Black Reign

When Rhea passed out, she really didn't expect to wake up again. She opened her eyes in a state of complete bemusement, looking at the starship Nora's small common area with a furrowed brow, trying to figure out why she was still alive.

Her last memories were mostly a confusion of sound. She remembered hearing the soft hum of the ship's warp drive suddenly escalate into a shriek that was cut off by a thunderous bang, then the loud whoosh of a wind that pinned her hard against her seat for a moment before the automatic doors slammed shut. The sound that followed sounded like an alert klaxon going off a vast distance away, and Rhea only had time to realize that it was the oxygen monitors frantically warning her that the ship was down to less than ten percent of its usable atmosphere, and the reason that it sounded so far away was because its sound was attenuated by the thin air, before...nothing.

And now she was awake. And breathing fine. Which was a relief, but also something of a puzzle. The Nora was too small to have a functioning atmosphere generator, and its tanks weren't really designed to hold enough air to replenish the ship after losing ninety percent of its supply. Even if the ship's AS evacuated every other room just to fill the common area, Rhea was pretty sure she shouldn't be under a full atmosphere of pressure. And there was no way in hell they were close enough to a planet to scoop up breathable air. They were easily three months from the middle of nowhere even on full warp.

First things first, Rhea decided. She pulled herself to her feet and went over to the Reflexive Imaging Scanner Kiosk. She stepped inside and did a full cycle of scans, checking herself out to make sure that she hadn't suffered any more ill effects than expected from a period of possibly sustained oxygen deprivation. The full-body mirror inside the RISK showed her blood vessels--slight pooling in the back and thighs consistent with minor contusions. She switched the view to her nervous system--no significant loss of brain cells, so she couldn't have been out that long. She'd seen worse damage after a night of drinking. She checked her skeleton; no damage--thank goodness for the seat cushions. Finally she switched to cosmetic view. Her skin was dark enough to hide the bruising, but Rhea knew she was going to feel it for a while. Even her breasts hurt where the force of depressurization squashed them against her body. She noticed a few burst blood vessels around her dark brown eyes, but nothing that required medical attention.

She bound up her dark curly hair tightly in a ponytail, and headed aft--for all of three seconds. When she got to the aft door that led back to the sleeping compartments and the engineering bay, the access icon glowed cherry red and refused to respond to her touch. Which meant that only the forward compartments were capable of holding pressurization. Rhea's heart sank. Isaac had been in the aft hold when the explosion happened.

She decided to mourn him when she was sure she wasn't going to join him. Her lips tight, Rhea turned and headed to the cockpit to find out just what the hell had happened to him.

Unsurprisingly, it was a mess of warning lights. The Artificial Stupidity wasn't up to deciding how to prioritize the non-essential repairs, which was frankly just how most spacers liked it. Let a computer start telling you what to do, and the next thing you knew you were ripping its personality core out while joining it in a duet of 'Daisy Daisy'. Rhea decided when she was first fitting the Nora that it was much better to have a very sophisticated dumb computer than one that was actually smart.

In this case, it had both saved Rhea's life and nearly killed her in the first place. According to the system logs, the warp engines had encountered a spatial anomaly that warped space in an interference pattern to their direction of travel. The non-sentient automatic pilot had tried to compensate by boosting power, but the turbulence increased too quickly for even computer reflexes to cope. It overloaded the engines and blew them out hard enough to rip a hole halfway along the ship's hull, venting ninety percent of the oxygen in under five seconds before the ship could seal the undamaged compartments.

Isaac's vital signs cut out at the moment of the explosion. Rhea closed her eyes for a moment, blinking back the sting of tears.

When she opened them again, it was to scroll through the system messages and find out how she survived. The logs indicated that they had dropped back into normal space somewhere in the interstellar void in the Cygnus arm of the Milky Way. The nearest star was some twenty parsecs away, the nearest inhabitable planet more than a hundred. They were an incalculable distance from even the most distant reaches of human civilization...but less than thirty seconds away by sublight from a nearby spaceship.

That spaceship saved her life. The Nora sent out a distress signal, and the other ship responded with a computer-generated message indicating that it had surplus oxygen in its tanks. Nora siphoned it off to replenish its losses, and according to the sensors, she was still hooked up to it now. Rhea decided to check the ID on her unexpected savior.

What she saw chilled her blood faster than the vacuum of space. The ship was a Kaiju-class exploration vessel, the kind of massive starship that money-grubbing star-mappers like Rhea and Isaac wouldn't be able to afford in a million years. It was registered as the Acharius, and flagged as belonging to BioHarvest Technologies, Incorporated.

BioHarvest. Even two hundred years after the company was forcibly dissolved, Rhea could still feel her skin pebbling into goosebumps at the thought of being this close to a BioHarvest research ship. Of course, what they called "research" was little more than disorganized plunder of alien biospheres, trawling well beyond the reach of established star charts and grabbing anything that looked interesting for later study. They were notoriously secretive, devastatingly callous in their treatment of their employees, and shockingly careless in their safety protocols. There was no telling what that ship contained, but given that it had been sitting out here for at least two hundred years, 'a living crew' was probably not on the list. No wonder it had air to spare.

Luckily, Rhea didn't have to go in. The hull breach was bad, but nothing she couldn't patch with a full supply of oxygen and a couple of weeks of EVA excursions. The warp drives were shredded, but she could melt the parts down and run them back through the fabricator to reassemble the whole thing piece by piece if she needed to. Star-mapping wasn't a job for people who weren't self-reliant. Or sentimental either, she told herself, pushing Isaac to the back of her mind again.

She studied the sensors again. There were a few other starships nearby, but all of them looked as dead as the Nora almost wound up. They probably ran into the same interference she did, and didn't have the same luck. Whatever was out there, Rhea knew she'd have to get outside its influence before she tried to go back into warp.

Still, that wasn't too bad. Nora was a nippy little thing even in sublight. Once Rhea had everything functioning again, she could just ramp up the maneuvering engines to a tenth of lightspeed and book it away from the crazy starship graveyard. It would only take her...Rhea put the AS to work doing calculations. After a moment, it responded with the data.

Seventy-five years of transit. At top speed. That was how long it would take to get away from the spatial interference. Spatial interference, the stupid computer informed her, that was being directly generated by the Kaiju-class warp engines of the Acharius, using its eternium generators. Key word being 'eternium'.

Grimly, Rhea instructed the Nora to dock. Then she went looking for her EVA suit.

*****

Rhea went halfway down the docking tunnel three times before she actually made it to the Acharius' airlock. She kept checking and rechecking the seals on her ship, making sure that there wasn't even a micron-sized gap for something toxic and horrible to get through. As it was, she planned to spend a little time in the void of space soaking up hard radiation before returning to the Nora, just to kill anything that might be clinging to her after her trip into the fucking mad scientist's paradise on the other end of the tube.

When she finally made it all the way to the other end, Rhea stood for a long moment, psyching herself up to open the airlock. She couldn't stop thinking about the story of the Blackburn, crashed on Pharos Delta with a payload of flesh-devouring insects. Or the Fleming, forced into a star by InterGov authorities to prevent the crew from spreading a debilitating plague. Or the Newcombe, which spent three days docked at Corvus Beacon before anyone realized why the crewmembers never opened their mouths. Or the Savigny, which why the hell was she going inside this damn thing anyway?

Because the warp drives couldn't be disabled from outside the ship without getting fried by hard radiation. Because the Nora didn't have any weaponry she could use to blow the damned thing up. Because she didn't want to spend the next seventy-five years of her life in the same three rooms. With a deep breath, Rhea pressed the access button for the airlock.

Once she was inside, there was a long pause as atmosphere cycled into the room. Rhea had no intention of breathing any of it--she was using her EVA gear as an improvised bio-hazard suit--but she did a quick analysis of it. Fresh and clean, straight from the atmosphere generators. Kaiju class had its advantages. She allowed herself a trifling second to fantasize about decontaminating the whole ship, top to bottom, and coming home in charge of the single largest salvage haul of the last century, but then the inner door opened and she was too busy freaking the fuck out to daydream.

The second the door opened, a thin black sludge spilled out into the airlock, covering Rhea's boots with a sloshing wave of gunk as it rushed into the room. It was faintly iridescent, sort of like the sheen on a puddle of oil, but it sure as hell wasn't hydrocarbons. Rhea's scanner choked up and died trying to analyze it. She didn't bother rebooting; instead, she lifted up her boot, just to make sure that it wasn't eating through the fabric of her suit. It didn't seem to be acidic, but it clung like ashy mud or dark syrup. She decided she didn't want to stick around to find out what else it did. Time to get her ass in gear.

Inside, the stuff was practically ubiquitous, spraying down from the corridor's fire suppression lines in a steady drizzle of dark mist. It reminded Rhea of trips to the pet store as a kid, seeing the amphibians basking in a stream of artificial fog to keep their skin moist. The fluid collected in puddles along the hallway and flowed through the drainage vents below with a slurping sound that Rhea really wished she couldn't hear. She moved forwards at top speed, relying on her helmet lights to show her the way through the greasy fog.

Her original plan was simple. Go directly to the cockpit, shut down the engines, go directly back, get the fuck out. The black slime complicated things, though. Rhea didn't want to risk letting even a drop of it on board without knowing exactly what it was. She decided to disengage the docking tunnel remotely, and spacewalk between the two ships. It held a little risk, but she'd rather take the guaranteed risk of the vacuum over the terrifying question mark of the contaminant that was everywhere in the Acharius. She didn't have to know what it was--the stuff just looked creepy. It seemed to absorb whatever light she shined onto it, but Rhea kept seeing those oily rainbows at the edge of her vision no matter where she looked. The sooner she got to the cockpit, the better.

Rhea got to the cockpit. It was not better.

The cockpit was sealed. Full on, bio-containment sealed. The cold-hearted motherfuckers who ran BioHarvest skimped on a lot of things, but they made damn sure that no matter what happened to the crew, the pilot would be able to lock themselves in and fly their precious cargo of specimens back home. The door was pure mondilium, and the ancient remains of a few bodies along with a few pieces of long-disused cutting equipment told her that someone had already literally spent a lifetime trying to get in without success. Rhea wasn't sure which terrified her more, the thought of someone fruitlessly trying to gain access until they died where they fell or the thought of the person inside that cockpit deciding to set the warp engines to destroy any chance of anyone ever getting out of this sector of space.

Because that was the only reason to perform this particular kind of sabotage. They didn't just want to make sure that the Acharius didn't leave. They wanted to make sure that the black ooze never left. Whoever set the engines to resonate spacetime the way they did wanted to make sure that a trip to the Acharius was a one-way journey even if they died of old age in there. That was definitely scarier.

But Rhea wasn't ready to die here, no matter what the long-dead pilot thought about the subject. She scooped up one of the cutting torches that still looked somewhat functional and started aft. Maybe she could find a way to disable the warp engines from the engineering bay, or at least reduce the area of effect. She'd settle for a twenty-year trip if she had to. So long as she was anywhere but the Acharius.

Three hours later, Rhea had a stitch in her side and she was starting to realize that Kaiju class had its disadvantages too. The signage gave her a pretty good idea of which direction to go (and more importantly which direction to avoid--she'd practically sprinted past four hallways that led toward specimen bays). But the ship dwarfed some of the cities she'd visited, and she wasn't about to let herself get locked into a ziplift on this ship even if it had been maintained more than once every three or four hundred years. She was definitely starting to wish she'd exercised more rigorously on the Nora.

The black mist didn't help matters any. Rhea kept having to wipe beads of clinging sludge from her visor, more often than really seemed natural. She tried to tell herself that it was just her imagination, but it seemed like they were seeking her out, flocking to her helmet light from the darkness of the ship instead of drifting to the floor in the artificial gravity. The iridescent swirls on the edges of the beam of light kept catching her attention, making her imagine someone lurching out of the side passages with some sort of horrible parasite attached to them. She jerked at every movement until the stress left her numb with mental exhaustion. All she could think about was putting one foot in front of the other in front of the other.

Then she hit the dead end.

At first she thought it was a mental lapse, a mistake in reading the signs that led her into a side passage. But when she got a little closer, Rhea realized that whatever was blocking her path wasn't part of the ship. It was a dark tangle of what looked like wires at first glance. But as she got a little closer, she realized that they were roots. A tangle of them, grown together and coated in black sludge until they looked like a solid wall. Rhea fired up the cutting torch, listening to it hiss satisfyingly as it vaporized the thin mist around its flame...but then she thought about getting even closer. About getting right up to those tendrils, so close she could touch them. So close they could touch her. She decided to find another route.

She doubled back to the last cross-section, then took a left. She went down a flight of stairs, shuddering reflexively as she stepped into knee-deep goo. Thankfully, it was too thin to really impede her progress, but after three hours of walking, even a little extra resistance to her forward motion left her feeling wiped in only a few minutes. She decided to take a short rest. Or at least as much of a rest as one could take when sitting down felt suicidal and she didn't want to risk leaning up against anything for fear it might damage her suit.

Once she stopped, though, it seemed to take forever to make herself move again. The shimmering haze at the edges of her view seemed to rim the world in a sort of rainbow tunnel, making Rhea feel like her stare was slowly locking into the middle distance. Her eyes refused to focus properly. Her body began to sway, and she realized that she was getting dizzy from the strange psychedelic swirls that kept tugging her gaze and her center of balance from one side to the other. Distantly, through an exhausted fog that seemed to be inside her head as well as outside of it, Rhea realized she was going to fall face first into the muck if she didn't turn that motion into a step. The thought of being submerged in the slime finally snapped her out of the fugue she'd fallen into, and she forced her body into action just as she felt herself about to topple over.

She managed one step, then another, swaying unsteadily as she staggered through the ooze. She stopped trying to navigate, instead focusing all her attention simply on keeping her body in motion. She just needed to get out of this stuff, get up the stairs that had to be on the other end of this corridor and rest there for a little while. She had to move, she had to keep walking, keep staring and walking and going right down the middle of that iridescent mist that floated at the edges of her vision, stop thinking and keep going, that was all that mattered. She could do it. She could reach the other side.

Instead, she found herself wandering into a vast room, one filled with storage tanks. The tanks were clear, and most of them were empty--probably awaiting new specimens, she thought absently. A few of them contained crumbling exoskeletons or old bones, the last remnants of alien lifeforms that had spent hundreds of years in captivity with no one to care for them. Rhea almost felt sorry for them, until she realized she was in the same room with them. She'd wandered into a specimen bay. The thought shot enough adrenaline through her system to wake her up better than any coffee possibly could.

It was only when the terror flooded her with flight-or-fight hormones that Rhea noticed just how fuzzy her head had gotten during her long walk. Thinking back, she realized it couldn't have been mere exhaustion that left her so groggy and confused--Rhea knew she was out of shape, the way that the EVA suit felt tight around her breasts and belly after five months in space told her that much. But she wasn't a creampuff, either. The weird reflections did something to her head, made her feel muzzy and sleepy. Even now, with her brain absolutely wired for action, she could sense the way the strange play of light on the fluid tugged her ever onward into the hold.

It wasn't a reflection, Rhea realized as she watched the swirl of colors flicker and dance on the edges of her helmet light. It looked enough like one to fool a casual glance, but as she paid more attention, she noticed that the iridescent patterns flashed all on their own. It happened mere fractions of a second before she moved her head, close enough to make her think she was causing it, but it was really the other way around. The shimmer was drawing her head to stare in a different direction, pulling her attention where it wanted her to go. She hadn't noticed when she was following the signs, but now that she was just wandering the ship, it was obvious. Rhea couldn't think how she hadn't spotted it before.

She wondered where it was trying to lead her. Obviously somewhere bad, obviously into a trap or a mouth or a maw, but even as the thought came to her, Rhea found that it was locked behind a mental wall of placid indifference. She could see it, she could understand it, but her mind was suddenly thick once more with a distant lassitude that prevented it from having any real emotional impact. Even when she realized she was walking again, it didn't terrify her the same way it did before.