The Craving: Wraith Ship #1

Scene 8: Ravager

The bones of the spheres drift in many places, far from the warming suns. Fragments of a world that was or seeds of one that might have been or will be. A silent hand guides their motions, patiently arranging them upon the tapestry of the black. They waft endlessly, without mind or soul, dreaming of nothing, inanimate undeath swarming among the worlds that live.

Shroud hid among them, the cosmic background bent and warped around his hull, the ghostly tendrils of his senses scrutinizing, interrogating, seeking. He let his course be shaped by the forces around him: the distant pull of the star, the wells of the asteroids, even the far away fingers of something beyond his ability to read but which he felt tugging quietly at all things.

And in the silence it was easy to hear even the slightest whisper. So it was that he felt the unthinking buzz of the gravitons, cycling far beneath stone and ore. An anomaly, faint but clear to him. This was the source, the place from which the lone cry had issued.

"We are here," he said to Zoran. In his main launching bay, the monstrous biped he had created stood before the hungry insertion pod, a semi-living mass of metal and black chitin, innards warm, pulsing with biomass and cybernated systems. Even now its surface began to bifurcate, opening on tendons and linkages, revealing moist and milk-white innards, a hungry womb waiting to unbirth him. The tiny robots from before were swarming over it, tapping its surface at select points, their laser eyes scanning its curves and nooks.

Zoran regarded the giant veined semi-mechanical egg, a suspicious eye ridge raised. "Either it's how you plan to deliver me to the surface or it's a very creative murder weapon."

"You will enter the pod, and I will launch it," Shroud replied.

"And then?"

"You will arrive at a place near the origin of the distress signal. You will find its source and perform what aid you can. If any life form or device should attempt to thwart you, you will destroy it."

The robots scuttled away as one, retreating to recesses in the walls. "The slave drones have completed final checks," Shroud said. "You will enter now."

Zoran moved to slide into the glistening guts of the pod, but hesitated, one leg still outside on the bare metal grating of the floor. "Isn't there anything more you can tell me about where I'll find myself?"

"No," Shroud said. Zoran waited a second or two for an explanation, but the machine mind said nothing more. He shrugged and slid inwards, letting the leaves of the pod's mouth close, enveloping him. The soft interior was unlit, chill and clammy, its surface giving slightly at his touch. He tried to breathe, but his lungs were compressed too much. A momentary panic set in, making him think the pod was some sort of torture chamber, suffocating him into oblivion.

But he found the urge to breathe lessening mysteriously, the reflex to draw in air shutting down, his body feeling satisfied without respiration. No doubt one of many mysteries aboard this ship. He felt a nudge from outside, then a hard slam. Acceleration.

Freefall. Silence and a greater chill threatening him. Somehow he knew the pod was fighting against the icy vacuum of space, giving of itself that he might live. Then another nudge, a sort of gravity returned as if he were suspended upright above ground. The soft interior seemed to ooze around him, tightening its grip.

Impact. Sudden end of movement, radiating in an instant through his bones and muscles. An indicator of mild concussive damage flitted across his field of vision, the red designator box flitting around it, attempting to identify his environment. He felt his body tingle, repairing, recovering. Then a momentary white heat. The pod softened, shone with an inner light.

And melted away. The scene around the pod began to become visible, his cocoon thinning. He was suspended, a mote of dust inside a gigantic water droplet. Then it broke, and he fell to the floor, catlike, silent save for the slushy splash of the pod material. He was crouched in a dimly lit hallway stretching many yards in front of and behind him. He looked up to see the pod's remains: a sort of ebony and white blister or scab, drying even as he watched, patching the hole it had made in the rock, protecting him from the Nothing outside.