Cosmosis

General Brennar Houph stared out the viewport of his Impyrial dreadnought. Amidst the everblack of the cosmos without the Slaughterer’s wide viewport hung a massive gaseous nebula, all crimsons and rubies, aegean hiding in its depths. From within the nebula a gargantuan vessel of unregistered and unrecognizable design had emerged out of the immense interstellar speeds of light-skip. The ship was larger even than Houph’s two kilometer long dreadnought, bigger even than some of the hundreds of moons in the Cyrelin System.

“Scan for lifeforms and hail the ship.” Brennar said to his Comms Officer Maxilian Renf, the young man had the short and muscular stature of one born on a high g planet, the frozen wasteland Rilithir if Houph remembered right. Renf’s pale complexion assured the General’s assumption.

“Hailing.” Renf said, Houph still hadn’t taken his eyes from the potential threat. The vessel was all jagged lines and daggers, it resembled no spacecraft he’d ever seen, the hull, or hulls for that matter, were all of a shit brown metal, almost rusted, the warped edges of the ship when stared at for long appeared to move, behind it glowed an eerie emerald hue, a remnant of its exit out of inter-dimensional light-skip. “Sir, I’m only getting static. Wait there's–”

The Comms Officer was interrupted by a shockwave of sound, almost like a distorted Kraeken horn's blast, so loud and so brutal it nearly threw Houph to his knees as it blared over the bridge’s intercom. He saw the crew’s mouths opened in silent screams, their sound hidden beneath the torrent of unwarranted feedback. Then, as soon as it started, the deafening cry felt within the bones of all the bridge crew as much as heard, ceased. Houph’s ears were left ringing as though he’d been smacked upside the head by the nuns who’d raised him on Wuera.

“Status report.” He called over the din of his crew moaning back to their stations.

“Sir…” First Navigator Avra Perih’s voice wavered, Houph looked to where she was pointing. The Comms Officer’s head had exploded, eviscerated by whatever power that horrible sound had carried, Renf’s headset having amplified the noise to such proportions his skull had erupted to spew shards of bone, blood and viscera in a two meter diameter around his slumped corpse, the remains of his neck a volcano’s crater of red matter.

Houph heard someone vomiting over the ringing in his ears, but he’d seen more dead bodies over his long years in the Ascension and longer years in the Impyrial Navy than he’d like to admit, he didn’t hesitate. “Evasive action.” He yelled to the crew of the control center, then chimed the comm set into the breast of his pressed slate uniform. “Artillery, open fire on the alien vessel, pilots to your stations, I want all 11s the vacuum flying defensive patterns around the Slaughterer until we know what the hell this thing is.” Then adding: “And somebody find another Comms Officer.”

The chatter of orders going out in his small earpiece added to the commotion of the bridge. The Impyrial dreadnought began to shudder underfoot with the reassuring feel of the cannons firing upon an enemy once again, it had been too long since he’d seen combat. Houph welcomed it with the open arms of an old friend.

“Sir, the alien ship is launching fighters.” Radar Officer Lyx Greine said, the Cyrelin’s scales reflected in the crimson firelight of the turret blasts.

“All pilots, engage the alien fighters.” Houph said into his comm. A murmur of ‘rogers’ and ‘yes sirs’ chimed in response. The alien vessel was shifting, faster now than the almost imperceptible speed at which it had before. Whole chunks of the massive ship broke off and took flight, shattered knives of a design lacking in all aerodynamics, though in the vacuum that didn’t matter. The Slaughterer’s sleek twin winged, arrowhead shaped Bravo-Class ZX11s entered attack positions and engaged the broken off alien fighters. Shreds of brilliant red light lit up the hull of the enormous ship and its smaller flying chunks. No lasfire came from the alien vessel, its fighter’s weapon system shot what could only be described as waves of energy that spread in a wide arc, the pulsing waves devastating all in their wake.

“Holy shit.” Major Branth Idirin said under his breath. Houph hadn’t even heard him walk up next to him, all his focus on the dogfights underway. The decimation of the ZX11s was swift, within seconds of engagement almost half the Bravo-Class fighters were nothing more than twisted hunks of warped metal and plasma scarred blast shields.

“All remaining fighters fall back to the Slaughterer and assume a defensive perimeter.” Houph dared a glance away from the fireworks display of his ships being destroyed to his Weapons Officer, a gray skinned Hwryernan man of middling years, his tall bipedal form dwarfing all around him despite sitting at his station as he was. “Officer Krav, prepare atomics, whatever this thing is, it needs to end here before it can enter Impyrial Space.”

“General, this is an extra-galactic species never before encountered by the Empyre." Wun Vuygen interrupted, desperation tainting the Xenobiologist’s voice. "Think of what we could learn from their ship designs alone.”

“Vuygen, you saw what that thing just did to our 11s, if that ship gets within firing range of the Slaughterer, we're gonna be slag before I can say I told you so.” Houph turned back to his Weapons Officer. “Krav, fire when ready.”

“Yes sir.” The tall man punched a sequence of orders into his console while speaking on the weapons comm to his subordinates.

“General, the vessel is hailing us.” Second Comms Officer Yari Bindu called from where she sat on Renf’s bloodied seat, the body had been moved in the minutes since his explosive demise.

“Don’t patch them through.” Houph barked, the ZX11s had made it back to within near orbit of the Slaughterer, the dreadnought’s turbo lasers pulsed blood red light as each blast impacted with no little to no effect on the unnerving hostile.

None of the alien fighters had followed the 11s back, all had stayed within relative close proximity to its main hub. Flying their own defensive patterns through an asteroid field of shattered Impyrial fighters and frozen pilots.

“General, are you seeing this?” Major Branth murmured.

“Yeah.” Houph gritted his teeth against the recognition.

“Sir,” Officer Undil Reade called from the far end of the bridge. “Scans are back, there’s only one life form aboard the ship.”

“It’s a hive mind.” Houph growled. He’d only encountered one other hive species before–besides the various non-sentient bug and plant species throughout the known Universium–the Pathilics. A semi-sentient community of vacuum adapted insectoids first discovered in the Amari Asteroid Belt about six AUs from Rayth system’s cobalt neutron star. They’d taken out two fully armed Impyrial dreadnoughts before then Captain Brennar Houph had been dispatched on an extinction run. The Empyre had initially shown restraint against the Pathilics, and it had cost nearly thirty thousand lives. Houph wouldn’t make the same mistake.

“Sir, the ship is hailing again.” Officer Bindu called over the scrambling of petty officers and engineers running about the bridge.

“Don’t answer. Officer Krav, blow that thing out of space.” Houph snarled.

“Priming, firing soon sir.” The lanky Hwryernan opened a hatch on his console and began to key in the launch code.

“Their cutting into our comms, I can’t stop it–” Second Comms Officer Yari Bindu’s head exploded in a shower of grotesque orange brain matter and eggshell colored bone, raining blood on all nearby. The horrid sound that had taken over the whole of the crew’s conscious beings once again attacked their inner eardrums.

The droning cry of static and feedback, the dull humm was almost hypnotic in its agonizing rhythm, Houph watched out the viewport as two of his pilot’s spun out of control and slammed into the hull of the Slaughterer in a fiery fury, their limited oxygen and fuel igniting on impact. All about the bridge men and women dropped from their stations, grasping at their heads, shuddering away the brutal reverberations echoing within their skulls. Even Houph found himself on his knees, tearing at his ears in a futile attempt to dull the clangor.

Then the sound eased, quieted, though it didn’t cease, remaining ever present in the back of Houph's mind. Over the painfully pleasant buzzing that it had become, it fuzzed into a garbled gibberish, and then to Impyrial Basic.

“There is no need for violence.” The omnipresent sound of the being’s voice was gentle and of an androgynous nature.

“My ass there isn’t,” Houph grumbled, rising from where he’d knelt, his Officers slunk back to their stations, eardrums dripping blood. “Krav, destroy that vessel.”

“We mean you no harm. We acted only in self preservation when your… ZX11s pressed themselves. There is much our species could learn from each other… General Houph.” It paused as though thinking when it spoke, translating. How the hell did it learn my name? Houph wondered. How the hell did it learn Basic so quick? But his inherent sense of curiosity took over then, the same curiosity he felt toward the nature of the species of the Universium, it was why he’d taken command of the outbound dreadnought in the first place, to discover all that lay beyond the fringes of Impyrial Space.

“Cease fire! If the being claims peace we should honor it.” Vuygen yelled through the clammer of the control center. “Sir, think of what we could learn from its weapons systems.”

The Xenobiologist's words gave the General pause, staring out the viewport at the distorting mass of metal, shifting and melting into itself like some horrid beast straight from the Three Hells themselves. The energy pulse firepower the extraterrestrial employed had decimated near half his fleet of 11s in seconds, with that technology at the Empyre’s disposal no systems would be able to resist Impyrial rule, the galaxy could finally find some semblance of peace. With that weapons technology they could forge a new path, light-skip far outside the range of any light-shred communications with the capital, the Empyre could finally stretch their fingers beyond known space…

But if that weapon fell into the hands of the crime lords of Kraeken, or the different marauder and mercenary guilds roaming between systems, or even the Bounty Hunter Ascension, a swift end could be brought to entire fleets of ships with that tech. And it had killed two of his comms officers, no matter his next move, it would be a dangerous one in the game of interstellar politics.

“Sir, the vessel’s radiation levels have spiked, it's priming to fire.” The soft spoken voice of Officer Reade called from the back of the bridge.

Shit. “Krav, open fire.” As the words slipped from Houph’s mouth, the alien ship warped, opening itself into a gaping maw, dagger prongs forming horridly twisted metal fangs surrounding a circular hole within the middle of the shifting ship. The grotesque vessel launched a pulse of energy at the Slaughterer, it struck the dreadnought with the force of moons colliding. The same weapons system used by the smaller alien's fighters, though on a grand scale. Houph was thrown from standing at the head of the bridge, tossed to the deck like a discarded child’s toy. Cries and moans of the crew echoed along the metallic bridge as they too were rag-dolled to the cold aluminum floor of the control center. The lights died, sparks fell from broken wires, entire consoles were ripped from their stations with the force of impact. Pilots screamed in his earpiece as their 11s were sent spiraling out of control, the sound of explosions and ringing static stabbed his ears with each of their cruel deaths.

Houph clambered toward Krav’s bent station, the bridge’s auxiliary power kicked in and blared alarm claxons, his crew was in various states of consciousness, battered by the pulse of energy. Hoping futilely the atomics would still be primed and ready for firing, Houph grasped at the console’s blank control panel, the normal dim glow of its controls dead of all electric life. Damnit. The alien vessel moved in, its fangs surrounding the Slaughterer as though the two kilometer long dreadnought was nothing more than a slice of Altaeran fry bread.

“Cannons, fire at will, destroy the alien ship.” Houph barked into his comm, but he knew he was far too late, the hostile had already overtaken them. A couple blasts of lasfire burst from the few turrets still with power lined atop the hull, nothing more than a nuisance, flies to a man. Pathetic. The General was left with no other option. “All hands to the docking bay, prepare to be boarded.”

The bridge crew scrambled around him, running to the weapons rooms to outfit themselves in plate and mail, arming themselves with lasrifles, and electropikes, larger and far more powerful than the Impyrial issued sidearms required of all Officers. The General abandoned the bridge, if there was no way to lead from the control center, he would lead from the front line.

He strode to the bridge armory and dawned his own kargrä plate and mail, the breastplate emblazoned with the twin headed serpentine sigil of the Clegharyon Empyre. Raising the onyx helm to his head, all of sharp angles, twin tusks hung from the temples like that of a mighty Athrëdaeon's, he praised the grace of the Empyror as his visor flickered to life with augmented displays and weapon sites. Grasping his tall vibroshield in one gauntleted hand and his laserlance in the other, he strode from the armory, his fuligin cloak billowing behind.

Men and women ran past as he marched to the launch bay, preparing himself for battle. He centered himself, pushed all his mental energy into what was to come, so focused on the nearing fight he near forgot his rank and himself. He morphed into the bounty hunter of his youth, the intrepid mercenary of the Ascension, the assassin of Nyven woken from his long slumber induced by the responsibility of leadership. Houph dove further into battle stasis with each step, though it was different than he remembered. Leadership had expanded his mind, but he was older, weaker, his vision less sharp, his strategic sight however had heightened. Some help that was.

Striding across the long sky bridge overlooking the chasmus engine room, the kilometer long mechanisms pulsed and flickered as the last remaining of auxiliary power was diverted into the light-skip drives. Crew ran past in troves, if the enemy vessel’s energy pulse had had the opposite effect and overcharged the Slaughterer, the light-skip engines would have overheated and turned the dreadnought into a multi-ton atomic super weapon, vaporizing them and the alien vessel instantly.

Houph wound through the Slaughterer's corridors and emerged into the massive launch bay, lit by a dim iridescent green glow coming from without the bay door viewports taller than ten of the General stacked atop himself. Rows of plate clad crew lined the whole of the internal landing pad. A legion of armed men and women, prepared to fight and die for the Empyre, prepared to give their lives to the glory of discovery.

Houph, fully embracing the stasis of battle, moved to the front line and walked amongst his ranks. Every man and woman of the dreadnought regardless of rank and position stood ready with him. He didn't know what lay ahead should they be boarded, only that battle was inbound, many of these men and women wouldn't live to see their families again. This wasn’t his first boarding, he wouldn’t let it be his last. He gave a brutal battle cry, and his crew responded with their own, he was a viking of the cosmos then, a knight in spacial armor, he was a blackhole, the killer of stars and the death of solar systems. He would not accept defeat.

The alien vessel engulfed the Slaughterer, bathing the landing bay in its eerie emerald hue, reflected from some unseen source amongst the metallic stalactites and stalagmites within the enormous alien ship. The bay doors hissed, steam billowed from breaking seals and the dreadnought opened wide, sulfur wove its way through Houph's helm and into his nostrils. Nothing but the metal spears lining the alien ship’s inner walls stood without the bay doors.

No one entered, no army awaited, only darkness and the oozing green glow that painted everything in its path greeted the dreadnought’s crew.

“Steady now.” Houph said, more for himself than his soldiers, eager as he was, ready to dive headlong into the chaos of battle, he felt a young man again, ready to kill whatever lay beyond the loading bay.

An apparition smoked into existence just without the tall bay doors. He felt his soldiers tense as the thing entered the realm of reality. A twisting, warping fog, not unlike the ship it originated, never sitting still, never ceasing its fluid shifting and smooth melding. From within the midnight smoke writhed a being of some sort Houph had never seen, nor read of during his years of studying astrological anthropology, no known species of the Universium took on a misted form such as this, sentient or not. Amphibian in its movements, tentacles squirmed within the smoking mass, jet black and liquid, shining with the reflection of the reptilian luminesce.

“Steady.” Houph repeated, his curiosity still giving him pause. He stood in the crouch of battle, ready to bathe the thing with the immense heat of his lasrifle, the long barrel hidden within the length of his outstretched electropike aimed on the contorting mass.

The creature swam forward slowly, its tendrils testing before it, soldiers shifted their stances, plate and mail rustled, metal clinked against metal as his crew prepared for whatever may or may not come next.

Faster than any of the crew’s mortal eyes could see, the beast shot a tentacle from its mangled mass into the nearest soldier, lifting and slamming him back to the deck. The other soldiers opened fire on the thing before Houph had time to scream the order, his own lance bursting to life as orders were drowned in electric explosions and the repeating hum of lasfire.

Blaster fire ripped holes through the smoking mass, but the lance beams did nothing to stop the beast as it sent tentacles flying about from within the deformed mist, soldiers were struck with the force of low altitude shuttle crashes. Their kargrä steel plate and mail did nothing to stop the arms of the monster as it demolished Houph’s ranks. The tendrils of black swept through them, crushing bone, fracturing armor and smashing men and women into pulp against the tall walls of the docking bay. They died by the score, piling high through the never ceasing crimson laserfire. The General never relented, planting his vibroshield to the floor of the bay, locking himself in against the slamming appendages.

Seeing laserfire would do nothing to stop the hostile, and the futility of their stand in the docking bay, Houph called the retreat. Laying down cover fire amongst the wreckage of his fallen comrades, the soldiers filed back into the corridors of the Slaughterer.

Houph raised his shield and ran, dodging fallen bodies and the crushed remains of dropships. Moving into the cover of a corridor, he resumed fire, blasting the shadowed thing until the tip of his pike glowed amber and smoked rose from its barrel. This fight was hopeless, they needed a new tactic or the whole of the crew would be eliminated within minutes.

“Disperse, make for the evac shuttles, abandon ship.” The General said into his helmet’s comm, the unicom crackled with affirmations.

“Sir, to abandon now would be our end, we still sit within the beast’s maw.” Major Idirin said from somewhere else amongst the labyrinthine corridors of the Slaughterer, blasts of lasfire echoed behind his words.

“Not for long.” Houph said. “Follow orders, bring word of this back to Hwryern, the Empyre must know of what we have encountered. Houph sprinted back the way he’d come, hoping all the way the Slaughterer’s backup power still had some juice, he entered the cavernous engine room breathing hard. I'm too damn old for this.

Auxiliary power was still on, he primed the light-skip engines, manually overriding the controls, he diverted all of the Slaughterer’s remaining power into the drive engines, raising their internal temperatures beyond catastrophic levels. The engines-turned-nuclear reactors spurted and smoked far beneath him on the sky bridge as they fired to life and began melting down from their own insane heat.

He hoped the alien ship would either sense the rising radiation levels and spit the Slaughterer out, giving his crew time to escape on the evac shuttles back Empyrical space, and if not he’d blow them all to hell.

For a moment it seemed to be working, the kilometer long drive engines beginning to erupt in an explosive rainbow of color so bright it would have blinded the General had his visor not dimmed the rays. He felt the ground shift beneath him as the alien vessel recognized what he was doing.

The hostile pulsed energy once more. The blast of energy tore its way through the hull of the Slaughterer, slicing out all remaining auxiliary power. Houph was thrown to the deck of the engine room, his blastshield visor went black, its electricity killed by whatever weapon the damned alien vessel employed. His power armor became heavy, the General was barely able to lift himself to his feet, the armor alone weighing over twice his naked weight. Unable to lift his shield, the long electropike became almost so unwieldy as to be useless without the augmented strength of his armor, almost.

He tore the plate and mail off, silently cursing himself for not blowing the drive engines earlier. He left his armor and shield behind, abandoning the engine room and sprinting past wide viewports showing the sickly green of the ship’s insides. The evac shuttles too had lost power, their pilots losing all instrument control and spinning to vaporize in brilliant shows of red and orange on the maw’s internal knives.

General Houph tore through the wide hallways of the dreadnought, back the way he’d come, past bodies twisted and smashed, little more than blood and sinew beneath crushed plate. He saw no living sign of his crew nor the writhing shadow being that had wreaked havoc aboard the dreadnought. Far in the distance he heard the final echoes of the fighting and the dying, blaster fire echoing down long corridors.

The Slaughterer was immersed in an eerie silence, so quiet that all Houph could hear was the clanging of his footsteps and ragged breath. So deep was the hush that his racing heartbeat rang in his ears like a ticking time bomb, ready to burst at any moment. He idly wondered how long his old heart could handle the exertion he was putting it through.

Throughout the silent corridors lay only corpses, thousands of dead crew littered the hallways. Viscera splashed at his boots with each sickening step.

Houph turned a corner and paused, before him in the hallway stood Major Branth Idirin, head angled gently to the left.

“Idirin, we need to gather our remaining forces and prepare for another assault.” Even as the words left his mouth he knew them to be hopeless. The Major only stood there, cocking his head from one side to the other.

“Branth, you alright?” Idirin’s eyes were dull, colored differently than Houph remembered, his arms seemed to writhe in place, though so minutely it was almost imperceptible, just as the alien vessel had when it’d first dropped out of light-skip. Houph raised his electropike.

“Hold your fire… General.” Houph recognized the voice, it wasn’t the cold craven of Branth Idirin’s, but that voice which the alien vessel had penetrated the whole of the crew’s minds with. The Major blinked wet reptilian eyes, his fingers transmogrifying in and out of clenching taloned fists.

Houph’s inherent sense of curiosity toward extrastellar lifeforms again gave him pause, it was the same mistake he’d made on the bridge, the same mistake he'd made in the landing bay, the mistake that had cost the lives of his crew. But that curiosity and sense of wonder that lay in xenology was what had led him to captaining the Slaughterer in the first place, what had driven him on all those missions in search of secondary life. Never had he encountered a creature such as he faced now, he would have put money on infestation and osmosis on this scale to be impossible. And yet here he was, facing down the reanimated corpse of his Major, inhabited by this mysterious alien race.

“How?” It was all Houph managed as his mind raced through the various implications of this species' adaptive capabilities. Despite his curiosity, he knew he couldn’t let this thing enter Impyrial Space, he had to destroy it, the whole of the Empyre was at risk if this species escaped.

“A form of osmosis, a conversion. I surveyed the minds of your crew. Learned your languages, your history and art, technology and tactics, I learned all I could grasp from the beings of this ship. They all live on through me now, and I through them.” The creature that had been his Major said, blinking multi lidded eyes. “And now you are all that remains of your crew, General.”

“Lick my ass.” Houph opened fire on his former Major, lasfire erupted the corridor in bloodlight. Knowing defeat was at hand and the futility of his attack, he didn't care, he'd do all he could to kill this thing. The hostile swerved and dodged, running up the walls and the ceiling on all fours like some vile human arachnid. It spun away from the General’s blasts, Houph peppered the hallway with electric flame, throwing grenade charges and scarring the once prestigious metallic corridor into a charred disarray. He emptied an entire mag on the reptilian shadow-thing, only landing one or two hits before the cruel beast turned on the offensive.

The Major’s body morphed, launching from his chest a wet black tendril that ripped Houph’s legs out from under him. He gritted his teeth as he felt bone shatter and tendons shredding. Blood spilled from where his legs had been minced just above the knees, the General fell hard, cracking his head against the cold aluminum deck. The air fled his lungs, his ears rang from the smack and the barking of his lasrifle. He grunted and rolled attempting to sit up, his severed legs spread out before him. Houph hacked and desperately tried for breath that wouldn’t come, adrenaline was all that kept him from succumbing to the unconscious abyss of blood loss.

“What do you gain by doing this?” Houph managed as coppery air returned to his lungs, he spat up thick maroon globules, his severed legs pooling blood about his barely sitting body. The creature had stopped running, its midnight black tentacle receded and morphed back into the Major’s body, shifting and bulging back into the shadow mass that had first boarded the Slaughterer.

“What did you gain when you nuked the Pathilics into extinction? Goodbye general.” The beast’s words enraged him, but beyond his hatred he heard the meaning, it only fueled the fire of his fury. Through blurred vision Houph thought he saw more of the crew rising to stand heads cocked to one side or the other, watching silently behind Branth’s reanimated corpse. The General shook it off as a hallucination brought on by rapid blood loss.

Idirin’s chest morphed once more, and the beast within launched a tendril straight at Houph’s face. The General resigned to the everblack of death having failed his crew and his Empyre.

General Brennar Houph stood straight backed on the bridge of the Slaughterer, around him the crew bustled about on their duties. The corridors had been meticulously cleaned of all evidence of the firefights, all blood and bone and shattered plate removed, repairs were made, the crew of the Slaughterer had returned to their stations, and the dreadnought’s power had been returned.

“Major Idirin, prepare for light-skip.”

“Yes, General.” The Major moved away from where he’d stood next to Houph, giving out orders amongst the Officers of the control center.

Houph stared out through the Slaughterer’s wide bridge viewports, a great gaseous nebula of rust melted into violets and indigos amongst the stars without, beyond which lay the hundreds of systems ruled by the Clegharyon Empyre, he flicked a tongue over the sclera of his eyes.

The entire Universium was within his claws.