him angrily.

‘Boss, Brett may be right. We can’t get away with this.’ Eden said.

‘Just shut the f*ck up and think about the money. Look at them – they’re not right.’

‘They’ve just evolved to fit the environment,’ Eden said.

Ezard turned to look at them. ‘I cannot express how glad we are to see you. We have been trapped in this realm too long. We want to meet the rest of humanity. Can you take us out of the red sky?’

Eldon sent the command from his neunonics and his suit visor opened. He breathed in the air. He, like the rest of the crew, had immunised themselves against the particular flavour of viral they were using. If you used virals you hadn’t protected yourself against, then you were a fool who deserved to die, in his opinion.

‘We’ll be glad to help.’ He ignored the demands to know what the f*ck he was doing over the interface. He knew with his long life he must have picked up all sorts of nano-infections that his cheap nano-screens could barely control. Time to spread them around, he thought. A plea of ignorance might help if they got caught.

Nulty was still picking up the sensor glitch. Eldon had been right: there had to be something there. Nulty did not like that and was running the signal through every filter he could think of, but the interference of Red Space was preventing him from gathering any more information. It seemed like another strange field reading, not dissimilar but not the same as the weird readings he was getting off the thing they were docked to. A thing he was more and more sure was some kind of S-tech ship.

He had expected to lose contact with the boarding crew but that did not mean that Nulty liked it. He wondered if they were being torn apart by feral Seeder servitors. He could pilot the Swan if he had to, though he was not sure about the bridge drive. The issue was the docking tube. It wasn’t a known tech interface. It seemed attached to the Swan like a leech.

Eventually they all followed Eldon’s lead and opened their visors, making the suits recede from their faces. Melia was the last.

‘It smells of fish,’ she observed. ‘I’m hungry.’

The bio-sculpted inhabitants of the ship/thing Ezard referred to as Mother were all staring at them, their expressions unreadable. Eden could not shake the feeling that they were communicating in some way. She had watched one of them crawl to a swollen nipple-like growth on the wall of the chamber and suck on it. Moments later she had sunk to the ground in what looked like a narcotic stupor.

Ezard had said little. He had just let them wander, as they wanted.

‘When you feel safe, when you are happy, we should discuss if you would be prepared to help us leave this place.’

Eldon had just nodded.

‘Call me when you need me.’ Ezard had then dived off the smooth bone/flesh island into one of the deeper pools. He glided though the water, propelled by a rippling movement in his cloak. Eden was not sure if it was technology, biology or some symbiosis of both.

Brett was looking despondent. Their attempted genocide was weighing heavily on him. He was wandering towards the subjective front of the craft, approaching the biomechanical machinery/organs. In front of the wall of machinery/organs there was what looked to be some kind of web made of a fine, delicate version of the same material as Ezard’s staff. In the centre of the web was a cocoon of the same material. It glowed with an inner light and something about it suggested a feminine quality.

Brett stood looking at it for a while. The others were some way back sitting on one of the islands, not sure what to do while they waited for genocide to take place.

‘We should be heading back,’ Melia said over the interface.

‘If it happens it’ll happen quick,’ Eldon replied, still angry at what he saw as betrayal by the licensed concubine.

‘We’ve no idea what effect it will have on their altered physiology,’ Eden pointed out. ‘If Nulty’s right and this is S-tech, then who knows how they could have augmented themselves.’

‘So what? We just make our excuses and leave?’ Eldon asked.

‘They don’t seem armed,’ Eden said. ‘But I don’t fancying holding off a small civilisation with four disc guns, yeah?’

Brett looked down. He was surprised to see a dolphin looking at him, similar to those that worked with the Church. Except it was not quite a dolphin. Where the Church dolphins had waldos, this one had tentacles. Where the Church dolphins used interface to communicate, this one appeared to have a human mouth growing out of its neck. The creature looked old, its skin cracked and covered in growths.

It was staring straight at Brett from about eight feet down in the clear water. A shadow passed over it and with a flick of its tail it dived down into a tunnel that led into the machinery/organs.

Ezard all but leaped out of the water to land on the island next to Brett. The black pools of his eyes made him difficult to read, but Brett was pretty sure that he was staring at the cocoon with an expression of reverence.

‘What is it?’ Brett asked. He now spoke the same anachronistic version of Known Space common that Ezard did, the translation subroutine having learned it fully and meshed it with his neunonics. Effectively the language had been downloaded into his brain. Though Brett was pretty sure he had heard the others here speak a different language, one that sounded a little like sea life communicating. He had heard sounds like that in immersion programmes. Brett reckoned it would require modifications to their voice boxes to allow them to make the sounds he had heard.

‘She,’ Ezard corrected. He seemed to be struggling to explain concepts with the linguistic tools he had. ‘She is a conduit, a translator. The Mother speaks through her because she is of the Mother’s line. When we are in the real, maybe she will hatch, become like a god. She is the link between them in the past and us now.’

Brett did not understand but found something beautiful in what Ezard was saying. More and more he was sure that he did not want to kill these people.

‘Look, Ezard, there’s something I have to tell you,’ he said. His handsome face was in turmoil as he struggled with his betrayal. He liked and trusted his companions but his loyalty to them was outweighed by the magnitude of the crime they were about to commit. Ezard regarded him with an expression that managed to be both expectant and inscrutable.

Tentacles shot out of the water and wrapped around Brett. He was ripped off his feet and dragged into the water before the others had a chance to respond. Ezard dived into the water after him.

The panic that came from submersion was just an ancient race memory. Brett had more than enough oxygen in his system to survive for a reasonable amount of time underwater. The grip of the dolphin’s tentacles was strong but not crushing. Still, as he struggled to get free, the tentacles might as well have been steel cables.

The dolphin moved with incredible rapidity through the water towards the tunnel that Brett had seen him disappear into earlier. Except now it looked less like a tunnel and more like a sphincter.

His neunonics sounded an alarm as the sensors on his skin, which he used to understand pheromones when dealing with insects, picked up an unknown secretion. The sphincter closed behind them.

Brett found himself being dragged through massive and very alien internal organs that seemed to pulse with their own life. There was the sensation of going deeper and deeper, though whether that was real or just fear, Brett couldn’t be sure.

He tried the interface and was more than a little disturbed that he could not contact the others. Whatever prevented them from contacting the Swan obviously had the same effect between different sections of the ship/thing, whatever it was. Brett did not like the totality of the signal block either.

The dolphin breached onto a small bone-like alcove that looked different to the other areas – dark, lacking in life. The organs around the alcove looking diseased to Brett. The tentacles dragged him out of the water and laid him next to the prone dolphin.

‘You carrying violence?’ Brett ignored the question. His disc gun was still bonded to the back of his suit and he had a laser at his hip. Shooting was imminent when he got free. His neunonics would replay the way back to the others. ‘I’m your only friend here young ’un. Don’t worry. They don’t know where you are. Mind blind in here. I killed it, whipped up a little disease right here, just small enough for them not to notice.’

Brett wondered how good the dolphin was at reading human expressions as he stared at the grotesque human mouth under the dolphin’s main mouth. It just would not stop talking, the ancient common accompanied by a clicking noise.

‘They call me Zadok. They say I wasn’t grown right, that the template was f*cked, but they need the likes of me. All sorts of disease alchemy. I can heal as well as hurt. Put a disease in my tool though, so there’d be no more of me.’

Brilliant, Brett thought. He appeared to have been kidnapped by a disease-spreading mutant dolphin bearing a grudge against their hosts.

‘They don’t have anything good for you here. They just want to get out of the dark and spread, like a disease. Everyone has to be the same, like. They are no friends to you and yours.’

‘Can you let me go?’ Brett asked.

‘If I let you go, you going to behave? Because I think you’re carrying some violence with you and I can’t get hurt before I tell you what you’re into here.’

Brett just nodded. The dolphin shifted him around in the coils of his tentacles so he could examine him with one crusty eye.

‘You got any bottled fun on you, boy? You are a boy, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Brett answered, trying to shift, the coils of tentacle tightening around him as he tried.

‘Yes to bottled fun or orifice fun?’

‘I’m a boy, man. I’m male. I don’t know what bottle fun is.’

‘See, they cut me off from the drug nipples, no more mother’s milk for me and I’m not an endorphin drinker, otherwise I could just suck it out of you. You wouldn’t like that though. It’s not fair, is it?’

‘Yes, I have drugs,’ Brett managed between gritted teeth. He kept to himself that they were part of his internal systems. He did not like the idea of being torn apart by some junkie dolphin looking for a fix. A thought occurred to Brett: ‘If they don’t wish us well then how come they let you live?’

‘Told you. They need me for maintenance. You, you’re just spare parts, some new information, maybe a top-up on the old gene pool, but most importantly you’re a key to this smoking red prison. I’ll be honest. I’d like to see the ocean that my ancestors saw. I ’members it up here.’ He tapped his skull with a tentacle. ‘But it’s far more important to f*ck them. Ruin it for them. Just like they f*cked me. They took my tool; they can all die.’ The little chamber of dead meat resonated with obvious anger and bitterness. Brett grunted as the tentacles started to tighten around him.

‘Drugs,’ he managed.

‘Oh sorry,’ Zadok said much more brightly and loosened his grip.

‘Where are your drugs?’

‘They’re in one of the suit’s internal pouches. You’ll have to let me out so I can get to them,’ Brett said in what he felt sure was a cunning manner. ‘No violence,’ he further reassured Zadok.

Zadok eyed him with what Brett assumed was cetacean suspicion, but he felt the tentacles loosen round him.

‘That’s good. Just a little something to take the edge off. I’ve got a lot to tell you, boy.’

Brett stood up among the serpentine uncoiling tentacles and wondered if they were looking for him. The bonded disc gun came off the back of his suit as soon as he touched the weapon. His neunonics sent the safety code to the gun instantaneously. Brett also sent the command to switch the weapon to pump action because he thought it was cooler.

The butt of the weapon was snug against his shoulder. Zadok saw what was happening but obviously did not have the soft machine enhanced reaction augmentations that Brett did. The dolphin was only just starting to move when both barrels of the disc gun went off. To Brett it was like everything was happening in slow motion. The butt of the weapon contracted, cushioning the recoil as solid-state shot turned into razor-sharp, electromagnetically propelled spinning discs. Zadok’s flesh spread itself across the diseased chamber. Brett worked the pump mechanism on the weapon, chambering another two rounds from the tubular magazines under the side-by-side barrels. He fired again, just to be on the safe side. There was another display of dead flesh.

‘F*ck yeah!’ Brett said, trying not to dance a little. ‘That’s what you get!’ Then he remembered where he was. He looked around the chamber for further threats, expecting more junkie, mutant dolphins but finding none.

Brett held the visor in place as he sent the signal to his suit and it grew out of his neck to cover his head the rest of the suit attached itself. He tried the interface again but got nothing. He reviewed the journey to the chamber in the memory of his neunonics. He was reasonably sure he could find his way back.

Brett rose out of the pool with the disc gun ready, scanning from side to side. This was the way the tac program in his neunonics told him to do it; more to the point it was the way he had done it in immersions. Playing legionnaire for fun.

Brett was now sure he was lost. He was not sure how as the recorder facility on the route finder application in his neunonics should have taken him back to the main chamber.

He rose, dripping, into a large chamber with a gently curving roof. The chamber was formed of what looked like thick, smooth, rubbery, but not unpleasantly so, skin. It reminded Brett of Zadok’s skin if Zadok hadn’t looked diseased and crusty. He retracted part of his spacesuit, which dragged the visor off his face and up onto his head.

The chamber was dimly lit. A warm wind blew though it and he could hear the sound of water gently lapping against the walls. It gave Brett a dimly remembered sense of well-being.

Then he saw the growths in the wall. He waded through the shallow water towards them. Drawn by curiosity, his sense of well-being bled off him the closer he got.

At first Brett thought it was some kind of organic waste sack or tube. Then he realised it was a massive distended pregnant belly, not unlike the ones on the few fetishist weirdos he had seen go in for natural births. Only this one ended in a biomechanical vaginal orifice. Brett followed the tube up. It was part of something that had once been very clearly human – more human than Ezard and his friends in the main chamber.

He/she, gender did not matter, was merged with the flesh of the chamber. No eyes, no ears, these were extraneous – why would it need them? Instead of a mouth there was a translucent tube. Matter could be seen moving sluggishly down it. This was not pregnancy. This was flesh as a material, storage, an incubator. Somehow Brett knew that the Mother and the Father were the ship. He knew that the passengers and crew were raw material. Their minds were only of use as inspiration. All over Known Space, human flesh was used as a raw material in more base ways – labour, sex, sustenance – but this had nothing to do with humanity. To Brett this was abomination. He looked around, his eyes brightening the darkness and magnifying what he saw. The abomination was repeated on either side of the chamber many times. Through the gloom he could see more chambers.

The plop it made sliding out of the closest stomach’s orifice was almost comical. Brett’s features contorted as he looked down at the utterly inhuman thing uncurling in the water in front of him. Even the flesh sculptors on Cyst could not have invented such a departure from humanity using the same basic material. Humanoid disgust overwhelmed Brett as for the first time he was confronted by something that, although hybridised, was genuinely alien and not just another uplifted animal like himself.

He raised the disc gun to his shoulder and aimed it at the newborn crime against human flesh. The safety was already off.

Brett’s neunonics recorded the flight of his head through the air, its impact on the surface of the water. As Brett’s head sank before his systems registered brain death and became inert, the neunonics recorded the hazy image of a full-grown version of the newborn Brett had just seen, vomiting something onto his headless corpse. The final thing Brett’s systems registered was the enzyme breaking down his flesh for the thing to start sucking up his corpse.

Eldon looked down into the pool that Brett had just been dragged into. Melia and Eden appeared on either side of him. Eden had her disc gun drawn and was pointing it into the pool. Eldon glanced between the women.

‘Well f*ck,’ he finally said.

‘We need to go after him!’ Eden said.

‘F*ck that!’ Eldon and Melia said simultaneously.

Ezard practically flew out of the water to land next to the three of them.

‘What the f*ck?’ Eden demanded of the speaker.

‘I am very sorry. It is a malfunctioning maintenance creature. Do not worry. It should not hurt your crew member. We will find him quickly though and return him to you safely. We are already looking.’

Eldon gave this some thought.

‘Well that seems fair enough,’ he finally said.

Eden glared at him. ‘We need to find him!’ she snapped.

‘I’m sure they know what they are doing,’ Melia said. Though she would miss Brett. On a ship with a crew as aesthetically challenged as the Black Swan, he had been her one respite.

Eden turned on the feline, but her angry retort was cut off by a shrieking cry from behind her.

They swung round to see a woman walking towards them and pointing.

‘You did this!’ She shouted the words as if they were new to her. As if she had not used even this ancient form of common in a long time, if ever.

Her skin was covered in jumbled words and patterns, some of them animated. Others glowed with their own luminescence. Eldon could not keep his eyes off her chest – the flashing and animated images looked like a collision between adverts for a soft drink and an insect brothel. They had apparently carried in a number of nanite advertising plagues. Plagues that their own screens would have stopped but against which those here would have no countermeasures.

Nearby they saw other adverts growing out of the naked skin of the crew/passengers of the biological ship.

‘Shit,’ Eldon said. Eden was trying to explain the concept of nano-pollution to the angry women as more closed on them. Ezard was staring at them like he wanted an explanation.

‘You brought something else . . .’ Ezard started.

Eldon drew the disc gun from his back and let Ezard have both barrels. Ezard’s abdomen almost ceased to exist as he flew back into the pool.

The angry women with the virulent advertising disease grabbed Eden by the neck and lifted her off her feet. Nanites quickly laced through the skin and flesh of Eden’s neck, hardening it, protecting her windpipe, but her augmentations were strictly civilian and designed for industrial accidents. The woman’s fingers were still crushing her flesh. There was blood running down Eden’s attacker’s fingers.

Eldon turned his disc gun on the woman holding Eden off the ground. His neunonics warned him that Eden’s position was within his field of fire but offered him the best target solution. He pulled the trigger. Both barrels fired. The discs tore chunks out of Eden and the woman. The woman staggered but did not drop Eden. Moments later Eden’s head just seemed to pop off. The headless corpse dropped to the ground and the angry and already injured woman turned towards Eldon. Melia’s double-barrelled disc blast tore the woman off her feet.

Melia and Eldon moved back to back, trying to cover all around them as they were encircled by a mass of pale flesh sporting multiple adverts on their newly diseased flesh. All Eldon could see were their inhuman eyes, black nails and needle-like teeth.

‘What the f*ck did you shoot Ezard for?’ Melia demanded, piteously aware of how few rounds the disc guns had in their tubular magazines.

‘Panicked,’ Eldon answered, thinking that this was not a good time for a domestic.

‘And Eden?’

‘Same thing.’

‘Are you panicking now?’

‘Yes.’ Though had Eldon been totally honest he would now have told her that panic was warring with irritation.

‘You going to shoot me?’ Melia demanded. Eldon gave it some thought.

‘You hold them off and I’ll make a run for help,’ he suggested. He looked up at the cocoon. He was surprised to see an ugly wiry-looking man with no hair and green-stained lips climbing around on it.

The man’s spacesuit sleeve was halfway up his right arm. Clinging to this arm, its legs digging into his flesh, was an arachnid with pincers and a sting. The arachnid looked like it was made of living brass. The sting had extended and seemed to be deep in the material of the cocoon.

Eldon recognised the man, or his neunonics did. He was famous. But there was something else, something familiar, as if he had actually met him but he could not remember when.

There was a cry of pain from the man as the sting retracted from the cocoon and the brass arachnid sank into his flesh, moving underneath the skin. The man’s spacesuit covered him and the visor slid over his face. Then the man hugged the cocoon.

Nulty didn’t like this at all. Red Space was starting to clear. The clouds were dissipating as if swept away by wind. Nulty had seen this effect before, watching ships gate from the red into real. Except this much cloud clearing away would mean either a very large ship or a lot of them simultaneously. Neither option seemed good for them.

The repeated interface hail to Eldon and the others might as well have been screaming into a vacuum. He was now very sure that the sensor glitch that Eldon had found was a stealthed ship. It was showing some of the strange energy signature that the S-tech craft they had found was displaying.

The violence done to the very fabric of Red Space was appalling in its scale. Nulty watched from the hull of the Black Swan, feeling exposed in the vacuum that he’d thought of as his home. As space was torn open, the craft coming through looked like a massive cliff of armour and technology from his perspective. It moved slowly, gracefully, through the pulsing blue tear, angry ribbons of white energy sparking off its hull. Nulty had the absurd urge to go and hide on the other side of it. Except that the sensor feed from the Swan was showing another bridge of similar size opening behind him. For a supposedly off-the-beaten-track part of Red Space, things were getting very busy. The second craft was of about equal size and similarly armoured, but unlike the smooth, angular lines of the first craft, its hull was ornate, even bearing statuary protruding.

Nulty recognised both craft. The first was a Consortium Free Trade Enforcer-class heavy cruiser. The second was also a heavy cruiser but belonged to the Seeder Church. Nulty understood why they were here. Both would have an interest in the Seeder craft, if that was what it was, particularly if it held the secret of bridge tech. To the Consortium it could mean breaking the Church’s monopoly, a monopoly that the Church would not want to see broken.

Despite the heavy interference, Nulty listened to threat and counter-threat rage through Red Space as the ships tried to lock weapons on each other through their glitching sensor systems.

The odd thing was that the Church ship was showing the same or similar spectrums of energy that the Seeder craft was. It was similar to some of the readings he’d been seeing from the Swan since their mysterious employer had paid to get the bridge drive functioning. Their employer had also apparently paid for some other modification, which Nulty was less than pleased about. The Consortium craft was not showing anything from that part of the energy spectrum. In fact Nulty was getting exactly what he would have expected from sensor readings of a Consortium heavy cruiser.

Nulty found himself praying to the Seeders, something that he had not done in a very long time, that both sides would want the Seeder craft intact. On the other hand, he could not imagine that whoever got the craft would have a good reason for keeping him alive.

Nulty started the ship’s systems via interface. He would just have to skip into Real Space and hope he could find a way home. If the worst came to the worst, he could set a repeating mayday, point the craft in Real Space towards the closest planet or habitat and hibernate.

Sorry, boss, he thought. He wasn’t surprised when the unpleasantly organic-looking docking tube would not relinquish its grip on the Swan. Nulty had already manoeuvred one of the torches into place. Just as he was about to start cutting, he noticed something in one of the optics and, with a thought, magnified it. The skin of the Seeder craft was changing, becoming more mottled, unhealthy-looking, diseased.

Seeder’s sake, Nulty thought as the two cruisers began to stab bright beams of energy at each other, what kind of viral had Eldon taken in with him?

One of the ship/thing’s inhabitants moved too close to Melia and she fired. Eldon also fired as they closed on him. To Eldon it looked like black veins of disease were crawling across the walls/flesh of the ship/creature. Eldon cursed himself roundly. The virals he had brought on board were the most potent he could find in Arclight. He had never imagined that they would be as potent as this. He had killed his prize.

‘You’ve done this!’ one of the women screamed at him with a larynx designed for a different language.

‘I didn’t mean to,’ he cried, and then shot her with both barrels. The craft bucked under his feet. It felt like an impact, a powerful one. The ripple that surged through the craft and knocked him off his feet reminded him of dry retching. In the ceiling above he watched as the flesh transformed itself into fire. A chemical reaction as explosives fed on flesh until it reached fusion and breached the outer hull.

Eldon did not see space. It was his torn-up constituent parts that were sucked through the hole in the ancient creature’s flesh and into Red Space’s clouded starless night.