The limbs holding Malan aloft stilled. He barely noticed, still captivated by the silver sphere rotating languidly in mid-air in front of him. Only he could see the cascading ocean of brilliant white that twisted around it like stardust, only he could feel the thrum of the celestial energies power.
It made sense. What lay before them was an object that interacted with that energy in ways nothing else in the galaxy did. All it was waiting for was a touch. The right touch.
“It takes your breath away, doesn’t it?” Talia asked from beside him, placing a too-gentle hand on his arm. “Only one with the genetic coding of the Voidborn could have parted the stonework on this place. A protection even the Elder Beings could not break—at least not without significant consequences.”
“I guess I’m just built different,” Malan muttered, and Talia laughed.
“You aren’t wrong. Only you could have got us here, before this particular Starbound.”
Malan winced. So they knew exactly what this was then. The Starbound were not just powerful ships; they were so much more. Only certain people could pilot them in the first place—that was what the compatibility testing was for. Once a compatible pilot was found they would bond with them. The Starbound would shape itself to match the person flying it, and as they flew together, it would change. Grow.
Nobody knew how. Nobody knew why. The general public assumed the ships were simply periodically upgraded. Malan, however, had been born to parents who had dedicated their lives to studying the various celestial anomalies that humanity shared the stars with, and they had known the truth.
Humanity hadn’t built the Starbound, they had found them.
It wasn’t a secret explicitly—the UGC didn’t like to admit it had those, and the Starbound were too public-facing for it to work—but they certainly didn’t like the information being talked about and spread freely.
Telling others was legal, but Malan’s father had talked about people who had talked openly about it suddenly finding themselves without a job, and for some reason finding it exceptionally hard to get another. Soon there were rumours from no clear source, and suddenly, you were the crazy guy people crossed the street to avoid.
To an extent, Malan understood it. The knowledge that humanity’s most effective defence was based on alien technology in a galaxy where no evidence sentient aliens had ever been found that we still had very little idea about how it worked would not be great PR.
What he was witnessing now, was exactly how all of the Starbound came to be. The datafiles he’d seen were limited in scope, but almost all described a similar sphere found on some previously uninhabited moon or planet, which the UGC would squirrel away until they could find someone able to pilot it. In any other scenario, witnessing the discovery of an untouched Starbound would have been scientifically momentous. It still happened every so often, but was a rarer and rarer thing.
“What could your plan possibly be, here, Talia? Even if I’ve opened the way for you, I’m still the only one here that could maybe fly that thing, and I don’t think I need to spell out what would happen if you let me try.”
“But of course,” she said, smiling at him. “Did you know there are different kinds of Starbound, Malan?”
He blinked at the apparent non sequitur. “I—no?”
“I didn’t think so. I don’t believe even your quaint UGC fully comprehends it. This one is a Starbound Prime. One of the very oldest. They are the only kind that require their pilot be of Voidborn blood—one who can touch the celestial energy as you can. Their capabilities are…limitless.”
“So it’s even less likely you’ll be able to use it any meaningful way, right? I’m still struggling to see the plan here, Talia.”
“I know. You are exactly right—if we allowed you to touch the Starbound, you would almost certainly attempt to turn it on us. But, you’ll notice I did not say they require the pilot to be Voidborn. Simply of their blood. We do not need you, Malan,” she said, and her small smile grew to one of ecstatic joy. “We simply need your body.”
“What the fu—”
But his words died in his throat. The tendrils holding him had started to turn before he spoke, and the moment he saw what lay behind them, all rational thought was shattered upon the anvil of pure, primal instinct.
He started to thrash, wild, animal impulses driving his muscles to their limit. The creatures holding him hissed, tightening their grip, jagged-edged tentacles tearing a thousand tiny cuts into his skin as he struggled madly. Useless. They did not give him an inch. His teeth mashed so hard he tasted the sweet copper tang of blood on his tongue, and he was suddenly supremely aware of his own manically wide eyes, straining this way and that to avoid looking at what was directly ahead.
No.
Nononono. Please.
“Please!”
The word tore out of him like vomited shards of glass, the scream barely audible over the gibbering of the abominations gathered around them.
Talia heard. She crouched beside him, and shushed him as though he were a crying baby, placing what was meant to be a soothing mask upon his helmet. “Hush now, Malan. I told you before—I am sorry. This will hurt you.”
She was not even looking at him as she spoke. Talia’s gaze fixated upon the one place his own eyes were too frightened to look, reverent and full of worship. There was no longer any choice. He had to look. Had to know what was coming.
Above, the gargantuan creature he’d glimpsed before on the other side of the Rift, was coming through. Even now, with what was surely half of it’s body having passed through, Malan could not identify one consistent feature that made up its body. Meat, he supposed. A writhing, ever-changing mass of meat, that somehow made form. He’d seen one solitary eye, but now there were dozens—even hundreds—bunched across it body, red and bulbous.
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One moment there were tentacles, dripping with ooze and reaching out, then in another there were none—only mouths and sharp teeth like rows of daggers. It was an impossibility, yet it made complete and total sense as the culmination of all the creatures that had come through before it.
Malan was half aware that he was babbling incomprehensible nonsense, tears streaming down his face, as the creature broke effortlessly into the moon’s upper orbit. Oddly, the closer it came, the more rational its size seemed to appear—now roughly the same size as a UGC warship. Admittedly, that was still something that would have dwarfed the Sparrow, but it was miniscule compared to what his eyes had initially seen.
The thought sparked another in him, and he allowed himself one, final glance towards the shape of the Sparrow in the distance, finally having been able to take off and escape.
He wasn’t given the chance to be glad. The abomination descended from above, oozing the same wrongness the evoked by that strange language Talia spoke, only on another scale. It roiled through him, every cell in his body responding as though a billion nails were being scraped across a million blackboards.
It spoke, then, in sounds his ears had never before heard, and he his stomach lurched, then emptied as reality itself seemed to warp and flinch away from the noise. A glance to the left revealed Talia had done the same, though her head was pressed to the dirt in a reverent bow. He could see the delirious ecstasy on her face, so powerful she either didn’t notice or didn’t care that her own vomit pooled around her.
Movement caught his eye. The monstrous…thing had sprouted tentacles once more, and now they reached out, a half dozen oozing appendages, grasping and putrid. He tried squirming again, but his bonds simply lifted him further up, closer and closer until it was too late.
It’s touch was like ice. The creature’s touch effortlessly burned away the textiles of his spacesuit, though oddly, did not outright harm him.
Too-liquid limbs reached and curled around his own, the feel of them on his skin too close to the sensation of being draped in offal. These arms were nothing like the now-retreating appendages that had been holding him before. Those had been living things. Twisted and warped living things, but still just that. Skin and flesh, bone and organ.
This was simply meat. Rancid and foul. Tiny tendrils of it reached out from the larger, and with growing horror, Malan realised they were exploring. Hunting for something. The tendrils roved across his upper arms and torso, seeping beneath his clothes and roving across bare skin. Some down his chest, some beginning to crawl around and up his neck.
He couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. He was no longer being pinned in position, but still he stood, paralysed, as he felt the icy chill spread onto his cheeks. Beneath his eyes. Belatedly, Malan realised it must have been drawn naturally to the heat of his breath, and he tried to force his mouth closed even as the creature found what it was looking for, the tiny tendrils squirming into the space between his lips.
There was a surge of flesh, now the target was found. Malan fought with everything to keep his mouth closed, anything to keep it away—before a sharp, blinding white pain in his left ear drew a gasp from him, and the battle was lost.
Putrid ooze surged into his mouth and down his throat faster than he could react, and immediately agony like nothing he’d ever felt before wracked his entire body. He convulsed, twitching and spasming as the creature found his other ear, and nostrils, and continued its violation.
The world started to fade, despite the devastating sharpness of the pain. It was unrelenting, even as Malan’s thoughts grew fuzzy and distant, until he was nobody. Nothing. Just a mass of flesh and agony. Him and the pain, alone, for the last agonising moments of his life.
Not alone, Voidborn. Never alone. Even if this is to be the extent of our reunion, know that you have never, and never will be alone. I will stand by you in this, as I would have in the thousand battles that never were. Although…
There was a hesitation in the voice, an emotion Malan could no longer recognise.
Perhaps there is still salvation. Even from here. The window will be short, Voidborn. I know it hurts, but you must be ready. You must fight through it, or everything will truly be lost.
Malan blinked. Pain was all there was. Only pain. Pain, and the sounds of screaming. Wait, he couldn’t scream. Who was screaming then? And what was that synthetic noise in his ears? He tried to open his eyes, and was met with blinding light, and the booming, rapid pulses of an energy rifle.
He tried to move, and his body was drowned in the pain all over again. Suit integrit… God, there was so much of it. Compromised. What? He tried to take deep breaths, only to find breathing required him to take enormous, rasping gasps. Slowly, groggily, things began to come together. His suit was damaged. It would have sealed off his helmet, but if he didn’t sort that problem out in a few minutes he’d be—
The creature’s hold on him wavered as more pulses boomed out around him, and finally the blinding light faded, and his eyes could follow the noise. A shape dove from above, drifting in the low gravity more than falling, raining orbs of light down upon the abomination’s tentacles still holding him. In the distance, he saw the Sparrow, making another hasty retreat.
Light had already blasted away the appendages that had entered him, and were now working their way through the ones holding him up, tearing its way through the flesh like paper. The creature hissed, and its appendages flinched back in reaction to the pain, instinctively loosening their hold on Malan.
He fell, tumbling to the floor, and hitting rock with a painful thud, despite the lessened gravity. The figure beside landed beside him an awful lot more gracefully, supported by the suits in-built booster pack. Malan’s mind still span, half-dazed, but he was aware enough of his surroundings to notice his rescuer turn and start firing pulse rounds into the horde of abominations behind them.
Elena’s pulse rifle, he realised.
He tried to speak, to thank her. Ask for a plan. Say something but he gulped vainly for the air to do so, and came up short. Fuck. The alert. Suit integrity compromised. The creatures drew in, too many for just one pulse rifle to possible hold back. The figure turned.
“Well, what are you waiting for, shithead? Go!”
Beric’s furious, grey eyes looked back at him, still firing even as he did so. Malan looked at him, bewildered. Then past him, where the abomination was drawing itself up in anger, even as its minions closed in around them.
Beric hissed, and halted in his firing, twisting his body just enough to kick Malan solidly in the ribs. He groaned, lungs reaching for air that was no longer there, and Beric turned back, rifle blazing to life.
“Fucking go! Don’t waste it!”
There were a million things he could have said, but for the lack of air or time to say them. Instead, he settled for a nod, pouring every ounce of gratitude he could into the motion, and scrambled away across the moon’s rocky surface. He was barely upright, vision growing spotty when he heard Beric’s rifle falter, and he ran faster, eyes locked on that spinning sphere of silver.
He heard Beric’s screams, and glanced back in time to see a gaggle of the creatures tear him in half, entrails drifting down and staining the moon’s pale surface. Malan sank to his knees, the lack of oxygen finally bringing him to the edge. No other option left to him, Malan reached out and touched the surface of the sphere, and let blackness take him just as a distant voice sounded.
…Integrating Pilot…
*****
Integration Successful.
Nexus Matrix Active.
****************
Pilot Name: Malan Tierin
Race: Human, Voidborn
****************
Starbound Compatibility Confirmed
Welcome to the System, Pilot.