Chapter Text
There is perhaps no more ancient prey to humanity than darkness itself. From its earliest days, humanity pushed back the darkness around it with fire and heat, then kept it at bay with torches, candles, and lanterns. In its ingenuity, it invented lightbulbs and electrical power to push the dark back even further, until the clouds of night themselves were helplessly complicit in burning away the shadows. Eventually, humanity discovered the means to leave its homeworld, and later its home system, to penetrate further than ever before into the limitless dark above.
Scattered lights in the empty black eventually became the Terran Accord, and the Accord spread its fire far and wide. So accustomed it was to seeing the void as its domain that it forgot the darkness wasn’t its alone.
In the year 2551, the Affini Compact made official first contact with the Terran Accord and demanded its immediate surrender, dangling promises of peace and abundance. The Accord refused. Its military, the Terran Cosmic Navy, brought everything it had to bear against the Affini leviathans that stalked the stars. Everything it had to bear amounted to not much at all, in the end.
The TCN cycled through strategies, fought smarter, and avoided battles it knew it couldn’t win. It didn’t matter. The strategy of the prey is irrelevant when the hunter is invincible, insatiable, inevitable.
Fleet after fleet and colony after colony disappeared behind the Viridian Curtain until the year 2554 of the Terran Calendar. The Affini Compact occupied Terra itself, and finally confronted by an enemy with no military there to save them, its leaders surrendered. The Terran Accord dissolved and reformed into the Terran Protectorate, a governing entity answerable to the Compact according to terms laid out by the newly signed Human Domestication Treaty.
Most of the Terran Cosmic Navy recognized the transfer of power and laid down its weapons. The rest scattered into a million fractured fleets to hide in the darkness until the inevitable comes for them too to drag them into the light.
Camron Pastor huddles for warmth in her bunk aboard the CNS Hunter in the Dark as it drifts through empty space. Constructed entirely along a massive spinal mounted barrel, the Hunter is a gun more than a battlecruiser, built by the Terran Accord to lurk in the void and kill from afar. To remind the Accord’s enemies that death lies waiting in the dark between the stars.
Due to the preposterous nature of its construction, the Hunter is also more display piece than weapon. A rocket can adjust its trajectory, and a mounted laser can aim precisely and quickly. A battlecruiser can only aim at targets that stand still and wait.
In practice, this Hunter can only hunt quarry that can’t flee.
Rumor has it that before Cam’s enlistment, when a yet-unchallenged Terran Cosmic Navy still kept its guns aimed inward, the Hunter could at least demonstrate the threat it posed against the odd space station or colony in rebellion. When its first shot at an Affini ship was swallowed by a wormhole into hyperspace, that paradigm shifted forever.
Accustomed to prowling, the Hunter slinks through the void. Its uncountable tons of steel and wire do little more than prop up the illusion that Terra ever stood a chance.
Hundreds of sailors live aboard the decrepit, preposterous thing. Some volunteered. Most were conscripted. Few see a distinction. Given a choice between the leafy unknown and cramped bunkrooms aboard the machinery of death, many chose to put their faith in the devil they knew. A choice that can’t be taken back.
“What’cha readin’?” asks one such sailor.
The question bounces off the narrow metal walls of their shared bunkroom, inheriting the bleak metal’s tinny horribleness in the ricochet before hitting Camron’s ear. It sounds the way the walls feel.
“Romance,” she says. Strictly speaking, it’s the truth. Darrel doesn’t need to know the gory details. Besides, it isn’t a real answer. It’s the first step in an annoying dance.
“Sounds like girl shit,” Darrel says, exactly as dismissive as the last hundred times he’s said it. She can see his stupid little “I know you know” smirk in her mind’s eye. It’s a playful barb, like the kind friends usually trade. It stopped being all that funny after the second time, but she’s not about to alienate her only remaining friend among the crew over it. Besides, what’s one or two or several tedious bits between old friends.
“Yeah, well, it’s that or the weed shit,” Cam says. The Affini Compact’s propaganda makes what the Accord spat out look subtle by comparison. Still, the inexplicably pornographic overtones of their messaging made ‘weed shit’ popular among the men of the crew until the armistice.
“Fuckin’ weed shit,” Darrel mutters.
Darrel’s pager interrupts the dance with a shrill beep.
“Hm,” he says, “They want me on the Jump Drive in ten.” He sighs. “Welp, better get to it. Breaks are for commies, after all.”
Cam isn’t sure if that’s a joke, and she suspects Darrel doesn’t quite know either. The old bastard rises out of his bed, heralded by the tinny plunks of rubber soles against old metal. He dons his coat and steps toward the door.
“Try not to blow up the ship,” Cam snarks.
“Don’t jack off too hard to your kissy books,” Darrel says, not missing a beat.
A thud sounds from the thin metal by the doorway, and the door slides shut a few seconds later. Cam sighs, and the force of her breath carries some of her tension with it. The quiet solitude of her empty room gives her weary mind the space to reassert itself, alone but for Darrel’s mess and a pair of empty bunks haunted by the memory of sailors no longer present.
The weeds didn’t take those sailors. They didn’t even get the chance to. “Command” and its paranoia were more than ravenous enough to do the job themselves.
On a long enough timeline, Cam is sure she’ll join them. Whether the end comes in the weeds’ vines or on the wrong side of the airlocks, one day, she’ll join the ranks of those led by the Hunter to their fate.
The PA system crackles to life in the corner of the ceiling.
“Attention crew, preparing to jump in ten seconds. Nine. Eight…”
The disembodied voice finishes out its count. Cam feels the kick of reality itself bending and parting and depositing her elsewhere in the universe. Hot air blasts through the room’s ventilation seconds later. Preventing the Jump Drive crew from boiling means spreading the miserable heat around until it can be properly radiated away. It usually isn’t necessary to vent heat in a routine jump situation, though.
One of the Hunter’s three destroyer escorts lands a moment later with a small kick, and then the second, and then the third.
And then another.
And another.
And another, and another.
The PA system erupts with the voices of a panicked bridge crew.
“All hands! Four enemy contacts and counting! Prepare for emergency jump!”
The horrible white LED lights in Cam’s room flicker off, and dimmer red ones flick on a moment after. The klaxons blare to life. She feels a familiar lurching kick of the Hunter in the Dark fleeing another fight. Adrenaline soaks into her body, filling her with cold fire. She hops out of her top bunk, grateful for the low spin gravity. More hot air blasts through the ventilation.
Then she feels another kick.
“Prepare for secondary jump!”
She braces, but the jump doesn’t come. Even more hot air pours through the ventilation after a moment. The drive engaged, but there was no jump. She scrambles through the desk drawer for her gas mask and her pistol.
“All hands, prepare for boarding!”
She straps the mask to her face and flicks off the safety on her weapon.
“Breach reported in-”
The announcement devolves into hissing static. Cam hears the sickening shriek of bending, splitting metal down the corridor.
Official Procedure is to find and defend positions between the invaders and the bridge, and secondarily between them and critical systems like life support. Cam hears a scream echo down the corridor. Official Procedure is for sheep. Camron’s leaving this ship alive.
She steps out of her bunkroom and spares a thought for Darrel. Most of the crew cut goons she’d met on this bad joke of a battlecruiser she couldn't care less for, but it doesn’t feel good to leave her bunkmate to the monsters.
A pair of gunshots and a stifled scream steal her attention. She looks to her left and sees a horned tangle of something dominating the corridor and looming over an unmoving terran, bathed in crimson light.
Then the tangle turns to face her. The smattering of eyes in its center mass glow steely blue, casting the dark walls of the corridor around her in dangerous violet. Its two horns rise from the squirming void like a wicked halo and catch the scarlet light above it and the cold blue below.
The sight of the thing over her crewmate’s limp body stirs the most primal of Camron’s fears. The trickle of adrenaline becomes a flood. Her body remembers to fear the predator that hunts in darkness.
The creature plunges coils of its tendrils into the bulkheads to its side, each with a shrieking crunch, and rears back. Cam decides not to see what happens next.
She sprints in the other direction, hanging a left out of her bunkroom corridor and a right out of the larger section of the ship.
There’s a heavy thump against the walls as she swings shut the hatch. She spins the wheel to seal it, then bolts it shut, then backs away and raises her pistol.
“Petal,” says the thing on the other side, “this will be easier and safer for both of us if you cooperate. I mean you no harm.” Its polytonal voice seeps and curdles through the metal. “If you don’t open that hatch for me, I’ll have to force it.”
Cam can barely understand it, but she gets the gist.
“I cannot open this hatch safely. If you’re on the other side, please tell me.”
Cam doesn’t wait. She sprints in the other direction and turns a corner, dodging exposed pipes and slumped terrans. Her feet stir the hazy soup of gas that’s pooled along the floor. She hears a horrible wail from far behind her, then a bang.
The hatch, she realizes.
She doesn’t look back.
She runs, dodging inebriated, incapacitated terrans and avoiding the lazy waterfalls of drugged haze spilling down from the vents as she makes her way into a nicer section of the Hunter’s bow-ward habitation ring. Her foot catches on something. She careens forward and lands on the steel floor.
Turning up and over, she sees the thing on her trail, the frigid blue of its eyes contrasting the blood red of its surroundings.
Cam pushes herself back across the gunmetal with her feet until the sliding door separating the two ring sections slams shut. Before she can thank her luck, the door bulges in the center in three, four, five different places and erupts in squirming tendrils. The tentacles pry and the metal screams and Cam launches to her feet and keeps running. She pays no mind to the shrieking crescendo that can only mean the seal has failed.
Finally, she reaches the escape pods. Blessedly, several are still unused.
She dives into the nearest one.
Before she can think to hit the button at the pod’s stern to seal the door, she sees it.
The creature is round, almost spherical, and so much taller than she is. Its tendrils dart out to grasp at the world around it, then pull back just as quickly. The squirming vines that compose its main body are revealed under the dim red lights like entrails, glistening and coiling and twisting back on themselves. Its too-many eyes burn blue like cruel stars from the body’s center, and its horns rise from that same darkness and curve into a crown adorned with upward-facing branches. Thick bundles of flowers spill down from it like blood from an open maw, their color lost between the reds and the blues.
Cam levels her pistol and aims it at the monster.
The lights suddenly go out, leaving the pod dark but for the illumination of the creature’s eyes.
It tilts its body, almost like an animal might tilt its head.
“Won’t you shoot me?” it asks. Its voice is wrong. Polytonal, polytextural undertones and overtones swim beneath and coil around its words. The loudest voice, a feminine contralto comfortably in the center of its register is echoed and preceded by a chorus of horrors in tones far above and below it.
Cam says nothing. She tries to keep her aim steady, but her whole body is shaking.
“I’ll even make it easy for you,” it says. The weave of its body shifts and slides and expands, resembling a net as much as anything else. Something in its center glows like pale moonlight.
Cam aims the pistol at the white thing and holds it there. Seconds pass. Sweat trickles down her face, lighting her stressed and sensitive nerves like wildfire. After a long several seconds, she swings her aim toward the button for the pod door and fires.
A vine swings up to intercept, and the creature lunges.
Cam feels a sting in her neck.
“What a fascinating creature,” the thing says. Its polytonal voice weaves around her like a snare. The creature’s eyes warm from blue to hazy orange like full moons hanging in the hazy Terran sky.
Cam’s tension starts to bleed out of her. Her heart rate settles. Her breathing slows. Her muscles relax. Against her will, her body forgets the danger she’s in and embraces the coerced placidity the monster has infected her with.
“Tell me your name, little one,” it says.
Cam looks into its many eyes. Something winds and coils around her brain.
“Camron Pastor…”
Her mouth forms the words regardless of her will. The sound of her voice feels distant, somehow.
A tendril comes down onto her head and strokes slowly down her back. She feels like she should hate this, but she can’t seem to find it in her to care.
“Oh, what lovely notes they have on you,” the creature says. Vines creep between her skin and the seal of her mask, undoing its straps and lifting it from her face.
Cam’s lips part around a silent question. Swirling, sparkling, floral-scented lethargy fills her lungs and seeps into her bloodstream.
“I’m going to have so much fun with you,” it says.
Cam’s eyes start to drift shut.
The creature continues.
“Rest well. My little lamb~”