“That’s a space-whale,” Nathan said unnecessarily, and then: “I think it looks awesome. And oddly biological? Like, it looks plausible. If you told me that was an actual lifeform back in my own universe, I mean, first I would be stunned because holy shit life that wasn’t on Earth, but then I would be like oh actually that makes a certain amount of biological sense. But… what’s up with the tubing and also the… holes?”
Indeed, the whale, the fish—for while terrestrial whales were not fish, the space-whale was a close cousin to the voidfish—was awesome in its size and in its aesthetic. It was vast on the scale of… not planets, perhaps, but on the scale of extraplanetary objects, and on the planetary scale it was hardly small. A traveler from gas giant to gas giant, it did not quite compare to those, but all lesser planets were its junior in size more often than not.
And it lived still.
A space-whale, voidwhale, great slumbering leviathan of the deeps, call it what you will; the spirit of vastness incarnate was the largest thing that lived in the universe. No other single organism approached it in size, because in order to sustain a unity of self across such a great distance and mass was nigh impossible, but the space-whale was creature of supreme, sublime mastery of the Self. It knew itself in a way that nothing else did and, conscious of every mechanism of its body and process of thought, it maintained its consciousness through the enormity of its space-folded bulk just as it maintained the ecosystems which were its bodily functions.
Distance. Breadth. Length. These words are lies, when one looks to the vicinity of a space-whale. There were swimmers in the darkness who outmassed solar systems, and within the confines of their labyrinthine bodies only carefully maintained use of higher spatial dimensions could possibly coordinate a Self. But the whale did, and it knew everything about itself. It knew intimately the most minute of self-repair functions, every pseudo-nerve of its sensorium, and the state of… well, perhaps not of every non-strand of its DNA analogue, but of the aggregation and sample, every statistically-sliced cross-section of what was necessary in order to catch any problems. After all, any problem which did occur could be dealt with through any number of means—bulk replacement, mitigation, patience, or further splitting of the sample or slice to disambiguate.
But some problems were too… stubborn to handle for so long. No, not small things like voidfish or the triggering of a nigh-mythical defensive installation that was a measure of last, desperate resort. Those were tractable problems, problems which could be solved with a straightforward application of dimensional prowess and spatial rearrangement. This was a larger problem, a problem which had driven the voidwhale to beach itself on the eagerly, hungrily welcoming shores of the space station that had become its home.
The outcome of that beaching was plainly visible to Nathan. He knew immediately, due to the translator fish’s ability which had become subsumed into his soul, that the tubing and piping which festooned and pierced the creature couldn’t have remained there without its consent. What that actually meant in practice wasn’t entirely clear, couldn’t have been clear to anyone who was not privy to the details, but the titan had a million options for dealing with foreign objects intruding on its own space. It could eject them in a dozen different ways, crush them into neutronium and beyond through means physical or metaphysical, deconstruct them with a dizzying array of internal defenses which had millennia of biomechanical engineering behind them and the guidance of its full volition, or simply shunt them into a pocket dimension for later study.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
No, the real problem was revealed in the writing that formed on the iridescent, coruscating colors of that massive hide. Words in the writing of the ancient cephalopods, those kith and kin to octopodes which shared no biological relation; words that Nathan knew from his earlier time getting a vicious migraine in the process of deciphering the language in question.
Kick rat away, acquire map, okay?
The words came with an unmistakable arrow, and as Nathan approached, every step bringing him uncountably vast distances in a casual twisting of spacetime that he compartmentalized for boggling over later, he saw the rat in question. It was… big, certainly. It was possessed of an unusual size for any rodent, but not impossibly big for a capybara at two feet tall and four feet long from head to tail. It was not, however, a capybara. It was unmistakably a rat, a black rat in every other regard typical in form, and for such a rat it was enormous.
“I hate to ask,” he said out loud as he walked, “but why are you unable to deal with this yourself? If I’m able to move it in the slightest, can’t you just, like, shred it with your dimensional gradients?”
The writing writhed, and his answer appeared on the skin of the interstellar beast.
It consumes, repurposes. Impermeable to intent, the space is. Any ensouled power can do naught but cower.
“Rude,” Nathan huffed. “I’ve died twice and I’m still alive. Doesn’t that mean I have a soul?”
To be ensouled is to have intent even to your utmost extent. You are proto-souled, to we this damned old.
“Well, fine,” he allowed. “Since I wasn’t aware of… any of this a couple of… well, a day ago? That seems valid.”
The whale seemed content to let that be the end of the conversational thread, and Nathan’s easy pace soon brought him to where the oversized Rattus rattus was latched onto the ever-regenerating flesh of the voidwhale, chewing lazily and carving slow furrows into it with its claws.
Here goes nothing, he thought to himself, and he kicked with all of his spacesuited might, a kick made much more effective by the fact that Saucer disemboweled the rat in the process and then launched it off of the boot, screeching as it quite literally rocketed into the distance on the pillar of fire coming out of its belly.
“Oh shit,” he swore as his perception expanded momentarily to include an intuitive understanding of what was about to happen. He ignored the psionic paragon of ratkind as the fires within it began to consume it utterly. “Saucer, incoming!”
And as Saucer lifted the burden of that information handling from him, Nathan saw the local minimap on his HUD update with first the terrain and then the opposition.
The sea of red… writhed.
The rats were coming to avenge their queen.