Somewhere in deep space, aboard a recently rediscovered space station.

The Somen-X pistol barked in Private First Class Solen’s hand. The black and red armored figure was a malevolent blur of transhuman speed that even his gene-enhanced eyes couldn’t keep pace with. One, two, three illuminating flashes and just as many bullets slammed into the bored grey metal of the deep space station’s service decks. Solen bent down and gripped Corporal Chasky’s breastplate as he fired on the heavily augmented nightmare.

He doubled back and dragged his unconscious and bleeding teammate towards the main path to the service lift, his breathing labored with frustration as a creeping dread spread out from deep within his chest to reach up and caress his neck with a threat to strangle the sense out of him. His eyes and gun darted anxiously about as he scanned for the threat, his Tactical Neural Implant cycling his visor from tactical to thermal vision with a single thought. Heat signatures like his wounded corporal or scattered electronic devices showed in hues of white, orange, red, and green, while the rest of the dispassionate environment was displayed in cool blues and muted purples. The enemy gave off no heat signature.

Corporal Chasky was a heavy burden, manageable by Solen’s gene-modded musculo-skeletal structure, but so very, very taxing on his hyper-alert mind, now frayed by the solemn realization that he was trapped. Solen could abandon Chasky, no one would blame him, he’d at least tried to help the corporal. His team were a finely-bred and well-trained pack of hounds, and they’d been hunted one by one by a black and red armored dire wolf.

Solen glanced behind himself to ensure that this gene-modded monster wasn’t present before taking a big risk to kneel and search Chasky’s survival pouch for one of Maedan Medical Co’s patented Super-Factor medical stims. He grabbed a hold of the med-stim, scanned again for the enemy, and then jammed it into the gap in Chasky’s armor. The med-stim pierced Chasky’s bodysuit and delivered its life-saving payload of painkillers, anti-biotics, coagulants, and metabolism-spikers into his flesh where it began to rapidly clot the savage wounds in his ravaged gut and internal organs.

Solen scanned again with his eyes and pistol before pulling Chasky across his shoulders into a fireman’s carry. “Come on, Corporal! We’re not dying here!”

Movement registered in the corner of his vision and Solen snapped around with his pistol lined up for a shot. He shuffled sideways as he waved the pistol about, cursing the gravity of this situation. The advanced stealth capabilities of the enemy’s armor were a sufficient match only for the preternatural stealth abilities of the creature wearing it.

It had to be a creature, no one in the company believed it was human anymore. He turned and ran with an urgency and pace that a baseline human would struggle to meet, even without the load of another person on their body.

“All callsigns,” Solen spat into his radio. “This is Oscar 6-4, my squad is down, I am on service deck 3, subdeck beta, carrying 1 casualty!”

His visor picked up a sudden spike in temperature and triangulated it to a blip of color on the far right of his visor that was rapidly changing from blue to red to white. Solen’s heart rate spiked as he recognized the unmistakable, whining hum of a Conqueror plasma pistol charging and he threw himself in a backwards dive as he unloaded his Somen-X pistol on what he hoped was a human silhouette.

There was no blast, no discharge of superheated and pressurized gases lancing through the air and slicing through the walls and decks that might as well have been constructed of stale paper. Just a derisive, sadistic noise that sounded ominously like a laugh as the plasma gun’s heat signature slipped out of sight behind a column of cool steel and the pistol’s humming died down.

“I say again, I have 1 casualty with me on service deck 3, subdeck beta! Is there anyone who can help me?”

Silence. The jamming was still in effect. Solen groaned in frustration and closed his eyes as he smacked his pistol against the side of his helmet. He could see his daughter’s gap-toothed smile from their last video call and felt his throat tighten as the noose of fate began to tighten.

He grit his teeth and forced himself to his knees, Chasky still on his shoulders as he made up his mind and sprang to his feet into a full sprint. His visor cycled from thermal to tactical, highlighting the quickest route to the service lift.

Fighting this monstrosity was out of the question, so he committed his gene-modded mind and body to flight. It was his only hope of saving Chasky, of getting off of this God forsaken station, and of ever seeing his beloved Fifi again. He weaved around service terminals and vaulted over guard rails, risking certain and brutal death being ground to pieces by exposed machinery or roasted by lethally powerful electronics, at speeds that would only have been achievable by world-class Terran athletes or the astonishingly robust populace of a Frontier World on clear grounds and open space.

Hope soared within his heart when he saw the service lift, and he allowed himself to believe he would survive. He was so close, close enough that he reached out to press the button that would open the lift’s doors and…

And then he was airborne. Something had smashed into Solen and sent him and Chasky both flying, only moments away from salvation. A cry of pain escaped Solen as his ribs slammed against a guard rail and set him tumbling violently through the air until the ground reached up to smash the wind from his lungs. Solen coughed and specks of blood splattered against his visor as he momentarily curled in on his shattered ribs.

With clenched teeth he fought through the white hot pain and brought his pistol to bear against his assailant, then he cried out as searing pain lanced through his forearm. The lightweight pistol clattered uselessly to the ground and Solen screamed in agony as the black and red armored figure lifted him into the air by the claws piercing his forearm, as if he were just a stubborn child, flesh and sinew tearing and ripping under the strain of his armored weight and flooding his mind with skull-shattering pain.

Solen screamed through gritted teeth as he glanced into the haunting orange eyes of the black-haired boy who had been hunting him. ‘Not like this,’ the thought slid across his mind like a bitter little worm. ‘Not like this!’

He bellowed defiantly and twisted his body to swing at the Nosferatu with his good hand, screaming through the pain as he struck with enough speed and force to break a normal man’s neck! But it never landed. The Nosferatu had simply shoved Solen off of his gauntlet blades, and the wounded mercenary staggered backwards, struggling to balance even as the agony threatened to rob him of consciousness.

He had very nearly regained his balance, at least until he saw the Nosferatu move. He cried out in fear and dropped onto his back, ignoring the crunch of his ribs as he evaded the violent blur that lashed at his throat and missed by harrowing centimeters. Instinct took over and he slammed his heel at the Nosferatu’s kneecap, only to watch in horror as its leg turned into a blur of upward motion and dropped on his shin like a hammer of God.

Solen screamed as his shin shattered and tears welled in his eyes as he remembered Fifi. The one or two times he had made it to her Christmas recitals and made the galaxy better for her, the times she cheered because he called in a favor or two to get an extra day of vacation, the time he had to console her after kicking an aggressive dog. Solen glared up through tears into the sadistic eyes of the Nosferatu, wanting for nothing more than to say sorry to his daughter one last time.

The Nosferatu’s eyes were empty of compassion, his lips curled up into a curious and mocking smirk. Solen coughed again, hacking up more blood onto his visor as white-hot pain pierced his chest, and he took off his helmet and threw it at the Nosferatu. The Nosferatu caught the helmet and craned his head, an avian movement that reminded Solen of the time he watched a Selian raptor regard a Red Weasel with predatory curiosity as it squirmed in its talons.

“You are courageous.” The Nosferatu spoke with a faintly Iberian accent.

Solen was astonished, unsure of why he thought it couldn’t speak. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to speak, his throat was tight with despair and his mind cluttered by a primal, gene-deep fear.

“You could have left your friend behind, focus on saving yourself, why didn’t you?” The Nosferatu craned his head in the other direction.

Solen lurched over in a longer, more painful fit of coughing as he hacked up more of his own blood. The Nosferatu chuckled, and Solen felt himself swell with anger and humiliation as he fought to control the coughing. He was now struggling to breathe, having been so focused on the fight that he hadn’t realized just how little air his left lung was retaining and how quickly it was filling with blood.

“What are,” Solen rasped. “You going to do to me?”

“I am going to ask you some questions, and if I am satisfied by your answers, I will take you aboard my crew.” The Nosferatu explained.

“Go to hell!” Solen spat.

The Nosferatu’s manic grin made Solen’s skin crawl. “I live in hell, my friend!” The Nosferatu made a sweeping gesture with his left hand, and his gauntlet claws pointedly dripped Solen’s blood in a tidy arc on the deck. “And every day I bring it to lost and miserable souls like yours, so unfortunate as to be damned by crossing me! Now tell me what this man means to you.”

The Nosferatu brandished a heavy 10 millimetre Onyx-III pistol and aimed it a little ways off at the still unconscious Chasky.

Solen grit his teeth, his vision dim and blurring. “My friend.”

“Loyalty and camaraderie, I am jealous. What did you expect to find in this station?”

“Payout for claiming it on behalf of Maedan Medical…” He coughed again as his body violently ejected blood from his lung. “Three hundred credits each.”

“A veeery lucrative payout!” The Nosferatu paced back and forth as he lowered the pistol. “It is a shame you won’t see a single dollar out of it. But I am in a good mood. I will bestow upon you a miracle, my friend. I am recruiting you, and your friend, and whoever else I remembered not to murder.

“No!” Solen screamed and rolled over.

The Nosferatu laughed heartily as Solen desperately crawled with what little strength he could muster in his good limbs. He would be an outlaw, hunted and despised by all of the known galaxy if he allowed the Nosferatu to take him. He couldn’t breathe. He was struggling so desperately yet he couldn’t breathe.

And then the Nosferatu’s power armored fingers closed around the back of his breastplate. Solen’s despairing screams quickly transformed into wheezing, choking coughs as the Nosferatu laughed with an inhumane richness in his voice.

“I am Alessandro, you can call me Alex if you’d like.”

3.5 kilometers away from the deep space station, aboard a ship belonging to Maedan Medical Co.

Consoles chimed with a variety of alerts and readouts as the TSS Veridia remained a safe 3.5 kilometers from the deep space station, adhering to standard protocols for deep space station reclamation as the ground team swept the station for hazards. Or they should have been.

“Ground team callsigns, there has been no response on this channel for 15 minutes, please respond!” The communications officer waited fifteen seconds.

The silence remained unbroken. Commander Yoomin Jae’s brows furrowed. Six fireteams had been deployed to that station, and comms had been lost with all six. Radios were silent, live-feeds from their helmets were offline, and connections to their Tactical Neural Implants were completely lost. Maedan Medical had paid Orion Security Services good money for the small one-hundred man company of genetically enhanced soldiers, and as far as she could tell, thirty of them were already lost.

“Chukwueze,” Commander Jae crossed her legs as she reclined in her seat at the helm. “Run another scan, something has to be jamming communications aboard the station.

“Yes ma’am, Commander!”

Jae scrutinized the station on the monitors in front of her and through the vacuum-rated glass that allowed her to see the station, hardly the size of an apple from this distance, against a backdrop of infinite darkness and winking stars. She pressed her thumbnail into her forefinger, already calculating how significantly such a loss would harm her career with Maedan. The ship wasn’t hers, and the crew were loyal to their paychecks and careers first, as any sensible person would be, but she had enough contacts that if needed, she could get a hold of a smaller ship and crew of her own and offer her services to one of Maedan’s competitors if need be.

“Ma’am, I see something outside.” One of the bridge crew pointed in the direction of the station.

Everyone stopped and looked outside, squinting until they eventually saw it. A red mass was floating towards the bridge’s main window. No, it wasn’t red, it was a hunk of torn metal and plastic that had strings of soft red tissue attached to it.

“Holy fuck, it’s one of the fireteam!” Someone whispered.

Jae sat up and uncrossed her legs as the object grew close enough to see that the torn metal and plastic was a ruined set of armor and undersuit, torn apart like soggy tissue, and the red strings were streams of flash-frozen blood and ribbons of mutilated flesh and organs. Jae’s eyes went wide and her spine stiffened as the bridge crew all gasped or cursed as the soldier’s ravaged remains floated closer and closer and smacked pitifully against the window.

They all watched in horror as what was left of the corpse floated off to the side, now little more than celestial debris. When they all looked back at the station, having gained an insight into what had happened to the fireteams, a wave of panic swept over them.

A sleek black corvette-class cruiser with red trim and silver accents had appeared little more than a kilometre away. Alarms went off as the Veridia’s electronic warfare suite detected multiple ship-based energy weapons platforms powering up aboard the hostile vessel.

“Ma’am!” Panic had filled Chukwueze’s voice. “It’s a Nosferatu ship! It’s the Lady Black!”

“Reroute power to the forward guns!” Jae ordered. “Evasive maneuvers and electronic countermeasures now!”

“Ma’am we’re locked out!” Chukwueze yelled back. “Hostile e-warfare systems have jammed our defensive systems! We’re sitting ducks!”

“Jesus Christ.” Jae whispered.

“Hostile plasma cannons are fully charged!” Gunnery Officer Adams screamed. “Weapons platforms across the ship are unresponsive!”

“Engines and thrusters are still under our control!” Helmsman Levy shouted. “Taking evasive actions now!”

Levy was a damn good pilot. He got the ship’s engines burning and the Veridia was rolling and pulling up to put some extra mass between the bridge and the enemy ship within the space of 5 seconds, until a single message flashed across every console screen and monitor.

“The Lady Black sends her regards.”

The bridge crew, in unison, held their breaths and clenched their bodies with their full might as searing plasma lanced across the inky void of space and slammed into the TSS Veridia.

Outside of the TSS Veridia.

My brain buzzed with the intoxicating need for violence as The Lady Black sank her vicious fangs into the prey ship. Volleys of plasma ripped through the prey’s hull and weapons, leaving gaping wounds that were bright with plasma fires and molten slag. The superheated blasts cooked off macro-cannon rounds and missile racks, causing a devastating series of secondary blasts that shattered the ship’s hull in several places.

I licked my lips, salivating at the sight of the prey crew being vented into the vacuum of space through the gaping, molten wounds that had been blasted into the hull of their ship.

“Ambush successful,” Rictus’ deathly voice crackled across the radio. “Prey vessel’s main guns are destroyed and her engines are crippled, but she still has Point-Defense Systems.”

Father Leon surged forward, his Low Gravity Maneuver kit propelling him towards the bleeding vessel. “They won’t be able to bring those guns online.”

“Rictus,” I said as I engaged my own LGM-kit to close in on the ship. “Dispatch shuttles to retrieve some of the crew, they might be salvageable.”

“Waste of fuel Titan,” Rictus spat. “Vacuum exposure ruins the meat you gluttonous buffoon.”

I twisted my shoulders and fired the LGM kit’s thrusters to maneuver around a partially-melted slab of debris. “What if we saved them, let them heal. At the very least flay them to pass the time!”

“No,” Father Leon grumbled as he approached a still-burning hole in the ship’s hull, a warped and twisted wound that cut deep into the ship’s decks and ejected 17 of the crew. “New Blood is already using medical resources for all the toys he catches. I won’t allow you to waste anymore on meat.”

“Bah,” my skull buzzed with excitement and satisfaction as one of the crew drifted towards me, eyes bulging from the sockets and skin frozen and swollen. “New Blood is soft, we should kill him and take his spoils.”

“Quiet, Titan,” Leon ordered as he flew into the hole in the ship’s hull. “If you want to kill him and take his little collection, do so on your own time in the pits. We are here to hunt.”

For a moment I focused on the radio, hoping that the Urges would take New Blood and he’d threaten to pull my intestines out of my gut with his bare hands, or demand that I face him in the pits so we could settle things with blade and maw. He didn’t answer, and my skull and nerves burned with cravings for violence.

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I trembled and my blood boiled with a gene-deep need to sink my teeth into someone’s warm, succulent flesh, as I followed Leon into the ship. Lights flickered as debris drifted in the absence of atmosphere and gravity, life-support functions in this section of the deck having deactivated when the breach was detected by the ship’s systems. Our thrusters propelled us to the nearest bulkhead, sealed to preserve precious atmosphere and protect the crew. We planted our feet on the deck, magnetizing our boots as Leon pinged Rictus.

Rictus unsealed the bulkhead door exactly 0.76 seconds after receiving the ping, and a torrent of atmosphere buffeted us both as the hissed open and spilled vital atmosphere into the void. We walked in and Leon pinged Rictus again so he could seal the bulkhead behind us.

“So empty,” I scowled. “Where have my victims gone?”

“Patience, Titan.” Leon admonished me as he disengaged the LGM-kit and shrugged it off of his Revenant armor. “I feel the Urges too, but we must focus. This ship has a contingent of gene-modded warriors supporting its operations. A deadlier prey, prey, but a threat all the same.”

I shrugged off my own LGM-kit, and they hit the deck with resounding thuds as gravity and atmosphere reactivated now that the bulkhead was sealed. “This will only make the hunt more entertaining! I like it when my prey puts up a fight before I rip out their throats!”

Leon chuckled. “You know what to do, Titan.”

I drew my Onyx-III pistol in my left hand and drew my Helljaw chainsword in my right hand. I activated the weapon and revved its bloodthirsty engine, the weapon loosing a banshee-scream as its jagged teeth tore through the air and just barely scratched at a growing itch the Urges set in my mind, equal parts promise and demand for the spilling of blood and gore. I let the chainsword idle, its engine idly purring as I took off in search of prey. Few things gave me such pleasure as a good hunt, and Leon always let me handle the best part of the hunt, he allowed me the choicest cut of the meat because I was so damn good at it.

And when I found the first of the crew at one of the gun decks, already hard at work sealing the wounds the Lady Black had torn into their vessel’s metallic flesh and desperately working to override Rictus’ viruses on the weapons systems they still had, I laughed as the Urges overcame me and launched myself into a sprint.

There was just enough atmosphere for my first victim to hear the Helljaw’s bloodthirsty shriek, and she turned just in time for me to see the naked terror in her eyes beneath her visor as she desperately raised her arms to shield herself. The chainsword slammed into her forearm and tore through her hardsuit and arm with such brutal ease that I couldn’t help but tremble with delight as the weapon slammed deep into her shoulder and tore through her flesh and her collarbone.

Her screaming was angelic.

“K-Kayla!” The man next to her screamed as he so sluggishly fumbled for his rifle.

I raised my pistol and fired three times, a bullet shattering his wrist, eviscerating his elbow, and destroying his shoulder before he could squeeze the trigger. I couldn’t help but giggle as he screamed, nearly dropping his rifle.

“N-Nosferatu!” A third man screamed, likely into his radio as he drew his own pistol. “Nosferatu has boarded us! We’re under attack…!”

He instinctively leveled his pistol as I charged, but his eyes widened with gene-deep terror as I dodged his one shot and my chainsword screamed through the dangerously thin atmosphere towards his throat. I pulled the strike, just enough to avoid decapitating him or severing the carotid arteries while enabling the chainsword to hungrily chew through the protective material guarding his soft neck and tear out his esophagus and larynx.

Blood spurted from his opened throat as he choked on his own blood, and I grinned with murderous glee as I moved on to let him die in miserable despair.

“Gene-modded prey are converging on Titan’s position.” Rictus croaks as I fire my pistol, slamming rounds home through four skulls before they could fire their weapons. “Be quick, Father Leon, I feel the Urges, and Lady Black’s guns are still ready to fire.”

I barked a laugh as my chainsword tore out a screaming woman’s intestines. “That a threat Rictus, you old corpse? You trying to kill me off!”

“It is so very tempting to vaporize you, I can do that, can’t I Father? The gluttonous oaf has served his purpose, hasn’t he?”

“Silence, or I’ll rip out your tongues.” Leon chastised us. “And don’t forget what happened to the last Nosferatu who so openly defied me.”

I howled with joyous laughter as I butchered the last fighting crew members. I turned with an ecstatic grin on my face as I took in the sight of gundeck crew, reduced to piles of savaged offal, or squirming like mutilated calves and bleating for their mothers. I mag-locked my chainsword to my belt and produced one of my flaying knives, an elegantly curved and sharp blade with hooks on the back.

I took one of the radios from the dead and raised it to my lips. “To all members of this quaint little ship. You are all damned.”

I set it in a dead man’s hand and set it so even dead, his finger would keep the push-to-talk button depressed and broadcasting this very important message. I knelt next to a still-living man, the sorry little bastard desperately trying to crawl away while clutching weakly at the gunshot wound in his gut.

“No! No please, get away from me!” He kicked at me. “I-I have family! My friends are still waiting for me to come back! Please! Please, have mercy!”

I licked my lips as I seized his ankle. He screamed as his shin cracked like dried clay under my grasp and I chuckled at myself for being so overly excited. I dragged him closer as he wailed and seized him by the throat, reducing my power so I could strangle him.

“Now, let’s put on a good show for all your friends!” I shouted as I gently removed his helmet and began to slice into the skin lining his face.

He screamed so sweetly. I almost felt bad knowing I wouldn’t be able to finish flaying him before the gene-modded warrior-prey arrived. Well, at least his agonized cries will make them move with greater urgency.

I heard them coming. They stomped so noisily, even with partially-vented atmosphere that leaked through incomplete patches and emergency repairs administered to the fractured hull, that I had no problems hearing them over my victim’s screams as I flayed the skin from his chest. I took my Onyx-III and shot out the lights, and then I pressed the hot, smoking barrel to my victim’s blood-soaked temple and scalp.

One last, writhing scream milked out of my delightfully suffering victim, I put a bullet through his skull and prematurely ended his suffering. And then I merged with the darkness, dim red emergency lights casting shadows over all as I moved for a more advantageous position.

I momentarily shifted my focus to my eyes, willing my perception to change as the warrior-prey breached the gun decks. The biological wiring of their neurological systems flashing bright in the darkness with the unique irregularity of biochemical impulses, an energetic contrast to the dull stability of their helmets, the gun deck’s consoles and their wiring systems. Five from the aft, ten from the port side. Their neural implants flickered and their helmets’ electrical signature changed. Thermal vision, easily defeated by my Revenant armor, but they had no counter-measure to my Nervesight. I primed an M-II corrosive grenade and tossed it at the five who came from the aft.

Neurological activity spiked as they reacted to the sound of the grenade bouncing on the deck next to their feet. It took them oone-thirty-sixth of a second to recognize the threat of the grenade and reflexively dive away from it. The grenade detonated with a dull, hissing boom and shrouded them in a dense cloud of aerosolized acids. Their instincts would have served them well if that had been a fragmentation grenade, but diving headfirst into a cloud of acidic mist was an agonizingly fatal mistake.

Neural activity in their hearts and lungs spiked as the acid began to eat away at their armor and clothing, and then pain receptor activity skyrocketed as they scrambled to their feet in a stumbling, screaming panic.

“Shit! He’s got corrosives!” One of the remaining ten shouted over their friends’ dying screams.

“Fan out! Don’t give him an easy target!”

Nervous systems flared as some of the prey I’d kept alive desperately dragged themselves towards the sound of their comrades coming to save them. I moved swiftly across the deck when my prey distracted themselves fawning over the mutilated crew, narrowing the distance between us and ducking behind one of the gun platforms when a particularly alert prey glanced in my direction.

“We have multiple casualties,” One of the gene-modded prey whispered. “Thermals are low, they’re not doing good.”

I readied my Helljaw chainsword as I moved to a closer console, my skull and nervous system ablaze with mind-numbing Urges to butcher them into screaming heaps of quivering gore. I was only fifteen feet away from one of the prey in one of the center positions, they only needed to disengage their thermal vision and carefully watch the deck and ignore their dying friends. But they didn’t disengage their thermal vision.

My prey didn’t realize until I was moving until a half second afterward, and by the time he looked up, I’d thumbed the power and was gunning the chainsword’s shrieking engine as I slammed it down. He was quick. Quick enough to throw himself backward and bring his rifle to bear, but I was quicker. I grabbed his rifle and swiftly redirected my chainsword to sever his arms. His pain receptors went into overdrive where his mutilated stumps began as he howled in pain.

“We’ve been engaged! Open fire!”

“Where’s the target? He isn’t coming up on thermals!”

“Disengage thermals! Disengage thermals!”

I tore one of his severed arms from the rifle’s trigger group and leveled it at other prey as I maneuvered to a superior firing position.

“There he is! Moving to our six!”

The rifle kicked in my left hand as it hurled lead at the one who called out my position. Two of them cried out as they were torn apart by the first volley, but no less than four others had already oriented themselves to open fire on me.

My heart surged with excitement as bullets angrily screamed past my ear or ricocheted off of my armor. I laughed as shattered armor and ravaged internal organs with superior fire in our deadly exchange, and when the rifle clicked dry I tossed it aside and slipped out of sight.

“You have more Orion troops converging on your position, Titan.” Rictus tediously drawled in my ears.

I slipped away from my last piece of cover as the four remaining prey laid suppressive fire on it. Their fire was accurate and withering and would have pinned any other prey, but all it did was mask the purr of my chainsword’s engine until I’d once again flanked them. I smiled ear-to-ear as my Helljaw chainsword screamed for blood and fell on another of my prey.

“I have control of the bridge,” Father Leon broke silence as I drove my chainsword through another’s gut. “Rictus, instruct the crew of this ship to surrender, or they will face the consequences.”

I drew my pistol and shot the remaining two, their helmets’ visors shattering as the bullets slammed through their skulls.

“Attention, crew of the TSS Veridia, you will be given one chance to surrender.” Rictus announced over the ship’s P.A. system. “Move to the mess hall within the next fifteen minutes, or we will hunt you down, flay the skin from your flesh and the meat from your bones, and drown you in the blood of the butchered. We have command of your ship, your commander is dead. Surrender now, or suffer like your friends did.”

27 minutes after the Nosferatu seized the TSS Veridia

New Blood entered the mess hall, his helmet off and his angelic little face exposed to the fifty-seven prey who had wisely gathered to surrender. Freshly spilled blood dripped from his still extended gauntlet claws. I took off my own helmet and approached him, the euphoric scent of blood wafting so enticingly from our dipping weapons and armors into my nostrils.

He regarded me with an infuriatingly bored expression while the terrified prey watched us, eyes wide with fear and their nerves strained taught with apprehension.

“Always so bored,” I sneered. “Do you even feel the Urges?”

New Blood’s smirk irritated me. “The Psychoconditioning affects me just as it does you, Titan.”

“How many of them did you kill?”

He narrowed his eyes in a mocking grin. “I killed enough.”

“And how many did you take prisoner?”

“I have marked plenty enough for capture.”

I inhaled deeply, savoring the scent of genetically augmented blood on his equipment, and I scowled. “It was one thing for you to take baseline humans as your little pets, but genemodded warriors?” I thumbed my chainsword’s power button. “Now I can only suspect mutiny.”

New Blood’s smile was nauseating. “Are you scared, brother? Or perhaps just jealous?”

I stared down at him as the Urges set fire to my body, anticipated bloodshed spurring me to strike first. His fingers twitched by a quarter of millimeter and I swung the chainsword. Pain blossomed through my left forearm as blood-soaked claws bit deep into my arm and pressed into my neck, just under the jaw.

“Careful, Titan,” His teasing made my blood boil. “I earned my prisoners, I’ve kept them alive. It is not my fault that you succumb to the Psychoconditioning, the Urge every time you hunt.”

“You are weak,” I snarled.

“Am I?” He pressed his claws upward and pain spread through my neck and jaw as they sliced deeper into my exposed flesh. “If you wish to kill me, it should be done in the pits. Now get out of my sight and go hunt for whatever scraps remain aboard this ship before I give in to the Urge, as you call it.”

I impaled my arm on his claws to bring the shrieking chainsword’s bloodthirsty teeth within an inch of his throat. “You won’t make it to the pits, New Blood.”

Gunshots rang out and the prey screamed fearfully. “Enough!”

I eased off of the chainsword’s trigger and let the blade idle to a hungry purr. New Blood dislodged his claws from the meat of my arm and removed them from my throat. Father Leon’s word was absolute.

“New Blood, Titan, you will both resolve this petty squabbling in the pits!” Father Leon holstered his pistol. “Shuttles are inbound from the Lady Black. New Blood, go round up your pets. Titan, this will be your last chance to hunt. Five minutes, if you are late, you will remain aboard the Veridia when Rictus destroys it.”

New Blood smirked and turned to leave the mess hall.

I shook my head in frustration. “Rictus, where are the rest of the prey hiding on this ship?”

He chuckled with that corpse-dry voice of his. “Scattered here and there, trying to override lockdowns, rushing for the bridge. Don’t take too long, I’ve got an itchy trigger finger.”

I turned to Father Leon and pointed my chainsword at him. “I will kill New Blood tonight, nothing else will satisfy me! He will be flayed and then bifurcated, and then I will string him up in the mess hall and eat that bitch of his alive before he dies!”

“Tick-tock, Titan,” Father Leon’s grin was almost as audible as it was visible. “Time is running out.”

“To hell with this!”

Aboard the Lady Black

Solen’s eyes were red and swollen from his desperate weeping, and his chest, arm, and leg were white-hot with throbbing pain. He felt a selfish spark of joy when he saw that some of his fellow Orion soldiers had been rounded up by the sadistic Alessandro, or “New Blood” as the other Nosferatu had taken to calling him. A fleeting hope, the reprieve of companionship against the certain darkness of being taken prisoner by none other than the Nosferatu. Alessandro had allowed them one final mercy, and those who were conscious and able, were allowed to join the nearly six and a half foot tall bio-engineered murderer to watch from a view port as the Lady Black’s plasma cannons unleashed hellish volleys of plasma that tore through the TSS Veridia. Some wept at the sight, others clenched their teeth in anger, while others still simply stared through and beyond the destruction of the Veridia, as if witnessing a transcendent horror that manifested to their eyes alone.

Solen risked a glance at Alessandro and regretted it. Alessandro was enraptured by the sight, the blasts of plasma and flashes from secondary explosions illuminating the sadistic but contented smile on his face.

The Veridia couldn’t withstand such harrowing abuse, and it was only minutes before her reactors went critical. Violently beautiful explosions tore through the ship and tore her apart, reducing the vessel and her uncaptured crew to ash, slag, and stardurst. Solen couldn’t stop himself from shedding another tear as his last hope of seeing Fifi ruptured in such a spectacularly brutal fashion.

No one spoke. It was all too much to even begin to grasp at, and no one had the slightest idea of how they could even try.

“Go to the infirmary,” Alessandro ordered as he turned to leave. “I have personal matters to attend to.”

His thirteen or so prisoners all limped out of the way, giving Alessandro a clear path through to the Lady Black’s menacing depths. No one interrupted him, nor did they think to ask him where the infirmary was. A crew member, one of Alessandro’s earlier prisoners, approached them all.

“Please, come with me. You won’t want any of the other Nosferatu to catch you limping about the ship.” Her eyes and voice held no emotion as she spoke.

Solen glanced back out the window, watched for signs that at least some of the crew had made it to the life pods as the Veridia’s mangled ruins drifted in the uncaring void and burned, for a little while at least. Solen’s body moved under the direction of his self-preservation instincts, while his mind remained firmly affixed to the TSS Veridia’s burning corpse.