The Nebula

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It began with a girl. But it always does, doesn’t it? But this was a special girl, as if that opening line needs any more clichés added to it. She was special to me, at least.



It was a layover on Sothis, and if you are staying in Sothis the only place to dock up for the night is Newholm. That is assuming you don’t want to wake up to the glorious sights and smells of the hundreds of large, sweaty workers that call the only other station in system home.



No, it had to be Newholm. And if you are going to that particular hive of debauchery it would be rude not to stop off at Slavern’s Tavern to kill a few braincells.



There was a low hum of conversation as I walked through the open bulkhead door and approached the bar. A group of five men crowded around a small table covered in cards and credit chits, gambling away what little cash they had in a fevered attempt to win enough money to buy their way into a better life.



At first glance they appeared quite well-to-do but as I drew closer the pungent aroma of unrefined hydrocarbons, scorched metal and black smudges in harder-to-reach places gave them away as workers from Sothis Mining. I guessed they were on a recuperation cycle and had opted to give a portion of their hard-earned cash to some Sidewinder pilot for transit to Newholm for a breath of clean air and a fresh perspective.



But a spray in the decon shower and some slicked back hair couldn’t change a man’s fortune, and it certainly wouldn’t do squat about his destiny. I gave a brief nod as one of the group looked up and noticed me staring, I feigned a smile to try and allay any hostility.



If I wanted to die in a bar brawl I would have become a bounty hunter, not an explorer.



There was a new barman on tonight and a young one at that, I ordered a glass of whiskey. He managed to smile despite his hands shaking as he poured the single malt into a surprisingly clean tumbler. The bottle was old and valuable, most likely worth more than the trainee barkeep would see in the next few years.



As he poured I studied my reflection in the mirrored back wall of the counter. My once black hair was now greying and longed for a good trim, though I had done the best I could with a comb before I left my ship. The same applied to my chin where a rough layer of stubble threatened to become a full-on beard with every passing day.



I paid the man with a good tip before taking up a stool and swiveling to continue my study of the room.



Vid screens were dotted around the dingy bar showing constant loops of adverts upon adverts. All the classics – Gutamaya, Core Dynamics and Faulcon DeLacy flashed across the screen, each showing new developments on hulls that were decades old. I remember smiling as I thought back to my fledgling years as a Commander. I tried my hand at hunting, everybody does. All the great childhood TV shows are about bounty hunters, taking down pirates and getting paid handsomely for the risk.



I wasn’t horrible at it. I built up quite a bit of bank in those early years, and was in my second or tenth-hand Viper in no time. As time ground on though, I grew weary of it. The endless bravado of my peers and the ceaseless shop talk grated at me.



Even sat in that bar in Sothis, a well-known trade station there were at least two small groups of men sat on different tables with one individual in each giving an animated recount of their latest dog fight using empty beer bottles as makeshift ship models. For all I knew they were both talking about different sides of the same scrap.



I shook my head with a smile and continued looking around the room. Here there was a couple apparently disagreeing over something, yet still holding hands over the sticky table top. At the end of the bar there sat an older man, possibly once a pilot or even commander but it was hard to tell, time had not been kind to him and frankly I wasn’t out that night looking to hear the war stories of a veteran. I had something else on my mind.



It was then that I saw her slumped at a table in the corner. A brown faux leather flight suit with red trim clung to her figure just right while her jet black hair hung loose and largely unkempt about her face, obscuring part of it entirely. A pair of ocean blue eyes smouldered at me through the strands that obscured her face as though daring me to make my move.



I hurriedly turned to the young barkeep and ordered a second whiskey for my new companion and gave him an extra tip to make it fast, not wanting to lose my shot with the raven-haired temptress in the corner. I picked my way through the maze of tables and chairs before triumphantly placing the glass in front of her.



“May I sit?” I asked, placing a hand on the tired wooden chair opposite her with my heart in my throat.



The girl looked up at me, then at the whiskey before wrapping a shaking hand around it and taking a sip. A grunt and the flick of her chin at the chair gave me all the permission I needed. Undeterred by her cold demeanour I slid into the chair, the old wood creaking under my weight.



“So what brings you to a place like this?” I asked with a grin and a pull of my drink, the golden brown spirit softly burning my throat on the way down.



“First place I came across,” she replied, her eyes still fixed firmly at either the poison in front of her or just the table beneath it. I couldn’t be entirely sure. Besides my initial introduction she hadn’t so much as glanced at me.



“The first place? Honey, this is Sothis. We are literally, no, officially in the middle of nowhere. You don’t just stumble across it. Where are you coming from?”



“I have no idea,” she muttered into her glass as she raised it to her lips, draining what was left of the malt.

Intrigued I turned and showed an open hand with two fingers to the young barman, luckily he wasn’t so inexperienced that he didn’t know what a top-up was. He nodded and pulled two new tumblers from his rack as I turned to face my companion again.



To my surprise she was now staring at me, her eyes wide and her head tilted slightly to one side as though studying my every feature. Her hair caught briefly on her petite nose as she tilted her head the other way before cascading free. Looking back I should have known she was trouble, she looked a total mess but there was something about her that I just found impossible to pull myself away from. Maybe it was the eyes.



I smiled and paid the barkeep as he placed the fresh drinks on the table before finishing off my first one with a gulp.



“Sorry,” I began as the barman headed back to the bar with our empty glasses. “I’m a commander, my name is -“ I continued before being interrupted by the girl’s fits of laughter.



“Why do you think your name matters, Mr Commander?” she said between fits of laughter. “In the grand, terrifying scale of the void. Of *Him*. Who are we, really?”



The interruption and strange question threw me completely. Sure, the galaxy was a big place but that was just something you dealt with, mostly by not thinking about it. I decided to try a different approach.



“So you aren’t a big fan of names then. No problem. What can you tell me? How did you get here? What you flying?”



“I didn’t fly here, was on patrol in my kite but got lost. No idea where the rest of my patrol are. In witch space. The purple mist…”



“Wait, what? Patrol?” I leaned forward and tugged the shoulder of her jumpsuit towards me, far enough that I could see the badge on her bicep. It was an SDF logo overlaid onto a silhouette of her rated ship. “A Viper?! You are all the way out of here in a goddam Viper?! I have heard of people going to great lengths to get out of service but damn, girl! That’s something! It must have taken you months!”



I was genuinely impressed! A Viper! And a shitty combat fit SDF Viper at that has about the same jump range as a frog with one leg. How she managed to get one fit with a fuel scoop was beyond me. Getting it all the way out here? Talk about creative navigation.



Still it would have taken months. Longer, even. This would explain her demeanour; that much time in space could do things to the mind. Would also explain why she was so desperate for drinks. People on the run were rarely flush with cash.



“Holy shit, you must have seen some things! How about another drink?”



Her head snapped up as the words left my mouth, a devilish grin on her full lips.



“I did see things. Do you want to see?” She stood and walked around the table before taking my hand, not waiting for my response.



It didn’t take me long to decide. Standing up the flight suit looked even better on her and the soft touch of her hand easily overrode the alarm bells that this woman seemed more than just a little space crazy.



No sooner did we get through the main hatchway into my AspX then she was on me. Our flight suits hit the deck followed shortly by our bodies. She wasn’t interested in any foreplay at all. She was animalistic and predatory.



I have no idea when we passed out, but I was awoken at around eleven AM local time by a thudding on the hull loud enough to invalidate my warranty. I opened my eyes to find the woman from the night before already awake and sat on the edge of my bed, staring at the wall.



“You expecting visitors?” I asked with a cough as I pulled on a loose pair of cargo pants and stretched out.



“None welcome,” she answered, not taking her eyes off of a single spot on the cabin wall.



Her hand shot out as I went to walk past her, her vice-like grip worlds apart from the gentle touch in the bar the night before.



“Listen, I’m sorry.” She said, looking up at me with her beautiful blue eyes. “About last night I-“



“It’s all good.” I said, cutting her off before she could finish her needless apology. “Now let me get rid of whatever bureaucrat is messing up my livery and we can find us some breakfast.”



Breakfast never came, at least not for both of us. No sooner had I opened the door to give the intruder an earful I was staring down the barrel of half a dozen nasty-looking rifles.



Whatever government she had fled from had finally found their missing Viper and had come for the space jockey that had stolen it.



“Where is Saffron?” their officer demanded the moment my hands were over my head. When I didn’t answer he nodded with annoyance before ordering his men to search my ship.



Uniformed soldiers stormed my beloved Asp and quickly found my companion who apparently went by Saffron. They never gave me a surname.



I waited at gunpoint in the corridor, my own wrists bound in cuffs while I listened to my ship’s interior being torn apart. It was hard to tell if Saffron was fighting back against the soldiers or if they were just vandalising my Asp for the sheer fun of it, either way it sounded fairly expensive. I looked at the officer standing not a couple of feet away from me, who was listening to the cacophony with some amusement.



“I’ll take your name,” I said in as confident a voice as I could manage with the cold metal cuffs biting into my wrists and a rifle barrel at my chest. “If anything is seriously damaged your superiors will be receiving a bill.”



“Adams. Captain Adams.” The bastard replied with annoyingly little worry in his voice. “And write to whoever you want, you’ll be lucky if they don’t bring you in for harbouring her.”



I shot him a look but knew that he spoke the truth. Really I was lucky that they weren’t taking me in with her, I wasn’t entirely sure at the time why they weren’t.



Now, of course I know only too well.



Finally Saffron was walked out of the ship. The friendly yet apologetic mood I had woken up to seemed to had disappeared, replaced with the downcast, distant state I had found her in at the bar the night before. Apparently glad they had their girl my guard and the captain wandered off to chat to the men trailing behind Saffron’s escort, many of which seemed to be sporting fresh bruises on their faces.



It seemed her demeanor was all a decoy. As she passed me she threw a wide head butt at the guard holding onto her cuffs and body slammed the other into the cold metal of the corridor wall. She dashed at me amid shouts coming from the other soldiers and heavy footfalls on the plated landing pad that told me that whatever she had planned, she didn’t have long to do it.



“I’m so sorry,” she whispered in my ear, leaning in as close as was possible with her hands bound behind her back. “It’s all my fault! He will bring you. Purple Mist! You must not fight!”



I pulled back, at looked in her eyes. There were so many questions. Purple mist? Who is He? And why would I fight? The soldiers weren’t going to-



The thought was interrupted by a scream of pain that broke from Saffron’s lips as the butt of a rifle struck her kidneys. A heartbeat later a second strike landed on her temple and she went limp, collapsing in an awkward heap on the cold floor with a thud.



“What the fuck!” I yelled, enraged at their brutality. “She’s one of yours, you can’t just-”



I never reached the end of the sentence. A sudden, intense pain shot through my skull as a hard, heavy object hit my head in much the same was as it had struck Saffron. I hit the deck a moment later and used the last few seconds of consciousness I studied her face as a rivulet of blood trickled from a fresh wound beneath her hairline.



It had just reached the bridge of her nose when the darkness swallowed me.



#



I awoke with a headache that could put a rhino out of service as well as a fairly unpleasant welt on the side of head. I had been dumped back inside the airlock of my Asp which was an unexpected blessing. Still, I figured if you’re supposed to be the law yet you go around butt-striking the public it doesn’t pay to advertise.



I spent the next few hours sleeping off the most powerful painkillers I could find in my med kits and wondering what I should do next. I had an amazing night with Saffron then she was gone, that wasn’t unusual. I am used to women being gone by morning; believe it or I don’t have the kind of face you want to introduce to the folks back home.



Leaving is one thing. A girl being taken from me though? That was new, and it didn’t sit right.



Once I regained my senses and the painkillers had done their job I searched for her, as best I could. I checked the medbays, all the dives and hovels that I could think of. I even asked a woman I knew in traffic control about any foreign SDF ship that might have been or gone over the last few days. Either she didn’t know, or she didn’t want to tell me. The effect was same no matter which it was. She was gone, and there was nothing I could do to find her.



I know. It sucks. Doesn’t it?



Eventually my money began to run out. Buying drinks for dock workers and engineers takes its toll, even on a commander’s wallet. But I still had enough for a box of rations, enough to last me a few months at the least. And refuel? There were ways to get fuel.



My mind was made up; maybe the distance would do me some good. There were still corners of the galaxy just waiting to be explored with some juicy bonuses for whatever commander scanned them first.



I set out the next day.



As soon as I sat back on my throne and grasped the controls I began to feel better. I went through my pre-flight checks pretty much on autopilot. Traffic gave me the all clear to launch but clear the letterbox quickly as there was a Type-9 on its way.



I inhaled deeply as I felt the clamps release. I was free once again. I threw on the vertical thrust until I was in line with the channel, then before my landing gear had even completed its retracting action I punched the boost and opened the forward throttle. A smile crept across my face as I was gently pressed against the leather of my seat and the worn material creaked in complaint. I knew the g-forces were fraction of what they would have been if my stabilisers hadn’t been there to stop me becoming a small bowl of human soup, but the feeling was still as exhilarating as the first time I took my first solo flight.



This was mankind as it was meant to be. Free. Free to go where I pleased and do what I wanted. How ironic that not five second after the thought entered my head did the first of the SDF forces outside the port begin scanning me for contraband.



Well, free to go and do almost anything that I pleased.



I never got into smuggling. The deck seemed far too heavily stacked against the smuggler, and I never liked to lose to the house.



I heard the familiar, warming sound of my frame shift drive spooling up as I waved to Viper Mk IV that pulled up alongside me, no doubt running a kill warrant scan on my little ship. Possibly hoping that it will give him a reason to light me up and add a little excitement to what I could only imagine must have been a very dull existence. All this space and doomed to patrol just a tiny portion of it.



I swallowed hard, aimed my Asp at the first system on my long trek out to Sag A and closed my eyes as the FSD kicked in.



#



I wasn’t long into my trip when I began to get the dreams.

Nightmares.



It was always the same, but different. She got brought out of my ship, arms cuffed tightly behind her back. I watch proudly as she expertly incapacitates her two guards and runs to me. Suddenly she is free and I am free. But the guards are still there. Only they have changed.



The once clean limbed soldiers have become twisted and diseased monsters. They charge at us swinging oozing, sore-covered claws that were once hands. From nowhere we are armed and fighting.



Shells erupt from the rifle that appeared in my hands and bullets lance into the closest of the charging abominations. Grotesque blisters on his body burst with every impact, the rounds tearing through his twisted torso with ease. He drops to the floor as a twitching, gore-soaked mess.



The next target followed suit, and then the next. My fourth target fell to a good tight grouping of rounds to the forehead. It has been almost a decade since I went through basic and learned to fire a rifle yet in this dream it was as though I had become a marine.

The rifle, too miraculously never ran dry of ammunition.



But even so it wasn’t enough. As my fifth target folds onto the deck I stare in horror as my first victim regains his feet and begins staggering towards me, ragged flaps of flesh hang from his chest and abdomen as his clawed arms flail at me. I am just taking a step back when my second target lets out a rasping breath and begins clawing across the floor towards me.



“We can’t do this alone, we need help!” Saffron screams from behind me. I turn just in time for her to be brought down by what was once the soldiers’ officer. Her weapon clatters across the floor towards me. I stare at it, taken aback.



A sword? Who fights with a sword anymore? Modern armour can stop fairly high calibre bullets and laser burns. What use is a sword? Then I look at her victims. Where the sword has struck the abominations that attacked her rot had taken hold, deep purple growths spread even as I looked at them. The creatures themselves lay there completely paralysed as their twisted bodies are eaten alive by the mysterious affliction until they are completely consumed. Once they had expired the broken and barely recognisable corpses burst into a foul-smelling purple vapour.



I look back at the weapon. Unreadable characters glow menacingly along its blackened blade while thick brown leather clung to a purple hilt that pulsed with an unnatural glow. The entire weapon radiates terrible power and fills me full of dread.



I put all thought of the eldritch weapon from my mind and raised my rifle, dropping the monster that crawled towards me. A three round burst into the face ended the existence of the creature attacking Saffron. The abomination went limp, pinning my compatriot to the deck.



“The sword! We need *His* help!” She repeats, struggling to free herself from beneath the cadaver.



I turn to see yet more of the creatures flooding the deck; it is as though the entire population of the station has been transformed into the disgusting violations of flesh and bone. These ones are faster though, too fast. I glance back at the sword laying on the floor but instead turn to face the oncoming horde with my rifle, felling dozens of the former station residents before they even reach the first gantry.



A blood-curdling scream interrupts my killing spree and I turn just in time to see the once-fallen officer tear Saffron’s throat out with jagged teeth. Her blood flows freely onto the diamond-pattern deck and creates a myriad of tiny rivers that reach out towards me like clasping fingers.



“We need… Him” she managed to croak one last time before her eyes glassed over, still staring at me. A heartbeat later a long serrated talon bursts from my chest.



Then I would wake up, bathed in sweat and struggling to breathe.

Alone in my little ship in the vast callousness of space, where I felt most safe.



It was after one such dream that I had woken up after barely four hours sleep. Saffron’s death had been particularly harrowing this time and succumbing to my fatigue only to relive it all over again filled me with more dread than I had ever felt before. I resolved to run a check on my systems and get back into the big black, continue my journey out to the rim and try to make a little more bank.



I don’t know how long after that decision it was until it happened. I was pumping myself full of caffeine and whatever uppers I could find in my cupboards to keep myself on an even keel, as it were.



Great thing about space is there aren’t really any days or nights.



Terrible thing about space is that it’s pretty much all night.



Of course there is light, every time you come screaming out of witch space you catch a face full of some star or another. But it’s not the same. This is not the same warming sun you find a calm afternoon on a temperate planet during shore leave. This is the raw, unbridled apocalyptic fury of the universe made fiery, burning flesh. It cooks your instrument panels and blinds unshielded eyes.



Your sensors scream at you to turn tail and flee before this primordial dragon consumes you, and all but the insane and explorers looking for an easy ride do just that.



Despite its inherent terror it was also a comforting one. It marked your exit from an FSD jump. You had survived another brush with the void and this most ancient of sentinels was here to greet you, albeit with open arms that would turn you to ash given the chance.



As fearsome as it was to come face to face with a star – even the neutron variety that us outer rim-jockeys love so much – there was only one thing that seemed worse, never completing that jump and finding yourself deep within dead space. That special kind of void between star systems that seemed to stare into your very soul as you willed your drives to spool up faster.



At least that’s what I thought.



My FSD spooled up fine, ever since I had that shady engineer mod it for longer jumps it sounded slightly different but so far it hadn’t failed on me. Then there was the countdown and the stomach-churning kick into witch space.



Familiar and unfamiliar nebula flitted past my canopy as my Asp ripped its way across the galaxy. The next star in my route – I don’t even remember what it was called – glowed softly at the centre of my reticule, inviting me in like the warm flicker of a fire on a cold winter’s morning.



That was when I first realised things had begun to go wrong.



The star moved.



It was subtle at first, as though something was tugging at my ship, pulling me off course. But my ship was fighting back, struggling to keep me flying true.



It soon appeared the strange force had merely been toying with my drives as moments later I was wrenched off course. More nebulae flew past the reinforced canopy, ones I didn’t know at all. They grew large and dark, some a menacing green and others a deep, barely visible purple against the blackness of the void.



The largest of these became the focal point of my reticule and before I knew it I was flying through the purple gaseous monstrosity. But this was not the almost two dimensional coloured clouds there were momentary flickers past my canopy. Even at FSD speeds the gasses surrounding my Asp seemed to go on for an eternity.



I sat and prayed that I would exit the nebula soon, or wake up from whatever horrifying dream it was that had me in its grasp.



But my prayers were in vain, they were directed to the wrong god.



My eyes were closed when the FSD shut down. There was no star, and I was shocked to find that I had not come out of the jump spinning aimlessly through the void. It was a few moments before I got my bearings and realised that I was still inside the nebula.



My navigation screens only read UNKNOWN.



Systems all came up clean after a diagnostic and I was a heartbeat away from spooling the FSD again and bugging out of that creepy-ass nebula when the faintest shimmer at the furthest edges of my sight invoked my curiosity.



The gas that surrounded me appeared harmless, and no warnings sounded on my sensors to state otherwise. The explorer in me overpowered my common sense as he so often did. I pointed my nose towards the distant glimmer and opened the throttle. Sensors were still intermittent and the distance was difficult to judge so I sat back and listened to the reassuring growl of my Lakon engines and waited.



It was a ship, this much was certain. But who built it and for what purpose was anybody’s guess. It’s hull was huge, I hazarded a guess at around eight hundred meters from the tip of its hooked bow to its stern where I counted around five exhausts for whatever gargantuan power plants moved this leviathan between the stars. The truly remarkable feat though was that the entire ships outer hull, from its beak-like bow all along its slender spine was a glorious golden colour. I remember wondering as I gazed at the warped reflection of my AspX in the gleaming hull whether this had once been a flagship of some kind. It definitely had the size and majesty.



As I vectored around the hulk, partly out of curiosity and partly to see if there was anything I could permanently borrow I began to notice blemished parts of the otherwise flawless skin. The gasses of the nebula seemed denser here, as though the anomaly itself was taking the grandiose vessel apart, yet another quick glance at my own hull reassured me that I was sitting pretty at 100%.



Eventually my curiosity with the other glimmers became too much to bear and I took leave of the golden monstrosity. As I ventured deeper into the abyss and watched the heavy gas roil around me I couldn’t help but remember Saffron’s cryptic warnings about the purple mists before she was dragged off.



The wrecks and derelicts grew closer together as I progressed. Each one looked increasingly dissimilar to the last and I was quickly becoming aware that whatever had brought them to this place and laid waste to them was nothing if not indiscriminate. I also noted that as I progressed each vessel grew increasingly decayed, as though the gasses here were more concentrated or the ships had simply been here for a longer amount of time.



I faltered a little when I passed the decaying remains of a once-proud Federal Corvette, the sleek black hull now pock-marked and missing much of the forward section entirely. Two massive multi-cannon hung loosely to its rear, evidence that perhaps at the very least this brutish lion of the space lanes went down fighting.



I was about to flee for the second time when a new glimmer caught my eye. This wasn’t a golden sheen or a metallic glint. This was a sequence of lights. Ship lights. Navigation lights.



The prospect of finding another living soul in this place was both exhilarating and terrifying, but I just had to find out. As I drew closer the ship lights gave away the shadowy outline of the ship that approached me, and as its sharp angular lines and two-pronged prow came together my blood ran cold. I was staring a Viper Mk3.



I tried desperately to open comms with the phantom ship, hoping against hope that it was her. For the moment I was completely ignorant of the dark nebula that surrounded us. If she was here she was okay, she was free and she was with me.



Even flashing my ship lights and waggling from side to side drew no response from the Viper and I quickly found my burst of adrenaline dying like a flame trapped under a glass. When I got up to spitting distance I was suddenly aware of why there had been no response. The canopy was shattered. I managed to pick out a slumped form in a Remlock suit sat at the controls.



I pushed closer, until mine and the Viper’s canopy were practically touching. I stared, pressed up against my own glass trying to find anything that would tell me if this was Saffron or not.



I was so close that when the figure twisted its neck at an unnatural angle to look up at me I could see my horrified reflection in the cracked visor. I was truly able to appreciate the terrified look etched into my features as I threw myself back into my seat and wrenched the throttle into reverse.



I had managed to pull a few meters away when the apparition disappeared into a cloud of smoke which circled the hull like a malfunctioning missile before heading right for me. I held my breath, no sure what I could do to keep the unnatural vison away from me.



My shields barely flickered as the mist punched through it, and my last line of defence – my canopy that was built to withstand the heat and radiation of stars offered less opposition than the air I was breathing as it shot past my seat into the walkway behind me.

In less than a few heartbeats this thing defeated every one of my ships defences and I froze in my chair as I began to hear the crumple of a jumpsuit behind me. I didn’t have to turn, I could see the monster’s reflection in the cockpit window.



It looked human, and sure enough the intruder looked as though they wore some manner of Remlock. The surface of the suit had turned inky black and now looked almost liquid in that no pocket, zips or seams of the suit could be seen. In their place the being was now covered in tiny points of light, as though it were a wishful reflection of the space outside the nebula. Their height, weight and even gender were all but impossible to discern too as their form did not seem to want to stay human and continued to shift in twisting, undulating mutations. It gave the overall impression of an oil-covered ocean reflecting a night sky. This coupled with the creature’s hunched, limp gait was incredibly unsettling.



I was just getting up to try and flee into the ship when a black malformed hand landed on my shoulder with a dull thud. The hand was ice, the creature’s unnatural cold passing easily through a suit designed to withstand the rigors of open space.



The thought was a fleeting one as the creature’s touch seemed to open my eyes to what was really going on around me.



Ethereal tendrils, deep purple in colour speared every one of the wrecks I could see, their strange translucent forms pulsating and glowing as they stripped metal and components from the derelict hulks. Where they intersected with the ships higher concentrations of the purple mists could be seen, the only indication I had been able to see of their existence with my altogether too human eyes.



The mist seemed to be disintegrated metals and components, stripped from the ships hulls and tainted by whatever foulness inhabited this place. I scanned and searched the ruins, desperately searching for the source of the tendrils, the architect of my being brought here and presumably the slayer of whatever creatures once inhabited these ships. The starred man that stood behind me did not seem to be connected to the tentacles in any way I could see.



I looked around my domed cockpit but in all directions all I could see were more derelicts being gradually digested by the twisted nebula. My eyes fell to a particularly large tentacle and followed its pulsating length as far as I could from where I sat. That was when I saw it.



As my eyes lost track of the limb I saw further into the nubula, at first I saw just gas until the mass shifted in a mind-bending, unnatural way. Suddenly, like a magic eye image snapping into focus I saw not a formless cloud of gas but a creature larger and more terrible than I ever thought possible.



It appeared almost ethereal in nature, as the dull pin-pricks of stars could be seen through its hazy purple form. It’s body appeared to be a carapace, like that of legless beetle. If there was a head, I could not discern it. In fact the only appendages that I could make out where two arms like those of a crustacean, each tipped with jagged claws large enough to halve a planet with one snip. The underside of the monstrosity was legless but not bare as from its belly came the tendrils that created and terrorised the nebula in which I now sat, quietly awaiting my fate.



“OPMUNEGU GATHERS,” a rasping, soulless voice hissed into my ear, dragging me from my hiding place in the darkest recesses of my mind. “You… Will… Serve…”



I turned my head to look at my shipboard visitor assuming he was the source of the terrifying words. The Starman now appeared human, at least once human. He no longer wore a battered Remlock suit, but the shredded remains of a thick padded white suit with what appeared to be a failed power supply at its chest. A shattered domed visor failed to obscure my view of his pale, cracked face or eyes red with burst vessels.



If he realised I was looking at him, he did not react. His features remained still and lifeless as the shattered lunar surface they resembled, and since he did not seem to notice me staring the knot of tendrils that laced their way through his broken body did not either.



“OPMUNEGU GATHERS.” The voice repeated, each word sounding as though it were being forced out with the Starman’s every dying breath. “SERVE!”



The final word came with such force and unrelenting rage that it seemed to echo in my mind and pushed out any notions I may have had for answering the apparition back or asking any questions of my own. How do I serve? I have no idea how I got here! How do I even leave this place?



All these questions bubbled to the surface but never made it past my throat. Despite the adrenaline pumping through me I was still completely powerless to speak.



With unnatural speed a huge tendril detached itself from a nearby hulk and swiftly engulfed my ship with its ethereal coils. Every alarm on my unsuspecting AspX screamed as I was hurled out of the nebula and into a kind of witch space that I had never seen. In my folly I tried to keep track of the mind-bending view through the canopy.



Stars flew past like motes of dust in a sandstorm, some occasionally snapped into view as though I had dropped out of the jump only to vanish a few moments later. I flew past planets I had never before seen nor would I ever again, and as I gazed out into that roiling mass of cosmic uncertainty the edges of my vision became blurred, then dark until it engulfed me entirely and I succumbed to will of this ancient creature.



As if I ever had a choice.



#



I awoke to a strangely familiar voice.





“Lakon Mike-Uniform-November, do you copy?”



My head pounded. I was vaguely aware of voices, though at that moment I didn’t want to hear them. I didn’t want to have to exist.



“Lakon Mike-Uniform-November, respond.”



My cockpit coalesced in front of me as my eyes remembered what their job was and got back to it. I managed to pull myself to my feet and stagger over to the console before slumping down in my command chair and forcing my drunken brain to make sense of the readouts in front of me.



The board looked good. Hull integrity was maxed, as were shields – weak though they were. Radar showed several green blips, one of them pretty large. Green meant friendly, and friendly would be a nice change of pace after the terrors of the nebula.



Finally I swung my foggy head over to the navigation panel just as a ship lat-thrusted into my field of view, barely meters from the canopy.



“Lakon Mike-Uniform-November, this is System Defence Force Condor at your 12 o’clock.” The pilot announced over a direct channel, the small ship gleamed in the glow from the nearest star and I was happy to see that thus far its weapons hard points remained retracted. “Are you in need of assistance?”



Shaking my head to clear out the last of the cobwebs I reached over and keyed the comms to transmit.



“Ah, Negative SDF Condor,” I said as I fired a few lateral thrusters to ensure that I had helm control. “Just a gremlin in the old comm system, think my girl had a rough time out in the big black.”



“I’ll say,” she replied as her condor did a slow circle-strafe around my hull. “She looks like she’s been through hell. Follow correct docking procedure before approaching the mail slot and welcome to Sothis, Commander.”



“Copy that, good to be back.” I replied as my mind raced.

Sothis? How have I got all the way back to Sothis in one jump? Saffron’s incredible journey here from the central bubble was becoming all too clear.



I got within range and requested a bay, after waiting sometime in the holding pattern for data runners and shit-haulers to do their thing I put my girl down onto the designated landing pad and took a step outside to see just what the SDF pilot had meant.



It wasn’t pretty. Purple scorch marks ran around almost the entirety of the hull like the striations you find on a burnt-out CPU, a half dozen navigation lights had been smashed along with the daft spoiler that I won in a poker game with an onionhead. Worst of all, the right engine nacelle was obliterated beyond repair, somehow crushed by the apparently spectral appendage that flung me uncounted light years through space.



I wondered where to go once I set down, I must have wandered for at least a few hours before I found myself at the place where it all began. Slavern’s Tavern.



I lost track of the hours there in the bar. Turns out the data they pulled from my scanner would just about pay for repairs plus a little liver damage and I was loathe to pass up the opportunity. It took a while, but eventually she walked in.



Not Saffron, though she was the only human I wanted to see. This was somebody else. She had blonde hair, where Saffron’s had been black. There were other differences too, but as she walked towards me all I focussed on was the glass of whiskey she cradled in her hand.



“Hi, I’m Dani,” she said as she slid the glass across the table to my waiting hand, not that I had any control over it. “What’s your name?”



“Name’s not important,” I replied quite sincerely, taking a stiff sip from the glass and savouring the golden-brown liquid as it burned its way down my oesophagus. I returned the wet bottom of the glass to the ring-stained table top and looked up into her ocean blu- no, brown eyes.



Not Saffron.



“Fair enough, what you doing out here? I’m hauling a bunch of tourists who wanted to see the back of beyond. Sothis it was.”



“Exploring, this was the first place I came across on my way home.”



“First pla? This is Sothis! No one comes here unless the expressly mean to come here sweetie… Hang on. Was that the remains of your Asp that I saw smouldering on pad six when I came in to dock?”



I nodded my head, eyes fixed on the table. Suddenly aware of the fact that I wasn’t entirely in control of my own actions. I wanted to do what I was doing and say the things I was saying, but I didn’t know why.



“Holy- what the hell happened out there? You must have seen some things…” She replied with a gasp, reaching across the table and taking my hand in hers.



I looked up, now completely unable to fight my own-



END OF READABLE DATA.



LOG ENTRY INCOMPLETE.