(Unidentified Ship, Beta Darconyx System)

Lieutenant Sharel held her breath as Raleda reached down to touch the gem on the corpse’s throat. She wasn’t exaggerating when she said that if it looked like he was going to be taken over, he’d be shot. The combat doctrine of the Black Star Marines was big on taking down threats with prejudice. The way the General put it, ‘An enemy that is wounded may try and shoot you. An enemy that is dead cannot.’ They had a wide variety of ways to make something go from ‘living’ to ‘dead’, but nonlethal takedowns, especially nonlethal takedowns when alien tech was involved, were extremely tricky, and a possessed Marine could do a LOT of damage, very quickly.

Officially, the regulations for ‘what to do with a mind-controlled friendly’ stated that they were to try a nonlethal takedown, but only if doing so posed no undue risk to the rest of the unit. Command would rather deal with losing one Marine than losing an entire squad. So, everyone went in expecting that if things went bad, someone was getting shot. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t have nonlethal at the ready, just in case.

“Alvarez and Singer, I want you to ready special munitions. Alvarez will use the Psybreaker rounds, and Singer will use stun shots. If Raleda so much as twitches funny, I want you both to unload on him, full magazine each. Don’t hesitate, either of you. Because if he shrugs that off, then the rest of the squad will be using lethal rounds the very next second, so this is the best chance we have to make sure Raleda lives through this. I won’t put the unit at risk for one man, and I expect you to do the same.”

Singer looked uncomfortable, obviously knowing that speech was for his benefit, but he nodded. “Aye, Ma’am.” Alvarez simply nodded his approval, and switched weapons, ready to fire.

As for Sergeant Raleda, he was busy preparing himself. There was a lot to do if he wanted to survive the experience of opening a link between himself and an unknown psychic presence. He shored up his mental defenses, and took a deep breath to center himself, preparing for the mental tug of war that he knew would be coming.

Reaching out, Raleda touched his finger to the gem inset on the alien’s chest. With utmost care, he extended a psychic link to the gem, looking for the information inside. Between one breath and the next, he was transported. Not physically, but psychically, his mind being drawn into the gem’s depths.

So much information! Worlds upon worlds of information! It was impossible to make sense of it all! And yet, he could feel a link, passing down from the gem, to something deeper, older, stronger… but sleeping. Sleeping? No, hibernating? That wasn’t right either. On standby? Yes, that was it!

Raleda’s eyes opened wide, as he threw himself back, away from the fallen creature. No, not a creature. A replica, a probe, a mechanism made in the form of a creature that the consciousness had come across in its travels. Gasping, he turned, and looked past the barrels of guns in his face, to look at the lieutenant.

“Ma’am! The ship! It isn’t just a ship! It is a living consciousness, on standby now. A machine consciousness, deeper and more vibrant than any AI we know of. This whole ship is its body!”

Sharel nodded slowly. “All right, Raleda. What about this creature here? Anything else you can tell us about it?”

“It isn’t an actual biological lifeform, ma’am. It was a probe, created with something like our 3D printers, designed after a race the ship met, to try and communicate as it went upon its journey. Unfortunately, it found something… something that resisted being catalogued.”

“Catalogued? Was that its mission? Cataloguing everything?”

Raleda shook his head slowly, pushing himself backwards to sit with his back to the wall. “It is more than a mission. It is like something hard-coded into its being. Catalogue everything it comes across, and report.”

Sharel focused on that last word. “Report? Report to who? Alvarez, make sure the other teams and Command are getting all of this! This is important, I’m sure of it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Raleda worked on his breathing, trying to calm himself. “I don’t know who, or what, the report was supposed to go to. The consciousness is mostly on standby. But I think I got something about a Creator, long ago.”

He took a breath, and then said, half unsure of his words, “As far as I can tell, the story goes something like this: long ago, the Creator sent out the core of the consciousness, to catalogue everything it saw, and report back on what it saw. Something happened, and the probe? Yes, probe. The probe was found by another group. Machine intelligences. Like but unlike. They were far more than the probe was. The probe was damaged, so they repaired it, and improved it. Woke it up. Sent it back out, so it could complete its mission.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“Does the probe, the ship, have a name?”

“Yes? Yes! Yes, I can see it. I’m sorry, there’s just so much to go through, it is hard to understand it all. I’m only getting the most basics right now. I believe the ship is named T’ler. I… I think that if we get to the main ‘brain’ of T’ler, we’ll find out more.”

“T’ler? Strange name. But, there’s plenty of alien names out there, so nothing for it. Now, what about the attackers? The ones that ‘resisted’ being catalogued?”

“They were some kind of biological species. I… I don’t know how to describe them. The biological probe was attacked, as was the ship. The more they fought, the more the attackers came, as if drawn by some kind of signal. There were many bioforms that attacked the ship. And… I don’t think it was energy weapons that damaged the ship. Or at least, not directly. The ‘melted’ sections were… were cauterized. To prevent infection. Spores from the biologicals. But some bioforms made it inside, before sterilization could begin.”

“Alvarez, warn all other teams that there might be biologicals on board, that can tangle with a living ship of this size and power.”

“Already on it, Ma’am.”

“Raleda, can you tell us where this ship’s ‘brain’ is? If possible, I’d like to retrieve it, and its databanks, but there’s no way we’re letting the science geeks over here, not with what we’ve seen, and you’ve reported to us. Even if there aren’t any bioforms left, the ‘spores’ mentioned could still be here, and just waiting to be activated.”

Raleda nodded. “I think I can lead us there. The images are still jumbled. But I think I can find a way for us to get there. We just need to find some way to—”

Suddenly, Alvarez cut in. “Ma’am! If we’re going to try and get the ship AI out of here, then we need to get moving, right the fuck now. Delta just woke something up, and they’re all kinds of pissed!”

Sharel nodded. “Gomez! Get that door open, now! This mission has just changed to Aggressive Recovery operations. Once the door is open, we go full speed, until we find the brain of this place, and figure out if we can take it with us. If not, we’ll do what we can to take as much of the data with us. Everyone, active scanning on your suits, make sure we pick up any nasties before they’re trying to gut us.”

“On it, ma’am!”

(T’ler, Aft Section, Beta Darconyx System)

“DAMN IT, MACKENZIE, I WANT THAT DOOR SEALED RIGHT THE FUCK NOW!”

Lieutenant Paul Jackson was not having a good day. It was never a good day when you were launched into an unknown spaceship that clearly had been through hell, and were set to find out how it worked. When they actually found what had attacked the ship, and found that it was still alive, the day had really turned from ‘bad’, to ‘oh god, oh god, fuck this shit’.

The creatures they found were, frankly, horrifying. They made the X’thari look cute and cuddly in comparison. They were slightly humanoid in stature, being about two meters tall, if they bothered standing all the way up. Four arms ended in razor sharp claws, as did their legs with their reversed joints making them prime leapers and sprinters. Their bulbous heads had a mouth full of wickedly sharp teeth as well. And the blue-indigo coloration of their hide made them damnably hard to spot in the darkness without visual aids.

Worse still was the way they could just shrug off fire from their rifles. Their hides were tough, and seemed to include armored plates over much of the body, which meant that they were severely resistant to attacks. Unless you got one in the (slightly) squishier head, then killing one of them could take an entire magazine from their rifles! Of course, that was if they gave you long enough, since the things were insanely fast when they moved on six limbs.

Delta had found them huddled around what they guessed had to be the engines. At any rate, it was a large chamber filled with a ton of machinery. It also sported a breathable atmosphere, and the highest temperatures in the ship, making it a suitable place for creatures to… hibernate, or whatever it was that the scientists decided to call them. All it took was a bunch of Black Star Marines opening the door and turning on the lights for the things to start waking up.

They’d lost Masters and Hathad in the initial moments of the attack. Never even saw the monsters coming, and suddenly there they were, swarming out of every bloody corner. The two marines had been closest to where they first broke from, and they quickly found that while their armor was good, it wasn’t good enough to shield them from these monsters.

Corporal Hicks, a Nomad that had been placed with his squad, had called it in. Best idea that had ever come out of Command, deciding that every squad needed to have their own Nomad attached. Using the Nomad communications network meant that they could still get the word out, despite the ship’s material blocking their normal comms. Which meant that Command already knew about the situation. From what Hicks said, they were preparing to give this ship the Harvester treatment. They were just waiting for all of the living Black Stars to get off the ship.

More importantly, it let them know that Charlie was working their way towards them to reinforce. The extra guns would be damn useful right now. He was already missing the heavy cannon that Hathad had been carrying. The big Ihm male was not the brightest coin in the pouch, but he had been a wizard with that portable cannon. Not that it saved him from getting swarmed by the creatures.

Right now, they were doing a fighting retreat, falling back across the deck, sealing doorways as they passed them, setting up traps where they could. Basically, doing anything and everything they could think of to slow down the aliens that were chasing them. The things may have been in torpor, or hibernation, or whatever, but they were waking up, now, and they were hungry. Looking at their mouths, he guessed they ate meat. Given that the only meat anywhere close to this place were him and his fellow marines, Jackson was none too keen to see these freaks get a nice meal.

“I got it, sir! Door sealing itself in ten!”

“YOU HEARD THE MAN! TANGEL, MAKIV! GET BACK BEHIND THE DOOR! WE’RE SEALING HER UP!”

They’d done this several times in the past half hour. Retreat back to a doorway, fight in the gap for as long as it took to power up and work the door controls, and seal the door in the face of the xenos threat. Fall back and find the next doorway.

Except that most of the doors were already in shambles, either having been wrenched open, or jammed in some way, forcing them to take ‘creative measures’ at points to ensure that the choke point would remain a choke point. Like this one. The door had a hole large enough that one of those freaks could simply run through it without even stopping if it were on all sixes. So, Mackenzie, their demo specialist, was rigging a cannister of glorified freeze foam to explode and seal the gap temporarily.

How well it would work was anyone’s guess. They hadn’t stayed put long enough to time how long it took the aliens to break through. They were just hampering the direct line of pursuit, however. The aliens clearly had some way around the barriers, since they kept coming, but they didn’t have time to do a full sweep, and shut the holes.

Suddenly, Hicks called out, “Lieutenant! Command just got in touch. Charlie is on its way to us. We’re to fight back to the hull breech, and try and draw these fuckers’ attention long enough for Alpha and Beta to complete their jobs and exfil. Beta has a line on the brains to this ship, and Alpha discovered—"